Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eigteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

ChapterTwenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

ChapterTwenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter One

William Mullen, having transported a cargo of blooded horses from Sprecklesville, Maui, to the Adolph Spreckles' stables in San Francisco, saw that the ship was about to reach dockage. Soon, he and the two Hawaiian cowboy assistants would have important work to do.

Although he was only nineteen, Mullen knew exactly what would be expected of him. It was not the first time he had undertaken this same difficult task. On those other times, he had only been an assistant to Seamus Kelly, head trainer for Claus Spreckles' Maui holdings which included the Spreckles' famous strain of full-blooded race horses.

So now, in 1886, the strapping young man always referred to himself as "William," certainly not "Billy," as Mr. Seamus had called him. He intended to make himself known some day as the world's best horse-trainer.

On the morrow, he would show the expensive horses, Hambletonians, for the carriage trade. Later would come the San Francisco showing for the California Full-Blooded Race Association.

Oh! But wasn't that a fine career for any man to have for a beginning in this new world! And best of all, he had trained them all himself, and well-trained, too. For Seamus had been too far gone in his bottle by then. Credit was coming to Bill, too, for indeed he had earned his laurels; none had been able to top him.

As the ship inched in to drop anchor, Bill recognized the familiar sight of Nob Hill, noting on this second visit the mansions of rococo showiness were even more breath-taking than he had remembered them to be. Perhaps some of his new horse-training contracts would take him to the large horse ranches in the big valley to the south as well.

From dockside, now, he could see still another hill ahead. Steep beyond imagination--Russian Hill. "Bet they have difficulty in getting teams to pull that one." he thought.

When the Ship drew alongside a long finger of a wharf, William pointed out to his fellow travelers there were all kinds of wooden wharves jutting out into the bay. Presently, the ship anchored beside other craft from varying world ports: ferry steamers, warships, Sea Island brigs, Chinese junks, whalers, side-paddle river boats, deep-busted windjammers, Italian crawls rigged in lanteen sails as vividly bright as the flowers that grew on every hill.

My father had often described how he had shipped off from Hull, England, and worked his way across the seas as a galley boy to Baltimore. There, a kind-hearted Irish woman hid him in her home until the ship continued its journey without him.

Now, standing on the ship's deck, the youthful horse trainer watched inconceivable people flow out of the strange craft, to enter blatant doors of obtrusive tumbledown shanties. What a different picture of the City it was to view from the wharf all the riotous merry-making going on!

As William scanned the scene, he looked for the Spreckles' agent to whom the horses had been shipped, but saw instead, turbaned Lascars, thick-set Russian sailors, almond-eyed Chinese men with their pigtails wound around partly-shaved heads, Italian fishermen in Tam-O-Shanters, Greeks in vivid shirts and sashes, and, praise God, Irishmen.

He also perceived low, wooden buildings, row upon row of disreputable shanties, and beyond, the gallant houses of brick and stone, homes with bay windows that opened for all the world to see!

Of a sudden, a man approached the two Hawaiian cowboys. It was easy enough to recognize cowboys dressed in blue trousers, red shirts and straw hats, as they were. But sizing up the third, blue-eyed youth, he hesitated before saying, "I'm, looking for Bill Mullen."

"Could you be Mr. Adolph Spreckles?" Bill asked brightly!

"The horses are for him," the agent said.

"Yes, I'm Bill Mullen."

The shippers' agent appraised him, then explained, "But I was expecting a cowboy."

Remembering how strange his Texas cowboy gear had looked when he had arrived in Maui six years before, William promised himself this time there would be no chaps, no spurs, no holster. Instead he would wear a tailored suit as did most American islanders when they went to meet representatives on the mainland. So the head trainer of the Spreckles ranch, Seamus Kelly, had had one to the Chinese tailors in Kahalui (which was near Sprecklesville) make it before William himself had ever dreamed what his destiny might be on the mainland. Yes, it had been part of his former boss's plan to make an American out of his favorite assistant, instead of an Irishman displaced among natives in the Sandwich Islands.

The stranger offered his card. It read, "George Martin, agent for Adolph Spreckles."

Adolph? Bill had met his brother, John, but not Adolph. John had charge of the sugar plantation in Sprecklesville. Bill had seen the father, Claus, too. People were always pointing out Claus Spreckles. Claus was the foremost representative of industry in all of Hawaii. He always got what he wanted.

"I want it because I want it," Bill once heard him shout at his son John. Certainly John knew that was reason enough. Everyone knew that.

"Ever been to New York?" asked Martin.

Bill answered, "Yes," while the Paniolos (cowboys) said "No."

No longer was Bill thinking of the raucous waterfront. Instead, he began appraising the high hill with its turreted mansions of Bonanza Kings. He thought of the Wells Fargo treasurer's home with stables that were like the palaces of the English lords in Ireland.

He thought, too, it had been quite a day! Aye, quite a day indeed! He was feeling happier on the mainland now than he had dreamed he could ever be in a lifetime. Tomorrow he would attend the auction and the California horsemen would know what sort of a trainer William Mullen was, by their own standards - the top standards in the world! Make no mistake, in California were the grandest horsemen on the face of the earth. Sometimes they would value the Spreckles' horse flesh so highly they would pay twenty-five thousand dollars for one horse!

Indeed, his would be good enough to command that high price because they would be the most docile, the more courageous, the most enduring, the best-educated horses in the world.

Next morning, William arrived at the Spreckles' stables along with the foreman.

"As fine a lot of horses as I ever say," the head stableman greeted him and offered a friendly hand, saying, "You the trainer?"

"Yes, sir," Bill answered with a smile.

"Must know your business!" he continued, "Adolph Spreckles is no slouch with horses, I tell you. Done a lot for 'em in this town. You bet he had, and there's plenty he's aiming to do still with harness racing growing in popularity."

As he spoke, a flashy road-cart swerved into the yard, a light vehicle, it was on extra long elliptic springs, making it an unusually well-balanced cart, with large wheels and no hood. Very definitely it was geared for a sporting man.

Bill looked up and surmised it had to be Mr. Adolph Spreckles.

"A true horseman learns a lot about human nature," Bill reminded himself. This member of the Spreckles family evidenced keenness of mind, but not without the marked shrewdness of Claus, who was the head of the powerful West Coast industrialists.

"When a horse is broad between his eyes and narrow from his eyes to his jowl," my father often told me, "it's a smart horse. With man, it's the same thing…what a lot of things you can learn about people if you take note of their physical features as well as what they do. What was there to determine a man's hidden vigor, like the thin, pointed ear of a horse? Or the large, round full eyes? A lot of things are revealed, too."

Spreckles' eyes flashed friendliness aimed for the young man who must have accompanied his full-blooded horses which he would no doubt train for the City's carriage trade.

No longer a cowboy now, Bill dressed as any qualified "professor" of horsemanship. He would teach San Francisco's rich and powerful how to handle their horses with reverence for their value to society. So he wore woolen trousers, neatly tucked inside shiny boots, and topped by a white shirt--a dress shirt, not the usual colored shirt and open vest of the cowboy--no handkerchief around the neck, no chaps, either. Yes, he appeared every inch the gentleman, a diamond in the rough, maybe, but a diamond nevertheless. When he spoke, it was in a commanding voice of strength even though he spoke with an arresting brogue.

"Are the horses in good shape for the sale?" Spreckles inquired.

"Yes, sir. Indeed, all are in good condition, sound, good eyes, good wing. We have a pair of perfectly-matched blacks and a pair of dapple greys. Both teams should bring a good price. You'll make no mistake in calling the blemishes," he assured proudly.

It was the custom to sell horses at halter as is, without any recommendation, and with the purchaser taking all the risks of them being lame, vicious, balky, or a kicker; but when blemishes were called and the horse sold, if any other defects later appeared, the sale could be canceled. That evidently was why Spreckles wanted to know how to offer them at auction.

He looked at the young trainer, and did not question why his father entrusted a youth with such precious cargo. "How are they for speed, Mullen?" he asked.

"If you look at them, Mr. Spreckles, you can tell they will make good racers. Take that black; he measures the same from between the ears and withers as from his withers to the coupling of his hips. His withers are higher than his hips, as you can see, and he has a short, broad back and long legs and is close-jointed. You can tell at a glance the horse will have speed."

"Our buyers are critical," Spreckles replied, yet with small doubt.

"You will find these horses will meet the demands of the most critical buyers," William went on. "See how that black shines: hair as fine as silk. And they have good clean-cut heads, firm bones, well-defined tendons, good feet. They have power; your climate here should develop good nerve force."

"Is that so?" Spreckles seemed surprised…"San Franciscans are importing Eastern horses."

"The California horse should be the best in the world," Bill ended the conversation and joined his assistants to finish the grooming before the auction was called.

At this moment, James Ben Ali Haggin swung into the yard and Bill could see his handsome Stanhope Phaeton was certainly more stylish than a buggy. The solid silver harness fittings gleamed like sterling silver. Of all the alluring characters of San Francisco's fabulous eighties, Haggin was the most talked of personality. He drove two perfectly-matched bays. He was exactly what one would expect of the treasurer of the profitable Wells Fargo Company. Flawlessly dressed, with flashing black eyes and a carefully-trimmed beard, he was indeed handsome.

Bill had been told by the Spreckles agent that Ben Ali Haggin was the owner of the fine stables on the hill, stables that stood out like a feudal castle in Northern England. What's more, he knew horse flesh. It was said of him he would go anywhere for a sought-after dam or sire, but Bill did not have to be told about that. He had learned first-hand when he had shown the Spreckles' line as an assistant to the man who had taught him most of what he knew about horses.

"Are you planning to keep this young Mullen in your employ?" Haggin asked Spreckles, and nodding good-bye, Bill could not help hearing the sugar king's reply: "Well all he has agreed to is to take a trainload of horses for the spring show in Madison Square Garden."

Before long, Haggin's partner, Lloyd Tevis, joined the lively group of buyers. Mr. Tevis was known as "King Midas" in California. Little by little, Bill learned how this son of a Kentucky lawyer had tried to get rich by digging in El Dorado, how he had dug for nine months with no success before turning to making himself rich by his sagacity. You could see this written all over his strong, resolute face.

He had started with practically no money, outside of what he received as salary in the recorder's office. Yet, because he had the determination to work twelve hours a day, he became California's tower of finance and his financial power had not even been shaken by the depression just ended.

While the three capitalists studied the horses to be auctioned, Bill studied the men who controlled an enviable portion of San Francisco's wealth. These were certainly some of the men he felt would be hiring him to train their best-blood animals. Ah, such glorious days and months and years, too, lay ahead for him!

Next day when the San Francisco sale was over, Lloyd Tevis also approached Bill with: "Do you have any plans for the future, young man?"

"Yes, I have, sir," he acknowledged. "After I have disposed of the Eastern horse sales, to which I have already committed myself, I plan to return to San Francisco and train horses by contract for as many different outfits as I can. Both in and out of this city. I charge five dollars per hour, sir."

"This is my card," Mr. Tevis answered, explaining, "Mr. Haggin and I have a ranch in Sacramento. It's called Rancho Del Paso. It's on the River of the Americans. We also own the Stockdale Ranch in Bakersfield, Kern County. We could use you."

"Thank you," Bill said, carefully putting the card in his pocket.

"I must have some cards printed when I return," he promised himself.

I still have one of my father's cards in my box of mementos, along with the scrapbook my mother gave me. Printed in Spencerian script, it read simply: "Professor William Mullen" in one line, and underneath, "San Francisco." I guess he thought that would be all the address he would ever need.

Chapter Two

Bill took many a trainload of horses East, but never had he a more eventful trip than that first one for Mr. Spreckles. The horse "pullman" bedded twelve horses to the car, to keep booths narrow enough so the horses couldn't be tossed round during transit. Including his fee, he figured it cost Spreckles at least one hundred twenty-five dollars a head to get the horses safely to the Eastern Market. He knew, too, he couldn't tolerate any trifling on the part of his men, the grooms, or even the train crew.

His "horse pullman" had scheduled overnight stops at Ogden and at Omaha, so he wanted to give the horses a chance to rest and get over the nervous effects of their journey before going on to New York. Also, he wanted them to arrive in the best condition and without having to suffer any unpleasantness along the way. So when members of the train crew coupled a sheep car onto the horse pullman, his temper flared. Immediately, he uncoupled the odious car. Later, he discovered the sheep car again had been attached to his horse train, and again he uncoupled it. Sheep were unfit to ride on the same train as his blooded animals.

"Let me tell you, you big galoot," he shouted at the brakeman, "If you couple that stinking car of yours to my horses again, I'll put you in a car with a bunch of wild stallions...tell that engineer I don't want anymore loud whistle blasts either."

Standing on top of the freight car, Bill looked more than twice his two hundred pounds. The trainman decided it was healthier to let the sheep go on another train.

It was a trip that paid off handsomely, for the horses averaged one thousand dollars a head. But, more important, it was a trip that was to catapult the young trainer to fame. My brother Everett loved to repeat this story, and his eyes would brighten whenever he told it.

Madison Square Garden was staging one of its horse shows so popular during that decade, and Bill decided to attend it. A wild stallion had been selected to be tamed with a prize offered to anyone who could as much a pick up a hoof. Bill knew he could match wits with any wild horse, but, being unknown to the Garden exhibitions, he did not want to appear too forward. So, while he was trying to make up his mind, another husky young lad came up to accept the challenge. The stranger approached the animal confidently, but when he reached too quickly for the halter, the frightened stallion showed its temper by baring its teeth.

William, with his quickness of mind, knew full well an angry horse will attack. Keeping his eye on the horse's challenger, he saw the untamed stallion charge for the would-be tamer. The young man quickly lost interest in the prize and made a rush for his seat, with the angry horse following.

When the nose of the horse touched the marked barrier behind which sat the audience, William knew it was time to stop him. So with thunderbolt speed, he grabbed the horse's tail with a mighty left hand, and the halter with the other. Then, with a fast jerk and a powerful shove, the horse spun from his feet to land upon his back, less than two feet away from the first row of boxes!

Still holding the untamed horse, Bill faced the panic-stricken crowd and in a confident voice, shouted, "This animal can be gentled in less than one hour. Would you like me to try?"

"Let's see you do it," the audience shouted.

"Go ahead," challenged the master of ceremonies.

Some of the more timid men and women in the boxes got up to go, but Bill commanded them, "Keep your seats. In a few minutes any little child in the house will be able to ride this horse."

They sat down, confident the might of this young man would work its miracle. The astonished horse seemed paralyzed, as the spellbound audience watched Bill both tire and charm the fractious animal, according to the method he had been taught by his Irish father and Seamus Kelly in Hawaii.

He first tied the horse's tail in a loop, using a small rope he carried with him in his coat pocket for whatever occasion might arise, and often did while working around the corrals. It was the singular head and tail method he had found so effective in quickly mastering a fractious horse. Then he put the halter rein through the loop, and pulled the horse's head around to the horse's side, not too far as to make the animal uncomfortable, yet tight enough to keep him in perfect control. The animal now could be turned loose in the straw-covered arena, while the fascinated audience onlookers saw the powerful animal twirl around and around. There was a thick tenseness in the packed Garden; all seemed afraid the stallion might break loose again and charge once more.

But Bill knew the stallion couldn't go anywhere. He knew, also, that when the horse was convinced there was nothing else he could do he would, in time, stop. And it did not take long for the once frightened animal to put his trust in this big man who had responded to his fearful cry for help from the vast throng of people who had him completely surrounded.

When the horse stopped, the master of ceremonies handed the "professor" a long whip as Bill had requested. Then Bill touched the horse gently over his body, keeping this up until the animal was completely assured that man and no intention of hurting him.

Now, "Professor Mullen," as the master of ceremonies referred to Bill, began to work first one side of the horse, then the other side. The crowd marveled at the trainer's mastery over the stallion as well as his method for quieting him. They could see he didn't use the whip with its cutting thongs. He didn't use spurs with sharp points, cruel bits or nose tortures. He didn't use a suffering post. All he used was his will to convince the animal there was no need to try to defend himself.

After thirty minutes of tactful handling, Bill gently loosened the tie hold on his head. The horse was now free, yet he remained close to the man who had proven to him he was his friend. He had no reason to leave this man's side.

Bill then invited anyone in the audience, even a little child, to come forward and get on the animal's back. He knew the horse would never be more gentle than he was now.

Yet no one came. So William threw himself on the horse's back and rode him with only a halter on, while the entire Garden applauded wildly. Some people cringed, as though they would prefer to see a horse held by a cruel bit than by a youth's quiet confidence. Bill sensed the fear that still gripped the audience who, even with so graphic a demonstration, could not accept the power of gentleness.

So, smiling, the tamer leaped off the animal and, after saddling and bridling the now-gentle stallion, Bill rode around the arena while the crowd cheered madly. They felt they were safe from this spirited animal now that his tamer had put a bit in his mouth. Bill knew they were eager for drama, so he rode the horse up to the very tip of the rope that marked off the barrier between the arena and the audience, and brought the stallion up on his haunches. He turned him around, made him take off in the other direction.

The audience was delighted with this example of perfect horsemanship. They had never seen such skill! Better still, the horse was convinced his master sat on his back!

Now the recently-gentled animal was unsaddled. A girth was buckled on him and one forefoot was secured to it so Bill could demonstrate how the horse could be made to lie down and get up at the trainer's will. Finally, Bill turned to the master of ceremonies and said, "Now if you would like to bring in a harness and Democrat (cart), I'll hitch him to it and drive him around the ring so everyone can observe that a wild horse can be tamed and put into harness in less than one hour's time."

"Let's see you do it. Let's see you do it." Cries came from all over the great hall. To tame and harness a charging stallion all within an hour! It was impossible.

The Garden hands rushed in with the requested equipment.

In a little more than forty minutes from the time the untamed charger had stampeded toward the dress circle, the smiling young man was seated in a cart, driving around the ring as if he had hitched a gentle plow horse to his cart.

The New York papers next morning gave a full account of the most astonishing horse show ever staged in the Garden. Certainly, America now accepted the young, unknown Mullen as the World's Greatest Horse Trainer.

Only one person in the world could have done it (the account in the NEW YORK SUN read), the handsome young horse tamer from San Francisco who spoke in an Irish brogue and who, by some strange coincidence, was talking in Hawaiian to two stable hands. His name? William Mullen, who gave a performance with a wild charger he had never seen before, putting this trainer to the greatest test of skill and judgment and supplied the Garden with all the excitement of a Roman amphitheater, but with none of the cruelty. He proved, however, he was not a gladiator but an educator, and taught his horse as well as his audience that a horse is bad only if he is badly treated. Gentleness had conquered brute force.

Bill took out of his pocket the clipping from the New York paper of his horse taming feat; unfolded it carefully; and read it again and, with half a smile, keeping most of the rejoicing inside himself, folded it up again and put it back into his vest pocket. In the days ahead he was to read it many more times. And his children would read it too, for many years to come, even when horseless carriages would replace the horse whom American men so loved above all other sports.

Chapter Three

Back in San Francisco, William settled in a "South of the Slot" boarding house as that particular section of Market Street was called. It included all sorts of rugged communities that lived unto themselves. The mechanical geniuses who worked in the shops lived up on Scotch Hill, or what is now the Potrero; the Dutchmen who worked in the mills stayed at Dutchman's Flat. The Tar Flatters who lived toughly in that section hugging the waterfront worked in the Gas Works. They all lived, fought and played within their own vigorous communities, never caring if they ever got to that section north of the Market Street Cable Car Slot or to Telegraph Hill or Russian Hill, most certainly not to that Hill of the Nabobs or "Snobs" as some maliciously called it.

On Saturday afternoon, there was so much entertainment among the men of the neighborhood that no one ever thought of leaving it even to go to the "teeater" as Bill called the theater. The neighborhood youth danced on a Saturday night, and rode out to the Cliff House on the plank road or to the race track on a Sunday; or the Casebolt's balloon car to the Woodward Gardens on Valencia and Mission near 14th Street when a girl could be had to share in the fun of this amusement part. Admission in those days was a dime, but getting a girl wasn't so easy, for there were two men to every woman.

San Francisco seemed to be a city of extremes. There were two kinds of women: those of society and those of the Barbary Coast; just as there were only two kinds of people: the blue bloods who owned the city and the red bloods who worked the city, manned the ships, drove the teams, the streetcars, and laid the bricks. There were his neighbors, the butchers of the yards and the cowboys who drove the cattle in from nearby ranches, and who always settled South of the Slot, too.

On a Saturday afternoon, entertainment for Bill's neighborhood consisted mostly of fighting, and good roaring fun it was; he couldn't think of anything better. In fact, one of the fight promoters on Irish Hill was doing his best to win the young trainer over from the horse ring to the prize-fight ring.

It wasn't that Bill didn't love a good fight. It was just that he loved to gentle wild horses more, but one could always count on him running up all ninety-eight steps to the top of Irish Hill in nothing flat when a fight was called with Mike Farrell's boys or Jim Gately's boys or Paddy Kearns' boys who lived, drank and held sway there. How they used to fight to get one another's customers, for the Hill was full of boarding houses and hotels! The boys from one boarding house would mark off a ring with a rope and challenge the boys from another hotel and fight all Saturday afternoon and sometimes into the night just because fighting was in their blood.

When the fights were over they would all go over to Mike Boyle's saloon and knock off a few tall "steams" for a nickel and then forget what caused the fight.

Come Monday morning, Bill would set off for a weekly round of training the horses of the financial wizards who lived in the Victorian mansions. He especially enjoyed working for those two partners of the Wells Fargo Company, because they owned the two biggest ranches of full-blooded horses in the world, as well as the Stockdale Ranch near Bakersfield. Bill was anxious to get a chance to work in the Big Valley.

Christmas was crowding the burdened branches of the Eve oaks. Another month and the roses would be blooming their brightest. It was December and there was a restlessness in Bill's soul that made his body stir out one rainy morning.

He dressed carefully; a horse trainer was an important person in this town. His hair was freshly washed; he had acquired this habit in the Islands, and he would keep it throughout his life. The glossy, almost-black waves gave his face the bright look that his oxford-grey walking suit demanded. He wore no cowboy boots now, for his training appointments, but packed leather puttees in a brown valise to protect his carefully-tailored trousers for later wear when he was training his horses. He put in a large silk handkerchief; with this he would keep his stiff white collar clean. Finally, he packed a mohair coat to replace his business suit when handling the horses. The wide brim of his black Stetson hat was brushed and the top carefully indented once. The familiar cowboy hat with the usual four creases was, indeed, a mark of the ruffian. Bill was in fact a gentleman. He could well have been mistaken for a Montgomery Street financier. Indeed, it was with reason he was proud; many of his blooded horses were track winners. His high-school stallions and mares commanded the highest prices in The City, ten thousand dollars for a span. Even up to thirty thousand for an exceptional team.

Mornings, he would work with a Standard bred horse until about ten o'clock, teaching it, usually, to single-foot. Always desiring to keep a light mouth on his horses, he would teach each one with a strap on the nose rather than a bit.

Sitting well on the animal's back, he held the horse's head high, while bringing the horse into a trot. After two or three steps, he would let the head down, pet and praise him for a job well done.

Then he would encourage the horse to walk for some distance before repeating the process. After a few tries, he would again praise and pet him.

The lessons, too, would be lengthened each day until the time came when he could hitch the horse and let him single-foot for many laps--perhaps as much as a half mile.

Little by little, he would change the front shoes, putting on heavier ones so that the horse had to reach out more. By then the hind ones would have been worn down some, to balance the nine-ounce shoe in front. He planned to have the horse in an easy, rapid single-foot with the slightest touch of the curb rein, or into a trot with the snaffle rein. He discovered this was a splendid method to teach the horse to single-foot as well at trot, under the saddle or harness, in one operation.

"Sure an' men wouldn't have so much trouble with their horses," he said to himself, "if they would only remember horses are as easy to confuse as people."

Give him a horse with an ounce of life in him and he could make a good single-footer, trotter, or pacer out of him.

By the time the business of the city was well in hand, he would stop for a mid-morning breakfast of steak, potatoes, and eggs poached in the steak drippings. Then with spirits higher, he was ready to jump onto the tandem seat of his gig. He liked the swank of this cart because it looked unsafe. He always enjoyed living on the edge of danger! It was good to feel slightly above the city. He liked the way the dark green enamel on the cart blazed with seven coats of varnish, the russet leather upholstery too, and the gold trim of the wheels. It was gaudy all right, but a gallant wagon to be sure!

"Oh…ho…Professor," Pete Arno cried out from his wagon that was also his workshop. "Any rags, any sacks, any bottles today? Morning Professor! How are you, Professor?"

Now, as William turned to zigzag up the steep hill, past the crenellated castles of the plutocrats, he might wave to a familiar Chinese vegetable vendor who added the right mystic touch of the Orient to the jumbled picture of the occident, what with his blue cotton coat and trousers, and his woven bamboo hat that could serve both for an umbrella or sun protection. It always reminded Bill of the Maui he had left--these little men swinging down the avenue in padded slippers and balancing a flexible pole on their shoulders, and with fruit and vegetable baskets held at either end. Bill learned to speak both Chinese and Japanese in the Sandwich Islands, enough of both to carry on a conversation when he wanted to pull rein and talk with one or the other. Most often the vendor would open up his overflowing baskets to give his friend, the big horseman, a handful of fresh fruit.

By then it would be time for Mr. Haggin to be back from his ranch in Sacramento. Indeed, William had better be putting himself in a hustle! He was well aware there were two things that absorbed the life of his millionaire employer: his Wells Fargo business and his horses…and William realized his horses must never be neglected.

Reaching the top of the hill, William said to himself, "What a fine view of the city. If I was wanting to rule it, I should be after living on top of it, too."

Sometimes he felt the power of even sitting on the tandem seat!

Across the street was the Senator's house, and close by, a white Roman mansion with a lovely garden surrounding it. Looking north was that crazy house that had been brought around the Horn in pieces. He laughed when he thought what a time they must have had putting the cut-up sections together again, trying to organize a proper New England house on a San Francisco hill! There it stood, looking rakishly funny trying to be dignified, but really a comical structure with the second story not quite lined up with the first, and a blank wall where the front door should have been!

"Well, quite a few people never were themselves after a trip around the Horn," he said to himself, remembering the trip he had once made.

Next, he turned into Haggin's driveway, jumped down from his seat and unharnessed his horse before rubbing him down with a turkish towel, and gave the animal his mid-day meal.

While he was working, James Ben Ali Haggin entered the stables, and he smiled cordially. His dark eyes seemed friendly enough in the way they flashed. Although he was not an effervescent man, he was one who loved a fine horse with a passion, and who knew a thing or two about blooded animals as well as international finance.

What a sight the financier was, dressed in a Prince Albert morning coat and silk hat. He drove a coach and four iron greys and had a spotted dog sitting beside him. In his beautifully-appointed carriage house were landau and barouche carriages, dog carts, victorias, and Beverly wagons as well. They were all kept sparkling like Tiffany diamonds. Certainly it was a sight to make an Irishman smile!

Haggin's famous horses were as grandly housed as the bonanza kings themselves. The harnesses hanging from pegs on the tack room walls were ornamented with solid Comstock silver. The liveries of his attendants were made by Wetzel in New York.

Bill took it all in with a glance and it made him feel a little sad. He didn't know why. Maybe it was just the rain, the never-ceasing rain that fell day in and day out in the City. Or did his feet itch to be on the move again? He had remained in the City longer than he had planned.

He thought of the Valley--the great Valley that had been carpeted with sunshine and wildflowers. Was that freer life on the ranches calling him? That life in the ranch house which never required a key to enter, much less the key of gold all these City homes demanded.

"There's a dampness in the air," Haggin said. "But it was sunny and bright at Del Paso this morning. Wouldn't you like to return to Sacramento with me?"

Rancho Del Paso, which he and Lloyd Tevis owned, was the largest stock farm in the world devoted to blooded horses. It was on the banks of the River of the Americans, fifty-five thousand acres all told, and every acre raising some of the world's most famous race horses.

"Yes, this weather has been getting me down some," Bill agreed.

"Bill!" He hesitated, but only for a moment, for he was quick to seize an opportunity where horses or business was concerned. "I'm putting Ben Ali in the Kentucky Derby this year and I'm going to enter the American Derby in Chicago later, in June." He said this with pride. The race horse had been named for his son.

"That's great, Mr. Haggin, I don't think there's a horse that could beat him."

"And I'd like to send you east for the horse sales this spring. I'd like you to take steady work with me at Del Paso from now on and spend some time training my horses, so as to be ready to conduct the pullman when the time comes."

"I don't know, Mr. Haggin," William was hesitant, "I don't want to tie myself down. I want to be free to move."

"But this would be moving!"

"I don't know what I want."

"Do you want more money?"

"No. What would I do with it anyway? I'd have all this…," he surveyed Haggin's luxurious stables, "to worry about."

"You told me when I first hired you," Haggin recollected, "that your ambition was to be the best horse trainer in the world. I know you have fulfilled your ambition. You handle the finest horses there are. What more do you want?"

"I was thinking, if I got back to the Valley, I might be able to read once again, like I used to. I got myself a whole set of Shakespeare when I was a kid in Texas; I enjoyed reading them. When I was in Maui, I had time for reading there. On Irish Hill, there's little time left for much of anything but fighting."

"That's surprising coming from you," Haggin said. "I've seen this town grow from the urchin it was. I came here in 1850 when it was born. I dug for gold; didn't have much luck, so I turned to law. But I must say that in the rush for wealth, there hasn't been interest shown in culture. It's sort of surprising that a horse trainer--horse professor--would yearn for books when most folks are just content to get rich."

"Well, if I can have my own quarters," Bill answered slowly, "not have to bunk with anyone, and have clean sheets on my bed at night, I'll go."

Haggin smiled--a little smile--but a little smile was a lot for him. "It's a bargain. Do you want anything else?"

"No, just clean sheets on my bed and a room of my own, all to myself."

Chapter Four

The quality of life changed for Bill, now that he was living at Rancho Del Paso. It was different from that life he had known South of the Slot. He had to admit he was happier for the change, too.

John Mackey, the tall, straight, strong superintendent, made the difference. A solid man he was, as anyone knew who saw his face furrowed with years of wind and sun and kindness, Mr. Mackey made certain not one note of harshness crept into the training of those princes and queens of the pacing and trotting world which came under his efficient, ranch management. He watched over the expansive acres, the six hundred brood mares and forty stallions, with such paternal devotion that the instant one was missing he would seek him out by name. He was just a solicitous about his men, too, and just as careful that they lived well-ordered lives. As well ordered as cowboys and horsemen can ever live!

Bill thought the Arcade, as the settlement was called, seemed to take on the same kind of atmosphere of the rolling acres that stretched onward over the rectangular miles where young colts scampered at play, bringing strength to their lengthening bodies and supple limbs.

Gradually, rowdyism became a thing unknown to Bill as he fell into the routine of life as it was carried on in the twenty-four big red barns, the bunkhouses and residences that were grouped together to house the horses, their groomsmen, and the trainers. All the wild life that Mr. Mackey permitted within the confines of this breeding farm were the fleet-footed deer that roamed within the network of fences that divided the ranch and the giant barns from the paddocks and pastures, or perhaps a marauding grizzly bear or a wild canary or linnet or mocking bird.

Now, as Bill led a more isolated, self-concentrated life, with long hours alone in the saddle, he became absorbed in many things that hadn't filled his mind before. He thought of his destiny for one thing, the destiny of his friends in the city, of his life hereafter, too, even the immortality of his soul. In his youthful brain, he tried to clarify all these things and more. But he tried to avoid thinking if the destiny that had been placed upon him when he was a lad, the destiny he had accepted, when life was full of laughs and values and God.

Standing there in the fenced-in paddock, carpeted in crinkly green, he watched the awkward infants, standing uncertainly on four legs. "Little do you know that you'll be 'edicated' as carefully as any boy or gairl," he said. "But for certain, it's me pleasure to watch you graze and gallop, scudding the hills as far as the eye can see. An' little do ye know that I watch the very ground under yer feet to be certain you can stand the shock of the hard earth to yer young muscles and tendons. Oh 'tis fair luck you have."

When subjects deeply touched his emotions, he always slipped back into speech that was closer to his homeland, although since coming to California he prided himself he was fast losing his thick brogue. He listened to other people talk and tried to imitate their speech. Someday, he hoped, he would not be recognized as an alien; no more would he be a stranger in America!

Each day was filled with sweet tenderness as he cared for the little weanlings, but it only increased the longing in his soul, and a hunger in his mind to enjoy a close-knit family life centered around a hearth once more. He thought of his sister Annie. Soon he would have saved enough money to send for her to come to America.

Before long, little ruffles of green became splotched with wild mustard. When Bill rode along the banks of the rivulets which crossed in and out of the pastures, he noticed how they swelled to where they had become almost rivers. He noticed the yearlings were losing their shaggy coats, too, and were looking more like the aristocrats they were.

The yellow fields turned to beige and he accompanied the fine racers to the Kentucky Derby, and later the American Derby in Chicago and saw Ben Ali win. He felt a distinct proudness in the part he had taken in the victory!

When he returned, the growth of the wildflowers had been cut down by the torrid sun, the grass had turned brown, the snow-capped Sierras, that had watched him working over his young animals all spring, were now hidden by summer's haze. Not a leaf or a twig, nothing stirred in the sweating heat of July. The sun was white hot under his black Stetson and the earth below was the color of a dun horse.

In the evenings now, he read constantly, by kerosene lamplight. He was gradually adding many fine words to his vocabulary. He read all the books in Mr. Mackey's library, books on horses, the veterinarian books, and novels too - Thackeray and Charles Dickens. And with his reading, he became more aware of the social evils of that whole, huge world of which he had always been a part. Small wonder he had made a happy retreat to Del Paso! He knew too well of the tremendous and awful truth in the pages of Dickens. Many times it seemed the English author had been writing of his own days of desperate loneliness in an English workhouse. Even now his life ached with the memory of it. It was something he could not scratch out of his mind. He became conscious of the evil within him, too. His own sins filled him with horror. He wished he could vomit them out of his soul. But there was no way.

So he read and read and read, hoping to find something he could latch onto that would erase the isolation he had always felt except for those few years in the Sandwich Islands. He read out of naked need, looking for one crumb of truth that would satisfy this insatiate hunger in his heart, the wisdom for which he searched.

The enormous dazzle of the sun knifed under him in the swelter of August and the sweat streamed from under the inner band of his broad-brimmed hat. But he didn't mind the heat, nor the glare, nor the sweat. Life was still better here than it had been in the cool mist of the Big City with its rot and its filth and its ugliness. Not what he wanted but better than what he had had before.

The dinner bell sounded and he strode up to the cook-house.

"Mr. Mackey wants a word with you," someone called to him. When he joined the fifty-three-year-old manager, he was holding a letter in his hand. "I know how much you have enjoyed your work here, Bill," he began. "I don't have to tell you how pleased I have been with you. The performance of the horses speaks for that. But Mr. Haggin has a request from a friend in Monterey County he can't turn down. I'm hoping you'll be back as soon as you can come. It isn't every man I can trust to conduct our horses East." He watched Bill's face for he was afraid Bill might not want to go, but he saw no disappointment there. "Maybe this young man, accustomed to traveling over the world as he had, never did stay in one place," he thought.

Bill said nothing.

"Will you go?" Mackey pressed him.

"That I will, sir. For certain I will be back. Yes, I will be back. I am glad to be of service to your Mr. Peregrini in Monterey, but it's sad I am to be leaving the books."

"The books?" Mackey was surprised at this for he had never had a trainer who took such keen personal delight both in each little weanling and in each new book. Bill knew to an ounce of milk what those capricious youngsters took. He knew where the dam would find the best grass to produce that milk, too. And in leaving, he only spoke of missing books he had read in the office each evening.

"Then prepare to leave for Gonzales as soon as possible," Mr. Mackey concluded.

"Gonzales? It is to Gonzales I am going?" Bill's interest perked up instantly, for the California Blooded Horse Association had a race track there and Bill hoped someday he would have the good fortune to train horses there.

"From Gonzales, you could easily be sent to our Stockdale Ranch in Bakersfield before heading back to Del Paso. We have four thousand blooded animals there in need of your expert knowledge."

"Agreed," Bill said with a smiling face. "There's a Mrs. Cochrane, a woman I worked for in San Francisco, who has a ranch at Madrone and I promised her I'd give her a hand on some vicious animals if I ever got to her neighborhood. Would you mind me keeping that obligation first. Mr. Mackey?"

"Certainly not! I respect a man who keeps his word."

Chapter Five

According to promise, William returned to Madrone to tame two especially vicious horses for Mrs. Cochrane. Of course, neighboring ranchers quickly heard he was there and lost little time in persuading him to train "just one unmanageable horse" for them while in the region. Thus, the days stretched into weeks. He enjoyed that country and the talent he had for handling horses made him quite a number of friends among the horse ranchers.

On a particular Saturday evening, Bill suggested he buy tickets for a show they wanted to see in San José. Since it was his job as foreman of the corrals and bunkhouses to keep the cowboys within bounds of good behavior, Mrs. Cochrane suggested he escort them to San José for the usual whoop-it-up celebration, taking in the dance halls, saloons, or gambling tables. Arriving at the theater, William approached the ticket office, while his cowboy charges watched a group of religious singers from a Crittenden Mission. The street group were evidently drumming up an audience for their regular Saturday night religious services the Mission held, perhaps to head off a few drunken brawls that came regularly each weekend night.

William took out his chamois skin purse from his right pants pocket, plunked down a ten-dollar gold piece in front of the cashier. Tickets were "six-bits" apiece. While he was waiting for his change, he heard one of the more boisterous cowhands trying to open a conversation with one of the young girl singers. This hand, Buck, had done his usual whisky-drinking earlier. Buck had never been a big drinker, never a man to hold his liquor well. So, rejoining the merry makers, William heard Buck say, "You jes' leave it to ol' Buck to make you forgit your religion, girlie."

The young girl flushed, but tried to ignore the remark as she kept her eyes on the open hymnal.

"No pretenses, Sweetie," Buck sniggered, prodding one of his companions in the ribs to give him the impression it was all in fun. The girl frowned a little now, showing annoyance, but kept on singing.

"No pretenses," the tipsy cowhand repeated, finding it hard to put the words into sentences. "I know you like a good time as well as me. All you Christians are hypocrites anyway. You know that. What you really want is a little lovin', and I'm jes' the guy to give it to you."

At that remark, there instantly flashed through Bill's mind the memory of his former benefactor, Clayton, and the one example of outstanding kindness he had known when he was a filthy waif on the streets of Washington, and this Sunday-school superintendent had taken him home, fed and clothed him and offered to make him his own adopted son. He remembered, too, he had promised, "Someday Christ will make a man of you."

Bill had felled more than one man when a crowd would stand around the bar of any saloon, drinking and passing spurious remarks about people who professed adherence to God. In the eighties a religious spirit was beginning to settle over the Western ranges, threatening to stamp out the old, unbridled lawlessness. It was not received with friendliness by those who had never been check-reined before.

"I know there was nothing on earth that would cause a man to take me in when I was a boy, like Mr. Clayton did, if he had not been a true Christian," Bill had often reasoned. "I know that all the good of those who are sincere and I will never stand by and permit them to be scorned by drunken bums,"

Off would come the coat, and there would be another one of those quick-tempered fist fights for which he was well known. And when the fight was over, it always gave him such a feeling of power to know he was in command of a combustive situation, something similar to the feeling he had of mounting a vicious horse for the first time.

Only, in his combats with man, there was never any feeling of achievement as there was with the horse, just a realization of his overpowering strength. It was accompanied, however, by a feeling of dejection, self-abnegation, and shame. And that was the way he felt now as he viewed the prostrate Buck lying in the gutter.

"Fight! Fight!" went the dry up and down the street as Saturday revelers scampered to the scene.

Buck was too drunk to accommodate their lust for blood. "I'll apologize to the little lady," he offered, lifting his head from the dirt.

"You'll do more than that," Bill declared. "You'll attend the meeting inside, and you'll sober up and behave yourself."

Buck thought a moment before nodding his vigorous affirmation.

"Indeed, we'll all go in," William added. "Every damned one of us, and see if they can make Christians of the lot of us. That we will."

The Mission workers sang louder trying to get the street mob back in order. But it was no use. The street loiterers were demanding an out-and-out fight.

"Oh come on. Let's see you fight it out," one coaxed.

"You gonna let this big bully manhandle you like that?" another challenged.

Bill looked sharply at both, his eyes flashing fire like a stallion ready to charge.

"Let me hear one word out of you," he cautioned with more than a shade of anger, "And I'll crack your heads together."

The band leader called for a marching song.

"Onward Christian Soldiers," the band struck up. The little group got into quick formation and set off marching down the street while the group of submissive cowboys, knowing full well that Mullen was in no mood for trifling, followed reluctantly into the Mission.

Inside, the preacher announced the text:

"Look unto me, and ye shall be saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God and beside me there is no one else."

"He is talking about me," Bill said, shame welling in his heart for the disturbance he had caused. "I am the end of the earth."

It was one thing to knock a man down in a saloon. It was something else again to break up a church gathering. He listened with consuming attentiveness forgetting his companions seated beside him. It seemed the preacher was talking directly to him. He was certain of it, for he looked at him with those grey eyes, calm eyes, as he explained what it meant to receive God's blessing of salvation.

"It means," he explained, "to have the load of sin lifted from you,"

"The load," Bill thought. "Could God ever lift the load from me?"

He was trembling. He could feel his knees strike each other like silver rowels clinking on a dance floor. He was afraid it was noticeable the way he trembled so. His legs were so weak he felt he could never walk to the livery stable where the horses waited to take them home. He wished he had not forced them to go to the meeting, forced himself.

The preacher turned to talking about how Saint Paul had turned to God and from that day on became a new man. Bill listened with rapt attention. He next talked of Paul's imprisonment, of his trials. He had a way of describing the historical sequences as to make the events seem to have just happened. Bill thought he could have been talking of California, so vivid and interesting was his account of his regeneration of the man Saul, Saul the cruel one, who became Paul the confident, believing one.

The preacher expounded with unquestionable conviction, "If Saint Paul had been like many Californians arraigned before a judge today with a price to buy his freedom and a willingness to go along with the corruption of the judge, he would have gotten freedom. Because he was poor, a poor missionary, they kept him in jail for two years without trial."

"What is the cause of the evils that are besetting us here?" Bill asked himself. "The drunken debauchery, the gambling, the theft, the bloodshed, the corruption in office, the fighting, the ballot box stuffing?"

Then the preacher told about how he had ridden over the Santa Cruz mountains from San Francisco and stopped at a little adobe inn and how he invited the guests of the inn to pray with him in the saloon before they all retired.

Bill said to himself, "Why don't I try it?"

"I promise you, religion will be worth more to you than all the gold of California and this is the only way to promote a genuine reform here."

Bill could not pull away from the conviction of his words. He know with his keen mind he spoke the truth, the only way to change a city was to change the hearts of the people in it, and he knew, with his open honesty, his heart needed changing.

"Yes, I'm just a great big bully," he said to himself. "There is no good in me. God, why am I the way I am? Why do I have to always be knocking men around just because I have a big fist and a big frame?"

And then he left off thinking of himself. Agonizing memories welled up inside him to cause a pain in his chest that wanted to explode. He realized the only way this little city and that bigger city, and the state, the nation, the world, could ever be reformed was by changing the hearts of the people in it. Yes, the preacher was right. It was a long, slow, hard process that embraced the ends of the earth and it began with one's self.

When the preacher was finished, a number of young people made short talks, for it was essentially a young people's testimonial meeting where a little band filled with the high idealism of youth spoke from frank inspiration of hearts not hardened with bitter contact of a stiff world. He listened to them, each one. He had never heard such utterances. He hadn't realized there were young people like this before. They even talked of being interested in him - him who had hurtled their well-planned meeting into confusion. And they were interested in poor, drunken Buck, even after his insulting remarks to this beautiful girl with the wide-open innocent eyes, who blushed easily but remained poised and calm.

William rose from his seat. "You young people have testified tonight for Jesus Christ," he said with a little smile stealing about the corners of his mouth.

He could not help but see the humor of the situation. Then he became serious, fumbled for words, and not finding them, blurted out with a sudden explosiveness, "I want to give testimony for the Devil, for I have served him all my life!"

"I am bad," he went on, slowly now, his face solemn and grave. "There is no goodness in me. I have tried to be good but I can't. You say that Jesus Christ will save me. Unless he does, I will never be any good, for every time I have tried, I have failed. But I am going to try again if God will save me as you say. I am not going to leave this building until he does."

Then he sat down, the big shoulders falling relaxed over his chest, his head dropped down so he had to hold his chin with his thumb and forefinger. His eyes were intent on the preacher now, and very grey.

When the meeting was over, an old lady invited him to go to the front of the mission and kneel. He did. She asked him to pray with her and wait on God for some miraculous power to work upon him. He knew it would have been a miracle. But he found instead this insistent old lady by his side heckled his very soul within.

"Brother, are you saved?" she kept repeating.

"She is the devil trying to tempt me," he said to himself. He was wanting to talk to this Stranger whom the preacher called Friend, to listen to Him; but all he could hear was the provoking words of an annoying old woman who kept repeating, "Brother, are you saved?"

She would not let him be alone with God. The fury rose within him. If the woman would only quit nagging him and go away. But it was no use. So he rose to his feet and made a weak little gesture to go. The preacher walked over to him; gave him his hand. He was surprised how strong it was for the little man that he appeared to be in the pulpit. And he, as big as he was, was almost too weak to walk

"Do you believe that God will save you?" the preacher asked.

"I do not know," Bill said, "I'm not quite sure. Not quite."

He felt he had reached his last irrevocable chance to contact God and lost it; muffed it somehow. His companions had already gone without him, disgusted, no doubt. He knew they would not be back before morning. He was glad. Now, at least, he was alone, except for the horse that would take him home.

He went directly to the livery stable as soon as he left the Mission, and, after paying his bill, he swung into the saddle. Astride, strength poured through his body, as that familiar animal strength joined his own, as it had so many times before. The weakness left him. He headed for Madrone.

The moonlight lighted his way with such a brilliance as to make the horse switch his tail joyously and snort excitedly as he attempted to take the gladsome miles.

"Easy now, Boy," he checked him. "There are some miles to go. Easy now."

He rode tall in the saddle, very tall, and he felt the stature of the man inside him grow to the full measure expected of the man astride. He had that trick of sitting erect but loosely, not gripping the saddle in any part, which was why he was tireless in the seat. As the blood coursed through his veins, his spirits soared. He sat now as though he were in a ladder-back chair. His shoulders fell well back, facing right in front of him, his legs hanging as straight as necessary for comfort. His feet were a little advanced and parallel with the horse's body. He was a picture of alertness for he never sat lazily in the saddle, only naturally. His feet remained still as the horse started to trot, he would raise the stirrup just so much and no more than the horse's actions demanded. And when, struck by the beauty of the evening, the horse broke into a happy lope, Bill's body gave every jump as he turned on either side, swinging his body and carrying the weight of the stirrup on the side to which the horse turned, and the feeling of mastery came back to him. He sensed the sweat of the horse's body, heard the slow musical creak of the leather, the rhythmical clop of the hard hooves on the road. He leaned over and stroked the horse's neck and a new calm entered his soul.

"You good, faithful brute, tell me one thing," he asked. "Why is it you and I get along so well, enjoy the world together, yet the meanness rises within me when I am with God's two-legged creatures?"

Chapter Six

Next morning he was surprised to realize he had slept so well. He had tried and tried to find God, yet when he stopped trying and lifted his head up to the heavens, there He was.

There was no tension in the air, no tension in his soul, just a feeling of peace and unity. He thought he was seeing the world for the first time. He took a deep breath. There was not one discordant note in all that illimitable expanse of beautiful earth. He dressed himself carefully as he usually did and went outside. It did not seem early with all the birds chirping, the sky so bright and blue. The brown earth that yesterday was dusty, barren, uninviting, a dreary expanse of monotony, was today golden, smiling. Why hadn't he noticed how pretty this particular country was before with all the little swells and folds and rippling valleys?

He strode over to the corral and looked at the horses as though he had never seemed to notice them before. A colt scampered up to him. He reached into his pocket and took out a lump of sugar. It nosed into his pockets, snorted in a friendly way before scampering off. The other horses greeted him joyously. How beautiful they were! But what was more surprising, he even thought the pigs and cows were handsome too. Strange, he had never noticed that a cow could be beautiful!

"Pigs are comical, ain't they." He laughed out loud.

He whistled and set about to work, forgetting it was Sunday. He ate his usual hearty breakfast - pancakes, steak, french fried potatoes and eggs, poached in the steak drippings. He drowned it down with coffee, two big cups of strong, black coffee.

Although he did not put into words, he knew the evil was now overcome. He had a higher happiness in proper control. Moreover, the old aloneness was no more, the homelessness, the restlessness. Yes, it was all gone.

He joined Mrs. Cochrane on the veranda before supper and they chatted about her horses, and the progress that had been made.

"Tis soon I'll have to be going," he told her. And then he remembered, "Sure an' I haven't taken a chew of tobacco all this live long day. That I haven't."

She looked startled as much as to say "Well, what brought that up," but instead replied "Well, how a good-looking man like you could ever have used that stuff is beyond me."

"But don't you know? God has saved me."

"Whatever are you talking about?"

"Last night I asked God to save me, and he did. I have not even thought about it all day long."

"Well, see if you can leave whiskey alone, too," she said reproachfully. Try that and see how far you'll get with it."

"Never fear, t'won't bother me none," he assured her, and gave her his brightest smile. "An' I forgot to do me cursings for the day. Why, it's a new man I am! A new man, and that entirely!"

And off he was to tell the men about it. He felt a strong compulsion to tell everyone of this change that had come over him. The ranch hands were washing up for supper outside the cook-house when he joined them.

"God has made a new man out of me, " he blurted out, there being no doubt of the exuberance he felt. "I know it because I haven't wanted any whiskey this whole blessed day."

When he talked to the men it was as though they were different too. He wanted to take them to his heart for now he loved them all. He had never had this feeling for them before. Everything was clear to him now. He was close to his friends and God.

He knew God had shown him His magnificent power of love by which he would live, and by which he would die. He danced a few steps of an old Irish jig, then swung into a few hula steps.

The course of his life wasn't greatly changed in the weeks that followed. He fulfilled his contract with Peregrini for Mackey. When that work was completed, he stopped at the Jockey Club and got acquainted with the secretary. It was no surprise to be received well there, and he was given a larger order to train their race horses. He agreed to give them as much time as possible until it was time to return to Del Paso.

He was still riding through the same familiar gates, up and down the same swelling ground, over the same gullies and ravines, but he saw the world as God had made it, not the world man had spoiled. Indeed, life was on a new plane. It was powered by a new, freer activity. He was happier than he had ever been before. "Sure, an' I have lost me load. I'm a new man."

He had always been relaxed working around his horses. That had always been his secret. But around men, he had been harassed with an anxiousness that had brought him only despair and hostilities that always could only be brought under control with characteristic free-for-all fighting. He discovered that now when he greeted men, or even old enemies, it was with an affection. And, more surprising, they responded in the same way. Indeed, God had made his soul receptive to the entire world. He was ready for the new faith he knew would follow. This new faith would be as big as the mountains and no longer hidden in the haze of summer. The enormity of this faith was built on the vast discrepancy of that old, bitter life of wrath, loneliness and despair, that other life of sorrow and sin. This new life of strength and power and joy and peace was so because it had the Power of God behind it. And God was with him and behind him in everything. "Ah, for sartin'," he said to himself, "Faith and the world's no trouble to me now."

He was always looking out for miracles about this new self that grew day by day before his very eyes. One of the first things he noticed was that he no longer was concerned about money. Another thing was that he not only wanted to talk to every man about Christ and the happiness inside his soul and how it had changed the external world, but he wanted to help these men in their daily work. He wanted to help them understand how to handle horses as easily as he did because their daily lives depended on understanding the horse.

In his spare time, he began classes in horse training among the ranchers and cowboys. He organized riding classes for men and women. He even started to write a book putting in it all the strange, fascinating observations he had accumulated about wild horses. He wrote with painful difficulty, even this brought him joy because he knew God was pointing out his need for schooling. Thus, he began to set himself to study, going to the library at night. He bought the finest Bible he could purchase, and he read it for the special message it contained from God to the humanity He loved. It seemed every word he read had been written for him. It was easy to understand this Book for he read it with the enthusiasm one uses in devouring an exciting novel or with the casualness one reads the newspaper. He read Psalms, a few each day, and was grateful they put into words the beauty he felt for this new world around him. Most or all he read and memorized Proverbs:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament sheweth his handy work.

He grew excited at the philosophical things Proverbs taught him about people.

Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee;

Rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee.

Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser:

Teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.

"Why people are the same today. All these things are just as true today," he said in amazement.

He read the Gospels to get a true appreciation of the teachings of Jesus and how they showed him the way God had walked among the poor, teaching and preaching and helping. The profundity of thought of the Sermon on the Mount filled him with wonder as he turned time and time again to that fifth chapter of Mathew and read from the third verse through the fifth;

Blessed are the poor in spirit:

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn:

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek:

for they shall inherit the earth.

And everything he read restored his belief that God was his Father, and Heaven his home, and he was no longer born to the despair of an orphan, a stranger alone, in a world of graft and greed.

He read, too, for any of the commands God contained in the Book for him. He impressed on his mind the most important commandment was to love one another.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which in Heaven:

A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another…

The love of God! That was it, the cure for the ailing world, the world he knew, the world that hugged the waterfront, the world enclosed by the corrals, hemmed in by wharves, where the houses tumbled one upon the other, the world of saloons and dives and brothels and sin factories. The world of forty-fives and long knives, of brass knuckles, laudanum and opium, the world of slave trade, of crooked politicians, of oppressive, back-breaking labor, of shanghaiing, the world of windows and orphans and men sickened by the ugliness around them until their eyes had become blind to God's goodness!

A new commandment I give unto ye: love one another…

Why with the love of his Father in his heart he would not so much as hurt an animal! It was the cure! The cure for the ailing world he knew! The love of God!

He would study, study, study. It was all in the Book. More and more, form day to day, he discovered it was all in the Book. He poured over it, studying, planning on doing something for God. Now, all the areas of his active mind that laid dormant for so long were awakened with a new energy. He was gifted with a retentive memory and a vivid imagination, and all that he heard or read remained fixed in his mind as though it were the negative on a camera. It was as though it had been happening before his very eyes he could call out passages whenever he needed them. He memorized it page by page, verse by verse, word by word, until one could misquote a verse to have him correct the error. If someone asked him what a certain verse said, he could tell it, or one could give him a part of a verse and he would finish it and tell where it was. The more he read, the more he remembered. It astonished him when he went to speak that he could talk with such a flow of language.

It was also a surprise to see how receptive the men were to his preaching. He preached in the corrals, at the race tracks, in the livery stables - wherever he or men went.

"You jes' keep on the way you're going," they told him. "You are all right."

There was only one man who objected to it. He was the secretary of the Blooded Horse Association for whom he worked.

"I like you fine, Professor," he told him, trying not to offend him for Bill was a valuable worker at the Jockey Club. "You are doing good work here, except for that."

Bill looked at him, surveying the starched white collar, the carefully tied four-in-hand tie, the broadcloth suit, the diamonds, and thought, "Perhaps he does not need Salvation."

The secretary and manager of the Blooded Horse Association did not look like any of the workers who loafed around the stables, the other men who encouraged Bill to keep telling them about God.

Bill had the gift of telling a good story, in that fervent way of talking to people so they could not help but listen. They did not resent talk of salvation

He agreed to refrain from speaking of salvation when he worked. He would joke with them, answer questions about how to pick out a good horse, how to train him, but he wouldn't speak of salvation at the track.

"One of the most important things in the horse training is to think like a horse," he reminded them many times. "To get along with men, too, the same rule applies."

He sought out the Association secretary and put the proposition to him. "Every Saturday night the men get drunk. On Sunday they lie around in the dirt. That's no place for a man who was made in God's image. I want to hire a hall, pay for it out of my own pocket, and invite them to listen to me, if they so desire. And, if they don't they can continue to go to hell anyway they wish."

The secretary drew back in astonishment. "That's the first time I've ever heard you swear, Mullen."

"Indeed, I'm not swearing. I'm just saying that if anyone doesn't want to go in the direction he is going, he can travel another road. Maybe I should have put it that way."

Much to his surprise, his friends filled the hall. So many jammed into the little building, he had to ask all the avowed Christians to leave to make room for the sinners. And still there wasn't enough room for the crowd when he began his sermon.

He spoke with an eloquence he never knew he had. His voice filled with emotion as he told of his young life in the mines of Newcastle. He told the story he was to use over and over again of how a little Scotch lad, Wee Donal, had drawn upon his tender back, the wrath of the schoolmaster who ordered him to strip and receive his lashing for not doing his lessons.

But when Donal removed his shirt, Jock, a tall strong lad of the village saw he wore no undershirt, and that his back was filled with sores; so neglected was his poor body. He begged the schoolmaster to permit him to take Wee Donal's place.

"That ye kin not do," the angry teacher said, and cracked his whip upon Jock's back. "Now that's for yer impertinence, ye big rascal," he said when he had finished giving him twenty stripes. "Take your seat while Donal comes forth like a man an' takes what is coming to him."

"Oh, no!" the pupils cried out, "Ye no kin do it for Jock took his place. Ye no can punish Wee Donal now."

When he was through, there was not a dry eye in the little hall in Gonzales, Monterey County. After the meeting was over they came up to congratulate him and encourage him to continue.

"You're a born preacher, Salvation. You jes' stick to it," they said.

So he began preaching. He began, and to his last day he was still preaching. Everywhere he went, he was preaching.

He had to work out a plan to go to school. He remembered that great University of Georgetown from his residence in Washington. "I will go there," he made up his mind, "I will be come a priest as every son of a good mother should."

He did not dream his education limited to three years in the workhouse would be a stumbling block for his chosen career.

"If God wants me to preach, He will show me the way," he concluded.

"The way" came when he took the promised horse pullman back East, this time again for Haggin's annual sale of blooded horses.

Chapter Seven

HA! HA! HA!

THREE BIG SHOWS

MOODY IN THE MORNING

FOREPAUGH CIRCUS IN THE AFTERNOON AND EVENING

Bill read this strange sign in front of the circus tent on Chicago's lake front. The Colombian Exposition was in progress and Dwight L. Moody was getting a good share of the strangers who poured into the city, holding revival meetings in Haymarket Theater, five tents at strategic points in the city: and religious meetings in Tattersall's Hall.

William read the sign and said to himself: "That's the man those young people I met on the train told me to be sure to see."

Several young men were putting up thousands of seats that would be needed for the morning meeting.

"Can I give you a hand," he offered them.

"You certainly can," one replied, scanning him from top to bottom, trying to decide if he was friend or stranger or maybe circus worker.

One of the performers passed by. Seeing the two men working together with enthusiasm, he asked, "Expect to get three thousand?"

But it was more of a jeer.

"Yes," one of the religious workers replied with a voice unmistakably confident. "And more. We expect to pack this tent."

"Well I'll tell you now, you'll never do it."

Bill's eyes grew large as he scanned the big tent.

Eighteen thousand people were already seated. The circus usually played to ten thousand.

A song choir circled around the rude platform. An invisible sense of awe fell upon the multitude as the choir sang out: "Nearer My God to Thee."

They went from hymn, to song, to psalm - one voice in melodic praise.

William sang along with the multitude, feeling a kinship with everyone. They came from every corner of the continent, even from every portion of the globe.

Then a short, rotund gentleman, with a round, full face and a jungle beard somewhat greyed, stood calm before the many people. A hush fell upon the tent and Bill knew it had to be Mr. Moody. He had expected to see a larger man. Dwight L. Moody, the most famous preacher of that time, perhaps of all time, proved with the impact of his first words he had an unmistakable power. What was this power? Bill noticed he held an open Bible, as he rapidly turned the pages. There was no doubt in the audience's mind that the Book was the "Word of God."

Moody chose the text: "The Son of Man is come to save that which was lost."

And before he had proceeded deep into the sermon, Bill felt he was talking to him alone. As he worked into his sermon, his strong but not loud voice became more intense with each passing word. It was not a rich, not a well-modulated voice, however, it had the carrying power to reach twenty thousand hearers without an amplifier. Never loud, it did not lose that intimate, everyday quality of talking that so characterized the noted preacher's delivery.

"He is sincere," Bill decided. "A sincere man, for certain, and a man of the Book. No mistake about that."

Towards the close of the sermon a slight disturbance was met when a child was passed up to Mr. Moody's platform. Mr. Moody held the little girl up so her parents might recognize her. Her father walked down to receive his daughter as this humble minister simply commented: "That's what Jesus Christ came to do: to seek and save lost sinners and restore them to their Heavenly Father's embrace."

"That's what happened to me," Bill muttered to himself. He knew he must have a word with this plain little man who had such compassion for humanity that he had sought to mobilize the big city into a many-ringed church service as well as to direct activities of the Young Men's Christian Association, and to conduct Sunday Schools all over the crowded metropolis for poor boys and girls - black and white, Christian and Jew, Catholic and Protestant.

When the service ended, Bill joined the ever-moving stream down to the crude platform. "Here is one man who cares about the poor. There was another, Mr. Clayton," Bill reminded himself as he watched the black-suited, corpulent little man shake their hands, one by one. Bill saw them walk away with tear-wet eyes, and when all had gone he knew his opportunity had come. "I'm on my way to Georgetown University," he declared quickly. "I want to prepare myself for the ministry. I'm a horse trainer. I came here with a load of horses. When they are sold, I'll be leaving. So will you be kind enough to answer a few questions for me?"

Quiet, blue-grey eyes seemed to reply "Go ahead." He must have caught the intent expression that spoke of this young man's avowed purpose, his lack of self-interest, his enthusiasm to do God's work, and he was filled with a zeal to enlist the young horse trainer into immediate service.

"Come over here; sit down and talk with me," the quiet religious leader invited.

The two talked for some time during which Mr. Moody asked Bill many questions. Finally, the apparent lack of education was discussed. Moody himself was unlettered and thus paid more attention to its importance than a scholar would have.

"Do you think that will bar me?" Bill asked.

"Perhaps," the older man said. "But you have this ability to handle wild horses, you say. Could it be God had given you this talent to interest men who might otherwise never be reached?"

"It could be, sir," Bill agreed.

"What do you want to be, a great preacher? Or a great teacher? Or a priest, as you say, or just work for God?"

"God has changed my life, I want to help others be changed in the same way. That's all."

"Fine. I don't hold to any secularism," Moody assured him. "It gives me pain to separate myself from the unfortunate multitude of unbelievers. Perhaps you might serve God better if you ministered to the unchurched."

Bill knew what he meant. He had not felt at home in a church since he attended the Catholic chapel in his boyhood.

"If you have no ambition for greatness, if you only want to do the Will of God, and further His Kingdom, I suggest you get all the understanding of the Bible you can. You can reach them in this one way as in no other way. But if the doors of our schools are closed for you, then get an education by yourself."

Bill looked at the tent menagerie, at the trapeze, the gaudy decorations. He knew God called him to that particular arena which drew men together to watch vicious animals perform. He knew from that moment o his pulpit would have to be of leather.

"I must honestly tell you, I'm afraid you'll run into some difficulty getting the kind of schooling you want," Moody warned. "You might try to get into the Chicago Bible institute here. But don't be discouraged if you are not admitted right away."

"I will look into it, Sir. That I will."

"Where do you go to church? Where is your home?"

"I do not go to church, Sir. I have been working on the ranches of California, and at the race track, too. I'm seldom near a church, but I've been studying the Bible all I could and I have attended a mission in San José and in San Francisco once in a while - a Crittenden Mission. I hold my religion is the love of God, Sir."

Moody smiled. "You might get acquainted with the Church of the Stranger when you're in San Francisco. Reverend W. W. Case does some fine work. I think you would feel at home there."

"The Church of the Stranger? It's on Howard Street. I lived close to it for some time. I'll get acquainted with Reverend Case."

Next morning Bill talked with the administrators of the Bible Institute. He also visited with his new-found train companions but he did not come to any decision of what he wanted to do nor did he make any formal application to enter the school. He wanted to study the matter thoroughly and go on to Georgetown University and make an inquiry there to become a Catholic priest. There always had to be in every respectable Irish family a priest, you know.

When his horses were all sold, he took the money he had coming to him so he could return to San Francisco.

"I have had a great education with the horse," he reasoned, "and I'm not discouraged. God gave me that knowledge, and for a purpose. I will use it in the same way Snaky uses his voice in singing for Moody."

Chapter Eight

Returning to San Francisco, William looked up Reverend Case and found the Church of the Stranger was in a new and bigger building, centrally located on Howard Street. It had originated in 1851 in the old Happy Valley School House, the neighborhood where Bill had first made his home in California. About all that was left of Happy Valley now was the name of a bar in the Palace Hotel.

Bill felt a warmth when he entered the church, and did not feel like an intruder, as he had always thought he would inside an American church.

At the close of services, Reverend Case admonished, "Now I want you to greet the stranger in our doors, remembering the social life is next to the spiritual life and our members are children of one Father, our God. After the services we will have an informal meeting right here in the church so all can get acquainted."

"I want to shake hands with you," Bill told the Reverend Case when the services were over. "I'm William Mullen and here on recommendation of Dwight L. Moody."

"I'm glad to know you, young man," he said with true cordiality. "Are you from Chicago?"

"No, sir, San Francisco is my home. I have decided to study for the ministry and had a talk with Mr. Moody. He suggested that I call on you when in San Francisco since I go to no church regularly."

"We would be glad to put you on our probation list here and receive you in our church when you qualify." Reverend Case promised. "At any rate, we'll always be glad to have you worship with up."

"I noticed you didn't have many women in the congregation."

"About seventy-five percent of our audience are men."

He sized up Mullen's proportions, noticing his brawn. "This church is sort of a well-spring from which many other San Francisco churches have sprung," he explained. "We have started several missions in various parts of the town and after a while they have grown into churches. We're conducting meetings on the waterfront at the present time. Would you have any interest in helping us here?"

"I should smile!" Bill replied.

"The hoodlums prowl there with such depredations the huskiest policemen are chosen for duty here. As I looked at you, I was just thinking that Christian workers for this Mission should be chosen the same way. Yes, I think you would fit into our street preaching program."

"Count me in," Bill said. "Would you like me to join you tonight?"

Reverend Case nodded and continued explaining: "Our church does considerable relief work among the poor. We also have old-fashioned revivals every Sunday night in the church if you'd prefer that. We like to think every one of our members is a working members"

"I would enjoy your Mission," Bill concluded.

"I must warn you to be on your mettle, though. It is nothing for the hoodlums to try to bomb a meeting or use some means to break it up. You'll find the police will give a certain amount of protection, but expect anything to happen."

"I will."

"Could you say a few words, if you were asked to?"

"I'll try, Sir."

"It will be good experience."

Bill nodded. When Reverend Case called upon him to speak that night, there was something about his confident manner that made him irresistible to the hecklers who had filled the long bench at the front of the hall.

"Aw shet up!" some yelled back to the hecklers, for they wanted to hear the stories that took Bill's listeners around the world.

But the hecklers would not be stilled. Bill's very manner, unruffled as it was, was too much a challenge for the scoffer.

"I was reared a Roman Catholic," he told them. "And I learned many fine things from this training. Yes, I learned many things from them, but I didn't get the power to forgive sins. No, I didn't get that."

As the hecklers went on, William could feel his temper rising. The blood rose so hotly in his veins that he was compelled to remove his coat. He knew it would have a shocking effect on the more sedate ones of the church group, but he also knew he must or he would suffocate from this fury inside.

The heckling continued, gathering momentum in the face of the church worker's non-resistance. They kept closing in on him, and Bill removed his collar and tie, and carefully laid them on the pulpit stand, his talk growing more dramatic with each passing minute. He surprised himself at his flow of speech, at the endless verses that poured out of his mind, and rolled off of his tongue. Little had he dreamed it would be so easy to remember the Bible he had read with such an intensity in the weeks and months since turning to God.

"No, I never got the power to forgive sins," he repeated. "But I'll tell you one thing, I did receive the power to cast out devils." The twinkle in his eyes was pure mischief.

He removed his stiff cuffs, carefully rolling back the sleeves of his "boiled" shirt. It gave what he did great importance. Eyes became fastened on the procedure. Snickers filled his nostrils. His mouth curved upward. His manner was that of good humor.

"Yes, I learned to cast out devils from my good Catholic relatives in Ireland, and I'm going to show you how it's done."

"The hell you can," one of the hecklers closest to him shouted. He was the ring leader of the hoodlums.

"Well, when you get to Hell, you'll have plenty of time to think over how it's done," Mullen came laughing back.

With this the crowd roared, too. They were beginning to think over how it's done," Mullen came laughing back.

"Now I', going to show you this power," he said, and with the agility he so often displayed in tossing a wild horse, he leaped to the pulpit's edge, and picking up the leader by the collar of his coat and the seat of his pants, he tossed him up and over the crowd so that he cleared the tallest head by several inches and hurtled the heckler on the floor at the entrance to the building.

The crowd jeered and cheered and the meeting from that minute on was as orderly as Grace Cathedral.

"Well, that's what I call muscular Christianity," Reverend Case told him afterwards. "The police have been powerless to give us much help. They themselves always go in twos whenever they are on this beat, and you'll find them all carrying long knives, for the hoodlums are as rough here as any place in the world. But you don't seem to need their protection."

"Call on me anytime you can use me," Mullen said with deep satisfaction.

There was no doubt that that he had enjoyed his second sermon.

"I have a better place than this for you," Reverend Case calculated. "We sometimes hold meetings on the wharf. How would you like to try taming the street?"

"When is your next meeting?"

"Sunday," Case replied.

"I'll be there."

Reverend Case took the church group over to a little coffee house for rolls and hot chocolate, and as they sat and talked over the afternoon services, Case said, "Mullen, I don't know of anyone better qualified to become a street preacher than you. I was amazed to hear you quote Bible verse for verse. How did you do it?"

"I spend a great deal of time with the Book because I've many years to make up in learning."

"Did you ever stop to think," Case said, "Jesus' only recorded sermon was preached on a mountain? We also have reports of others preached on the seashore, on the decks of ships, and in the streets to prove Jesus, too, was an outdoor preacher."

"It's certainly something to think about," Bill agreed.

"There isn't room in all the churches of California to hold all the people who should be reached," Reverend Case sail.

"I know that, sir," Bill answered. "And I also know that often men feel unwanted in the church. They are kept out by their own poverty."

"Besides," Reverend Case sought to clinch Bill's interest, "you practice a muscular Christianity and that's why you are needed on the wharf. I'd like to see you do it regularly, will you?"

Bill was silent a moment as he studied the matter. "I'm afraid that is the trouble, Reverend. If I were any good as a preacher, I wouldn't have to resort to what you call 'muscular Christianity." What I had to say would hold their interest. Oh, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the fight tonight. I enjoyed it too much. Both times I got into a fight, didn't I? And both times that held the men - not what I said - not the Love of God. You've plenty of churches here, and your missions, and the Salvation Army, and they are all doing better work than I could ever do. I know where I belong."

"Where?"

"In all our Western States the cowboy never has had much opportunity to hear about the Love of God. He could travel a hundred miles on horseback if he wanted to, and still he wouldn't find one church to attend. Well, my congregation's going to be the cowboys of our western ranches. I am one of them. I speak their language and they will understand me. I can break horses as I go along and earn enough money to take care of my ministry so I won't be bound to preach the way someone else wants me to - to have others put words in my mouth. An' I guess if I just keep on learning the Book I won't need anything more than the education I have, although I still would like to go to school if I could find one that would take me in. The cowboy has never had any labor union to protect him, no welfare worker, no woman's club or child labor laws. He has managed to live happily on an eighteen-hour day and always thought it unmanly to complain. He's always known his place, revered womanhood, and yet there's no one today who worries one iota about his soul. He has always displayed the hardihood and the courage that comes with long familiarity with trouble and hardship. Indeed, he would make a good man in God's army. When he gets sick and lonely and not knowing what else to do, he wanders into town on a Saturday night and downs whiskey to drown his soul, and then there are thousands of folks willing to believe his courage is packed inside his Colt. I know where he can always find a source of strength that will give him the fearlessness he needs without revolvers or whiskey. And I'm going to make it my business to tell him about it."

The little band of religious workers sat there drinking in his every word, all there knew, here was a man who truly was drafted by God.

"Yes, Reverend Case, I thank you for this experience tonight. I know my place. It's on my horse's back. And that's going to be my pulpit, from now on, the hard ground, the pews of my church, and the open sky, God's tabernacle. I won't need any money because I can break horses by day and preach nights and Sundays. And when I'm through, please God, there won't be a cowboy in America who will not have had the opportunity to accept Christ's love and be blessed with the power of God's salvation."

Chapter Nine

He went to Rancho Del Paso the next morning and had a good talk with his friend, John Mackey, who was sympathetic with his plans. "For sartin'," he assured his understanding employer, "I want you to know that if God is willing, I'll be back in time to accompany your horses East in time for the races and sales."

Mr. Mackey nodded agreement. "I have business in Sacramento today," he offered, "I already have the team harnessed and ready to go if you are."

"Much obliged," William said. "I'll get my valise."

"Cowboy Minister Mullen," as William thought of himself now, trained horses as he rode the Gulf Trail from Ft. Worth north through the ranch country.

He wasn't on the road long, however, before he realized that God was trying to convince him that he was being "called" to head for the mining country of Colorado.

He said to himself: "Well, after all, I was a miner before I was a preacher." He referred to that time when, as a mere lad, he, his father, and eight brothers trudged down inside the coal mines of Newcastle, England every morning at dawn.

How he had loved that job! He had known the miners' jargon then as he now knew the cowboys' lingo. It made him feel he was a man then - going every day deep into the mines. His father often reminded him he was a full-grown man, too. Indeed he was, doing such responsible work as a "trapper-boy" did, for didn't he open and close the trap door every time the little engine that pulled its coal-loaded train passed by his station, so no gas could escape and kill those who worked down in the shafts where the coal was dug.

He knew Ouray was a good mining center and so he headed his sure-footed mustang toward the trail that led there.

His self-appointment with the Ouray townspeople provided him with a pattern for his later revival campaigns that were to follow, until he could get to his postponed schooling.

When he arrived at the business district of the town where he planned to conduct his street meetings, he would ride around the business section to look over and appraise the livery stables where he planned to most easily earn his expenses. Then he would introduce himself to the stable owner.

Most owners took him at his own evaluation, as he had learned from experience, was pretty much the way the world did, then as now.

If he gave his credentials as having trained horses for Claus Spreckles in Hawaii and San Francisco , as well as for Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, it was always accepted with one long, approving glance.

When he became well-acquainted with the livery stableman, he would enjoy taking out his little notebook and carefully-folded clippings of the NEW YORK SUN's account of how he had saved the lives of those seated in the dress circle at the recent horse-taming exhibition in Madison Square Garden. This convinced his new-found friends he had already paid his dues.

From the mining district of Ouray, he moved on to Nevada. Sacramento still remained his destination. In Nevada, he headed for Carlin, where he remained for one month. The town, being a railroad center, was teeming with the tension of the Great Strike of 1894. It had started locally in Chicago as "The Pullman Strike" when the workers of the model Illinois town of Pullman received a severe slash in their wages.

Following on the heels of the panic of the year before, the blow was too severe to accept. A new labor union called the American Railway Union formed a sympathetic alliance with these embattled laborers, even though the odds were against them. Thus, a local labor situation assumed national importance. When the labor convention had proposed, on June 12, that a boycott be declared on all pullman cars, a committee of laborers called on industry to hear the reply: "We have nothing to arbitrate."

It was the spark that touched off the flame that swept across the nation.

In the past years, railroads throughout the country had reduced wages. Hours were long and there were many grievances. On June 26, the boycott became operative, and the local Pullman strike became a mighty struggle between the American Railway Union and the General Managers.

By July 1, the fight became one between the United States Government and the American Railway Union. The United States marshal felt forced to telegraph Attorney General Olney: "The situation here is desperate. I have sworn in over 400 deputies, and many more will be needed to protect the mail trains."

Very little mail and no freight was moving. The United States Government had placed a blanket injunction under the Interstate Commerce Act, as provided by the Sherman Anti-trust Law. With haste, the writ was whipped into shape and ordered served on the officials and members of the union forbidding any interference with "mail trains, express trains, or other trains whether freight or passenger, engaged in interstate commerce."

No one was able to foresee how far-reaching the strike would be. At Trinidad, a large crowd surrounded and completely disarmed 52 deputy marshals as they approached the town the very day William rode into Carlin, and having just left Colorado, he followed the activities in the morning paper with considerable interest.

Since he had been a laborer himself practically his entire life, his sympathies were with labor. He remembered the model town of Pullman, too, during the Columbian Exposition when all the world came to see this great new experiment in industrial relations. He remembered seeing beautiful homes erected for the workers (homes they couldn't own), the parks, the great sanitation system. He remembered how provisions had been made for their entertainment in magnificent theaters, how schools had been provided; also an arcade and hotels, and how one beautiful church had been planned to complete the setting - a magnificent green stone church. Just one church, seating 800 people - in a town of eight thousand!

On July 2, telegraph wires were cut a Pueblo. Trains were unable to move.

Coal miners, on strike in New Mexico, joined the railroad strikers, enforcing the boycott. The sheriff of the county was sympathetic to labor as the West in general was.

William remembered the feeling in California against the railroads' greed in gobbling up so much of the land which it felt should have gone to the people.

On July 3, rioters three miles above Raton turned 16 cars loose. Troops were rushed to the West and kept on duty at Trinidad, Raton, Las Vegas, and Newcastle. Sacramento, however, where the public had great sympathy for the strikers, was the worst storm center. This was the western terminal of the Central Pacific.

At Ogden, western terminal for the Union Pacific, strikers were in absolute control and flaunted court orders supported by public sentiment.

President Cleveland held that troops were needed to protect interstate commerce, protect the mails, and to keep the Union Pacific and Central Pacific roads open for military and other government purposes. Two generals were given instructions as to how to cope with the situation.

Four companies of troops moving westward from Ogden were assigned to keep the Central Pacific road open. A like force moving eastward from Sacramento was to cooperate with them in the following manner.

The troops left Ogden on July 11 for Truckee, California. On the same day 542 soldiers reached Sacramento by boat from Mare Island. On the next day, 370 more sailors and marines landed at Oakland. As the large force concentrated on Sacramento with sabers drawn and bayonets fixed, the cavalry and infantry were able to drive the mobs away from the railroad yards without bloodshed.

But, on the next day, an engineer and three soldiers were killed outside Sacramento and several soldiers wounded, one mortally. The next clash that followed resulted in one striker being killed and another wounded.

"All right, God," he said. He knew he would never know any freedom if he did not act at a time when men's actions were being motivated by violence.

He told himself the strikers had been driven to such actions. "It's small blame on them," he rationalized. He knew, however, he had to take a stand this time against violence.

He walked over to the livery stable and asked for his bill.

"But you must be crazy," the stableman replied. "It's two o'clock. Where you going this time of night? The strikers are guarding the town. No person is permitted to leave or enter."

It gave him an idea how he should act: "I must pretend to be crazy!" he thought.

"Well, I have preached enough to save every man and woman and child in Carlin," he ranted. "I have been here two weeks now, and if they don't want to be saved they can all go to Hell."

"Strong words from a preacher," the stableman looked at him suspiciously, but led the horse out of his stall.

William saddled him, cinching him fairly loosely. He then paid his bill and left, selecting a dark lane that led to the outskirts of town. He followed the road along the river, for the railroad tracks also followed this route.

William slid out of the saddle slowly. It was the saddle he had carried around the Horn and from Maui to San Francisco, from Texas to Colorado and Nevada. "A man would as soon sell all his possessions as his saddle, " he warned himself.

Man and horse followed the sinuous Humboldt River, said to be the meanest river of its length in the world. When they came to a spot made dark with willow thicket, Mullen reasoned it had to be the place where he would have to leave his horse behind.

He threw the reins over the animal's neck, for his saddle horses were trained to stand without having to be tied. He untied the latigo straps, reasoning the strikers at Carlin would figure some injury had befallen the crazy preacher and he had not been able to give alarm. No one would believe he would have left his horse; it was as much a part of his program as the very Bible he always carried.

"Now…stay!" he whispered in his horse's ear. "Stay until I get out of reach."

William walked alone until he reached the outskirts of town where sentries were forbidding anyone to leave or enter.

"Halt or we fire," came the order.

William stopped.

"Who goes there?"

"Mullen, the cowboy preacher."

"Where are you going?"

"I', going to preach the gospel. Since you are the first one I have come upon, I'm going to begin on you. God has sent me out into the highways and the byways to preach the gospel and to save men from Hell's damnation. Yes, God told me to do that and I'm going to start with you…"

"No one is to leave town," the guard spoke with harsh authority.

"Just try to stop God," William replied, squaring his shoulders, ready for a fight. "I've preached in this town for two weeks now. Enough to save every man, woman and child, and now they can all go straight to Hell if they want to, while I go to preach in Elko."

"Over our dead bodies," the guard insisted.

"And dead bodies you'll be!" William retorted.

"Oh, let the damn fool go," one of them advised. "He's preaching every time you turn around. For God's sake, let him go."

William continued murmuring, carrying out his crazy act, as he continued walking lest someone change his mind and call him back.

He walked and walked. When he got to the trestle that crossed the winding river, he examined the pilings and saw in truth they had been burned in such a way the weight of any oncoming train would hurtle whatever passengers it carried into the river below.

Now, out of renewed effort, he quickened his pace. "Give me strength, God, " he prayed, knowing God would answer his prayer. He walked swiftly as he had scudded the Irish miles when a lad bound for the fair.

By daylight, he was well outside Carlin. Then his eyes penetrated the grey dawn and the huge black snout of the powerful engine approaching. He watched the locomotive swing slowly around the veiled bend. He heard its explosive thunders rising into the quiet of the dawn. The squat funnel of the sturdy train proceeded down the rails that flashed brightly in the dawn morning

Then, the foreboding engine reached him and ground quickly to a halt. It was obvious the big man in dark clothes did not intend to move from the tracks lest it pass him in its indifference.

The fireman shouted angrily, "What the hell you doing on our tracks?"

"I have a message."

The hawk eyes stared furiously at him, then called an army officer to come and receive William's warning that the bridge pilings had been burned and that to try to go over the trestle would mean certain death for the trainload of soldiers.

"How can I be sure it's not one of their tricks," the skeptical officer said.

"God sent me to warn you to approach with caution. You'll see when you get there I'm telling the truth."

"You don't look like a minister," he said. "Do you have your credentials?"

"No, but why else would I walk these miles?"

"Maybe you got a ride back."

"You may not believe God's voice but I do, and I say God wants you to spare the lives of the men in your charge."

"God's voice," he muttered. "He's cracked."

"Cracked or not," another said, "we'll approach with care. Instruct the engineer to stop before crossing all bridges."

No provision was made for William's transportation to Elko, twenty-five miles away, and the nearest town east. He had no choice but to walk the desolate miles.

Before William reached Elko, he looked up and saw a mountain lion ambling casually down the rails as though he too had no place to go.

Accustomed to wild animals, William knew there would be no danger as long as he remained relaxed and unafraid. So down the track he continued; up the track walked the cougar. They met face to face as they looked at each other, the one as calmly as the other, and then continued on their ways, one to the east, the other to the west.

William was not surprised; it was what he had expected. He quoted form his favorite Ninety-first Psalm:

For He shall give His angels charge over thee,

To keep thee in all ways.

The traveling cowboy preacher continued past treeless hills, over monotonous miles, in and out of the sullen river, squinting in the bright sunlight, but always asking God to give him strength to meet the miles and miles before him he knew not where.

He had been headed westward, westward for the Haggin-Tevis ranches at Sacramento and Bakersfield. He wondered why the soldiers had not offered to transport him back. They knew by now their lives had been spared, spared by the traveling preacher. God must want him to go to Chicago. That was it, so he would keep the course. He would continue east. He followed along the route of the barren, banked river and walked until he reached a railroad station. The large black letters painted in the white board read "ELKO."

He walked up to the clerk behind the glass window and said "I want a ticket."

"There won't be trains for some time," the agent said gloomily.

"I want a ticket to Chicago," William said in a commanding voice. He hesitated a moment before repeating "To Chicago."

"You'll have a long wait, brother, no passenger trains have gone for some time," the station agent informed him.

"I'll wait," the big man wearing a black Stetson hat said, "I'll wait until the next one comes along." Then he thought it would be better to busy himself preaching lest any suspicion be attached to his being in Elko "Where's the nearest stables?"

The agent thumbed eastward without looking up. On the following day a passenger train came through. The violence must be ended. He boarded the train headed for Chicago. "God's will be done," he said softly. It was a prayer.

Chapter Ten

In Chicago, the Moody Bible Institute still has the original application which William Mullen filled out seeking entrance to study for the ministry. He gave Dr. W. W. Case, pastor of the Church of the Stranger, 2026 Howard Street, San Francisco, as his reference, and said his only schooling had been three years at the Workhouse in Newcastle, England.

He gave his reason for wanting to enter the Institute that he wished to become a worker in bringing men and little children to Christ, that he had done personal work in the Crittenden Mission Army, and that, for six months, he had been thinking about entering Moody's. he wrote that he had a good profession that would supply his needs, and that his address was on Indiana Avenue and 22nd Street in Chicago.

Dr. Case responded to the queries of the Institute by saying he was "unselfish, teachable, not conceited, although he knows something and he knows that he knows it," that he had "more than average judgment, was a hard worker, firm in his convictions," and that "he has been a horse tamer and has succeeded wonderfully without whip or spur which shows he understands human nature. He has done good street work speaking for the Master, and is respected highly by those who know him." They also said, "He is an interesting speaker, above average considering his advantages. I am glad Mr. Mullen is to take a course in your Institute. If he were properly trained, I think he would be a poser in city mission work where nerve and tact and shrewd common sense are necessary to success. He has some elements of extraordinary efficiency and I know nothing against him. I hope you will take him and make a strong man of him."

The letter was dated November 20, 1894, but it was not until June of the following year that William Mullen was admitted to the Chicago Moody Bible Institute.

In the meantime, he had enrolled at a night school in Chicago, and in eleven months to the day he entered, he had his high school diploma. His instructors at the Institute were surprised to discover he knew the Bible verbatim. I don't believe he had heard by that time the term "photographic memory."

He studied with a zeal few men have because few men are so sure God is walking beside them. With him, God was as close as the horse's reins a rider holds. He knew, too, his days of preaching on the isolated trail and the faraway cattle ranches were over. He knew, now, he was ready for that larger audience in the cities of America's great Middle West, east or west. He began to think especially of the little children in the congested metropolitan areas, and he made up his mind he would prepare for the kind of work that could help them. Perhaps he was through with days of homelessness.

He also wanted to get married. In this larger plan he wanted a helpmate - a good, old-fashioned helpmate! He planned to talk to Dr. Torrey about that. Maybe he could give him a little coaching, but before he had a chance to approach the matter, he invited six girls to dine with him at the Morrison Hotel Oyster House one night.

When he returned the girls back after the front door of the Institute had been locked, Dr. Torrey was waiting in the lobby with a ready-made reprimand. The fatherly scolding turned into a night-long discussion during which William told him of his desire to be married.

"You seem to be in open contact with God in all other matters," Dr. Torrey observed. "Why don't you ask Him to help find you a wife?"

"I will," he agreed.

No one but God would have thought the quiet, gentle Annie would be content to put her future in the hands of the unpredictable, fearless William Mullen.

It was the McCarts who helped bring this about. They were staunch members of the Ninth Presbyterian Church on Ashland Avenue where Rev. E. P. Frothingham was the pastor. They also attended the Moody Church on North Clark Street, especially during the week. It was here the four Hepp sisters, close friends of the McCart family, became acquainted with William.

Mrs. McCart was the adult leader of the Christian Endeavor Society at the Presbyterian Church and used to love to invite the society members over for Sunday supper at her home. The four Hepp girls were always present on these occasions. The couple had a special interest in the girls since both their parents had been dead some five years and they had managed to hold themselves together as a family unit, keeping house in a seven-room flat which they rented, and working at downtown department stores.

Anna Hepp was best friend to the oldest of the two McCart daughters. At twenty-three, "Annie," as her sisters called her, was the buyer in books and stationery at Rothschild's, a large State Street store. Elizabeth, next oldest, was State Street's first model and worked at Mandel Brothers. Barbara was the billing clerk at the Boston Store, and Lena, the youngest, was the housekeeper for the parentless family.

Mrs. McCart was a dressmaker who sewed for all four girls who displayed a little more that the average young girl's interest in pretty clothes since they had no discerning parent to frown upon such frivolity.

Annie was the prim one and wore her expertly-made woolens with a trimness and neatness that gave Mrs. McCart a satisfaction her craftsmanship. Lizzie had a chicness that always brought forth admiration. She was a striking brunette with dark, flashing eyes, a mass of brown, wavy hair and an hour-glass figure. What's more, she had a born flair for wearing clothes that Mandel Brothers felt inclined to experiment with the new idea of selling clothes by using a live model to wear them for a customer's viewing.

"Oh Annie," Bernice McCart said when they were walking each other home after a Christian Endeavor meeting, "you just have to come to supper next Sunday and meet our new boarder, William Mullen. Mama's told him all about you, too. She even said you'd make him a good wife."

"Oh, Bernice! What did she say that for? Now I'll be too scared to come."

"Don't be a goose. Do you want to be an old maid? Besides, Mama says, now that he's going to be a minister, he'll just have to have a wife."

"Me married to a preacher! Anyhow, how do you know he'll like me?"

"Course he will. Mama says that opposites attract and you being so quiet, you'd suit him to a 'T'."

"Heavens, is he boisterous?"

"Loud! He's bedlam. Why he chases us all over the house. And he's so comical you'll just die laughing at him all the time, an' you ought to see him dance an Irish Jig or even a Hula! It's just not the same since he came to board with us. I'll sure hate to see him get married."

"Why don't you marry him yourself?"

"I told you, opposites attract. Besides, I'm not religious."

"How do you know I'll like him?"

"Oh, you will. He's quite handsome. He'd make three of you. And you should hear him talk. He rolls his 'rrs' and he's so interesting it doesn't matter what he says, you just listen anyway."

"Handsome?" Annie was thinking. "But he won't like me. I just know what will happen. We'll walk in all dressed up fit to kill and Bob'll josh him and he'll spend all his time talking to her, and looking at Liz out of the corner of his eye. He won't even notice me."

Sunday evening, Annie announced she wasn't going to Christian Endeavor "I have to iron a blouse," she made the excuse, "and mend my veil for tomorrow."

"Don't be a fool," Liz said. "You know you're just scared because Mrs. McCart made an engagement for you and that new Bible student."

"But you should take him, Liz," Annie protested.

"She should!" Bobbie protested with a guffaw. "She's already got too many beaux on the string now. I'm constantly in hot water trying to get her out of one pickle after another - letting one man out the back door and bringing another by the front, and if I tell anymore lies for her, I'll never get to heaven!"

"Oh, come on, Annie, be a sport," Liz said. "I', dying to see you in your new caniche wool dress. I want to see how those new sleeves are going to look, tight at the wrist and leg-of-mutton at the shoulder. They're the last word, you know. It'll sure show off your classy waist."

"Liz!"

"Don't be silly. What's the use of having a good figure if you can't make the most of it. Want to wear my amethyst brooch?"

"Could I?"

When the girls arrived at the McCart home Sunday evening, Barbara rushed into the parlor to get first glimpse at the much-acclaimed new boarder from San Francisco.

"All's clear girls," she called out humorously. "He ain't toting a six-shooter."

Everyone laughed.

"You must be Barbara Hepp," he spoke, a cheerful smile breaking as he shook her hand warmly.

Mrs. McCart rushed in to handle the introductions of her favorite family, but William put out his hand, halting her. "Hold on, now," he cautioned. "Let me figurrre out the name of each one myself." And when he rolled his r's in his rich-fibered voice, there was no mistaking the fascination he held with women.

"It's happy I am to shake your hand," he said cordially to Barbara.

"And I like you, too." Bobbie agreed. "We've been holding our breath all week for the sight of you."

Lena stepped up insisting for some attention too. "Which one am I?"

"You're Lena, and what a pleasure, my young lady!"

"That one was easy," Barbara said. "She's so young you couldn't miss."

"I'm not, am I?"

He eyed Lena's pretty dress and it was easy to see she was trying hard to look like her older sisters.

"I should say you aren't, and I hear you can cook, too! Well, you know that's the way to a man's heart."

Then he took Elizabeth's hand.

Annie thought, "Here it comes! Liz will dazzle him so he'll never notice me!" she wished she hadn't come. Or, what was worse from the way Mrs. McCart had sung her praises, he might even mistake Liz for the one Mrs. McCart had picked out for him.

"And you are Liz," he said. "It's happy I am to know you, too."

But his eyes moved on and remained fastened on Annie. He took hold of both her hands, drawing her a little closer to him. She looked like a tiny child beside him, her head barely meeting his shoulders, her ninety pounds seemingly even less beside his more than two hundred pounds. "Annie," he said in a half-whisper. "You flower of the flock! You flower of the world!" He was really not saying it to her. It was more like telling it to himself.

"Now don't make that blarney so strong she won't even believe you," Barbara joked.

When Mrs. McCart saw he was instantly attracted to Annie, she said proudly, "This is William, Annie."

"I'm pleased to meet you, William," Annie responded with a little nervous attentiveness and yet with a shyness that William couldn't help but like. A little fearsome smile tried to hover around the corners of her mouth, but found it too difficult, so her eyes helped her out by softening bravely.

" 'Tis my happiness entirely," he told her. "I never thought I would meet one so lovely." He was appraising her carefully now, noticing first the beautiful, big, black yet soft eyes - eyes with the wide open innocence of a little child. He observed her lovely moist skin, on the olive tone but highly colored like the skin of the girls of the British Isle, or the skin of the fog-drenched San Francisco women. She reminded him of someone. Why his own Annie! And she was little and shy like his sister, and half-frightened by the world. He led her away from the group that huddled together in the parlor. He sensed she didn't like to be the cynosure of all eyes.

"If you'll excuse me for a second," Annie said quietly, "I want to take off my wraps. Then I'm going to help Mrs. McCart in the kitchen."

"And I, too." Bill added.

She didn't want him to think she was trying to run away from him so she explained, "I always do."

"So do I. You should see how handy I am in the kitchen," William bragged. "Ask Mrs. McCart."

"He certainly is," Mrs. McCart agreed. "Take off your things, Annie, and you can both help me. I've plenty of things to do. Enough for the three of us."

Mrs. McCart, a born matchmaker, was glad to get her couple off to themselves.

Annie went into the bedroom to take off her coat and gloves and little brimmed velvet hat with the perky ribbon trim. While she was in the bedroom, William picked up Mrs. McCart by the waist and swirled her in the air as though she were a whirligig.

"Let me down, William. Let go of me!" she screamed.

So he changed to dancing a little jig that shook the kitchen floor so the dishes rattled on the table.

"None of your jigging. It's Sunday, you know," she scolded.

"Sure the Lord's not blaming me for being merry. 'Tis love at first sight, an' well He knows it."

Bernice came into the kitchen to see what was going on. "Not so fast, William," she said. "You'll scare her away."

"She'll never get away now. Never!"

When the evening was over, William took all four girls home to their flat on 14th and Paulina. Then he went back to Mrs. McCart's and wrote a letter. There had been so many things he had wanted to tell Annie, but how could he with all her sisters listening to their every word. "I just must write her a letter and ask her to go to church with me tomorrow night," he concluded, "Then I'll have her alone an' I can tell her."

But it was difficult for him to write letters. "No, I will get up early and drive her over to her work," he said, throwing his written attempts in the waste paper basket.

"But what if she is already gone?" he asked himself. "I will write the letter," he again went back to the first plan.

He composed five or six letters, but none would say what he wanted to say. It was one thing to be so frank that you startled everyone, but a twinkle, a laugh helped to pass off, but to put it down on paper was another thing. Finally, he wrote simply:

Sunday night

Dear Annie:

What they say about God's goodness is true,

else why did he bring you to me?

I hope we can have an understanding.

I want to call at your home tomorrow night to

find out. If I don't see you before I go to work, will

you be ready when I come to take you to church?

Your

William

The Hepp doorbell rang at six-thirty the next morning.

"Answer it Bobbie," Lena called from the kitchen, for her bedroom was nearest the front door.

"Holy cats!" she exclaimed. "Did you sleep on the front porch all night? Come in. Annie's out in the kitchen."

"Merciful heavens!" Annie shrieked, drawing her dressing gown about her and picking up the curling iron she was heating on the Acorn range.

She flew into the bedroom with William quickly following. She then ran into Liz' room and Elizabeth shouted, "Women's dressing room. Somebody better twirl a lariat around your cowboy's neck." Then she added sternly, "Get out of here," and she slammed the door.

William laughed at all the consternation he had caused. What fun it was to know a full family of girls with no parents to set up obstacles. It was made to order for his robustness.

Annie said, somewhat embarrassed, "Let's go in the dining room."

"Here's a letter I wrote you last night," he said, handing it to her.

She blushed, fumbled for words, then decided to say nothing. She read it, folded it carefully, and put it in her bosom. "Lena, will you bring us some coffee and kitchen?" she called in to the kitchen.

When they had finished the coffee he asked her, "Can I come tonight?"

She thought for a moment, looking intently at her coffee.. "Yes," she agreed.

"Good. Then you do understand me?"

She liked this confident way he had, his ruggedness, even his roughness. "Tell me, sweet girl," he said, "that you do understand me."

She thought he meant that she understood his being from the West, a cowboy and all that. She had never met a cowboy before. She hesitated. "Do you?" It was a coaxing voice.

"What is there to understand?" She asked simply.

"Why I want you to marry me," he said.

"Oh," she gasped.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. She was so surprised she offered no resistance.

"I'll take you to work," he said assuredly. Then he chuckled to himself, for the cart he used for exercising the horses before he went to school could only hold two people. The sisters would have to use the street car this morning and he would have his "caillin" to himself.

When she saw the naked cart, she shied away, too frightened to get in.

"Oh, I couldn't," she protested, trembling.

"Why you're shaking like a wet dog in a gunny sack, " he laughed, holding her firmly as he boosted her on the seat. "sure an' there's nothing to fear as long as you are by my side."

She felt that now and took hold of the iron-strong arm.

He could feel her body relax quickly as he make her unafraid. He gave the horses rein. They were anxious to get into a good trot. "Aisey now, aisey," he quieted them. "Don't frighten the poor darlin' to her death."

Once they were trotting smoothly, she saw what perfect control he had of the animals and the light vehicle and she knew she was in good hands.

She never truly accepted his proposal. But since he had confidence he would succeed in everything he undertook, he anticipated the same good fortune in love he had in other matters, and went ahead making plans for a wedding as soon as the school term would be over.

He had now completed two terms, but he was a long way from graduation, and Annie pointed this out to him. It was only an excuse, she wanted more time to think over the matter of marriage as well as more time to prepare to leave her sisters. They would have to hunt for a new and smaller home with their funds diminished by one paycheck.

"But you should finish your education," she argued. "You waited so long to get it, and now that you have the opportunity you should go ahead, you really should."

"Oh, that I can always do later. I can always go back and finish. I have a good profession. It will always support me in school."

"And a wife?" she asked.

He was ever an optimist, "Yes, and a wife."

Chapter Eleven

A week before the term ended. Dr. Torrey received a request from a Baptist Church in Coldwater, Michigan, for a student minister to assist in revival meetings that would begin on the tenth of January.

Mullen had proven an exceptional student; having mastered the King James Version of the scriptures as no one else could have without his phenomenal memory. He tried hard to lose his characteristic manner of speaking, trying hard to drop his brogue, but still retaining the quaint Gaelic sayings that gave color to his speech.

When he was asked to consider the assignment, Bill told Dr. Torrey, "It is a little out of line, but I would like to try it for Annie's sake. She was raised in the church and I think it would mean a lot to her to see me preach in a regular pulpit. After all, you can't imagine her going horseback from ranch to ranch or standing among a group of miners in Colorado the way I have done, can you?"

"She might surprise you," Dr. Torrey offered.

"It is better to start this way," he concluded.

"There won't be much money in it," Torrey warned. "Perhaps only five dollars a week. Do you think you two could get along on that?"

"Oh, I wouldn't take any money for preaching," Bill said with considerable surprise. "Purse strings would tie my mouth."

"I hope God will help you keep your independence," Torrey said. "But how are you going to support you wife?"

"The same way I support myself. I plan to keep on contributing to the Horse Review and shall conduct classes on how both men and women can handle unmanageable mounts. I might even give riding lessons if there aren't enough broncos for me to gentle in Michigan."

Then Dr. Torrey added, "I'm sure you'll do for the job, but we'll make a binding decision after you've preached your trial sermon."

Both William and Annie looked forward to the evening of the trial sermon with almost as much expectancy as the wedding ceremony itself. And like the latter event, it also took place in the Moody Church.

Annie was tempted to wear her going away suit to the services but didn't. She did feel the Astrakhan cape she had bought with her last earnings gave her the look of importance the wife of a young minister should have, and her wide-brimmed velvet hat nodded gayly with plumes as she alighted from the street car in front of Moody's Church. Barbara accompanied her, for it had been decided William would need every minute for polishing up on his first important sermon that would determine his immediate future.

Annie sat erect in her pew, anxiously waiting for her William to make his entrance. She was sure he would be wearing the black broadcloth English walking suit she had helped him pick out for the wedding. It was cut away enough to give him an air of dignity. She could close her eyes and fairly see him standing before her in that ramrod erectness, his coal black hair waving about his broad forehead, his neat four-in-hand tie, the shirt cuffs stiffly edging the somber suit in dramatic black and white. Annie did so love to see a person neatly dressed. William had the physique and countenance to create a total look of importance. It was difficult not to notice him.

There was a quick rustle stir through the crowd as Dr. Torrey entered the pulpit and William behind him, his powerful shoulders clothed in a brown corduroy jacket worn over - not, not the tan roughneck sweater he always wore of a morning when he was stable bound to train his wild horses? Brown corduroy trousers and high-heeled cowboy boots completed his preaching attire.

Annie turned to Barbara, grasped her hand and in a quiet frenzied tone muttered "No, no, he couldn't have!" Then realizing she was being critical of this man she was to wed within forty-eight hours, she smiled slowly, bravely, and sat straight in her pew and listened with concentrated attentiveness.

The explanation was obvious when William announced his sermon topic, "Going to Hell at a Two-Twenty Gait."

It would not have taken much imagination to see how such a sermon could be delivered from the back of a wild horse, but in the austere Moody Church, before an elect and solemn group, it was lost. But the way he delivered his talk left no doubt as to his ability to arouse and sustain the attentions of his congregation.

Two days later, on December 16, they were married by Dr. R. A. Torrey - the tumultuous William and Annie with the quietness inside. They went to Niagara Falls for a honeymoon and ten days later arrived at Coldwater, Michigan on Saturday, the day after Christmas.

William gave the landlady his last five-dollar gold piece to pay one week's rent for their new one-room home. The landlady handed him two dollars in change.

Annie's eyes grew large and luminous when she saw the almost empty purse. She had always managed the family finances ever since her parents had died. Never once had she been so perilously close to being penniless. Her brother, George, a teamster for Amour's, had been a good provider, too, leaving his sisters nine thousand dollars in insurance after he was accidentally killed. Under her guidance, the quartette of sisters did uncommonly well, what with their weekly salaries that went into the family purse, coupled with Annie's astute ability inherited from a father who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the shrewdest cattle buyers in the business. It was said of John Hepp that no one in this country, with the exception of William Morris, knew more about cattle buying in America and few in Germany from where he had come. On her mother's side, the Millers (Muellers) had been prosperous distillers in Munich, thus business management was part of the Hepps' make-up. But William never thought of trusting the family purse to the careful Annie. His method was simple. He spent money freely and when it was gone he hunted up new wild horses to tame for a fee. He put his silver and gold coins in the right pants pocket, the keys and such in his left pocket. When the right pocket only had a big hand inside, it was time to line up more wild horses to be gentled and readied for the road.

"Spend you last dollar, Annie my darling," he would advise, "as though you had a million."

"But when they're all gone?" his wife asked, perplexed and startled.

His answer came quickly: "Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought of the things itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof…"

"Maybe so," she agreed, but remained puzzled, almost frightened at the prospect of so uncertain a future. It was a wonderful thing this faith of William's, but how was Annie to keep from worrying?

"Now give those big, black eyes some rest," he said. "I'm going down to the stables to see what's going on."

He set up headquarters in the feed barns that afternoon of the first meeting and arranged to break a wild colt. The paper published an account of it on the following Monday:

"Professor William Mullen of Chicago gave an interesting exhibition of colt breaking last Saturday afternoon opposite the Reporter office, taking a green colt and breaking it to harness in forty minutes' time, bring the youngster under such perfect control that this trainer could lift both the animal's hind feet with his hands at once without a protest form the horse and drive it about the yard a little later as he pleased. He is evidently an expert in the horse training line."

When he came home, he tossed two gold pieces on the dresser: "My Father will supply all my needs in Christ Jesus," he quoted, smiling and with absolute cheerfulness.

How wonderfully happy life was with William! Unpredictable - but happy!

On the tenth of January, William preached his first sermon in Coldwater. The text was,

"Jesus answered: 'Verily, verily I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God"

His subject was regeneration, preached from a full heart, out of a full life of experiences. He preached with earnestness, sincerity and the wisdom that draws upon one's own hidden resources. He called into dramatic play illustration upon illustration, from the kaleidoscopic events of his incredible life that had always been lived just a little space from death. He had a passion of his race for evangelism, and the talent for taking a tiny thread of interest and weaving it into the warp and woof of a colorful, solid carpet upon which one could walk with grace.

The "services" the first week in Coldwater were an instant success. Crowds of men flocked to hear the young cowboy evangelist, sitting on the corral railing, on barrels, tree limbs - whatever - to listen to what the strange preacher had to say.

"God be praised," he told Annie, " I am to conduct the meetings all by myself. Reverend Ather is going out of town for a week."

He prayed to God for more energy. Then charged with a new vigor that was unusual even for the dynamo he was, he set about to train horses every morning. He not only needed this work for money to live on and to take care of Annie, but he had need also for the advertising fund to invite all the townspeople to come to his nightly gatherings. The two newspapers rallied to his support and wrote long accounts of his skill as a trainer. But he needed a drawing card to lure the people inside. One of the Coldwater papers wrote:

William Mullen, who advertises to tame and break a colt on the streets Saturday, combines the professions of horse tamer and evangelist, and, strange to say, makes a success of both. It is his intention to form a class in horse training, the proceeds of which will support him when he conducts nightly revival meetings so all can attend. Mr. Mullen's home is in California and his reputation as a trainer and tamer of unmanageable horses is well known. He is a regular contributor to the National Horse Review, published in Chicago.

He called on the Coldwater newspaper offices and ordered small, paid, running announcements of the meetings, paying them out of his horse training funds. Then he had large posters printed inviting all the townspeople to attend the meetings in the church. He advertised free horse training exhibitions in the town square on Saturday afternoon, done purely as an advertisement for the revival meetings.

When the posters were ready, he took a hammer and a few nails and went about from saloon to saloon asking permission of the bar keeper to put up his signs. Flattered that he asked their cooperation, they were more than happy to make any concession to this likeable fellow who was on fire for God.

One saloon keeper asked him "What would you do, Professor, if our customers took your invitation at your word and came to your church and sat down in your pews beside your nice church people and listened to you preach?"

"Why, I would thank God for the privilege of speaking to them," he said, hardly daring hope for such good fortune.

Then he had an idea. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll gentle the most vicious animal you can find in Coldwater, in front of the church steps tomorrow evening, if all those who watch the outside horse-taming exhibition in front of the church will come inside to listen to the sermon that follows; and I'll divide my time equally between the two events."

"Oh, ho," they laughed. "With the horse we'll bring you, there won't be any church service."

"Don't you worry about that," William replied. "You get the colt and leave the rest to God."

"We sure will find you a bronco, Parson, that will reach for the sky and bust it wide open," one shouted.

"Hallelujah," William shouted back, joining in their good-natured ribbing!

Mirth filled him for he knew if the story would go the rounds of the saloons that they were going to try to best the preacher, there would be a record crowd.

"Great guy, the preacher," one of the town's most notorious drunks said. "Best man with a horse you ever seen. Wouldn't miss this tonight for anything."

They all liked him. No one had come to their town in many a day who had been as well received. Hadn't he proven that to follow the Cross one had to have something more than a call, be something more than a scholar? He had to be close to the people.

William could hardly wait to get home to tell Annie to prepare for the biggest meeting of the engagement. She was pressing his trousers and joyously singing her favorite hymn, "I Know My Redeemer Liveth."

His coat was laid out on the bed, his vest, too, the tie, the stiff-bosomed shirt, the big handkerchief. It was all ready. Her eyes shone with pride as she thought of him dressed neatly for the pulpit, as fine a looking minister as there could be found in the entire Midwest. She smiled, pleased that she had so handsome a husband. Everyone spoke of his good looks.

When he told her of his plans for the horse-taming exhibition, she frowned. "But don't you think it's a bully idea?" he asked anxiously.

"Yes, but you look so nice in your black suit."

"Oh," and his shoulders shook with laughter. "So that's what's bothering your pretty little head. Well, now I can break a fractious colt in my Sunday-go-to-meeting clothers, that I can, my sweetheart if it'll make you happy. I'll wear my leather puttees outside when I'm handling the animal and when I go inside, I'll take them off. If it's dressed up dandy you want, I can be that, I can."

"It isn't that, William," she said, trying to cover up any hurt her pride might have caused him, "but I know these church people and I know they want their minister to be as 'tony' as possible."

True to expectations, there was a large crowd gathered in the lot next to the church. One could imagine from the group assembled the saloons must be empty.

William roped off a ring where he could gentle the wild bronco, the most vicious that could be rounded up. Every small boy in town was present, as well as a good crowd of eager men, but only a sprinkling of women.

William removed his hat, raised his hand and offered a prayer. He then motioned for a small boy to take his hat and hand it to Annie.

"So that was how he could train a horse in his broadcloth," Annie thought, knowing it would have been more appropriate to have let him wear his corduroy suit, his chaps and his high-heeled boots as he had for the trial sermon.

She could feel the acceptance of the townspeople who had assembled, as well as the immense popularity of her husband with this crowd who pushed around the rope corral to watch every fascinating move as he captivated the wild horse through the sheer magnetism of his strong personality and calm will.

"They respect him for his fearlessness," she thought. "They can't help but respect him for his courage either."

When he prayed, he talked to God in an intimate style that was all his own, asking Him to save every sinner in Coldwater, thanking Him for opening up the hearts of the saloon keepers in assembling this event for Him, praying that all the men, women and children in the town be brought together to work for God's kingdom. There was no doubt about his earnestness, no doubt about what turn the meeting would take.

"Before I proceed," he began, "I want it understood that if I tame this hither-to-now unmanageable horse, the wildest one you could find in the city, you will agree to come inside the church after and listen until the service is ended."

"We agree," they shouted. "It's a bargain."

Then, according to a clipping pasted in Annie's scrapbook:

The evangelist took a rope with which he lassoed the tail of the bronco and wrapped the other end of the rope around the horse's nose, then fastened a piece of rope to the nose band, going behind the ears and coming down the other side of the head to tie again the rope bridle. Now he was ready for the match of the horse's strength, against the intelligence and skill of his tamer.

The bronco was ready, too. As soon as the man mounted, the bronco proceeded to raise his back high up in the heavens and jumped stiff-legged. The wild animal, however, could not dislodge the preacher. Around and around the horse went, with the preacher sitting a firm seat. Up and down the horse leaped sideways, finally it whirled round like a top. The evangelist, however, was still in the saddle. Finally, the horse became pacified.

That's just what you have to do with the devil, Mullen exclaimed. Break him. The devil gets pretty stubborn and he gets a hold of you and he wants you to do as he says. what you've got to do though, is to hold to him, master him. You've got to stay with him until you've downed him. That's what you've got to do with these wild horses, too. I have mastered the bronco and I have mastered the devil. I've got him in control and I've got sin in control. You've got to be with God, if you expect to be saved. He alone can save you.

He dismounted from the horse and the owner came up and offered his sincere thanks and paid him a five dollar gold piece for his work. Then the owner drove away with the tamed brute.

He's the only one who gets off without going inside, the horse-taming preached joked.

After wiping the sweat from his brow with his large linen handkerchief, he was ready for the second event. There was no one who had the hardihood to walk away. But just to be sure, he walked behind them, smiling broadly, fairly shoving them into the church, spreading his hands out wide as much to say, Not one of you will be permitted to slip through my arms now that I have you within reaching distance of my voice.

They laughed good naturedly. They liked the humor of the big man.

When he got inside, he opened his big black leather Bible, and announced his text would be: Hell Without Bottom.

His sermon was a well-organized flow of fire that called upon Bible verse after verse to clinch the importance of what he had to say. It took his hearers to what he called the hell that he had seen himself as he described the fiery crater of Hawaii. He told of the hell on earth he had known that hugged the waterfront, the hell of the coal mines where little children worked underground, down to the thid and fourth generations without ever being able to better their lives.

All listened spellbound to this strange preacher who went from busting broncos to the devil within one second and two motions! When the sermon was over, they streamed down the aisle to shake his hand and beg to be shown a better way of living.

When he and Annie walked home, arm in arm in the moonlight, their hearts thanking God for this wonderful miracle that had come into their lives. He was now an evangelist.

"You are going to be the world's greatest preacher," Annie told him. "I just know it. I never heard such interesting preaching. And my, how they did listen to your every word!"

He could hardly wait for the church pastor to return to tell him of the enthusiasm the town felt for the revival.6667

The next night, William talked to a packed house again, and every night afterwards. When the week was over, the church listed forty new converts. What he said was on the lips of everyone on the street. When he walked around, everyone greeted him as a friend. "Hi, Professor," they'd call out.

"Hi, Sky Pilot."

It didn't seem natural to say Reverend. Besides, he wasn't a reverend.

Then the pastor of the church returned!

Some of the self-styled 'Church pillars' lost no time in telling him how the church had been defiled by the presence of the bar keepers, how the saloons had been scanned for his congregation, and how theatrical devices such as Wild West circus exhibits had been used to draw the obnoxious crowds of sinners into the righteous pews of the elect.

"Who put all those posters in every saloon in town?" the pastor thundered!

"Who but I?" William answered proudly. "And isn't it a fine thing to have the church filled with sinners?"

"And why did you take it upon yourself to do such a thing without my permission?" the church pastor went on, ignoring the young man's fervor.

William was speechless. He couldn't believe the minister objected to his canvassing the saloons. "But I wanted to reach every man, woman and child with the glory of the gospel," he stammered.

"We don't want to offend our own church people," the pastor said. "There's a time and a place for everything, and our church is not the best place for inebriates."

"Offend?" William was aghast. "The only one I'm concerned about offending is God for neglecting man, who was made in His image."

"You have preached your last sermon here," the minister informed him, and his face was white with anger. "Leave this instant. Go," he screamed, "before I lose my self-control."

William found it difficult to restrain himself, too. "His temper," he thought. "How I'd like to punch his two eyes together." The old way of settling an argument had been so much easier. "Help me, God. Help me now. Help, with that soft answer that turneth away wrath."

Annie could not believe her eyes when she saw him coming down the street, his head intent upon the ground, the old erectness gone form his shoulders, sagging in the way an old man's will with the discouragement of bitter years.

"Heavens, what can the matter be?" she asked impatiently, taking his hat away form him and hanging it on the peg as he entered.

He didn't say a word as he took off his coat and vest, and hung them on a hanger in the closet. He had removed the gold watch from his vest pocket, and put this on the dresser. Then he removed his shoes, unlacing them slowly as though it were an impossible task. Annie stood silent, knowing his grave face indicated some awful thing had transpired.

Annie laid back the covers on the bed, and William flopped his body heavily on the bed as though it were too much to speak standing up. "He had broken up the meeting," he said, choking on the words. "There will be no more sermons. I am through."

"But he couldn't!" Annie cried. She fell on her knees beside him, great tears wetting her face. She touched her soft hands gently on his cheek. It was pitiful to see this big man of hers so broken and filled with grief. "How did it ever happen? Whatever fault could they have found with you?" she questioned.

"Ather said he should never have chosen me. He should have chosen a seminary man. I wasn't cut out to be a preacher. That's what he said."

"Well, who calls men to preach?" Annie wanted to know, "God or that old ignoramus."

It was a term of opprobrium that William frequently used. She tried to think of something worse to say but couldn't, so she repeated it. "That horrid old ignoramus."

Chapter Twelve

"Now, what are you going to do?" Annie asked. She would not have said, "What are we going to do?" that was not like her, for William was the one who made all the decisions.

"I do not know," he said. "I will have to see what God says about it."

She knew he meant to search the Bible for the answer; it was his way. So she brought the big Book to Him. He opened it and started to read while still lying down. It was the first time he had ever done that. Usually, he read sitting up and alert, his body attentive as he discovered some great truth, his head nodding with enthusiasm as he was filled with each new understanding. He was usually very much alive when he searched for God's truths.

He turned naturally to the story of Jesus' evangelism, reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. What a great street preacher Christ was," he thought, "and an open air preacher, too," he noted proudly. "The answer must be here."

He searched.

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of the judgment…..

"What is cause?" he asked himself. Then read on.

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members shoould perich, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

What had he done wrong? Had he really offended the church people, breaking the wild horse in front of the building. Was that it? The revival didn't have paid singers or an organist as some churches did to attract people. They didn't even have song books. Breaking horses was used in the same way, as a drawing card, wasn't it? Had not Moody had his Sankey?

He read on.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

"Oh, you are a hard man, God," he said. He always spoke to God as a friend standing by his side. His prayers were not the usual on-the-knees, head-bowed-down formal prayers. They were made while on horseback or while driving or walking, wherever and whenever he found the need to talk to this very personal Friend. "But show me your will." In comparison to eternity, nothing else mattered.

He continued reading . . . .

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven…

"The children of your Father…" So that was it? He had to fail in order to succeed in becoming a child of God. Could it be God was trying to teach him the spirit of humility?

His pride was his greatest sin. He always found himself reaching out for praise, for acclaim, and because he was colorful and "good copy," the newspapers were always liberal in the publicity they gave him.

He rose from the bed. Once again he wore the characteristic cheerful smile. "Annie, what do you think I did that I shouldn't have done? You are used to these church people. I am not. Tell me where I failed."

"I don't think the 'elect' liked sitting next to people with whisky on their breath."

"So that was it! You think that was it?"

"Yes."

"And the breaking of the wildhorse?"

"I don't think they liked that either."

"But they seemed to like it."

"The townspeople, yes, but not the church people. They like to think of their preacher as being a 'tony' fellow. It makes them feel more genteel themselves."

"I'm beginning to think, Annie, some atheists are closer to God's love than many of these so-called Christians who, having been brought up within the church all their lives, have never felt they have to experience God's grace the way outsiders do. Belonging to the church is to them something to puff up their egos, and not enjoying God's saving grace. Do you think I should give up using the wild horses as a drawing card?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Well, I was reading that part, 'If thy right hand offends thee, cut it off.' Surely the horse is my right hand, and I thought maybe if I want to get the cooperation of the church people, I'll have to make this sacrifice. But I do not know if I can talk to the people without the horse demonstration. When I am horseback I feel like a different man. I can even talk to God better. The horse seems to be my mediator. But I shall try. When we go to Quincey I shall try."

The meetings had been going on at Quincey for six weeks when Bill and Annie arrived. People were beginning to show sings of losing interest and the minister was discouraged.

Bill knew in his heart how he could thrust a hypodermic of energy into the arm of the lagging meetings. It was a sore temptation to pass a coral of wild horses and not engage one for an exhibition that was always bound to draw an interested public.

He preached from an indoor pulpit each evening, appearing in well-dressed tailored clothes that bespoke the care Annie gave them. He studied far into the night, organizing his sermons. With inexhaustible preparation. He called on the church members by day to enlist their support. But when he got opnto the pulpit to preach, the old verve was gone and he felt a weakness in his legs. His voice didn't seem to have the same rich fiber that came form an inner well of happiness and satisfaction. He often felt dizzy. It was hard to draw upon the exciting stories that had thrilled the Coldwater saloon crowd. He didn't get many converts, preaching mostly to church members.

Heartsick, he wrote to Dr. Torrey, asking for the school to pray for him. He told him of his discharge at Coldwater and his coming to Quincey in Branch county. He told him he had no one to lead in the singing, no one to play the organ.

How he hated to write of his failure to Dr. Torrey, who had had such faith in him. His letter in part said, "I have all kinds of people to contend with here, but the worst are the church members. They will try to break up the meetings. There is a class in the country that say they cannot sin, yet they will lie. These are the hardest for me to deal with."

"Things are spiritually dead here. The mayor is an infidel and many church people are in doubt. I have had no conversions as yet. Pray that the Lord will give us a soul for Him before the end of the meetings."

On the last night he had one convert!

"If just one soul is brought to Christ," he told Annie, "the meeting has been worthwhile." But in his heart he knew he was a failure.

Annie hated living in the single rooms. She hated living in the country. She hated the narrow-minded inquisitiveness of the small towns; she was not used to having people point her out. She was lonesome for her sisters, too. They went back to Chicago.

They rented a house and William busied himself about the city with his horses, working again for some of his old clients for whom he had worked while he was going to school. He trained dressage horses for Chicago millionaires. He taught High School riding to women of the Gold Coast. He finished his book on "How to Educate a Horse," and got it published. Sears Roebuck sold more copies than had been anticipated. He continued to write for the Horse Review. He spent what time was left organizing a Sunday School for newsboys. But he missed the old days when he went up the trail for God, when he talked to men who, except for his efforts, had little opportunity to hear of God's love. He was restless, unhappy.

Then Annie discovered she was going to have a baby. She was glad for William's sake, perhaps now he would be satisfied. Perhaps he would be content to stay in Chicago.

They bought a house in Austin, which is now Oak Park, and set about with young excitement getting a first home ready for a little one. William painted the house, planted a garden, and built a fence. He did all the many things a husband will do gladly for his young bride. He even braided a hammock for her and hung it under the shade of a tree. The first child came, and William proudly called him Calvin Hepp Mullen. Two months later the Bible Institute asked him to go to a little mission in Saute St. Marie where a worker was badly needed.

Annie was alone now for the first time. And so was William.

William often thought when he was a student, he would have liked to become a home missionary. "The rougher and tougher the better: was the way he put it on his school application blank.

The mission building in Saute St. Marie was owned by a woman called Miss Mason, who had gone heavily in debt for a big building in her own name. Here, as in his first two evangelistic engagements, there seemed to be much contention among the groups of religious workers.

It had been simple, preaching in the shade of a big tree on a western ranch before hospitable cowboys as broadminded as the limitless sections they rode. Neither was he prepared for the tremendous tact and subtleties demanded to work in highly organized groups within the narrow confines of church walls. Or perhaps it was his high zeal to work for God that made him overlook the necessity that a preacher, too, must also be worthy of his hire.

He suggested he work mornings with his horses and serve the mission afternoons, but no, that did not meet with their approval. Then he offered to accept as little a salary as six dollars a week. That, too, was voted down.

How about the congregation spending the night in prayer? Oh, no. the day in prayer? No --there seemed to be no way to settle this matter harmoniously. There was another difficulty of a more personal matter. The mission superintendent, in asking for a home missionary worker, had failed to say she wanted a single man. She had planned rather "to give him his room, board and a little money, if any was left after the bills were paid.? Much of his concern now was for taking care of Annie and his new son. The fifty dollars' payment on the purchase price of seven hundred dollars, plus the considerable work he had invested in the place.

Again, he wrote Dr. Torrey:

There is so much contention here among the mission society over who would be master; but I have nothing to do with it. I am preaching the word as the Lord leads me, and He is blessing us with new souls for Christ.

I would like to continue living in Oak Park, but do not know if I can. I'll never owe another dollar, if I can help it! I would like your advice on this.

I am striving just as hard as I can against sin but need help. This is a hard town (Saute St. Marie) to cope with.

Good-bye,

Your brother in Christ,

(Signed)William Mullen

Dr. Torrey answered that his duty was to his family. It would be better for the mission to get a single man who could accept the room and board payment.

So he returned to Austin and Annie. He was soon called for a protracted meeting at the Dutch Reform Church in Roseland. It proved to be a pleasant one for both the members and William seemed pleased with the outcome. Annie was ecstatic to be reunited with William.

William also filled other engagements for churches in and nearby Chicago, but not too many of them, for it had to be within driving distance of the little home they both enjoyed. He again formed a Sunday School for newsboys in Chicago, paying all expenses from his own pocket. Expenses included a hot lunch of frankfurters, buns, hot cocoa and cookies.

But it was not enough. "God gave me one talent," he told Annie in despair: "It was to gentle the wild. Without doing this I am nothing. I cannot endure it when I think of how God worked miracles in my own life to keep this secret for happiness away from the great throngs of burdened men in the world."

She understood.

They sold the little house that had given them such happiness, the little house that always had been filled with the sweet aroma of freshly-baked bread, of scrubbed floors, of blooming lilacs by the kitchen door. They put what was left of their belongings into a big, brown valise that had to be sat upon when strapped shut, and they bought a long railway ticket, and set out on a trail for God again -- a big, smiling strong man with a baby boy in one arm and a stuffed valise in the other, and a rather somber-faced little woman wearing a neat black and white checked Eton suit, trimmed with velvet collar and cuffs, and a perky little hat on her head. Her veiled face still had the roses in her cheeks, but her eyes were moist and, if one looked closely, a little sad.

They went from town to town, from city to city, and from village to village. Wherever they went, William trained horses and preached to the throngs that were eager to hear him. Mostly they were men. Once again papers were filled with news of the now-famous "Cowboy Preacher." There were no churches to bother about anymore -- he was done with that -- no jealousies to steal the preacher's strength, no smugness of an elect few to weaken his verve.

Yes, William was happy. And the Kingdom of God was being served with streets packed with crowds. Annie "managed" somehow getting along in little one-room homes she set up in tiny towns, or in the simple rooms of city hotels along the way. Before long they had visited and preached in every western state in America.

Wherever her minister husband went, he was well-received by both people and press.

"Horse and Holiness," headlined a Denver paper. "Now my friends, you have seen how easy it is to bring under control even a vicious and heretofore unmanageable horse, will you be more obdurate when I try to lead you in the way of light?

"Broad-shouldered and brawny, with a chest as thick and solid as a cake of ice, and a flashy face lit up by a cheerful smile, Evangelist William Mullen, who came to Colorado recently from the Bible Institute in Chicago, turns from horse training to holiness in one minute's time and a twist and a turn of tow powerful arms."

Another Denver newspaper compared his "horse breaking and preaching exhibition" to a baseball game.

It was staged at the Broadway Baseball Park before a crowd of fans. Like features of a real ball game, were the events of the horse-breaking and preaching exhibition by evangelist horse tamer William Mullen. It included several wild pitches, considerable fanning of the air, wild throws, assists, and errors.

At Lincoln, the newspaper noted:

Evangelist Mullen gave a splendid exhibition of horse-breaking yesterday afternoon on Haymarket Square. It is not considered hard for experienced horsemen to reduce a native animal that has never felt halter or saddle, but only horsemen can appreciate the skill on Mr. Mullen in making docile wild Mexican Mustangs which he had operated upon while in Lincoln.

His daily schedule was to conduct two meetings, one in the afternoon and another in the evening, breaking two vicious horses at each gathering. It was a rigorous program and demanded tremendous vitality, but he was glad to do it and whenever wanted more reward that the privilege of telling people about Christ and how His love could change their lives.

In Omaha, where he went next, a newspaper wrote:

The mustang was led away by a little boy, whereas it required a good stout man to bring it to the scene of subjugation. The wild mustang which was tamed belonged to a saloon keeper. After the meeting, Mullen accepted an invitation to go to the saloon and drink a glass of soda water.

His technique was always to close the demonstration with a child riding the recently-gentled animal. By the time his son was four years old he would terminate the meeting by hoisting him on the bronco's back. And later, when I was the right age and my brother Calvin in school, I would do the same, while the crowd cheered and shouted. I loved it.

I remember sometimes there would be catcalls of "Fake. Fake."

"What is fake?" I once asked my father.

"There are some who have eyes but cannot see," he replied. "Horses love gentle people, but man cannot understand this. When they cry 'fake' they cry out their unbelief."

"Oh," I said uncertainly.

Chapter Thirteen

By the next spring, William had preached his way back to the Golden Gate. Annie's dark-toned eyes grew wide as she beheld the fertile rolling hills of San Francisco's Bay. And splattered they were in a thousand different shades of riotous color, all blooming gold and green, vermilion and sky blue. In the background soared grey-green Australian Eucalyptus trees. Nor should we omit the umbrella-like red and green pepper trees. Since she had never seen any of these things before, it filled her with unaccustomed excitement. Now she understood the fascination the West held for William.

How her eyes would shine with each new spectacle, and all the time William kept boasting, "Didn't I tell you, Annie, my darling? God willing, we shall settle here in San Francisco some day. You like it here, don't you?"

"Oh, I do, yes!"

He smiled then mostly to himself, repeating from Deuteronomy:

For the Lord thy God bringeth thee

into a good land,

A land of brooks of water,

Of fountains and depths that spring

out of valleys and hills;

A land of wheat, and barley, and vines,

And fig trees, and pomegranates;

A land of olive oil, and honey;

A land wherein thou shalt eat bread

without scarceness,

Thou shalt not lack any thing in it ….

She loved the way William always recited verses to her. She had a feeling he did not think she read enough, and by quoting passages he found in the Book or any of the many volumes he devoured, he was helping supplement what she had not gotten by herself.

It was impossible for him to separate the state from the city. He always thought of it as a unit and never ceased to marvel how this new life was filled with God's promises to supply "all their needs."

This, perhaps, more than anything else made him a man of deepest security and so happy in it that he believed and wanted everyone else to enjoy it. Thus his life had but one purpose -- to preach to the unchurched, especially the poor.

He carried two ten-dollar gold pieces in his pocket and usually before a sermon was ended, he would offer one to anyone who could bring to him one believer in Christ who was hungry. He carried them always. Not to the very day he died were they ever claimed! So he would put them inside his pants pocket each new day as he dressed and the promise bobbed into his mind again:

I have been young,

And now am old;

Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken,

Nor his seed begging bread.

Both Annie and William found it impossible to ignore the excitement that was the City's birthright less than fifty years ago when gold started it racing up steep hills in nothing flat. The City, as William always called it, seemed to have no other passion except amusement. He decided, however, there was an open-handed frankness that he liked, an honesty that promised success in this evangelistic work he would be doing until Annie would have their second child: teaching and feeding the newsboys, boot blacks, and unemployed men on the streets; Chinese in one of the several Christian missions, or in any of the valley towns to which he frequently called for special meetings.

He knew it would always be easy to train horses here where he had had such a good following among the rich. There was no place in all the world where one could make a living as easily as in San Francisco. It had always been a friendly town to street preachers who could forget sectarianism and stick to a straight, forthright message of God and His love. He would offer his services again to the Church of the Stranger, most certainly. These good people, he knew, would give Annie every friendship she needed in this strange, new place that was so different from her Middle West.

But, as they walked down the planked sidewalk, William noticed it was changing from the wild, raucous city to which he had come. He noticed the wooden shanties were fast being replaced by larger stone houses. Many streets were now macadamized.

"Shanghai" was still a fearful word on the waterfront, though, and the Barbary Coast was the same wild bit of hell. Life was stirring all over this City of Seven Hills. William felt a definite call to work more energetically in the disheveled, charming open-handed city.

"Let's see if we can get a little flat on Telegraph Hill," he suggested. "I think you would like it there. And you could walk most anywhere. It would do you good to get out in the sunshine, dear."

"I want to live where you used to live," Annie told him referring to the Happy Valley neighborhood he lived in off and on for ten years.

"Oh, but that is on the south side of Market. It was a residence section then. Now it's filled with foundries and repair shops and lumberyards. I don't think you would enjoy it."

"It isn't at all like it was when you lived here?"

"No," William said sadly. "But we can still go to the Church of the Stranger. You will like the church people there I know. The women especially are not so tightly bound by convention as are the whale-bone-waisted women we found in the Middle West where we held our missions."

He always hated tightly-corseted styles after getting accustomed to the loose garments the women of the Islands wore. He hated the hide bound convention and formality just as much.

A sad smile must have crept around the corners of Annie's mouth. "So he still smarts under the snubbing he got at Coldwater!" She thought the extensive publicity he had on his tour west should have erased the memory of those stinging early failures.

Yes, they got a little flat on Telegraph Hill with a big window to let in the sunlight, and Annie planted geraniums in flower pots that grew in every available spot of her second floor balcony. She just couldn't believe anything could grow as fast as her geraniums!

From here she watched the orange lateen sails of the Italian fishing boats returning to harbor and saw the white-shawled women hurrying down the pathways to greet their fishermen home.

She would frequently take two-year-old Calvin for a walk to Chinatown, past the arabesque shops, marveling always how no two were alike, or stroll down the narrow sandalwood and fish-scented streets, stopping to window shop in the hundred and one colorful bazaars. And how Calvin loved to listen to the stringed instruments that wailed in pleasant disharmony! They enjoyed watching the Chinese men wearing lavender coats and long queues braided with cherry-colored silk ribbons, bobbing back and forth, as they shuffled down the street on padded soles, greeting one another in a sing-song of monosyllables. How proud they were of their sons, in bright tunics and cunning caps with dazzling tassels and bells that twinkled from colorful headdresses! But she, too, smiled proudly as she looked at her son in his whitest of linen suits she had laundered herself?

Annie had always loved to go to Chicago's west-side shops, but they were no match for San Francisco 's bazaars that strung from California Street to Clay Street, stores that displayed strings of sausages, glazed roast duck, dried shrimp, Chinese vegetables, square cakes, bean cheese, candied coconut, litchi nuts, sugar cane, dried lizards, toads, and shark eggs.

"Oh, lookee, lookee," Calvin would cry, tugging at her hand to get away and grab a goodie.

Yes, Annie felt a kindred sprit with these quiet, hard-working people whom so many seemed to hate more for their virtues that their vices, or that was the way William explained it. She noticed how proudly they walked down the ribbon streets with their offspring tightly clasped by work-worn hands. Yes, she decided she liked them very much. Her world, too, was a world of four walls and minding children, of scrubbing floors, and baking bread and caring for a family.

Once a week on Sundays she would ride along Van Ness Avenue, her arm entwined in William's for security. And what fun to see the trim ladies with wasp-waisted dresses that had immense sleeves and many-gored skirts which were flounced with dust catchers.

Most of all, she loved the cartwheel hats with large birds perched on tiny crowns. She wished Lizzie could see the smart styles of San Francisco's women and how they walked. Such daring, tall, deep-bosomed women they were! It was fun to watch them promenade arm-in-arm, with their men handsomely dressed in striped trousers and derby hats.

Ah, yes, already she felt at home in William's city. Small though she was, she did not look unlike these neatly-dressed women, with her gloved hands and her veiled hat, but she was not by temperament like them. They loved to live in hotels and dine out. She yearned to care for her family with German thoroughness and efficiency.

She agreed to help William at his Chinese Mission until the baby arrived. That would give her some work to do. She hoped William would settle down by then and be content to buy a home, perhaps across the Bay at Oakland where the sun smiled more regularly, and the west winds did not blow so steadily ten months out of the year. It was cooler in San Francisco than she had imagined it would be, especially indoors.

"Oh you will be all right once you get acclimated," William promised her.

The little fireplace was cozy enough at night when one sat by it and did mending, but she missed the comfort of the big, base-burner her sisters had had at the Paulina Street apartment. She wondered how the girls were in Chicago. San Francisco was really quite far away.

There were some days when Annie felt lonely. When the first little one had come, she had gone to her sister's flat for two weeks, but that could not be done now.

The baby came in June -- a little girl whom William named Anna, for her mother and for her father's sister, the sister for whom had worked in vain to bring to this country. And, like his sister, the new little girl was also blue-eyed and blonde.

"Annie, little Annie," William said, his eyes flashing the gladness that filled his heart. "God is good, a son first, and, now a daughter!"

When they realized, several days later, there would be confusion with the mother and daughter both called "Annie," William decided, "Indeed, we will have to give her a middle name or you both will always be mixing me up."

He took down the Book which directed his ways from little to big matters. It opened to the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah. He began reading:

…and thou shalt be called

by a new name,

Which the mouth of the Lord

Shall name.

Thou shalt also be a crown of

Glory in the hand of the Lord,

And a royal diadem in the hand

Of thy God.

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken;

Neither shall thy land any more be

Termed Desolate;

But thou shall be called Hephzibah,

And thy land Beulah:

For the Lord delighteth in thee…

And so I acquired the name of Beulah; a name I never liked, but it did not matter greatly, for my father called me "Sister," and my brothers "Bee." Mother stuck to that name from "the mouth of the Lord." When I finally did look up the verse myself, I was grateful Father had read on a little more and named me "Beulah." I concluded later that he had named me more for the land he loved, the land of my birth, than for any other reason. I was the first Mullen to be born on California soil and in his heart he knew he would someday make California his home.

Soon afterwards, William received a letter from Rev. Collins, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Bakersfield, asking him to supply his pulpit there for six months. The membership of the church was now a paltry sixteen, and discouraged, the pastor had given up and was leaving.

William read the letter aloud, watching Annie's velvet eyes grow dark and moist, and seeing the corners of her small mouth curve as to make her look childlike. He knew she would say it would be all right to accept if he asked her point blank, so instead he asked her why she didn't want to go.

"It isn't that I don't want to," she said slowly, thinking out each word carefully, for she never wanted to be a stumbling block. "It is just I was beginning to feel so settled here. But tell me about Bakersfield." She tried always to appear unbiased.

"Oh, you will love it," he said, using his considerable persuasive ability. "With the fall coming on, most of the hot weather will be over."

"Hot? Does it get hot?"

"Does it!"

"Hotter than Chicago?"

"Yes, but drier. That's why you wouldn't mind it."

"How do you know so much about it?"

"I worked for the Kern County Land Company at the Stockdale Ranch before I met you," his eyes were brilliant with the memory of those lightsome years. "There's as fine a horse flesh there as you'll find in the world."

He remembered how many blooded horses he had trained there before. He thought, too, he might be able to combine his preaching with working again for the Land Company and thus give Annie some of the comforts she had never had since her marriage.

"The Land Company has the largest irrigated farm in the world," he told her. "I have often thought if God hadn't called me to preach, I should have saved up a couple thousand dollars for land and started ranching for myself at Kern County when four hundred dollars could have built you as trim a little house as anyone would want."

"A farmer's wife! Oh, William, I couldn't be a farmer's wife."

His answer was a good-natured laugh.

"No, I couldn't. I just couldn't."

"But why?"

"Too lonely for one thing."

"Bakersfield is anything but lonely," her persisted. "They discovered oil there six months ago and it's swarming with people now. Why, I was reading they have made twenty-five oil strikes in six months." In his mind he was going over the type of a town it must be today, with the wild, rough men who always flock to an oil town, the type of congregation he liked best.

"But I thought you never wanted a church again," Annie argued.

"This one might be different."

"I hope so."

"When I first went to Bakersfield as a young man, it was a desert waste," he recalled. "Next time I went down there to train horses for Tevis and Haggin, they had brought irrigation to a quarter million acres of fertile soil and it was difficult to find a vacant house. They must have built about three hundred miles of irrigation canals and over a thousand miles of laterals to water all that fertile land. I'll wager now we'll see green alfalfa fields where the desert was, and fat herds where jackrabbits roamed, and where hard-working farmers used to strive in vain to produce wheat and barley. Prosperity will have taken the place of poverty, and the little village I first knew will have become a substantial town. I was talking to a Bakersfield man I met downtown the other day, and he said oil will do more for Bakersfield than was ever accomplished by water, and where water brought thousands of dollars into the county, the oil will bring it in by the tens of thousands. But mark my words, the day will come when water will make Bakersfield and the entire valley the most prosperous section in the entire world."

"You are planning on accepting, aren't you?" she said.

"I was thinking I wouldn't have gotten the call out of the blue like this, if God hadn't wanted me to go."

"But there is so much to be done in San Francisco. You have said so yourself."

"I know … I know that." He was dreaming again of that wide open boom town, with the streaming oil and the filled saloons and the groups of men congregating on the streets and always willing to gather around welcoming any conversation. He was thinking, too, of the big Stockdale Ranch and the properties of the Land Company and the broad acres and that perhaps there would be opportunity for Annie to live in a little house again!

He knew there would be no uncertainty about money either in this new town, that he could make needed funds in a short time and devote the rest of the time to his calling. "But I will wait for a sign from God before I make up my mind," he agreed. "If it comes, I will investigate it. Is that all right, my dear?"

"Whatever you say."

"God," he said, still talking in that direct way he had learned at the chapel. "God, if you want me to go to Bakersfield, send some money so I can know."

"That would be a sign, a practical sign," Annie agreed.

Walking down Market Street later that day, he looked down into the gutter. There was a twenty-dollar gold piece. He picked it up and put it in his pocket and went home to pack. The next morning the little family took the Southern Pacific train to Bakersfield.

Chapter Fourteen

Arriving at Bakersfield, the first thing they did was to ride down the red and white oleander-bordered lane of the Stockdale Ranch, with tall palm trees giving the place a tropical atmosphere, different from anything Annie had ever seen. She sighed happily and agreed: "One would almost think it were another world."

As they approached the cook house, Annie caught sight of a mule, hitched to a locust post, going round and round pumping water. She noted the bunk house on stilts where William had slept, the big bell that had called him to meals.

It was her first true glimpse of that life he had had before she met him. She was happy to know more of these open-hearted horsemen to whom her husband was so closely bound.

The orchard was an Eden of peach trees, orange trees--every kind of fruit tree one could imagine. A garden also grew enough fresh vegetables for all. "Oh, this is California," she said.

Mr. Tevis was there and lost little time hiring William to start training their blooded horses in the morning, freeing his time in the afternoon and evening for his ministry. "Praise God," William sang out. "One-hundred-twenty dollars a month for the ranch work! And you shall live in a cottage and raise geraniums to your heart's content and roses, too." Annie did so love flowers!

"And what is your church salary to be?" she asked.

"Twenty dollars a month! But what does that matter? I'd be just as happy if it were nothing."

She knew he spoke the truth. Well, William was right," . . .all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose."

Church work was slow in Bakersfield for the first few months. The congregation did not want special meetings, but William was busy getting acquainted with each family in the church and then with each member of the roaring oil community.

He would preach at the race track, at the corrals, even on the street during week days and inside the church on Sundays--mornings and evenings and Wednesday evening. The attendance grew from sixteen to eighty. It was the best attendance they had had in years. Yet it was not enough.

"I know what to do, Annie, my darling," he said. "We have no singers to draw the people inside the way Moody did with Sankey."

"Now you tried that, William, once before!" she broke in, knowing what he had in mind.

"But this is California and haven't I been training horses over this entire United States to draw my street crowds?"

"And no one has objected. I will train a horse every Sunday night and pack them in side the church afterwards!"

The horse taming exhibition in front of the church that Sunday evening was a success, according to the Bakersfield MORNING ECHO which described it as follows:

There is no denying the fact that brawny, broad-shouldered Evangelist Mullen is an expert at breaking and training horses. If he could only squelch the old nick in sinners as readily and effectually as he does the "wild" broncos, he would be a world-beater at saving souls.

Yesterday an ECHO reporter accepted an invitation from the evangelist to witness him "try his hand" on a great, tall, high-headed, high-kicking and wild-eyed iron grey steed, fresh from the freedom of the herd. Within one hour from the time the untamed charger was led from the Land Company's stables into the street, the evangelist was seated in a cart behind him, driving along the streets as if a gentle plow horse were pulling the vehicle.

The evangelist has an original way of handling wild horses just as he has in preaching to sinners. A girth was buckled on the untamed horse and one forefoot secured to it. In this way, it could be made to lie down and get up at will. Following this, the horse was harnessed and hitched to a cart and driven off as above stated.

Is not the preacher a horse breaker?

But on Monday a committee of church members called on William. Their faces gave warning of grave offense. "It is beneath our dignity to put on a bronco-busting stunt in front of our church."

There was no use to plead it was only used as a drawing card.

"And you will have to give up your job with the Land Company," they demanded.

That matter of supporting his family had to be introduced again.

"But we will raise your salary gladly," they offered. "And give you a place to stay." William knew, much to his sorrow, he had given his word to stay six months, and what the Bible said: "He that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not . . ."

He packed his belongings again in the big brown valise and sadly drove his little family down the palm-lined avenue away from the snug cottage of the Stockdale Ranch.

They set up housekeeping in the back of the old church on Twenty-Second and Eye Street--two gloomy rooms in the back of a frontier town church that looked more like a country store than a chapel. In fact, it was later to house the Bakersfield Creamery.

There were times God's will seemed stern, indeed, Annie thought, but did not say so.

The Land Company begged him to remain with them and offered him a hundred acres of river bottom land as an inducement. They liked the influence he had on the wild, brawling town. They had known how many times he had been awakened in the night to settle a saloon fight, how many wives and mothers had summoned him to bring a drunken husband or son home in the early morning. The strange thing about this trainer-preacher, he was welcomed by saloon keepers as well as by community leaders. But he had little influence on stern church members.

No doubt you'll strike oil," one of the Land Company officials argued with him. "You better accept."

"I couldn't take the land," the preacher told him. "I have to keep myself on call for God."

So he gave all his time to the church. They raised his salary to thirty dollars a month.

Once again he wrote to Dr Torrey but still not with bitterness. In fact, he didn't even mention having to give up his job at the Stockdale Ranch. The letter, instead, was teaming with enthusiasm for the work he was doing. He began:

It is with pleasure I can write you. This is one of the hardest fields, if not the most sinful in California. Work has been slow here, but after laboring for five months, sinners are now listening to God's work and men are turning to God. The Lord has drawn unto Himself twelve this month and many more are under conviction.

His religion was growing away from a narrow, confining one into a mature, strong conviction.

My engagement as pastor of the church will close on the last Sunday in February. We expect to follow with a big independent revival in this wicked city.

This has been a hard struggle but we are more than conquerors after fighting within and without. The Baptist Home Mission Society representative has been fighting me very hard because the church called me as their pastor in preference to Seminary men. As yet I am unordained but I have received a call from five churches where I held special meetings and two of these have a membership of offer two hundred and fifty. I told them to get a better man.

Pray that God will give us a great revival here next month for the wickedness here is awful. Murderers and all kinds of wicked men and women walk the streets and children are guilty of the sins of aged sinners.

May the Lord bless you in your work and prosper the school

Yours in the Lord,

William Mullen (signed)

When the revival was over, William packed the big, brown, bulging valise again. This time he mapped out an itinerary that was to take him from one coast to the other, culminating at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.

He was from this time on to become a pastor of the unchurched.

Annie didn't mind leaving the dingy little rooms in the back of the old church as much as she minded leaving the spanking clean cottage with the rose garden in front, and the tall, tall, red geraniums in back.

Son Calvin was three now, old enough to sit on a horse's back and convince the skeptics of man's power of gentleness. She shuddered as she thought about this. William had once said he could "hardly wait for little Beulah to be old enough to ride the wild horses hoot." What a thrill it would be to see her golden curls in the sunlight bobbing as she galloped around the ring before the applauding onlookers.

Each day, Annie cut out the many newspaper articles that were always being written about the fiery evangelist who was her husband. She pasted them in a scrap book she carefully kept. It seemed there were few people in America about whom so much was being written as her husband who was preaching his way across the continent, a leather saddle for his pulpit, and her three-year-old son to prove the control of fiery spirits was best done with kindness.

Her heart trembled many times with fear, but she would tell herself, "I'm sure William knows best."

They took a northerly route this time, stopping first at Fresno where, according to the scrap book, his sermon proved "too warm a test for a gang of toughs who attempted to disturb Evangelist Mullen's meeting Tuesday evening, and they have not shown their faces since."

In Oregon, he preached in a Chapel Car and the account said, "He is not afraid to declare the whole word of God . . . He is one of the finest Bible students we have met . . . "

From Oregon, they went to Colorado where he held meetings for two weeks. He was also well received in Denver where one newspaper commented:

Evangelist Mullen conquered a seven-year-old horse in less than a half-hour--a horse which had never been broken nor ridden. He breaks fractious or untamed horses as an important part of his crusade against the flesh and the devil.

From Denver, he followed his familiar midwestern trail, preaching in Nebraska first. During that time William Jennings Bryan was visiting Lincoln. Somehow the two men became life-long friends. I remember Papa telling me once that the "silver-tongued orator" had invited our family to his "his home our home" at a time when he was holding a revival meeting in Bryan's hometown.

"And why didn't we stay there?" I asked.

"I had already told a widow who ran a good boarding house there that we would be staying with her." papa answered.

"But then why didn't you just pay her the money instead? It would have been fun to tell my friends about it," I said.

Papa laughed. "And hurt the poor woman's feelings?"

After Nebraska, he preached in Iowa and then traveled on to Chicago where he got a permit from Mayer Harrison to preach on the Lake Front at the foot of Randolph Street. Of him the Chicago CHRONICLE wrote:

Mr. Mullen is an eloquent speaker and the novel method of drawing large crowds invariably creates a favorable impression among his hearers. By the time the horsemanship of Mullen has won the admiration of the onlookers and when the horse is subdued, the evangelist dismounts and proceeds with the second part of his program. This is opened with prayer and a text selected for the gospel of the day.

On October 14, 1900, the Chicago INTER OCEAN reported a near mishap. He had made his appearance on the Lake Front near the Art Institute and had proceeded as he usually did, braiding the horse's tail and twirling the animal by his head and tail as well as using the formidable rope rigging that he had used when the horse was especially vicious. After ten minutes of this, he vaulted on the bronco's back.

The crowd was enthusiastic. Everyone was talking to everyone else. It was as jolly an occasion as Chicago had seen in many a day, according to the INTER OCEAN. Then:

. . . the bronco reared and plunged, took a breath, jumped three feet in the air, came down stiff-legged, before starting into a bucking experiment that outdid anything Chicago had ever seen.

The sinners were cheering loudly, the small boys yelled with joy and shinnied up the nearest telegraph poles. The evangelist came out of the bucking unscathed.

The bronco tried new tactics. Staring suddenly, the animal runs five blocks and the revival meeting begins to feel deserted and lonely. Then the horse returns back down Michigan Avenue with the expert rider. It is plain that the bronco has given up the fight. He is steaming and covered with foam. The animal hangs its head and the revival meeting cheers itself hoarse.

But he was not so fortunate when he handled a vicious horse at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

He had been preaching on the fringe of the beautiful fairgrounds. The New York SUN said he was the most talked of preacher of his day when he began the first of his series with: "Instead of leading in the singing of 'Heaven is My Home,' I will now tame Flying Devil, a vicious bronco."

Buffalo Bill had his famous show going on at the same time and tried to persuade William to join him but money was never a temptation.

Soon after this offer, William handled a vicious horse who proved too swift a kicker and he left the imprint of his hoof on William's gold watch, smashing it completely and almost doing the same to its owner.

"Nevertheless, God spared my life," he said later, showing the watch to his audience. "the watch is devoid of crystal and hands but after two weeks I am able to thank God for His healing power."

The physicians had given up all hope for his life but William never thought for one moment his working for God had come to an end. When he read the worry lines on Annie's face he comforted her with, 'never fear, Annie. God still has too much for me to do."

The average life of most horse tamers was then said to be seven years. Many of them became incapacitated with hernia or collapsed lungs in much less time, but William had been taming horses for eighteen years and this was his only accident. Annie told him it was a warning God wanted him to give up this dangerous work. He had two children to think of.

He promised her he would give his final sermon on a bronco's back in Detroit in September. Then he would afterwards head west for San Francisco.

The front pages of the Detroit papers carried in full what was supposed to be his farewell exhibition.

Mr. Mullen conducts his exhibitions on the theory that animals can be subdued more easily by kindness, assisted by the proper mechanical devices, than by any amount of brutality. He employs a simple rope rigging of his own conception, which is attached to the animal's halter and runs around its body lengthwise. When this rigging has been secured in place, he begins operations by beating a brass drum on the horse's back, then opening an umbrella over its head, next leaping upon the horse's back and subjecting it to other treatment so the horse will see the man has no desire to hurt him. The rope rigging prevents the horse from kicking backwards, and usually at the end of 25 minutes is subdued to such extent that Prof. Mullen can stand on its back or lift it by its hind legs. At this juncture, Prof. Mullen turns to the spectators and begins to preach. He does not proceed far before he startles his hearers with the assertion that religion is the worst thing in the world and nothing that they need.

Prof. Mullen maintains that religion, as it is popularly known, is nothing more than fanaticism. The true religion is the love of God. Says he: "The creeds have always been fighting among themselves. The Romans have burned the Protestants and the Protestants the Romans. No man who has ever received the love of God in his heart has ever hurt anybody, nor even an animal." Prof. Mullen is widely known as the cowboy evangelist. He worked on a ranch in Texas when he first came to America, and his knowledge of horses is perfect. He is soon to give up his exhibitions and return with his family to the West Coast and continue with his calling. The professor is a man of fine physique, and a most pleasing conversationalist.

When he returned to his hotel room and to Annie and the two children, she was reading the Bible. She was filled with fear every time he preached--a fear the Buffalo incident would be repeated. She had marked the passages of the eleventh and twelfth verses in the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians:

And that ye study to be quiet.

And to do your own business,

And to work with your own hands,

As we command you;

That ye may walk honestly toward

then that are without.

And that ye may have lack of nothing.

He glanced at the open pages still wet with her tears. He knew the verse filled her mind with wishful thoughts. He took her in his arms, held her close to him as though she were a frightened little filly being approached with a halter for the first time. "My poor darling. Dry your tears. We will buy a house in Oakland for you and the children. I will work in San Francisco. You shall not live in one room anymore."

Annie thought it was a beautiful house they bought, with its two stories, its room for everything, the wide verandah, the white picket fence, the rose garden, the orchard, the big mortgage . . . the charming garden for little children to play in. There were three, now, including the newest baby named after William--William Everett. We called the little brother "Everett," again to avoid confusion.

The spring before I entered school Papa organized a class at Hayward for Bay Area society women who wanted to learn how to master his horse taming art. Up to that time he had held classes for men, but now he found no end of fun teaching women how to overcome the many difficulties that arose in handling the skittish animals on the street, and especially more and more as that "new contraption of the devil" was threatening to push the beautiful animals into the background.

His book on "How to Educate a Horse" was used as the basis for some of the lessons. Now that I was old enough to serve as the child rider, I traveled with him once a week to Hayward. Annie never went along. She hadn't overcome her fear of horses, and besides, her hands were full of family work now with five to care for. How enthralled I was sitting by Papa's side, and him telling me all about California. It was always "his" because he had come here almost a quarter of a century before, and I guessed that gave him right of ownership.

We loved to trot over that land of brooks of water, of fountains and spring flowing forth out of valleys and hills, over the land of wheat and barley, grape vines, fig and olive trees. We were part of all the silver and green, the gold and purple hills, all the great, colorful, wonderful earth.

It was all ours--not just the white house where we lived on the corner of Twenty-fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, then in Fruitvale (now Oakland).

When we would turn the bend and a new vista would come into view, Father would repeat to the beat of the trotting horses:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

And the firmament sheweth His handiwork.

Then soon we would arrive at Hayward where expensively dressed women would greet us and fuss over me because I rode the wild horses that Father was teaching them how to handle. These women learned to drive the timid animals over bursting firecrackers and guide them up to face grim automobiles that were gradually appearing on the roadways.

Inside the corral, he would explain how to teach a horse to park, to dance, or to stand on a box, while I sat on the horse's back holding a tiny whip which I was not to use. Papa would stand in front of both of us, rider and ridden, signaling us what to do.

When the lessons were over, we trotted homeward, happy the lesson had pleased the women students of horsemanship. I learned early success in one's chosen work gave a wonderful sense of accomplishment and made a person feel good inside.

And in the same way that Papa belonged to the earth and all the fullness therein, he belonged to the people also, as I learned during the many trips we took together during the ministry of those years. The power, the grandeur, the glory of this land were his . . . and the misery and the sorrow and the sadness of the people, too.

"Poor fellow" he would say when meeting up with a little urchin in a crowded city street, or when passing a hobo carrying a roll of blankets on his back . . . trudging down a railroad track. He could not behold pain in others without feeling pain in himself.

Chapter Fifteen

Nineteen hundred six introduced many changes in our small world. Papa built a large barn, back of our house, to stable the horses he would bring home to educate to their many steps. For casual customers, he also continued to tame the "come and go" horses in the vacant lot across the street, for five dollars an hour. I was usually on hand to ride them afterwards, to "prove" they were "so gentle a little child could handle them."

He spent more time, too, in his Oakland office now, where his "Nonpareil Stock Food" was manufactured. It was a mixture of St. John's Bread (carob), ginger, herbs and spices well-liked by the horses' palates. Nor did they reject his special brand of horse liniment. The harness oil sold well to teamsters, whose numbers were still worthy of consideration in the Oakland factory district. For years, he had studied by lamplight late into the night, then taken the State examination for veterinarians and passed so he could treat any ailing horse he was training if they were hurt or became ill during their stay at our stable. He was fast building up clients. Now some called him "Dr. Mullen." However, he still preferred being called "Professor." He built a factory on 14th Street, next door to the California Cotton Mills. His business was called "The Mullen Medicine Co." The address where he conducted his business, however, was at 1166 East 16th Street in Oakland.

It was a thriving business. Indeed, he was a busy, busy man. He still went to San Francisco three or four times a week to train blooded horses for the rich and powerful. He also had a business in San Francisco which was destroyed by the earthquake and fire. I never learned where it was, because by the time people in San Francisco were ready for horses, the automobile was beginning to replace them.

What of his religious work? Never think he neglected that. He organized a Man's Bible Class at the Twenty-third Avenue Baptist Church, The Neighborhood Boys' Club, too, and rented a hall close to his factory so he could operate a Sunday School for the many Portuguese children who lived in that neighborhood. On Wednesday nights he conducted a prayer meeting there for their parents. Many of them worked at his factory.

Saturdays, Mama, Calvin and I were glad to help with the Sunday School preparations: making molasses taffy, popcorn balls, and peanut brittle. What Papa's horse-taming act was to his revival crowds, Mama's big clothes-basket full of goodies was to the children's Sunday School.

In those years, the months followed easily into years without notice, and before long I was learning to read Calvin's school books and, with Papa's help, the Oakland ENQUIRER which was delivered daily to our house. By the way, I was also able to converse with Papa's Sunday School children in Portuguese and do a wonderful job of singing "Throw Out the Life Line," and other hymns. I still remember a few of those refrains.

Then, on March 17, 1906, I saw this advertisement in our daily paper:

School of

Horsemanship

by

Prof. William Mullen

The world's Greatest Horse Tamer and Educator,

18th and Franklin Sts. (Gates Old Stables.)

Riding, Driving and Handling for the uses of every

day life taught.

Classes commence March 23d and close April 2d.

Single lessons every day. (Sunday excepted.)

No charge for work done on horses.

Every afternoon instructions for ladies.

Any lady can learn how to teach her own riding or

Driving horse, fox trot, running walk or single-foot,

Park, Spanish Trot, side step and graceful carriage

Of head and neck. Also break her own horse,

Riding or driving from shying or any other habit.

Every evening an advanced course for gentlemen.

Both classes open to all pupils for the one class fee.

I could make out enough words to get excited. Of course, it wouldn't be as much fun helping Papa at the Old Gates' stables as riding down to Hayward to help him teach his "society ladies" how to tame their beautiful animals to do intricate high-steps, but if Papa were running it, there would be good times for all at the Old Gates stables. Since Calvin was in school, he had to wait until Saturday afternoon before he got his turn. On that day, I stayed home to help Mama prepare for Sunday, and take care of Everett. He would not be four years old until November 3. How I adored looking after my little brother, who was apt to get into almost anything. Full of mischief -- that was Everett!

I was aware also my father had met several times that early spring with a small group in our immediate neighborhood to discuss what was to be done if an earthquake happened. Neighborhood schools and churches were the centers of social activity and knew how to gather the community quickly whenever there was need. Most welfare crises were handled this way.

When the earthquake actually struck, about 5:15 on that following April 18th morning, we knew exactly what to do: our parents had prepared us to "be calm: by telling us frequently there was "nothing to fear; Mama would take care of Everett, and Papa would see that both Calvin and I were safely cared for." However, the rumble of our chimney-bricks falling down made me think a war was going on in front of our house and I refused to budge. So Papa picked me up in his strong arms and carried me down the stairs, while he held Calvin by the hand as he walked beside him. Mama, holding Everett in her arms, followed. We all were led to the front curb where we joined many of the neighbors and their children.

I have no memory of our family or our neighborhood playmates showing fear or hysteria. What I do recollect is how we children made a game of sitting on the seemingly-safe ground and putting our forefingers in the newly-formed cracks to feel the earth move. That was exciting!

However, my finest and most deeply felt emotion was of our family, all five of us, as we stood outside on the street curb taking note of how the red flames leaped high in the sky. My father's face was serious, but he showed no alarm. All he said was:

"I should go hitch up the team."

He went into the barn immediately. His chores done, he went into the house by the back door. When he rejoined us, great smoke clouds had already shut out the sky. So serious he was, we knew there was little time to lose.

"God calls," he said. That was all. His voice steady, his eyes were still fixed toward the bay. He knew the significance of the blazing waterfront; he ferried to his work in the City almost daily.

Then, he kissed us, each one, and advised: "Do no worry, but pray. When my work is done, I shall return.

Soon, his high-wheeled cart, driven by a pair of chestnut standard-breds, could be seen swerving around the curve.

An Oakland newspaper reported that he and a small group of church workers called on Mayor Eugene Schmitz and Governor George Pardee early that morning to learn what help they might give. He knew them both well. I remember the day as though it were yesterday.

Also, to supplement my little-girl memory, I have additional reference material in a collection of photographs a newspaper reporter gave Papa, who had them made into slides to illustrate the lectures he sometimes gave before civic clubs or school groups on "Handling an Emergency." He never lost an opportunity to explain the value of being ready for "come what may."

One thing he mentioned about that terrible day was that when he was assembling the rescue squad, he found "it saved time to seek out the humble, God-consecrated workers." Somehow they had the courage to enter buildings and carry out the wounded and dying. In later years, I often thought of this.

Some thirty-five years later, when I was doing research in the Newberry Library in Chicago, I was to learn why he chose to talk about the most heartening experiences that happened that week.

Quite by chance, I picked up a book which was compiled by the survivors and rescuers of the "San Francisco Horror." There I read how the only hospital that survived the first hours was General Hospital, so other emergency facilities had to be improvised. And, in that Chicago library, my eyes fell upon a full-page photograph of one of those open-air morgues in Jefferson Square, where the soldiers, aided by the volunteers, had removed the stricken out of the fire area. Covered caskets were placed in rows on the grass, including some infant-sized ones.

There, leaning against a stone table, stood my father -- alone now, he stooped as he wrote in an open register the names of the dead, or their description, so that later those who came searching for loved ones might identify them. It had become his task to reunite families and, later, to find a safe haven for them. There was no mistaking him, dressed exactly as he always did, ready for whatever occasion.

At 2:25 that first afternoon, another strong earthquake struck, causing crazed crowds to hurdle rubble-filled streets to reach the ferry landings. Oakland was recognized bu all as the Haven of Hope. When a ferry pulled into the slip, some even tried to climb the iron gates, and had to be protected by the militia. By 10:00, the fire was unabated.

My father reached the east shore that evening, in time to help organize the Oakland Relief Committee of One Hundred. He had no time to come home. Chosen a member of the executive board, he was assigned to hear the transportation committee, and so had to return that night to San Francisco. Here tug-boats transported tons of supplies from Oakland, while carts and drays relayed them to the fifty-two substations and warehouses throughout various sections of the area. But because all available help was needed to fight the fires, no one was free to distribute the supplies to the people. Otherwise, the City would face starvation.

That night -- the third night -- San Francisco was a twenty-square-mile area of blackened desolation. Its wealthiest area was in ashes; sixty thousand buildings had become a thirty-foot rubble heap.

Suddenly, a gale swept from the west, fanning the embers into fierce flames! The fire, which had been thought to have practically burned itself out, revived by the wind, moved eastward and threatened to destroy the entire waterfront, including the Ferry Depot. Such a disaster would destroy the only means to transport the homeless out of the City! That was Papa's job, we had been told. The only way to get in or out of the peninsula was by rowboats, or floats, or, by foot over the blocked, overland, south passage.

Men in tugboats were ably holding their own fighting the fire. Then, suddenly it became obvious that more help was needed. Two vessels were ordered to the spot. When these arrived, they needed more volunteers to help the sailors aboard hold the hose lines. Few refused. Yet pale, hungry men, many of whom had not slept, and some had not eaten for forty-eight hours, rallied around the crew and held onto the hoses while the sailors aimed the streams of water, pumped from the bay, upon the persistent flames. It worked! At three-thirty the fire was conquered. This time it held.

Soon, at daylight, the fire was under complete control. Minutes later, couriers on sure-footed horses carried the news to the relief camps that the Southern Pacific Railroad had offered free transportation to all who wanted to leave the City for any destination on its line in California. The Professor, able horseman that he was, knew what he was called upon to do.

Everyone worked in single-minded zeal to begin to move out the refugees as swiftly as possible. The best-trained horses were selected, and the most talented horsemen-couriers were put upon their backs to synchronize the train movement information given by the railroad agents to the volunteer relief committee aides. The news was forwarded, in all haste, to the people in the relief camps who were readied to depart.

That first day, three-fourths of the city's population were huddled together in these relief camps, and Papa and other Oakland residents helped here. At dawn, led by the soldiers, they now began moving out. They were headed in the direction of the Ferry Depot.

Papa was there to make certain the committee's plans were carried out. A big man, he towered over most others. Numerous aides worked beside him. Everything was orderly until the first, free train pulled into the Mole.

As though directed by one mind, those who had been hoping against hope they would escape, faced the reality they could leave, rushed madly towards the incoming train. This time it was not from the fear of falling buildings, or the uncontrolled fire! It was from fear that they might be left behind! Like rampaging cattle, they pushed and shoved and knocked down others so intent on being the first to board the train -- without even waiting for it to come to a complete stop.

What did Papa do? He told me: "I knew people in a stampede crisis have to be handled the same way as wild horses, by directing their attention to something else. Human beings, more sensitive than either cattle or wild horses, are hardest of all to control in a terror panic, which is what a stampede is. So I jumped on a pile of freight containers. I boomed out in a commanding voice: "God is not dead!"

That was all. Yet it was enough to bring them to their senses. The fearful became silent. Still standing on his box platform, he then gave them necessary information: How the trains would be coming all day; that there would be a seat for every man, woman and child. He made a point to tell them that those who could not leave today would have the opportunity to leave tomorrow, or the next day, or still again on yet another day, until everyone was taken care of.

As they listened, he assured them relief aides would board the trains to help them in any way. Then he directed them, each one, to form a single line, and start to board the cars in turn.

Twenty-five thousand departed that Saturday in trains that came in quick succession. Twenty-five thousand marveled at the miracle that they were still alive.

On Monday, a fourth, stiff earthquake was again felt. The next day, when the last traveler was taken care of, the Oakland Mole was filled with an increasing number of anxious travelers who also had decided to leave. In the end, only 175,000 inhabitants remained to build a new city out of the destroyed old San Francisco that up until the earthquake was also referred to as The City. But they were enough.

It was, however, not until 1931 before my father told me the full story of how almost an entire city's population had been moved out within those morning hours of the fourth day.

I, along with Mama, Calvin, and Everett, had an early first lesson, learning: "They also serve who sit home and wait."

As did other Oakland families, we opened our house to a refugee family, who moved upstairs. I also remember no small joy and satisfaction accompanying Mama, every day, to a neighborhood bakery with unbaked loaves of bread placed in black, iron baking pans, ready to be baked in the community ovens so the fresh-baked bread could be distributed to the hungry. Somehow I found great reward in this task. I enjoyed doing my little girl's bit. Especially did it make up for our father not coming home for such a long time.

When the homeless were finally sent, each one, to wherever he chose to go, to a close relative or friend who had expressed willingness to accept the responsibility for his care, Papa coma home. It had been a full three weeks. And, then, he couldn't even remember his name!

To honor the work he had done in the City's behalf, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company sent our family -- every one of us -- to Chicago to visit mama's three sisters. We stayed all summer, returning to the Fruitvale house, and Calvin and I enrolled in the Fruitvale Avenue school. Mama resumed her gardening and caring for her little flock of chickens, and Papa to his horse training and factory business. Such happiness we children felt returning home to California! And Mama, who had always missed Chicago so, was even happy to be back again in the West. But for Calvin and me, there was real sorrow to be confronted, with the discovery of the refugees who had been permitted to occupy our home in our absence took the beautiful doll Aunt Bob had given me one Christmas -- the pretty doll with eyes that opened and closed, and had real hair, too. Aunt Bob had made a complete wardrobe for her and each Christmas she would send me a new dress for my precious doll. And with the doll that was stolen, my once-felt love for the "destitute stranger" went out the door. It was grief indeed to bear. What made it a family tragedy, Calvin and his Chinese doll, outfitted in a silk mandarin suit, also stolen. It even made it harder to bear that he could not get to the wicked girl and give her "a good punch in the nose."

Long years afterwards when I asked him what he remembered about the earthquake, he replied: "How we'd put a finger in the ground those first few days and were so thrilled to feel the earth move."

"And the worst thing?"

"That bratty girl stealing my Chinese doll. It was dressed like a true Chinese little boy."

San Francisco bravely tried to become once more the "City That Was." Somehow I never felt she make it.

And Papa tried to piece together the fragments of his business. It was discouraging work. He began turning his eyes away from the beautiful standard breds and show horses with their multiple steps. More and more he began noticing that men were becoming interested in buying the automobile, that "contraption of the devil." Even the neighbors across the street came home with one, which brought new interest to transportation needs in our community.

We put our home up for sale. It sold quicker than we expected it would, and we lived temporarily "across the railroad tracks" in an improved apartment upstairs in Papa's factory that housed The Mullen Medicine Co.

We started building a new house in a just-opened subdivision called Highland Park. This was to be our home, also the home where Oliver was to be born.

From then on for the next several years, Calvin and I were to attend the Garfield School. When Everett turned six, he also enrolled there. But by that time, we were about to move. Such was the character of that wonderful first decade of the twentieth century. I might just as well say it out loud, I've said it so many times to myself: There never was a decade quite like it.

Chapter Sixteen

And what of those next few years immediately following the San Francisco earthquake? The first years were busy reconstruction years. Rebuilding after devastation always brings its own good times because hands and minds are kept busy.

It was natural as most of Papa's clients were busy building new streets, roadways, and houses, some few of them put some attention to garages. That was something new, "garage." We even had to borrow a French word to designate it: "The place to keep an automobile." Oh, the changeover did not happen all at once, but by 1910, it was obvious that if San Francisco had tossed two coins in the air to determine which way it was going to travel in the future, "the horse" did not come down with "heads" on top.

Papa himself began to spread out, in other ways, too, trying to determine where his influence could best be placed. For one thing, he needed big audiences for his type of preaching. San Francisco had always welcomed the street preacher, even from Gold Rush Days. But men no longer had time to loiter on the streets, or in the corrals, where they had once congregated, when the horse was of paramount importance.

So William began to travel once more, always southward, to such major towns as Stockton, Merced, Visalia, Ceres, Bakersfield, even Orange and Los Angeles counties. He worked training horses first in one locality, then in another. He held a few evangelistic meetings in such towns as Stockton and Bakersfield. The scrapbook records clippings include all of these, showing him still preaching to crowds using horse training for a drawing card, but these meetings were gradually diminishing. There was, however, a trip he made quite frequently, and that was to San Quentin. It gave him his most attentive audience even for its being a captive one. And for no other audience in the state did he spend more time preparing the sermons he so enjoyed giving.

At the time I was ten years old and in the first term of the fifth grade, and advanced enough in school to study shorthand. Papa had a friend, a reporter for the Oakland ENQUIRER, teach me the rudiments of newspaper writing and also shorthand for note-taking. In every respectable Irish family, you know, there has to be one member who was educated for the priesthood and one who was prepared to be a writer. I, obviously, had been chosen for the latter.

My brothers, definitely, were taken up with baseball and football for their "spare time." So it turned out that on Saturday, Papa would get me to help him with his correspondence and sermon preparation while I performed my secretarial duties, so to speak, looking up references in the big Strong's Concordance and jotting down story illustrations. It was fun for me to take down his dictation -- the exciting little stories of incidents he had enjoyed in the strange places where he had traveled. Patagonia was one I remembered, the Sandwich Islands, another of course; Peru, too, such remote yet familiar Ports of Call: Calloa, Sydney, Lahaina. Nothing delighted him more that to "help" me write a composition for school about these, although my teachers knew they did not come from my own experience. By the time I entered high school, I had a fairly large-sized carton of manuscripts written. They were lost as we moved form place to place. It's too bad I did not take better care of them! Writers never seem to learn the importance of jotting down impressions of the moment.

When school permitted, I went with him to those Big Valley towns nearby. I once asked him it I couldn't accompany him on one of his frequent trips to San Quentin. And even today I can see his big frame shaking with laughter. "No, Sister, you can't go this time. This is a trip for men only. But I'll tell you what it'll be like, so you can imagine you are there, and when I return I'll tell you what happened. You can help me prepare my talk, if you wish, so we can keep it for the record."

"I'll leave from Vallejo Street wharf and soon be steaming past the guns of Alcatraz, past Angel Island," he smiled, reflecting only goats played there, and I new what he was thinking.

Then he described the journey, speaking of the irony that San Quentin should be located at that one spot in all California where the waters of the Bay are most gentle.

"Even the hills seem to lift one up to the heavens touched by Mount Tamalpais which seems to apprehend the gravity of the situation," he told me, but I could not understand then how much the sorrow of those in prison touched his heart. Later, working with him, taking his sermons down form dictation, I came to know what he must have said. Looking back, I'm certain he planned it this way to become part of my religious education.

Even today, I can close my eyes and almost hear him preaching to his favorite congregation on that fall day late in 1910.

I did not have to witness the service to see him standing before thousands of sad, intent men, waiting for him to speak, according to his manner to get an audience's full attention.

His countenance certainly would have been grave, his head held high, his left hand clasping the large, closed Bible to his breast.

I'm certain he saw in the audience at least one steeple of a man who had loved God's craggy country with an abiding passion -- until the day his farm was taken away from him, as it had been with Papa's father, and thanked God that He spared him this experience. He probably saw a young, handsome man, too, with a quiet face, who didn't belong there. He had never seen his eight brothers after he entered the workhouse. They left to join those others of the big Mullen family who had taken Australia's offer for free land and gone to the Kimberly District in Australia, where gold was later discovered.

He must have seen an irrepressible, good-natured Irishman in the audience, joking with the man next to him as though he was getting ready to ship off for the Sandwich Islands, just as he himself had done. He saw a blond Scandinavian making merry in a San Francisco saloon after a long haul around the Horn, only to lie prostrate on the floor after two drinks and awaken the next day to find himself on a strange cruise to Shanghai, as he had often seen on his travels. It happened often in San Francisco until the Unions, in 1905, put a stop to "Shanghaiing."

There also must have been a man, who after years of bitterness, found it more natural to nourish the hate inside him than the love God had put in him, until he finally turned against that society, which had sought to restrain him behind iron bars.

Yes, and he must have pictured a man with a heavy head and a low, square forehead, burrowing into dank, dreary mines twelve hours each deadly day, until his face was as gloomy as the shafts of the mines. He saw a leathered face of a man who was once an agile rider, and quick to draw a gun of a Saturday night on a West Coast plaza as he was to lasso a bronco before on the range.

He saw a sullen Mexican in a hovel, who had once been a proud caballero of limitless sections.

He saw a proud, ambitious man who stole, and got away with it, because he had political power. He knew some of those in this category had to be now in his audience. But he knew God offered redemption to every one born. He saw a labor leader who wanted to correct the injustice done to the seamen, and he saw labor leaders succumb to the desire for easy money.

He saw them all -- as individuals -- and he saw them as one.

He saw them as his father, and his brothers, and himself. He saw them as his neighbors and even his might-have-been sons.

But they did not look at him. They only looked into the never-ending space of the penitentiary walls.

He saw them all and knew that his message was for men who were lost, as he, too, had been lost and the blood coursed strong in his veins as to almost overwhelm him. The secret of his eloquence came from his grateful heart, his heart so grateful it would almost overflow inside him.

"There is none good, no not one," he whispered knowing he was talking of these men, and of his father, his brothers, his neighbors, and of himself. He knew and thanked God that, through the miracle of Christ, he had been saved this terrible fate that locked a man inside four skyless walls.

But he said nothing.

The discipline of the prison showed and the room too, remained silent.

He tried to speak, once, but he could not.

He paused -- a long slow pause. The eyes of this big man, with the massive head set courageously on solid shoulders, filled as the eyes of a little child. Even those in the back knew the tears were there. Not one could have wanted to tangle with him on the outside, yet they knew this strong man was too overcome with their grief to say one word.

Still, he stood squarely on the balls of his feet, broad shoulders back, seeming even taller than he was, head upward as though reaching to heaven.

Finally, he began to talk. His first words were quiet, solemn, slow, studied, melodious and soft, like a father talking to a little son of whom he was very fond. Little by little, the carefully-chosen words became louder, stronger, faster -- but always keeping that affectionate, melodious, magnetic cadence that compelled people to listen even when they didn't want to.

He was ready, now, to open his Bible. "Dearly beloved, I have chosen my text from the sixth verse of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah:"

All we like sheep have gone astray;

We have turned every one to his own way;

And the Lord hath laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

"I am also going to read down through the eighth verse of the same chapter:"

He was taken from prison and from judgment;

And who shall declare his generation?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

For the transgression of my people was He

stricken.

As he read he seemed to understand, for the first time, how hate had been bred in him, in all men; how greed and envy and jealousy had piled up the aggressions from childhood to the grave -- until it was easier to yield to the hate than to turn to the Love of God that alone could save humanity from its own destruction -- the man in the prison and the man who, through God's mercy, was still out of it.

They knew as they listened, he was a man who knew about these things. They knew he had learned form sorrowful experiences that "Faith in God" and the adherence to the teachings of this Jesus Christ who, too, was taken from prison could save them as it had saved him.

"You know you are not free as you sit before me, but I tell you our own iniquities have imprisoned us all. They have cut us all off from the Love of God that is the power of Salvation. You who are here, and will be here until that day when they will come and get you and tell you there will be no more days, you can be free. But only in fulfilling the will of God can you or anyone free himself from the abuses of government, from the abuses of the manufacturer, the landowner, the slum owner, the bully, the thief, the labor agitator -- all men who live for themselves and not for the will of God. But I offer you all hope of eternity, for it is only in fulfilling God's will can you be saved from eternal damnation, and that will is to love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.

"Dearly beloved, I know for some of you there is no happy prospect that through toil and good behavior you can say good-bye to the labor within these walls by day and the aloneness in the cells by night. The years will drag slowly on until your sorrows will be buried in your grave and hired attendants will wipe away the cold sweat of death from your brow and put you in a convict's coffins, and take you to the hill and so end your life."

The heads of many of the convicts fell forward, those men who knew they would spend the rest of their lives there. All over the room, there broke out the convulsive sobbing of the men, as though it were the voice of one man.

He looked about the hundreds and hundreds of faces, before so stern and hard, but now soft, relaxed, wet with tears, and not out of sympathy for themselves. Each one knew it was humanity about whom the big man spoke, not himself, not them, but all men.

…all our righteousness are

as filthy rags;

And we all do fade as a leaf;

And our iniquities, like the wind,

Have taken us away.

"But there is no cause for despair. Man may have shut you out for a few years; but Christ has served out your sentence that you might have freedom in Eternity. God gives it to you this moment, if you will but believe in Him. There is love for you in Jesus Christ. There is mercy. There is heaven."

Chapter Seventeen

William was to devote all his time from the beginning of the Second Decade to developing Mullen Medicine Company, from the ravages of the earthquake -- his stock food, gall cure, coach oil, harness oil, hoof remedy, and the like. But it was uphill all the way. He advertised his goods for the most part in a small paperback book which he sold for twenty-five cents, and brought out another edition of his Horse-Taming hardback "How to Educate a Horse." This sold for one dollar. It was published by Sears, Roebuck, and enjoyed good distribution by them.

Whenever Papa was to make a journey, he always took along a good supply of his paperback "How to Purchase and Examine the Horse" as well as his hardback "Horse Taming" as if to leave his stamp on the Valley. Maybe, he counted on coming back. Who knows?

We were now living in the home Papa had built after the Fruitvale house was sold. This was in Highland Park, "Diamond Canyon" to us then. It was built to Annie's specifications, and was all she had ever dreamed a house should be.

I remember it well, standing out in gleaming white, high on top a hill above Twenty-third Avenue, with a sunny porch that faced Wakefield Avenue, and had a strawberry bed for a lawn.

I can't tell you why Long Beach was the town we finally settled upon, and to which we moved in 1911. Perhaps because Papa happened to put an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times for someone who had a "house for trade." Or maybe it was for no other reason than because the beach faced south. And also a consideration must have been that the Southern Pacific had a good electric train service to Los Angeles, so that Papa could commute there daily. His friend, Paul Shoup, who owned it, assured him he would like it there and another friend of his, Harry Chandler, recommended Southern California as a good "church community," suitable for raising a family. What was more, there were many churches throughout the area which offered assurance there should be plenty of opportunity for evangelistic activities in nearby towns. Time would tell.

Papa once told me that after the earthquake, some of the more influential citizens in Oakland had asked him to consider running for Mayor of Oakland.

"Why didn't you?" I asked.

"I felt God was rebuking me," he explained. "He was telling me that I would not have been invited to enter politics if I had been doing God's work." As it turned out, once the family had moved south, for whatever reason, there was no time to ponder where God's work called. His love for poor children, whose families all lived around the Plaza, which came from his own past, was to become the heart of his life's work.

However, as far as his ministry among the "untamed" men of the street -- and that is exactly what they were -- God had chosen him to go South. As it turned out, the men themselves fairly catapulted him into becoming their own preacher as we shall soon see.

It so happened the transition from taming horses to vicious men was accomplished easily enough, once he accepted this as his ministry.

"Just as the wildness in the horse comes from his fear of man and being treated harshly, so the wildness in men comes from the same things," he philosophized. "If man applied the same cruel bit and the cutting rowel, it would have the same effect." He knew he had to apply the gentleness of Jesus in dealing with these "misguided fellows."

He had just laid down the newspaper when he said this. It had told of how these International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) were traveling in gangs of three to four hundred men, seizing trains as means of transportation, camping at stops in the great forests, raiding the country-side for food and terrorizing the farm workers in the Valley and their employers to a point where they could get occasional forced employment at exorbitant wages, or failing that, could wreak vengeance on the capitalists by burning wheat fields, haystacks, and barns. All of which was happening every day.

At year's end, on the twenty-ninth of December, my brother Oliver was born. Papa spent most of his time at Mama's bedside praying, always praying for her, for she was gravely ill. I prayed too. I just couldn't imagine Papa ever getting along without Mama. It was not without reason that Oliver came to represent the Crown Jewel of the family.

Another reason for considering the move south was that Everett had taken ill shortly after Mama gained enough strength to once again take charge of her growing family. William asked God to guide him to make the right decision on our next move. He always believed "the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much," and in every case of illness, went quickly to his knees beside the bed of the one sick. When the doctor came he advised moving to the south; Southern California was always called "the South." Soon after, a trade was made for a large lot on the corner of Fourth and Main Streets in Long Beach.

Once again, Annie tore herself away from the home she loved best. It was their first home which William provided for her in the prosperous years after the Earthquake. Never again was she to have so lovely a home, although the cottage at Long Beach had its good points, she reluctantly agreed. It was of brick and stucco, with a large flower garden and shasta daisies lining the long sidewalk on main Street, and palm trees fronting Fourth Street, and eucalyptus trees separating the alley from the big vegetable garden which her growing family needed. The beach was near at hand with its plenty of sunshine where Everett could regain his strength and where the new little brother, Oliver, would grow strong, too. William could commute back and forth to Los Angeles as he had always done to San Francisco from Oakland, and so, please God, all would be well with the growing family of six now.

It was moving time again. As soon as the first school term was finished we would go South. And we did.

William worked very hard that summer, trying to get a foothold in Los Angeles. Each morning, he would pack a small valise with samples of harness oils and horse liniments which had an eucalyptus oil base and take the Pacific Electric to Los Angeles where he made his sales rounds. He also made stock foods of St. John's bread, imported from Portugal, a long bean that was sweet-tasting and which we children ate instead of all-day suckers. Carob, as we now know it, was a good seller in the industrial district that skirted the Jungle and the Plaza. The big manufacturers which now had a foothold in Los Angeles still used the fine big Percheron draft horses. They used great quantities of his Mullen's stock food. It was the backbone of his business. Papa felt this product would bring in enough income to support his ministry there.

One of the best customers was the Maier Brewing Co., the largest firm of its kind in Los Angeles. Back in 1897 there had been an attempt to unionize the workers of this brewery, but since Los Angeles workers were being paid in excess of what was gotten in San Francisco, from where the organizers came, no union was formed. A boycott was placed on Maier Beer, but nothing ever came of it. It did make Mr. Maier open-minded about this strange preacher's stranger ideas of preaching unselfish relationships of employers and employees, through the inspiration of the Bible; at least he was willing to listen. It also gave William time to better study the wild men and their ways.

Eddie Maier agreed with William, that he would give his men time off with pay one afternoon a week to listen to William tell of this simple plan for community and world harmony, beginning in the work place. Papa did not hesitate to denounce employers where they were unjust or grasping, nor workers when they were not honest in putting forth their best efforts. But this was not much of an outlet for one fired with such zeal to spread salvation throughout the growing city. It helped, however, to keep the channel with God open, for that time when his business could grow to where he could afford to devote more time to his ministry.

And it was a start.

Chapter Eighteen

The I.W.W. organization was only five years old when William began his work on the streets in Los Angeles in 1917. They had claimed they would organize within the ranks of the workers. William knew that certainly was needed, but he knew also it should be an American movement instead of this violent movement of Syndicalists. He himself sought improved working conditions among the craft workers. Now, he wanted to see something done for the unskilled mass of production workers who had no champion except this rabid organization of I.W.W.'s which he felt would irreparably hurt the workers' cause. When the I.W.W. settled in here they did not settle with families as had the earlier German, Scandinavian and Irish immigrants, but joined in lawless discontented bands, denouncing all governments except the new government in Russia. They especially denounced the American form of government, because it was the most prosperous and, so the most hated.

The I.W.W. gained members quickly in Los Angeles. William agreed they needed a champion. He referred to them as ''poor, misguided creatures'' for that reason. That was why he so desperately wanted to help them - before it was too late.

He also wanted to convert them - to get them familiar with the regenerative power of God before they started to bore from within into the many worthwhile American organizations. This gave an urgency to his work you could not help but feel when you conversed with him. ''I want to get into my street preaching as soon as I can,'' he told us in talking over the matter. ''I really can't function as well as I'd like, otherwise, but I have to feel my way,'' he said. He might have spared his worry. As it so happened, the I.W.W. fairly catapulted him into beginning his work.

''You'll know what to do,'' Annie told him, and with a word of caution to Papa to ''be careful today,'' he was off to start on his one man ''sociological experiment'' as he had termed it when he sought the cooperation of the city administration. ''I'll be careful all right.'' Then he reminded Annie, ''You never get a swift kick in the seat of your pants if you don't walk behind a horse's hind legs. You know that.''

Annie was not convinced. ''Just you see that you don't,'' she came back.

And so the next day, William went down to that section of the city where the wild and lawless always congregated to speak their propaganda of hate. Although the I.W.W. was a young organization, they were openly hostile to the United States Government.

They had so intimidated law-abiding citizens of the Los Angeles district that the owners of wholesale houses located in this section around the Plaza had appealed to the police for protection, but it was hard to get a policeman to cover the wild, untamed street.

William moved among the disorderly crowds that day to learn their ways first-hand. Just as he had first watched the wild horses in their movements on the Texas plains, studying their nature, how to subjugate them, and then how to gentle them, so he began to study this maddened band ready to charge upon any who would challenge their threats.

He turned the next corner and walked toward a meeting, already in progress, and was faced with a large placard that read:

ARISE, SLAVES OF THE WORLD

NO GOD: NO MASTER

''Let's give the young preacher a nice marching song,'' an agitator told the crowd as he began singing his own parody on ''Onward Christian Soldiers.''

CHRISTIANS AT WAR

Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain:

Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain.

Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill.

God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill.

All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high:

If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.

As William listened, the blood of anger rushed to his face. It was all he could do to keep silent, to listen to their philosophy as sung in the song, and to watch their movements. But he was searching for some clue so he could approach them successfully.

History will say of you: "That pack of God-damned fools."

The song ended.

''Yes, we were fools to ever let them spread their hate to the strength they now enjoy so that no decent man nor woman can walk kown Los Angeles Street, no honest cop can dare take the beat,'' he admitted to himself.

When the song finished, three long verses, the syndicalist began to discuss their weapon, sabotage, ''Yep, the little wooden shoe is our symbol,'' he said. ''It is with this little wooden shoe that the weavers in France were able to make the bastard capitalists aware of what a sabot (French for shoe) could do. It could break windows and it could break machines.

''Of course, we wouldn't apply sabotage. Oh no, not us. We are sure no self-respecting worker would ever resort to that terrible thing called sabotage!''

''Sabotage is to this class struggle what the guerilla warfare is to the battle. The strike is open battle of the class struggle between the opposing classes. Sabotage means ordinarily the withdrawal of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up and interfere with quantity or to botch, in your skill, and interfere with the quality of the capitalist production or to give poor service.''

And then he ended, ''Our country? The country of millions of hunted, homeless, hungry slaves. It is not our country!''

Inflamed by this, William went to an open saloon and borrowed a chair. He wanted to show these no government men, these men of mob violence he was not afraid of them. He had judged them as men of fear, cowards, and he knew he could conquer them.

''You hate all countries,'' he began, ''but America most of all because it is the freest country of all. You hate God's law. You say you want liberty, but you want license, and God's law doesn't give it to you. Liberty is not what you want. You want the right to destroy by terrorism all that is good. You teach the regeneration of society by upsetting everything that centuries of experience have taught us when the only way that man can be regenerated is through the power of God.''

But he didn't get the words of his sentence finished when one began singing another of their hymns from the back of the crowd.

THE PREACHER AND THE SLAVE

Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;

But when asked 'bout something to eat

They answer with voices so sweet!

You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay,

You'll get the pie in the sky when you die.

It was no use. He could not speak above their ribald songs, for they went in to another, "HE'S A BUM." He had no choice but to listen. The words were simple enough. He learned them as they sang.

By now, William was far enough away from the first crowd as not to be recognized. As he climbed upon the chair once more and this time began to sing up a crowd for himself with the song he had learned from the first crowd.

''I'm a Bum,'' he sang.

Looking at him in his tailored clothes, they wondered what manner of I.W.W. could he be and began to congregate around him curiously.

''I.W.W.'s,'' he said sarcastically, and he could be as cutting as a two-edged sword. He had figured they respected force and ridicule, and he would give it to them "'Industrial Workers of the World' also stands for 'I Won't Work.' Of course you won't work. Why should you when you can go out on the American streets, under the warm Los Angeles sun, and beg a dime from some kind, professional man to make you splits! Why should you be so foolish as to work the way you had to work in Russia in order to eat your black bread. It stands for 'I Will Wobble' because you know these Americans, poor fools, will always feed you and give you enough money for liquor. Wobblies, that's what you are!"

With this, they edged in on him, in the way college boys will surround a popular hero and carry him off the field. They circled around him so tightly that all they had to do was shove and push in unison and carry this stalwart body with each shove. There was no place for William to go but with them. They carried him around the block, but he kept preaching all the while they shoved him around and around. He was too big to be crowded off the street by these wild men.

"I had to fight for twenty minutes," he told us when he returned home that night.

To this day the I.W.W.'s carry the name "Wobblies" which he gave them in his first Sunday as the Open Air Preacher to the I.W.W.'s. The newspapers picked up his pet term, and in time they even came to refer to themselves as "Wobblies," and still do.

Finally, he spotted a policeman, and as he did, he pounced upon the ring leader of the toughs and with one swift blow, landed him on his face, then picked him up and told the officer to arrest him. The surprised policeman took the heckler to jail and William continued preaching for two hours.

"It made me think of the days I used to conquer a vicious horse in about thirty minutes,'' he told us, "and then make him lie down on the street for an hour while I preached to the surrounding crowd."

Mama smiled proudly, yet sadly. She knew she would be spending evenings by the fireside alone again.

On the second Sunday he withstood considerable abuse, dodging bricks and bottles, and epithets. When he could stand it no more, he leaped down into the crowd and, with one swift wallop, felled the worst offender, then picked him up and marched him off to a police station three blocks away.

Mayor Sebastian told him, "We're going to give you the key to the call box so preach close by, and the first one to give you any trouble, bring him in."

The opportunity came the next Sunday, before a crowd hungry for more excitement. They continued to heckle him as they had done the past two Sundays, but this time, with the key in his pocket, he decided to tackle two toughs. At the propitious moment, he pounced down from his chair, grabbed two particularly evil-talking and abusive fellows and bashed their heads together. Then he walked a few steps over to the police call box and with his key, opened it up and called for the patrol wagon, much to the astonishment of his congregation.

Arrests grew amazingly in those first three months of his preaching on Los Angeles' streets. He was successful for one reason. With all his fighting and arresting and pouring out wrathful words upon the men who, for some strange reason rallied around to listen to him, he loved them in the same way he had loved the wild, vicious horses, and when they were ready to submit, he had a ready gentleness for them, and would help them get work, and get on their feet.

He was not attacking these lawless men with their anarchy and their sabotage and their vilification of God and this country. He was only attacking the sin, the lawlessness, the anarchy that enslaved them, which he hated with all the fury of his tempestuous heart. He loved the men as he loved his own family and himself, and somehow, they knew it and gave him a certain, peculiar brand of loyalty.

The leaders among the anarchists and I.W.W.'s, of course, swore they would ruin him. Some threatened to kill him, and made many attempts (he once told a reporter twenty-two) but just as he never expected to be hurt by a wild horse, he never anticipated any injury from these vicious toughs, either, nor were any of the attempts successful.

Sunday upon Sunday they fought it out - the toughs and this one tough man. But he was enough for he was always under the shadow of the Almighty.

Chapter Nineteen

When his street work was running smoothly, he rented an empty store building on Los Angeles Street and converted it into a Mission by putting a platform in the center from which he could conduct his weekly Bible study classes, held for his street converts. The partition wall behind this bore this large inscription:

…this we command you,

That if any would not work,

Neither should he eat.

Among ourselves, we children made up our own verse: "No workie, no eatie."

Behind the mission partition was a kitchen to provide food for the older men who could not find work or who were not able to work.

Now William was ready to organize a Sunday School for poor boys of the street who needed to be fed as well as taught the Bible verses. I smiled, recalling it. The English church ladies at the Newcastle Workhouse he had attended, in hopes, as Papa so thought at least, of persisting in converting the young Catholic children to their Church of England, would have them memorize certain Bible verses when they made their regular church visits once a week to the Workhouse children. If they quoted the selected verse verbatim and gave the chapter and verse of the book where it was found, they were rewarded with a coin, a ha'penny, tuppence or whatever.

On the particular Sunday morning when William was to begin his bootblack Sunday School, he went to the Plaza and engaged the services of a young Russian shoe-shine boy. The little square was filled as usual, with many ragged little Mexican or Russian children selling newspapers or shining shoes. There was a large colony of Russians who lived just off the Plaza. In another section was the large Mexican population that characterized Los Angeles as the second largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, second only to Mexico City at that time. Not too far removed were Chinese and Japanese neighborhoods so William had a racial mixture on which he could draw for his interracial Sunday School.

"Would you like an ice cream cone?" he asked the little Russian lad who was polishing his shoes.

The shoe-shine boy eyed the nearby push cart vendor. "What's the catch?" he wanted to know.

"Oh, I just remembered how much I like ice cream cones and thought if you would have one I could…"

"Oh, sure! Sure."

As the two ate, other boys gathered around. "Here, here now, we can't just enjoy this ice cream all by ourselves," he good naturedly said. "Cones for all," he nodded to the vendor.

Then more boys gathered around, and he began telling stories about horses and cowboys.

"Were you ever a cowboy?" one asked.

"Oh, sure."

And when he had quite a little handful of street urchins about him he announced, "I have a hall down the street a ways, and if you would like to follow me, I could tell you more stories and we could have dinner together."

"What you after, mister?" one insisted. "You sure after something."

"Yes, I am," he said. "I was once a poor boy working on the street and a man came along and saw me and invited me to go to Sunday School." He preached on the street and in late spring and summer, in the evening, too. And twice a week he taught the Bible at the Mission to whomever straggled in - usually men who were hungry. Volunteer workers usually were the cooks.

The school grew until there was a hundred or more, mostly Russian and Mexican boys in ragged clothes with shoe shine boxes slung over their young and burdened shoulders, attending this strange Sunday School.

In 1911, President Taft came to Los Angeles and a lavish banquet was tendered by some of the business men of the city. Eddie Maier, of the Brewery, was among those present, and when William called at his business office the next day to take his order for stock food, he told him about it.

"Oh, I'm not interested in your telling me about how all you overfed men banqueted with the President," William said. "When you have a banquet like that for the poor boys of the city, I will sit up and take notice."

Mr. Maier surprised him by saying, "I'll tell you what I'll do. You duplicate the banquet. Get Chef Christopher to put it on the same way he put it on at the Shrine Auditorium for the President. I'll supply the turkeys from my ranch, and foot the bill, only I don't want anyone to know who's doing it, so you make all the arrangements."

When Christopher was contacted by Mr. Maier and William, he agreed to have everything the same as when President Taft had been honored by the Los Angeles citizens.

"I want the boys to eat with the same silver, using the same linen, and from the same dishes," William said.

"But isn't that apt to be pretty risky? These are boys form the street."

"I'll guarantee that you won't miss a knife or fork. Mark my word."

He knew that Dr. Torrey was now teaching at the Bible Institute and so he contacted him and arranged to have the Fishermen's Club composed of young men and the Girl's Lyceum Club of the Institute serve. He had the Caledonian orchestra, composed entirely of bagpipes, entertain the boys.

Before the doors were opened on the Christmas evening, one thousand eighty-four boys lined up in front of the old department store at Franklin and Spring Street, and the strain of so many leaning against the plate glass window proved too much, and the window broke through with a crash that called out two emergency squads from the Central Police Station to come and fix it without interrupting the celebration. It was a miracle that not a single boy was so much as scratched by the shattered pane.

Mr. Maier picked up the tab - two thousand dollars - and promised to repeat it every year. By the standards of 1911, it was some banquet. By any standards it was! Not a sterling knife or fork was missing and oh, how they applauded when William told them that a boy present was eating with the same silver the President of the United States had used when he was recently here.

But what did disappear as was reported in the LOS ANGELES TIMES were one hundred turkeys, eight hundred pounds of mashed potatoes, fifty gallons of coffee, thirty gallons of milk, one hundred loaves of bread, six gallons of cranberry sauce, fifty bunches of celery, six gallons of green peas, six gallons of gravy, three hundred pounds of dressing, twenty-five pounds of butter, one hundred mince pies, and one thousand oranges.

Significantly, there was an orange for ever boy to have, to hold in his hand and to take home, for the orange was always the symboy of plenty to William. He remembered he had never tasted one until the generous hearted Lottie gave him one from the bowl on the kitchen table of Clayton's Washington house.

When the dinner was over, a little boy was seen standing in the corner of the hall crying out his heart.

"Does you stomach hurt?" William asked tenderly, feeling he had only eaten too much.

"No," he sobbed without being able to answer.

"Then why are you crying?"

When the sobs subsided enough so he could answer, he burst out, "My sister didn't get none."

The next Christmas, Eddie Maier told William to invite a thousand boys of the street to a second annual Christmas dinner.

"I guess we'll have to invite their sisters this time," said William, and told him the story of the sobbing boy who couldn't enjoy it because his "sister didn't get none."

The head of the Los Angeles Brewery replied, "Well, tell them to bring their sisters along, the more the merrier."

The little Kuzman lad smiled widely when he heard the announcement at Sunday School that their sisters were also welcome. When the dinner hour finally arrived, he was first in line with his sister by his side and accompanied by their father. William said nothing to the bearded, heavy-set Russian, but watched him take a seat in the balcony to watch over his son and daughter with sharp, diligent eyes.

Some of the boys were a little better dressed with girls present than they had been the previous year, but many came in street clothes and barefoot, probably because they had no other clothes to wear.

The children were assembled and bowed their heads reverently while William prayed fervently, joyfully with a heart full and running over for this unique opportunity to fill the stomachs and hearts of so many poor children

Then the hosts at each table, Bible students who had volunteered to serve, began to carve the big, brown turkeys.

William could not pass up any opportunity to carve a big turkey and was presiding at the table where the two Kuzman children were seated. He was still curious about the father sitting in the balcony, watching over his children, no movement escaping his attention.

Little Mary Kuzman's eyes bounced with excitement as she watched William carve the beautiful bronze turkey. "I can hardly wait. I have never tasted turkey. Do you think Papa will let us eat it?" she asked her brother.

"Yep, I ate it last year."

"But Papa wasn't here then. If he should say 'no,' I think I would die."

"Be still. He is coming now."

The stern Russian father left the gallery and went directly to William. All the children except his two were eating their dinners with ravenous delight.

"Is the turkey cooked with pig?" their father inquired of William.

He was evidently a member of a religious sect that forbade the use of lard in their cooking. "Dunkabors?" the Russian father inquired of William.

So intent with carving, William nodded negatively.

"No?" the bearded parent wanted to be sure.

"I understand. No, the turkey is cooked with butter," Papa said. "There is no sausage in the dressing. Everything is cooked in butter."

A smile covered the face of the immigrant father. "Iss goot," then pointing to his children, he shouted, "Can eat. No pig."

Chapter Twenty

Los Angeles Street had been known as the "jungle" of the city and that was partially how the "soul" of the jungle had been tamed. Papa himself referred to his ministry as the "Gospel of the Open Air," or more often, "Ministry of the Unchurched." It was an active ministry indeed.

William, and usually Calvin, left for Los Angeles early Sunday mornings to conduct the "bootblack" Sunday School at eleven, and serve a noon-time meal for these poor boys of the street.

On holidays, there was turkey, but the boys usually would ask afterwards when would they be having weenies again.

However, on school days, Papa went to Los Angeles by Pacific Electric train and preached every afternoon for two and sometimes three hours in the open air, as well as to deliver a short noon-day combined hot meal and sermon for working men. Then in the evening he would conduct a Bible Class for any who wished to attend the little Mission on Los Angeles Street. It was a rigorous ministry, but he was indefatigable.

Our religious training had been varied. Father tried to instill within us the importance of believing with our hearts and accepting the Bible as the Word of God. But he did not seem to hold any church preference. Rather, he preached tolerance for all Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic.

In time, I realized Calvin was having a good time at the Presbyterian Church, so when I was old enough, I joined, too. The principal of the high school was also the Sunday School Superintendent, and he invited me to play the organ for the primary department. Later I also became their teacher. Finally father was convinced I was sincerely interested in belonging to the Presbyterian church and gave me some encouragement.

The pastor of the church, Dr Hugh K. Walker, whose daughter was my closest friend, asked me if I would invite my father to address the prayer meeting. The subject was to be, "What Does The Youth of Today Need?"

Dr Walker pointed out in introducing Father, "Mr. Mullen had been invited because he has had wide experiences with the boys of the street, in Chicago, San Francisco, and in Los Angeles, and his work already has covered more than a quarter of a century educating them."

I remember that Wednesday evening as though it were yesterday. When Father started to talk, his voice was not one that boomed to the ends of the block, nor did it have the fiery tones of accusation charged with vehemence upon the wealthy employer who took advantage of the impoverished worker, or the misguided laborer who looked to direct action to force improvement by revolution instead of working for constructive evolution. He spoke, rather, in Gaelic minor tones, for his heart was in this children's work.

If those attending expected to hear prophetic warnings as to the future of America in the hands of the street toughs, they were surprised, but not disappointed, when he said, "You have asked me what is our greatest need in education today, especially what the poor boys of the street need to make them good citizens. I tell you the needs of the boy of the street, the little dirty-faced boy, clothed in a suit many sizes too big for him, shod in man's cast-off shoes, with his homemade bootblack box thrown over his careworn shoulder is the same as the needs of the boy in your home, or in my home, or in any other home. Love--that is all--love."

He went on telling of the heroism of these lads, the love they often poured out on a widowed mother, the happiness they felt when others were interested in them. He told of their Sunday meetings at eleven o'clock, how they attended the little Mission after their morning work was over, a hundred boys--Russians, Armenians, Mexicans--how they heard a Bible story in their own vernacular, the story of Joseph or David or Daniel to inspire any one in trouble needing God's help to make him brave and honest and true. He spoke of the way they disciplined each other, and when the lesson was over how a major or a captain or sergeant handled the crowd so effectively that one could almost hear a pin drop.

"They are not forbidden to smoke or drink, but none of them seem to want to," he said, "and they are trying hard to be true and clean and honest; and it works on the poor boy in the same way it works on the rich lad."

It ended as it had begun, in the soft, quiet tones of this man whose flock was the people of the street, the anarchists, the I.W.W.'s, the unemployed or their children, the bootblacks, the newsboys, the street vendors, the children in rags, in tattered clothes, the barefoot, the hungry children who go to Sunday School because it means a Sunday dinner. Love, the power of love is the answer to what the nation's poorest children need. "How can ye love God whom ye have not seen, if ye love not man whom ye have seen."

Soon after that day, my father asked me: "Do you still want to join the church, Sister?"

"Yes," I said.

"And Calvin, too?"

"Yes."

"Then I will talk to your mother. She was a member of the Presbyterian Church when I met her. I have given some study to this and I think we might just as well make joining church a family project."

That was how my father, who had been a minister for twenty-five years, finally affiliated with a denomination, and it so happened it was a Presbyterian Church, not Catholic, Baptist, Methodist or Lutheran.

"A church is where those gathered together in the name of the Lord are," was the way he explained it.

I was not surprised when a little later the minister of this Church asked if he could submit William's name for ordination before the Los Angeles County Presbytery.

Father looked forward to being ordained when he was a young minister, but had met with so much frustration on every hand in his early ministry that it was a thorn in his flesh that he had not been able to attend college or a seminary. He gave it no more thought, when the anguish of these bitter memories had subsided. Now he had become so wrapped up in his flock that it was of no importance to him, nor to his congregation. His scholarliness had been valued for what it was.

The Los Angeles Presbytery gave the examination with over two hundred ministers pouring out questions at him, only to be amazed at his unhesitating flow of accurate replies from the Bible, quoting the answer with Bible verses, giving the actual verse and chapter located in the Bible.

He came home that night, knowing he had passed with flying colors. "I gave one answer I thought would not be accepted, but it was," he told us.

I knew if he believed it true he would have given the same answer, even if it meant failure. "What was it?" I asked.

"They asked me to name the sacraments and instead of giving the two, Baptism and Communion, used symbolically in the Presbyterian Church, I added a third, Marriage, which is a sacrament in the Catholic Church.

When I attended Occidental College, my Bible teacher told me that he had never seen such a remarkable demonstration of biblical knowledge. "Why I believe it impossible to have asked him for a verse that he could not have given verbatim."

"That's right," I told him. "He knows it all by heart."

He had been called "Reverend" for many years now. Just as no one would have thought of calling him "Reverend" instead of Sky Pilot" or "Cowboy Preacher" in his first years of evangelism, no one would not have called him "Reverend" in his later years. But now that he had earned the title, he could use it if he had wished to so do.

No one could keep him out of a pulpit now for breaking wild horses nearby. Only there were no more horses to be tamed! There weren't even many wild men left on the street. America was now knee-deep in the war effort.

The flag was flying high at the little Mission. The bootblack boys had always begun their services by saluting the flag as well as singing "America" so they only had to sing it louder for a war going on.

There was less and less money for the Mission expenses, try as hard as William did to earn it, so the Presbyterian Church offered him the use of one of their chapels, which saved the Mission rent. It had a good kitchen, too, in the basement, for preparing the Sunday School meals. And it could be used as well in the afternoon for feeding hungry men who had organized a "Brokefellows Club." This group was comprised mostly of older men who now could not find work. When they joined the "club," they were given a card that read: "If needy, you can get soap to clean you up, soup to fill you up, salvation to keep you up, at Brokefellows Hall, No. 229, South Hill Street."

At four o'clock every Sunday, these men were fed and work secured for all able men who wanted to work. Service men were also "invited" and did drop in to eat, too. In the evening there was the usual service on the street.

Chapter Twenty-one

I look back and wonder how both William and Annie managed with their little brood of four and the slim returns from the small business that got only half a man's time and in a fast-diminishing market. But I do remember those days as days of plenty, of shining damask tablecloths on the dining room table, of big platters of good food, home-baked bread, baked beans on Saturday, bacon and eggs, and pancake breakfasts Sunday mornings, chicken and homemade noodles for "heathen" Sunday dinners, and devil's food cakes, in case friends dropped by on a Sunday afternoon.

Mama never accepted Sunday as a day of rest, much to Father's disapproval. We did have a garden and we all worked in it. There were times when we had a cow and chickens, too. I guess that was part of the management. I remember clean clothes with all buttons sewed on, pressed and mended, even though the brothers pressed their own pants, and a house that sang with cleanliness. How it was all done only Annie could explain. It was a glad house always! William never brought home his hardships.

"Mama wouldn't understand," he told me once. "And I wouldn't want her to."

Then he gave me a letter. If my memory serves me right, it came from Mayor Sebastian, but it could have been Mayor Alexander, for both mayors gave him complete backing in his work. It told him of a big I.W.W. demonstration the police were expecting the following Sunday and that the plan was to bomb Mullen if he tried to preach. It was the opinion of the mayor's office and of the police department as well, that it would be better if he did not show up. He wanted me to know about it, for most likely my older brother would accompany him and he wanted me, who would remain at home, to be aware of what might happen. But when he read the alarm on my face, he smiled. "Never fear, Sister," he consoled me. "God would not let those blackguards hurt me or my boys either. But you keep the letter where it will be safe and say nothing about it to Mama."

"But Papa, you don't have to go this one time," I pleaded.

"Seems to me I gave you a quarter once for learning the Ninety-first Psalm. Have you forgotten it so soon?

I shook my head.

"Remember any of it . . . still?"

"I think so."

"Let me hear you repeat it."

"He that dwelleth in the secret

place of the most High

Shall abide under the shadow of

the Almighty . . . "

When I came to the end--"With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation"--he said, "Good girl. Nothing's going to happen to me. The Lord still has use for me yet."

He always said that when people warned him of impending danger. But I will never forget the anxiety I felt. I was too nervous to go to my own church. (I attended the Presbyterian Church at Long Beach.) I washed my hair and studied, but I remained nervous and unstrung all day. It was the longest and most fearful day I have ever known.

Then came the sound of the familiar footsteps on he porch. Papa was home, with that certain walk he had when I had been a little girl and he had conquered that day an especially vicious horse. Yes, he had overcome the odds!

I rushed to him and put my arms around him and sobbed out loud.

"Whatever is the matter with you, child?" my puzzled mother asked.

Then my father told her, giving it all the suspense of the stories he so loved to tell.

He had had his biggest crowd that day--fifteen thousand men--extending from First to Second Street and overflowing in the doorways and wherever else they could find room to stand! They were there to hold their own celebration and they would not have their enthusiasm drowned out by a street preacher who told about God's love and preached against violence.

The crown had marched, a great throng of them, down Los Angeles Street, congregating finally around his preaching area. The air was charged with the electricity of a thunderstorm about to break.

He took his pulpit in the back of his parked car, took off his coat and hat, handed them to Calvin to keep for him. Then he lifted his head high to pray. Instantly, there was the rumble of an earthquake, an ominous rumbling that foretold something was about to break loose.

His automobile was parked in front of the Mission. By the Mission's open door stood a group of friends who usually came to the meetings, interested Christian workers such as Maurice Clark of Exeter, who never missed a Sunday. Plain-clothed police were standing by, too, keeping their eyes on the ugly crowd.

Then, with the rumbling, came the onrush of vicious men, pushing toward this one lone man in his shirt sleeves, clutching an unopened Bible against his check. They were not going to permit him to say one word, and if he opened his mouth, they promised to shut it.

But he was going to speak, and, as he did, they rushed against his car, closing in on him. Instantly he picked up a nearby chair and hurling it in the air, he cried out: "If one dares cross this line, I will crack his skull and those of the cowards who follow."

There he stood, unafraid--no matter how big the crowd, or how ugly, he would not let them frighten him. The crowd, silenced now, watched him anxiously while he held the chair high above his head.

No one came.

So he dropped the chair and delivered a prayer with his head raised to God. Full of power now, he opened his Bible and preached as only he could while the adrenaline from anger was coursing through his veins.

When he was well into his sermon he noticed excitement was brewing among the crowd directly in front of his car. Still, he kept on preaching. Then he noticed the cause: the promised bomb was under his automobile, smoking menacingly! Before anyone could gather courage to do anything about it, it fizzled and went out. He wanted the crown to know he had seen it, and it had not frightened him. He boomed out the poetry of his favorite Psalm.

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;

nor for the arrow that flieth by day:

"I should have said bomb, shouldn't I?" he added, chuckling a little, too. His face brightened now as he continued giving meaning to the words.

"A thousand shall fall at thy side,

And ten thousand at thy right hand;

But it shall not come nigh thee."

They caught the meaning of the words. Here was a man who had something they did not have, and because of it there was no fear in him, and from then on, they listened with rapt attention and many must have wished they, too, could have had his strange power, this something that made him set apart from the crowd.

He looked into the heavens and put his left hand in his pants pocket and raised his right hand high into the air as he declared with magnificence and beauty:

For he shall give his angels charge over thee,

To keep thee in all ways,"

They knew it had been true. Fifteen thousand men had assembled to demonstrate the wildness of the street. What they demonstrated instead was God's power to tame it with love.

In the months that followed communism seemed to be on the rise, so William staged a celebration similar to the ones the I.W.W. often staged when they marched to the open forum where he would preach--this time on Eighth Street between Spring Street and Broadway.

His theme was "Christianity versus Communism." This time, he defied the foul-mouthed speakers to reply to the logic of his argument in the cause of I.W.W.-ism.

It was published next day in a news story for the LOS ANGELES TIMES:

"In the oratorical battleground, here we find these reformers, these blaspheming communists, these I-Wobbly-Wobblies, who are ever screaming for pies and doughnuts without labor, seeking these favors which the devil offered to heap upon Jesus. Why, we read of one of them trying to be Governor and when he cannot obtain the Governorship, he is willing to take a Constableship, and, failing that, he announced his willingness to take that of Poundmaster. Anything! Anywhere! Anyhow! To feel at the political crib. Not having brains to do business, too lazy to work, he would like to be fed by others."

He received his first blow from the hands of the strong arm members of the I.W.W. just as he had received but one injury in all his years of horse training. So he was to be injured, finally, by one of the street thugs.

It was in late January, 1917. The California rainy season compelled him to remain home for a Sunday. He had been with us for two of Annie's lovely Sunday dinners and then on the third Sunday, the first week in February, the sun poured forth a beautiful spring morning, and he went to conduct his street meeting in his usual place. But instead, two I.W.W. meetings were holding forth in front of his Mission. He stood at the fringe of the crowd and this angered the I.W.W. members, who mingled in his audience and tried to break up the meeting. He started to get down from his auto pulpit to move the men out, and before he reached the ground, he was struck with a blackjack. As he toppled over, two other men struck him again, knocking three teeth loose. Calvin, now an experienced football player on the Occidental College team, wanted to get into the fight, but Father checked him and in so doing let the men get away.

Of course Calvin was hurt to think he wasn't permitted to fight.

"It was not your battle," Father said.

When the altercation was over, William climbed back into the auto and continued preaching. He promised when the sermon was over, "I'll be back next Sunday."

Calvin drove him home. Papa staggered into bed where he remained for several days, but by the following Sunday, he was back again preaching as usual.

rope seemed to cause the I.W.W.'s to mobilize in still greater strength in America. Socialism had its origin in Germany, Syndicalism in France, Anarchistic Communism in Russia. The I.W.W. was the American counterpart.

Those who belonged to the various national branches of the revolutionary, industrial movement opposed the war on the grounds that it forced them to go to war against their brothers. Thus the war abroad only fomented greater agitation here for more I.W.W. members, so labor difficulties took on increasing violence. The entire world seemed to be moving toward a General Strike that would precipitate the overthrow of all government. And, in fact, such was the plan.

After the incident of the bomb, nevertheless, William was permitted to preach unmolested. He had talked, sung, and prayed down the toughs for four intervening years, but now all his time and effort went into vocalizing about that turning the other cheek, that "ridiculous doctrine of Jesus," the I.W.W.'s scoffed. But they came and listened and laughed just he same. About a thousand a year of the men had accepted this religion William proposed as the antidote for "anarchistic communism."

Lawless bands had been forming all summer in Los Angeles as well as in the valley, where they swarmed down upon the ranches in predatory bands. Little by little they had been rounded up and jailed, or been run out of town, in the small farming communities. But now that the rains had come, they had moved in on Los Angeles, taking possession of the river bed. The police had responded by arresting one hundred and seven men one Sunday, including some of their leaders. Those who had successfully dodged arrest scurried out of town.

Immediately after these mass arrests, William sought a conference with the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and the District Attorney.

When asked what he wanted done with these men, he replied:

"I want them released from prison and given a chance to work."

"But they have had plenty of opportunity to work. You know that, Mullen."

"Yes, I know it. But these men are misguided. It will give me a chance to talk to their leaders." He laughed here. "Where they will have to listen."

"No one understands the I.W.W.'s better than you, Mullen, and yet you call them misguided." the District Attorney said.

"But they are. They are easy prey to agitators as all poor people are. How can you expect them to be good citizens when they have had numbers of unemployed men in every big city but there is never anyone to explain to them how they can find a new and good life in Jesus Christ."

The Mayor looked quizzically at the Police Chief. The District Attorney shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.

"You believe that, don't you, Mullen?" the Mayor said, "this is the answer to all our problems?"

"Well it gets at the cause. You have to do that before you can get to the effect."

But that did not mean they discounted his method, for they had admitted he had tamed the lawless street. They respected what he had to say and listened while he continued trying to win them over to his plan.

He argued: "While we are sending missionaries to foreign lands and thus glorifying God, we forget that there are thousands of heathen at our own door, who live in sin, darkness and sorrow, with misery in this life and no hope in the life to come, filled with ignorance and superstition and thus we find them turning to socialism, communism, and anarchism."

He went on to explain. "These are the people colonizing in that section where I preach, and I know them to be first and foremost discouraged men, who cannot endure their lives without an Advisor, a Strength-given, a Comforter as you and I have. What they want is someone to give them help, to give them love, to give them peace--a friend to save them from this life of misery, someone to lead them out from the shadows of death into a land of sunlight, joy."

He was so intent on what he was saying, they could not help but weigh his words. They listened to him with sincerity. They, themselves, were almost convinced.

The Chief of Police debated him, saying: "But they were arrested as lawbreakers. You believe we should enforce the law, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," William replied. "I agree they should have been arrested. Force is the only thing they understand. I admit that, and that is your job and you have done it. But mine is to help them and to bring them the gospel and I must do my job, too."

"But you ask to have them released. You are not asking for the privilege of preaching to them in prison!"

"I have found the heart is best reached through the stomach. And the best way, the only way to get at that is through work."

"Then you want them released for work."

"Yes, I want them to know in this big city there is someone who cares for them. That's what I want. Can you ask such people to be good citizens, to be kind and true fathers, who know no love, know no truth, who know no life, no light? Does this not create that army of men who congregate here in Los Angeles, breathing out vengeance and blasphemy against a God they don't know, cursing their luxuriously-living brothers, and teaching a vile doctrine of sabotage, a philosophy of destruction and anarchy and lawlessness?"

"You're probably right," the Mayor agreed. "Their motto is no God, no master, no respect for anyone. What they cannot obtain by fair means, they teach to obtain by foul. I know this class claims no allegiance to our government, to society, to law. Poor fellows, they have no rest, day or night. When they are not in the jungle, they are in cheap flophouses. Now that they have migrated back to Los Angeles they gather in crowds on the street, listening to the agitators, who urge them to adopt means of violence, to disregard law, and to reject all moral customs. But arresting them isn't going to correct the matter."

You have almost convinced me," the Chief of Police replied. "It will only cost the taxpayers considerable money to prove them guilty of breaking a law they will continue to break anyway then they get out."

"Yes, they have already asked for jury trials," the Mayor said. "We will have to keep them in jail until they can go to trial. And there are one hundred seven of them to house and feed."

"Yet it still doesn't give them jobs after their sentences are fulfilled," Mullen argued,. "I would ask you to suspend their sentences, and I would teach them that someone besides the agitator is interested in them. That is what I would do."

"Do you propose to get them jobs?"

"I do."

"All right," they concluded. "Go out and get them jobs, if you can find anyone willing to hire them. When you have gotten work for them, we will release them to you."

Papa came home a happy and unburdened man that night, glad that he had made the city administration see his point. If they were to have law-abiding citizens, they had to recognize that a man must have employment to keep his self-respect, that when he doesn't, he is provided with fertile ground for the seeds of sedition.

The next day he made the rounds of all the industrial plants. At first all he got were refusals. Then he used his rhetoric for the effective weapon he had always found it to be.

"Can the unemployed father go to his unfitly-furnished home and behold his discouraged wife and see his dying child drying and pleading for food, nourishment or medicine? he asked the industrialists. "Can he see the undertaker paid by the county, come in and place in a pauper's coffin that cold form, after suffering as it did, and bury it in a pauper grave? Can he remember that sweet, merry laugh that rang from its lips?"

One by one, they broke down and agreed to give these men work on a trial basis.

Then he was faced with his hardest task, getting the men themselves to agree to forfeit going to trial and to go to work instead.

His tactics with the men were the reverse, "Of course, if you would rather huddle together in the jungle, too lazy to work, relying on hunting, killing all you catch, getting a dime or a nickel from a kind professional man to obtain your liquor, and to steal a piece of meat and an onion and potato to make your Mulligan stew, that's a nice easy life for you. If that's all you want, you can starve for all I care."

"What's in it for you?" one of the leaders asked.

"The greatest reward a man ever had."

"What?"

"Seeing one soul brought to the Kingdom of God."

"But going to work won't bring about that!"

Humor never failed William. He smiled. "Don't you know that if God can get one of you men to go to work, He will have performed the biggest miracle of the year?"

The men laughed.

"Mullen, you're a damn fool," the gang leader said. "I've seen you on Los Angeles Street. I've even stood there and listened to you. You're interesting. An' we don't bluff you. I've seen our men throw bricks and bottles at you. I've seem them curse you and sing dirty songs about you. Why do you want to get us out of jail now? I should think you'd be free to have things all pretty much your way. I jes' don't get it--why?"

"God hath not appointed man to wrath but to salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ," Father quoted from scriptures.

"I think you really believe that, don't you?"

"I do."

"I'll think about it. Come back tomorrow. I'll give you my answer then."

Before the week was over, the tired shoulders were bravely erect once more and the smile had returned to the recently trouble-worn face. "I got them all to go back to work but one man, and that bum wouldn't work no matter how hard we tried to make him." Nothing was more disgusting to William than a man who was too lazy to work. "And besides, the mean fellow had spoiled my record," he added quickly.

He had to keep after them, though, encouraging the released men to stay on the job, also seeing that the people who had given them employment weren't letting them down. That was the beginning of a free employment bureau that he ran in connection with his Mission on Los Angeles Street for some years to come. He also got a group of lawyers and doctors to offer their services free to help these people, in sickness and in trouble.

Chapter Twenty-two

Sunday after Sunday, William showed more and more signs of the strain, of tense war days, while the Los Angeles Street work showed more signs of a growing restlessness.

Those who had helped finance the Mission work before were now interested in buying Liberty Bonds. William realized the time was approaching when he had to face the fact his ministry was ended.

He had brought "order out of chaos" as the LOS ANGELES TIMES phrased it. Granted it had not been the spectacular evangelism of the decade. No singing, no advance men, no well-trained ushers, or generous money support, no mass conversions, but plenty of new members to swell old church rosters.

In William's words, however, "many hearts had been reached." Violence had been subsided; indeed, the gentle had conquered the wild.

William toyed with the gold pieces he had kept in his pants pocket throughout the years of his ministry across the United States. Once again he recalled the promise of the Bible and quoted one more time:

I have been young and now am old;

yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken

nor his seed begging bread.

In the six years he had been gentling the street, he had offered the twenty-dollar gold piece every Sunday, offered it to any man who could bring to his attention one example of a Christian family in need. Yet there had not been one taker and the promise was still good. He put it in his pants pocket, shaking his head. His smiling countenance was covered with somberness.

"Annie, my darling. Children, my dears," he announced at the supper table. "I have something to say. There is nothing left but the gold pieces and God's work he will provide for his own."

"I have been thinking, Calvin, and soon, Everett, will be of age to joint the army. I want my sons to do everything for their country, but I cannot convince myself that God wants us to kill any man. I offered my services to the Cavalry to train the army's horses, but they would not take me. They said I was too old, but I am not too old to farm in the San Joaquin Valley, to raise produce for the needs of our country. If you are willing, I will put our house up for sale and we shall all farm together. There is a great need to supply food for the hungry here and 'Over There.'"

Annie whitened. She had never once disagreed with William. He had always "been right." She had done everything to help his work, economize, skimp, and save, never complaining for the lonely nights, when he didn't come home until nearly midnight, the budgeting to feed the poor, going without garments to clothe the ragged, only to hear him announce:

"I am going to farm."

Annie had always hated the Valley, but she said not a word. Perhaps it was because she, too, thought taking up farming would keep her sons out of the war. Perhaps it was the only way to get the children through college.

True to William's good fortune, he sold the home quickly and with enough profit to buy one hundred acres of land in Shafter, Kern County.

We all pitched in packing with a vigor, but when no one was around, Annie would sit on the piled-up boxes and cry her heart out for the little brick and stucco home with the long row of Shasta daisies that grew from the side street to the alley, the fan-palm trees edging the street and the garden, fragrant from General MacArthus roses that thrived in the side yard. Asparagus, peas and tomatoes grew in abundance in the backyard. "Our salt-of-the-earth Annie," as Aunt Bob referred to her, would never have another house like the one she had there.

I think she thought of me as being disloyal because I made no protest. But it was considered patriotic to lend a hand at raising food and many of my friends planned to become "farmerettes." So I felt I was doing my bit, too, and I was glad. I had joined a speaking group at Occidental College and was going about with other young people from theater to theater selling Liberty Bonds. Father had become a dollar-a-year-man, working for the government selling Liberty Bonds, too. He was "making the world safe for democracy," destroying once and for all the "Kurtur of might makes right."

"I told your father it would mean losing you," Mama said, eyeing me closely, trying to read the thoughts of my heart. "I said you would never go live on a farm."

She wanted so much to have one in the family share her dread of that hot, dry country. I think there still lingered the memory of that six months' pastorate at the Bakersfield Baptist Church and small blame to her!

So on a warm June morning, we set out for Shafter on the winding, then narrow, Ridge Route, across tawny mountains splotched with dark green of the scrub oak. The Model T Ford bravely climbed the crest of the horseshoe formed by the meeting of the two mountain ranges, the ragged Sierras with lofty snow-capped peaks, and the not-so-lofty but greener rolling ridges of the Coast range. It was an all-day trip in the loaded-down touring car. The sun drove straight down with stinging rays. The wind scurried through the curtainless car, and a blast from the fiery furnace that we could not escape.

Yet our black touring car labored up the steep grade, spouting and hissing angrily. Father was a ludicrous sight sitting straight and looking massive behind the little steering wheel so people could probably not help but think it was he that made the little car go and not the engine inside it.

When the Pass was reached, the car slowed down, and then screeched to a stop. He squeezed under the wheel and jumped out on the red road to fill the sputtering radiator with water from the burlap bag that had hung on the car door.

"Boiling! Never saw anything like it! We have too much of a load," he sputtered out. "All this junk! You women never throw your burdens away."

"It's the sun that makes it so hot," Annie retorted. "And this isn't junk."

"Burdens!"

"Memories," Annie corrected.

"Memories belong in the heart, not loaded in a Model T."

Still with all its burden of memories, the Model T made its last heroic effort to climb the summit. And did. There below lay the Valley, the terrible Valley, shimmering vibrantly in the sun. The good mountains would soon be hovering in the distance with black shadows settling on their peaks. And we would belong to the Valley, the hot, terrible, unconquerable Valley, the Valley that was to blossom someday as a rose.

"There it lies, the world's finest Valley. And do you know it's bigger than three New England states and can produce more food than all of New England. All it needs is water to make it the world's most productive valley."

"Yes," he boasted, "the world's finest Valley. I wish I could have been bringing you here in February or March when the entire floor of the oval Valley was covered with purple lupine and the red paint-brush. What a sight that would have been for you."

"Water! Doesn't seem to be any signs of that! Where is all this water to come from?" young brother Oliver asked.

"From the rain," Papa said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

"Does it rain much here?! I asked. (I knew there was only one rainy season in California and it wasn't summer. But this thirsty land could never have been visited recently by water, so desolate did it appear now.)

"No," Father said. "Only about three inches. But at the other end of the Valley, north of Sacramento, there's as much as one hundred inches of rain and snowfall."

"So how are they going to get the water here?" my sister, Elizabeth, asked.

"They will move it, wee sister," Papa said. "Someday they will move it."

We all accepted it without question. When Father spoke like that, he had a way of making you believe what he said, no matter how fantastic it sounded.

There must be others with this same faith, for as we sped along the beeline stretch of road across the prosperous Valley, men were planting along the public highway small cottonwood trees and watering the infant saplings to add some change of vegetation to the jimson week, the sage brush, and the brittle, stalked weeds with choking pods.

To us, Bakersfield looked like any other early California pioneer town, although not as attractive as the newer ones sprouting up in Southern California.

But I never saw Papa happier than when he ended the monotonous forty-mile "straightway" ride from the mountain pass across the parched fields to arrive at Bakersfield, a city he had loved from his younger days. He had to stop to say "hello" to old friends, of course, to tell them that at long last, he was to become a resident of Kern County.

"What a place this is for you," he told Annie. "Finest place in the world . . . wonderful country . . . no people like the Bakersfield people . . . honest, frank, open-hearted. How well I remember Bakersfield. Don't you, Annie?"

"Yes, I remember it," Annie said.

I thought I detected a touch of sarcasm in her voice, but I did not press the matter.

We left Bakersfield after a congenial lunch with hospitable friends. "That's the way fold are here," Father said proudly, glad to find the present was loyal to the past.

We then journeyed on, past the red-brick hospital, and across the bridge of the winding tree-shaded Kern River.

"A river!" wee sister called out excitedly.

"Why there's no water in it at all," Oliver said in disappointment.

"It's quite a river in the spring," my father came back. "You should see it then as it rushes down the narrow canyons from the hills. Why, I have seen this community flooded in the spring, but before long the wild river had receded so much that when summer came, there was hardly any water at all! And this summer's unusually dry! We haven't had a dry season like this in many years. There used to be a community of English people ahead at Rosedale. When we pass there you'll see the tall palm-lined driveway. All this was once part of the biggest irrigated farms in the world. The government will soon awaken to our needs for irrigation and this will again be the garden spot of the world. That is if they don't strike oil before."

"And how are we to get water on our place?" Annie wanted to know.

"Wait and you shall see, my dear. There's a surprise in store for you! We shall soon be at Shafter. another twenty miles and you shall see."

"I'm glad. I'm tired," mother replied. "I want to get home before dark so I can get things straightened up a bit before we retire."

The next twenty miles took us first past a few farms where chickens hid wherever they could find any shade, and pigs lay panting wherever a shadow fell.

Then there were no more farms--only dark green, resinous sage, in a land that was otherwise brown and beige. The only motion of life now was the skittering of gophers in their holes, or bounding leaps of long-eared jackrabbits from brush to brush.

Suddenly we saw Calvin and young Everett running to greet us, up behind the new, roughly-constructed one-room house they had hastily erected in preparation for our homecoming. They had plowed also, a few acres to give an aspect of pleasant activity to the landscape that had been so monotonously naked except for the never-ending sagebrush.

"It's beautiful," William said with enthusiasm. "The ranch will be level as a table top in no time."

"I want to see the surprise," Mama coaxed. I thought there was more bitterness than hopefulness in her voice. She knew it could not be the rough shack she had just seen.

"You shall see it, my dear," Papa replied, and as proudly as if he were showing her a marble castle. "It's the only ranch around that has one like it in Shafter, to be sure!"

"What?" Annie asked, looking all around her, but seeing nothing.

William walked a few steps beyond the house to stand on a concrete slab and, pouring out of a large pipe was a stream of water that rose from the ground.

"White gold!" William exclaimed joyously, and with a pleasant twinkle in his eyes. "Did you ever see anything like it? The Land Company sank this well as a test-well, to show the settlers coming here every day there's plenty of underground water. You never drank such water in all your life! Clear, pure water. Taste it."

Now his face wore the animated look of a man who had waited a lifetime for this moment. A ranch all his, a ranch that poured forth an abundance of water, and, because of this water, it would yield food--in abundance in fact. "This ranch will yield nine crops of alfalfa a year. Do you know what that means?"

The blank expression on Annie's face told him she didn't.

"It's a hydraulic pump," Everett explained, his brown eyes shining.

Mother could see both boys were happy and, although she didn't understand why, she relaxed. "And will I have to carry water into the house for my work?" she questioned, afraid of what the answer might be.

"Indeed you won't, will she boys?" William asked.

Calvin quickly caught the cue and replied, "We'll carry in a big bucketful every time we come near the house."

"That's right. I don't ever want to see your mother carrying water, or your sisters, either. White gold! White gold!" Father repeated joyously.

Mother, little sister and I set about to unpack and get the house in order while the men worked in the fields.

"To think we could have come here years ago when we were young and more able to endure such hardships," Annie mourned. "To think when your father is old enough to retire he should start at the very beginning, farming . . . it is such a hard life!"

But in spite of Mother's low spirits, there was a certain air of adventure about the undertaking. Once more we would have our own horses, and the boys' first job would be to build a corral and then a reservoir which we would use for irrigation as well as for swimming! We glanced at each other. Our faces seemed to agree it just wasn't going to be as difficult as it had appeared on the surface.

Calvin and Everett and eight-year-old Oliver raced to the corral to do the chores. That included milking the cow which was housed in a lean-to shed. feeding two plow horses, Old Sal and George, not to forget the collie, Mark, showing multiple signs of happiness that the family was again reunited.

Mother and I unpacked our provisions and set to preparing a good supper. Elizabeth, almost four, tried her best to set the table.

Papa was philosophizing there was nothing so bad a good meal couldn't made better.

Chapter Twenty-three

We slept outdoors that first summer, all except William and Annie. While the three brothers were up early and busy outside with morning chores, William would be busy starting the day's homework, heating the favored soapstone griddle over the two front burners of the coal-oil flame of a Skelgas range, and stirring up pancakes.

Mama would be cooking oatmeal, little Elizabeth setting the table, Mama frying crisp bacon and poaching eggs-all the familiar jobs of a well-ordered breakfast.

The family was singing again and praying again around the well-appointed breakfast table-praying for strength to do the job at hand, and for the American forces in Europe, and for those intent on proving "might doesn't make right."

The rough, unpainted batt and board house had no shades or even curtains as yet to shut out the knifing rays of a cruel sun. "We will plant grass. That will help," William promised. "and when the reservoir is finished, we will get the coolness of its moisture."

"As well as to go in swimming," Everett said, gleefully.

There was plenty of work on the ranch that first year, digging out the reservoir, building the high edges to hold the water, planting weeping willows around the beige banks, and cottonwoods along the side of the house to get a little shade for the next summer, which we hoped would not be as tortuous as the present one.

"I don't know how I can ever stand the heat," Annie complained. She would rise at four to get her work done in the cool of the morning, but when noonday came she would refusing to quit, saying she could rest at "sitting down" work, preparing fruit for canning, or mending, or ironing.

"But it's really not hot," Papa kept assuring us. "it's dry heat. Why if it were this hot in Chicago we would all de dropping dead."

Bakersfield was his country. He could not bear to admit there was anything unpleasant about it.

He and his three sons worked with a verve those first few summer months, getting the land leveled, planting the fields of alfalfa, seeding a vegetable garden, planting an orchard, buying pure-bred Poland China pigs and carrying on the many activities from his stored-up know-how. He prided himself he could work right along with his three sons. Yes he had an inner lining that was corrugated iron and the strength of three men.

When he fame in for his nooning, he would sit at the table, the table that mama still set in the living-diving room with the lovely white damask tablecloth of pure Irish linen. Before eating, Papa would bow his head and pour out his thanks for "this land that would some day be a good home for many." And all the while the sweat would be pouring from his face and hands, and dripping on the Wilton rug Mama had brought from the stucco cottage. She would ask me to get a newspaper and put it down beside his chair to save her prized possession from the salty sweat.

"Such heat! Such heat!" she would say, tsk-tsking, and shaking her head wearily before sitting down to eat, only to get up again and obtain a fly swatter and continue waging her private war against ants and flies and the heat that had become her life in the Valley.

Then, one day in the fall, William heard at the village that there was to be a Farm Bureau meeting. He looked forward to attending with his two sons, who, too, would become a part of the growing Valley. He had been gathering information from government bulletins. He enjoyed studying the new and better ways to farm and adding whatever information he could to his storehouse of knowledge.

Annie, too, wrote often to the University at Berkeley Extension Division for homemaking booklets. She studied how to raise chickens, and what seeds were to be planted for a family garden, what fruit trees were the best yielders for table fruit and canning. She was even learning new ways to can fruit in their jars in a hot water bath, as well as to make those jewels of the kitchen, the lovely jams and jellies she would eye so proudly. Thus, she, too, found a new happiness and felt pride in her accomplishments.

She baked her own bread three times a week. Such wondrous, fine textured bread! "I declare, your bread is better than most people's cake," William praised her.

She rendered her own pure, leaf lard from the Poland China hogs the men raised. She made doughnuts, and french-fried potatoes to make one smile. She always kept every scrap of unused fat for the lovely white soap she showed to her new friends who would visit our place.

Mama noticed Papa found more and more excuses to go to Bakersfield. When he'd return home, he always had little exciting incidents to tell of meeting old friends, Tom O'Brien, Tim Sullivan, Dr. George Sabichi-all the many people with whom he had spent his youth, and his eyes sparkled again with blueness, and for a while he was happy. His friends were oil men, or working for the big land company, or in the hotels, or in garages, everywhere in this active city. He would stop to talk with the sheriff, Cas Walser, with Paul Hornung, who still had a harness shop on Chester Avenue, with all those people of his warm-hearted youth.

And now past fifty, he was beginning life anew amongst a people he couldn't even talk to or understand because they spoke either German or Russian.

When Sunday came and there was no English-speaking church to go to, we had a long Bible lesson around the breakfast table and when the lesson and the prayers were over, we mounted our horses and rode out into the ever-widening, barren acres in the Maple territory where there was little but sage brush and skittering jackrabbits to keep us company. Our horses would give us many exhilarating rides following our collie dog, Mark, who followed the hound, Bones, a new addition whom Oliver had adopted, and who followed the leaping jackrabbits with their flapping long ears as they scurried in and out and around the sage. We loved this active, free life. We had each other and somehow we were not lonely as were our parents.

Thus the summer for us young folks passed.

In the fall, my older brother, Calvin, joined the army although he was still too young to be drafted. He would not have been drafted, papa told him, since he was doing war work.

"Well, perhaps God, in his goodness, would see fit not to put a gun in his hand."

I went back to college for a second semester while Annie and William and the three younger children remained at home.

Winter came, but not the gentle rains needed to percolate water into the floor of the Valley.

Family upon family kept pouring into the land that had once belonged to the big Kern County Land Company. But the rains still stayed away from the thirsty land.

Another summer came, and with it the larger power bills, for the ranch's 120 acres were all in production, yielding corn and cotton and alfalfa. With war's demands, the produce brought high prices. William added another room to the still-unpainted house, and a bathroom with a bathtub and hot and cold running water. The water was heated with bottled gas. A screened sleeping porch was added, where Elizabeth and I slept.

Annie was delighted that she didn't have to rely on others to carry the water from the well to the kitchen either, for a pipe from a newly-built tank house provided pressure for an indoor water supply. A new contentment filled her.

I learned to be a real farmerette that second year, driving a team, in summer's vacation, and handling most of the farm equipment, and even shocking hay. Inside work seemed dull compared to the romance of watching the desert bloom. The power that came from viewing the wide acres and feeling the challenge of harnessing them to man's own resources was contagious. I wanted to feel a part of this strength of the growing Valley as well as help my father and brothers. "Little sister, help your mama," I would say.

Little by little, new families came in to quickly erect batt and board houses with no time either for painting them. And soon the bright green leaves of potato plants bushed out to add color to a beige and brown earth.

I learned to pick potatoes, following the potato digger that dug up the profitable food from the rich soil and poured it forth to be picked up and placed in sacks.

"Shafter Whites," Father said proudly, holding a large potato in his hand as though it were a five-carat diamond. "The finest potato in the world. It will make a rich man of the settlers who have come to live in the Valley." Potatoes were priced at nine cents a pound.

The green cottonwoods grew, casting needed shade on the scant shanty. No matter; it would do for another year. The reservoir with its good supply of water, and the weeping willows, and the grass that grew in the front yard, all added coolness to combat the over-one-hundred degree heat that persisted all summer. Nor did we dare complain, for William would defend the Valley anyway.

"It is so dry you don't feel the heat," he would tell us almost every day; we did not argue as we wiped away the sweat from our faces.

The months came. So did new settlers. The high prices brought by war's demands made farming popular. People swarmed into the Valley.

Then came the Armistice and with that Calvin soon came home to football, classes, and his best girl.

But now the real battle began for us-to pay the power bills and the interest money. Annie regretted William having spent their quickly-earned money on the many improvements needed to make her home comfortable.

"Oh, well, if our foresight were only as good as our hindsight!" William said. "The rains will come and there will not be such a great need for pumping water. That would diminish the biggest demand for the irrigation we could not afford.

William thought of that fertile northern portion of the Valley with its color-splotched green fields of Dos Pasos where he had trained horses as a young man. He knew the bounty of this land came from its great abundance of rain and snow that fell in the Sacramento watershed. Two-thirds of all California's rain fell upon this beautiful Valley.

"But it can't contain more than a third of the acreage of the Great Central Valley," he told himself. "there must be a way to water the San Joaquin portion that contains the other two-thirds of arable land."

But why did you come to such a place?" was the only answer Annie could give.

"The soil is rich here. When we came to Shafter there was plenty of water."

"Then why isn't it there now?"

"Too many wells taking too much water. But there must be a way to conquer the rambunctiousness of the land."

"Look out!" Annie thought. "When William uses that word 'rambunctious,' he is ready to swing into action."

"Why I remember when I was a pastor at Bakersfield, we had so much rain here, don't you remember that?"

"Yes, I remember," Annie added.

"It's not like Annie to be so snappish," William thought to himself, "this hardship is getting on her nerves."

In some areas the water table dropped so low, the farmers could not afford to pump the brackish water. Many ranchers, for lack of water, gave up their parched lands, and went back to the city. Paint peeled on the houses, fences sagged; weeds grew around the cottage door where red roses had once bloomed. The acres that had been green with alfalfa, too, now were brittle brown stalks of barrenness. Saddest of all were the naked orchards that had been voluptuous with fruit.

"What was that poem you had to memorize for school?" William asked me. "I think it was by Goldsmith."

"Ill fares the land

to hastening ills the prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay . . . " I answered.

"Yes, that's it. Could it be Shafter will someday be a deserted village?" William knit his brows.

He was smiling less, too. But the sun continued to smile down on the Valley, baking already dry fields. It smiled down on the Sacramento River, as well, as it wound in and out of the northern part of the upper Valley, before it finally poured its billions of gallons of water through the Golden Gate into the sea.

"There must be a way to use every drop of water God gives us without all this waste," William brooded. "There must be a way to change this cycle of drought and floods."

He borrowed more and more from the bank and brooded more and more how he would ever be able to pay it back. He could not give up. He would not give up. "If only the farmers in the Valley understood the danger! Would they wait to organize a plan to conserve the water when it was nearly gone?" It was a lonely thought.

Papa had not felt so alone in years, and this aloneness would bring him to Bakersfield. Any excuse would do. To be on the go was his sedative. And in his desolation, he felt the channel that had been an open river of living water now uselessly clogged. Perhaps God had not wanted him to give up the Open Air Church. He felt as though a curse was upon him.

Ever since the war had ended, the I.W.W.'s influence had been growing uglier in the state. He had scanned the LOS ANGELES TIMES daily, trying to understand the growing restlessness that was fomenting all over. The street rumbled with new discontent.

"The profiteers!" he would mutter. "How can they be so blinded to the needs of the poor? The country should yield an abundance for all. Wealth, wealth, where is the true wealth but in the physical strength of the people?"

The people! But could one awaken the people?

"That's it. I have gotten away from the people. I have kept my nose to the grindstone so long I have forgotten the people. We have been so busy this past year working we haven't even had time for morning Bible readings."

And then he began to study. At first only a little, while waiting for dinner to be placed on the table; then while resting a little before going back to the fields. He studied, too, well into the rights. One subject seemed to be absorbing his mind. What was it to "curse man."

In the first years, when we moved from Long Beach to the ranch, he had read from the classics and the great philosophers. He had collected a splendid library and used it as few people use home libraries. He also kept abreast with all our school subjects, getting his high school and college education five times over. It was his habit to read aloud to Annie while she was working in the kitchen.

"Just listen to this," he would coax, his face alive with the delight of a new, wonderful passage. "Why this was written a thousand years ago and it's just as true today."

Annie would be kneading bread dough, concerned with those "many things." Not mindful one bit what any philosopher had said a thousand years ago, wishing William would be still and leave her to the peace of mind labor brought her, but too polite not to feign interest. Finally, distracted, she would "shoo" him into the living room. "leave me to my baking, or I never will get through this blessed day," she would say.

When the years grew sterner, he left off this reading and devoted all his time to the hard-won acres, and little by little the wellspring of his earlier enthusiasm became exhausted. The farmers around him began to admit defeat and abandon their ranches. His burden of grief became hard to bear.

Then one day a tremendous desperation overtook him. When I asked him what was gnawing him, he confessed, "I feel I have lost the way. If God does not help me, I am destroyed. Pray for me, Sister."

"I will, Papa, I will."

"And will you go with me to the bank tomorrow?"

"Yes. I will go." I knew he did not have the courage to face the cashier, to tell him he could not meet another payment on our outstanding note.

We left early the next morning to get to Bakersfield before the bank was opened. I tried to keep up a pleasant stream of conversation as we passed Rio Bravo and Rosedale. I could see there was still hope in his heart for he reminisced, "I can remember how I could see the Kings and Kern Rivers rushing down the narrow canyons and strike the Valley with explosive force and sometimes overflow." As we crossed the Kern bridge and turned toward town, he continued. "The San Joaquin would pour down from the hills and overflow into he Kings and flow north to the Delta. And it was the same with the Merced and Toulumne, the Mokelumne and the Chowchilla and the Stanislaus Floods. The rivers have always flowed in the spring, but come summer, the beds become desolate, indolent wastes. And yet with another spring would come floods and floods. The same cycle; the same cycle, just like a rambunctious mustang who needs to be put in the rigging!"

I had a feeling he was trying to resolve the problem of water shortage, but of that other desolation of the spirit, I did not know. He understood wild nature better than these domesticated villagers where he lived. He understood the disheartened people, the downcast people. He knew how to work with them, how to reach them, but these Kern County ranchers who should be discouraged, who should have been disheartened and weren't puzzled him. He did not know how to reach them because they did not need him as had other communities where he had cast his lot. And because of this, he had lost his contact with men.

While many farmers were leaving their farms, the Russian farmers who were his closest neighbors knew how to combat the perverse nature; they had known far greater hardships when they had farmed for the Czar. But he could not count on them to work with him in solving how to get cheaper irrigation. They did not seem to understand there was a need. Ah yet! They would survive where others could not.

And then he remembered!

He remembered a lot of things. He remembered the lovely mist of Ireland and how green the grass grew, but selfish landlords had kept the people from the land that was rightfully theirs.

He remembered the alkali wastes of Texas, and the first time he had chanced upon a reservoir and how one man, with engineering skill, had dammed up the waters and cared for all God's lesser creatures! He remembered how this rancher had accepted the responsibility God had placed upon him, and in accepting the responsibility, the bounty of the land had become his.

The answer seemed to come to him in remembering that first time he went up the trail from the Gulf to the Brazos. Perhaps it was that he remembered even as a lad God had always been with him in all his ways. "Could it be God is calling me in another capacity?" he asked out loud, more to himself than to me.

"Perhaps," I answered, more because didn't know either.

"Sometimes I wonder if God is punishing me for my sin."

"What sin?" I asked. I had heard a lot about sin, but it had never occurred to me to ask what it was, but now, I wanted to understand it more than anything else.

"The Bible has but one definition," and he seemed to speak with great relief. "to him who knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin."

"Yes, it is in James," I now remembered. "I earned five dollars once memorizing that book of James in a day. You didn't think I could do it, did you?" I asked.

"No, I knew you could. But you were filled with snobbery when you were a high school girl. I wanted you to learn when you showed respect for persons you disobeyed God."

He repeated the verse over and over again. "To him who knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." Then the worry left his face. He had resolved the other problem.

He would work and work and work! Work for the water the Valley needed. He would do everything his two hands found to do until the Valley had a supply of water. It was sin not to accept the responsibility. God was calling him to that purpose. I breathed easier. He would not fail at the bank. He would ask for an extension of the loan with such assurance it would be paid back since no one would refuse him!

Yes, I knew he would get it.

And he did.

I knew, also he would work with such renewed courage, doing anything his two hands found to do that he could not help but succeed.

The work turned out to be sausage making. We had our well-cared-for pasture of pure-bred Poland China hogs. The price on the hoof was low. Mama sent to the University Extension Service in Berkeley for information on sausage making. It was spiced almost right. She added a little nutmeg. At lunch we tried the new sausage, "Ah, that's perfect," all of us agreed.

Chapter Twenty-four

With the cold, nippy winds settling in the Valley, William, Everett, Oliver, and a neighbor would start butchering the hogs. William was using the knowledge he had gained as a lad working in a Texas packing house so he could buy his first cowboy outfit.

As the men were outside finishing the butchering, Mama would be at her stove, making head cheese and scrapple. There was very little of the hog that was not used one way or another. We would have pork roasts for many days to come, and later, Mama would render the leaf lard until it looked like the "driven snow" as she would put it. The lard promised many batches of french-fried potatoes, doughnuts, and pumpkin pies, not to forget the mince pies made with real brandy. The surplus fat was saved for the soap which gave Mama pride to display.

Several days later, Mama rose before dawn so she and Papa could grind and season the sausage. Then Papa would put on his pressed Oxford suit, his stiff bosom shirt with the starched collar and the narrow, black bow tie, his tailored overcoat and broad-brimmed Stetson, and get into the Model T Ford and go to Bakersfield to sell it from door to door.

Even though he had a good list of customers who clamored for his pork sausage all winter long, it still didn't yield enough money. It was not enough to satisfy the bank and give them their margin of profit and pay the delinquent power bills for the water that had to be pumped from the ever-lowering underground water table.

Still harder than butchering, or the cutting up, or the meat grinding into sausage, even the door-to-door selling, harder than all that was the going to the bank when in ~~ or a note was to be met. Hardest of all was saying:

"I cannot meet it."

"It seems no matter how hard a man tries, he cannot keep his word anymore," he grumbled all the way.

"The grasping, Christless corporations with their blood money are causing the people to leave the land. Heathenish power companies with their pound of flesh are evicting the people from their land as cruelly and surely as though they set their homes on fire. Overweight, plutocrats with greedy demands for interest make it impossible for an honest man, a hard-working man with a family to make a living anymore."

Still he would fight on and on, for the good he knew that had to be done.

The day would come.

Work. Work. Work.

Work, that was what a man must do. Work for that day when the Valley would unite and have water.

The rain would be moved: with God's help it would be. But now one had to work. Work, work, work.

I graduated from college that June, and took a job on the LOS ANGELES TIMES. Papa met me one morning at two o'clock and persuaded me to give it up and return to the ranch where I was badly needed to help ward off the black discouragement that was closing in on the Valley.

"You can get a job teaching school," he said.

"But I'm not trained as a teacher," I protested.

"They will not be particular as badly as teachers are needed."

The settlers fast filled the Valley during the post war years so school facilities were inadequate. Beside the district had not accumulated enough attendance monies to meet the salaries of the more experienced teachers.

I got a job teaching at the Maple School. I also took a night school job, teaching English to Russian and German immigrants preparing them for citizenship. There were now more non-English-speaking families in Shafter than there were English-speaking people.

Since the Model T was in use on the ranch, I rode a mustang to the Maple School five miles away. Everett had broken it for me; it was a fiery little animal with a fast gait. Mot of my students, forty-nine in all in the three primary grades, were children of Russian or German immigrants whom I taught at night. The upper five grades occupied the school house proper and a temporary, barn-like structure called a "soup house" served as quarters for my forty-nine lower grades. Afternoons, on the way home, I would single-foot over to the post office in town and pick up the mail.

One afternoon I brought home the notice from the Farm Bureau of a meeting called to discuss the most vital issue of 1920. Water!

Father had waited long for this to come. "Let's all go," he said, "the boys and you, too, Sister." He was so glad for the opportunity to associate with the people who were his near neighbors. He had been so cut off from society these past three years.

"But I have my Americanization class to teach tonight," I tried to excuse myself.

"Come afterwards, and bring your class with you."

"The farmers are Russian, and speak no English."

"Bring them anyway. We need a good turnout."

There were only two women attending my classes: Mary Malofy and her sister Dora Rilcolf, who were Russians and lived a quarter-mile away from us. They drove to school in a buggy with Mrs. Rilcolf's husband driving, a heavy set, bearded man he was with a face that was shining and resembled the face of a little boy who had used too much soap. Mary spoke good English and usually served as interpreter for the entire class. These Russians were good students, trying hard to learn English, and the rudiments of American history so they could become citizens.

When I thought of this fine family, I promised father I would explain how important water was to the arid Valley, and invite them to come. This little band of Russians worked so hard in the fields and seemed to be getting along well without changing, but perhaps for me they would come. We were on friendly terms and many evenings Everett and I on horseback would follow behind their buggy until we came to the parting of the way. We would wave good-bye and ride our short way home alone.

I closed school early that night, and we all joined the Farm Bureau meeting in time to get in on the discussion of water.

When they called for members of the Bureau to express their views on what should be done, Papa was first to rise. "It is apparent that everything man has done with his knowledge over these past seventy-five years is not enough to supply this end of the Valley with water."

I could see my night school students were embarrassed that they could not understand him. I rose from my seat and begged permission to say something.

"I teach night school here to those who wish to learn English. Many will get their citizenship papers in June. Mary, will you be kind enough to rise." Mary did so. She wore a troubled face. I continued, "You speak such good English. I am asking you to tell all who do not understand English, what my father is saying."

"We will have to ask God for more rain." she said in Russian.

There was a ripple of laughter in the audience.

Then William continued, "I came to this Valley in the early eighties and I have seen wet years and dry years, but I have never seen a dryer cycle than the one we have had these past three years.

"I have seen man try every possible plan to build dams, to fight floods with levees and dams, and by canal.

"I have seen optimistic men use every scheme to conquer a perverse Nature, only to watch the Sacramento Valley lose its battle to floods and the San Joaquin to lose its battle to drought." Father stopped a moment to allow Mary Malofy to translate this.

"It should be clear that everything man has done is not enough to keep these wild, northern torrents from flooding the sodden acres where the two great rivers meet to join and pour forth their billions of gallons of water into the sea. Everything man has done to get water on his arid land in summer has been in vain. Desperate farmers, with tiny mouths to feed, and hard-working loyal helpmates to support, should not have to give up their parched acres to the ever-widening desert." Mary paused with each phrase or clause, timing her interpretations with Papa's explanations.

"We will all have to call upon God to show us how to use His abundance and God will help us, for He, in His infinite mercy, never meant this to be. He never meant for our vineyards, alfalfa fields, potato patches, and our cotton fields to become sun-baked and abandoned, while the Sacramento River pours forth its many gallons of unused water through the Golden Gate." Once again he waited for Mary to repeat this to the Russian farmers so they would understand.

"What is needed is for us all to join together working for a common good, forgetting our own little, selfish, community interests. It is a State problem, not a Shafter problem. For fifty years Californians have been trying to find the answer to how this state can get needed water, and every time selfish men have blocked the way for those who have labored vainly.

"How long does this have to go on?

How long can the rotten politics and bribery and crookedness and selfish interest rob honest people of the right to earn their livelihood by the sweat of their brow?

What we need is to discover a plan to move God's rain--to work out a plan and then to work together so that in the end all will benefit, this generation and the next, so your children and mine, and our grandchildren and their children can all profit by it."

And then he closed with a Bible verse according to his custom, although it was more for himself than his audience.

For my people have committed two evils;

They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters,

And hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns,

That can hold no water.

"How long are we to hold a broken cistern in our hands when all we have to do is commit our cause to God and He will help us?"

He took out a large white silk handkerchief, wiped the sweat and the tears from his face, and sat down.

Mary Malofy rose and quickly went over what William had said. I saw her face brighten as she watched my father.

"Mr. Mullen," she said, "You don't know who I am, do you?"

He looked puzzled. "No, I don't. Have we met before?"

"Yes," said Mary. "You met us in Los Angeles. My brother went to your bootblack school; one Christmas he brought me with him to your Christmas Dinner and you gave me dinner and a doll. It was the first present I ever got in this country. I still have it."

His face lit up with a smile that made him seem years younger. He had not smiled that way in such a long time. He shook her hand warmly, then the hand of her sister and brother-in-law.

They stood there talking of their ranch, of the prosperity God was giving them, of the need for water. "Yes, the Lord has been good to us." Dora said in her broken English. "And we praise Him for it." Gratitude and thanksgiving were in her voice, and no hint of complaint for drought or hard work or low prices.

William was very quiet on the way home. Everett spoke enthusiastically of what irrigation could mean to the Valley, but William didn't talk of the meeting as he usually would have.

Finally he spoke. "To think my own children, my own Los Angeles Sunday School class were here all the time, and doing well, too. Industrious they are. Did you know that Mr. Rilcolf once had been exiled from Russia?"

They were a part of that suffering humanity to which he had belonged, refugees, persecuted Christians, believers who would follow Christ to the end. Their seeming indifference was understood now. It was hard for them, except for Mary, to talk to Americans. She was the youngest of that little family and had had more opportunity to become Americanized since she had come as a little girl, as he himself had come as a lad. They would tell others of this good, kind man who had taken them into his mission and fed them and taught them. He knew God had had a hand in this. Once again he was needed. Once again he was called!

William dreaded going to the bank tomorrow to ask for an extension of another loan.

"Owe no man anything but love," he said, shaking his head. How he owed the bank!

"There is something I want to study," he said when I suggested turning in. He had the bulky Strong Concordance open to "Curse," the subject he had been studying which was weighing on his heart. But meeting the Rilcolfs and Mary Malofy had made his position in the village clear. He was no longer cursed!

The next morning, he was up before anyone, stirring pancakes and singing! The old soapstone griddle was warming over the two burners of the range. Mama was setting the table in the dining room again. The cheerful mood did not seem conducive to eating in the kitchen. It reminded me of the early days before Papa became so burdened.

Mama knew, somehow, Papa would call for a Bible reading, even though we hadn't had a morning service in quite a while. So she brought the Bibles to the table and passed each one around to its proper owner.

"What will you have, Annie?" Papa asked, wanting to know what she wanted to read.

"Whatever you say."

William was on the powerful family throne again. "Let's read one of the Psalms," he said.
The thirty-seventh."

We all know that Psalm. It was one of Papa's favorites. The ninety-first was his top favorite. Mama's was the nineteenth, but the thirty-seventh was his test for confident living. Mama did not seem surprised that he called for it and almost turned to it before he said to.

"Fret not thyself because of evildoers,

Neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity . . .

Trust in the good Lord and do good . . .

Fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way,

Because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass . . .

Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; . . .

the wicked plotteth against the just,

The Lord shall laugh at him for he shall see his day coming . . .

A little that a righteous man hath

is better than the riches of many wicked . . .

For such as be blessed of Him shall inherit the earth;

And they that be cursed of Him shall be cut off.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord

And he delighteth in His way . . . "

And then he came to the verse that had been his arrow in all his Mission days on the street.

"I have been young, and now am old;

Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken,

Nor his seed begging bread."

He explained how he had been studying the meaning of "Curse". To curse one's neighbor was to cut him off from your influence. "God does not want us to curse our brothers." He knew he had been cursing his brethren but would do it no more, for he had plans to use his influence to get water for all his neighbors. In this common need, they would all be united.

Chapter Twenty-five

Father had me take the wheel on our way to Bakersfield that morning. I knew it was because he wanted to think over what had happened at the water meeting last night.

The day was cold, crisp, and bright. A long eared jack-rabbit loped through the sage brush that skirted the highway.

"When I first came to Kern County, fat herds roamed where jack-rabbits had hardly existed before," he reminisced. "Vineyards and orchards thrived where the toiling of farmers had labored in vain to produce scanty crops of wheat and barley. Poverty and hard times took the place of prosperity. The Land Company had introduced irrigation to the land, with its three hundred miles of canals and over a thousand miles of large laterals, watering two hundred thousand acres! There was no place in the world where so large a body of land could be watered from one source. But there wasn't the population then to be taken care of. It was all one farm watered from one source.

Now we have to look to other regions where there is too much water for the locality, we have to transport it long distances to take care of the too little that is here.

When the great estates of my youth were divided and the cattle ranches gave way to the colonies, where one estate was divided to make many farms, the people have to turn to sinking wells instead of using one central canal system and so the water level gradually became depleted.

Now, we must replenish the source and where there is too much water we will have to move it away, correcting the evil of floods and drought."

"Oh, I see," I said.

"That is what so many farmers fail to note. If they have a good well and are taken care for the moment, they do not see the greater need of other farmers. Why when Shafter began as a settlement in 1914, the water level was at its highest in history. Wells were drilled less than two hundred feet, some at ninety. They could use electric motor-driven centrifugal pumps then. But in 1917, when we first came here, along came the drought and the pumps had to give way to turbine pumps. With all these small-farm operations, the Kern River waters were shut off and pumping had to be resorted to for surface irrigation.

"Farmers gradually approached the deadline where costs met surplus gains and so, you see, men have abandoned the fields to the jack-rabbits and the poor, disheartened, hard-working people are driven from the farms that had once offered so much promise to their hopeful hearts. Now do you understand why we have to harness our lives to God's power and have him show us how we can use the abundance of rainfall, the too much rainfall in the northern part of the Valley, up around Mt. Shasta, to water this far end at the lower part of the Valley? This country will blossom again as the rose, mark my word. It was a garden when I was a young man, and it will be a garden when my grandchildren are young men!"

I loved it when he talked of latching on to God's power. As a child it has thrilled me to hear him speak of God as a next door neighbor. It was the first time he had spoken so in months, I felt the discouraging days were over the grey clouds had drifted past, and the sun was smiling upon the Valley. I felt I was a child again, sitting beside him in the two high-wheeled cart, driving past the cherry orchards to Hayward, owning every hillock and valley, every stream and river. Father had accepted the responsibility of these grey acres and they were his--his to make green again.

We passed the Kern River, with the fringe of green, passed the old County Hospital, down bustling Chester Avenue. I always hated to walk down Chester Avenue with him because he would stop to shake hands with so many people that the hours dragged into half a day and I wanted to get home.

As we parked the car and took to the street on which the bank was located, he stopped to shake hands with an old friend. I heard him say, "Charlie, you are just the man I wanted to see today."

"Well I'm always glad to see you," was the reply.

"We had a meeting--an irrigation meting--last night. You are the President of the California State Irrigation Association, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"Well now, we want to do everything out in Shafter that we can do to help move this along. I want to volunteer my services. If I can help in any way, please call upon me."

"It strikes me we do need you. If you can preach the gospel of irrigation as you preached that old-fashioned gospel, we can certainly use you to enlist the help of every man, woman, and child in the state to get the water California needs."

As we went to the law offices of Mr. Barlow, I could see Father was in his old form again.

"How slowly man moves," William declared. "I can remember going to Sacramento in the eighties to work on the Haggin ranch. What a clamor the State Legislature made that year over what they called the 'most important subject of the year--irrigation'. Think of the years irrigation has been our number one problem. Yet we have not resolved it to this day"

"Indeed," William continued. "Thirty-five years ago they realized the state's number one need was water. Without it there could be no prosperity. They know it today, but wicked and powerful men with their selfish interests have deprived millions of prosperous farm homes." William spoke vehemently, being alert to prove his point. "Selfishness, the curse of the world!"

"Now you are talking like a preacher," Barlow said, but in a kind, reproving way.

"Yes, and I am a preacher. How have you politicians solved it with each little group looking out for his own interest, resorting to bribery and chicanery to put his particular private measure through? You know that I am right, Charlie. Don't you?" He was looking at him in that intent way he had which seemed to pierce straight into a man's inner conscience.

"Yes, Bill, how well I know it! I was just reading of an example of it--about the time you were working in Sacramento. You should be familiar with the story the BEE printed," and he held up a clipping and read from it. "the state should handle it in an intelligent manner so that their waters would not go to swell the waters of the Pacific."

"To think that we are still using this valuable water to swell the Pacific!" William broke in.

Barlow put the paper down with a shrug of his shoulder to express his feeling of disgust.

"Let's see, you were congressman then, weren't you?" William asked.

"No, that came ten years later," Barlow replied. "But I was always interested in the water problem even before I got into politics," he explained. "You must remember we followed the English law of riparian rights. I remember Senator Sax saying then that if the Constitution was amended so as to allow the owners of land not contiguous to the streams to use all the water that is running to waste, that was all that would be needed."

"He said that in 1885?"

"In 1885 and today it still isn't passed, and still that is all that is needed."

"Today or in 1885, that will solve the problem," William prophesied, for he felt the solution to the water shortage was in utilizing the waste rather than tapping the underground supply. In this he disagreed strongly with many of his neighbors who felt all one had to do was tap the percolating supply. He had seen, in Shafter, how quickly this could be exhausted when a drought came. "But the use and right of water should be a public one. All water should be public property and subject to public control. When we transfer the abundant water in the North to the South, we will be on the right track."

"Now, you are forgetting riparian law is the law of California," Barlow reminded. "It isn't so simple to change now. I would involve too much litigation."

"It is more effective to change the hearts of the people," William said simply. "Do that and you do not have to worry about the laws. Don't do that and still change the law and it won't work any better. You have to inspire people to want to look to the needs of others and work in harmony with one another--those who don't need water giving to those who do. When man works in such harmony it becomes easy to use the forces of nature God offers us. Love is the dynamo, believe me, Charlie. That is why I am offering you my services to do what I can."

"To change the hearts of the people?" Barlow raised his eyebrows quizzically. He was trying to connect this philosophy of love with the politics of water.

"Yes, to change the hearts of the people."

"And where will you get irrigation from that?"

"Where have you gotten it from legislation, Charlie?"

Barlow ignored the question. He was not disagreeing: he was only searching for the answer. "I started to tell you about how they tried to get irrigation through in 1885."

"Yes, I interrupted. You were talking about those clippings you were reading. Go on."

"Here's an article from the MARYSVILLE APPEAL. 'The proposed bills and constitutional amendment will condemn the rights of riparian owners and throw the waters of the State into one grand pool in which the great land grabbers are to share and share alike . . .'

You see, we have always held a dog-in-the-manger attitude. Some would have rather cut off their nose to spite their face. I'll read on, 'The irrigation scheme is communistic in its conception, but in its results, it merges in a monopoly . . . '

"Well of course, Miller and Lux were at the head of one interest," William pointed out. "They had the riparian rights and Haggin and Carr were at the other, holding the appropriative rights. The whole riparian battle was waged right here in Kern County you know, and Haggin lost the legal battle, but after he had proved this desert could be made to blossom like a rose, by irrigation. I was working for Haggin at the time."

"Yes, our first legislature had already accepted the Common law of England and that advocated riparian rights," Barlow reviewed the matter.

"That's why I say the only way you can put a proper water plan in effect is by changing the hearts of the people. We all know riparian laws are not practical for California. We have to make the people look at it from an unselfish viewpoint. In adopting this law our founders did not foresee our parched acres and they erred."

"I'm not so sure now but that you are right," Barlow agreed. "I'd like to hear how you propose to do it, but before you get into that, let me read you a few of these clippings about our early struggle for irrigation. The you will understand what we are up against." Barlow showed him the clippings. "In 1885 . . . the ALTA."

"That was a San Francisco paper," William observed, taking it and handing it back.

"Yes, and its on this matter of riparian rights. It says: 'They (the riparian proprietors) want to use the water for irrigation and they don't want anyone else to use it. They wish to take all they need and let the rest of the water run to waste. Such colossal hoggishness is well calculated to make credulity stand aghast and even to paralyze indignation!'"

Barlow shoved the paper aside and said, "There were a million people in California then. They said they could add another million with water on the land, but they were fought by owners of great cattle ranches who didn't want the small farmers to come into the Valley. The entire press voiced the demand for enactment of irrigation laws then, but it didn't do any good."

"Selfish interest," William said, nodding his head. "It's the same today."

"I knew you would say that. The next clipping gives an accurate account of just what happened at Sacramento and the way it was done."

"What's the paper?" William asked.

"SAN JOSE MERCURY."

"I have read it many times."

"The irrigationists blindly trusted the justice of their cause only to learn that coin is more potent than patriotism," Barlow read.

Bill smiled knowingly.

"You may know this first hand, but I want you to hear it again because politicians are not too different today. The paper says: 'They did not know much about the average California legislature (referring to the irrigationists). They were so earnest they believed they would have little difficulty.'

Now I'm going to read you the newspaper's report of how early legislation on irrigation was lost.

'The committee had a consultation and concluded they would have to make a proposition to Bill Higgins. They met him downtown, took him by the arm, led him into a shadow.

"Say, Higgins; we have got to have your help in this irrigation fight of ours."

"Is that so? What is there in it?"

"There is damn little in it, but I'll tell you how we are fixed. We did not think there was going to be any need of money to get our bills through, and all the money we raised was twelve hundred dollars (for committee's expenses, transportation, rent for headquarters, printing, board, etc.). This was intended to pay for the committee's expenses while here, but we have concluded to pay all our own expenses, and give you the twelve hundred dollars, if you will help us."

"Twelve hundred is a small sum, I usually get five times that amount, but if you're so poor, I'll take it."

"That's why it went through the Assembly so easily, but they learned that to get it through the Upper House they had to raise money.

"An editor, a former member of the Legislature, went to some of the wealthier members of the irrigationists and said he knew how to put a bill through and got them to put up five thousand dollars.

"The next day, with grip sack in hand, he put in an appearance at the headquarters in the Clung Building on New Hope Street.

"Tom Reynolds, a noted lobbyist, had been indicted once for getting away with funds in the Secretary of State's office. He asked Reynolds to help him.

"Reynolds said: 'What's in it?'

"Can't you do something for patriotism?" the editor asked.

"Patriotism be damned. I'm not here for my health. But if you want anything in the Senate done . . . " and he mentioned a member of the Legislature from San Francisco.

"Well, I have five thousand dollars, that's all," the editor said.

"He will take your case."

"You will see him."

"All right. I'll see he takes it."

Reynolds did as he said. He went to the San Francisco Senator who took the job but said he would have to work through Higgins. On seeing Higgins he straightway told him he was getting five thousand dollars to do what he could to put it through.

"Five thousand dollars" gasped Higgins.

'The Senator saw he had put his foot in.

"I put it through the lower house for twelve hundred, while the Senator got five thousand," Higgins cursed the irrigationists.

'Then the editor sought out Reynolds.

"Lie me out of it."

'Higgins met the editor and stood him in a corner and demanded an explanation. The editor took the train home and returned the five thousand dollars to the donors. "It wasn't enough to go around.'

"'It's safe enough to say,'" Barlow continued reading, "'that when the Legislature meets again, the irrigationists will have an organization of more experienced lobbyists. Anyone who expects to get important legislation like this through a California Legislature without coin, doesn't know much about the secrets of legislation.'"

William was quietly thinking. Finally he said slowly but with great earnestness, "there isn't enough money in the state to beat the power interests, but there is something more powerful than money."

"What is it?"

"God."

"You mean changing the people's hearts again?"

"I mean that very thing. I would convince the people they have to lay aside selfish interests and think in terms of what homes in the Valley will provide, and the work it will give the returning soldiers, of the soil it will put into production. Let me tackle it, Charlie. Let me be your lobbyist. I can handle those fellows. God wants me to tackle it."

"You will make a good one. No one has the eloquence of persuasion the same way you have, or maybe it's as you say, you have God. But, as a matter of curiosity, what makes you think God wants you to do it?"

"Charlie, I was a poor boy. I began in the workhouse in England. I worked in the mines as a lad. I worked for child labor laws here in California, for the eight-hour laws for women, but it has not been enough. I have always worked for the poor man but I see a different need now. I know now I have to awaken myself to the needs of all men, for all men without God are poor. I realize that now as I never realized it before. I see a need all men have to work together, and when we do we will find it easy to handle this perverse nature. The hardest thing to handle is this selfishness in man. I used to believe it was the rich who selfishly crushed the poor because they were helpless, but in my years ranching in the Valley I have seen this same fearful thing in all classes. I find each one, in his own way, is controlled by his own interest and afraid of his neighbor. But I think I can point out how we must all pull together to achieve the goal we all need so much."

"All right, Mullen," Barlow agreed. "Go to the state Irrigation Association headquarters in Sacramento on Monday. Get acquainted with the Marshall Irrigation Plan which is what we are trying to get through as an initiative measure. Study it. Learn all about it. When you are prepared, preach the gospel of irrigation to everyone you can reach. You might start on the farmers first as you are one of them now. Then tackle the rest. I guess there isn't a man in the state who has a wider acquaintanceship. You've convinced me, with God's help, you'll get them on your side."

William's eyes twinkled hopefully and he extended his hand. Barlow knew from the sturdy grasp the man meant to succeed.

"I've been a politician a long time but never used the tactics of evangelism before," he said as William stood at the door, his hat in hand. "You were a corker at taming wild horses. I've heard about your success at taming wild men, too. If you're half as good at this as you were at either, you'll do all right."

William creased the center fold in his hat, rolled the broad brim in his right hand, then he took hold of the gold chain and looked at his watch. "It's time to go."

He walked away proud and tall, with a spring in his step. Nearing sixty, he still carried his stalwart body with an astonishing erectness and held his head high.

It was late November. The black clouds were gathering. "There is anger in the sky. Torrents of fury will pour upon the earth and into the sea, and God has given me a job to do."

I was used to my father talking in metaphor. It was the preacher in him, I thought. I was familiar with that unconquerable look on his face. I knew important accomplishments were ahead.

"I'm going to Sacramento," he told me on the way home. "I'm going to lobby for a state water plan. We're going to reach every man and woman in California and enlist their help and then we are going to get the cooperation of every legislator at the capitol and then I'm going to enlist the Governor's help. With God's help we will move the rain."

So that was it. There would be battles. Thunder and lightning and torrents of rain would fall upon man's thirsty acres, but in the end the wild waters would be harnessed and quietly driven to another land. He had been thinking of this for a long time and now the time had come when it had to be done. I could see there was not even the slightest doubt it couldn't or wouldn't be accomplished. They might have been working on it for half a century already. Greed and jealousy and bribery may have blocked the way before, but when William set out to tame wild nature, he always ended up by making it tractable. No longer would wild rivers lose their waters to the sea. God was mending the broken cistern and it was to be filled with living water.

"You will win. I can see in your face. You will win," I said.

"Yes, we will win. We have God's promise."

Chapter Twenty-six

Father was analyzing the problem as he packed the old brown valise, studying all angles in the way he had studied the movements of the wild horse. He wanted to be certain that when he met his foe in the field, he would be prepared to handle him.

"The suitcase is pretty shabby," Annie implored. "Don't you think you should use Beulah's?"

"Well, I should smile!" he answered in a way that meant "No". "Think of how that old valise has served me. And you would have me use another! They don't make valises like that anymore. A little scrubbing with saddle soap, and it will be good a new."

He went about his packing, taking the stiff-bosomed white shirts from the bird's eye maple chiffonier drawer. He put them neatly in the valise. Then he added a good supply of narrow, white organdy ties for those occasions when he had an important engagement, and narrow black how ties for lesser ones and four-in-hand ties for all others.

"Put on a pair of overalls while I clean your suit," Annie said.

We resorted to the big gasoline drums for this, airing the clothes well on the line before pressing with a dampened cloth. "I can do that, Mama," the youngest son, Oliver, volunteered.

Everyone wanted to have a part in this important work of getting Papa in "band box" shape, as Mama termed it.

Once in Sacramento, there was a buoyancy about Papa's step as he alighted from the Southern Pacific Pullman car, and a studied manner about his face, however cheerful he appeared. He seemed to be intently going over a grave problem in his mind. There would be that initial period of preparing himself for the legislative battles that were to follow, getting together all the facts, studying them one by one, until he knew each phrase as he knew his verses from Proverbs, and everything related to them to make the understanding clearer.

He recollected when he first came to the Rancho Del Paso, forty years ago, the ranchers were grumbling then about the cycle of flood and drought.

Later came the realization the Valley could produce more money, even with colonies of settlers. Thus, the buying of land grants from impoverished Spanish dons or with script from hard-put soldiers, were frowned upon. Still there wasn't enough water to take care of a sixth of those who wanted to make their homes in the big Valley.

Legislators were easily bought then, but the little fellow had nothing with which to buy them. So the worry cycle of flood and drought went on and on, because man was inherently selfish.

Still later came years when loyal and honest men worked tirelessly to save the State's resources, while men of lesser vision fought it because they feared big men might derive some benefit from it. Big men fought it because they feared it might increase their taxes. Communities fought it because they were jealous that another district might derive a benefit they wanted only for themselves.

There were others, too, who were overwhelmed by the bigness of the program, afraid the opportunity was too great. To water twelve million acres was too much for the brain of man to conceive to transform barren acres into fertile fields.

These things must have rushed through William's mind as the taxi wheels kept turning their own frequent revolutions, and in his mind he reflected upon the repeated cycles of flood in winter and drought in summer, and man's selfishness to man ....

Once at the hotel, he did not take time to unpack, but went immediately to the office of the California Irrigation Association on K Street.

There followed an all day briefing on the Marshall Plan which had been designed to control and save and use the water of all the streams of California, and move it farther than it had ever been moved before.

After that he attended a stimulating luncheon hour with information poured out from the mouths of other irrigationists.

In the afternoon, William got his credentials as a lobbyist so he would be permitted to discuss the matter at the Capitol, and present his case before committee members. Afterwards, he walked to the State Library and studied the wealth of information it had on that number-one problem: getting enough water to irrigate California's land and production needs.

Friends invited him to dinner, but he concluded he wanted to spend the evening alone. He wanted to study the problem out, in his own way. By asking for directives from God, he knew that with God's help it could be done. It could well prove to be man's greatest undertaking, but he knew there was a way it could be accomplished. He approached the subject slowly, weighing each detail carefully, objectively, in the light of the mistakes that had already been made, and how they could be avoided this time. He intended to remain in his room all night and pray. He would spend the night on his knees. It was the way he had done in those successful days of his youth when he knew he had to rely on the Almighty for the supernatural power his dangerous assignments demanded. He was going to rely on that Power now. This was his biggest problem, even bigger than getting Anarchy Street under control.

There were one million three hundred thousand voters in California then who had to be made to understand that with water the Valley would become the most productive in all the world. Without it, California would be nothing. It was his job to reach as many of the voters he could. He was not working alone on the matter, there were many others giving of their time, too. But he felt this was his task because he was familiar with the Valley since the early eighties. He felt called now, to reach the college graduate, as well as the man who couldn't read, the manufacturer, the grocery clerk, the farmer, and the business man. They all had to understand this mutual problem. They had to understand it clearly and, in understanding the problem, it would be resolved.

"God what is this maddening fear that makes men hold a broken cistern in their arms, and let the living water pass uselessly through their unproductive hands, while many cry for land that could feed the thousands upon thousands who cry for food?

God direct our paths. Show us how to rid ourselves of this broken cistern, that we may wipe away the tears that flow from greed and selfishness.

Teach me God, to show them how simple it is to have 'the fountain of living waters', how much good can come of it. Teach me to show them that it is a sin not to do this good." Finished with his praying, he rose to his feet and walked to the dresser, picked up the big leather Bible he always packed in his suitcase and sat down to read.

He knew Isaiah had a good bit to say of the power of water. He turned to the thirty-fifth chapter:

The wilderness and the solitary place

shall be glad for them;

An the desert shall rejoice,

and blossom as the rose."

How many times had he pictured his desert in blossom? He wanted to see it come to pass in his lifetime. And the way?

"Strengthen ye the weak hands,

and confirm the feeble knees.

Say to them that are of fearful heart,

Be strong, fear not:

Behold your God will come with vengeance,

Even God with a recompense;

He will come and save you."

It was God's way of telling him to replace fear with courage, to remove the fear that always lay as the summer haze on the Valley, hiding the stalwart and fearless mountain ridge.

" . . . for in the wilderness shall waters break out,

And streams in the desert.

And the parched ground shall become a pool,

And the thirsty land springs of water:

In the habitation of dragons, where each lay,

Shall be grass with reeds and rushes."

The dragon! The crushing dragon would be slayed and grass and reeds and rushes grow. The powerful, moneyed dragon had been asking for a fight for a long time, forty-five years according to his memory, but farther than that, if one wanted to go back in history.

He knew God had answered his prayers, strengthened his weak hands, confirmed his feeble knees, fortified his heart. With a verve, he turned to studying all the data he had collected during the day. He went from pamphlet to pamphlet memorizing, filing it away in his memory for instant reference whenever he was called upon to speak. He never had used notes of any kind whenever he addressed a congregation. He always spoke and recited from memory. He didn't intend to use notes now.

Then he sat there, for a long time, looking out into the night, toward Capitol Park with its ten full blocks of trees and flowers, the air aromatic with camphor, pine, and eucalyptus trees. He reached for his suit coat and hat and went to the elevator. Once on the street, he walked toward the park. The gold dome was brilliantly lighted, as if to tell man of the gold his state held, that all men could have, if they could but learn to work in harmony.

That was it, the wealth that comes from setting aside the fears and working in love. Why even the very garden seemed to declare it. He had reached the west entrance. He could see how all the trees planted and shrubs set out had been done with geometric precision. The world was governed by order. Everything in the plant world seemed to blend with all the other things. Here in California, all plant life flourished, as demonstrated in this well-watered garden. He walked down past a lane dotted with date palms from Africa, fan palms from Asia, pampas grass from South America, cedars from Lebanon, stone pine from Italy, fir trees from Norway, eucalyptus from Australia. They all flourished. He turned and walked to the portico and stood there beside the supporting colonnades of iron and felt the full stature of what man was supposed to be. He remembered the glory of the Valley that first year when it was carpeted with spring's wild flowers, that year when rains fell so generously. It did not seem to be the same, this present day dun-colored Valley. This was the fearful year, the year of drought.

"Say to them with are of a fearful heart,

Be strong, fear not."

Yes, God had given him the answer. Banish the fear of this tremendous thing by teaching them, one thing at a time, as he had banished it from the hearts of the yearling at Del Paso:

Teach them little by little, they have nothing to fear. The desert shall rejoice! Little by little. They will learn to trust when they understand.

He turned and walked west, past the tall, giant redwood, strong and stalwart, unafraid, reaching to the sky.

If we ca hold back the flood waters in winter and spring, and divert it to the south, redistribute the rain when needed, we will have done it.

If the little plan to harness the wild waters is the correct way, from an engineering standpoint, then the tremendously big plan is the same opportunity multiplied many times. To fear it is to be frightened by the size of God's opportunity.

A little at a time! It will be easy to hold back the mighty Sacramento and the San Joaquin, a little at a time, in a hill or a mountain reservoir, in every small tributary, in every mountain stream. The rivers have not run together to become too powerful to combat. The plan is to hold the excess flow in these reservoirs while the rain is falling, the snow thawing, releasing only as much as canals and watercourses can handle. Then, in a dry season, to draw on the deep water, carry it away, without floods one season, drought another. This is the way we must do it. We should begin at the outlet of the rivers, building high levees, and by-passes, in an attempt to bypass control floods that pass into the ocean. Water that goes into the ocean is lost; while water that is stored in the foothills is saved to be released at will, to turn into canals to water twelve million acres.

Have I made it simple enough? He was determined to make the problem of harnessing the wild waters as easy to understand as the taming of the wild broncos. "One has to do it with gentleness."

To the farmers, he said, "This is a world of give and take. The central organization will know what form of cooperation one part of the State has to offer another, and what form of cooperation from that other part of the State."

"We must view the possibilities of prosperity that might be realized by proper conservation. We must impress upon the voters, also, the fact that money spent for utilization of waters is an investment of the most constructive and profitable character."

To the businessman, he said, "It will cost what? It will cost nothing."

"It is waste that costs. Paying fort the building that burned without insurance, paying for the floods that destroy, permitting nature's wealth to escape unused, these are things that cost."

To all he said, "Join . . . subscribe. Pay your fee into the Association (it was five dollars) that we can save our white gold to use." He knew man's heart was where his money was.

To the lawmakers, he said, "Do this wicked thing of neglecting to use the God-given resources, and the burden of that sin will be on your heart."

Week after week, he worked, tirelessly, joyfully, earnestly. And with the help of those for whom he worked, successfully. His expenses were paid and he counted himself lucky; there were many who worked without. But he gave of himself, his whole self.

It had its own compensations, too, separate and apart from "the white gold" all were to receive. There came with it the gold of understanding, the working with all classes of people. Once called to preach to the poor, he found in working with all humans their needs were the same. In understanding it all, he came to love all, well almost all, the Christless corporations were still dragons to be slain. When he began to work in harmony with all men, there came a richness in his life he had never known before. He knew now the sorrow of the farmer as well as the coal miner, the loneliness of the businessman, as well as the homeless man on the street. He found all men naked in their need to be in harmony with all other men.

He found when called upon to do so, the men whom he had often berated for their profiteering and their taking advantage of the poor man, now opened up their hearts to the needs of others. One by one, he lost his enemies and gained friends. Thus, he began to gather together all the vehemence of his spirit around that one colossal enemy, the "power trust" who fought the issue with all the force of their wealth. One by one, he met them, talked with them, assured them God would hold them accountable for their sin.

"To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not

To him it is sin."

He had plenty of facts on file in his memory to prove indisputably it was a good thing they had to do.

He would sit and talk to each one and when he shook a hand good-bye he knew how that man would vote. He felt no money and no power would change his thinking. His way for winning votes was the same as getting that understanding, getting the people behind the issue, person by person.

When June came, and he returned home for a week-end birthday celebration, he had good news, "The Legislature has passed a bill providing for an investigation on California's water and power. Two hundred thousand dollars has been appropriated."

And the desert was rejoicing.

The news next year was not good. "A bill incorporating the initial features of the Marshall Plan was passed by a vote of twenty-eight to one in the Senate but defeated by three votes in the Assembly with thirty-seven voting for it and thirty-four against it."

He refused to be downcast. "We are making strides. Even with the power opposition of the giant west coast power trust, we are making headway. The plan not only had the support of the California State Irrigation Association, it had the backing of the league of California Municipalities. "We have made more strides forward these past two years than in any ten years before."

No, he was not troubled, but he studied more and more, always seeking his directive. Far into the night he would study. He found his guidance in the fifth chapter of Job.

"Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust,Neither doth trouble spring out of the ground;

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

I would seek unto God,

And unto God would I commit my cause:

Which doeth great things and unsearchable;

Marvelous things without number:

Who giveth rain upon the earth,

And sendeth water upon the fields:

To set up high those that be low;

That those which mourn may be exalted to safety."

Next year, when the Legislature closed without appropriating additional funds to continue with the investigation, he knew they had to do something and do it quickly to keep from losing their hold. They could not give up. The investigation had to go on.

"But how?" they said. "How?"

"We will borrow the money."

"From whom?"

"From the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce."

"Why them?"

"Because they have it."

"But how can it be paid back?"

"We will get the next Legislature, when it meets, to appropriate enough money to pay it back."

"But how is that possible, when they wouldn't appropriate it in the first place?"

"We know now that we must work harder to convince them. We know that we must reach everyone and get their assurance of support."

Chapter Twenty-seven

He knew the measure was going through. I don't know how he knew it, but he did. Maybe in the same way he knew the members of the Los Angeles Chamber would give them the fifty thousand dollars. Or in the same way he knew the San Francisco members would make up the rest of the ninety thousand dollars needed to carry out the investigation. And when the Legislature met they appropriated the ninety-four thousand dollars to pay back the loans and an additional three hundred thousand to continue the investigation.

The association had done what it had set out to do. It took ten years all told, of intensive study, to work out a plan that was submitted to the Legislature as the State Water Plan. It was finally approved by the Legislature, much to everyone's surprise.

The opposition, still active, had it referred to the people, the well-informed people, who passed it.

In 1935, the project was authorized as a federal reclamation undertaking. Construction began in 1937.

William was only one of the many people who worked for the success over a seventy-five year time period. When California struggled to save its precious flow of white gold, but in all those years, out of the many who gave their life blood to see California adopt a plan for conservation of its water, not one man contributed greater faith that the springs of water would be saved to use for man's good.

The California of the future would not have a broken cistern that would not hold water. When the plan would be finally carried out, all the waste waters would be used. It would not come about in one year or ten, but it would come. William's faith knew it as no one else could have.

Men had worked on this dream since 1873 to make it the reality it is today. Efficient engineers, politicians of vision, honest legislatures and congressmen who could not be wooed with gold, the organizers of the California State Irrigation Association, and its president, and the small irrigation districts that were far-sighted enough to work with the larger unit. Everyone worked together, rich and poor, so the dream might be pushed ahead, the plan could materialize. The work that William did was small compared to all this.

I have written of his work only because it was a story of faith and because I knew of it first hand. What others did can be plainly seen as one traverses the highways of California today. The engineering feat is obvious as the water cascades over the Shasta Dam, the highest man made falls in the world, as the rain starts on its way being moved from the north where it isn't needed, to the south where it is.

Faith made the Valley a land of fulfillment instead of a land of promise.

I do not know how many years William worked on the project. I do not know how many years he worked for the Association. It was never too apparent when he was working as a staff member and when he was working out of love. I only know he was a familiar figure at the Capitol for about eight years, as he came and went when duty called.

Now his hair was white, he still had the same erect carriage, the same spring to his step, as he traversed the palm-lined walks of Capitol Park.

To his face he was always greeted as the "Reverend," but to his back he was often called affectionately, and sometimes fearfully, "The Boss of the San Joaquin."

And how did he fare when his work was over, when the Marshall Plan converged into the larger plan that became known as the Central Valley Project, a federal project with a price tag of two billion dollars, all to be finished in the years to come? Well, about the same as usual. He did his ranching in pretty much the same way as always, with the help of Annie, of course, the boys and two girls. There were the same chores to do, the same power bills to pay, the same uncertainty of crops and failures and worry of low prices, the same anxiety that the cost would add up to more than the production. But the old apprehensions were gone, all the little problems had been. swallowed up in the larger problem of seeing the springs come forth in the desert and the valley to rejoice in its blossoming

When the call came to reach out for men's souls in such a way it could not be ignored, he would get into his car and drive away on a preaching tour for a few days or even a week.

He preached in low places and in high places as the opportunity presented itself. Among the lowly places was the Plaza in Los Angeles. A Los Angeles newspaper did a feature story on this activity, inserting a photograph of him as he was in his seventies. The soft wavy hair was still as thick, but very white, and, instead of wearing the little narrow black bow tie he wore a blue and white silk four-in-hand with large, bold design, to show he had kept up with the feeling of modern styles. The smile was not as brilliant as in former years, more sweet than vital in the way a young mother's smile is.

The story's caption read:

"Reds' Sabotage Soapbox Taken

Over in Plaza, by Disciple of Love, Faith."

It explained, "Offsetting the doctrines of sabotage spread by communists in the same district, William Mullen, superintendent of the Open Air Evangelistic Association, laid down a new doctrine of faith to more than five hundred men gathered in the Plaza yesterday."

"Mullen's work at the present time marks a return to the same spot where years ago he took issue with the destructive policies of the I. W. W., then seeking to establish strength in Los Angeles.

"'We are only seeking to prevent the seeds of sedition being sown by the reds from taking root in the hearts of the poor and the unemployed,' was the description the evangelist gave yesterday of his work. 'The only way I know to do this is to preach, in simple fashion, the doctrine of faith and love as exemplified in the Gospel.'

"Mullen, who also has worked for many years to better the conditions under which boy bootblacks live, received no salary as superintendent of the association, which is dependent entirely on donations."

Among the "high places" where he preached, was often the First Presbyterian Church in Bakersfield, where he delivered one of his last sermons in March shortly before he died. Wherever he went, from the governor's palace, to the residing places of the little bootblack's on the street, he was welcome.

In speaking of his service THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN wrote, "In more recent years the Reverend Mr. Mullen has devoted himself to farming in Kern County, but he never has lost the urge to preach, and his sermons have lost none of the energetic human quality that won him thousands of followers whom he first attracted by training wild horses in the streets to draw his crowd."

In May, he gave a public horse taming act at the Fair Grounds and the same paper publicized it in a front page story.

"The spectacle of an elderly minister, one famed throughout the country for his phenomenal strength, and his horse taming powers, gentling the wildest horses within an hour and transforming them from man-killing broncos into saddle horses that a child might ride with safety, is the thrill promised Kern County residents at the Fair Grounds next Saturday.

"At that time the Rev. William Mullen of Shafter, noted two decades ago as the wild horse taming preacher, will give his first publish exhibition in twenty years. The exhibition is not in the nature of a comeback for the minister, since abandoning public demonstrations, has tamed many wild horses for Kern residents and for members of his family. Saturday's exhibition, slated to begin at 2:30 o'clock, is being given as an educational event for farmers, and other horse owners, under the auspices of Farm Adviser Lawrence Taylor and the University of California Extension Service.

"'Anyone can tame a horse just as I do, by following my methods exactly, 'the Rev. Mullen declares, and will explain his methods to the spectators. Nevertheless, education or not, old-time residents who remember the horse taming parson's exhibitions in front of the old armory here are expecting thrills galore when the big minister and the wild horse meet.

"No longer has the minister the physical power to throw a horse in to a feed bin or perform the other amazing feats of strength that were part of the old exhibitions, the Rev. Mr. Mullen says, but he can still throw a horse to the ground and can teach any able-bodied man to do the same thing.

"Wild horses will be brought down from the mountains of Kern County for the demonstrations."

It was because of the success of this exhibition, that the committee in charge of the County Fair, held later in September, invited him to give a horse-taming exhibition each day for a week.

"You can't do it," Annie told him. "I won't let you. You are an old man now."

"Then if I'm dead," he answered her heatedly, "call in the undertaker and put me under the ground, but let's not have a walking dead man around here."

"But William," she softened, "those horses are too vicious for you now. You can't move as fast as you did when you were a young man."

When she saw there was no use, she agreed and suggested he take Everett to assist.

"I shall keep the engagement," he told Annie.

What happened at the exhibition is also best told by THE BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN which made its front page news in reporting the activity of that fair.

"Hundreds of persons saw the famed horse-taming parson subdue a wild horse at the County Fair on the first day. It was a man killer from the R. L. Stockton Ranch where William worked as a young man. The animal was filled with fear and would climb over a seven-foot fence or go through a barbed wire fence to get away. The noted handler said the animal was young, however, and the fear was removed so that he became docile and tractable by easy and kind handling. But, on the last day an "old and filled with dread horse" was to be broken, and of this the newspaper commented:

"The fair crowd thrilled to the excitement of trying to gentle the old horse who had never permitted anyone to ride him, although many had attempted.

"'He is on the offensive,' Mullen told the crowd, 'as well as defensive, fights with both front and hind feet and will run at a man as quickly as away from him. He is an outlaw and an enemy to mankind--which is an unnatural condition--but he can be brought into docility and made a kind and gentle horse by proper treatment.'"

After a little more than thirty minutes, the animal was ready to receive him on his back, as thousands of other wild animals had done, too, in just about as many minutes.

The horse had not failed him, but behaved as obediently as any intelligent animal should. His life was now complete. He had had faith in the horse to the end, and it had not disappointed him. Instead, it brought him honor when he was an old man. He remembered what the horse had taught him about human nature. He remembered it with tenderness and affection for it had been a part of the best things his life had given him.

He mounted the outlaw now with the same lack of fear he had always mounted a wild horse, but not the same agility of his youth, for he had changed. But not the horse. The horse was the same understanding animal responding to affection in the same loyal way. He had been disappointed in other men and what they had done, but not the horse.

He knew that before he dismounted he had to recognize the knowledge God had given him, and that it was his duty to pass what he had learned on to his son, and his son's sons, and to all those who had come to see one of nature's wild forces harnessed. Now the old Professor was to speak from a leather pulpit, but his voice would be the voice of a fervent young man and with an unmistakable Gaelic quality that compelled the ear to listen to the authoritative admonition, as his message had always brought rapt attention.

What he said was what he had often spoken, and with the tenderness of an old man who remembered many things, but most of all he spoke of love and loyalty, for that was what the horse had taught him.

THE BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN printed what he said--a short sermon of one paragraph.

Annie clipped it out and pasted it in the old worn scrap book, the last chapter in the life of the famed Cowboy Evangelist.

"It was necessary to use bits, hobbles and twirling, in order to subdue this animal today. I would have that none of you, beloved, would be like this horse with a heart full of fear and a neck so stiff that it is necessary for God to use a bit on you; but rather that He should have your hearts filled with love by the Holy Ghost, and belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, loving one another and being kind by relieving the widow and orphan in their distress. Also, keeping yourself unspotted from the greed of the world. If this ye will do, ye will have found heaven on earth."

Finished, the old Professor leaped to the ground. Everett swung into the saddle to ride the now-manageable horse to the barns behind the bleachers, undoubtedly to deliver him to a satisfied owner.

The spectators' applause resounded throughout the entire ring of the extensive fair grounds.

Now the trainer, famed since the state's historic 1880s and of the Great Valley's expansion since the 1890s acknowledged the audience's appreciation by doffing his hat and bowing low as he pivoted around with his heels to take in the immense audience.

Immediately onlookers huddled around him to ask him further questions. Everyone seemed eager to learn more and more about his gentle method of harnessing wild forces by his kind, humane method. He reached into his pocket and took out a large white, silk handkerchief he always carried with him for his pulpit, and he wiped away a tear. Those close must have seen the smiling countenance through the look of satisfaction. As for the tear or two--they were of pure joy, for that was what he felt.

The End