The stranger looked at him curiously across their clasped hands, and glanced inquiringly to Saxon.
"You gotta excuse me," Billy gurgled, pumping the other's hand up and down. "But I just gotta laugh. Why, honest to God, I've woke up nights an' laughed an' gone to sleep again. Don't you recognize 'm, Saxon? He's the same identical dude say, friend, you're some punkins at a hundred yards dash, ain't you7" And then, in a sudden rush, Saxon placed him. He it was who had stood with Roy Blanchard alongside the automobile on the day she had wandered, sick and unwitting, into strange neighborhoods. Nor had that day been the first time she had seen him.
"Remember the Bricklayers' Picnic at Weasel Park7" Billy was asking. "An' the foot race? Why, I'd know that nose of yours anywhere among a million. You was the guy that stuck your cane between Timothy McManus's legs an' started the grandest roughhouse Weasel Park or any other park ever seen."
The visitor now commenced to laugh. He stood on one leg as he laughed harder, then stood on the other leg. Finally he sat down on a log of driftwood.
"And you were there," he managed to gasp to Billy at last. "You saw it. You saw it." He turned to Saxon. "--And you?"
She nodded.
"Say," Billy began again, as their laughter eased down, "what I wants know is what'd you wanta do it for. Say, what'd you wants do it for? I've been askin' that to myeelf ever since."
"So have I," was the answer.
"You didn't know Timothy McManus, did you7" "No; I'd never seen him before, and I've never seen him since."
"But what'd you wanta do it for?" Billy persisted.
The young man laughed, then controlled himself.
"To save my life, I don't know. I have one friend, a most intelligent chap that writes sober, scientific books, and he's always aching to throw an egg into an electric fan to see what will happen. Perhaps that's the way it was with me, except that there was no aching. When I saw those legs flying past, I merely stuck my stick in between. I didn't know I was going to do it. I just did it. Timothy McManus was no more surprised than I was."
"Did they catch you?" Billy asked.
"Do I look as if they did? I was never so scared in my life.
Timothy McManus himself couldn't have caught me that day. But what happened afterward? I heard they had a fearful roughhouse, but I couldn't stop to see."
It was not until a quarter of an hour had passed, during which Billy described the fight, that introductions took place. Mark Hall was their visitor's name, and he lived in a bungalow among the Carmel pines.
"But how did you ever find your way to Bierce's Cove?" he was curious to know. "Nobody ever dreams of it from the road."
"So that's its name?" Saxon said.
"It's the name we gave it. One of our crowd camped here one summer, and we named it after him. I'll take a cup of that coffee, if you don't mind."--This to Saxon. "And then I'll show your husband around. We're pretty proud of this cove. Nobody ever comes here but ourselves."
"You didn't get all that muscle from bein' chased by McManus,"
Billy observed over the coffee.
"Massage under tension," was the cryptic reply.
"Yes," Billy said, pondering vacantly. "Do you eat it with a spoon?"
Hall laughed.
"I'll show you. Take any muscle you want, tense it, then manipulate it with your fingers, so, and so."
"An' that done all that'" Billy asked skeptically.
"All that!" the other scorned proudly. "For one muscle you see, there's five tucked away but under command. Touch your finger to any part of me and see."
Billy complied, touching the right breast.
"You know something about anatomy, picking a muscleless spot," scolded Hall.
Billy grinned triumphantly, then, to his amazement, saw a muscle grow up under his finger. He prodded it, and found it hard and honest.
"Massage under tension!" Hall exulted. "Go on--anywhere you want."
And anywhere and everywhere Billy touched, muscles large and small rose up, quivered, and sank down, till the whole body was a ripple of willed quick.
"Never saw anything like it," Billy marveled at the end; "an' I've seen some few good men stripped in my time. Why, you're all living silk."
"Massage under tension did it, my friend. The doctors gave me up.
My friends called me the sick rat, and the mangy poet, and all that. Then I quit the city, came down to Carmel, and went in for the open air--and massage under tension."
"Jim Hazard didn't get his muscles that way," Billy challenged.
"Certainly not, the lucky skunk; he was born with them. Mine's made. That's the difference. I'm a work of art. He's a cave bear.
Come along. I'll show you around now. You'd better get your clothes off. Keep on only your shoes and pants, unless you've got a pair of trunks."
"My mother was a poet," Saxon said, while Billy was getting himself ready in the thicket. She had noted Hall's reference to himself.
He seemed incurious, and she ventured further.
"Some of it was printed."
"What was her name?" he asked idly.
"Dayelle Wiley Brown. She wrote: 'The Viking's Quest';
'Days of Gold'; 'Constancy'; 'The Caballero'; 'Graves at Little Meadow'; and a lot more. Ten of them are in 'The Story of the Files.'"
"I've the book at home," he remarked, for the first time showing real interest. "She was a pioneer, of course--before my time.
I'll look her up when I get back to the house. My people were pioneers. They came by Panama, in the Fifties, from Long Island.
My father was a doctor, but he went into business in San Francisco and robbed his fellow men out of enough to keep me and the rest of a large family going ever since.--Say, where are you and your husband bound?"
When Saxon had told him of their attempt to get away from Oakland and of their quest for land, he sympathized with the first and shook his head over the second.
"It's beautiful down beyond the Sur," he told her. "I've been all over those redwood canyons, and the place is alive with game. The government land is there, too. But you'd be foolish to settle.
