Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/311



EXT to the trying-vats stood the carpenter's house, which was the last one in the row facing on the arcade; beyond the vats was the tallow-tank, sunk deep into the ground, its top showing like a sunken turret, as has been said. Then there came a corner of the vineyard which grew up to the church-side and spread away to the boundary of the Indian village, where it came against the adobe wall that stood between.

The vines of this vineyard were not trained on trellises, but grew in luxuriant clumps from the stumps of the grape, cut back year after year, in the old-world fashion which came to California with the padres. Since the day that Cristóbal had found covert among these vines to strike down Captain del Valle, they had dropped their leaves, save for a tenacious cluster here and there, in the quick way of yellowing and dropping that a grape leaf has, the world over. It is as if the vines, exhausted by the labor of bringing their juicy burden of fruit to maturity, lose all their sap in a day, unfeeling of the leaves no longer needed to shield the vinous globules from the sun.