THE RIVER

THE RIVER

By
EDNAH AIKEN

ILLUSTRATED BY
SIDNEY H. RIESENBERG

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1914
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO
CHARLES SEDGWICK AIKEN

CONTENTS

THE RIVER

THE RIVER

CHAPTER I
MARSHALL SENDS FOR RICKARD

THE large round clock was striking nine as “Casey” Rickard’s dancing step carried him into the outer office of Tod Marshall. The ushering clerk, coatless and vestless in expectation of the third, hot spring day, made a critical appraisement of the engineer’s get-up before he spoke. Then he stated that Mr. Marshall had not yet come.

For a London tie and a white silk shirt belted into white serge trousers were smart for Tucson. The clerks in the employ of the Overland Pacific and of the Sonora and Yaqui Railroads had stared at Rickard as he entered; they followed his progress through the room. He was a newcomer in Tucson. He had not yet acquired the apathetic habits of its citizens. He wore belts, instead of suspenders. His white trousers, duck or serge, carried a newly pressed crease each morning.

The office had not reached a verdict on the subject of K. C. Rickard. The shirt-sleeved, collarless clerks would have been quick to dub him a dandy were it not for a page of his history that was puzzling them. He had held a chair of engineering in some eastern city. He had resigned, the wind-tossed page said, to go on the road as a fireman. His rapid promotion had been spectacular; the last move, a few weeks ago, to fill an office position in Tucson. The summons had found him on the west coast of Mexico, where the Overland Pacific was pushing its tracks.

“You can wait here,” suggested the clerk, looking covertly at the shoes of the man who a few years before had been shoveling coal on a Wyoming engine. “Mr. Marshall said to wait.”

“Ribbons, instead of shoe-laces!” carped the human machine that must ever write letters which other men sign. “And a blue pin to match his tie! I call that going some!”

It would never have occurred to Rickard, had he thought about it at all that morning as he knotted his tie of dark, brilliant blue silk, that the selection of his lapis pin was a choice; it was an inevitable result, an instinctive discretion of his fingers. It warped, however, the suspended judgment of Marshall’s men who had never seen him shoveling coal, disfigured by a denim jumper. They did not know that they themselves were slovens; ruined by the climate that dulls vanity and wilts collars.

“Give him a year to change some of his fine habits!” wagered Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, as the door of the inner office closed.

“To change his habits less!” amended the office wit. And then they fell to speculating what Marshall was going to do with him. What pawn was he in the game that every one in Tucson followed with eager self-interested concern? Marshall’s was the controlling hand in Arizona politics; the maker of governors, the arbiter of big corporations; president of a half-dozen railroads. Not a move of his on the board that escaped notice.

On the other side of the door, Rickard was echoing the office question. This play job, where did it lead to? He had liked his work, under Stratton. There had been some pretty problems to meet—what did Marshall mean to do with him?

The note had set the appointment for nine. Rickard glanced at his watch, and took out his Engineering Review. It would be ten before that door opened on Tod Marshall!

He knew that, on the road, Marshall’s work began at dawn. “A man won’t break from overwork, or rust from underwork, if he follows the example of the sun,” Rickard had often heard him expound his favorite theory. “It is only the players, the sybarites, who can afford to pervert the arrangement nature intended for us.” But in Tucson, controlled by the wifely solicitude of his Claudia, he was coerced into a regular perversion. His office never saw him until the morning was half gone.

A half-hour later, Rickard finished reading a report on the diversion of a great western river. The name of Thomas Hardin had sent him off on a tangent of memory. The Thomas Hardin whose efforts to bring water to the desert of the Colorado had been so spectacularly unsuccessful was the Tom Hardin he had known! The sister had told him so, the girl with the odd bronze eyes; opal matrix they were, with glints of gold, or was it green? She herself was as unlike the raw boor of his memory as a mountain lily is like the coarse rock of its background. Even a half-sister to Hardin, as Marshall, their host at dinner the week before, had explained it,—no, even that did not explain it. That any of the Hardin blood should be shared by the veins of that girl, why it was incredible! The name “Hardin” suggested crudity, loud-mouthed bragging; conceit. He could understand the failure of the river project since the sister had assured him that it was the same Tom Hardin who had gone to college at Lawrence; had married Gerty Holmes. Queer business, life, that he should cross, even so remotely, their orbits again. That was a chapter he liked to skip.

He walked over to the windows, shielded by bright awnings, and looked down on the city where the next few years of his life might be caught. Comforting to reflect that an engineer is like a soldier, never can be certain about to-morrow. Time enough to know that to-morrow meant Tucson! What was that threadbare proverb in the Overland Pacific that Tod Marshall always keeps his men until they lose their teeth? That defined the men who made themselves necessary!

His eyes were resting on the banalities of the modern city that had robbed “old town” of its flavor. Were it not for the beauty of the distant hills, the jar and rumble of the trains whose roar called to near-by pleasure cities, twinkling lights and crowded theaters, stretches of parks and recreation grounds, he, who loved the thrill and confinement of an engine, who had found enticement in a desert, a chapter of adventure in the barrancas of Mexico, would stifle in Tucson! American progress was as yet too thin a veneer on Mexican indifference to make the place endurable; as a city. Were it a village of ten thousand people, then he’d not be scolding at his hotel, The Rosales. He could find the limitations picturesque, even. The census it was that accused those dusty unswept floors, the stained cuspidors, the careless linen, and The Rosales the best place in town! One has a right to expect comforts in a city.

“I’m good for a lifetime here, if I want it,” his thoughts would work back to the starting place. “If I knuckle down to it, let him grow to depend on me, it’s as good as settled that I am buried in Tucson!” Hadn’t he heard Marshall himself say that he “didn’t keep a kindergarten—that his office wasn’t a training-school for men!” He wanted his men to stay! That, one of the reasons of the great man’s power; detail rested on the shoulders of his employees. It kept his own brain clear, receptive to big achievements.

“Perhaps as the work unrolls, as I see more of what he wants of me, why he wants me, I may like it, I may get to shout for Tucson!” It was improbable enough to smile over! Child’s work, compared to Mexico. He was never tired—that was his grievance; he had it, now; he was never tired.

The distinction of serving Marshall well certainly had its drawbacks. He wanted to sweep on. Whether he had a definite terminal, a concrete goal, had he ever stopped to think? Specialization had always a fascination for him. It was that which had thrown him out of his instructorship into the fire-box of a western engine. It had governed his course at college—to know one thing well, and then to prove that he knew it well! Contented in the Mexican barrancas, here he was chafing, restive, after a few weeks of Tucson. For what was he getting here? Adding what scrap of experience to the rounding of his profession?

Retrospectively, engineering could hardly be said to be the work of his choice. Rather had it appeared to choose him. From boyhood engineers had always been, to him, the soldiers of modern civilization. To conquer and subdue mountains, to shackle wild rivers, to suspend trestles over dizzy heights, to throw the tracks of an advancing civilization along a newly blazed trail, there would always be a thrill in it for him. It had changed the best quarter-back of his high school into the primmest of students at college. Only for a short time had he let his vanity side-track him, when the honor of teaching what he had learned stopped his own progress. A rut—! He remembered the day when it had burst on him, the realization of the rut he was in. He could see his Lawrence schoolroom, could see yet the face under the red-haired mop belonging to Jerry Matson—queer he remembered the name after all those years! He could picture the look of consternation when he threw down his book, and announced his desertion.

“Casey was off his feed,” he had heard one of the students say as he passed a buzzing group in the hall. “He looks peaked.”

He had handed in his resignation the next day. A month later, and he was shoveling coal on the steep grades of Wyoming.

“Marshall keeps his men with him!” The engineer’s glance traveled around the fleckless office. A stranger to Marshall would get a wrong idea of the man who worked in it! Those precise files, the desk, orderly and polished, the gleaming linoleum—and then the man who made the negro janitor’s life a proud burden! His clothes always crumpled—spots, too, unless his Claudia had had a chance at them! Black string tie askew, all the outward visible signs of the southern gentleman of assured ancestry. Not even a valet would ever keep Tod Marshall up to the standard of that office. What did he have servants for, he had demanded of Rickard, if it were not to jump after him, picking up the loose ends he dropped?

Curious thing, magnetism. That man’s step on the stair, and every man-jack of them would jump to attention, from Ben, the colored janitor, who would not swap his post for a sinecure so long as Tod Marshall’s one lung kept him in Arizona, to Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, who had followed Marshall’s cough from San Francisco. Poor Smythe! as inextricably entangled in the meshes of red tape as was the hapless Lady of Shalott in the web of her own snarled loom. It was said in Arizona—he himself had met the statement in Tucson—that any man who had ever worked for Tod Marshall would rather be warmed by the reflection of his greatness than be given posts of personal distinction.

Rickard found his office the only attractive place in the desert city. Shining and airy, even in the hottest days, its gaily screened windows were far enough above the street to give a charitable perspective. Restive as he was under the inaction of the last few weeks, he could acknowledge a quaintness of foreign suggestion in the mixture of Indian and Mexican influence, hampered, rather than helped, by American aggressiveness. Over the heads of a group of low buildings he could see the roof of the old mission church, now the lounging place for roisterers and sponges. There, the fiery mescal, the terrible tequila, were sending many a white lad to destruction.

Those office buildings across the street, gay with canvas, suggested American enterprise. In the distance were the substantial structures of the lusty western university. Down by the track the new home of the Overland Pacific was nearing completion. In the street below, young girls with their crisp duck skirts and colored waists gave the touch of blossoming. Mexican women wrapped in the inevitable black shawl were jostling one another’s baskets. The scene was full of color and charm, but to the watcher who was eager to be on and doing, it cried teasingly of inertia.

Was it office routine Marshall intended him for? He admired without stint Tod Marshall, but he preferred to work by the side of the other kind, the strong men, without physical handicap, the men who take risks, the men who live the life of soldiers. That was the life he wanted. He would wait long enough to get Marshall’s intention, and then, if it meant—this! he would break loose. He would go back to the front where he belonged; back to the firing-line.

As the hands of the round clock in the outer office were pointing to ten, the door opened and Marshall entered. His clothes, of indefinite blackish hue, would have disgraced an eastern man. His string tie had a starboard list, and his hat was ready for a rummage sale. But few would have looked at his clothes. The latent energy of the dynamic spirit that would frequently turn that quiet office into a maelstrom gleamed in those Indian-black eyes. Beneath the shabby cloth, one suspected the daily polished skin; under the old slouch hat was the mouth of purpose, the lips that no woman, even his Claudia, had kissed without the thrill of fear.

Marshall glanced back at the clock, and then toward his visitor.

“On time!” he observed.

Rickard, smiling, put his book in his pocket.

CHAPTER II
A BIT OF ORATORY

MARSHALL threw his hat on a chair, the morning paper on his desk. He aimed his burned-out cigar at the nearest cuspidor, but it fell foul, the ashes scattering over Sam’s lately scoured linoleum. Instantly there was appearance of settled disorder. Marshall emptied his pockets of loose papers, spreading them out on his flat-top desk.

“Sit down!”

Rickard took the chair at the other side of the desk.

Marshall rang a bell. Instantly the shirt-sleeved clerk entered.

“I shall not see any one,” the chief announced. “I don’t want to be interrupted. Take these to Smythe.”

His eyes followed the shutting of the door, then turned square upon Rickard. “I need you. It’s a hell of a mess!”

The engineer wanted to know what kind of a “mess” it was.

“That river. It’s running away from them. It’s always going to run away from them. I’m going to send you down to stop it.”

“The Colorado!” exclaimed Rickard. It was no hose to be turned, simply, off from a garden bed!

“Of course you’ve been following it? It’s one of the biggest things that’s happened in this part of the world. Too big for the men who have been trying to swing it. You’ve followed it?”

“Yes.” Queer coincidence, reading that report just now! “I’ve not been there. But the engineering papers used to get to me in Mexico. I’ve read all the reports.”

His superior’s question was uncharacteristically superfluous. Who had not read with thrilled nerves of that wild river which men had been trying to put under work-harness? Who, even among the stay-at-homes, had not followed the newspaper stories of the failure to make a meek servant and water-carrier of the Colorado, that wild steed of mountain and desert? What engineer, no matter how remote, would not “follow” that spectacular struggle between men and Titans?

“Going to send me to Salton?” he inquired. The railroad had been kept jumping to keep its feet dry. His job to be by that inland sea which last year had been desert!

“No. Brainerd is there. He can manage the tracks. I am going to send you down to the break.”

Rickard did not answer. He felt the questioning eyes of his chief.

“Down to the break,” repeated Tod Marshall, his bright black eyes taking in every detail of the engineer’s get-up, resting, finally, on his sunburned face. “Have one?” He offered Rickard his choice of two small black cigars.

“Thanks, no,” said Rickard.

“Not smoking yet?”

“Not yet.” Rickard was amused at the solicitude. It was as though he had asked: “Your mother is dying?”

“When will the penance be over?” Marshall lighted his cigar, watching the blue blaze of the sulphur-tipped match, the slow igniting of the tobacco—obviously an exquisite sensuous rite.

“It isn’t a penance! It’s an experiment. I never had to do anything I really hated to do. I’ve never had to deny myself anything. Some fellows have to give up studying the profession they love, go to some hard digging or other, to support somebody. I’ve been lucky. I discovered I did not know the meaning of the word ‘sacrifice.’ I buckled down, and gave up the thing I liked best. That’s all that amounts to.”

His words had a solemn effect. Marshall had stopped smoking. Rickard discovered that his confidence had been tactless. Few men had had to sacrifice so much as the one now somberly facing him. His home, first, because a civil war had crushed it; his refuge, then, after years in attics, and struggle with post-bellum prejudices, just as success met him there; the fulness of life as men want it—those eyes knew what sacrifice meant!

“When are you going to quit?” Marshall’s face was still sober.

“When am I going to quit quitting?” laughed his subordinate. “I haven’t thought it out, sir. When it comes to me, the inclination, I suppose. I’ve lost the taste for tobacco.” The break—where those Hardins were—how in thunder was he going to get out of that, and save his skin? Marshall liked his own way—

Marshall had resumed his cigar. “We’ll consider it settled, then.” His minute of introspection was over. He had picked up his thread.

“Who’s in charge there?” Rickard was only gaining time. He thought he knew the name he would hear. Marshall’s first word surprised him.

“No one. Up to a few months ago, it was Hardin, Tom Hardin. He was general manager of the company. He was allowed to resign, to save his face, as the Chinese say. I may tell you that it was a case of firing. He’d made a terrible fluke down there.”

“I know,” murmured Rickard. It was growing more difficult, more distasteful. If Marshall wanted him to supplant Hardin! It had been incredible, that man’s folly! Reckless gambling, nothing else. Make a cut in the banks of a wild river, without putting in head-gates to control it; a child would guess better! It was a problem now, all right; the writer of the report he’d just read wasn’t the only one who was prophesying failure. Let the river cut back, and the government works at Laguna would be useless; a nice pickle Hardin had made.

Still to gain time, he suggested that Marshall tell him the situation. “I’ve followed only the engineering side of it. I don’t know the relationship of the two companies.”

“Where the railroad came in? The inside of that story? I’m responsible—I guaranteed to Faraday the closing of that break. There was a big district to save, a district that the railroad tapped—but I’ll tell you that later.” He was leisurely puffing blue, perfectly formed rings into the air, his eyes admiring them.

“Perhaps you’ve heard how Estrada, the general, took a party of men into the desert to sell a mine he owned. After the deal was made, he decided to let it slip. He’d found something bigger to do, more to his liking than the sale of a mine. Estrada was a big man, a great man. He had the idea Powell and others had, of turning the river, of saving the desert. He dreamed himself of doing it. If sickness hadn’t come to him, the Colorado would be meekly carrying water now, instead of flooding a country. Pity Eduardo, the son, is not like him. He’s like his mother, you never know what they are dreaming about. Not at all alike, my wife and Estrada’s.”

Then it came to Rickard that he had heard somewhere that Marshall and General Estrada had married sisters, famous beauties of Guadalajara. He began to piece together the personal background of the story.

“It was a long time before Estrada could get it started, and it’s a long story. As soon as he began, he was knocked down. Other men took hold. You’ll hear it all in the valley. Hardin took a day to tell it to me! He sees himself as a martyr. Promoters got in; the thing swelled into a swindle, a spectacular swindle. They showed oranges on Broadway before a drop of water was brought in. Hardin has lots of grievances! He’d made the original survey. So when he sued for his back wages, he took the papers of the bankrupt company in settlement. He’s a grim sort of ineffectual bulldog. He’s clung with his teeth to the Estrada idea. And he’s not big enough for it. He uses the optimistic method—gives you only half of a case, half of the problem, gets started on a false premise. Well, he got up another company on that method, the Desert Reclamation Company, tried to whitewash the desert project; it was in bad odor then, and he managed to bring a few drops of water to the desert.”

“It was Hardin who did that?”

“But he couldn’t deliver enough. The cut silted up. He cut again, the same story. He was in a pretty bad hole. He’d brought colonists in already, he’d used their money, the money they’d paid for land with water, to make the cuts. No wonder he was desperate.”

It recalled the man Rickard had disliked, the rough-shod, loud-voiced student of his first class in engineering. That was the man who had made the flamboyant carpets of the Holmes’ boarding-house impossible any longer to him. He had a sudden disconcerting vision of a large unfinished face peering through the honeysuckles at a man and a girl drawing apart in confusion from their first, and last, kiss. He wanted to tell Marshall he was wasting his time.

“Overwhelmed with lawsuits,” Marshall was saying. “Hardin had to deliver water to those colonists. It was then that he ran over into Mexico, so as to get a better gradient for his canal, and made his cut there. You know the rest. It ran away from him. It made the Salton Sea.”

“Did he ever give you any reason,” frowned Rickard reminiscently, “any reasonable reason why he made that cut without any head-gate?”

“No money!” shrugged Marshall, getting out another cigar. “I told you he’s a raw dancer, always starts off too quick, begins on the wrong foot. Oh, yes, he has reasons, lots of them, that fellow, but as you say, they’re not reasonable. He never waits to get ready.”

Why was it that the face of the half-sister came to Rickard then, with that look of sensitive high-breeding and guarded reserve? And she, a Hardin! Sister to that loud-spilling mouth! Queer cards nature deals! And pretty cards Marshall was trying to deal out to him. Go down there, and finish Hardin’s job, show him up to be the fumbler he was, give him orders, give the husband of Gerty Holmes orders—!

“It was Hardin who came to me, but not until he’d tried everything else. They’d worked for months trying to dam the river with a few lace handkerchiefs, and perhaps a chiffon veil!” Marshall was twinkling over his own humor. “Hardin did put up a good talk. It was true, as he said; we’d had to move our tracks three, no, four times, at Salton. It was true that it ought to be one of the richest districts tapped by the O. P. But he clenched me by a clever bait—to put out a spur in Mexico which would keep any other railroad off by a fifty-mile parallel, and there the sand-hills make a railroad impossible.

“The government must eventually come to the rescue. Their works at Laguna hang on the control of the river down at the Heading. Once, he told me—I don’t know how much truth there was in it—the Service, Reclamation Service, did try to buy up their plant for a paltry sum. He wouldn’t sell. The short is, I recommended long-sighted assistance to Faraday. I promised to turn that river, save the district. We expected before the year was out to have the government take the responsibility off our hands.”

Rickard made an impatient shrug. A nice problem Marshall had taken unto himself. He wanted none of it. Hardin—the thing was impossible.

He met laggardly Marshall’s story. He heard him say: “Agreed with Faraday. The Desert Reclamation Company was as helpless as a swaddled infant. We made the condition that we reorganize the company. I was put in Hardin’s place as president of the corporation, and he was made general manager. Of course, we had to control the stock. We put up two hundred thousand dollars—Hardin had estimated it would cost us less than half that! It’s cost us already a million. Things haven’t been going right. Faraday’s temper burst out, and Hardin, a while back was asked to resign.”

“And it is Hardin’s position that you want me to fill?” His voice sounded queer to himself, dry, mocking, as if any one should know what an absurd thing he was being asked to do. He felt Marshall’s sharp Indian eyes on him, as if detecting a pettiness. Well, he didn’t care how Marshall interpreted it. That place wasn’t for him.

“I want you in control down there.” Rickard knew he was being appraised, balanced all over again. It made no difference—

“I’m sorry,” he was beginning, when Marshall cut in.

“Good lord, you are not going to turn it down?”

He met Marshall’s incredulous stare. “It’s a job I’d jump at under most circumstances. But I can’t go, sir.”

Tod Marshall leaned back the full swing of his swivel chair, blankly astounded. His eyes told Rickard that he had been found wanting, he had white blood in his veins.

“It is good of you to think of me—pshaw, it is absurd to say these things. You know that I know it is an honor to be picked out by you for such a piece of work. I’d like to,—but I can’t.”

The president of railroads, who knew men, had been watching the play of feature. “Take your time,” he said. “Don’t answer too hastily. Take your time.”

He was playing the fool, or worse, before Marshall, whom he respected, whose partisanship meant so much. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t tell that story—he knew that Marshall would brush it aside as a child’s episode. He couldn’t make it clear to the man whose stare was balancing him why he could not oust Tom Hardin.

“Is it a personal reason?” Marshall’s gaze had returned to his ring-making.

Rickard admitted it was personal.

“Then I don’t accept it. I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t advise you to disregard the little thing, to take the big thing. Maybe, you are going to be married.” He did not wait for Rickard’s vigorous negative. “That can wait. The river won’t. Maybe it’s some quixotic idea, like your smoking; for God’s sake, Rickard, don’t be quixotic. It’s fine to be quixotic, magnificent, when you’re young. Oh, you are young to me. But when you’re no longer young? When you see the opportunity you did not take wasted, or made splendid, even, by some other man? Look at me! I could have foresworn the South, taken a different name after the war, said I was from England, or from New England. I could have made a decent living. What did I do? It seemed glorious to the youngster who had been fighting for his idea of justice to fight against such a handicap—a beaten southerner. And I did fight. I fought poverty, cold—I had a mother back there—I was hungry, often. Sick, and couldn’t go to a doctor who might have warned me, because I hadn’t a cent in my pocket. And so, when I was where I wanted to be, where I’d struggled up to be, had my hand on the life I loved, in the city I loved, with the woman I loved, I was knocked down, banished to this desert if I wanted to live a few more years! Where if I eat gruel, sleep a child’s night sleep, give up all the things a man of red blood likes to do, I may live! If you’d call it that! Just because I’d had no one to talk to me, as I’m talking to you, to tell me I was a young fool.”

Rickard was looking intently at a slit in the colored awning. He did not answer.

Marshall looked at the stiff figure facing him. “Your reason may be sounder than mine, less highfalutin. But look at it. Balance the other side. Drop yourself out of it. There’s a river running away down yonder, ruining the valley, ruining the homes of families men have carried in with them. I’ve asked you to save them. There’s a debt of honor to be paid. My promise. I have asked you to pay it. There’s history being written in that desert. I’ve asked you to write it. And you say ‘No—’”

“No! I say yes!” clipped Rickard. The Marshall oratory had swept him to his feet.

The dramatic moment was chilled by their Anglo-Saxon self-consciousness. An awkward silence hung. Then:

“When can you go?” Marshall’s voice dropped from the declamatory. He had already taken up a pencil and was vaguely scribbling over a writing pad.

“To-day, to-morrow, the first train out.” Rickard wondered if the scrawls had anything to do with him.

“Good!” Marshall’s tone was hearty, but it had the finality of “good-by.” He was tracing nebulous figures, letters. The word, “Oaxaca,” ran out of the blur. Instantly his mind was diverted.

He had made his appeal, won his point. An hour later, perhaps, he would be honest in denying the paternity of some of his flowery phrases were he to be confronted by the children of his brain. His word of honor—he had used as his climax. He had never thought of his business talk with Faraday in that light before, and never would again. It was a tool, picked up for his need and thrown away.

Already, he was revolving a spur he was planning for Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico. An inspiration had come to him on his walk from The Rosales that morning. His pencil made some rapid calculations.

A few minutes later he glanced up at the clock, and saw Rickard standing, as at attention.

“Ah!” He allowed his absorption to betray him.

“I should be off,” discovered Rickard.

“Oh, no,” replied the president of several railroads, looking at the clock again.

“Any instructions?”

“Just stop that river!”

Rickard again had a humorous vision of himself, asked to take away a bursting hose from a garden bed. “How am I limited?” he persisted. He stooped for his straw hat.

Marshall, still intrigued by his figures, looked up patiently, inquiringly, nibbling the end of his pencil.

“The expense?” demanded the engineer. “How far can I go?”

“Damn the expense!” cried Tod Marshall. “Just go ahead.”

He had begun a swift pencil map of the province of Oaxaca before Rickard was out of the room.

CHAPTER III
THE BLESSING OF ARIDITY

WHEN Rickard left the main line at Imperial Junction the next afternoon, his eyes followed the train he was deserting rather than the one that was to carry him to his new labors. He felt again the thrill of detachment that invariably preceded his entrance into a new country. With the pulling up of the porter’s green-carpeted stool, the slamming of the train gates, the curtain fell on the Tucson set scene.

The long line of cars was pushing off with its linen-covered Pullmans and diners, steaming down-grade toward the Sink, the depression which had been primeval sea, and then desert, and was now sea again. Old Beach, rechristened Imperial Junction for railroad convenience, was itself lower than the ancient sea-line where once the gulf had reached. Rickard knew he could find shells at that desert station should he look for them. He picked up his bag that the porter had thrown on the ground and faced the rung-down curtain.

Its painted scene was a yellow station-house broiling under a desert sun; a large water-tank beyond, and in the distance the inevitable cardboard mountains, like property scene-shifts, flat and thin in their unreal hues of burnished pink and purple. A dusty accommodation train was backing and switching, picking up the empty refrigerator cars to carry into the valley for the early melon growers.

Already, the valley had asserted its industrial importance; the late rampage of the Colorado had made it spectacular. Those who would pay little attention to the opening of a new agricultural district in the heart of a dreaded desert opened their ears to the vagary of the river which had sportively made of a part of that desert an inland sea. Scientists were rushing their speculations into print; would the sea dwindle, by evaporation, as it had done before? Or would the overflow maintain the paradoxical sea?

The flood signs were apparent. There, cracks had split the desert sand; here, water fissures had menaced the track; and to the south, a fringe of young willows hid the path of the Colorado’s debouch. The burning desert sands cried out a sharp antithesis. The yellow railway house bore all the parched signs of a desert station. Even the women, with children in their arms, did not attempt to sit in the stifling waiting-room; they preferred to stand in the glare.

The men crowding the platform wore the motley of a new country. In Tucson, the uniform of the male citizens, with the exception of those reckless ones who found inevitably that lotus is a liquid, was the wilted pretense of a gentle civilization; despondent ducks and khakis and limp collars. Imperial Junction marked the downfall of the collar. The rest of the composite costume was irregular, badly laundered and torn, faded and sunburned; the clothes of the desert soldier. Rickard saw buttonless shirts, faded overalls, shabby hats—the sombrero of Mexico. The faces under the broad-brimmed hats made a leaping impression upon him of youth and eagerness. He noted a significant average of intelligence and alertness. This was not the indolent group of men which makes a pretense of occupation whenever a train comes in!

“Going in?” asked a voice at his ear. A pair of faded eyes set in a young-old face, whether early withered or well-preserved he had not time to determine, was staring at him.

He assured his interlocutor that he was going in. His mood isolated the phrase; its significance vastly different from “going on.”

“Buying?”

“I think not.”

“It is a good time to buy.” Rickard suspected a real-estate agent. “For land is low, rock-bottom prices on account of the uneasiness about the river. People are afraid. They want to see the company redeem some of its promises before they come in; and the company isn’t in much of a hurry.”

Rickard raised his chin that his collar might bind his suffering neck in a different place, and then asked what company he referred to.

The young-old face with the faded eyes looked at him in surprise. “The D. R. Company, Desert Reclamation, which brought us all here.”

“Scamps?” The newcomer’s survey of the long line of naked mountains and lean lands that formed the neck of the valley gave a snub of casualness to the question.

“No. Fools!” The answer was as swift as a bullet. “Though some people think them worse than that. I don’t go so far, I’m willing to say they’ve tried. I’ll say that much. But they haven’t the know-how.”

“I’d rather be a scamp than a fool,” ventured Rickard. “It’s more progressive.” He drew a look of amused recognition from the faded valley man.

“Newspaper man? No? They are always coming in now since the break. I’m usually able to spot them.”

“You’ve spotted wrong once,” smiled Rickard, picking up his bag. The engine was backing the made-up train toward the station.

The crowd pushed forward. “No offense, I hope,” called the sun-dried face over the heads of the press. “I’ve done a little of it myself.”

The window seats, Rickard could see, were filled before the cars halted, by the experienced ones who had not waited for the train to be made up. In the scramble, he spied a vacant window on the sunny side, and made for it. Seated, he looked for his talkative friend who was already opening office farther down the car. A stranger dropped into the seat beside him.

Every window in the car was open. Each red-velveted, dusty seat was filled. A strong desert wind was blowing sand into their faces, discoloring the seats and covering the floor.

The engineer turned to his companion who was coughing.

“Do you mind this window being open?”

“I’d mind if it were not. It’s always bad at the Junction. When we get into the cultivated country, you will see what the valley will be like when it is all planted. The wind is not bad when it blows over grain or alfalfa. It is the desert dust that nags one.” He coughed again. “Going in?”

Rickard said he was going in.

“Are you going to settle in the valley?” The inquisitor was a man of about fifty, Rickard decided, with a desert tan of apparent health. His face was clear-cut and intelligent.

“I don’t know.”

“Just looking the country over?”

“You might call it that.”

“Go slow,” admonished his companion. “Don’t let yourself be carried away. It is a wonderful country. But go slow. It’s the ones who expect to make millions the first year that become the worst knockers. Go slow, I always tell them. Go slow.”

“It’s not a good time to buy then?”

“Not so good as it was ten years ago! But land is cheaper than it was a year back. In some districts you can buy a good farm for a ticket back home, the farmers are so discouraged. Cold feet.” The slang sounded oddly, somehow. The man’s voice had the cultivated precision of the purist. “Cold feet. The river’s chilled them. The valley’s losing faith in the company.”

“What company?” inquired Rickard again.

“There’s but one company to the valley, the one that brought them here, the D. R. They don’t call the railroad The Company. They have nothing to do with that problem. They won’t recognize that problem! It’s had hard luck from the first, the D. R. At the very start, the wrong man got hold of it. Sather, the first promoter, was a faker; a pretty thorough faker. The company reorganized, but it’s been in bad odor with the public ever since.”

Rickard’s eyes left the deep cuts in the land made by the ravaging waters, and looked at his companion.

“I thought Estrada was the original promoter?” he inquired.

“Estrada’s a recent comer—oh, you mean the general. He started the ball rolling; that was all. Bad health, following the Bliss complication, tied his hands. Did you ever hear the story of the way he colonized his grant?”

Rickard shook his head.

“It is a good story. I wrote it once for the Sun. I was out here then. That was before the doctors sent me, giving me a year if I lived anywhere else. Reclamation was being talked even then. Estrada picked up the enthusiasm, and got hold of a big slice of land. The terms of his purchase were a few cents an acre, fifteen, if I remember correctly, and a hundred colonists to be established the first year. Estrada sent in his hundred families, and did not think it necessary to mention to the government that he was paying the so-called colonists a dollar a day. They earned their dollar—it was big money in those days, two dollars Mexican—by digging a canal. When the inspector came along—there were the hundred families. After he was safely out of the country, Estrada paid and dismissed his colonists. He had the mile or so of canal and his tract besides. What’s the difference between fifteen cents and a hundred dollars? Multiply that by a million and a half, and you can see what those colonists were to bring to Estrada. Though they say he died poor.”

The man in the seat ahead was listening. His head was leonine, his body shriveled. Rickard could see on the neck the ancient burns that had spared the magnificent head. The rest of the man had been shriveled and twisted into terrible deformity. Rickard found himself puzzling over the accident with its accompanying miracle. There was not a scar on the powerful face.

“Estrada’s business methods were then not different from Sather’s and Hardin’s!” It was a deep rich organ.

“Oh, you can’t class Hardin with Sather,” protested Rickard’s companion. “Sather used Hardin. Hardin’s honesty can not be questioned. It’s not money he’s after. His whole heart is in this reclamation scheme.”

“Hardin’s a false alarm,” growled the owner of the massive head. “He makes promises. He never keeps them.”

The older man’s smile was tolerant. “Barton,” he indicated, “is the president of the water companies. And if you want to hear about a rogue and a scoundrel, ask the water companies their opinion of Hardin.”

“Well, what sort of a hole has he got us into?” demanded the other with heat.

“Hardin’s in a hole himself.”

Rickard found himself admiring the distinction in the face beside him. The sharp-pointed beard in which the gray was appearing gave a dog-like keenness to the well-modeled head, but the sharpness of the features, of the long slender nose, the long chin and thin eyebrow lines were offset, curiously, by the mildness, the resignation, in the steady gray eyes. If fires had ever burned in them, there were but cold ashes left.

“No one seems to remember that he crucified himself to save the valley. I’ve a great respect for Thomas Hardin.”

“Yes?” returned Rickard, whose liking had been captured by the speaker.

The impression of distinction sharpened. The stranger wore a laundered, pongee silk shirt, open at the neck, but restricted by a brown silk tie; and it was trimly belted. There were but two neckties in the entire car, and they occupied, Rickard observed, the same seat.

“The beginning of the canal system.”

Rickard looked out upon a flat one-toned country, marked off in rectangles by plows and scrapers. Farther south, those rectangles were edged by young willows. He fancied he could see, even at that distance, the gleam of water.

It was the passing of the desert. A few miles back, he had seen the desert in its primitive nakedness which not even cactus relieved. He was passing over the land which men and horses were preparing for water. And he could see the land where water was.

“That was the way Riverside looked when I first saw it,” commented the other man who wore a tie. “Come out on the rear platform. We can see better.”

Rickard followed to the back of the dust-swept stifling car. The glare on the platform was intense. He stood watching the newly made checker-board of a country slip past him. Receding were the two lines of gleaming steel rails which connected and separated him from the world outside. He was “going in.” Not in Mexico even had he had such a feeling of ultimate remoteness. The mountains, converging perspectively toward the throat of the valley, looked elusive and unreal in their gauze draperies of rose and violet. The tender hour of day was clothing them with mystery, softening their sharp outlines. They curtained the world beyond. Rickard felt the suspense of the next act.

It was a torpid imagination, he thought, which would not quicken over this conquest of the desert. East of the tract, men and teams were preparing the newly-furrowed ground for the seed. The curved land-knives were breaking up the rich earth mold into ridges of soft soil as uncohesive and feathery as pulverized chocolate. It was the dark color of the chocolate of commerce, this silt which had been pilfered from the states through which the vagrant river wandered. The smell of the upturned earth, sweetly damp, struck against his nostrils. Rickard indulged a minute of whimsical fancy; this was California territory over which his train was passing, but the soil, that dark earth those blades were crumbling, was it not the tribute of other states, of despoiling Wyoming, of ravishing Colorado and Arizona?

To the west, new squares were being leveled and outlined. Shrubby rectangles were being cleared of their creosote-bush and tough mesquit. Compared with other countries, the preparation for planting was the simplest. Horses were dragging over the ground a railroad rail bent into a V angle which pulled the bushes by the roots and dragged them out of the way. Beyond, farther west, could be seen the untouched desert. The surface for many miles was cracked by water-lines, broken and baked into irregular sand-cakes; the mark of sand which has been imprisoned by water and branded by swift heat.

Close by, men were putting in with care the seed that was to quicken the river silt. They were passing a square where the green tips of the grain were piercing the ground. Now, they were abreast of a field of matured alfalfa over which the wind raced gratefully. Desert and grain field; death and life! The panorama embraced the whole cycle.

“Excuse me. I did not hear you.” His new acquaintance had been endeavoring to get his attention.

The valley man tried to pitch his voice above the rattle of the train, but the effort ended in spasmodic coughing. The attacks left him weak and gasping.

“Better go back,” suggested Rickard. He followed the stranger who waved him to the seat by the open window. He busied himself with the sliding landscape, withholding his sympathy. He could hear the man drawing in long deep breaths. “Poor devil! He’s had his sentence!” he gathered.

After a few minutes, the other leaned over his shoulder, his hand waving toward the passing mountains. “Those are the Superstition Mountains you can see over yonder. An unusually apt name.”

“Yes?”

“An accidental hit of some tired traveler,” hazarded the colorless lips. “He had probably been listening to the legends of some unusually garrulous Indian; could not find the germ of universal religion in the simple creed, so he called it,—the nameless mountains—‘Superstition.’ I’ve always wished I knew his own name, that we might credit him, this late, with the inspiration. Have you ever thought,” he deflected, “how many familiar names are unsponsored? Take the Colorado, for instance. Melchior Diaz called it the Rio del Tizon; Alarçon, for diplomatic reasons, gave it Rio de la Buena Guia; Onate changed it to the Rio Grande de Buena Esperanza, and it was Kino, the Jesuit padre, who christened it in memory of the blessed martyrs Rio de los Martires. Who called it first the Colorado? History shuts her lips. And who will ever call it anything else?”

Rickard was attracted by the man’s educated inflection, as well as by his musing. “Why Superstition?” he queried.

“Why is it good, you mean? That pile of dark rock stands as a monument to an effete superstition. It is the gravestone for a gigantic mistake. Why, it was only the grossest ignorance that gave to the desert the label of ‘bad lands.’ The desert is a condition, not a fact. Here you see the passing of the condition, the burial of the superstition. Are you interested in irrigation?”

Rickard was not given to explain the degree of interest his profession involved, for the stranger drew a painful breath, and went on.

“Of course you are, if you are a western man. You are, I think?”

The engineer said that he was, by choice.

“Irrigation is the creed of the West. Gold brought people to this country; water, scientifically applied, will keep them here. Look at this valley. What was it a few years ago? Look at Riverside. And we are at the primer stage only. We are way behind the ancients in information on that subject. I learned at school, so did you, that some of the most glorious civilizations flourished in spite of the desert which surrounded them. That was only half a truth. They were great because of it! Why did the Incas choose the desert when their strength gave them the choice of the continent of South America? Why did the Aztecs settle in the desert when they might easily have preempted the watered regions? Then there are the Carthaginians, the Toltecs, the Moors. And one never forgets Egypt!”

“For protection,” Rickard gave the slighted question an interested recognition. “Was that not what we were taught at school? The forest held foes, animal and human. Those nations grew to their strength and power in the desert, by virtue of its isolation.”

“Superstition!” retorted the man with the pointed beard. “We are babes at the breast measured by the wisdom of the men who settled Damascus, or compared with the Toltecs, or those ancient tribes who settled in Northern India. They recognized the value of aridity. They knew its threefold worth.”

“An inherent value?” demanded the college-bred man, turning from the window.

“An inherent value,” declared the exponent of aridity.

“Will you tell me just what you mean?”

“Not in one session! Look yonder. That’s Brawley. When I came through here, ten years ago, I could have had my pick of this land at twenty-five cents an acre. They were working at this scheme then—on paper. I was not alive to the possibilities then; I had not yet lived in Utah!”

The train was slowing up by a brand-new, yellow-painted station. There were several dusty automobiles waiting by the track, a few faded surreys, and the inevitable, country hotel bus. The platform was swarming with alert vigorous faces, distinctly of the American type.

The man in the seat beside him asked Rickard if he observed the general average of intelligence in the faces of the crowd below. Rickard acknowledged that he had been struck by that, not only here, but at Imperial Junction, where he had waited for the train.

“There is a club in the valley, lately started, a university club which admits as members those who have had at least two years of college training. The list numbers three hundred already. The first meeting was held last week in an empty new store in Imperial. If it had not been for the setting, we might have been at Ann Arbor or Palo Alto. The costumes were a little motley, but the talk sounded like home.”

The dust, blowing in through the car doors, brought on another fit of strangling. Rickard turned again to the window, to the active scene which denied the presence of desert beyond.

“The doctors say it will have to be the desert always for me.” The stranger tapped his chest significantly. “But it is exile no longer—not in an irrigated country. For the reason of irrigation! It is the progressive man, the man with ideas, or the man who is willing to take them, who comes into this desert country. If he has not had education, it is forced upon him. I saw it worked out in Utah. I was there several years. Irrigation means cooperation. That is, to me, the chief value of aridity.”

The wind, though still blowing through the car and ruffling the train dust, was carrying less of grit and sand. To the nostrils of Rickard and his new acquaintance, it brought the pleasing suggestion of grassy meadows, of willow-lined streams and fragrant fields.

“It is the accepted idea that this valley is attracting a superior class of men because of its temperance stand. It is the other way round. The valley stood for temperance because of the sort of men who had settled here, the men of the irrigation type.”

The engineer’s ear criticized “irrigation type.” He began to suspect that he had picked up a crank.

“The desert offers a man special advantages, social, industrial and agricultural. (I would invert that arrangement if I made over that sentence!) It is no accident that you find a certain sort of man here.”

“I suppose you mean that the struggle necessary to develop such a country, under such stern conditions, develops of necessity, strong men?” evolved Rickard. “Oh, yes, I believe that, too.”

“Oh, more than that. It is not so much the struggle, as the necessity for cooperation. The mutual dependence is one of the blessings of aridity.”

“One of the blessings of aridity!” echoed his listener. “You are a philosopher.” He had not yet touched the other’s thought at the spring.

“You might as well call me a socialist because I praise irrigation in that it stands for the small farm unit,” retorted the valley man. “That is one of its fiats; the small unit. It is the small farm that pays. That fact brings many advantages. What is the charm of Riverside? It comes to me always like the unreal dream of the socialist come true. It is a city of farms, of small farms, where a man may make his living off his ten acres of oranges, or lemons; and with all the comforts and conveniences of a city within reach, his neighbors not ten miles off! A farmer in Riverside, or in any irrigated community, does not have to postpone living for himself or his family, until he can sell the farm! He can go to church, can walk there; the trolley car which passes his door takes him to a public library, or the opera-house. His children ride to school. His wife does not need to be a drudge. The bread wagon and the steam-laundry wagon stop at her door.”

Rickard observed that perhaps he did not know anything about irrigation after all! He had not thought of it before in its sociological relation, but merely as it touched his profession.

“Not going into soil values, for that is a long story,” began the older man, “irrigation is the answer which science gives to the agriculturist who is impatient of haphazard methods. Irrigation is not a compromise, as so many believe who know nothing about it. It is a distinct advantage over old-fashioned methods.”

“I am one of those who always thought it a compromise,” admitted the engineer.

“Better call rain a compromise,” retorted the irrigationist. “The man who irrigates gives water to the tree which needs it; rain nourishes one tree, and drowns out another. Irrigation is an insurance policy against drought, a guarantee against floods. The farmer who has once operated an irrigated farm would be as impatient were he again subjected to the caprice of rain as a housewife would be were she compelled to wait for rain to fill her wash-tub. There is no irregularity or caprice about irrigation.”

“Wonder how the old fellow picked it all up?” mused Rickard with disrespect. Aloud he said—“You were speaking of the value of the soil?”

“Look at the earth those plows are turning over. See how rich and friable it is, how it crumbles? You can dig for hundreds of feet and still find that sort of soil, eight hundred feet down! It is disintegrated rock and leaf mold brought in here in the making of a delta. Heavy rainfalls are rare here, though we have had them, in spite of popular opinion. Were we to have frequent rains, the chemical properties, which rain-farmers must buy to enrich their worn-out soils, would be leached out, drained from the soil. I can’t make this comprehensive, but I’ve a monograph on desert soil. If you are interested, I’ll send it to you.”

“I should like it—immensely,” assented the engineer, still amused.

“It explains the choice of the Aztecs, of the Incas, of Carthaginians, the Moors,” observed the stranger. “They chose the desert, not in spite of the soil, but because of it. I doubt if they were awake to the social advantages of the system, but it was their cooperative brotherhood that helped them to their glory. We are centuries behind them. Look what the acceptance of the superstition has already cost California! The Mexican Boundary Survey Commission did its work pretty thoroughly until familiarity with the bad lands they were plodding through confirmed the old superstition. The international line was to cut across at the mouth of Hardy’s Colorado. When the surveyors struck the Gila, they assumed it was the river they wanted it to be; anyway, it did not matter; it was ‘bad land,’ where even the Indians were thinning, where only scorpions and rattlers could flourish. The line was drawn there, and California lost all that area of desert land. However, a lady got her silk gown!”

The last words were as spice to a tasteless pudding. “A silk gown!” It sounded piquant.

“That’s a page of unwritten history,” said the stranger, rising. “I’m getting out here; Imperial. If you come up to Imperial, look me up. Brandon’s my name. I’ve no card these days!”

“There are several things I want to hear from you,” answered Rickard, rising also, and following the pointed beard to the platform. “I’ll be sure to look you up. Mine’s Rickard.”

“There’s my residence,” waved Brandon. “That tent over yonder?” All of Imperial was easily seen from the car platform. “No, that is a canvas house. There is a great difference,—in distinction!”

Rickard liked the nicety of speech which to the critical ear is as pleasing as wit. He watched Brandon step off the car, saw him greeted and surrounded by a knot of station watchers.

“Hello, Brandon,” Rickard could hear them hail him. “Back home, Brandon?” “Treated you well at Palm Springs?”

“Poor devil,” he thought again. “Trying Palm Springs for his cough. Wonder who the old duck is. Country newspaper, I fancy. He did say he had reported for the Sun.”

The young-old man who had spoken to him at the Junction, pushed past with some bundles. He stopped when he saw Rickard.

“I get out here. If you come to Imperial, hunt me up. I run the Star, the only newspaper in the valley. Glad to meet you.”

“Disposing of my theory about Brandon,” smiled the engineer, going back into the dusty car. He was interested enough to lean over and ask Barton who was the man called Brandon. They could see him from the windows, still surrounded, still smiling that sweet ascetic smile.

“Captain Brandon they call him. He’s one of the old settlers. Was with Powell, on the second expedition down the river. Then was one of the big men on the Sun.” He tapped his chest significantly. “Bad; came West, folks thought to die. There’s lots of grit in the old fellow. He’s written a history of the Colorado River that reads like a novel, they say. I’ve never read it. I never read books. I’m lucky if I can get time for a newspaper, and I don’t often get a newspaper.”

Rickard observed that “Captain Brandon” seemed to be well informed on the subject of irrigation.

“That’s his hobby, that and desert soil. He’s writing a book on irrigation, not half done yet, but it’s already sold. He’s published a pamphlet on desert soil. Oh, he knows his subject.”

“College man?”

“Harvard, I think, and then either an English or German university. I’ve heard, but I’ve forgotten by now. He’s lived in the West, everywhere they’ve tried irrigation; in Utah, Colorado, California, and he’s been to Egypt and Syria and all the classic places. Studying, but he came back again, nearly dead. He goes up to Palm Springs every little while to get toned up, taken care of. Poor devil!”

The breeze, which was now entering the car windows, had blown over clover-leafed fields. Its message was sweet and fresh. Rickard could see the canals leading off like silver threads to the homes and farms of the future; “the socialists’ dream come true!” Willows of two or three years’ growth outlined the banks. Here and there a tent, or a ramada, set up a brave defiance against the hard conditions of the land it was invading. Rickard leaned out of the window, and looked back, up the valley which was dominated by the range now wrapping around itself gauzy iridescent draperies.

“The monument to an effete superstition!” he repeated. “That wasn’t a bad idea. I hope he won’t forget to send me his monograph.”

CHAPTER IV
THE DESERT HOTEL

HE left the dusty car with relief when the twin towns were called. The sun, plunging toward the horizon, was sending out long straight shafts of yellow light, staining the railroad buildings a deeper hue and playing queer tricks with faces and features. The yellow calcium isolated two stalwart Indians whose painted faces and streaming black hair, chains of tawdry beads and floating ribbons made the vacuity of their brown masks a grotesque contrast. Their survey of the train and the jostling passengers, was as dispassionate and incurious as though this brisk invasion carried no meaning nor menace to them.

Rickard had expected to see a Mexican town, or at least a Mexican influence, as the towns hugged the border, but it was as vividly American as was Imperial or Brawley. There was the yellow-painted station of the Overland Pacific lines, the water-tank, the eager American crowd. Railroad sheds announced the terminal of the road. Backed toward the station was the inevitable hotel bus of the country town, a painted board hanging over its side advertising the Desert Hotel. Before he reached the step, the vehicle was crowded.

“Wait, gen’lemen, I’m coming back for a second load,” called the darky who was holding the reins.

“If you wait for the second trip, you won’t get a room,” suggested a friendly voice from the seat above.

Rickard threw his bag to the grinning negro, and swung on to the crowded steps.

Leaving the railroad sheds, he observed a building which he assumed was the hotel. It looked promising, attractive with its wide encircling veranda and the patch of green which distance gave the dignity of a lawn. But the darky whipped up his stolid horses. Rickard’s eyes followed the patch of green.

The friendly voice from above told him that that was the office of the Desert Reclamation Company. His next survey was more personal. He saw himself entering the play as the representative of a company that was distrusted, if not indeed actively hated by the valley folk. It amused him that his entrance was so quiet as to be surreptitious. It would have been quieter had Marshall had his way. But he himself had stipulated that Hardin should be told of his coming. He had seen the telegram before it left the Tucson office. He might be assuming an unfamiliar rôle in this complicated drama of river and desert, but it was not to be as an eavesdropper.

“Going in to settle?” The friendly voice belonged, he could see through the press of arms and limbs, to a pair of alert eyes and a faded buttonless shirt that had once been blue.

“I did that before I left!” He was tired of the question.

There was a laugh from the seats above.

“Going to try Calexico?”

“I think Calexico is going to try me! If this dust is a sample!”

“Wonder if they are so eager to welcome settlers because they are all real-estate agents, or if the valley movement is a failure?” reflected the newcomer.

The heavy bus was plowing slowly through the dust of the street. Rickard was given ample time to note the limitations of the new town. They passed two brick stores of general merchandise; lemons and woolen goods, stockings and crackers disporting fraternally in their windows. A board sign swinging from the overhanging porch of the most pretentious building announced the post-office. From a small adobe hung a brass plate advising the stranger of the Bank of Calexico. The ’dobe pressed close to another two-storied structure of the desert type. The upper floor, supported by posts, extended over the sidewalk. Netted wire screened away the desert mosquito, and gave the overhanging gallery the grotesque appearance of a huge fencing mask. From the street could be seen rows of beds; as in hospital wards. Calexico, it was seen, slept out-of-doors.

“Desert Hotel,” bawled the darky, reining in his placid team.

“Yes, sah, I’ll look out for your bag. Got your room? The hotel’s mighty sure to be full. Not many women yit down this a-way.... All the men mostly lives right heah at the hotel.”

Rickard made a dive from a swirl of dust into the hotel. The long line he anticipated at the desk was not there. He stopped to take in a valley innovation. One end of the long counter had been converted into a soda-water bar. The high swivel stools in front of the white marbled stand, with its towering silver fixtures, were crowded with dust-parched occupants of the bus. A white-coated youth was pouring colored sirups into tall glasses; there was a clinking of ice; a sizzling of siphons.

“That’s a new one on me,” grinned Rickard, turning toward the desk where a complacent proprietor stood waiting to announce that there was but one room left.

“With bath?”

“Bath right across the hall. Only room left in the house.” The proprietor awarded him the valley stare. “Going to be here long?” He passed the last key on the rack to the darky staggering under a motley of bags and suit-cases. Rickard recognized his, and followed.

“I may get you another room to-morrow,” called the proprietor after him as he climbed the dusty stairs.

Rickard decided that the one room was not only hot and stifling, but dirty. The darky thrust his bag through the door and left the guest staring at the bed. He pulled back the covers; dust and sand of apparently a week’s accumulation lined the sheets. The red, gaily-flowered, Brussels carpet was gritty with sand. Rickard rubbed a reflective finger over the surface of the golden-oak bureau.

A middle-aged chambermaid with streaming rusty hair, entering without ceremony, caught his grimace.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. I cleaned it up this morning. It’s the wind. Ain’t it awful? I’ve known people to come into this place when the wind has been blowing as it has to-day, and seen them leave as soon as they seen their bed. They had to come back, as there’s no other place to go, and they’d be no better if there was. But Mr. Patton, that’s the boss, has me go around regular now, and explain. It saves his time. I’ll fix it up for you, so you can be easy as to its being new dirt. It’ll be just as bad as this when you come to go to bed.”

Rickard washed his hands, and fled, leaving the berserker to the clouds of fury she had evoked. The soda-counter was deserted. The youth, divested of his white coat, was relieving Mr. Patton at the register. Rickard followed the sound of voices.

The signals of a new town were waving in the dining-room. The majority of the citizens displayed their shirt-sleeves and unblushing suspenders. One large table was surrounded by men in khaki; the desert-soldiers, engineers. The full blown waitresses, elaborately pompadoured, were pushing through the swing-doors, carrying heavy trays. Their transparent shirt-waists of coarse embroidery or lace were pinned to rusty, badly hung skirts of black alpaca. An apron, the size of a postage stamp, was the only badge of servitude. Coquetry appeared to be their occupation, rather than meal-serving, the diners accepting both varieties of attention with appreciation. The supremacy of those superior maidens was menaced only by two other women who sat at a table near the door. Rickard did not see them at first. The room was as masculine as a restaurant in a new mining town.

A superior Amazon inquired if the gentleman would like vermicelli soup? As he did not even glance at her magnificent pompadour, he was punished by being served last through the entire bill of fare.

He had two men at his table. They were engrossed with their course of boiled beef and spaghetti. Iced tea, instead of wine, was the only variation from the conventional, country hotel dinner.

Rickard left his indoor view to look through the French windows opening on a side street. He noticed a slender but regular procession. All the men passing fell in the same direction.

“Cocktail route,” explained one of his neighbors, his mouth full of boiled beef.

“Oyster cocktail?” smiled the newcomer.

“The real thing! Calexico’s dry, like the whole valley, that is, the county. See that ditch? That is Mexico, on the other side. Those sheds you can see are in Mexicali, Calexico’s twin sister. That painted adobe is the custom house. Mexicali’s not dry, even in summer! You can bet your life on that. You can get all the bad whisky and stale beer you’ve the money to buy. We work in Calexico, and drink in Mexicali. The temperance pledge is kept better in this town than any other town in the valley. But you can see this procession every night.”

The Amazon with a handkerchief apron brought Rickard his soup. He was raising his first spoonful to his mouth when he saw the face, carefully averted, of the girl he had met at the Marshalls’ table, Innes Hardin. His eyes jumped to her companions, the man a stranger, and then, Gerty Holmes. At least, Mrs. Hardin! Somehow, it surprised him to find her pretty.

She had achieved a variety of distinction, preserving, moreover, the clear-cut babyish chin which had made its early appeal to him. There was the same fluffy hair, its ringlets a bit artificial to his more sophisticated eyes, the same well-turned nose. He had been wondering about this meeting; he found that he had been expecting some sort of shock—who said that the love of to-day is the jest of to-morrow? The discovery that Gerty was not a jest brought the surprised gratification which we award a letter or composition written in our youth. Were we as clever as that, so complete at eighteen or twenty-one? Could we, now, with all our experience, do any better, or indeed as well? That particular sentence with wings! Could we make it fly to-day as it soared yesterday? Rickard was finding that Gerty’s more mature charms did not accelerate his heart-beats, but they were certainly flattering to his early judgment. And he had expected her to be a shock!

He was staring into his plate of chilled soup. Calf-love! For he had loved her, or at least he had loved her chin, her pretty childish way of lifting it. She was prettier than he had pictured her. Queer that a man like Hardin could draw such women for sister and wife—the blood tie was the most amazing. For when women come to marry, they make often a queer choice. It occurred to him that that might have been Hardin—he had not wanted to stare at them.

That was not Hardin’s face. It held strength and power. The outline was sharp and distinct, showing the strong lines, the determined mouth of the pioneer. There was something else, something which stood for distinction—no, it couldn’t be Hardin.

And then, because an outthrust lip changed the entire look of the man, Rickard asked his table companions, who was the man with the two ladies, near the door.

“That, suh,” his neighbor from Alabama became immediately oratorical, “that is a big man, suh. If the Imperial Valley ever becomes a reality, a fixtuah, it will be because of that one man, suh. Reclamation is like a seed thrown on a rock. Will it stick? Will it take root? Will it grow? That is what we all want to know.”

Rickard thought that he had wanted to know something quite different, and reminded the gentleman from Alabama that he had not told him the name.

“The father of this valley, of the reclamation of this desert, Thomas Hardin, suh.”

Rickard tried to reset, without attracting their attention, the group of his impressions of the man whose personality had been so obnoxious to him in the old Lawrence days. The Hardin he had known had also large features, but of the flaccid irritating order. He summoned a picture of Hardin as he had shuffled into his own class room, or up to the long table where Gerty had always queened it among her mother’s boarders. He could see the rough unpolished boots that had always offended him as a betrayal of the man’s inner coarseness; the badly fitting coat, the long awkward arms, and the satisfied, loud-speaking mouth. These features were more definite. Could time bring these changes? Had he changed, like that? Had they seen him? Would Gerty, would Hardin remember him? Wasn’t it his place to make himself known; wave the flag of old friendship over an awkward situation?

He found himself standing in front of their table, encountering first, the eyes of Hardin’s sister. There was no surprise, no welcome there for him. He felt at once the hostility of the camp. His face was uncomfortably warm. Then the childish profile turned on him. A look of bewilderment, flushing into greeting—the years had been kind to Gerty Holmes!

“Do you remember me, Rickard?”

If Hardin recognized a difficult situation, he did not betray it. It was a man Rickard did not know who shook him warmly by the hand, and said that indeed he had not forgotten him.

“I’ve been expecting you. My wife, Mr. Rickard, and my sister.”

“Why, what are you thinking of, Tom? To introduce Mr. Rickard! I introduced you to each other, years ago!” Gerty’s cheeks were red. Her bright eyes were darting from one to the other. “You knew he was coming, and did not tell me?”

“You were at the Improvement Club when the telegram came,” put in Innes Hardin, without looking at Rickard. No trace of the Tucson cordiality in that proud little face! No acknowledgment that they had met at the Marshalls’!

“Oh, you telegraphed to us?” The blond arch smile had not aged. “That was friendly and nice.”

Rickard had not been self-conscious for many a year. He did not know what to say. He turned from her upturned face to the others. Innes Hardin was staring out of the window, over the heads of several crowded tables; Hardin was gazing at his plate. Rickard decided that he would get out of this before Gerty discovered that it was neither “friendly nor nice.”

“If I had known that you were here, I would have insisted on your dining with us, in our tent. For it’s terrible, here, isn’t it?” She flashed at him the look he remembered so vividly, the childish coquettish appeal. “We dine at home, till it becomes tiresome, and then we come foraging for variety. But you must come to us, say Thursday. Is that right for you? We should love it.”

Still those two averted faces. Rickard said Thursday, as he was bidden, and got back to his table, wondering why in thunder he had let Marshall persuade him to take this job.

Hardin waited a scant minute to protest: “What possessed you to ask him to dinner?”

“Why shouldn’t I? He is an old friend.” Gerty caught a glance of appeal, from sister to brother. “Jealous?” she pouted charmingly at her lord.

“Jealous, no!” bluffed Hardin.

He thought then that she knew, that Innes had told her. The Lawrence episode held no sting to him. Once, it had enchanted him that he had carried off the boarding-house belle, whom even that bookman had found desirable—bookman! A superior dude! He had always had those grand airs. As if it were not more to a man’s credit to struggle for his education, even if he were older than his class, or his teacher, than to accept it off silver plates, handed by lackeys? Rickard had always acted as if it had been something to be ashamed of. It made him sick.

“They’ve done it this time. It’s a fool choice.”

Again, that look of pleading from Innes. Gerty had a shiver of intuition.

“Fool choice?” Her voice was ominously calm.

Hardin shook off Innes’ eyes. Better be done with it! “He’s the new general manager.”

“He’s the general manager!”

“I’m to take orders from him.”

Gerty’s silence was of the stunned variety. The Hardins watched her crumbling bread on the table-cloth, thinking, fearfully, that she was going to cry.