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'. . . He met her in the lane and he laid her on a board And he played her up a tune called Sugar in the Gourd, Sugar in the gourd, honey in the horn, Balance to your partners, honey in the horn. . . . "

HONEY IN THE HORN

NOTE

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and all of the incidents are either imagined or taken from very old legends of the country. Some of the geographical names are real, but they are in general altered as to topography and location so that residents of the country will readily understand that they do not refer to any real places. None of the incidents are autobiographical, and there is no intention anywhere in the book of offering social criticism or suggesting social reform.

I had originally hoped to include in the book a representative of every calling that existed in the State of Oregon during the home-steading period—1906-1908. I had to give up that idea, owing to lack of space, lack of time, and consideration for readers. Within the

limits set me, I have done my best.

H. L. D.

Chapter I

There was a run-down old tollbridge station in the Shoestring Valley of Southern Oregon where Uncle Preston Shiveley had lived for fifty years, outlasting a wife, two sons, several plagues of grasshoppers, wheat-rust and caterpillars, a couple or three invasions of land-hunting settlers and real-estate speculators, and everybody else except the scattering of old pioneers who had cockleburred themselves onto the country at about the same time he did. The station, having been built in the stampeding days when people believed they were due for great swarms of settlement and travel around them, had a great many more rooms and a whole lot more space than there was any use for; and so had the country behind it. Outside the back fence where the dishcloths were hung to bleach and the green sheep-pelts to cure when there was sun was a ten-mile stretch of creek-meadow with wild vetch and redtop and velvet-grass reaching clear to the black-green fir timber of the mountains where huckleberries grew and sheep pastured in summer and young men sometimes hid to keep from being jailed.

The creek-meadow in season was full of flowers—wild daisies, lamb-tongues, cat-ears, big patches of camas lilies as blue as the ocean with a cloud shadowing it, and big stands of wild iris and wild lilac and buttercups and St. John's wort. It was well-watered—too blamed well in the muddy season—and around the springs were thickets of whistle-willow and wild crabapple; and there were long swales of alder and sweetbrier and wild blackberry clumped out so rank and heavy that, in all the years the valley had been settled, nobody had ever explored them all. When the natural feed in the mountains snowed under late in the year, deer used to come down and graze the swales and swipe salt from the domestic stock; and blue grouse and topknot-quail boarded in all the brush-piles and thorn-heaps by the hundreds all the year round.