He shook me in his iron grip. “Call on your memory. It's ungrateful to forget a man who—who owes you money,” he laughed.
“That doesn't help me,” I said, probing the vivid face.
“Have I changed so, where nothing else has changed?” he said, looking around—“except that they've put a fire escape outside the window where I used to sleep.” I followed his glance, and memory flashed its belated recognition: “Carlo Trentano!” He gave me another powerful, affectionate shake. It was like being petted by a lion. “No longer,” he said. “That's buried with—with him.” He looked again toward the high-roofed house where his father had died. “I'm all American now, Charles Trent, at your service.”
“Where have I heard that name?”
“Seen it in the papers probably. They've had their fun with me in the Senate Committee hearings.”
“Ah! So you're the Trent who's been making all the trouble for the water-power people in the Southwest! And I thought that wonderful boy's imagination of yours was going to make a poet of you, or at least a dramatist.”
“It made me see visions,” he explained with gravity—“visions that had to be expressed in facts. After I had worked my way through college, I went out to the desert country. And I saw visions of water brought from the mountains. What I saw I made other people see. Now there are growing cities and fertile farms where there used to be only dry sand and my imagination. Isn't that poetry, dominie,—and drama?”
It was all said quite simply, and without brag, as a man would explain the working of some power outside of himself.
“But where did you get the money?”
“People brought it to me. The people of the dry country first. Afterward it came in from all over, much of it from New York; and when I needed more for my biggest projects I went to Europe and raised it.”