“Goin' up, goin' up,” Billy chortled, as they drove on through the winding hills past another lake of intensest blue. “D'ye notice the difference in our treatment already between ridin' an' walkin' with packs on our backs? With Hazel an' Hattie an' Saxon an' Possum, an' yours truly, an' this high-toned wagon, folks most likely take us for millionaires out on a lark.”
The way widened. Broad, oak-studded pastures with grazing livestock lay on either hand. Then Clear Lake opened before them like an inland sea, flecked with little squalls and flaws of wind from the high mountains on the northern slopes of which still glistened white snow patches.
“I've heard Mrs. Hazard rave about Lake Geneva,” Saxon recalled; “but I wonder if it is more beautiful than this.”
“That architect fellow called this the California Alps, you remember,” Billy confirmed. “An' if I don't mistake, that's Lakeport showin' up ahead. An' all wild country, an' no railroads.”
“And no moon valleys here,” Saxon criticized. “But it is beautiful, oh, so beautiful.”
“Hotter'n hell in the dead of summer, I'll bet,” was Billy's opinion. “Nope, the country we're lookin' for lies nearer the coast. Just the same it is beautiful... like a picture on the wall. What d'ye say we stop off an' go for a swim this afternoon?”
Ten days later they drove into Williams, in Colusa County, and for the first time again encountered a railroad. Billy was looking for it, for the reason that at the rear of the wagon walked two magnificent work-horses which he had picked up for shipment to Oakland.
“Too hot,” was Saxon's verdict, as she gazed across the shimmering level of the vast Sacramento Valley. “No redwoods. No hills. No forests. No manzanita. No madronos. Lonely, and sad—”
“An' like the river islands,” Billy interpolated. “Richer 'n hell, but looks too much like hard work. It'll do for those that's stuck on hard work—God knows, they's nothin' here to induce a fellow to knock off ever for a bit of play. No fishin', no huntin', nothin' but work. I'd work myself, if I had to live here.”
North they drove, through days of heat and dust, across the California plains, and everywhere was manifest the “new” farming—great irrigation ditches, dug and being dug, the land threaded by power-lines from the mountains, and many new farmhouses on small holdings newly fenced. The bonanza farms were being broken up. However, many of the great estates remained, five to ten thousand acres in extent, running from the Sacramento bank to the horizon dancing in the heat waves, and studded with great valley oaks.