“Well,” went on Mr. Cook, “we’ve got a big lot of work cut out down there in the desert—petroleum mainly,” he explained, “but metal, too. And just now it’s all prospecting. Maybe you don’t know southern Utah?”
The aeroplane company manager smiled in the negative.
“When they git done tellin’ you about the plains of Arizona, and New Mexico, just add one hundred per cent and call it Utah,” went on Mr. Cook. “It ain’t sand and bunch grass down there,” he added, with a grim smile. “It’s alkali deserts, borax holes, rotten volcano craters and river beds that ain’t seen water in a thousand years.”
“Don’t the Colorado and Green rivers run through it?” asked Mr. Atkinson, stepping to a large wall map.
Mr. Cook grunted.
“They do,” he explained, “right through it, and they might as well be buried in steel tubes. What you goin’ to do with a river shootin’ along at the bottom of a gash in the ground a half mile deep? Mr. Atkinson,” continued the westerner. “I’ve known many a man to die o’ thirst on the banks of them rivers with the sound o’ gurglin’ water in his ears. As for gettin’ to that water, well you might reach it with a shot gun—nothin’ else.”
Mr. Atkinson turned, ready to hear Mr. Cook’s explanation:
“I went to Utah five years ago—I’m a Pennsylvanian. My hair was black then. It’s gray now. I got that in one week down in the San Juan river canyon. Sailin’ an aeroplane down there ain’t a goin’ to be no county fair job.”
“I don’t quite understand,” exclaimed Mr. Atkinson.