“I can’t see it finished,” was Estrada’s mournful answer. He turned again to stare out of the window.
An odd sense of unreality rested for an instant on Rickard. Swiftly he rejected it. Outside, the sunshine, the work to be done, the river running wild—
“You’ve been too much in the valley, Mr. Estrada!” Estrada looked at him, and then his glance went back to the car window. His silence said plainly: “Oh, I knew you would not believe me!”
“I mean, this country gets on men’s nerves. It’s so—omnipotent! The victories are all to the river’s side, as yet. We’re pygmies, fighting Titans. We fear what we have never conquered.”
“Oh, that!” He could see that Estrada would not argue with him. “Oh, we all get that. The personal feeling, as if it were really a dragon, and we trying to shackle it with our wisps of straw!”
“A few lace handkerchiefs and a chiffon veil!” sang Rickard’s memory.
“We get the sense of being resented, of angry power. We feel like interlopers in this desert. She tells us all, in her own terrible, silent way, ‘You don’t belong here!’”
“That has been quoted to me, silently, too!” laughed Rickard. And they were on solid ground again.
“Who are the river-men in the valley?” demanded the newcomer. “I want to meet them, to talk to them.”
“Cor’nel, he’s an Indian. He’s worth talking to. He knows its history, its legends. Perhaps some of it is history.”