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.