The Pride of Palomar Part 45

"Dear old idiot," she thought. "If he ever falls in love he'll pay his court like a schoolboy."

"By the way, sir," Farrel spoke suddenly, turning to John Parker, "I would like very much to have your advice in the matter of an investment. I will have about ninety thousand dollars on hand as soon as I sell these cattle I've rounded up, and until I can add to this sum sufficient to lift the mortgage you hold, it scarcely seems prudent to permit my funds to repose in the First National Bank of El Toro without drawing interest."

"We'll give you two and one-half per cent. on the account, Farrel."

"Not enough. I want it to earn six or seven per cent. and it occurred to me that I might invest it in some good securities which I could dispose of at a moment's notice, whenever I needed the money. The possibility of a profit on the deal has even occurred to me."

Parker smiled humorously. "And you come to me for advice? Why, boy, I'm your financial enemy."

"My dear Mr. Parker, I am unalterably opposed to you on the j.a.panese colonization scheme and I shall do my best to rob you of the profit you plan to make at my expense, but personally I find you a singularly agreeable man. I know you will never resign a business advantage, but, on the other hand, I think that if I ask you for advice as to a profitable investment for my pitiful little fortune, you will not be base enough to advise me to my financial detriment. I trust you. Am I not banking with your bank?"

"Thank you, Farrel, for that vote of confidence. You possess a truly sporting att.i.tude in business affairs and I like you for it; I like any man who can take his beating and smile. Yes, I am willing to advise an investment. I know of a dozen splendid securities that I can conscientiously recommend as a safe investment, although, in the event of the inevitable settlement that must follow the war and our national orgy of extravagance and high prices, I advise you frankly to wait awhile before taking on any securities. You cannot afford to absorb the inevitable shrinkage in the values of all commodities when the show-down comes. However, there is a new issue of South Coast Power Company first mortgage bonds that can be bought now to yield eight per cent. and I should be very much inclined to take a chance on them, Farrel. The debentures of the power corporations in this state are about the best I know of."

"I think you are quite right, sir," Farrel agreed. "Eventually the South Coast Company is bound to divide with the Pacific Company control of the power business of the state. I dare say that in the fullness of time the South Coast people will arrange a merger with the Central California Power Company."

"Perhaps. The Central California Company is under-financed and not particularly well managed, Farrel. I think it is, potentially, an excellent property, but its bonds have been rather depressed for a long time."

Farrel nodded his understanding. "Thank you for your advice, sir.

When I am ready will your bank be good enough to arrange the purchase of the South Coast bonds for me?"

"Certainly. Happy to oblige you, Farrel. But do not be in too great a hurry. You may lose more in the shrinkages of values if you buy now than you would make in interest."

"I shall be guided by your advice, sir. You are very kind."

"By the way," Parker continued, with a deprecatory smile, "I haven't entered suit against you in the matter of that foreclosure. I didn't desire to annoy you while you were in hospital and you've been busy on the range ever since. When can I induce you to submit to a process-server?"

"This afternoon will suit me, Mr. Parker."

"I'll gladly wait awhile longer, if you can give me any tangible a.s.surance of your ability to meet the mortgage."

"I cannot do that to-day, sir, although I may be able to do so if you will defer action for three days."

Parker nodded and the conversation languished. The car had climbed out of the San Gregorio and was mounting swiftly along the route to La Questa, affording to the Parkers a panorama of mountain, hill, valley and sea so startling in its vastness and its rugged beauty that Don Mike realized his guests had been silenced as much by awe as by their desire to avoid a painful and unprofitable conversation.

Suddenly they swung wide around a turn and saw, two thousand feet below them, La Questa Valley. The chauffeur parked the car on the outside of the turn to give his pa.s.sengers a long, un.o.bstructed view.

"Looks like a green checker-board with tiny squares," Parker remarked presently.

"Little j.a.panese farms."

"There must be a thousand of them, Farrel."

"That means not less than five thousand j.a.panese, Mr. Parker. It means that literally a slice of j.a.pan has been transplanted in La Questa Valley, perhaps the fairest and most fruitful valley in the fairest and most fruitful state in the fairest and most fruitful country G.o.d ever made. And it is lost to white men!"

"Serves them right. Why didn't they retain their lands?"

"Why doesn't water run up hill? A few j.a.ps came in and leased or bought lands long before we Californians suspected a 'yellow peril.'

They paid good prices to inefficient white farmers who were glad to get out at a price in excess of what any white man could afford to pay.

After we pa.s.sed our land law in 1913, white men continued to buy the lands for a corporation owned by j.a.panese with white dummy directors, or a majority of the stock of the corporation ostensibly owned by white men. Thousands of patriotic Californians have sold their farms to j.a.panese without knowing it. The law provides that a j.a.panese cannot lease land longer than three years, so when their leases expire they conform to our foolish law by merely s.h.i.+fting the tenants from one farm to another. Eventually so many j.a.ps settled in the valley that that white farmers, unable to secure white labor, unable to trust j.a.panese labor, unable to endure j.a.panese neighbors or to enter into j.a.panese social life weary of paying taxes to support schools for the education of j.a.panese children, weary of daily contact with irritable, unreliable and una.s.similable aliens, sold or leased their farms in order to escape into a white neighborhood. I presume, Mr. Parker, that n.o.body can realize the impossibility of withstanding this yellow flood except those who have been overwhelmed by it. We humanitarians of a later day gaze with gentle sympathy upon the spectacle of a n.o.ble and primeval race like the Iroquois tribe of Indians dying before the advance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, but with characteristic Anglo-Saxon inconsistency and stupidity we are quite loth to feel sorry for ourselves, doomed to death before the advance of a Mongolian civilization unless we put a stop to it--forcibly and immediately!"

"Let us go down and see for ourselves," Mrs. Parker suggested.

Having reached the floor of the valley, at Farrel's suggestion they drove up one side of it and down the other. Motor-truck after motor-truck, laden with crated vegetables, pa.s.sed them on the road, each truck driven by a j.a.panese, some of them wearing the peculiar bamboo hats of the j.a.panese coolie cla.s.s.

The valley was given over to vegetable farming and the fields were dotted with men, women and children, squatting on their heels between the rows or bending over them in an att.i.tude which they seemed able to maintain indefinitely, but which would have broken the back of a white man.

"I know a white apologist for the j.a.panese who in a million pamphlets and from a thousand rostrums has cried that it is false that j.a.panese women labor in the fields," Farrel told his guests. "You have seen a thousand of them laboring in this valley. Hundreds of them carry babies on their backs or set them to sleep on a gunnysack between the rows of vegetables. There is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling with a one-horse cultivator, while her sisters and her mother hold up their end with five male j.a.ps in the gentle art of hoeing potatoes."

"They live in wretched little houses," Kay ventured to remark.

"Anything that will shelter a horse or a chicken is a palace to a j.a.p, Kay. The furnis.h.i.+ngs of their houses are few and crude. They rise in the morning, eat, labor, eat, and retire to sleep against another day of toil. They are all growing rich in this valley, but have you seen one of these aliens building a decent home, or laying out a flower garden? Do you see anything inspiring or elevating to our nation due to the influence of such a race?"

"Yonder is a schoolhouse," Mrs. Parker suggested. "Let us visit it."

"The American flag floats over that little red school-house, at any rate," Parker defended.

William halted the car in the schoolhouse yard and Farrel got out and walked to the schoolhouse door. An American school-teacher, a girl of perhaps twenty, came to the door and met him with an inquiring look.

"May we come in?" Farrel pleaded. "I have some Eastern people with me and I wanted to show them the sort of Americans you are hired to teach."

She smiled ruefully. "I am just about to let them out for recess," she replied. "Your friends may remain in their car and draw their own conclusions."

"Thank you." Don Mike returned to the car. "They're coming out for recess," he confided. "Future American citizens and citizenesses.

Count 'em."

Thirty-two little j.a.panese boys and girls, three Mexican or Indian children and four of undoubted white parentage trooped out into the yard and gathered around the car, gazing curiously. The school-teacher bade them run away and play and, in her role of hostess, approached the car. "I am Miss Owens," she announced, "and I teach this school because I have to earn a living. It is scarcely a task over which one can enthuse, although I must admit that j.a.panese children are not unintelligent and their parents dress them nicely and keep them clean."

"I suppose, Miss Owens," Farrel prompted her, having introduced himself and the Parkers, "that you have to contend with the native j.a.panese schools."

She pointed to a brown house half a mile away. Over it flew the flag of j.a.pan. "They learn ancestor wors.h.i.+p and how to kow-tow to the Emperor's picture down there, after they have attended school here,"

she volunteered. "Poor little tots! Their heads must ache with the amount of instruction they receive. After they have learned here that Columbus discovered America on October 12th, 1492, they proceed to that j.a.panese school and are taught that the Mikado is a divinity and a direct descendant of the Sun G.o.d. And I suppose, also, they are taught that it is a fine, clean, manly thing to pack little, green, or decayed strawberries at the bottom of a crate with nice big ones on top--in defiance of a state law. Our weights and measures law and a few others are very onerous to our people in La Questa."

"Do you mean to tell me, Miss Owens," Parker asked, "that you despair of educating these little j.a.panese children to be useful American citizens?"

"I do. The Buddhist school over yonder is teaching them to be j.a.panese citizens; under j.a.panese law all j.a.panese remain j.a.panese citizens at heart, even if they do occasionally vote here. The discipline of my school is very lax," she continued. "It would be, of course, in view of the total lack of parental support. In that other school, however, the discipline is excellent."

She continued to discourse with them, giving them an intimate picture of life in this little j.a.pan and interesting revelations upon the point of view, family life and business ethics of the parents of her pupils, until it was time to "take up" school again, when she reluctantly returned to her poorly paid and unappreciated efforts.

"Well, of course, these people are impossible socially," John Parker admitted magnanimously, "but they do know how to make things grow.

They are not afraid of hard work. Perhaps that is why they have supplanted the white farmers."

"Indeed they do know how, Mr. Parker. And they can produce good crops more cheaply than a white farmer. A j.a.panese with a wife and two fairly well-grown daughters saves the wages of three hired men. Thus he is enabled to work his ground more thoroughly. When he leases land he tries to acquire rich land, which he robs of its fertility in three years and then pa.s.ses on to renew the outrage elsewhere. Where he owns land, however, he increases fertility by proper fertilization."

"So you do not believe it possible for a white man to compete economically with these people, Farrel?"

"Would you, if you were a white farmer, care to compete with the j.a.panese farmers of this valley? Would you care to live in a rough board shack, subsist largely on rice, labor from daylight to dark and force your wife and daughter to labor with you in the fields? Would you care to live in a kennel and never read a book or take an interest in public affairs or thrill at a sunset or consider that you really ought to contribute a dollar toward starving childhood in Europe?

Would you?"

"You paint a sorry picture, Farrel." Parker was evasive.