Water witched, and Lee explains himself

Adam sits on his land like a contented cat while carpenters rebuild the old Sanchez adobe for a dynasty — copper nails, hard wood, nothing to rust or rot — and the whole valley talks the same way, in futures: roads, ditches, a peach carried whole to Philadelphia. Cathy waits out her pregnancy as she would an illness, answering correctly and intending to leave. Driving Samuel over from the Hamilton ranch, Lee drops the pidgin, explains that he speaks it because it is what people will hear, that he was born in Grass Valley and found himself a foreign devil in China, and defends being a servant as a philosopher's refuge. Samuel witches three sites and finds strong water. Adam tells him what Cathy did to his gray life and asks for a garden; Samuel refuses the friend's duty of puncturing it. At supper the talk dies and Samuel feels a goose walk over his grave; afterwards Lee asks him for a job. Alone, Cathy tells Adam she will go away, and he laughs it off.

Two men see Cathy clearly in one afternoon and neither can act on it: Samuel by instinct, twice shivering at the table, and Lee by asking for another job. Adam's own name does the work of the Eden joke, which he makes himself. The chapter's method is to let the plain warning — "I will go away" — sound like everything else Cathy says.