these people had known him since he was a shock-headed, barefoot kid, and
when they saw him in his store clothes and heard his purified grammar,
they realized that for youth in California belongs the phrase "the world
is my oyster."

Now Mark had graduated and was studying in a large law office in San
Francisco. He was paid twenty dollars a week, was twenty-four years old,
rather silent, five-feet-ten and accounted good-looking. At the time this
story opens he was spending his vacation--pushed on to the summer's end
by a pressure of work in the office--on the ranch with his parents.

It was late afternoon, on the day following the holdup, and he was
sitting in the barn doorway milking the brown cow. The doorway was
shadowed, the blackness of the barn's interior behind it, the scent of
clean hay drifting out and mingling with the scents of baked earth and
tarweed that came from the heated fields. With his cheek against the
cow's side he could see between the lower limbs of the oaks the country
beyond, rust-colored and tan, streaked with blue shadows and the mottled
blackness below the trees. Turning a little further he could look down
the road with the eucalyptus tall on either side, the yellow path barred
by their shade. From the house came a good smell of hot bread and a sound
of voices--Mother and Sadie were getting ready for supper. At intervals
Mother's face, red and round below her sleeked, gray hair, her spectacles
up, her dress turned in at the neck, appeared at the window to take a
refreshing peep at her boy milking the brown cow.

The milk sizzed and foamed in the pail and the milker, his forehead
against the cow's warm pelt, watched it rise on the tin's side. It made a
loud drumming which prevented his hearing a hail from the picket fence.
The hail came again in a husky, dust-choked voice: