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Updated: August 27, 2024
They vanished; all the faces she knew. The big train slid through Monroe. Martie had a last glimpse of Mason and White's of the bridge of the winery with its pyramids of sweet-smelling purple refuse. Outlying ranches, familiar from Sunday walks and drives, slipped by. Down near the old Archer ranch, Henry Prout was driving his mother into town.
We discovered a veteran of the Civil War turned liveryman, who for a paltry consideration in cash was ours every afternoon, and showed us something new each day, from racing horses on the Lucky Baldwin Ranch to the shadow of a spread eagle on a rock. Grandmother's favorite excursion was to a picturesque winery set in vineyards and shaded by eucalyptus trees.
Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools, churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a winery had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail. The Interurban Trolley "looped" the town once every hour. All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich.
There were not many connected links of cause and effect in the old man's muddled brain, but the value of water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester. "They're blastin', be they?
The old man gave his questioner a look of maudlin surprise. "Why, he tole me so hisself; how else'd I find it out? I was a-settin' there in the winery on a kaig, an' he come an' tole me he wanted to see me on business. 'Pears to me you're duller 'n common, Lysander." The speaker began to gather courage from his own ready comprehension of intricacies which evidently seemed to puzzle his son-in-law.
So heavy was his sleep that the stamp of hoofs and cries of the drivers from the bridge that crossed the creek did not rouse him. Wagon after wagon, loaded high with grapes, passed the bridge on the way up the valley to the winery, and the coming of each wagon was like an explosion of sound and commotion in the lazy quiet of the afternoon. But the man was undisturbed.
Over all other odors lay the sweet, cloying smell of crushed grapes from the winery and the pungent odor from the tannery of White & Company. The men, and boys, and girls of the settlement all worked in one or another of these places, and the women gossiped in their untidy doorways.
He 'lowed you wouldn't hev no objections to my comin' on business." He braced himself on the last two words, and made a feeble effort to look his son-in-law in the face. What he saw there was not encouraging. It became audible in a sniff of undisguised contempt. "Where'd you see Forrester?" "At the winery. Ye see I was a-goin' over to the Duarte, an' I stopped at the winery"
Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals sick from shore to shore until the gods ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged
They could run in the hundred an' forty if I only had it. I wonder if Chavon would lease it." Or, less ambitious, Billy would say: "I gotta skin over to Petaluma to-morrow, Saxon. They's an auction on the Atkinson Ranch an' maybe I can pick up some bargains." "More horses!" "Ain't I got two teams haulin' lumber for the new winery? An' Barney's got a bad shoulder-sprain.
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