The man in the seat beside him asked Rickard if he observed the general average of intelligence in the faces of the crowd below. Rickard acknowledged that he had been struck by that, not only here, but at Imperial Junction, where he had waited for the train.
“There is a club in the valley, lately started, a university club which admits as members those who have had at least two years of college training. The list numbers three hundred already. The first meeting was held last week in an empty new store in Imperial. If it had not been for the setting, we might have been at Ann Arbor or Palo Alto. The costumes were a little motley, but the talk sounded like home.”
The dust, blowing in through the car doors, brought on another fit of strangling. Rickard turned again to the window, to the active scene which denied the presence of desert beyond.
“The doctors say it will have to be the desert always for me.” The stranger tapped his chest significantly. “But it is exile no longer—not in an irrigated country. For the reason of irrigation! It is the progressive man, the man with ideas, or the man who is willing to take them, who comes into this desert country. If he has not had education, it is forced upon him. I saw it worked out in Utah. I was there several years. Irrigation means cooperation. That is, to me, the chief value of aridity.”
The wind, though still blowing through the car and ruffling the train dust, was carrying less of grit and sand. To the nostrils of Rickard and his new acquaintance, it brought the pleasing suggestion of grassy meadows, of willow-lined streams and fragrant fields.
“It is the accepted idea that this valley is attracting a superior class of men because of its temperance stand. It is the other way round. The valley stood for temperance because of the sort of men who had settled here, the men of the irrigation type.”
The engineer’s ear criticized “irrigation type.” He began to suspect that he had picked up a crank.
“The desert offers a man special advantages, social, industrial and agricultural. (I would invert that arrangement if I made over that sentence!) It is no accident that you find a certain sort of man here.”
“I suppose you mean that the struggle necessary to develop such a country, under such stern conditions, develops of necessity, strong men?” evolved Rickard. “Oh, yes, I believe that, too.”
“Oh, more than that. It is not so much the struggle, as the necessity for cooperation. The mutual dependence is one of the blessings of aridity.”