“Cheap at the price, cheap at the price,” Dick explained to his guardians. “Wouldn’t you rather see me spend my money in buying professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the trouble with you fellows is that you don’t know the game of buying brains. I do. That’s my specialty. I’m going to make money out of them, and, better than that, I’m going to make a dozen blades of grass grow where you fellows didn’t leave room for half a blade in the soil you gutted.”
So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on the jaw. “One year more,” he warned, while he delved in agricultural chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California with his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and actually embarked on his agricultural folly.
The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was consummated.
“An incredible price,” said Mr. Crockett.
“Incredibly cheap,” said Dick. “You ought to see my soil reports. You ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen, guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the song.”
Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song to the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:
“Hu’-tim yo’-kim koi-o-di’!
Wi’-hi yan’-ning koi-o-di’!
Lo’-whi yan’-ning koi-o-di’!
Yo-ho’ Nai-ni’, hal-u’-dom yo nai, yo-ho’ nai-nim’!”
“The music is my own,” he murmured apologetically, “the way I think it ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung. The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States Pacific Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was formed out of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the mountain flowers in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for you in English.”
And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent, Dick sang:
“The acorns come down from heaven!
I plant the short acorns in the valley!
I plant the long acorns in the valley!
I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!”