Kendall, managing editor of The Tribune, had run the story, partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country with the brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.
That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in the evening of the day on which Connabel’s write-up appeared.
It was Kendall’s regular habit to close his desk at seven o’clock and to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling down to his night’s work. On the evening in question he had chanced to sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad, and with Maxwell’s friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had appeared that morning in The Tribune.
“Yes,” said the editor; “Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. We’ve all known, in a general way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had no idea that they’d got their dam pretty nearly done and were about ready to open up for business.”
“It’s wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!” cut in the railroad man snappily. “What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as this street pavement here.”
Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face the color of old oak-tanned leather.
“That is what you would think—that they are out for the easy money,” he agreed. “But there is something a little queer about it. They haven’t advertised.”
“Not here,” supplemented Maxwell. “It would be a trifle too rank. Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of the Red Desert.”
“They haven’t advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain,” put in the editor, quietly. “What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers.”
“Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings,” was Maxwell’s comment; but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.