The Long Chance Read online

  CHAPTER VIII

  Donna's mail-order library proved a great source of comfort to Bobduring the lonely days at the Hat Ranch. At night she sang to him, orsat contentedly at his side while he told her whimsical tales of hiswanderings. He was an easy, natural conversationalist, the kind of a manwho "listens" well--an optimist, a dreamer. He was, seemingly, possessedof a fund of unfailing good-nature, and despite the fact that the pastseven years of his life had been spent far from that civilization inwhich he had grown to manhood, in unconventional, occasionally sordidsurroundings, he had lost none of an innate gentleness with women, thatdelicate attention to the little, thoughtful, chivalrous things which,to discerning women, are the chief charm in a man. And withal he was adroll rascal, a rollicking, careless fellow who quickly discovered that,next to telling her that he loved her and would continue to love herforever and ever, it pleased Donna most to have him tell her abouthimself, to listen to his Munchausenian tales of travel and adventure.Did he speak of cities with their cafes, parks, theaters and museums,she was interested, but when he told her of the country that lay justbeyond the ranges, east and west, or described the long valley to thenorth, rolling gradually up to the high Sierra, with their castellatedspires, sparkling and snow-encrusted; of little mountain lakes,mirroring the firs of the heights above them, of meadows and runningwater and birds and blossoms, he could almost see the desert sadnessdie out in her eyes, as she trailed him in spirit through this marvelousland of her heart's desire.

  "When we're married, Donna," he told her, when there came to him for thefirst time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a changefrom the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'lltake horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful country onour honeymoon."

  She turned to him with glistening eyes, seized his hand and pressed itto her cheek.

  "How soon?" she murmured.

  He was silent, wishing he had not spoken. He was a little subdued as heanswered.

  "As soon as my ship comes in, Donna. Just at present it seems quite along way off, although if nothing happens to upset a little scheme ofmine, it will not be more than a year. Things are very uncertain rightnow." He smiled sheepishly as he thought of his profitless wanderings."You know, Donna, I've been a rolling stone, and I haven't gathered verymuch moss."

  "We can wait. I haven't thought much about the future, either, Bob. I'mjust content to know I've got you, and the problem of keeping you hasn'tpresented itself as yet."

  They were silent, listening to the zephyr whistling around the HatRanch.

  "Do you know," she told him presently, "I haven't stopped to gather upthe hats since the night you came. Bob, dear, I'm afraid you're ruiningmy business."

  He stared at her amazed. "I don't understand" he said.

  "I don't gather moss," she taunted him; "my specialty is hats," and thenshe explained for the first time the peculiar side-line in which she wasengaged. It was their first discussion of any subject dealing with thepractical side of her life, and Bob was keenly interested. He laughed asDonna related some homely little anecdote of the hat trade, and later,after plying her with questions regarding her life, past and present,the mood for a mutual exchange of confidences seized him and he told hersomething of his own checkered career.

  Bob McGraw's father had been a mining engineer who had neveraccomplished anything more remarkable than proving himself a failure inhis profession. He was of a roving, adventurous disposition, the kindof a man to whom the fields just ahead always look greenest, and as aresult his life had been a remarkable series of ups and downs--mostlydowns. Bob's mother had been an artist of more or less ability--probablyless--who, having met and fallen in love with McGraw senior in New Yorkduring one of his prosperous periods, had continued to love him when thefortune vanished. Bob had been born in a mining camp in Tuolumne county.He had never seen his mother. She died bringing him into the world.His father had drifted from camp to camp, each successive camp being alittle lonelier, less lively and less profitable than its predecessor.He had managed to keep his son by him until Bob was about ten yearsold, when he sent him to a military academy in southern California. Ateighteen, Bob had graduated from the academy, and at his father's desirehe entered the state university to study law.

  Long before he had waded half-way through the first book of Blackstone,Bob had become fully convinced that he was his father's son, andthat mining engineering would be vastly more to his liking. It was aprofession, however, upon which his father frowned. Like most men whohave made a failure of their vocation, he dreaded to see his son followin his father's footsteps. He was insistent upon Bob following the law;so to please him young Bob had managed to struggle through the courseand by dint of much groaning and burning of midnight oil, eventuallyhe was admitted to practice before the Superior Court. Unknown to hisfather, however, he had been attending the courses in geology and miningengineering, in which he had made really creditable progress. He wasunfortunate enough to pass his law examinations, however, whereupon hisfather declared that he must make his own way in the world thereafter.He secured for his son a position in the office of an old friend, acorporation lawyer named Henry Dunstan, where Bob while not activelyengaged upon some minor detail of Dunstan's large practice had theprivilege of going down into the police courts for a little practicalexperience in the gentle art of pleading.

  A month later, McGraw, pere, while ascending the shaft of the mine wherehe was employed as superintendent, was met by an ore bucket coming down.Bob closed his office, went up country to the mine and saw to it thathis father was decently buried. Fortunately there was sufficient moneyon hand to do this, Bob's parent having received his pay check only theday before.

  There had been no estate for Bob to probate, and his few briefless weeksscouting around the police courts and acting as a messenger boy forHenry Dunstan had given him a thorough disgust for the profession ofthe law. He left his position with Dunstan and went to work on a morningpaper at fifteen dollars a week. At the end of two months he was gettingtwenty--also he was very shabby and in debt. It was his ambition togather together sufficient money to enable him to complete his miningcourse and secure his degree.

  He hated the city; it was not in his nature to battle and grub with hisfellows for a few paltry dollars, and the call of his father's blood wasstrong in his veins. Bob was the kind of fellow who likes to make a heapof his winnings, when he has any, and stake it all on the turning of acard; if this metaphor may be employed to designate Bob McGraw's naturewithout creating the impression that he had, inherited a penchant forthe gaming table. It had been born in him to take a chance. And the goldfever, inherited from his father, still burned in his blood. He driftedto Nevada, where he did a number of things--including the assault onMr. Hennage's faro bank, which, as we have already been informed, alsoresulted disastrously.

  These adventures occupied the first two years of Bob McGraw'swanderings. For the next eighteen months he worked in various mines invarious capacities, picking up, in actual experience, much of the miningwisdom which circumstances had denied that he should acquire in college.His Nevada experiences had given him a taste of the desert and he likedit. There was a broad strain of poetry in his make-up, inherited perhapsfrom his mother, and the desert appealed to that mystical sixth sensein him, arousing his imagination, taunting him with a desire that wasalmost pre-natal to investigate the formation on the other side of thesky-line. It pandered to the spirit of adventure in him, the purpledistances lured him with promise of rich reward, and the day he madethe remarkable discovery that he had saved enough money to purchasetwo burros, an automatic pistol, a box of dynamite and the usualprospector's outfit, he took the trail through Windy Gap and Hell's Bendinto Death Valley.

  Here Bob McGraw learned the true inwardness of a poem which he had oncerecited as a boy at school. "Afar In the Desert I Love to Ride." OnlyBob walked. And after walking several hundred miles he found nothing.But he had seen lots of country, and the silence pleased him. Also
hehad met and talked with other desert wanderers, with whom he had sharedhis water and his grub, and in return they had infected him stillfurther with the microbe of unrest. He heard tales of lost mines, ofmarvelous strikes, of fortunes made in a day, and that imaginativestreak in him, inherited from his mother, fused with the wanderlust ofhis father, combined to make of him a Desert Rat at twenty-three.

  He came out of the desert, on that first trip, at Coso Springs, anddoubled north along the western edge of the White mountains up throughInyo county picking, prospecting, starving, thirsting cheerfully as hewent. At the town of Bishop, his stomach warned him that it would be awise move to sell his outfit and seek a job; which he accordingly did.He found employment with a cattle company and went up to Long valley inMono county. Here he was almost happy. Life on a cow range suited himvery well indeed, for it took him away from civilization and carriedhim through a mineral country. He rode with a prospector's pick on hissaddle, and in addition the scenery just suited him. There was justenough of desert and bare volcanic hills, valley and meadow andsnow-capped peaks to please the dreamer and lover of nature; therewas always the chance that a "cow," scrambling down a hillside, wouldunearth for him a fortune.

  Thus a few more years had slipped by. In the summer and fall Bob McGrawrode range. In the winter he quit his job, invested his savings in twoburros and a prospector's outfit and roved until summer came again andthe heat drove him back to the range once more. He was very happy, forthe future was always rose-tinted and he had definitely located two lostmines. That is to say, he could say almost for a certainty that they laywithin five miles of certain points. Somehow, his water had a habit ofalways giving out just when he got to those certain points, and whenhe had gone back after more water something had happened--a new strikehere, a reported rush elsewhere, to lure him on until he was once moreforced to abandon the trail and return to work for his grubstake in thefall.

  This was the man who had ridden into San Pasqual and got as far as theHat Ranch; when as usual, something had happened.

  He told Donna his story simply, with boyish frankness, interlarding thenarrative with humorous little anecdotes that robbed the tale of thestigma of failure and clothed it in the charm of achievement. Shelaughed in perfect understanding when he described how some desert waghad placed a sign beside the trail at Hell's Bend at the entrance toDeath Valley. "Who enters here leaves hope behind."

  "I saw that sign when I came by, Donna," he told her, "and I didn't likeit. It sounded too blamed pessimistic for me, so when I broke camp nextmorning I changed the sign to read 'Soap' instead of 'Hope.'"

  Donna's laughter awoke the echoes in the silent patio, and Bob McGraw,certain of his audience, rambled on. Ah, what a dreamer, what a lovable,careless, lazy optimist he was! And how Donna's whole nature went outin sympathy with his! She knew so well what drove him on; she enviedhim the prerogative of sex which denied to her these joyous, endlesswanderings. "I love it" he told her presently. "I can't help it. Itappeals to something in me, just like drink appeals to a drunkard. I'mnever so happy as when gophering around in a barren prospect hole orcoyoting on some rocky hillside. But it's only another form of thegambling fever, and I realize that whether my present plans mature ornot I've got to give it up. It was all right a few years ago, but nowthe idea of wandering all my life over the mountains and desert, and inthe end dying under a bush, like a jack-rabbit--no, I've got to give itup and follow something definite."

  Again she patted his hand. She knew the resolution cost him a pang; itpleased her to learn that he had made it because he realized that heowed something to himself; not because of the fact of his love for her.

  "It won't take you long, once you have made up your mind" she encouragedhim.

  "I don't want to be rich," he explained. "When I started out, Donna, Ihad that idea. I wanted money--in great big gobs, so I could throw itaround with both hands and enjoy myself. I used to think a good dealabout myself in those days, but five years in the desert and riding therange changes one. It takes the little, selfish foolish notions out ofone's head and substitutes something bigger and nobler and--and--well,I can't exactly explain, dear, but I know a little verse that covers thesubject very thoroughly:

  The little cares that fretted me, I lost them yesterday Among the fields above the sea, Among the winds at play, Among the lowing of the herds, The rustling of the trees, Among the singing of the birds, The humming of the bees; The foolish fears of what might happen, I cast them all away Among the clover-scented grass, Among the new-mown hay, Among the hushing of the corn Where drowsy poppies nod, Where ill thoughts die and good are born, Out in the fields with God."

  The hint of the desert sadness died out in the girl's eyes as hedeclaimed his gospel.

  "Oh," she cried softly, "that's beautiful--beautiful."

  "That's the Litany of a Pagan, Donna," he answered. "One has to believeto understand when he goes to church in a city, but if you're a Paganlike me, you only have to understand in order to believe."

  "I am," she interrupted passionately, "I'm a Pagan and the daughter of aPagan. My father was a Sun Worshiper--like you."

  "Tell me about yourself and your people," he said, and Donna told himthe story with which the reader is already familiar. He questioned hercarefully about Sam Singer and the man who had murdered her father anddespoiled him of his fortune.

  "Who was this tenderfoot person?" he asked. "Didn't Sam Singer know hisname?"

  "No. We never knew the man's name. When my father left for the deserthe merely told mother that he was going to meet an Eastern capitalist atSalton. Sam says the only name my father called the man was Boston."

  "Boston?"

  Donna nodded.

  "That means he hailed from Boston, and your father called him that insheer contempt. No wonder they fought."

  He was silent, thinking over that strange tale of a lost mine which SamSinger had told Donna's mother.

  "Well, I'm not going to keep on desert ratting until somebody cracks meon the head and stows me on the shelf" he said presently.

  He waved his arm toward the north. "Away up there, a hundred and fiftymiles, I've cast my fortune--in the desert of Owens river valley. I'vecut out for myself a job that will last me all my life, and win or lose,I'll fight the fight to a finish. I'm going to make thirty-two thousandacres of barren waste bloom and furnish clean, unsullied wealth for afew thousand poor, crushed devils that have been slaughtered and maimedunder the Juggernaut of our Christian civilization. I'm going to plantthem on ten-acre farms up there under the shadow of old Mt. Kearsarge,and convert them into Pagans. I'm going to create an Eden out of anabandoned Hell. I'm going to lay out a townsite and men will build mea town, so I can light it with my own electricity. It's a big Utopiandream, Donna dear, but what a crowning glory to the dreamer's life if itonly comes true! Just think, Donna. A few thousand of the poor and lowlyand hopeless brought out of the cities and given land and a chance forlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to know that their toil willbring them some return, that they can have a home and a hope for thefuture. That's what I want to do, and when that job is accomplished Iwill have lived my life and enjoyed it; when I pass away, I want themto bury me in Donnaville--that's to be the name of my colony--and for anepitaph I'd like Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem":

  Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie,

  Glad did I live and gladly die And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me; Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill."

  He paused, a little flushed and exalted. Never before had Bob McGrawunburdened his heart of its innermost secrets, its hopes, its fears,its aspirations; for a moment now he almost quivered at the thought thatDonna would look upon him as a dreamer, an idealist--perhaps a fool--he,a penniless desert wanderer assuming to hold in his sunburnt palm thedestinies of the under
dogs of civilization--the cripples too weak andhopeless to be anything more than wretched camp-followers in the Army ofLabor.

  He glanced down at her now, half expecting, dreading to meet, the lookof gentle indulgence so common to the Unbeliever. But there was nopatronizing smile, no tolerant note in her voice as she asked simply:

  "And this great, beautiful Utopia of yours, Bob--what did you call it?"

  "It doesn't exist yet," he explained hastily, "but it--it may. And whenit does become a reality, I'm going to call it Donnaville."

  "Why?"

  "Because it sounds so much better than Bobville or Robertstown, andbecause it will be beautiful. It will be the green fields of God aftercenturies upon centuries of purgatory; because it will be the land I'vebeen telling you about, where you'll find all the things your soul ishungry for; where we will own a big farm, you and I, with great fieldsof alfalfa with purple blossoms; and there'll be long rows of apple andpear trees and corn and--don't you understand, dear? It will be the mostbeautiful thing in the desert. And yet," he added a little sadly, "I maybe beaten into the earth and all my life Donnaville will remain nothingbut a dream, a desire, and so I--I--"

  "Nobody can despoil you of your dreams," she interrupted, "and henceyou'll never be beaten, Bob. The dreamers do the world's work. But tellme. How do you propose to establish Donnaville? Tell me all about it,dear. I want to--help."

  He gave her a grateful glance. "I guess I must be wound up to-night,"he began, "but it is good to talk it over after hugging it to myself somany years, and suffering and striving as I have suffered and strivensince I came into this country.

  "When I pulled out of Death Valley on my first trip I came into Inyofrom the south and worked up along the base of the White mountains asfar as Bishop. The Owens river valley runs north and south, with theWhite mountains flanking it on the east and the high Sierra on the west.It is from ten to fifteen miles wide, that valley, with the Owens riverrunning down the eastern side most of the way until it empties intoOwens lake just above Keeler. The lake is salty, bitter, filled withalkali, boras and soda, and for nearly forty miles above its mouth theriver itself is pretty brackish and alkaline. Away up the valley theriver water is sweet but as it approaches the lake it gathers alkali andborax from the formation through which it flows. This renders it unfitfor irrigating purposes and at first glance the lower end of the valleyseemed doomed to remain undeveloped unless somebody led pure water fromabove down the valley in a big cement-lined canal and the cost of sucha canal would thus render the project prohibitive, unless the watercompany which might tackle the job also owned the land.

  "The valley is pure desert, although there are a great many brilliantgreen streaks in it, where streams of melted snow water flow down fromthe mountains and either disappear in the sands or just manage to reachthe river or the lake. The valley looks harsh and desolate, but onceyou climb the mountains and look down into it, it's beautiful. I know itlooked beautiful to me and I wished that I might have a farm there andsettle down. For the next few years, every time I drifted up or downthat valley I used to dream about my farm, and finally I picked out abully stretch of desert below Independence, and made up my mind to filea desert claim of three hundred and twenty acres, provided I could seemy way clear to a water-right that would insure sufficient water forirrigation.

  "There wasn't any alkali in the land that I imagined would be my farmsome day--when I found the water. Of course I didn't want the riverwater at this point, on account of the alkali in it, and from theformation I judged that I wouldn't have much success putting in artesianwells. Besides, I didn't care to be a lone rancher out in that desert.I've always been a sociable chap, when I could meet the right kind ofpeople, and unless I could have neighbors on that desert I didn't wantany farm.

  "I scouted for the water all one summer, but didn't find any. However,just at a time when I was getting ready to come out of the mountains andhustle for next year's grubstake, I found a 'freeze-out' in the graniteup on the slope of old Kearsarge, and it netted me nineteen hundreddollars.

  "That water question always bothered me. I knew the land was rich--apure marle, with lots of volcanic ash mixed with it, and that it wouldgrow anything--with water. You ought to see that land, Donna. Why, thesage grows six feet tall in spots, and any desert land that will growbig sage will produce more fortunes than most gold mines--if you canonly get the water. There the land lay, thousands of acres of it, butgood water wasn't available, so the land was worthless.

  "However, Donna, I had wandered around in the desert long enough toobserve that wherever Nature appears to have created a paradox,there's always a reason. If Nature makes a mistake here, she places acompensating offset over there. Here was a valley that with irrigationcould be made marvelously fertile at this point, only the river hadto go brackish and alkaline just where it was needed most. I couldn'tdevelop an irrigation system from any of the little streams that floweddown the Sierra, because there wasn't enough water, and there was noplace to impound it, even if there had been sufficient water.

  "While I was pondering this peculiar situation, a very strange thingoccurred. The lower portion of the valley, including the stretch ofdesert on which I had my eye, was suddenly withdrawn from entry andthrown into a Forest Reserve by the Department of the Interior. It wasa queer proceeding that--including a desert timbered with sage-brush andgreasewood in a Forest Reserve. Withdrawing from entry lands that wouldnot even remotely interest settlers!

  "I thought this over a great deal, and by and by I began to see thelight. I had suspected from observation and personal experience thatthere was a powerful private influence at work in the state land office,and by reason of their seeming control of the office were engagedin looting the state of its school lands which were timbered. In thecongressional investigation into certain land frauds in California,it was discovered that the men accused of the frauds had been aided bycorrupt minor officials in the General Land Office--clerks and chiefs ofcertain bureaus, whom the land-grabbers kept on their private pay-rolls.This was a matter of public record. Fortunately for the government,however, it has generally managed to secure for the head of the LandDepartment able and incorruptible men to whom no taint of suspicionattached--men whom the land-grabbers dare not attempt to corrupt.

  "At the outset, I strongly suspected that the corrupt influence, whichpresumably had been exposed and punished in former investigations,was nevertheless still at work. The suspicion that grossly erroneousreports, intentionally furnished the General Land Office by officials ofthe Forestry Department in California, was responsible for the inclusionof the desert in the Forest Reserve, strengthened into belief the moreI thought it over. I thought I could detect in this hoodwinking of theDepartment of the Interior, through the agency of some localofficial, who had been 'reached' by the land ring, the first move in awell-planned raid on the public domain, _through the state land office._

  "I quietly investigated the surveyor-general of the state, who is alsoex-officio Registrar of the State Land Office. I discovered that he wasa man of unimpeachable public and private life. I discovered also thathe was in ill health, and had been during the greater portion of histenure in office; that he rarely spent more than two hours each day inhis office; that frequently he was away from his office for a month at atime, ill, and that the office practically was dominated by his deputy.The surveyor-general was a quiet, easy-going man, advanced in yearsand inclined to take things easy, and the upshot of my investigationsconfirmed me in the belief that he was taking things easy--too easy--andthat his wide-awake deputy was doing business with the land ring,by virtue of his unhampered control of the office and the implicitconfidence reposed in him by the surveyor-general.

  "There could be but two reasons for this ridiculous action by theDepartment of the Interior in thus including a desert in a ForestReserve. Either an error had been made by the local forestry officialsin defining the boundaries of the reserve, and thus reporting to theGeneral Land Office, or the job was intentional. If the
former, theerror would be discovered and the boundaries rectified.

  "Well, a year passed and the boundaries were not rectified, despite thefact that I wrote half a dozen complaining letters to the General LandOffice. The answer was easy. The land-grabbers had subsidized somebodyand my letters never got to headquarters. So I knew a big job was aboutto be pulled off. I guessed that the land-grabbers had solved the waterproblem further up the valley and were scheming to get control of thelower valley and lead the water to it, and while developing their watersupply they wanted the land denied to the public. There was always thechance that some smart nester would come, file on a half-section andstart boring artesian wells. If he struck water, the news would traveland other settlers would come in and take a chance, and before longthere might be a hundred settlers in there. There would be no reason tofear that they would stay forever, unless they got a big artesianflow on every forty acres, and knew they could get water in sufficientquantity. But they would have found water and it would have taken saythree years for them to discover that their claims could not supportthem, Nesters are a dogged breed of human. It takes a nester a long timeto wake up to the fact that he's licked, and until they woke up,the nesters would be liable to block the water wheels of a privatereclamation scheme.

  "Then, too, if it should become bruited abroad, while the valley wasopen for entry, that water for irrigation was being developed up thevalley, settlers could have flocked in down the valley--and waited forthe water. A nester is patient. His life is spent in waiting. Under thedesert land laws one can file on three hundred and twenty acres, or ahalf-section, pay twenty-five cents per acre down and then wait fouryears before being compelled to file with the land office the proof ofreclamation that will entitle him to final patent to his land. Theland ring, of course, knew this, and by their corrupt influence had somaneuvered to hoodwink the General Land Office that the valley hadbeen withdrawn from entry. When they had protected themselves fromprospective settlers, it would be safe for them to develop their wateraway up the valley. When they were ready, it would be easy enough, tosuddenly discover that a desert valley had, by some stupid error,been included in a Forest Reserve, the boundaries would be readjustedimmediately, the valley once more thrown open for entry and--dummyentrymen, Johnny-on-the-spot, to file on the land for the water company!Within the statutory limit of four years the water company would havehad time to extend its canals and laterals, the dummy entrymen wouldhave been able to show proof of reclamation and secure their patents,and after waiting a year, perhaps to preserve appearances, they would,for a consideration, gradually transfer their holdings to the watercompany, Within five years, the water company would have owned theentire valley, would have reorganized, called themselves a land andirrigation company and gone into the real estate business, selling fiveto twenty acre farms, with a perpetual water right, at prices rangingfrom three to five hundred dollars per acre.

  "I didn't, of course, know who was behind the game, but I knew the rulesby which it would be played. I'm more or less of a mining engineer,Donna, and it's part of a mining engineer's business to know the lawsrelating to the public domain. I could see that unless I developed waterfirst and filed on the land first, I would never get my farm in thevalley without paying dearly to the thieves who had stolen from me myconstitutional right to it.

  "Hence, for the past two summers, Donna, I've been up in the Sierralooking for water. It seemed to me that with so many mountain lakes upthere below the snow-line, I must find one that I could tap and bringthe water down into my valley. If Nature made a mistake in the valley,she would compensate for it up in the mountains, and I had an abidingfaith that if I searched long enough I'd find the water.

  "I circled around mountain lakes where in all probability no humanfoot but mine had ever trod. I crawled along the brink of a chasm threethousand feet deep, and crossed a glacier crevice on a rawhide riata. Icamped three nights on a peak with so much iron ore in it that when anelectrical storm came up it attracted the lightning and struck aroundme for hours. I crawled and crept and climbed; I fell; I was cut andbruised and hungry and cold; but all the time I was up there in themountains I could look on the valley--my valley--and it was beautifuland I didn't mind.

  "A big thought that had been in the back of my brain for a long timecame to me with renewed force while I was up there in those InyoAlps--the thought that if I could find the water it would be richesenough for me. But I wanted the land, too--not merely a half-section formyself, but the whole valley--only I didn't want it for myself. It wouldonly be mine in trust, a sacred heritage that belonged to the lowly ofthe earth, and I wanted to save it for them. I could see them all atthat moment, the roustabouts, the laborers and muckers, the unskilledtoilers of the world. It was the hewers of wood and the drawers of waterthat I wanted that valley to bloom for; the poor, poor devils whose onlyhope is the land that gave them birth and life and would receive themin its bosom when they perished. Ten acres of that lonely thirsty land,waiting there for me to reclaim it from the ruin of ages--ten acresof my desert valley and some water and an equal chance--that's what Iwanted for each of my fellow-Pagans, and I made up my mind to get it forthem from the robber-barons that planned to steal it.

  "It comforted me a whole lot, that thought. It gave zest to the battle,and made the prize seem worth fighting for. And I guess the God of aSquare Deal was with me that day, for I found the water. I discovereda lake a mile wide and nearly five miles long, fed by countless streamsfrom the melting snow on the peaks above. I walked around it, but Icouldn't find any outlet, and yet the lake never seemed to have risenhigher than a certain point. This puzzled me until I discovered asandstone ledge half-way around its eastern edge, and through a giganticcrevice in this sandstone the water escaped. When the lake rose to theedge of this crevice, during the summer when the snow was melting upon the face of old Mount Kearsarge, the surplus flowed off into somesubterranean outlet, probably emerging at the head of some canyon milesaway on the other side of the range. This lake was hemmed in by hills,and between two of these hills a canyon dropped away sheer to the deserttwo thousand feet below. I made careful estimates and discovered thatby shooting a tunnel three hundred feet through the country rock atthe head of this canyon I would come out on the other side of theplace where the two hills met, and pierce the lake below this sandstonecrevice. I could drain the lake until the surface of the water graduallycame down to the intake, when I could put in a concrete pier with aniron head-gate and regulate the flow. Even in winter when the lake wasfrozen over I would have a steady flow of water, for my tunnel would tapthe lake below the ice.

  "Having found the water, my next move was to go down into the valley,into the great, hot, panting hungry heart of Inyo to protect the landfor my Pagans. At the land office in Independence I registered my filingand turned to leave, just as a clerk came out and tacked a notice on thebulletin board. I read it. It was the customary notice to settlers thatthe lower valley had been withdrawn from the Forest Reserve and would bethrown open to entry at the expiration of sixty days from date.

  "I went to the feed corral, where I had kept Friar Tuck all summer,while I was up in the mountains. I paid my livery bill, threw the saddleon Friar Tuck and headed south, for I knew that if I was to turn robberbaron and steal the valley for my Pagans I'd have to hustle. I got toSan Pasqual one night three weeks ago--and here I am."

  Donna was silent. For perhaps a minute she gazed into his tense, eagerface.

  "What will it cost to drive that tunnel?" she queried finally.

  "With me superintending the job and swinging a pick and drill myself, Iestimate the cost at about five thousand dollars."

  "And how long does your right hold good before commencing operations?"

  "The law allows me a year."

  "And you have five weeks left in which to plan your campaign to acquirethe land?"

  "Five weeks. And I'm about to attempt an illegal procedure, onlyI'm going to do it legally. I want to tie up fifty sections on thatvalley--aggrega
ting 32,000 acres. I have money enough in bank atBakersfield after paying my expenses here, to accomplish that. If I cantie that land up, my water-right is worth millions. If the other fellowsget the land, they will buy my water-right at their own figures, orstarve me out and acquire the right when I am forced to abandon it byreason of my inability to develop it; or failing that they will proceedon their original plan and lead their own water down the valley incanals. Without the water the land is worthless, and without the landmy water-right is practically worthless--to me. To control that 32,000acres of desert I will have to put up the purchase price of $40,000 forthe men I induce to file on the land, and after paying the filing fee of$5 and the initial payment of $20 on each of the fifty applications forthe land, I'll be in luck if I'm not left stranded at the State LandOffice."

  "But can you accomplish this in opposition to the land ring, if yousecure all the money you will require?"

  "No" he answered. "The plan I have outlined is a mere contingency. Inorder to carry it out, I must get my filings into the land office beforetheirs--and they control the land office."

  "Then, how can you hope to succeed?"

  Bob smiled. "Hope doesn't cost anything, Donna. It's about the onlything I know of that can't be monopolized. A man can hope till he'slicked, at least, and despite the fact that I have neither money norcorrupt influence, I have a long chance to win. I have one grand asset,at least."

  "What may that be?" queried Donna.

  "All anybody ever needs--a bright idea."