The train reached Fresno, and MacAdams's gaze rested with joy on leafy orchards and vineyards and the cool green of alfalfa fields. She perceived the effect upon him of that refreshing contrast with the arid desert. Before they reached Ripley his mind would be adjusted to a green land and ditches filled with running water. She had lost one point.
Her attention concentrated upon the thoughts slowly forming in his mind. Each word he spoke was an indication which she seized, considered, turned this way and that, searching for the roots of it, the implications growing from it.
The train was now running across a level plain covered with dry grass. Desolation was written upon it, and small unpainted houses stood here and there like periods at the end of sentences expressing the futility of human hope. She smiled above a sinking heart. They alighted at Ripley.
She had never seen the town before, and she saw now, with MacAdams's eyes, a yellow station, several big warehouses, a wide dusty road into which a street of two-story buildings ran at right angles. It was not much larger than Coalinga. She looked anxiously for the agent from Ripley Farmland Acres. That morning she had telegraphed him to meet her.
He came toward them and shook MacAdams' hand heartily. His name was Nichols. He had a consciously frank eye, and a smooth manner. He hustled them toward a dusty automobile whose sides were covered with canvas advertisements of the tract, and put MacAdams into the front seat beside him.
The machine, stirring a cloud of dust behind it, rattled down the road between fields of dry stubble. She was ignored in the back seat. Nichols had taken the situation out of her hands, and she did not trust him. However, she could not trust herself, in the midst of her uncertainties and ignorance.
Nichols talked too much and too enthusiastically. She was astounded by his blindness. To her it seemed obvious that his words were of little importance. It was what MacAdams said that mattered. He gave MacAdams no silences in which to speak, and he appeared oblivious to the fact that MacAdams, gazing contemplatively at the sky-line, said nothing.
They drove beneath an elaborate plaster gateway into the tract. Seventy thousand acres of scorched dry grass lay before them, stretching unbroken to a misty level horizon. Over it was the great arch of a hot sky.
The machine carried them out into the waves of dry grass like the smallest of boats putting out into an ocean of aridity. When it stopped the sun poured its heat upon them and dust settled on perspiring hands and faces. Nichols unrolled a map and talked with galvanic enthusiasm. He talked incessantly and his phrases seemed worn threadbare by previous repetition. MacAdams said nothing, and Helen tried to devise a way to ask Nichols to stop talking.
His manner had dropped her outside of consideration, save as a woman for whom automobile-doors must be opened. She saw that he felt her presence as a handicap in this affair between men; he apologized for saying "damn," and his apology conveyed resentment. He was losing her the sale, and she could not interfere. Her only hope of saving Bert rested on this sale. She controlled a rising desperation, and smiled at him.