"Peddlin'?" the young man asked, too discreet to put his question directly to Saxon, yet dividing it between her and Billy, and cocking his eye at the covered basket.
"No," she spoke up quickly. "We're looking for land. Do you know of any around here?"
Again he desisted from the egg, studying them with sharp eyes as if to fathom their financial status.
"Do you know what land sells for around here?" he asked.
"No," Saxon answered. "Do you?"
"I guess I ought to. I was born here. And land like this all around you runs at from two to three hundred to four an' five hundred dollars an acre."
"Whew!" Billy whistled. "I guess we don't want none of it."
"But what makes it that high? Town lots?" Saxon wanted to know.
"Nope. The Porchugeeze make it that high, I guess."
"I thought it was pretty good land that fetched a hundred an acre," Billy said.
"Oh, them times is past. They used to give away land once, an' if you was good, throw in all the cattle runnin' on it."
"How about government land around here?" was Billy'a next query.
"Ain't none, an' never was. This was old Mexican grants. My grandfather bought sixteen hundred of the best acres around here for fifteen hundred dollars--five hundred down an' the balance in five years without interest. But that was in the early days. He come West in '48, tryin' to find a country without chills an' fever."
"He found it all right," said Billy.
"You bet he did. An' if him an' father 'd held onto the land it'd been better than a gold mine, an' I wouldn't be workin' for a livin'. What's your business?"
"Teamster."
"Ben in the strike in Oakland?"
"Sure thing. I've teamed there most of my life."
Here the two men wandered off into a discussion of union affairs and the strike situation; but Saxon refused to be balked, and brought back the talk to the land.
"How was it the Portuguese ran up the price of lend?" she asked.
The young fellow broke away from union matters with an effort, and for a moment regarded her with lack luster eyes, until the question sank into his consciousness.
"Because they worked the land overtime. Because they worked mornin', noon, an' night, all hands, women an' kids. Because they could get more out of twenty acres than we could out of a hundred an' sixty. Look at old Silva--Antonio Silva. I've known him ever since I was a shaver. He didn't have the price of a square meal when he hit this section and begun leasin' land from my folks.
Look at him now--worth two hundred an' fifty thousan' cold, an' I bet he's got credit for a million, an' there's no tellin' what the rest of his family owns."
"And he made all that out of your folks' land?" Saxon demanded.
The young man nodded his head with evident reluctance.
"Then why didn't your folks do it?" she pursued.
The lineman shrugged his shoulders.
"Search me," he said.
"But the money was in the land," she persisted.
"Blamed if it was," came the retort, tinged slightly with color.
"We never saw it stickin' out so as you could notice it. The money was in the hands of the Porchugeeze, I guess. They knew a few more 'n we did, that's all."
Saxon showed such dissatisfaction with his explanation that he was stung to action. He got up wrathfully. "Come on, an' I'll show you," he said. "I'll show you why I'm workin' for wages when I might a-ben a millionaire if my folks hadn't been mutts. That's what we old Americans are, Mutts, with a capital M."
He led them inside the gate, to the fruit tree that had first attracted Saxon's attention. From the main crotch diverged the four main branches of the tree. Two feet above the crotch the branches were connected, each to the ones on both sides, by braces of living wood.
"You think it growed that way, eh? Well, it did. But it was old Silva that made it just the same--caught two sprouts, when the tree was young, an' twisted 'em together. Pretty slick, eh? You bet. That tree'll never blow down. It's a natural, springy brace, an' beats iron braces stiff. Look along all the rows. Every tree's that way. See? An' that's just one trick of the Porchugeeze. They got a million like it.
"Figure it out for yourself. They don't need props when the crop's heavy. Why, when we had a heavy crop, we used to use five props to a tree. Now take ten acres of trees. That'd be some several thousan' props. Which cost money, an' labor to put in an' take out every year. These here natural braces don't have to have a thing done. They're Johnny-on-the-spot all the time. Why, the Porchugeeze has got us skinned a mile. Come on, I'll show you."
Billy, with city notions of trespass, betrayed perturbation at the freedom they were making of the little farm.
"Oh, it's all right, as long as you don't step on nothin'," the lineman reassured him. "Besides, my grandfather used to own this.
They know me. Forty years ago old Silva come from the Azores.
Went sheep-herdin' in the mountains for a couple of years, then blew in to San Leandro. These five acres was the first land he leased. That was the beginnin'. Then he began leasin' by the, hundreds of acres, an' by the hundred-an'-sixties. An' his sisters an' his uncles an' his aunts begun pourin' in from the Azores--they're all related there, you know; an' pretty soon San Leandro was a regular Porchugeeze settlement.
"An' old Silva wound up by buyin' these five acres from grandfather. Pretty soon--an' father by that time was in the hole to the neck--he was buyin' father's land by the hundred-an'-sixties. An' all the rest of his relations was coin' the same thing. Eather was always gettin' rich quick, an' he wound up by dyin' in debt. But old Silva never overlooked a bet, no matter how dinky. An' all the rest are just like him. You see outside the fence there, clear to the wheel-tracks in the road--horse-beans. We'd a-scorned to do a picayune thing like that. Not Silva. Why he's got a town house in San Leandro now.
