Liberty Jones had been a year at the cabin.  In that time she had learned that her employer’s name was Doctor Ruysdael, that he had a lucrative practice in San Jose, but had also “taken up” a league or two of wild forest land in the Santa Cruz range, which he preserved and held after a fashion of his own, which gave him the reputation of being a “crank” among the very few neighbors his vast possessions permitted, and the equally few friends his singular tastes allowed him.  It was believed that a man owning such an enormous quantity of timber land, who should refuse to set up a sawmill and absolutely forbid the felling of trees; who should decline to connect it with the highway to Santa Cruz, and close it against improvement and speculation, had given sufficient evidence of his insanity; but when to this was added the rumor that he himself was not only devoid of the human instinct of hunting the wild animals with which his domain abounded, but that he held it so sacred to their use as to forbid the firing of a gun within his limits, and that these restrictions were further preserved and “policed” by the scattered remnants of a band of aborigines,—­known as “digger Injins,”—­it was seriously hinted that his eccentricity had acquired a political and moral significance, and demanded legislative interference.  But the doctor was a rich man, a necessity to his patients, a good marksman, and, it was rumored, did not include his fellow men among the animals he had a distaste for killing.

Of all this, however, Liberty knew little and cared less.  The solitude appealed to her sense of freedom; she did not “hanker” after a society she had never known.  At the end of the first week, when the doctor communicated to her briefly, by letter, the convincing proofs of the death of her father and his entombment beneath the sunken cliff, she accepted the fact without comment or apparent emotion.  Two months later, when her only surviving relative, “Aunt Marty,” of Missouri, acknowledged the news—­communicated by Doctor Ruysdael—­with Scriptural quotations and the cheerful hope that it “would be a lesson to her” and she would “profit in her new place,” she left her aunt’s letter unanswered.

She looked after the cows and calves with an interest that was almost possessory, patronized and played with the squaw,—­yet made her feel her inferiority,—­and moved among the peaceful aborigines with the domination of a white woman and a superior.  She tolerated the half-monthly visits of “Jim Hoskins,” the young companion of the doctor, who she learned was the doctor’s factor and overseer of the property, who lived seven miles away on an agricultural clearing, and whose control of her actions was evidently limited by the doctor,—­for the doctor’s sake alone.  Nor was Mr. Hoskins inclined to exceed those limits.  He looked upon her as something abnormal,—­a “crank” as remarkable in her way as her patron was in his, neuter of sex and vague of race, and he simply restricted his supervision