They kept me poor with their bills while I went from bad to worse.
The trouble with me was two fold: first, I was a born weakling; and next, I was living unnaturally—too much work, and responsibility, and strain.
I was managing editor of the Times-Tribune—"
Daylight gasped mentally, for the Times-Tribune was the biggest and most influential paper in San Francisco, and always had been so.
"—and I wasn't strong enough for the strain.
Of course my body went back on me, and my mind, too, for that matter.
It had to be bolstered up with whiskey, which wasn't good for it any more than was the living in clubs and hotels good for my stomach and the rest of me. That was what ailed me; I was living all wrong."
He shrugged his shoulders and drew at his pipe.
"When the doctors gave me up, I wound up my affairs and gave the doctors up.
That was fifteen years ago.
I'd been hunting through here when I was a boy, on vacations from college, and when I was all down and out it seemed a yearning came to me to go back to the country.
So I quit, quit everything, absolutely, and came to live in the Valley of the Moon—that's the Indian name, you know, for Sonoma Valley.
I lived in the lean-to the first year; then I built the cabin and sent for my books.
I never knew what happiness was before, nor health.
Look at me now and dare to tell me that I look forty-seven."
"I wouldn't give a day over forty," Daylight confessed.
"Yet the day I came here I looked nearer sixty, and that was fifteen years ago."
They talked along, and Daylight looked at the world from new angles.
Here was a man, neither bitter nor cynical, who laughed at the city-dwellers and called them lunatics; a man who did not care for money, and in whom the lust for power had long since died.
As for the friendship of the city-dwellers, his host spoke in no uncertain terms.
"What did they do, all the chaps I knew, the chaps in the clubs with whom I'd been cheek by jowl for heaven knows how long?
I was not beholden to them for anything, and when I slipped out there was not one of them to drop me a line and say, 'How are you, old man? Anything I can do for you?'
For several weeks it was:
'What's become of Ferguson?'
After that I became a reminiscence and a memory.
Yet every last one of them knew I had nothing but my salary and that I'd always lived a lap ahead of it."
"But what do you do now?" was Daylight's query.
"You must need cash to buy clothes and magazines?"
"A week's work or a month's work, now and again, ploughing in the winter, or picking grapes in the fall, and there's always odd jobs with the farmers through the summer.
I don't need much, so I don't have to work much.
Most of my time I spend fooling around the place.
I could do hack work for the magazines and newspapers; but I prefer the ploughing and the grape picking.
Just look at me and you can see why.
I'm hard as rocks.
And I like the work.
But I tell you a chap's got to break in to it.
It's a great thing when he's learned to pick grapes a whole long day and come home at the end of it with that tired happy feeling, instead of being in a state of physical collapse.
That fireplace—those big stones—I was soft, then, a little, anemic, alcoholic degenerate, with the spunk of a rabbit and about one per cent as much stamina, and some of those big stones nearly broke my back and my heart.
But I persevered, and used my body in the way Nature intended it should be used—not bending over a desk and swilling whiskey... and, well, here I am, a better man for it, and there's the fireplace, fine and dandy, eh?
"And now tell me about the Klondike, and how you turned San Francisco upside down with that last raid of yours.
You're a bonny fighter, you know, and you touch my imagination, though my cooler reason tells me that you are a lunatic like the rest.
The lust for power!
It's a dreadful affliction.
Why didn't you stay in your Klondike?
Or why don't you clear out and live a natural life, for instance, like mine?
You see, I can ask questions, too.
Now you talk and let me listen for a while."
It was not until ten o'clock that Daylight parted from Ferguson.
As he rode along through the starlight, the idea came to him of buying the ranch on the other side of the valley.
There was no thought in his mind of ever intending to live on it. His game was in San Francisco.