He rode now through open woods, across little flower-scattered glades, till he came upon a spring.
Flat on the ground, he drank deeply of the clear water, and, looking about him, felt with a shock the beauty of the world.
It came to him like a discovery; he had never realized it before, he concluded, and also, he had forgotten much.
One could not sit in at high finance and keep track of such things.
As he drank in the air, the scene, and the distant song of larks, he felt like a poker-player rising from a night-long table and coming forth from the pent atmosphere to taste the freshness of the morn.
At the base of the knolls he encountered a tumble-down stake-and-rider fence. From the look of it he judged it must be forty years old at least—the work of some first pioneer who had taken up the land when the days of gold had ended.
The woods were very thick here, yet fairly clear of underbrush, so that, while the blue sky was screened by the arched branches, he was able to ride beneath.
He now found himself in a nook of several acres, where the oak and manzanita and madrono gave way to clusters of stately redwoods.
Against the foot of a steep-sloped knoll he came upon a magnificent group of redwoods that seemed to have gathered about a tiny gurgling spring.
He halted his horse, for beside the spring uprose a wild California lily. It was a wonderful flower, growing there in the cathedral nave of lofty trees.
At least eight feet in height, its stem rose straight and slender, green and bare for two-thirds its length, and then burst into a shower of snow-white waxen bells.
There were hundreds of these blossoms, all from the one stem, delicately poised and ethereally frail.
Daylight had never seen anything like it.
Slowly his gaze wandered from it to all that was about him.
He took off his hat, with almost a vague religious feeling.
This was different. No room for contempt and evil here.
This was clean and fresh and beautiful-something he could respect.
It was like a church.
The atmosphere was one of holy calm.
Here man felt the prompting of nobler things.
Much of this and more was in Daylight's heart as he looked about him.
But it was not a concept of his mind. He merely felt it without thinking about it at all.
On the steep incline above the spring grew tiny maidenhair ferns, while higher up were larger ferns and brakes.
Great, moss-covered trunks of fallen trees lay here and there, slowly sinking back and merging into the level of the forest mould.
Beyond, in a slightly clearer space, wild grape and honeysuckle swung in green riot from gnarled old oak trees.
A gray Douglas squirrel crept out on a branch and watched him.
From somewhere came the distant knocking of a woodpecker.
This sound did not disturb the hush and awe of the place.
Quiet woods, noises belonged there and made the solitude complete. The tiny bubbling ripple of the spring and the gray flash of tree-squirrel were as yardsticks with which to measure the silence and motionless repose.
"Might be a million miles from anywhere," Daylight whispered to himself.
But ever his gaze returned to the wonderful lily beside the bubbling spring.
He tethered the horse and wandered on foot among the knolls.
Their tops were crowned with century-old spruce trees, and their sides clothed with oaks and madronos and native holly.
But to the perfect redwoods belonged the small but deep canon that threaded its way among the knolls.
Here he found no passage out for his horse, and he returned to the lily beside the spring.
On foot, tripping, stumbling, leading the animal, he forced his way up the hillside.
And ever the ferns carpeted the way of his feet, ever the forest climbed with him and arched overhead, and ever the clean joy and sweetness stole in upon his senses.
On the crest he came through an amazing thicket of velvet-trunked young madronos, and emerged on an open hillside that led down into a tiny valley.
The sunshine was at first dazzling in its brightness, and he paused and rested, for he was panting from the exertion.
Not of old had he known shortness of breath such as this, and muscles that so easily tired at a stiff climb.
A tiny stream ran down the tiny valley through a tiny meadow that was carpeted knee-high with grass and blue and white nemophila.
The hillside was covered with Mariposa lilies and wild hyacinth, down through which his horse dropped slowly, with circumspect feet and reluctant gait.
Crossing the stream, Daylight followed a faint cattle trail over a low, rocky hill and through a wine-wooded forest of manzanita, and emerged upon another tiny valley, down which filtered another spring-fed, meadow-bordered streamlet.
A jack-rabbit bounded from a bush under his horse's nose, leaped the stream, and vanished up the opposite hillside of scrub-oak.
Daylight watched it admiringly as he rode on to the head of the meadow.
Here he startled up a many-pronged buck, that seemed to soar across the meadow, and to soar over the stake-and-rider fence, and, still soaring, disappeared in a friendly copse beyond.
Daylight's delight was unbounded.
It seemed to him that he had never been so happy.
His old woods' training was aroused, and he was keenly interested in everything in the moss on the trees and branches; in the bunches of mistletoe hanging in the oaks; in the nest of a wood-rat; in the water-cress growing in the sheltered eddies of the little stream; in the butterflies drifting through the rifted sunshine and shadow; in the blue jays that flashed in splashes of gorgeous color across the forest aisles; in the tiny birds, like wrens, that hopped among the bushes and imitated certain minor quail-calls; and in the crimson-crested woodpecker that ceased its knocking and cocked its head on one side to survey him.
Crossing the stream, he struck faint vestiges of a wood-road, used, evidently, a generation back, when the meadow had been cleared of its oaks.