It wasn't pretty. The lean stomach had become
a paunch. The ridged muscles of chest and shoulders and abdomen
had broken down into rolls of flesh.
He sat down on the bed, and through his mind drifted pictures of
his youthful excellence, of the hardships he had endured over
other men, of the Indians and dogs he had run off their legs in
the heart-breaking days and nights on the Alaskan trail, of the
feats of strength that had made him king over a husky race of
frontiersmen.
And this was age. Then there drifted across the field of vision
of his mind's eye the old man he had encountered at Glen Ellen,
corning up the hillside through the fires of sunset, white-headed
and white-bearded, eighty-four, in his hand the pail of foaming
milk and in his face all the warm glow and content of the passing
summer day. That had been age. "Yes siree, eighty-four, and
spryer than most," he could hear the old man say. "And I ain't
loafed none. I walked across the Plains with an ox-team and fit
Injuns in '51, and I was a family man then with seven
youngsters."
Next he remembered the old woman of the chaparral, pressing
grapes in her mountain clearing; and Ferguson, the little man who
had scuttled into the road like a rabbit, the one-time managing
editor of a great newspaper, who was content to live in the
chaparral along with his spring of mountain water and his
hand-reared and manicured fruit trees.
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