The next morning the guest left.
Fairbanks turned to his wife. “I can haul these abandoned shacks down there in no time. Charlie’s not working, I can get him to help.”
Ralph Fairbanks had stayed with Greenwater to the bitter end. Now he hauled it away.
The road to the new site was over rough desert, gutted with dry washes. Brown slept in the brush, put the shacks up while Fairbanks went for others. Both worked night and day to get the place ready. Finally they had lodging for 50 men, a dining room, and quarters for the family. With $2250 a month they could afford a chef and Ma could take it easy. Stella could go Outside to a girl’s school.
Then like a bolt of lightning came the bad news. The Greenwater guest, they learned, was just an engaging liar, with no mine, no men. He was never heard of again.
Without a dollar they were marooned in one of the world’s most desolate areas. Stumped, Fairbanks looked at Brown. “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. But this is below the belt. What’ll we do?”
“I can get a job with the Borax Company,” Brown said. “But you?”
“We have that canned goods we brought to feed that liar’s hired men. I’ll figure some way to live in this God-forsaken hole.”
From the dining room, prepared for the $2250 monthly income, he lugged a table, set it outside the door facing the road. Then he went to the pantry, filled a laundry basket with the cans of pork and beans, tomatoes, corned beef, and milk brought from Greenwater. He arranged them on the table, wrenched a piece of shook from a packing crate and on it painted in crude letters the word, “Store.” He propped it on the table and went inside. “Ma,” he announced, “we’re in business.”
You could have hauled the entire stock and the table away in a wheelbarrow and every person in the country for 100 miles in either direction laid end to end would not have reached as far as a bush league batter could knock a baseball.