“Oh,—it is all so beautiful,” sighed Saxon. “But there are no moon-valleys here.”
They encountered a plague of butterflies, and for days drove through untold millions of the fluttering beauties that covered the road with uniform velvet-brown. And ever the road seemed to rise under the noses of the snorting mares, filling the air with noiseless flight, drifting down the breeze in clouds of brown and yellow soft-flaked as snow, and piling in mounds against the fences, ever driven to float helplessly on the irrigation ditches along the roadside. Hazel and Hattie soon grew used to them though Possum never ceased being made frantic.
“Huh!—who ever heard of butterfly-broke horses?” Billy chaffed. “That's worth fifty bucks more on their price.”
“Wait till you get across the Oregon line into the Rogue River Valley,” they were told. “There's God's Paradise—climate, scenery, and fruit-farming; fruit ranches that yield two hundred per cent. on a valuation of five hundred dollars an acre.”
“Gee!” Billy said, when he had driven on out of hearing; “that's too rich for our digestion.”
And Saxon said, “I don't know about apples in the valley of the moon, but I do know that the yield is ten thousand per cent. of happiness on a valuation of one Billy, one Saxon, a Hazel, a Hattie, and a Possum.”
Through Siskiyou County and across high mountains, they came to Ashland and Medford and camped beside the wild Rogue River.
“This is wonderful and glorious,” pronounced Saxon; “but it is not the valley of the moon.”
“Nope, it ain't the valley of the moon,” agreed Billy, and he said it on the evening of the day he hooked a monster steelhead, standing to his neck in the ice-cold water of the Rogue and fighting for forty minutes, with screaming reel, ere he drew his finny prize to the bank and with the scalp-yell of a Comanche jumped and clutched it by the gills.
“'Them that looks finds,'” predicted Saxon, as they drew north out of Grant's Pass, and held north across the mountains and fruitful Oregon valleys.