For days and days we worked away busily at this, my husband and I, and our boys, standing out in that hot glaring Californian sun, with the dry dust of the soil getting into our shoes and stockings and soaking all our clothes. Our ranchman was busy with the trees, and the coloured lady looked on when she was not cooking; looked on with a disdainful air, showing by many signs a great contempt for people who could be so foolish as to carry about such quantities of “stuff,” as she called it.
To English eyes many Californian houses look very empty, and no doubt our possessions did seem ridiculously unnecessary to this darky, who thought only of the bother they would be to keep clean.
As we packed away case after case into every available corner, stringing up chairs and sofas, and all manner of things on to the rafters, we began to wonder where we ourselves were to be housed. We have always since considered that it was a proof positive of great sweetness of temper that we got through a time of such terribly close quarters without doing any violence to each other.
But with all our contriving there were a number of cases for which we could find no room, and these we covered with bits of oil-cloth, and left them out of doors. They led us a dreadful life, those seven cases; our ranchman was for ever predicting rain, which did not come, but kept us anxiously on the watch. Finally, when it did come, it was unexpected, and we had to rush out one night to see if the high wind, which had risen with the rain, had dislodged the oil-cloth. That was a lively night, for the rain came running down the inside walls of our barn in little streams on the windward side, and pictures and other things hung there for safety had to be hurriedly removed.
It was the first night, too, that a large, handsome kangaroo rat paid us a visit, running about like an acrobat among the chairs on the rafters, and when I carried a candle quite near to him, to see what he was like, he looked down at me with the greatest coolness and impudence, with his brilliant black eyes. The place seemed to suit him, for he became a constant visitor. Another intimate guest was a particularly large lizard, who darted in and out under the big door.
We were a little uneasy lest some less harmless visitors should invite themselves. We knew that there were scorpions and tarantulas; the men who had built our barn had unwittingly pitched their tent the first night just over a nest of tarantulas, and had discovered them in the early evening, and spent the rest of the night in searching for and killing them with their hammers.
Ugly, wicked-looking things they are, with their enormous hairy legs and body and cruel nippers; they are very aggressive, too, and would much rather fight than run away.
But most of all we dreaded the rattlesnakes. Our ranchman had killed thirty on the adjoining land, and several had already been found on ours. Everyone told us they were very easy to kill, but that did not reassure us.
Our first introduction to snakes was more alarming than dangerous. We had put all our umbrellas and sticks into a corner of the barn behind a large corner seat. One day whilst we were quietly resting after dinner, our youngest boy, Gip, asleep on his couch, my husband chanced to be looking at these umbrellas, thinking sleepily that he did not recognise one of the handles, which seemed to stand out from the rest, when he was suddenly made wide awake by seeing it move quietly round, first to one side then to the other, and knew that it was a snake. He reached out his hand quietly for something to strike it with, but it darted out of sight at once behind the couch, and though we searched long for it, we did not find it. We found, however, a large notch hole through which it had probably crept in, and we lost no time in closing this securely. It was not a rattlesnake, however, and was probably quite harmless, as numbers of the snakes are, some of them being considered valuable as destroyers of vermin.
Some of these try to pass themselves off as rattlers, however, and we often wondered how they knew that the faint sound of the rattle is so strangely horrible and frightening, that they should try to imitate it as a means of defence.