Rickard shook his head.
“It is a good story. I wrote it once for the Sun. I was out here then. That was before the doctors sent me, giving me a year if I lived anywhere else. Reclamation was being talked even then. Estrada picked up the enthusiasm, and got hold of a big slice of land. The terms of his purchase were a few cents an acre, fifteen, if I remember correctly, and a hundred colonists to be established the first year. Estrada sent in his hundred families, and did not think it necessary to mention to the government that he was paying the so-called colonists a dollar a day. They earned their dollar—it was big money in those days, two dollars Mexican—by digging a canal. When the inspector came along—there were the hundred families. After he was safely out of the country, Estrada paid and dismissed his colonists. He had the mile or so of canal and his tract besides. What’s the difference between fifteen cents and a hundred dollars? Multiply that by a million and a half, and you can see what those colonists were to bring to Estrada. Though they say he died poor.”
The man in the seat ahead was listening. His head was leonine, his body shriveled. Rickard could see on the neck the ancient burns that had spared the magnificent head. The rest of the man had been shriveled and twisted into terrible deformity. Rickard found himself puzzling over the accident with its accompanying miracle. There was not a scar on the powerful face.
“Estrada’s business methods were then not different from Sather’s and Hardin’s!” It was a deep rich organ.
“Oh, you can’t class Hardin with Sather,” protested Rickard’s companion. “Sather used Hardin. Hardin’s honesty can not be questioned. It’s not money he’s after. His whole heart is in this reclamation scheme.”
“Hardin’s a false alarm,” growled the owner of the massive head. “He makes promises. He never keeps them.”
The older man’s smile was tolerant. “Barton,” he indicated, “is the president of the water companies. And if you want to hear about a rogue and a scoundrel, ask the water companies their opinion of Hardin.”
“Well, what sort of a hole has he got us into?” demanded the other with heat.
“Hardin’s in a hole himself.”
Rickard found himself admiring the distinction in the face beside him. The sharp-pointed beard in which the gray was appearing gave a dog-like keenness to the well-modeled head, but the sharpness of the features, of the long slender nose, the long chin and thin eyebrow lines were offset, curiously, by the mildness, the resignation, in the steady gray eyes. If fires had ever burned in them, there were but cold ashes left.