“No one seems to remember that he crucified himself to save the valley. I’ve a great respect for Thomas Hardin.”
“Yes?” returned Rickard, whose liking had been captured by the speaker.
The impression of distinction sharpened. The stranger wore a laundered, pongee silk shirt, open at the neck, but restricted by a brown silk tie; and it was trimly belted. There were but two neckties in the entire car, and they occupied, Rickard observed, the same seat.
“The beginning of the canal system.”
Rickard looked out upon a flat one-toned country, marked off in rectangles by plows and scrapers. Farther south, those rectangles were edged by young willows. He fancied he could see, even at that distance, the gleam of water.
It was the passing of the desert. A few miles back, he had seen the desert in its primitive nakedness which not even cactus relieved. He was passing over the land which men and horses were preparing for water. And he could see the land where water was.
“That was the way Riverside looked when I first saw it,” commented the other man who wore a tie. “Come out on the rear platform. We can see better.”
Rickard followed to the back of the dust-swept stifling car. The glare on the platform was intense. He stood watching the newly made checker-board of a country slip past him. Receding were the two lines of gleaming steel rails which connected and separated him from the world outside. He was “going in.” Not in Mexico even had he had such a feeling of ultimate remoteness. The mountains, converging perspectively toward the throat of the valley, looked elusive and unreal in their gauze draperies of rose and violet. The tender hour of day was clothing them with mystery, softening their sharp outlines. They curtained the world beyond. Rickard felt the suspense of the next act.
It was a torpid imagination, he thought, which would not quicken over this conquest of the desert. East of the tract, men and teams were preparing the newly-furrowed ground for the seed. The curved land-knives were breaking up the rich earth mold into ridges of soft soil as uncohesive and feathery as pulverized chocolate. It was the dark color of the chocolate of commerce, this silt which had been pilfered from the states through which the vagrant river wandered. The smell of the upturned earth, sweetly damp, struck against his nostrils. Rickard indulged a minute of whimsical fancy; this was California territory over which his train was passing, but the soil, that dark earth those blades were crumbling, was it not the tribute of other states, of despoiling Wyoming, of ravishing Colorado and Arizona?
To the west, new squares were being leveled and outlined. Shrubby rectangles were being cleared of their creosote-bush and tough mesquit. Compared with other countries, the preparation for planting was the simplest. Horses were dragging over the ground a railroad rail bent into a V angle which pulled the bushes by the roots and dragged them out of the way. Beyond, farther west, could be seen the untouched desert. The surface for many miles was cracked by water-lines, broken and baked into irregular sand-cakes; the mark of sand which has been imprisoned by water and branded by swift heat.