Anita looked at him stolidly, turned her great bulk and stared down at the river hurrying by in the midday sunlight. She lifted a hand to her eyes and stared out from beneath the flat of her brown palm.
“Gol’—if it can buy me back—t’ings I have love’—t’ings I have los’ long time ago,” she murmured. “Gol’—it don’t buy young body—pretty face—voice to sing like a bird. Gol’ don’t give back my girl—modder of Nevada. Pah-h!” She spat at the river contemptuously. “W’at I care for gol’?”
Nevada,—to her the dream was a splendid vision indeed. To her it was achievement—success—the open door through which she might pass to a glorified future. Nevada, when pressed, admitted that she loved pretty things—“And then, the world is so full of people who want to be helped!”
Rawley nodded. “I know. I’ve felt that.”
“And if there is gold to be had, so that they can be helped, I think it’s wicked not to use every ounce of energy we possess to get it, so that we can use it,” she declared with more enthusiasm than Rawley had ever seen her show. “When it’s fought for, just for sake of self-indulgence, it ought to be fought for in the interests of good. I’d found a home for—well, almost anybody that needed it. And I want so to travel, Fifth Cousin! I don’t mean to spend more than two or three millions, just myself. I’m afraid I might grow reckless and extravagant. So I shall only hold out three million, at the most, for my own personal needs. The rest I shall give away.” Whereupon she laughed at him.
“You don’t really expect to be a lady billionaire?” Nevada sobered. “It’s such a big, untamed land,” she dreamed aloud, her young eyes on the river, as Anita’s had been. “If you don’t dream splendidly, you somehow feel that you’re too small for the desert. It’s a land of splendid visions, Fifth Cousin. Never mind if they don’t come true. They’re like the sunsets and the sunrises. They live, and they die, and they live again, on and on—forever.” She lifted a tanned, rounded arm and pointed away to the floating, hazy blue of the horizon.
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Can you look at that and think small? Why, every old prospector who follows a burro along the desert trail has his visions. The dim distances promise him heart’s desire. Why else would he keep going? He’s a millionaire—in his dreams. The next gulch may change his vision to reality. Think how the Spaniards came dreaming up this very river, as long ago as when Washington was praying for boots at Valley Forge! What brought them, but the splendid dreams—their visions of what lay over the next hill?”
Her gaze dropped to the river. Just as every other adult member of the Cramer family looked at the hurrying water, so Nevada gazed and saw—not lost youth and lost love, as did Anita, but the splendid future that would be hers when the river gave up its hoarded gold. She smiled and forgot to speak. Her vision held her entranced.
Peter’s dream was very like Nevada’s. Peter, as Rawley knew, exulted over the achievement itself; the constructive thinking that left the beaten path of thought and plunged boldly into the realm of unguessed possibilities. The taming of a river that called itself untamable meant more to Peter than to Nevada, even. The gold would be his just reward for having dared to achieve the improbable.
Peter also craved emancipation from the petty round of his isolated life. Around the world Peter would sail and learn of other lands and other peoples and the problems which Fate had set them to solve. Peter was willing to divert a part of his gold to the welfare of his fellow men, but he did not dream of that as did Nevada. The building of the dam, the actual getting of the gold, the splendid hazards of the undertaking, these things set Peter’s indigo-blue eyes alight with the flame of his enthusiasm.