IX
UNCLE JAP'S LILY
Jaspar Panel owned a section of rough, hilly land to the north-east of Paradise. Everybody called him Uncle Jap. He was very tall, very thin, with a face burnt a brick red by exposure to sun and wind, and, born in Massachusetts, he had marched as a youth with Sherman to the sea. After the war he married, crossed the plains in a "prairie schooner," and, eventually, took up six hundred and forty acres of Government land in San Lorenzo County. With incredible labour, inspired and sustained by his natural acuteness, he wrought a miracle upon a singularly arid and sterile soil. I have been told that he was the first of the foothill settlers to irrigate abundantly, the first to plant out an orchard and vineyard, the first, certainly, to create a garden out of a sage-brush desert. Teamsters hauling wheat from the Carisa plains used to stop to shake the white alkaline dust from their overalls under Uncle Jap's fig trees. They and the cowboys were always made welcome. To such guests Uncle Jap would offer figs, water-melons, peaches, a square meal at noon, and exact nothing in return except appreciation. If a man failed to praise Uncle Jap's fruit or his wife's sweet pickles, he was not pressed to "call again." The old fellow was inordinately proud of his colts, his Poland-China pigs, his "graded" bull, his fountain in the garden.
"Nice place you have, Mr. Panel," a stranger might say.
"Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes. Uster be nothin' but sun an' bushes onst. It's nice, yas, and it's paid for."
"What a good-looking mare!"
"Yas; she's paid for, too."
Everything on the ranch, animal, vegetable, and mineral, was "paid for." Uncle Jap was the last man to hurt anybody's feelings, but the "paid for" rankled on occasion, for some of his visitors stood perilously near the edge of bankruptcy, and, as a rule, had not paid for either the land they occupied, or the cattle they branded, or the clothes they wore. To understand this story you must grasp the fact that Uncle Jap lived with credit and not on it.
His wife, also of New England parentage, had a righteous horror of debt bred in her bone. Uncle Jap adored her. If he set an extravagant value upon his other possessions, what price above rubies did he place upon the meek, silent, angular woman, who had been his partner, companion, and friend for more than a quarter of a century. Sun and wind had burnt her face, also, to the exact tint of her husband's. Her name was Lily.