Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/110

98 boys—turned light hearted and played pranks that would have made their children or grandchildren ashamed—if they had known! Especially as George Scott, the amused cynic, never went riding. He spent his mornings at the beach, watching the bathers, snubbing the forward, and uttering caustic comment.

But it was when they stopped on some outlying spur and looked abroad on the scenery that the real charm of the country gripped them.

For over the panorama below them lay a misty peace, a suspended stillness as though a great Spirit had sighed in his sleep and had for a contented moment held his breath, and the moment was as the Biblical thousand years. From above, the folds of the lesser hills were soft and rounded, and on them showed the dark spots of the trees. The sea rose up from the depths below them until it met the horizon at the level of the eye. This gave it the curious effect of being the opposite wall of a cañon in the bottom of which lay Arguello and the farms and the ranchos and the shore. A yellow haze mellowed it. From incredible distances and with incredible clarity, rose single sounds—the stroke of a bell, the lowing of cattle. The pungent aroma of sage brush—Old Man—hung in the air.

The old boys used to stop and look on all this with great inner appreciation, but with outward indifference. At length Boyd himself broke out:

"Where on the globe," he cried, "will you find anything even approaching this? The climate is perfect; the people—look at the way that country lies! There's not another place in the world where you can ride a horse in high mountains and come home on a beach two hundred feet wide, and do it all in one afternoon! There's not another place like it in California! Why look at the size of that valley, and consider how many people, wealthy people, will flock in here when a few of them get to know it as we know it! There won't be room for them! Why, the fellow who owns real estate"

They crowded their horses around him whooping with amusement, slapping him on the back, while even the staid old horse fidgeted.