He had made up his mind to double on his tracks, to go north again, specifically to British Columbia, partly because Tommy was there, chiefly because Vancouver was a growing place on the edge of a vast, newly opened interior. He knew that if no greater thing offered, from that center there was always the avenue of the woods. He could qualify in that line. And in the woods even a common axeman exacted and received more democratic treatment than in this older region where industry ran in fixed channels, where class lines were more rigidly drawn, where common labor was cheap and unprivileged.
He hadn't been getting on in those three months. He had less money than when he started out—about enough now to get him up North and leave a hundred dollars or so for emergencies. No, decidedly he wasn't getting on—he was going down, he told himself. It dismayed him a little. It wasn't enough to be big and strong and willing. A mule could be that. The race was not to the swift or the strong. Not in modern industry, with its bewildering complexities. No, it fell to the trained, the specialist in knowledge, the man who could do something more efficiently, with greater precision than his fellows.
He could not do that—not yet. And so there was nothing in California for him, he decided. A man could no longer go West and grow up with the country—but he could go North.
Thompson was sitting on the border of a road that runs between San Mateo and the city when he definitely committed himself to doubling on his tracks, to counteracting the trick of fate which had sent him to a place where he did not wish to go. He was looking between the trees and out over an undulating valley floored with emerald fields, studded with oaks, backed by the bare Hamiltons to the east, and westward by the redwood-clad ruggedness of the Santa Cruz range. And he was not seeing this loveliness of landscape at all. He was looking far beyond and his eyes were full of miles upon miles of untrodden forest, the sanctuary of silence and furtive living things, of mountains that lifted snowy spires to heaven high over the glaciers that scarred their sides. And the smells that for a moment rose strongly in his nostrils were not the smells of palm and gum and poppy-dotted fields, but odors of pine and spruce and the smell of birchwood burning in campfires. He came out of that queer projection of mind into great distance with a slight shake of his head and a feeling of wonder. It had been very vivid. And it dawned upon him that for a minute he had grown sentimentally lonely for that grim, unconquered region where he had first learned the pangs of loneliness, where he had suffered in body and spirit until he had learned a lesson he would never forget while he lived.
The road itself, abutting upon stately homes and modest bungalows behind a leafy screen of Australian gums, ran straight as an arrow down the peninsula toward the city and the bay, a broad, smoothly asphalted highway upon that road where the feet of the Franciscan priests had traced the Camino Real. And down this highway both north and south there passed many motor cars swiftly and silently or with less speed and more noise, according to their quality and each driver's mood.
Thompson rested, watching them from the grassy level beneath a tree. He rather regretted now the impulse which had made him ship his bag and blanket roll from the last town, and undertake this solitary hike. He had merely humored a whim to walk through orchards and green fields in a leisurely fashion, to be a careless trudger for a day. True, he was saving carfare, but he observed dryly that he was expending many dollars' worth of energy—to say nothing of shoe leather. The pleasure of walking, paradoxically, was best achieved by sitting still in the shade. A midday sun was softening the asphalt with its fierce blaze. He looked idly at passing machines and wondered what the occupants thereof would say if he halted one and demanded a ride. He smiled.
He stared after a passing sedan driven by a uniformed chauffeur, one half the rear seat occupied by a fat, complacent woman, the other half of the ten-inch upholstery given over to an equally fat and complacent bulldog. And while he reflected in some little amusement at the circumstance which gave a pampered animal the seat of honor in a six-thousand-dollar car and sent an able-bodied young man trudging down the road in the heat and the dust, another machine came humming up from the south.
It was a red car, crowding the state limit for speed, and it swept down on Thompson with a subdued purr like a great cat before a fire. When it was almost abreast of him there burst from it a crack like the report of a shotgun. There was just a perceptible wabble of the machine. Its hot pace slackened abruptly. It rolled past and came to a stop beside the road fifty yards along—a massive brute of a red roadster driven by a slim girl in a pongee suit, a girl whose bare head was bound about with heavy braids of corn-yellow hair.
Thompson half rose—then sank back in momentary indecision. Perhaps it were wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Then he smiled at the incongruity of that proverb applied to Sophie Carr.
He sat watching the machine for a minute. The halting of its burst of speed was no mystery to Thompson. Miss Carr proceeded with calm deliberation. She first resurrected a Panama hat from somewhere in the seat beside her and pinned it atop of her head. Then she got out, walked around to the front wheel, poked it tentatively once or twice, and proceeded about the business of getting out a jack and a toolkit.