"I met him last night and we had a little talk over things. I confess I was a little surprised."
"Why?"
"Well—that he is in charge. I was instructed to report to him. I find that he has had no schooling whatever; that, in fact, he is nothing but a kind of a self-educated surveyor. I have no doubt that he is a good, practical fellow, but it seems to me somewhat reckless to put him in such a responsible position."
Jefferson Worth did not say that he himself had had no more schooling than the Seer's lieutenant. Perhaps that, also, was not necessary to explain. He did say: "We have only one standard in the West, Mr. Holmes."
"And that?"
"What can you do?" came the words as if spoken by cold iron.
CHAPTER VII.
DON'T YOU LIKE MY DESERT, MR. HOLMES?
After his noon-day meal, Willard Holmes, following the example of others, sought the shade of the arcade in front of the hotel. Helping himself to a chair and moving a little away from the general company, he sat enjoying his cigar, musing on the novelty of his surroundings and reviewing his impressions of the last few hours.
It was natural that he should make comparisons—that he should see men and things in the light of the only men and things he had ever known. Abe Lee he measured by the standing of his own school-trained engineering friends, demanding that the desert-born and desert-trained surveyor exhibit all the hall-marks of Boston. He might as consistently have demanded that the flood of sunlight that fell in such blinding glory upon the new world before him should shine as through the smoke-grimed city atmosphere of New York. One was no more impossible than the other. Jefferson Worth he compared with the college and university friends of his father—with Mr. Greenfield and the New York-bred business men of his class, demanding that the western pioneer banker show the same characteristics that distinguished the cultured capitalists whose great-great-grandfathers were pioneers. Rubio City he saw in the light of those eastern cities that were founded in the days when men knew not that there was any world west of the Alleghanies.