“Well, what else?”
“That is about all we have had to do with them in a business way. Two weeks ago, when we had that wreck at Lobo, they were asking Benson for an extension of the copper-mine spur to a point nearer their job, chiefly, I think, so they could run a hand-car back and forth between the camp and the saloon at Angels. Benson didn’t recommend it, and the matter was dropped.”
“Without protest?”
“Oh, yes; Jennings didn’t make much of a roar. In fact, I’ve always felt that he avoided me when he could. He is in town a good bit, but I rarely see him. Somebody told me he tried once to get into the Town and Country Club, and didn’t make it. I don’t know who would blackball him, or why; but evidently some one did.”
The ash grew a full half-inch longer on Sprague’s fresh cigar before he said:
“Doesn’t it occur to you that there is something a bit mysterious about this dry-land irrigation scheme, Dick?”
“I had never thought of it as being mysterious. It is a palpable swindle, of course; but swindles are like the poor—they’re always with us.”
“It interests me,” said the big man, half-musingly. “A company, formed nobody knows where or how, drops down in the edge of the Red Desert and begins—absolutely without any of the clatter and clamor of advertising that usually go with such enterprises—to build what, from all reports, must be a pretty costly dam. If they have acquired a title to the Mesquite Mesa, no one seems to have heard of it; and if they are hoping to sell the land when the dam is completed, that, too, has been kept dark. Now comes this little newspaper puff this morning, and Mr. Jennings promptly turns up to ask Kendall to drop it.”
“It is rather queer, when you come to put the odds and ends of it together,” admitted the railroad man.
“Decidedly queer, I should say.” So far the Government man went on the line which he himself had opened. Then he switched abruptly. “By the way, where is your brother-in-law, Starbuck? I haven’t seen him for three or four days.”