"Here is a gentleman who has land for sale, Sara." Sara's scowl disappeared. He gave the Ames family such a pleasant welcome that Jim was puzzled. Ames and Jim dropped down on the doorstep while Mrs. Ames and Pen took the hammock chairs.
"Have you people been long in this country?" asked Pen.
"Thirty years this coming fall," replied Ames, taking the cigar Sara offered him and smelling it critically. "I was a kid of 21 when I took up my section down on the old canal. I couldn't have sold that land for two bits an acre a year after I took it up. I refused two hundred dollars an acre for the alfalfa land the other day."
"You must have done some work in the interval," commented Sara.
Jim, leaning against the door post, watched Sara through half closed eyes and glanced now and again at Pen's eager face. Ames puffed at his cigar and gazed out over the desert.
"Work!" he said with a half laugh, "why when I took up that land sand and silence, whisky and poker were the staples round here. I built a one-room adobe, bought a team, imported a plow and a harrow and a scraper and went at it. I've got a ten-acre orange grove now and two hundred acres of alfalfa and a foreman who lets me gad! But no one who ain't been a desert farmer can imagine how I worked."
Pen spoke softly. "Were you with him then, Mrs. Ames?"
The little woman looked at Pen with her far-seeing eyes. "Oh, yes, I don't know that Oscar remembers, but we were married in York State. I was a school teacher."
After the little laugh Pen asked, "Do you like the desert farming?"