“Damn the expense!” cried Tod Marshall. “Just go ahead.”
He had begun a swift pencil map of the province of Oaxaca before Rickard was out of the room.
CHAPTER III
THE BLESSING OF ARIDITY
WHEN Rickard left the main line at Imperial Junction the next afternoon, his eyes followed the train he was deserting rather than the one that was to carry him to his new labors. He felt again the thrill of detachment that invariably preceded his entrance into a new country. With the pulling up of the porter’s green-carpeted stool, the slamming of the train gates, the curtain fell on the Tucson set scene.
The long line of cars was pushing off with its linen-covered Pullmans and diners, steaming down-grade toward the Sink, the depression which had been primeval sea, and then desert, and was now sea again. Old Beach, rechristened Imperial Junction for railroad convenience, was itself lower than the ancient sea-line where once the gulf had reached. Rickard knew he could find shells at that desert station should he look for them. He picked up his bag that the porter had thrown on the ground and faced the rung-down curtain.
Its painted scene was a yellow station-house broiling under a desert sun; a large water-tank beyond, and in the distance the inevitable cardboard mountains, like property scene-shifts, flat and thin in their unreal hues of burnished pink and purple. A dusty accommodation train was backing and switching, picking up the empty refrigerator cars to carry into the valley for the early melon growers.
Already, the valley had asserted its industrial importance; the late rampage of the Colorado had made it spectacular. Those who would pay little attention to the opening of a new agricultural district in the heart of a dreaded desert opened their ears to the vagary of the river which had sportively made of a part of that desert an inland sea. Scientists were rushing their speculations into print; would the sea dwindle, by evaporation, as it had done before? Or would the overflow maintain the paradoxical sea?
The flood signs were apparent. There, cracks had split the desert sand; here, water fissures had menaced the track; and to the south, a fringe of young willows hid the path of the Colorado’s debouch. The burning desert sands cried out a sharp antithesis. The yellow railway house bore all the parched signs of a desert station. Even the women, with children in their arms, did not attempt to sit in the stifling waiting-room; they preferred to stand in the glare.
The men crowding the platform wore the motley of a new country. In Tucson, the uniform of the male citizens, with the exception of those reckless ones who found inevitably that lotus is a liquid, was the wilted pretense of a gentle civilization; despondent ducks and khakis and limp collars. Imperial Junction marked the downfall of the collar. The rest of the composite costume was irregular, badly laundered and torn, faded and sunburned; the clothes of the desert soldier. Rickard saw buttonless shirts, faded overalls, shabby hats—the sombrero of Mexico. The faces under the broad-brimmed hats made a leaping impression upon him of youth and eagerness. He noted a significant average of intelligence and alertness. This was not the indolent group of men which makes a pretense of occupation whenever a train comes in!
“Going in?” asked a voice at his ear. A pair of faded eyes set in a young-old face, whether early withered or well-preserved he had not time to determine, was staring at him.