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For the climate.” He spread his arms to embrace the golden morning. “The sun shines three hundred days a year in California.” He dropped his arms and grinned. “So I’ve read.”
    “I admit the weather’s important, but I thought the main reason people came was the chance to get rich.”
    “Jesus, Chance, you’re dumb. Most people in this world don’t know how to get rich. They don’t have the brains—or the nerve. Be thankful. It leaves more room for a couple of smart fellows like us.”
    Wyatt whipped his cup over, throwing the rest of his coffee on the fire. It hissed and smoked as he jumped up.
    “Where are you going?”
    “South,” Wyatt said. “Time’s wasting. You can keep the coffeepot.”
    In a few minutes, he was ready to go. “I appreciate what you did for me in the mountains,” he said, extending his hand to Mack. “You come see me in Los Angeles, at The City of Health. Meantime, good luck to you.”
    When Wyatt Junius Paul smiled like this, Mack thought, he could charm the angels out of heaven. With a final wave, Wyatt went splashing into the shallow river and soon vanished among the willows and oaks on the other side. Mack stared after him, shaking his head in amazement and not a little relief. Undoubtedly he would never see Wyatt Paul again, and he had to admit he didn’t mind. Lighthearted as the Kansan might be sometimes, there was something hard and calculating about him too.
    Mack poured the last of the coffee and realized that his brow was sweaty. He rolled up the tattered sleeves of his shirt and squinted at the huge butter-yellow sun in the hazy sky. Hot weather coming. It couldn’t get too hot for him. In half an hour, he was moving west.

3
    H E PASSED BELOW SACRAMENTO and into wheat country, where fields of tasseled stalks stood two and three feet high in the spring sunshine. In those left fallow for the year, he saw sweating, cursing men behind eight-horse hitches that pulled seven-blade gangplows. In one field he saw ten gangplows moving forward together, like an army, filling the sky with dust. What amazed him most was the openness of the country. He never climbed over a single fence, or saw one. Did all this land belong to one man?
    The morning of his third day in the wheat country, he was trudging along a dirt track leading to a smudgy line of trees. Here the wheat, bleached pale by the sun, grew tall as his head. His mouth felt as dry as the sandy loam in which the wheat was planted, and sweat stuck his smelly shirt to his back—he’d peeled off his rancid suit of long underwear and left it behind. The wheat plain baked. He’d never been so thirsty.
    Maybe the trees ahead shaded water. He’d seen several riparian groves on his journey. He started to run but cut it short, his panting making him even thirstier. A pebble or wood chip in his left shoe set him limping, but he was too exhausted to stop and remove it.
    Sure enough, where the dirt track snaked through the woods to a ford, he came upon water. It was brown and sluggish, a stream several yards wide in a streambed ten times that width. He staggered through the uncut stand of oaks, sycamores, and willows festooned with wild grapevines and fell on his knees at the edge of the turgid brown water. His face was nearly to the water when a gunshot reverberated across the hot pale wheat fields, and a man came riding toward him at a gallop. On his feet now, his heart thudding, Mack could see two other riders as well, moving at a more leisurely pace behind. He watched the gunman ride down on him and rein his big powerful gray with a cruel yank that pulled the horse’s head back and made him whinny.
    “You’re on my land, drinking my water,” the man yelled, poking the air with his gun, a Smith & Wesson Schofield .45. “You got no right, mister.” Hatless, his forehead red and peeling from the sun, the man had a peasant’s face: small pale eyes, a lump of a nose, a deep dimple on his round chin. A few strands of