When Mr. Twiggs had departed again, accompanied by a partner to guide him past the dangerous shoals of Tomlinson’s grocery, Rice clapped his hand on Wells’s shoulder.  “If it hadn’t been for me, sonny, that shark would have landed you into some compromise with that red-haired gal!  I saw you weakenin’, and then I chipped in.  I may have piled up the agony a little on your love for old Quince, but if you aren’t an ungrateful cub, that’s how you ought to hev been feein’, anyhow!”

Nevertheless, the youthful Wells, although touched by his elder partner’s loyalty, and convinced of his own disinterestedness, felt a painful sense of lost chivalrous opportunity.

*****

On mature consideration it was finally settled that Jackson Wells should make his preliminary examination of his inheritance alone, as it might seem inconsistent with the previous indifferent attitude of his partners if they accompanied him.  But he was implored to yield to no blandishments of the enemy, and to even make his visit a secret.

He went.  The familiar flower-spiked trees which had given their name to Buckeye Hollow had never yielded entirely to improvements and the incursions of mining enterprise, and many of them had even survived the disused ditches, the scarred flats, the discarded levels, ruined flumes, and roofless cabins of the earlier occupation, so that when Jackson Wells entered the wide, straggling street of Buckeye, that summer morning was filled with the radiance of its blossoms and fragrant with their incense.  His first visit there, ten years ago, had been a purely perfunctory and hasty one, yet he remembered the ostentatious hotel, built in the “flush time” of its prosperity, and already in a green premature decay; he recalled the Express Office and Town Hall, also passing away in a kind of similar green deliquescence; the little zinc church, now overgrown with fern and brambles, and the two or three fine substantial houses in the outskirts, which seemed to have sucked the vitality of the little settlement.  One of these—­he had been told—­was the property of his rich and wicked maternal uncle, the hated appropriator of his red-headed cousin’s affections.  He recalled his brief visit to the departed testator’s claim and market garden, and his by no means favorable impression of the lonely, crabbed old man, as well as his relief that his objectionable cousin, whom he had not seen since he was a boy, was then absent at the rival uncle’s.  He made his way across the road to a sunny slope where the market garden of three acres seemed to roll like a river of green rapids to a little “run” or brook, which, even in the dry season, showed a trickling rill.  But here he was struck by a singular circumstance.  The garden rested in a rich, alluvial soil, and under the quickening Californian sky had developed far beyond the ability of its late cultivator to restrain or keep it in order.  Everything had grown luxuriantly, and in monstrous size and profusion.  The garden