(THREE)

Harry McCallum's Hillside House

2

  Friday, February 5, 1897.  Harry, twenty-six years old, scrambles out of an empty bed and gropes his way through the spectral shadows of Hillside House to watch the sun come up.  Oh, it’ll come up all right, no clouds will obscure the sky—except perhaps a taunting, thin trail of cirrus.  In the midst of the rainy season, no rain will fall.  Another day like all the others.

  In spite of omens, Harry is compelled to see the sunrise; to purge himself of a nightmare, a fearful dream he only half remembers.  For all he knows, he might be losing his mind, his ability to separate fancy from reality, like his father.  In the murky light, he stumbles over leather boots cracked with mud, trying to find his clothes, and grumbling, “No time to let an unnatural dream get ahold of me.”

  Or quit.  What would his family do without him?  He’s the only one besides his father who’s stayed with the ranch all these years.  After his two older brothers Johnny and Wallace died, he’s the only one who lived with his father for long periods of time in Palm Springs, coaxed water down from the falls, kept the Palm Valley Water Company solvent, managed the general store, the orchards (what was  left of them) and the livestock; endured  scorching, desolate summers the last two years while his mother, Emily, and two sisters, Pearl and May, lived com­fortably in Chicago with May’s husband, Doc Forline, and their son, John, now two years old.  Chicago summers were hot enough—sometimes worse than Palm Valley and certainly more sultry—but the family lived only a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan.  No lakes in this wilderness!

  Self pity.  Is this what he’s been reduced to?

  He finds his overalls caked with muck mixed out of dust and yesterday’s sweat, slung over a red-dyed leather chair in the second bedroom.  How did they get in there?  He was sober when he went to bed; no more drinking for him!  He couldn’t afford it—not only because money was tight, but he didn’t want to end up like his brother Wallace.

  He hitches the work denims over his naked limbs and pulls on the boots.  No water to splash on his grizzled face.  Rubbing his gray, bloodshot  eyes with his knuckles, he brushes back dark hair and makes his way onto the porch.

  Alone and lonely, that’s the way it was last night, missing the brooding comfort of Louise—the warmth of her body next to him; the sublime relief that came from having her.  Nights were cold on the desert—not as bad as in January, but still cold before sun up.

  In the east the ragged edge of Cottonwood Mountains seems unreal, painted like a smudge of black sand against the white fire of inevitable sunrise.  He squints and waits.  A breeze stirs, harbinger of dayb­reak, filling dry air which smells of creosote bush, drifting sage and clove.  He breathes deeply to test his cough; feels good he can fill his lungs without pain—taking in the breath of the desert; inhaling the scented mysteries of the land he and his father love—in recent months, more often—hate.

  He gazes dully across the huge valley basin—the McCallum Ranch—his father still calls it “Johnnie’s Ranch”—reaching out to the southeast from Hillside House, exhausted citrus groves, a pocket pasture with a handful of cattle tucked against a jumbled toe of San Jacinto to the north, sprawling like a gigantic dinosaur on the desert floor.  And beyond—silhouettes  of billowing cotton­wood trees along Main Avenue, obscuring the white Adobe where his father sleeps.  His father would be alone in the Adobe.  His mother Emily had taken Pearl to Chicago two years ago to live with May and family.  So it’s only he and his father in Palm Springs, and the land is dying.

  Not the land itself, of course, but what they’d put into it—their great trans­formation—lush orchards and pasture—these were dying, reverting to a primi­tive state—to wilderness, hardly an “Eden” anymore—the ranch, crops, citrus, and the dream.  The whole damned enterprise!

  This makes him think of Louise, the last time he’d been with her, six or seven nights ago, her rankling nonsense reeling out the Indian’s legend of Tahquitz and his curse on the McCallum family.  Only for spite did she spin her tale.  Harry had to admit he wasn’t much of a lover.  Too serious—too mechanical for passionate Louise, although more than energetic and dominating than his small frame would suggest.  And she was demanding, and sometimes—like the last time—Harry simply couldn’t allow himself to let go, to relax and make love to her the way she wanted.  His desire was to get it over with as quickly as possible.  Maybe it was his conscience.  He was using her, not loving her, or so she would have him believe.

  “You don’t love me!” she jeered one night after he’d finished with her and told her to get dressed and go home.

  “I do love you,” he said, “and I want you here.  I want to marry you!”

  “No you don’t,” she persisted, throwing a brown cotton dress over her well-shaped, tight body.  She was so young—too young, perhaps, only twenty-one; dark skin and even darker eyes, reflecting her mother’s ancestry; tall like her father.  “Your family would never allow it, even if you wanted to marry me.  They look at me as nothing but a half-breed.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “And now you want me to gallop home to Banning in the middle of the night.”

  “No, ‘suredly I don’t, but you worry me.  My family doesn’t know anything about you.  They’re in Chicago.”

  “Not your father!”

  “We can marry in secret.”

  “There, you see!”

  She stood at the door, looking down at him.  “You’re all cursed—all you McCallums.  Your father came down here and thought he could change everything—change the way these people lived for hundreds of years!”

  “What do you know about these people?”

  “Plenty!  You forget my father was in the Riverside Bureau of Indian Affairs.  My mother herself was half-Indian.”

  “Yes, I know, I know . . .”

  “No, you don’t know anything.  How long have we been together?  Two months?  All you want is a body to keep you warm at night.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Lord Tahquitz has put a curse on you.”

  “That’s insane.  You don’t believe that.”

  “Well, maybe I do believe it.”

  Harry rolled out of bed, a blanket thrown around his middle.  Not a tall man, he was a head taller than Louise.  His gray eyes glowered at her.  “We made life better for the Indians.”

  “Water?  What’s water to the Calientes?  Water from Tahquitz has always been enough for them and now you’re diverting even that.”

  “They never use it!  In flash flood it spills out into the desert and vanishes in the sand.  They’ve had a better life since we came—since fifteen years ago, anyway, when my father built the ditch.”

  “Trespassing on their land.”

  “The government approved it.”

  “Your life is better, Harry, not theirs.  They believe Tahquitz has put a curse on you for violat­ing the canyon.  See how your two young brothers died, and now—how soon—your father!”

  “Come back to bed,” Harry growled, tugging at the blanket.

  “No, you got what you wanted.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  “Well . . .”  She started undressing, slowly making her way to his side.

  Harry remembered now.  The source of his nightmare—the nightmare itself just as it was in legend—the ghost of Lord Tahquitz rising in a column of awesome gray smoke above the canyon; Tahquitz burned for a demon because he’d enticed young maidens into his tenebrous domain and ravished them.

  In his dream, Harry had seen his father pursued by Indians up into the canyon and Chief Tahquitz himself confronting his father and casting a spell on him.  And in the dream, the curse dissolved with distant thunder rolling down through the canyon.

  His father wasn’t well.  He’d be seventy-one July 26, and his heart had given out—his tenacity and optimism, so virulent only a few years ago.  He shifted quixotically between delirium and apathy, lingering over memories of his childhood along the Ohio River in Indiana.

  “When I was a boy we had respect for the land . . . if Johnnie were alive.   When is Johnnie coming back from Ventura?”

  “Father, Johnnie is dead.  He died six years ago.  He’s buried at Rosedale in Los Angeles, beside Wallace.”

  “Wally never amounted to much, did he?  What a looker.  He should have gone on the stage. . . . Yes.  Poor Johnnie, and Wally.  They never got to see where I was born.”

  Harry knew Louise wasn’t afraid to plague him with maledictions.  She could bring down curses all she wanted, because he needed her.  He knew he must marry her soon if he wanted to keep her at all.    He’d simply marry her secretly.  The family need never know.

  He damned himself for loving her at all.  What in thunder was he doing here now, standing like some heathen to watch the sun come up?  Maybe Louise was right.  Maybe there was a curse on his family, and he was praying to the sun, or maybe Tahquitz, to exorcise it.

  So what if his father did hack into the desert with his long, stone-lined ditch?  So what if he improved the Tahquitz channel—widening the stream even more than old Van Slyke and Burn—to trap and divert the water into his orchards.  Before the drought took hold two years ago, the Tahquitz stream brought almost two hundred miner’s inches into the ranch each year, and John Guthrie’s canal system, hundreds of miner’s inches into Palm Springs for other ranchers who became share­holders of the Palm Valley Water Company.  Not too many of them anymore!  Without water, the Caliente Indians would have to wander off into the mountains each summer for food and game—some of them still did.

  In spite of what Louise professed, Harry was convinced they preferred settling into the hot springs year round.  And now, if this blasted drought would come to an end, the Indians in Palm Springs could settle into a true ranchería style of living—at least so his father hoped.  They had an opportunity like no other Indians in America, so he believed—to become rich, as long as speculators and govern­ment “trustees” didn't connive to get the land away from them.  They owned more land than John Guthrie, given to them by the government in checker­board two mile squares; the other acreage in the checker­board pattern given to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, from which Van Slyke and Burn had purchased the ranch before John Guthrie took his option for all eighty acres in 1887.

  But not without water.  Without water—nothing.

  Maybe there was a curse.

3

  In 1890, shortly after his return from Boston, his father got the govern­ment to plant date palms in Palm Valley.  The fragile offshoots, many of them smuggled out of Arab countries in the dead of night, mostly from Syria, would flourish in the valley, John Guthrie wrote the government.  He succeeded in interest­ing one palm­ologist in particular, H.E. Vandeman, urging him to bring the offshoots to the area.  John Guthrie supported his argument with living proof—fruit bearing date palms he’d learned to cultivate from an Indian specialist.

  Yes, the dream had been alive all right, and only seven years ago!  Now it seemed nothing but a dream.  And today he’s the only McCallum son alive, strug­gling with his father to keep the dream alive.

  If Louise was right, if Tahquitz or the Indians had visited a curse on them for violating the desert, his malevolence first touched them in the summer of 1891.  All the family were together then—his mother, Emily, in good health for the first time in months; Johnnie just returned from Ventura on the coast, even though not the previous November as his father had hoped.  Even the peripatetic Wallace visited for a short time after a long sojourn to places he was not willing to reveal.  Most likely Chicago, New York, and Boston—Harry guessed Boston, because his father and sister May were there in 1890.

  Harry never had seen May so melancholic.  He knew her to be overly serious at times—much too hard on herself—but this was different.  At times they were alone together, she gradually spilled out the story in bits and pieces of her failure in Boston.  She should have known she was too young to strain toward learning difficult operatic roles.  The vocal coach should’ve advised her that the voice doesn’t mature until the age of thirty, so trying to force a girl of twenty-one into singing in the soprano range was doubly dangerous, besides which she was naturally a contralto.  But neither she nor her father were advised, and her chances to become an opera star were ruined.  Her father had no control over that.

  Pearl, twelve years old, was in from Marlboro School in Los Angeles for summer vacation—aloof, nose in the air, her speech artificial, lathered with broad “a’s” where they didn’t belong, as in dahncing for dancing.  When Harry chided her for being stuck up, she said, half-mocking, “A lot you know, desert rat!”

  They’d had over seven inches of rain in Palm springs—all of it in Febru­ary.  Water cascaded off the mountain.  Overflow from Tahquitz creek broiled out into the desert, its overflow diverted from the pipes which fed the orchards.

  The summer of 1891 also was the summer Johnnie died.

  Two years after, although they hadn’t realized it at the time, the long cycle of drought began in the rain-season of 1892-93.  They thought it an aberration—only one unusually dry year.  There’d been tantalizing months of rain since then—heavy flash floods in 1895, but never like in the 1880s.

  In the summer of 1893, John Guthrie took the family, and a shipment of the ranch’s early grown oranges and grapefruit, to the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  May, now twenty-five, renewed acquaintance with Henry Hamilton Forline, son of friends of the McCallums dating back to John Guthrie’s youth along the Ohio River.  Henry Hamilton was a young graduate of Northwestern University, born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, not too far from John Guthrie’s birth­place across the Ohio River in Vevay, Indiana—a river town.   May first met him on her trip to Boston in 1890 when they stopped off in Chicago to visit her father’s old family friends.

  In Chicago, in 1893, Hamilton proposed marriage and a year later, they tied the knot.  From the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express:

  Early Days in Los Angeles:  September, 1894 – Announcement cards are out for the marriage of Miss May Guthrie MacCallum [sic] and Harry Hamilton Forline which will take place Wednesday, Sept. 18.  The reception will be held at the family home, 321 South Grand Avenue from 8 to 10 o’clock.

  September, 1894 – Mr. and Mrs. J. G. MacCallum [again misspelled] gave a reception the other evening at their home on Grand Avenue for their son-in-law and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Harry [sic] Hamilton Forline.

  Sure, the marriage was a blessing, but the family was breaking up none­theless, along with the Palm Springs community.  May and her new husband immediately moved to Chicago where the doctor had a clinic with his brother in Western Springs, a suburb of Chicago south of Cicero.

  In 1893 the silver panic created havoc nationwide.  As the government began buying more silver under the Sherman Silver Act and new issues of paper certificates backed by silver were exchanged for gold, the gold supply dwindled and people lost confidence in the Treasury itself.  Credit dried up along with the rivers and creeks in Palm Valley.

  Then, in 1895, Wallace, now twenty-eight, succumbed to flu in Chicago at May and Hamilton’s home.  Harry and his father hadn’t seen much of Wallace the years before he died, as he drifted in and out of their lives, gathering compan­ions like stray dogs, trying to connect them into ranch life—partnerships.  As he’d written in 1890:  Please, father, make an offer to my friend.

  Apart from May’s marriage, one other joyous event had marked the last seven years.  The same year Wallace died, May gave birth to a son on November 1, 1895, in Western Springs, naming him John after her beloved brother Johnnie.  And now word reached Harry and his father that May was carrying a second child, expected in August this year.  But these were evanescent moments of happiness.  Louise was right after all, Tahquitz indeed had cursed the McCallum family.  In seven years, Harry’s two older brothers, dead; the family scattered—financial panic and drought.

  Harry feared his nightmare might come to life.  Was his father’s great accomplishment going to dissolve into an hallucination like the mirage of the decimated citrus groves?

  The hot sun suddenly exploded over Cottonwood Mountains, its aureate flame searing the eastern sky, revealing the failing orchards.  Yes, it would be a day like all the others, like the two hundred and eighty days before this one, without a single drop of rain falling on the thirsting desert.  It had been weeks since he’d been in Tahquitz Canyon.  He’d seen a fringe of snow on top of San Jacinto in his last trip out into the desert.  Maybe, just maybe, water was casca­ding down the falls.  Perhaps someone had tampered with the floodgate which diverted the water to the McCallum orchards.  He must hike up into Tahquitz again in spite of the old curse.  He’d have to challenge the evil spirit of the revengeful Chieftain once more.

  “You haven’t got me yet, old devil Tahquitz!” The general store and his father could wait.

4

  Tahquitz Canyon.  Climbing up the long slope to its broad opening, Harry never fails to wonder what mighty and ancient cataclysm dilacerated the foot of the mountain, ripping this jagged hole, tumbling giant slabs of rust colored granite out of the chasm onto the long, sloping alluvial plane below.  Many of its colossal, petri­fied rocks cling to the sides of the gorge as if waiting for another telluric disaster to dis­lodge them.  Lord Tahquitz had chosen his haunt well.

  Only when he gets up into the narrow, although easily traversed path along the canyon’s north side, does he feel safe from the hanging rocks, no longer afraid the slightest tremor might break them loose and crush him.  Quakes in the region are practically unknown—at least in the fifteen or so years he’s been in the desert.

  One mile of picking his way among creosote bushes and he’s out of breath.  Morning sun hasn’t reached here.  It’s still cool, but he’s been walking too fast, rushing onward, anticipating water swirling in the small pool beneath the falls and that it might vanish if he doesn’t get to it in time, as if then he could make sure the sluice gate on the cliff below the pool is open so cataracts of melted snow can gush down through the flume and through the huge rusted pipe on the ranch itself to the thirsting fruit orchards.

  Tahquitz has bewitched me.  I’m losing my hold.  Why am I in such a hurry?  Why have I come up here at all?  There’s no water, no veil of melted snow flowing over the high marbled granite.  The desolate pool below the falls will mock me—empty, dry and full of lizards.

  He stops to get control of his breathing, resting his back against a rock.  He’s a fool.  If he keeps up this pace, he’ll start coughing blood.

  He pushes ahead, hiking briskly up the winding path which rises sud­denly, then drops precipitously into a small gully.  Above him is the sluice gate and flume his father rigged to control the flow of water from the spring beneath the falls.

  Climbing up and circling around a jutting rock, he doesn’t bother to check the wheel which turns the valve and opens the gate.  It’s been a long time since they used it.  No, he wants to see the pool first—dry or full.  Maybe there’s been a miracle, like the old days.

  No miracle. . . . not today.  The pool is empty and glancing up at the falls into half-light filtered through yellow-leaved poplar trees, he detects only a trace of water like tears from a dying animal, trickling down its white-veined, rusty, bronzed granite face.  Perhaps if he brings a barrel into the canyon, he can fill it some­how.  At least now he can enjoy some of the water for himself.

  He steps through the soft floor of the pool, avoiding tiny rocks, frightened lizards scurrying for cover.  He gets to the falls and cups his hands to catch some of the melted snow, sloshing it on his grimy mouth, rubbing it into his eyes.

  If only he could spend the whole day right here!

  Refreshed, Harry starts his descent and goes for the sluice gate.  At the edge of the dry pool farthest away from the falls, he inches carefully out along the ledge.  He climbs down and is about to swing one leg over the pipe to straddle it and get at the mechanism when, with one foot in the air, some­thing arrests him.

  Someone has been at the valve, but not to work it.  He gets as close as he can.  Wire has been twisted through an open spoke and around the valve stem.  The blasted thing is sealed tight!  He can’t turn it and couldn’t open it if he wanted to.

  Confound it!  Has that puritanical, over-dressed, slickered Indian agent closed the sluice gate?  The thought of the agent coming up here in his stiff, black suit and getting himself dirty makes him laugh.  More than likely he had one of his slavish, toad-eating bondsmen do it for him.

  Or maybe those young Indian rebels have done it.  Damn!  He could get five, maybe six barrels out of the falls today if he spent the whole day doing it.  Maybe he would anyhow.

  Fat chance.  Not with government snoopers around.  Or with one of the Cahuilla young bloods perched on a ledge this very minute—

  Thinking so has made it happen—the echoing blast of gun fire cracks above him.  A leafless bush below the embankment shudders and dust flies.

  Crimeny, so that’s it!  The Indians!

  He slides off the precipice, quickly finding the trail, high-tailing it for the gaping mouth of the canyon—more than a mile away.  A distant rifle shot shatters the still air.

  What else can he do but run?  He must hurry to get to his father!

  He curses and eats dust, the cough raking his throat.  Their nearest water supply—their only water supply for the ranch cut off by Indian thugs—or the government!  Or maybe it’s old devil Tahquitz himself.

  He stumbles out of the canyon into the hot sun, hacking and wheezing, hardly able to breathe, dodging around granite megaliths, racing down the stony trail toward the center of town and the Adobe Ranch house where he hopes he’ll find his father.

5

  The hawk, circling high, sees it differently—Harry’s a prairie dog sprinting across the sloping alluvial plain spilling out of Tahquitz, a diminished speck scutter­ing against the face of the ancient lava flow which fans into the valley.  And to the north, John Guthrie’s decimated citrus groves, retreating like a beaten army from the base of San Jacinto toward the dark green fuzz of cottonwoods on Main Street.  The speck disappears suddenly into green mossy trees; the hawk banks southward toward Shadow Mountains in search of more likely prey.

  Harry gets to the Adobe out of breath, expecting to see his father, but he’s not there.  Outside in the patio, he slumps into the rattan rocker under the spidery, white branched fig tree . . . needs trimming before it starts to get its summer leaves.  What summer leaves?  The thing is probably dead, but fig trees always look dead in the winter time.  .  .  .

  A deep cough racks his lungs and he yanks the red bandana from his back pocket and covers his mouth.  No blood—that’s a blessing!

  Where are they—his father and Theresa?  On a normal weekday morning, she’s banging pots in the kitchen, cooking mush and eggs for them; stewing beef or chicken soup for the afternoon meal.

  And John Guthrie, dressed always in collar and tie, even in the hot, dry air, sitting like Captain Thorne in a play Harry had seen in Los Angeles—William Gillette in “Secret Service”—impeccable and determined, whether sitting under the fig tree, or on the porch, or wandering about in Emily’s flower garden.

  Today—no one.

  Now that the sun is well over the valley, the air is tinder dry.  Harry is running sweat; his overalls stuck to his skin like the clutch of a straight-jacket—not that he’d ever worn one—but perhaps now’s the time for insanity.  I’ll be the first McCallum to go insane, he muses.

  He fights to get control of his breath.  The cough subsides and he can breathe freely again, although the pain continues to tear at him each time he wheezes a draught of the dusty air.

  The shelter of the latticed patio is no comfort; the grape arbor nothing but a twist of empty branches; only tentative shade from a musty green cotton­wood pro­tects him.

  Finally, he’s able to get up without bringing on the cough and decides to go inside to see if he can find a clue as to why his father or Theresa has disappeared.  He scuffs along the short, ground-level porch, its slanting roof held up by white two-by-four pillars.

  He doesn’t want to go into the house.  He hesitates and looks out toward Main Avenue.  The dirt road is deserted too—not a mule or a buckboard.  He sighs at the sight of the lawn in front of the Adobe . . . used to be emerald green in winter.  Now, parched amber, smelling like burnt hay; his mother’s flower garden, once a pungent bed of pansies, nasturtiums and rainbow verbena, a twisted mass of dried twigs.

  He takes a deep breath, feels a stab of pain his chest, turns and walks into the house.

6

  Strange paradox, John Guthrie’s building the McCallum White Adobe, as it was called.  Ironic indeed, his ever coming to Palm Springs in the first place.

  Certainly John Guthrie loved his sons and believed the dry hot air of the desert would help cure them, and hoped their health would improve.  But Harry knew his father wanted to settle in the desert to recreate what he himself had known as a boy in Indiana; to farm his own land and live on it.  His father was here to stay, whether or not Johnnie, or Wallace, or Harry recovered from tuberculosis.

  Before 1891, the year Johnnie died, Harry had seen his father become possessed with the desert—a man with dogged intent to stop at nothing to cultivate farmland which would grow California varieties of citrus rivaling Florida and other southern states.

  Harry languished in the Adobe, it must’ve been more than an hour, hoping the pain would leave his chest, sprawled half-awake in a porch lounge his father had dragged inside.

  No way he could stop John Guthrie anyhow, from whatever it was he’d decided to do.  Besides, where could Harry look for him?  He hadn’t taken the phaeton, so that would mean he hadn’t gone to Seven Palms for the train to Los Angeles.  Was he up in the mountains?  If so, where?  Had he found the sealed flume in the canyon?

  Harry got up and wandered listlessly through the cool rooms.  Only his father lived in the Adobe now, so it was sparsely furnished.  A couple of fancy tables and a lounge . . .

  He finds himself, once again, imagining an inventory for when his father dies. . . . dining table and chairs, worth about ten dollars . . . he’d have to sell them.  Kitchen stove and utensils, worth maybe fifteen silver dollars; carpet—seven fifty; marble-top sideboard—

  Remnants only . . . What’s wrong with him?  Morbidity always gets to him when he’s alone in the Adobe, remembering happier days.  He almost forgets he’s been shot at in the canyon.

  Where is John Guthrie?  Maybe he’s over at their general store at Main and North.  Or sitting on the porch of Welwood Murray’s hotel chewing the fat with the old Scot, wondering what’s going to happen to their village with this blasted drought.

  Or maybe he’s gone up into the orchards or to Hillside House looking for Harry.  John Guthrie has taken to walking along the Whitewater ditch lately, mumbl­ing to himself; kicking stones and cursing if anything is out of kilter, like a crumbled revetment or jammed sluice.

  Maybe I’m worried for nothing, but hasn’t the thing been gnawing at him all morning?  Hasn’t his premonition about the sluice gate at the falls proved true?  And hasn’t he been chased out of the canyon?

  His father must know about the sealed flume.  That’s why he’s gone off somewhere—to find out who did it.  He might even be in danger if he hikes up into Tahquitz, not only from gun fire, but from his heart condition.  Now, if only I can  grab onto my breath and move without coughing blood, I can run after Father and look out for him.

  In the dining room papers, scattered like chunks of flagstone on the marble-top sideboard catch his eye.  Perhaps these will give him a clue as to what his father is up to.

  John Guthrie obviously has been rummaging through his huge trunk again.  Has the Indian agent paid him a visit last night. . . this morning?  Has his father been told they could no longer take water from Tahquitz?  It looks as if he’s been studying how to fight it—to build a case.  He’s made a few marginal notations, but none of the documents seem related.  Perhaps he’s been reliving the old feud with his Syndicate partners again.  Because—well, what good is it to drag out these yellowed documents?  What do they have to do with Tahquitz water?  Unless . . .

  Anyway, if his father wants to fight an Interior Department decision, he wouldn’t go tearing off unprepared to lawyers in Los Angeles—not until he planned his brief methodically.  His father might be getting old but he was still mentally alert and certainly hadn’t lost his perception in legal matters.

  No, Harry’s first assumption has to be correct.  Someone has told John Guthrie about the closed sluice gate and he’s tramping around the village trying to find out who did it.

  Then Harry notices, just beneath the top of the pile, the stipulation dated February 7, 1888 by Joseph W. Preston, United States Indian Agent who’d been instructed to investigate trespass and fraud on the Rincon and Mission Indian Reser­vations by the Palm Valley Land Company started by his Syndicate partners—a rival to John Guthrie’s own Palm Valley Water Company.

  John Guthrie himself had initiated the investigation.

7

  Preston’s 1887 investigation into possible fraud on the Rincon and Mission Reservations climaxed a fight between John Guthrie and old friends from the north over the development of Palm Springs.  John Guthrie’s concept of land use differed from his friends; and in fact, from  many Anglo-Americans who’d crossed the continent to settle in California.  He would’ve been more closely allied with the early Mexican rancheros who never regarded their vast holdings as real estate to waste away unused, later to be sold for profit on a rising market.  The land in ranchero days was to be used for grazing cattle which were slaughtered mostly for hides.  After September 9, 1850 when California became a state, vast holdings of Mexicans were taken illegally and given to the railroads—Central Pacific, and the Southern Pacific, and John Guthrie found himself up to his elbows defending the rights of Mexican land holders.  He wasn’t very successful.  The railroads had a voice in Washington.

  John Guthrie envisioned his acreage in Palm Valley as land to be culti­vated by families who actually lived on it, and who would pass on their farms to succeeding generations.  This was a concept which never was to take hold in Cali­fornia.  As a delegate to the California Constitutional Convention in 1878-79, John Guthrie had fought for these principles and helped draft paragraph three of Article Eighteen which reads:

  Lands belonging to this State, which are suitable for cultivation, shall be granted only to actual settlers, and in quantities not exceeding three hundred and twenty acres to each settler, under such conditions as shall be prescribed by law.

  His first purchase of land in Palm Valley from Van Slyke and Burn was precisely the limit of three hundred and twenty acres.  He planned to become an “actual settler” on eighty acres and make it “suitable for cultivation.”  Land he couldn’t cultivate himself, he’d sell to settlers who agreed to cultivate the land, raise families on their farms and help build a lasting community.  This was John Guthrie’s dream.

  Pablo Chino, who brought John Guthrie into the village, originally resided on the land later designated, “Section Fifteen.”  Chino knew it was “white man’s” property.  He didn’t object to moving off—in fact, he was anxious to make a shift to Protrero, near Banning, where he had political aspirations for becoming chief or captain of all Indians in that section.

  John Guthrie took an option dated March 24, 1885 to buy the Van Slyke and Burn property at the foot of San Jacinto.  His eighty acres spread outward into the heart of the village—to Main Street.  This was to become the McCallum Ranch and thus strate­gic and indispensable to the family, not only because John Guthrie forecast succeed­ing generations of McCallums living there, but because it included a thousand feet running along the foot of the moun­tain.  San Jacinto symbolized permanence.  The mountain was Palm Springs.

  [The name for the city is credited to Harry McCallum who used it in his correspondence to his father in Boston in 1890, and subsequently as he was named Post Master for the city in June, 1897.  But often the larger area, particularly in relation to the water company, was referred to as Palm Valley.]

  One of Harry’s most acrimonious quarrels with his father was over building Hillside House in 1888.

  “You’re not to touch the mountain!” John Guthrie warned him, so Harry was forced to build his home on the slope, not into it.  A huge, bronze slab still rested undisturbed in the middle of the back porch in 1969, and remained there until the house was bulldozed in 1971, this portion of the mountain gouged out for tennis courts.

  John Guthrie made sure Harry would not move a rock over three feet to build his house—not one fragmented, or hauled away.  How often Harry had heard his father say, “As long as I’m in Palm Valley, they shall not tear down the mountain!  What is Palm Springs without old San Jacinto, the extinct volcano, the protective wall, the slumbering goddess?  We must protect her in kind.  You’re not to touch a foot of her!”

  A bit of irony here.  It was this magnificent mountain which held back Pacific storms, creating dry desert conditions.  His father was nearing sixty years of age when he started building the stone-lined flume which was to stretch northward to Whitewater River originating in the San Gorgonio watershed.  He had nothing but hand labor to depend on—his own and the Indians, who were paid hand­somely—not in the manner in which Chinese had been paid when building the railroads.  It was one of the most unique irriga­tion projects of the 1880s in Southern California.

  In order to complete Whitewater ditch and bring water into the village, it was necessary to cut through about eight miles of the Indian reservation, raising the question of trespass.  The Agua Calientes didn’t object since they would have use of the water but couldn’t dam it to divert the water from flowing southward from the reservation.  They helped John Guthrie willingly, and not only because water might improve their land.

  The pattern for getting a work force together in California always had been to hire cheap labor at next-to-nothing wages—originally “coolie” labor from China, and more recently on the citrus and vegetable farms along the coast, immigrants from Japan, many of whom ended up owning the land themselves.  McCallum’s labor force in Palm Valley for the Whitewater ditch, and afterwards for planting the orchards, necessarily was drawn from the Indians.  But he saw to it they understood what his purpose was in bringing water in, and he paid them.

  And so, in 1885 as water began to flow south from Whitewater; from Snow Creek, tapped as he had the Tahquitz stream, John Guthrie picked up his option on the Van Slyke and Burn land and started planting trees.  He was beginning to develop his city.

  Unwieldy indeed, managing the sale of two thousand acres of land.  Cash was needed.  John Guthrie decided to form a Syndicate, a casual arrange­ment of partners to share undivided interests in the land, other than the ranch land, until it could be sold to individual farmers.  At the same time, he made plans to form the Palm Valley Water Company to be incorporated and intricately tied in with the community’s develop­ment.

  Linking water rights with land sale wasn’t unknown in Southern Califor­nia.  The idea had originated with George Chaffey, promoter and self-educated engineer who created the twin settlements of Etiwanda and Ontario in the western part of San Gabriel valley about thirty miles northwest of Palm Springs—not desert land since the settlements were west of the mountains.  Early in the 1870s, Chaffey, aided by a wealthy Riverside news­paper­man, L.M. Holt, chartered a mutual water company so that the company could use water anywhere within the huge develop­ment.  Thus he could divert the streams at will, a questionable practice awaiting court decision at the time.  By selling shares in the water company with equal amounts of land, the buyer and settler became part of the water company, no matter where the water came from.

  Divergence of streams wasn’t a question as yet in Palm Valley, although the idea of a mutual water company appealed to John Guthrie because it meant that settlers would share a stake in the area’s development.  To underscore this intention, he wrote the following into his articles of corporation:

  . . . for the purposes of acquiring water rights, constructing conduits, dams, reservoirs to supply Palm Valley, Township 4 . . . for sale and domestic use for distribution [of water] to shareholders of said corporation owning and occupy­­ing land in Palm Valley . . .

  Interesting that these articles complied with the Chaffey concept of protecting shareholders against the possible illegality of using diverted streams, but the California Supreme Court had settled that question in 1885 in favor of the share­holders.  More important to John Guthrie was the phrase, owning and occupying land.  It meant that only those who lived on the land (and, by inference, cultivated it), could become shareholders in the corporation and the water company.

  Nothing was said in the original articles about the right to sell, lease or dispose of property, nor about mineral rights.  Precisely so.  It’s the way John Guthrie wanted it.  He wished to exclude speculators and land grabbers—those who would come in to buy up the land and let it lie fallow until they could sell it at a profit.  He’d never build an agricultural community that way!

  Pearl, in the Palm Springs Life 1960 annual pictorial refers to the syndicate her father formed to buy large portions of land in Palm Valley:  “They had all split up.  They had a very heated argument—they thought my father was selling the land too cheap.  They broke up without any reconciliation—they were old friends, they should have reconciled—and they abandoned everything.  Later I spent great sums of money to buy back the land and clear the titles.”

  Two inaccuracies here:  First of all, John Guthrie’s argument with syndicate partners zeroed in on use of the land, not that he was selling it too cheaply.  They called him a deluded dreamer.  Nowhere else in the state had such an idealistic proposal, as in the articles of incorporation, been put forward.  All agricultural developments had been monopolistic—large ranches under the control of single ownerships.  Nobody, they told him, would buy land in Palm Springs if they were forced to live there.  The idea was preposterous!  Speculation was the mode of the day—the potential increment in the land’s value in a rising market.  Chaffey’s mutual water company had been created only to circumvent the controversy over diverted rivers, and that had been settled in court.  To sell land, the partners insisted, they must guarantee the buyer profit could be realized.

  And what of the potential mineral deposits—lime and cement?  Why limit the new Elysium to growing oranges, figs, apricots and dates?  The suggestion that Palm Valley might be converted into cement factories riled John Guthrie even more than speculation.  Next his partners would propose building plants to bottle water from reservation hot springs!

  Secondly, Pearl’s statement that she “spent great sums of money to buy back the land and clear the titles” does not explain that 540 acres were held by John Guthrie and his partners in undivided shares of .2748, or 2748/10,000.  So Pearl needed to buy back the partners’ shared interests.  And, as we shall see, her right to her father’s .2748 interest in syndicate land was in question more than once.

  Thus, John Guthrie held a trump card.  His partners couldn’t give clear title to the land unless he agreed to a division, since he’d sold them undivided shares.  Almost three acres of Section Fifteen—the most valuable property of all because it was against the mountain—was still undivided, and John Guthrie refused to do so.

  But his partners also held a trump.  All but one refused to invest capital in his Palm Valley Water Company.  They warned him they would form their own company.  John Guthrie was to invest $136,500, but he needed a total of $600,000 to capitalize.  Van Slyke and Burn agreed to put up $299,000 which he would buy out when he took up the option.  A friend from San Francisco, E.H. Thomas, not part of the Syndicate, offered $27,000, and their lawyer, H.L. Drew, a token $500.  John Guthrie needed someone to match his share.  O.C. Miller, a syndicate partner, was ready to put it up.  But not until the articles were amended.

  They haggled.  Finally, on the very day set for incorporation, February 1, 1887, the articles were amended.  The original paragraph stood, but the following was added at the insistence of Miller:

  . . . and for the purpose of acquiring, developing, leasing . . . to deal in timber, lime, cement and other deposits. . . to acquire, construct, operate and dispose of [interests] in real property. . . .

  Timber?  Lime and cement gouged out of  sand in the heart of the village?  John Guthrie would see to it that never happened!  The Palm Valley Water Company was incorporated with offices in Los Angeles.  Miller put up his $136,500.

  John Guthrie also made a tentative agreement with Miller that he would work out a division of Section Fifteen with the Syndicate, but he had one more trick up his sleeve—just in case.  He played it when Miller announced that some of the partners wanted to go ahead with forming a rival company; and were, in fact, going to do it.  Worse—they planned a ballyhoo land auction in the fall.

  And, add insult to injury, who was the principle backer of the rival company?  None other than the nabobical L.M. Holt of Riverside, the man who set up Chaffey in the formation of his mutual water company schemes in Etiwanda and Ontario.

  John Guthrie knew that Miller was interested in the large tract of land south of the village reservation, later to be known as “Smoke Tree Ranch.”  He also realized the area was fed by the Whitewater ditch.  He reminded Miller, after agreeing to relinquish this land in a division, that the question of trespass on the reservation hadn’t been settled.  Miller shot back, “The question of stream diversion was settled by the State Supreme Court two years ago.  The government’s not going to allow a bunch of redskins to block our use of that water.”

  “It’s not a question of diversion,” John Guthrie told him.  “It’s a question of fraud and trespass for using Indian lands illegally.”

  “We’re going ahead with the land auction in spite of it,” was Miller’s final word.

  John Guthrie prodded the government.  He had failed to stop the specula­tors, but at least the matter might be settled once and for all.  And later in the same year, 1887, the case for John Guthrie’s mutual water company was strength­ened by the Wright Act in California which permitted fifty or more neighboring landowners to incorporate an irrigation district  under the laws of the state.  All the more reason to “legalize” Whitewater ditch.

  On August 22, 1887, the Indian Agent, Joseph W. Preston, received his instructions:

  . . . to investigate the subject of fraud, trespass or other interference with lands and rights of the Mission Indians on what is known as the Agua Caliente and the Rincon Reservations. . . [since the government had] discovered and ascertained among other things, that a certain land company operating in said County, known and organized under the corporate name and style of the Palm Valley Land Company . . . had located, surveyed, designated and partly con­structed a water ditch or canal on and through Township Four S., Range Four East . . . having for its purpose to convey and conduct water from a point North of said reservation through the same to a point South and beyond said sections, to be used for irrigating their lands, and in supplying a town which said Com­pany had located at said point, and the lands claimed by them.

  Nothing came of the investigation that summer.

  By this time Miller had lined up not only Holt, but three other Syndicate partners, friends of John Guthrie from Oakland and San Francisco, and three additional small investors, to capitalize his Land Company with $300,000.  Holt promised Miller thirty percent.  John Guthrie, of course, refused to join them.

  Miller insisted his “Land” Company was going ahead with the auction and shouldn’t John Guthrie help them with it?  Prospective buyers likely would be more attracted to land in Section Fifteen than land south.  Where was John Guthrie going to get his fifty shareholders to “legalize” his Water Company district if they didn’t throw open Palm Valley to settlers?  Convincing arguments, but John Guthrie still wouldn’t acquiesce to a partition of Section Fifteen.  He did agree to a new survey of Section Fifteen, however.

  It was a stalling tactic.  He argued:  how could they divide the Section until it was surveyed properly?  And in October, it was completed by J.H. Stevenson for “The Palm Valley Land and Water Company,” which should have read “The Palm Valley Land and The Palm Valley Water Companies.”

  A big, ballyhooed auction was held on November 1.  John Guthrie helped write some of the promotional material but continued to prod the government to get after Preston to complete his investigation.

  Finally, on February 7, 1888, Preston issued his opinion, allowing the invasion of Indian land by the Whitewater ditch:

  . . . whereas, the value of the land through which the said ditch is located is inconsiderable and without water is worthless, but with water may be of more value. . . .the same will be of great use and benefit to said Indians. . . . That the said Palm Valley Land Company shall have the full, free and exclusive right of way through said reservation for the construction of a water ditch now located and designed through the sections aforesaid owned by the said Government . . . together with all the rights and privileges of ingress, egress and regress, and other rights necessary for the full and successful construction, occupation, used, enjoyment and operation of the same. . . .

  Preston’s edict established an interesting precedent.  Because water flowing through the reservations could improve the land, the trespass was legal.  John Guthrie was satisfied, even if he hadn’t stopped the Land Company.  He believed water would benefit the Indians, if they ever totally converted to agriculture.  But he worried about the future of land use.  The decision might broaden interpreta­tion to include almost anything “beneficial” to the Indians, and who was to decide that?  Bottling the hot springs or digging for minerals might also be “beneficial.”  And John Guthrie knew well how the railroads under the blanket protection of the federal government had stolen large tracts of land from the Indians in California.

  In June, 1888, John Guthrie agreed to divide up Section Fifteen, holding an undivided share in twelve and half acres; at the same time taking his option on the sixty or so acres of the McCallum Ranch, one hundred percent of which he would own.  He and Miller were the only shareholders in the Water Company at this time.  All others, including Van Slyke, had sold out.  Nor did any of John Guthrie’s children hold water company stock at this time.

  The argument between John Guthrie McCallum and his Syndicate partners was a faint echo of a greater struggle that had been going on in California since statehood.  Who owned the land?  And which system of land use would prevail—the “agrarian ideal” of small subsistence farming, or gigantic monopolistic enterprises?  John Guthrie had become embroiled in the controversy as soon as he came to California and began to practice law.

  As vast Mission holdings ranging in millions of acres were secularized—at the exclusion of the Indians who were supposed to benefit—huge baronies, the so-called “Mexican Land Grants” were created, sometimes extending into a quarter of  million acres across under a single ownership.  Mexican owners and their families seldom saw, or walked or rode upon all of the land they owned.

  Newcomers to the state in the 1850s who failed in the gold fields, tried to take up small farming and were frustrated by holdings greater than they’d ever dreamed of.  John Guthrie remembered well the violent riots of protest in Sacra­mento; the bitter legal battles in the courts.  He’d argued, debated, fought to clarify title uncertainties for settlers.  It was a losing battle.  Emigrants stayed away from California in droves in the 1850s, as gold rush fever waned.

  John Guthrie also was aware that landed empires had been pieced out of grants to the railroad companies—most notably, the Central Pacific, later merged into the Southern Pacific.  These empires resulted from questionable practices—bribery of legislators, manipulation of acres belonging to public domain given to the state by the federal government.  The “checkerboard” in Palm Valley was a lurid example, except that Palm Springs was a wilderness and nobody was interested in it anyway, so the Indians were left with large alternating one mile square sections.

  The Indians in Palm Valley had a peculiar history.  Unlike any other group in California, they’d been bypassed by early trail blazers from Sonora and the Colo­rado River; by the Mission-Presidio colonization (the area never was under Spanish control), and later ignored by Anglo-Americans.  The village—the winter habitat of the tribe known as the “Agua Caliente” because of the hot springs—was close to the impenetrable mountain, San Jacinto; the land, barren.  Who would be interested?

  California Native Americans were grouped into small tribes, and each had its hereditary chief who could be replaced for incompetence.  The Tahquitz legend sprang from this tradition.  To quote Chief Patencio:

  Tahquitz was a man of great power, but he didn’t do any good for anyone.  He had no friends among his people and became a bad spirit living in the Tahquitz Mountains, speaking through thunder and lightning.

  Now at last the region was being settled by the white man.  Would the attitudes of the Agua Calientes become less peaceful?  How would their culture be affected?  For the better, John Guthrie hoped.  He wasn’t going to force them into agriculture, but how could they not behold the great benefits from planting crops and raising cattle?

  For John Guthrie the Palm Springs venture was the summation of his life—a chance to make real his dreams and ambitions frustrated in younger days:  to own, design and control his own community, his own city.  He couldn’t isolate the Indians from this dream.  They were interconnected with him—an integral part of the environment; from his point of view, they had a stake in the community’s develop­ment.  In no other place in California had such an opportunity presented itself to an Indian  population.

  Because of these convictions, he emphatically opposed enticing into his community an avaricious mob and cynical manipulators.  Some day, given time, they’d even gouge at the mountain, and most assuredly begin to manipulate the Indians into giving up their huge tracts of land in the heart of the envisioned “Elysium.”

  For the present, at least, John Guthrie owned outright almost six hundred acres in Palm Valley including a thousand feet at the foot of the mountain and the McCallum Ranch.  His mutual water company controlled the water supply.  He also held more than one-quarter interest in over five hundred acres of Syndicate pro­perty.  He refused to agree to a division or sell his share.  The Syndicate could go hang.

  And hang they did.  In the spring of 1888, the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles announced they would cease to advance money for land spec­ulation.  Other banks followed suit.  The speculation fever broke.  By the early 1890s Miller’s Land Company had gone out of business altogether.

  As a clear example of John Guthrie’s attempt to thwart industrial development, he bought four hundred and ninety acres in Section 19, southwest of the village.  The land seemed worthless for growing crops, but its industrial develop­ment had definite potential—especially the manufacture of cement.  In only a few years, Harry would realize it was a good thing the family held title to this Section 19 property.  It would save them from losing the ranch.

8

  Harry recalled the Syndicate fight with some indignation now that their source of water from Tahquitz Canyon was threatened.  The 1888 decision on the eight miles of Whitewater ditch cutting through the Rincon and Mission Reserva­tions did not improve Indian land.  They never made use of it, nor had they ever made use of Tahquitz water to any great extent.

  Now, if he and his father couldn’t use the water—if it ever flowed again—nobody would benefit.  It was well known in the village the Calientes weren’t inter­ested in Tahquitz water, except for a few young rebels egged on by government snoops.  Older members of the Cahuilla tribes, including those who lived the other side of the mountain, believed water from Tahquitz arroyo was cursed. 

  When he was sure he could breathe again, Harry made quick time getting through the village.  He ran into Dr. Welwood Murray taking a stroll down Main Avenue, his tam perched on his head, his white beard shining in the sun.

  “Yes, laddie, I did see your father this morning.  I stopped to chat with him but he was all in a huff.  Theresa was trying to set him down to breakfast and he ordered her out of the house, says ‘Can’t talk to you now, Murray!’  In a sorry state, he was.”

  “Why?”

  “I canna say, laddie, and I didn’t hang on to find out.  When the Judge behaves like that, you get out of the way.  Why not try the Indian village?”

  As Harry went running off, Murray shook his head—Poor fellow, where’s he off to now?  Not in the direction of the village, he noted.

  Harry hurried westward, running toward San Jacinto, passing the sheds and stables.  The phaeton was still in the open barn, jammed in among farm imple­ments . . . hay rake, ten dollars, grind stone, three dollars, wheelbarrow, two dollars . . .

  So even though his father had not taken the phaeton and gone off to Seven Palms Station, one of the horses was missing, his father’s honey colored palo­mino he’d named “Indiana.”  He must’ve struggled to saddle up—to say nothing of how a ride into the canyon would affect his heart!  What was he thinking!

  Harry quickly saddled up his own mount, “Mariah,” a docile dappled grey, riding off toward Tahquitz, pulling the mare up briefly by the fenced-in pasture.  The cows and heifer were feeding from forage he’d dumped there yesterday, brought in from the station along with other supplies and groceries, courtesy of the M. W. Stewart Company; fortunately there was cash on hand to pay for it.  Two mules lolled sleepily in the far corner under a yellowing cottonwood.

  Harry turned and galloped through the orchards racing toward the canyon.  At the other side of the dying trees, he spotted his father in the distance, emerging from behind a giant, flat-top boulder, his back straight, his large, gray head turned toward the mountain.  Fully dressed, with his boots on, riding slowly, dreamily toward the awesome arroyo into the chasm of tumbling rocks.

  Harry reined in.  He didn’t want to pounce on his father.  He was close enough to catch up to him before he got to the falls.  He grumbled softly to himself—something he’d read in the encyclopedia:  Stars whose fuel is almost spent break out with luster . . .

  And indeed, John Guthrie now was riding with a certain luster, swaying easily on the back of his mount, bare headed, his face looking into the sky.  Loping along, with grandeur, like a dying star.

  John Guthrie paused, pulled his watch out, the gold chain catching a glint from the sun.

  His father, John Guthrie, going into the mountain like a lover returning for a final tryst with San Jacinto.  To tell her, “No one shall ever touch you.  Now it’s only you and I, old mountain.  I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  Blast it!  Harry shook himself.  The Tahquitz Curse was working on him and he couldn’t stop it.  Gotta get to father!  Damn rebel Indian up there with a shotgun!  He tapped the mare with his hand and galloped ahead.  Just as he reached the canyon opening, a crack of rifle fire bounced down along the rocky walls.  Harry leaped from his horse, not waiting to tie her up, and sprinted up the trail.

  He found John Guthrie about fifty yards in, lying stretched on the path, brown dust covering his dark clothing, his chest heavy with breathing.  Harry fell over him, grabbing his shoulders, to protect him from the unseen menace.

  “Are you hit, Father?”

  There was no blood.  His father must’ve dismounted when he heard the shot, had a seizure and fell.

  “Father, I’ll get you outta here.  Hold on!  Oh please, hold on!”

  John Guthrie sucked in his breath.  “No!  You leave me!”

  “Why’d you come up here by yourself?  You know you’re not well enough!   There’s Indians at the falls with shotguns.”

  John Guthrie tried to catch his voice to form words, but all that came out was a rattling sound.  Harry shivered, in spite of the hot sun on his back.

  “Johnnie, I’m going to . . . to leave you, Johnnie.  Listen to me, son.  I want to tell you. I can’t . . .”

  “It’s Harry, Father!  It’s Harry! “

  Harry bent down to his chest.  John Guthrie clutched his shoulder and pulled him close.  “Harry,” he whispered, the sound rasping and faint, “Harry, don’t—don’t let ‘em touch the mountain!”

  On February 5, 1897, in Palm Springs, California, John Guthrie McCallum died.  An inquest was held because he had died away from home.  Harry said nothing about the gunfire.  The conclusion:  Death due to natural causes.  John Guthrie was buried in Rosedale Cemetery on Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, an obelisk placed there by his wife, Emily, next to the graves of their two sons, John and Wallace.

  Louise said Tahquitz had revenged himself.

  But Harry Freeman McCallum was in Palm Springs to stay.  The family still owned the McCallum Ranch with its acreage stretching out from the foot of the mountain, and hundreds of acres beyond.