Close by, men were putting in with care the seed that was to quicken the river silt. They were passing a square where the green tips of the grain were piercing the ground. Now, they were abreast of a field of matured alfalfa over which the wind raced gratefully. Desert and grain field; death and life! The panorama embraced the whole cycle.
“Excuse me. I did not hear you.” His new acquaintance had been endeavoring to get his attention.
The valley man tried to pitch his voice above the rattle of the train, but the effort ended in spasmodic coughing. The attacks left him weak and gasping.
“Better go back,” suggested Rickard. He followed the stranger who waved him to the seat by the open window. He busied himself with the sliding landscape, withholding his sympathy. He could hear the man drawing in long deep breaths. “Poor devil! He’s had his sentence!” he gathered.
After a few minutes, the other leaned over his shoulder, his hand waving toward the passing mountains. “Those are the Superstition Mountains you can see over yonder. An unusually apt name.”
“Yes?”
“An accidental hit of some tired traveler,” hazarded the colorless lips. “He had probably been listening to the legends of some unusually garrulous Indian; could not find the germ of universal religion in the simple creed, so he called it,—the nameless mountains—‘Superstition.’ I’ve always wished I knew his own name, that we might credit him, this late, with the inspiration. Have you ever thought,” he deflected, “how many familiar names are unsponsored? Take the Colorado, for instance. Melchior Diaz called it the Rio del Tizon; Alarçon, for diplomatic reasons, gave it Rio de la Buena Guia; Onate changed it to the Rio Grande de Buena Esperanza, and it was Kino, the Jesuit padre, who christened it in memory of the blessed martyrs Rio de los Martires. Who called it first the Colorado? History shuts her lips. And who will ever call it anything else?”
Rickard was attracted by the man’s educated inflection, as well as by his musing. “Why Superstition?” he queried.
“Why is it good, you mean? That pile of dark rock stands as a monument to an effete superstition. It is the gravestone for a gigantic mistake. Why, it was only the grossest ignorance that gave to the desert the label of ‘bad lands.’ The desert is a condition, not a fact. Here you see the passing of the condition, the burial of the superstition. Are you interested in irrigation?”
Rickard was not given to explain the degree of interest his profession involved, for the stranger drew a painful breath, and went on.