Their talk was of the coming heat, the new canal; the difference it would make to “Number Six”; the melon crop.

Mrs. Parrish came fluttering back, her brown apron changed for a clean white one. A few pins sealed the gap in the unutterable purple waist. She could not get another without passing through the sitting-room, and she had a feeling of shame to emphasize her embarrassment before Miss Hardin. Her cheeks were redder, her eyes more glittering.

She established Mrs. Busby on the wire-collapsible couch, with the green and red flowered cover. The guest preferred a straight chair, but Mrs. Parrish would not hear of it. She herself had a rocker. Perched on one edge of it, she rocked back and forth violently, until her chair kept grating against Innes’. The girl pitied the woman’s excitement, wondering at it.

Mrs. Parrish was worked up to almost hysterical sociability. It was as if a deep desert well had been tapped. Her rocker swaying interminably, she told them of her life at home, of the farm they were just clearing of the mortgage; of her love for Nebraska. She would never forget that day when a friend, they wouldn’t know him, but it was Sam Kirkland, anyway! when he came through on his way back East to get his family. He told the wonderful story of the Imperial Valley—of the country below sea-level, where even cactus would not grow. To their skeptical ears he had unfolded a tale of rich soils, of desert redemption—of irrigation “which made Jim Parrish just sit up, I can tell you.” The early crops, the water scientifically applied, the hothouse heat, the millions in sight. Was he, Sam Kirkland goin’ back? Well, sure. He was no man’s fool. He knew opportunity when he saw it.

And then the pamphlets! When they began to come she fell to watching her Jim uneasily. All their friends were in Nebraska; and her doctor. “Let well enough alone,” says I. “How can I live without Doctor Pratt, who knows all my symptoms? But Jim just would come!” She related the weary minute details of their home-breaking; of their move from Nebraska. Her impressions of California, deeply registered, were passed on to her guests. Her horror of the valley. Her fear of the Indians—her fear of the wind, of centipedes, and she knew that the water was typhoidal—

“Typhoidal? Bosh!” interjected Maria Busby. She had something to say about the water, but she could not get it in. The rocker grew more agitated. “The very rocker which had been brought in on a wagon from Old Beach! That was before the railroad came in; every one had to wagon it from Old Beach. But that was before their time!

“I don’t sleep. That’s the trouble with me,” she jumped back to her ailments, her nervous eyes passing from Mrs. Busby’s face to Innes Hardin’s. “Jim calls me the desert watch-dog. I feel as I must keep an ear and eye trained on the desert to see what it’s going to do next; or the river; or the Indians.”

Mrs. Busby thought she saw a chance to talk of the water, and why it was not typhoidal. But she was not swift enough. Innes was cheered to hear the chug of the company automobile. Before another stream of talk started on its irresistible flow, she made her escape. Through the screen door, as she was borne away, she could see Mrs. Parrish, still wildly rocking.

CHAPTER X
FEAR

MRS. Parrish’s chair continued to plunge. It rocked and pitched like a ship in a storm. Her tongue gathered excitement from the motion. Mrs. Busby looked with anxiety at the graphophone perching uncertainly on the pine box. The curved rocker was threatening it. Mrs. Parrish drew back, and the danger was once again averted. She was plowing her way now toward the wire couch covered with the red and green tapestry ordered from a circular from Howe and Wort’s, Chicago. Mrs. Busby, usually placid, caught a little of the excitement. If she had nerves she told herself, she would be turned crazy. As it was, nerveless, and poised by the support of a newly acquired philosophy, she watched, hypnotized, the menace of that desperate rocker. Two lurid spots glowed in the cheeks of her hostess. The excitement of hostess-ship was consuming her. Entertaining, in simple folk vocabulary, means talking. So Mrs. Parrish talked.