CHAPTER I—MANIA AND DREAMS
Lemuel Huntington had told himself a thousand times that his Dot must have an education. He had long since become infatuated with the notion. It had him gripped as tenaciously as the seductive toils of romance had the imaginative Dot enmeshed. It was a consuming mania with him.
“If I got to steal the money, she’s goin’ to college—the dream of her darlin’ dead mother. S’help me, I’ll turn thief if I got to!”
Lemuel, the failure, was fifty-one—the age when most men begin to slow down, whether they want to or not. Twenty years before, he and his little bride had left a perfectly good living in Iowa to try a short cut to fortune in California. The fact that more often than not distance is a most captivating beckoner, did not occur to these happy newlyweds until they reached the Golden State and found that a tremendous army—also seeking sudden wealth—had preceded them, and was daily being augmented by regiments of recruits from the four corners of the globe.
The discovery appalled them—their capital being alarmingly small; and nearly two years of drifting from little town to little town, just managing to get by, took the heart out of them.
Then, one day, Lemuel brought home news of a tract of government land known as Soapweed Plains, on the north rim of the Mohave Desert, with enticing reports of rich mineral belts in the adjacent mountain ranges. It looked like the opportunity for which they had waited. They would homestead, and in a few years Huntington would be a name indelibly branded on the cattle industry of the State. And there was the further golden prospect of rich mines!
Packing their few belongings, husband and wife bought tickets to the dismal wind-whipped station of Mirage, on the Mohave & Southwestern Railroad, and spent two everlasting days shooing a trinity of stubborn burros over a hell waste, into the new land of promise. But again the captivating beckoner had tricked them. Soapweed Plains was a sweltering realm of sagebrush, sand and sidewinders, twenty-five miles wide, divided off from the rest of the desert universe by a horseshoe barricade of saw-edge peaks and table mountains that abutted a sky-line mesa to the south—and by serenading coyotes by night.
In despair, the Huntingtons filed on two quarter sections of sand and rubble, the west side of their claims overlapping a bunch-grass hill; the narrow strip on the east was handy to those scant benefits of irrigation so grudgingly bestowed by the tepid disappearing-reappearing Mohave River. Here, at least, they might coax a living out of the soil, said Lemuel dolefully. It was a permanent anchorage, if nothing more, sighed his wife. And they started grubbing away a site for a home and killing the sidewinding rattlesnakes.
Soon, they found that the potato thrived, as did the melon and alfalfa; found, too, that it was a paradise for bees. They contrived to get a cow and heifer, a span of desert-broke horses, and a rattletrap buckboard. Prospectors learned about the Huntington ranch and, finding it handier to go there after certain commodities than to far-off Mirage, began patronizing it. Its popularity grew. As a result, Lemuel added a stock of bacon, beans, condensed milk, sugar, matches, and such staple supplies to his assorted farm products, and reaped a comfortable profit therefrom.
Then Dot came—and the lonely brush ranch became the nucleus of Lemuel and Emily’s resurrected hopes, for they began planning wonderful things for their first-born, and, not the least among these things, an education that would make her a great lady of accomplishments some day.