Wilbur waited a moment to see if the old man would speak again, but as he was silent, he turned to the man beside him:
"How did you get interested in this land?" he asked.
"I was born," the other answered, "in one of the villages of the cliff-dwellers, who lived so many years ago. Dad, he always used to think that the sudden droppin' out of those old races an' the endurin' silence about them was some kind of a visitation. An' he always believed that the curse, whatever it was, would be taken off."
"That's a queer idea," said the boy; "I never heard it before."
"Well," said the other, "it does seem queer. An' when the government first started this reclamation work, dad he thought it was a sign, and he went into every project, I reckon, the government ever had. An' they used to say that unless 'the Apache Prophet,' as they called him, had been once on a project, it was no use goin' on till he came."
"But what did he do?"
"They always gave him charge of a gang of men for as long as he wanted it, and Jim an' I, we used to boss a gang, too. We've been on the Huntley and Sun River in Montana, we've laid the foundation of the highest masonry dam in the world—the Shoshone dam in Wyoming,—helped build a canal ninety-five miles long in Nebraska, I've driven team on the Belle Fourche in South Dakota; in Kansas, where there's no surface water, I've dug wells that with pumps will irrigate eight thousand acres, and away down in New Mexico on the Pecos and in Colorado on the Rio Grande I've helped begin a new life for those States."
"An' a river shall flow out of it," the old man burst forth again, "an' I reckon thar ain't a river flowin' nowhere that's forgot. I don't know where Jordan rolls, but any stream that brings smilin' plenty where the desert was before looks enough like Jordan to suit me. I've seen it, I tell you," he added fiercely, turning to the boy, "I've seen the desert an' I've seen Eden, an' I'm goin' there to live. An' where the flamin' sword of thirst once whirled, there's little brooks a-ripplin' an' the flowers is springin' fair."
"You must have seen great changes?" suggested the boy, interested in the old man's speech.
"Five years ago," he answered, "we were campin' on the Snake River, in southern Idaho. There was sage-brush, an' sand, an' stars, an' nothin' else. An engineerin' fellow, who he was I dunno, rides up to the fire. Where he comes from I dunno; I reckon his body came along the road of the sage-brush and the sand, but his mind came by the stars. An' he takes the handle of an ax, and draws out on the sand an irrigatin' plan. There wasn't a house for thirty miles. An' he just asks if he shall go ahead. An' I knows he's right, an' I says I knows he's right, an' he goes straight off to Washington, an' now there's three thousand people where the sage-brush was, and right on the very spot where my campfire smoked just five years ago, a school has been opened with over a hundred children there."