Page:Solo (1924).pdf/180

 spent an hour in its library, bought some necessities in its shops, walked in First, Second and Third Streets, likewise in A, B and C, and in its leading theatre witnessed an appalling melodrama called The Algerian Princess. His mates had found their way by instinct to a street whose houses flaunted red lights at their portals.

On the Fourteenth of July, the captain declared a fête in honour of the taking of the Bastille. Paul obtained extra leave and boarded a jaunty little train which ran through forests of gigantic redwoods carpeted with fern, past gorges and gulches, to the village of Trinidad, perched on a precipice and serving as a centre of the logging industry. There he hired a buggy and drove along a superb coast, in the direction of Crescent City, over a narrow road which in places was merely a ledge on the cliffs. Above him stretched walls of rock; below, steep grassy slopes, riotous with bushes of mountain laurel, while far beneath lay the green sea, streaked blue in a manner that recalled the "blueing" he had once employed to "whiten" his duck jackets.

In the early afternoon he arrived at a cove about which clustered a few farms. Roses and geraniums spilt over unpainted fences. Before the prettiest cottage he stopped and called out to a girl who was feeding chickens. She shaded her eyes with one hand, held up her apron with the other, and advanced wonderingly. She was uncouth but comely, with silky yellow hair, strong teeth and sculpturesque limbs. Her figure was revealed by a tight blue cotton blouse; and stout, iron-toed boots could not entirely disguise the neatness of her feet.

"Is there any place near here where I might get something to eat?" Paul inquired.

There was not. "At least no regular place—like," the girl amended.

"What would you be wanting?" she asked, at a loss