“God’s country!” he said, as he struck the first low swell of rising land, where a cool wind from off the wooded and watered hills greeted his face.  Dust there still was, but it seemed a different kind and smelled of apple-orchards and alfalfa-fields.  Here were hard, smooth roads, and Anderson sped his car miles and miles through a country that was a verdant fragrant bower, and across bright, shady streams and by white little hamlets.

At Huntington he dropped his neighbor rancher, and also the detective, Hall, who was to go disguised into the districts overrun by the I.W.W.  A further run of forty miles put him on his own property.

Anderson owned a string of farms and ranches extending from the bottom-lands to the timber-line of the mountains.  They represented his life of hard work and fair dealing.  Many of these orchard and vegetable lands he had tenant farmers work on shares.  The uplands or wheat and grass he operated himself.  As he had accumulated property he had changed his place of residence from time to time, at last to build a beautiful and permanent home farther up on the valley slope than any of the others.

It was a modern house, white, with a red roof.  Situated upon a high level bench, with the waving gold fields sloping up from it and the green squares of alfalfa and orchards below, it appeared a landmark from all around, and could be plainly seen from Vale, the nearest little town, five miles away.

Anderson had always loved the open, and he wanted a place where he could see the sun rise over the distant valley gateway, and watch it set beyond the bold black range in the west.  He could sit on his front porch, wide and shady, and look down over two thousand acres of his own land.  But from the back porch no eye could have encompassed the limit of his broad, swelling slopes of grain and grass.

From the main road he drove up to the right of the house, where, under a dip of wooded slope, clustered barns, sheds, corrals, granaries, engine and machinery houses, a store, and the homes of hired men—­a little village in itself.

The sounds he heard were a welcome home—­the rush of swift water not twenty yards from where he stopped the car in the big courtyard, the pound of hoofs on the barn floor, the shrill whistle of a stallion that saw and recognized him, the drawling laugh of his cowboys and the clink of their spurs as they became aware of his return.

Nash, the suspected driver, was among those who hurried to meet the car.

Anderson’s keen, covert glance made note of the driver’s worried and anxious face.

“Nash, she’ll need a lookin’ over,” he said, as he uncovered bundles in the back seat and lifted them out.

“All right, sir,” replied Nash, eagerly.  A note of ended strain was significant in his voice.

“Here, you Jake,” cheerily called Anderson to a raw-boned, gaunt-faced fellow who wore the garb of a cowboy.