Chapter 8 - The Great Adventure (or Cherchez La Femme)

"Gertrude Llewellen Burrill is her name and she is two months younger than me. Born in Oregon, she was brought up on a remote ranch in Canada, their nearest neighbour being twelve miles distant. Unused to the ways of the cities, she is more at home in the saddle than on the tram. She is devoted and loyal and can go anywhere that I can, whether it is to the top of the highest tree or to the foot of the most treacherous ravine, whether it be to Timbuktu or Camlachie.

(I met her at the Alexandria, where at times, I had to supervise a number of girls as well as my own crew. She was different from the rest... and we got married in November, meaning to keep it a secret. Two very fine boys, who worked under me, came to live with us in our hillside apartment and the news soon leaked out, however.)

Since leaving Los Angeles, we have been all over California together in our Velie touring car...

Situated on a road leading to nowhere in particular, and cuddled to the side of a mountain, Palm Springs is, indeed, an oasis on the California desert. An artist in anything would surely find this place irresistible – such a variety of color and such incomparable sunsets! On the horizon, in any of the three directions that it presents itself, volcano-looking mountains arise, like dark forbidding sentinels, guarding this restful spot from the outside world and its attendant worries.

After the rains in months of October and November, the desert thrusts up its floral thanksgiving – thousands and thousands of beautifully hued verbenas help the many-colored cacti and heather-like sagebrushes to make up a landscape that one will always remember.

The township of Palm Springs is beautifully foliaged with stately palms, graceful pepper and aromatic eucalyptus trees, not to mention the orange, lemon and grapefruit groves.

Twenty miles distant, in the Coachella Valley, are some of the most advanced date farms in the world, while a little further to the south lies the famous Imperial Valley, noted for its treble and quadruple crops of everything, the whole year round....

Spain meets America in the vast Southland, where to this day, stand the Spanish Missions of the conquest era; wonderful, picturesque, old cloisters where one can well imagine the shaven, quiet-voiced padres of another age praying for the conversion of the heathen Indians – and later giving them shovels and axes, with which to show their appreciation of the new Faith."