“I’m not going to call you,” returned the man. “We’ll split the pot. Cut one in half and we’ll go evens. There now—I’ll take this one and start over in this corner.”
“All right,” she answered. “You start over there—where the West begins!”
There’s a time that comes to every man when he meets a girl on an even footing. Billy was usually bashful; it was the first time that he had ever met a real girl without stepping on his own feet or doing something equally ridiculous and self-conscious. Before he knew it he was telling Jennie Ross his whole history—outside his homestead experience—and almost everything that he knew.
“Then you are a real Western cowboy,” she exclaimed. “All my life I have wanted to know one, one who lived on the range, who lived out in the open and thought the great free things of nature. You must meet my brother and get acquainted.”
Then she went on to tell of their dreams—of a well, and alfalfa, fruit trees, a mansion, avenues, driveways—a dream that was half homesteader and half school-teacher; and most of all out of a girlish heart. Billy listened. They stepped out on the porch; the girl pointed to the irrigated lands in the distance.
“See,” she spoke. “They tell me that all that country was once government land just like this—all desert.”
“It sure was,” answered the cowboy. “And it would be desert yet were it not for the water.”
“That’s what Arthur says. It seems to me that while they were getting water they could have drilled up here just as well as down there. When we get our well all our dreams will come true.”
Billy did some thinking. He was no tenderfoot; he knew why the irrigated belt extended just so far and no farther. He was familiar with the eccentricities of water. Down there it could be tapped at a reasonable depth and was at least semi-artesian; while up on the homestead it was almost inaccessible—the elevation was higher and the water, consequently, farther from the surface. Even after it was found there was a two-hundred-foot lift before it could be utilized; and water for irrigation purposes cannot be profitably pumped more than a hundred feet.
But he said nothing to discourage her. She was having her dream. If he could he would make it all come true. He was half sorry and half doubtful; should he tell her the truth or go after Holman? He did not care for his homestead; at the very most it had been, with him, merely a whim—a place to hang his hat, a notion.