“What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as that, Mr. Kendall?”
“Oh, he had his reason pat enough,” rejoined the editor, with his tired smile. “He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project. He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert project alone. He claimed that it had been financed without taking a dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local investors to be protected.”
“Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it’s an admission that the Eastern investors might need protection,” scoffed the railroad superintendent. Then he added: “They certainly will if they expect to get any of the money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why, Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!”
“And the other half?” inquired Sprague.
“It’s a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill arroyos,” Maxwell explained. “Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then, for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand.”
“Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water,” commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: “As you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long as it doesn’t stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven’t much excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you’re up my way. Always glad to see you.”
The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding highlands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.
The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over Maxwell’s railroad.
“Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we concocted?”
“They are, for a fact,” was the hearty assurance. “I have never seen anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They’ve been coming in squads to ’fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that it’s the water-wagon for theirs from now on. By George, Calvin, it’s the most mellowing experience I’ve ever had! It proves what you have always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the front if you only know how to appeal to it.”