Desert Conquest Part 16

"What has he got, and what does he want for it?"

Farwell told him.

"What is it worth, Sleeman?" And at his agent's appraisal, Carrol looked shocked and grieved. "Why, good Lord! Farwell," he said, "he wants almost what his ranch is worth."

"Funny that he should, isn't it?" sneered Farwell, who stood in no awe of Carrol. "Well, and that's what I want him to get."

"Can't do it," said Carrol decisively. "No money in it. Show me how I could make a profit."

"Cut it up into little chunks and sell it to those marks back East,"

Farwell replied. "I don't have to tell you your business. Make another Sentinel of it if you like."

The reference was to the town site of Sentinel, a half section of prairie which had been bought for three thousand dollars and sold as town lots on paper at a couple of hundred thousand to confiding, distant investors. It was still prairie, and apt to remain so. Carrol had engineered the deal, and he would have blushed if he had not forgotten how. As it was, he smiled sourly.

"I wish I could. Is this McCrae a friend of yours?"

"Put it that way," Farwell replied, frowning at the quizzical expression of Sleeman's eye. "He doesn't want to sell, but I want him to have the chance of refusing real money. He may take it, or he may not. Anyway, I make it as a personal request."

Carrol eyed him for a moment. He knew Farwell's reputation for uncompromising hostility to any one who thwarted his plans, accidentally or otherwise. Also Farwell was a good man. He was bound to rise. Some day, he, Carrol, might require his help and he kept a sharp eye on possibilities of that nature. So he said:

"It isn't business, but to oblige _you_, Farwell--all right, I'll take the chance that he won't accept. But it's sudden death, mind. No d.i.c.kering. He accepts, or he doesn't. If not, he'll get just dry-belt prices with the rest when they surrender."

And so a few days afterward Farwell, armed with a check representing one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of lawful money, procured because he considered it likely to have a good moral effect, sought Talapus Ranch and Donald McCrae. And McCrae, as he feared, turned the offer down.

Farwell had calculated on producing the check at the proper psychological moment, in practically stampeding him. The trouble was that the psychological moment failed to arrive. McCrae showed no symptoms of vacillation. The issue was never in doubt.

"I told you before," he said, "I don't want to sell, and I won't sell."

"It's a hundred and fifty thousand cold cash--your own value," urged Farwell. "At 6 per cent. it's nine thousand a year from now to eternity for you and your wife and children. If you refuse, the best you can hope for is dry-land prices. It's your only salvation, I tell you."

"My word is pa.s.sed," said McCrae. "Even if it wasn't, I wouldn't be harried off the little bit of earth that's mine. It's good of you to take this trouble--I judge you had trouble--but it's not a bit of use."

"Look here," said Farwell. "Will you talk it over with your family--your wife and daughter particularly? It's due to them."

"I will not," McCrae refused, with patriarchal scorn. "_I_ am the family. I speak for all."

"The old mule!" thought Farwell. Aloud he said: "I want to tell you that in a few days you'll lose half your water. The rest will go when the dam is finished. This is final--the last offer, your last chance.

I've done every blessed thing I could for you. Right now is when you make or break yourself and your wife and children."

"That's my affair," said McCrae. "I tell you no, and no." He plucked the oblong paper from Farwell's unresisting fingers. "A lot of money, aren't you?" he apostrophized it. "More than I've ever seen before, or will see again, like enough." Suddenly he tore the check in half, and again and again, cast the fragments in the air, and blew through them.

"And there goes your check, Mr. Farwell!"

"And there goes your ranch with it," Farwell commented bitterly. "One is worth just about as much as the other now."

"I'm not so sure about that," said McCrae.

"I'm sure enough for both of us," Farwell responded.

With a perfunctory good-bye, he swung into the saddle, leaving McCrae, a sombre figure, leaning against the slip bars of the corral. He had antic.i.p.ated this outcome; but, nevertheless, he was disappointed, vaguely apprehensive. In vain he told himself that it was nothing to him. The sense of failure persisted. Once he half turned in his saddle, looking backward, and he caught, or fancied he caught, the flutter of white against the shade of the veranda of the distant ranch house. That must be Sheila McCrae.

For the first time he realized that his concern was for her alone, that he did not care a hoot for the rest of the family. All this bother he had been to, all his efforts with old McCrae, his practical holdup of Carrol, even--he owned it to himself frankly--his failure to push the construction work as fast as he might had been for her and because of her. And what was the answer?

"Surely," said Farwell, straightening himself in the saddle, "surely to blazes I'm not getting fond of the girl!"

As became a decent, respectable, contented bachelor, he s.h.i.+ed from the idea. It was absolutely ridiculous, unheard-of. The girl was all right, sensible, good-looking. She suited him as well as any woman he had ever met; but that, after all, was not saying much. He liked her--he made that concession candidly--but as for anything more--nothing to it!

But the idea, once born, refused to be disposed of thus summarily; it persisted. He found himself recalling trivial things, all pertaining to Sheila--tricks of manner, of speech, intonations, movements of the hands, body, and lips--these avalanched themselves upon him, swamping connected, reasonable thought.

"What cursed nonsense!" said Farwell angrily to himself. "I don't care a hang about her, of course. I'm dead sure she doesn't care for me.

Anyway, I don't want to get married--yet. I'm not in shape to marry.

Why, what the devil would _I_ do with a wife? Where'd I put her?"

A wife! Huh! Instantly he was a prey to misgivings. He recalled shudderingly brother engineers whose wives dragged about with them, living on the edge of construction camps under canvas in summer, in rough-boarded, tar-papered shacks in the winter; or perhaps in half-furnished cottages in some nearby jerk-water town.

He had pitied the men, fought shy of the women. Most of them had put the best face upon their lives, rejoicing in the occasional streaks of fat, eating the lean uncomplainingly. They led a migratory existence, moved arbitrarily, like p.a.w.ns, at the will of eminent and elderly gentlemen a thousand or so miles away, whom they did not know and who did not know them. Continually, as their temporary habitations began to take on the semblance of homes, they were transferred, from mountains to plains, from the far north to the tropics. Their few household goods bore the scars of many movings--by rail, by steamer, by freight wagon, and even by pack train.

And there were those whose responsibilities forced them to abandon life at the front. These set up establishments in the new, cheap residential districts of cities. There the wives kept camp; thither, at long intervals, the husbands took journeys ranging from hundreds of miles to thousands. True, there were those who had attained eminence. These lived properly in well-appointed houses in eligible localities; and their subordinates kept the work in hand during their frequent home-goings. But the ruck--the rank and file--had to take such marital happiness as came their way on the quick-lunch system.

Now Farwell was a bachelor, rooted and confirmed. He had always shunned married men's quarters. When his day's work was done, he foregathered with other lone males, talking shop half the night in a blue haze of tobacco around a red-hot stove or stretched in comfortable undress in front of a tent. This was his life as he had lived it for years; as he had hoped to live it until he attained fame and became a consulting engineer, a man who pa.s.sed on the work of other men.

His theory of his own capacity for domesticity, though sincere, was strictly academic. He had no more idea of putting it into practice than he had of proving in his own person, before his proper time, the doctrine of eternal life.

Now, into the familiar sum of existence, which he knew from divisor to quotient, was suddenly shot a new factor--a woman. He experienced a new sensation, vague, unaccountable, restless, like the first uneasy throbs that precede a toothache. He lit a cigar; but, though he drew in the smoke hungrily, it did not satisfy. He felt a vacancy, a want, a longing.

He became aware of a dust cloud approaching. Ahead of it loped a big, clean-limbed buckskin. In the straight, wiry figure in the saddle he recognized Casey Dunne. Dunne pulled up and nodded.

"Fine day, Mr. Farwell."

"Yes," said Farwell briefly.

"Work coming on all right?"

"Yes."

"That's good," Dunne commented, with every appearance of lively satisfaction. "Been to Talapus? See anything of Miss McCrae there?"

"She's at home, I believe," said Farwell stiffly.

"Thanks. Come around and see me some time. Morning." He lifted the buckskin into a lope again.

Farwell looking after him, experienced a second new sensation--jealousy.

CHAPTER X