makes a detour round the head of the marshes, but this is seldom used, a
bog in winter and in summer riven with dried water-courses and overgrown
with brambles. To get around the tules comfortably you have to strike
farther in and that's a long way.

The last house before you get to Tito Murano's, which doesn't count, is
the Burrage Ranch. In the white mansions among the fruit trees the
Burrage Ranch doesn't count much either. It is old and small, fifty
acres, a postage stamp of a ranch. There is no avenue to the house,
which is close to the road behind a picket fence, and instead of
encircling balconies and striped awnings, it has one small porch with a
sagging top, over which climbs a rose that stretches long festoons to
the gable. In its yard grow two majestic live oaks, hoary giants with
silvered limbs reaching out in a thick-leaved canopy and casting a great
spread of shade.

Old Man Burrage had had the ranch a long time as they reckon time in
California. In his youth he had seen the great epoch in Virginia City,
figured in it in a humble capacity, and emerged from its final _debacle_
with twenty thousand dollars. He should have emerged with more and that
he didn't made him chary of mining. Peace and security exerted their
appeal, and after looking about for a few reflective years, he had
married the prettiest waitress in the Golden Nugget Hotel in Placerville
and settled down to farming. He had settled and settled hard, settled
like a barnacle, so firm and fast that he had never been able to pull
himself loose. Peace he had found but also poverty. If the mineral vein
was capricious, so were the elements, insect pests and the fruit market.
Thirty years after he had bought the ranch he was still there and still
poor with his wife Mary Ellen, his daughter Sadie and his son Mark.