“Well, it's up to us to collect.”
“An' we'll collect all right, all right, somewhere down in them redwood mountains south of Monterey.”
CHAPTER II
It was a good afternoon's tramp to Niles, passing through the town of Haywards; yet Saxon and Billy found time to diverge from the main county road and take the parallel roads through acres of intense cultivation where the land was farmed to the wheel-tracks. Saxon looked with amazement at these small, brown-skinned immigrants who came to the soil with nothing and yet made the soil pay for itself to the tune of two hundred, of five hundred, and of a thousand dollars an acre.
On every hand was activity. Women and children were in the fields as well as men. The land was turned endlessly over and over. They seemed never to let it rest. And it rewarded them. It must reward them, or their children would not be able to go to school, nor would so many of them be able to drive by in rattletrap, second-hand buggies or in stout light wagons.
“Look at their faces,” Saxon said. “They are happy and contented. They haven't faces like the people in our neighborhood after the strikes began.”
“Oh, sure, they got a good thing,” Billy agreed. “You can see it stickin' out all over them. But they needn't get chesty with ME, I can tell you that much—just because they've jiggerooed us out of our land an' everything.”
“But they're not showing any signs of chestiness,” Saxon demurred.
“No, they're not, come to think of it. All the same, they ain't so wise. I bet I could tell 'em a few about horses.”