made out a scar upon a hillside. His first thought was that it
was the dump of a mine tunnel, but remembering that he was not in
gold-bearing country, he dismissed the scar from his mind and
continued the circle of his survey to the southeast, where,
across the waters of San Pablo Bay, he could see, sharp and
distant, the twin peaks of Mount Diablo. To the south was Mount
Tamalpais, and, yes, he was right, fifty miles away, where the
draughty winds of the Pacific blew in the Golden Gate, the smoke
of San Francisco made a low-lying haze against the sky.

"I ain't seen so much country all at once in many a day," he
thought aloud.

He was loath to depart, and it was not for an hour that he was
able to tear himself away and take the descent of the mountain.
Working out a new route just for the fun of it, late afternoon
was upon him when he arrived back at the wooded knolls. Here, on
the top of one of them, his keen eyes caught a glimpse of a shade
of green sharply differentiated from any he had seen all day.
Studying it for a minute, he concluded that it was composed of
three cypress trees, and he knew that nothing else than the hand
of man could have planted them there. Impelled by curiosity
purely boyish, he made up his mind to investigate. So densely
wooded was the knoll, and so steep, that he had to dismount and
go up on foot, at times even on hands and knees struggling hard
to force a way through the thicker underbrush. He came out
abruptly upon the cypresses. They were enclosed in a small
square of ancient fence; the pickets he could plainly see had
been hewn and sharpened by hand. Inside were the mounds of two
children's graves. Two wooden headboards, likewise hand-hewn,