“All right; he’s Stanton.”

“And”—­hesitated the secretary, “You, who appear to understand the locality so well,—­I trust I may have the pleasure”—­

“Oh, I’m Jules.”

The secretary was a little startled and amused.  So “Jules” was a person, and not a place!

“Then you’re a pioneer?” asked Hemmingway, a little less dictatorially, as they passed out under the dripping trees.

“I struck this creek in the fall of ‘49, comin’ over Livermore’s Pass with Stanton,” returned Jules, with great brevity of speech and deliberate tardiness of delivery.  “Sent for my wife and two children the next year; wife died same winter, change bein’ too sudden for her, and contractin’ chills and fever at Sweetwater.  When I kem here first thar wasn’t six inches o’ water in the creek; out there was a heap of it over there where you see them yallowish-green patches and strips o’ brush and grass; all that war water then, and all that growth hez sprung up since.”

Hemmingway looked around him.  The “higher ground” where they stood was in reality only a mound-like elevation above the dead level of the flat, and the few trees were merely recent young willows and alders.  The area of actual depression was much greater than he had imagined, and its resemblance to the bed of some prehistoric inland sea struck him forcibly.  A previous larger inundation than Jules’ brief experience had ever known had been by no means improbable.  His cheek reddened at his previous hasty indictment of the settlers’ ignorance and shiftlessness, and the thought that he had probably committed his employers to his own rash confidence and superiority of judgment.  However, there was no evidence that this diluvial record was not of the remote past.  He smiled again with greater security as he thought of the geological changes that had since tempered these cataclysms, and the amelioration brought by settlement and cultivation.  Nevertheless, he would make a thorough examination to-morrow.

Stanton’s cabin was the furthest of these temporary habitations, and was partly on the declivity which began to slope to the river’s bank.  It was, like the others, a rough shanty of unplaned boards, but, unlike the others, it had a base of logs laid lengthwise on the ground and parallel with each other, on which the flooring and structure were securely fastened.  This gave it the appearance of a box slid on runners, or a Noah’s Ark whose bulk had been reduced.  Jules explained that the logs, laid in that manner, kept the shanty warmer and free from damp.  In reply to Hemmingway’s suggestion that it was a great waste of material, Jules simply replied that the logs were the “flotsam and jetsam” of the creek from the overflowed mills below.

Hemmingway again smiled.  It was again the old story of Western waste and prodigality.  Accompanied by Jules, however, he climbed up the huge, slippery logs which made a platform before the door, and entered.