“But he couldn’t deliver enough. The cut silted up. He cut again, the same story. He was in a pretty bad hole. He’d brought colonists in already, he’d used their money, the money they’d paid for land with water, to make the cuts. No wonder he was desperate.”
It recalled the man Rickard had disliked, the rough-shod, loud-voiced student of his first class in engineering. That was the man who had made the flamboyant carpets of the Holmes’ boarding-house impossible any longer to him. He had a sudden disconcerting vision of a large unfinished face peering through the honeysuckles at a man and a girl drawing apart in confusion from their first, and last, kiss. He wanted to tell Marshall he was wasting his time.
“Overwhelmed with lawsuits,” Marshall was saying. “Hardin had to deliver water to those colonists. It was then that he ran over into Mexico, so as to get a better gradient for his canal, and made his cut there. You know the rest. It ran away from him. It made the Salton Sea.”
“Did he ever give you any reason,” frowned Rickard reminiscently, “any reasonable reason why he made that cut without any head-gate?”
“No money!” shrugged Marshall, getting out another cigar. “I told you he’s a raw dancer, always starts off too quick, begins on the wrong foot. Oh, yes, he has reasons, lots of them, that fellow, but as you say, they’re not reasonable. He never waits to get ready.”
Why was it that the face of the half-sister came to Rickard then, with that look of sensitive high-breeding and guarded reserve? And she, a Hardin! Sister to that loud-spilling mouth! Queer cards nature deals! And pretty cards Marshall was trying to deal out to him. Go down there, and finish Hardin’s job, show him up to be the fumbler he was, give him orders, give the husband of Gerty Holmes orders—!
“It was Hardin who came to me, but not until he’d tried everything else. They’d worked for months trying to dam the river with a few lace handkerchiefs, and perhaps a chiffon veil!” Marshall was twinkling over his own humor. “Hardin did put up a good talk. It was true, as he said; we’d had to move our tracks three, no, four times, at Salton. It was true that it ought to be one of the richest districts tapped by the O. P. But he clenched me by a clever bait—to put out a spur in Mexico which would keep any other railroad off by a fifty-mile parallel, and there the sand-hills make a railroad impossible.
“The government must eventually come to the rescue. Their works at Laguna hang on the control of the river down at the Heading. Once, he told me—I don’t know how much truth there was in it—the Service, Reclamation Service, did try to buy up their plant for a paltry sum. He wouldn’t sell. The short is, I recommended long-sighted assistance to Faraday. I promised to turn that river, save the district. We expected before the year was out to have the government take the responsibility off our hands.”
Rickard made an impatient shrug. A nice problem Marshall had taken unto himself. He wanted none of it. Hardin—the thing was impossible.
He met laggardly Marshall’s story. He heard him say: “Agreed with Faraday. The Desert Reclamation Company was as helpless as a swaddled infant. We made the condition that we reorganize the company. I was put in Hardin’s place as president of the corporation, and he was made general manager. Of course, we had to control the stock. We put up two hundred thousand dollars—Hardin had estimated it would cost us less than half that! It’s cost us already a million. Things haven’t been going right. Faraday’s temper burst out, and Hardin, a while back was asked to resign.”