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Richie an affectionate farewell, should stagger out into the street and ride away on the horse of someone else. The ensuing hours of the evening and the night were a merciful blank to Mr. Dawson. His first conscious thought was when he awoke at dawn on a side-hill, a sharp rock prodding him in the small of the back and the bridle-reins of his dozing horse wound round one arm.
The sheep had risen from their beds and were huddled close. The tender and herders stood with drawn guns and the three dogs bristled savagely and turned their gaze toward the timbered slope that rose on one side of the open side-hill bench that served as a bed ground.
The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a practised eye that travelled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey. "Looks good to me," he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and gold-pan.
A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated Silurian rock and shale, into the river, and some millions of years hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been lifted up into the light of day, some other, and, I trust, wiser husbandman, will be gathering his harvest from it, and be worried over the downpour that robs him of it.
We did not see this last, so cannot vouch for it. All the streams were filled with trout, and more than once we saw the side-hill salmon on the slopes. No, side-hill salmon is not a peripatetic fish; it is a deer out of season. But the trout! At Gualala Charmian caught her first one. Once before in my life I had caught two . . . on angleworms.
A little past one o'clock on Sunday last my mother came running into the house and informed me that a man was dying on the side-hill, from a wound, and that I must go for father and the boys immediately.
The range was taking on fall shades, the gray of the sage relieved by brown patches of open grasslands and splotches of color where early frosts had touched the birch and willow thickets that marked each side-hill spring. Tiny dark specks moved through it all. Meat! It had been long since Breed had tasted beef, and his red tongue lolled out and dripped in anticipation of the coming feast.
"And doesn't it ever make you dizzy? All this local lore, I mean, that you carry around in your head?" "It isn't much of a strain to a practiced intellect," he deprecated. "If you're interested in natural history, there's the Side-hill Wampus " "Yes; I know. I've been West before, thank you! Pardon my curiosity, but are all you creatures of the desert queer and inexplicable?"
One of my earliest recollections of my father is seeing him, when I was a child of three or four, striding across the middle side-hill lot with a bag slung across his breast, scattering the seed-grain. How often at early nightfall, while the west was yet glowing, have I seen the grazing cattle silhouetted against the sky.
His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house.
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