The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

"You were right, Johnny. The memory of him will live and grow with this town when the rest of us are forgotten."

They had turned from the park and went speeding up between the rows of new poplars along the Alameda, and the prospector's eyes moved over the reclaimed vale, where acres on acres of young fruit trees in cultivated squares crowded out the insistent sage. "And this town for a fact is bound to grow," he said.

Then at last, when Cerberus loomed near, and they entered the gap, the little man's big heart rose and his bleak face glowed, under Tisdale's expressions of wonder and approbation at the advance the vineyards and orchards had made, so soon after the consummation of the project. Fillers of alfalfa stretched along the spillways from the main canal like a green carpet; strawberry plants were blossoming; grapes reached out pale tendrils and many leaves. But, at the top of the pocket, where the road began to lift gently in a double curve across the front of the bench, Hollis dismissed Banks and his red car and walked the rest of the way. On the rim of the level, near the solitary pine tree, he stopped to look down on the transformed vale, and suddenly, once more he seemed to feel David's presence. It was as though he stood beside him and saw all this awakening, this responding of the desert to his project. Almost it compensated—for those four days.

Almost! Tisdale drew his hand across his eyes and turned to follow the drive between the rows of nodding narcissus. The irony of it! That Weatherbee should have lived to find the Aurora; that, with many times the needed capital in sight, he should have lost. The perfume of the flowers filled the warm atmosphere; the music of running water was everywhere. As he left the side of the flume, the silver note of the fountain came to him from the patio, then, like a mirage between him and the low Spanish building, rose that miniature house he had found in the Alaska wilderness, with the small snow figure before it, holding a bundle in her arms.

The vision passed. But that image with the bundle was the one unfinished problem in the project he had come to solve.

He entered the court and saw on his right an open door and, across the wide room, Beatriz Weatherbee. She was seated at a quaint secretary on which were several bundles of papers, and the familiar box that had contained David's letters and watch. At the moment Tisdale discovered her, she was absorbed in a photograph she held in her hands, but at the sound of his step in the patio she turned and rose to meet him. Her face was radiant, yet she looked at him through arrested tears.

"I am sorry if I startled you," he said conventionally. "Banks brought me from the station, but he left me to walk up the bench."

"I should have seen the red car down the gap had I been at the window," she replied, "but I was busy putting away papers. Freight has been moving slowly over the Great Northern, and my secretary arrived only to-day. It bore the trip very well, considering its age. It belonged to my great-grandfather, Don Silva Gonzales. He brought it from Spain, but Elizabeth says it might have been made for this room. She is walking somewhere in the direction of the spring."

While she spoke, she touched her cheeks and eyes swiftly with her handkerchief and led the way to some chairs between the secretary and the great window that overlooked the vale. Tisdale did not look at her directly; he wished to give her time to cover the emotion he had surprised.

"I should say the room was built for Don Silva's desk," he amended. "And— do you know?—this view reminds me of a little picture of Granada, a water-color of my mother's, that hung in my room when I was a boy. But this pocket has changed some since we first saw it; your dragon's teeth are drawn."