The Winning of Barbara Worth

by Harold Bell Wright

"I know it will," she said simply.

And as she stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young womanhood, the Seer felt that sweet, mysterious power of her personality—felt it with a father's loving pride. "I believe you do know, Barbara," he said; "I believe you do."

CHAPTER V.

WHAT THE INDIAN TOLD THE SEER.

In the making of Barbara's Desert the canyon-carving, delta-building river did not count the centuries of its labor; the rock-hewing, beach-forming waves did not number the ages of their toil; the burning, constant sun and the drying, drifting winds were not careful for the years. Therefore is the time of the real beginning of what happened in this, the land of my story, unknown.

Somewhere in the eternity that lies back of all the yesterdays, the great river found the salt waves of the ocean fathoms deep in what is now The King's Basin and extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a mighty delta dam.

South of this new land the ocean still received the river; to the north the gulf became an inland sea. The upper edge of this new-born sea beat helpless against a line of low, barren hills beyond which lay many miles of a rainless land. Eastward lay yet more miles of desolate waste. And between this sea and the parent ocean on the west, extending southward past the delta dam, the mountains of the Coast Range shut out every moisture-laden cloud and turned back every life-bearing stream. Thus trapped and helpless, the bright waters, with all their life, fell under the constant, fierce, beating rays of the semi-tropical sun and shrank from the wearing sweep of the dry, tireless winds. Uncounted still, the centuries of that age also passed and the bottom of that sea lay bare, dry and lifeless under the burning sky, still beaten by the pitiless sun, still swept by the scorching winds. The place that had held the glad waters with their teeming life came to be an empty basin of blinding sand, of quivering heat, of dreadful death. Unheeding the ruin it had wrought, the river swept on its way.

And so—hemmed in by mountain wall, barren hills and rainless plains; forgotten by the ocean; deserted by the river, that thirsty land lay, the loneliest, most desolate bit of this great Western Continent.

But the river could not work this ruin without contributing to the desert the rich strength it had gathered from its tributary lands. Mingled with the sand of the ancient sea-bed was the silt from faraway mountain and hill and plain. That basin of Death was more than a dusty tomb of a life that had been; it was a sepulchre that held the vast treasure of a life that would be—would be when the ages should have made also the master men, who would dare say to the river: "Make restitution!"—men who could, with power, command the rich life within the tomb to come forth.

But master men are not the product of years—scarcely, indeed, of centuries. The people of my story have also their true beginnings in ages too remote to be reckoned. The master passions, the governing instincts, the leading desires and the driving fears that hew and carve and form and fashion the race are as reckless of the years as are wave and river and sun and wind. Therefore the forgotten land held its wealth until Time should make the giants that could take it.