“Well, I’ll be blowed! Is it the guileless Sing Ling whom Don Manuel has been tapping for information? This certainly looks like home,” and again he glanced over the table. He looked at the titles of the books—several of the latest novels, a volume on socialism, another on the history of architecture.
“Seems to know my book tastes, too. I won’t be lonesome, that’s certain. Well, I can’t do better than make a start with the newspapers. I’ve fallen quite behind the times.”
He stretched himself out on a long rattan chair, and started with a Los Angeles daily. He had read lazily on for nearly an hour, when there came from his lips a little cry of surprise.
Starting up into a sitting posture, Dick again perused the paragraph that had excited his special interest.
It was an announcement stating that an ideal city was about to be built in the Tehachapi valley, and that a prize of ten thousand dollars was to be awarded to the designer of the best plans for laying out such a town. Reference was made to an advertisement on another page giving the details and the rules of the competition. To this Dick eagerly turned.
The advertisement set forth that the model city was to be located somewhere near the centre of San Antonio Rancho, that the land was traversed by the state highway, by two railroads, by two electric power lines and two oil-carrying pipe lines, also the great Owen’s River aqueduct that supplied Los Angeles, some two hundred miles away, with water from the high Sierras. It was further stated that the entire ranch was to be subdivided into small tracts, and that already hundreds of applicants were waiting to make choice of home sites just so soon as the survey work was completed and the land thrown open to selection.
The plans required, and for which the prize of ten thousand dollars was offered, were to show the finest landscape effects, the most impressive and convenient location of public buildings, the most attractive ideas for bringing into being a veritable ideal city provided with all the most modern conveniences and sanitary equipment.
“By gad, I’d like to have a shot at that,” murmured Willoughby as he lay back in his chair and meditated.
After a time he picked up the London journal, and the very first thing that met his eye was the identical advertisement on the back of the cover. He rose and began to search through the week’s file of the Figaro, and there again he found the announcement of the contest. He was too keenly excited now for more reading. He began to pace the chamber. What a clever head had planned all this world-wide publicity!
“That Los Angeles bunch of fellows are certainly great. They are evidently going into this thing right. Doubtless they are determined to build the ideal—the model—city of California. They want the best brains of all lands to help beautify the place. Gee! but I’d like to be in this contest game. But perhaps it would be presumption on my part. Yet, who knows the country better than I do? When it comes to landscape effects, I’m Johnny-on-the-spot all right. And they’re in a hurry—only sixty days for the drawings. Unusual, such a short time. But I guess they’re going to make the dust fly without a week’s unnecessary delay. They are certainly live wires—they began by getting old Ben Thurston on the run.”