Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/224

212 cattle work was of course the basis, and was always interesting. They liked to ride out with one of the vaqueros on his never-ending round, spying out the distribution and condition of the stock, observing strays, helping young calves, keeping a vigilant eye for those in trouble. Daphne told of the spring round-up when the neighbouring ranches joined forces to sort and brand the stock. That was a season of hard work, but also of picturesque pleasure. But outside the cattle were many minor industries that repaid investigation—a vineyard and an olive orchard of dove-gray foliage, where dwelt a flashing smile set in the simple countenance of one Tomaso, whose duty it was to make wine and pure olive oil. Near the foothills dwelt the bee-man, a religious fanatic who wore no hat or coat and let his hair grow long, who shouted texts and Bible quotations as he strode here and there among the hives, a strange person who was nevertheless quite at home with the hot, uncertain insects and who thoroughly understood all the mysteries of honey. The vegetable garden lay in a flat below the house. It was protected with wire fencing, and in its enclosure cress-grown water ditches ran in patterns, frogs croaked, and an ancient Chinaman in the wide peaked bowl of a woven hat moved like a figure on a screen. His name was Lo, and he knew little English, nor had he pride of appearance. He dwelt in a ramshackle little hut in one corner of the vegetable garden, made of old doors and lumber slung together anyhow, with a rickety stovepipe sticking out of it; not intrinsically an impressive dwelling; yet in some fashion, by means of strips of red paper with ideographs, tall-stalked bulbs growing in bowls, a queer smell or so, Lo had managed to make of his dwelling something exotic and picturesque. And over by the stables was the blacksmith shop; where they shod horses, and fashioned parts of agricultural machinery or wagons out of hot metal that glowed in the dusk of the shop, and hissed in water tubs like serpents. Nor must we forget the great stables for the working animals, nor the dairy stables, nor the dairy itself, with its cool, silent shelves of milk set to rise, nor its churns with its sweet smell of buttermilk, nor its rows of fragrant butter rolls, with everywhere a dampness and a cleanness. Nor the fowl yards, seemingly endless in extent, very