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is no bad friend to its host.
    After a long time a few families of squatters moved into the Pastures of Heaven and built fences and planted fruit trees. Since no one owned the land, they squabbled a great deal over its possession. After a hundred years there were twenty families on twenty little farms in the Pastures of Heaven. Near the center of the valley stood a general store and post office, and half a mile above, beside the stream, a hacked and much initialed schoolhouse.
    The families at last lived prosperously and at peace. Their land was rich and easy to work. The fruits of their gardens were the finest produced in central California.

II
    To the people of the Pastures of Heaven the Battle farm was cursed, and to their children it was haunted. Good land although it was, well watered and fertile, no one in the valley coveted the place, no one would live in the house, for land and houses that have been tended, loved and labored with and finally deserted, seem always sodden with gloom and with threatening. The trees which grow up around a deserted house are dark trees, and the shadows they throw on the ground have suggestive shapes.
    For five years now the old Battle farm had stood vacant. The weeds, with a holiday energy, free of fear of the hoe, grew as large as small trees. In the orchard the fruit trees were knotty and strong and tangled. They increased the quantity of their fruit, and diminished its size. The brambles grew about their roots and swallowed up the windfalls.
    The house itself, a square, well-built, two-story place, had been dignified and handsome when its white paint was fresh, but a singular latter history had left about it an air unbearably lonely. Weeds warped up the boards of the porches, the walls were grey with weathering. Small boys, those lieutenants of time in its warfare against the works of man, had broken out all the windows and carted away every movable thing. Boys believe that all kinds of portable articles which have no obvious owner, if taken home, can be put to some joyous use. The boys had gutted the house, had filled the wells with various kinds of refuse, and, quite by accident, while secretly smoking real tobacco in the hayloft, had burned the old barn to the ground. The fire was universally attributed to tramps.
    The deserted farm was situated not far from the middle of the narrow valley. On both sides it was bounded by the best and most prosperous farms in the Pastures of Heaven. It was a weedy blot between two finely cultivated, contented pieces of land. The people of the valley considered it a place of curious evil, for one horrible event and one impenetrable mystery had taken place there.
    Two generations of Battles had lived on the farm. George Battle came west in 1863 from upper New York State; he was quite young when he arrived, just draft age. His mother supplied the money to buy the farm and to build the big square house upon it. When the house was completed, George Battle sent for his mother to come to live with him. She tried to come, that old woman who thought that space stopped ten miles from her village. She saw mythological places, New York and Rio and Buenos Aires. Off Patagonia she died, and a ship’s watch buried her in a grey ocean with a piece of canvas for her coffin and three links of anchor chain sewn in between her feet; and she had wanted the crowded company of her home graveyard.
    George Battle looked about for a good investment in a woman. In Salinas he found Miss Myrtle Cameron, a spinster of thirty-five, with a small fortune. Miss Myrtle had been neglected because of a mild tendency to epilepsy, a disease then called “fits” and generally ascribed to animosity on the part of the deity. George did not mind the epilepsy. He knew he couldn’t have everything he wanted. Myrtle became his wife and bore him a son, and, after twice trying to burn the house, was confined in a little private prison called the Lippman Sanitarium, in San Jose. She