“And you didn’t guess who he was?”
“No. Why should we? Who is he?”
“Why, Peter the Hermit, of course. I should have thought the presence of the raven would have enlightened you: he is always described as going about in company with a raven.”
“So he is. I’d forgotten that. But, on the other hand he is always described also as being half crazy, and certainly there was no sign of such a thing about him that we could see. Was there, Joe?”
“No. Nobody could have acted more sensibly. Who is he, Mr. Crawford? And why does he live all by himself like that?”
“I know nothing about him beyond common report. I suppose his name is Peter—though it may not be—and because he chooses to lead a secluded life, some genius has dubbed him ‘Peter the Hermit’; though who he really is, or why he lives all alone, or where he comes from, I can’t say. Some people say he is crazy, and some people say he is an escaped criminal—but then people will say anything, particularly when they know nothing about it. Judging from the reports of the two or three men who have met him, however, he appears to be quite inoffensive, and evidently he is a friendly-disposed fellow from your description of him. If you should come across him again you might invite him to come down and see us. I don’t suppose he will, but you might ask him, anyhow.”
“All right,” said I. “We will if we get the chance.” And so the matter ended.
It was just as well that we returned to the ranch when we did, for we found plenty of work ready to our hands, the first thing being the hauling of fire-wood for the year. To procure this, it was not necessary for us to go to the mountains: our supply was much nearer to hand. The whole region round about us had been at some remote period the scene of vigorous volcanic action. Both the First and Second Mesas were formed by a series of lava-flows which had come down from Mount Lincoln, and ending abruptly about eight miles from the mountains, had built up the cliff which bounded the First Mesa on its eastern side. Then, later, but still in a remote age, a great strip of this lava-bed, a mile wide and ten or twelve miles long, north and south, had broken away and subsided from the general level, forming what the geologists call, I believe, a “fault,” thus causing the “step-up” to the Second Mesa. The Second Mesa, because the lava had been hotter perhaps, was distinguished from the lower level by the presence of a number of little hills—“bubbles,” they were called, locally, and solidified bubbles of hot lava perhaps they were. They were all sorts of sizes, from fifty to four hundred feet high and from a hundred yards to half a mile in diameter. Viewed from a distance, they looked smooth and even, like inverted bowls, though when you came near them you found that their sides were rough and broken. I had been to the top of a good many of them, and all of those I had explored I had found to be depressed in the centre like little craters. From some of them tiny streams of water ran down, helping to swell the volume of our creek.
Most of these so-called “bubbles,” especially the larger ones, were well covered with pine-trees, and as there were three or four of them within easy reach of the ranch, it was here that we used to get our fire-wood.