The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories. Graham Margaret Collier
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stopped at the door of the tent and took off his rusty hat. The breeze blew his long linen duster about his legs.
"Have you looked much into electrical phenomena?" he asked, putting up his trumpet.
Palmerston moved a step back, and said: "No; not at all." Then he raised his hand to possess himself of the ear-piece, and colored as he remembered that it was not a telephone. His companion seemed equally oblivious of his confusion and of his reply.
"I have made some discoveries," he went on; "I shall be pleased to talk them over with you. They will revolutionize this country." He waved his hand toward the mesa. "Every foot of this land will sometime blossom as the rose; greasewood and sage-brush will give place to the orange and the vine. Water is king in California, and there are rivers of water locked in these mountains. We must find it; yes, yes, my young friend, we must find it, and we can find it. I have solved that. The solution is here." He stooped and patted his satchel affectionately. "This little instrument is California's best friend. There is a future for all these valleys, wilder than our wildest dreams."
Palmerston nodded with a guilty feeling of having approved statements of which he intended merely to acknowledge the receipt, and motioned his guest into the white twilight of the tent.
"Make yourself comfortable, professor," he called. "I want to find Dysart and get my mail."
As he neared the kitchen door Mrs. Dysart's voice came to him enveloped in the sizzle of frying meat.
"Well, I don't know, Jawn; he mayn't be just the old-fashioned water-witch, but it ain't right; it's tamperin' with the secrets of the Most High, that's what I think."
"Well, now, Emeline, you hadn't ought to be hasty. He don't lay claim to anything more'n natural; he says it's all based on scientific principles. He says he can tell me just where to tunnel – Now, here's Mr. Palmerston; he's educated. I'm going to rely on him."
"Well, I'm goin' to rely on my heavenly Fawther," said Mrs. Dysart solemnly, from the quaking pantry.
Palmerston stood in the doorway, smiling. John jumped up and clapped his hand vigorously on his breast pockets.
"Well, now, there! I left your mail in the wagon in my other coat," he said, hooking his arm through the young man's and drawing him toward the barn. "Did you get him turned on?" he asked eagerly, when they were out of his wife's hearing. "How does he strike you, anyway? Doesn't he talk like a book? He wants me to help him find a claim – show him the corners, you know. He's got a daughter down at Los Angeles; she'll come up and keep house for him. He says he'll locate water on shares if I'll help him find a claim and do the tunneling. Emeline she's afraid I'll get left, but I think she'll come round. Isn't it a caution the way he talks science?"
Palmerston acknowledged that it was.
"The chances are that he is a fraud, Dysart," he said kindly; "most of those people are. I'd be very cautious about committing myself."
"Oh, I'm cautious," protested John; "that's one of my peculiarities. Emeline thinks because I look into things I'm not to be trusted. She's so quick herself she can't understand anybody that's slow and careful. Here's your letters – quite a batch of 'em. Would you mind our putting up a cot in your tent for the professor?"
"Not at all," said the young fellow good-naturedly. "It's excellent discipline to have a deaf man about; you realize how little you have to say that's worth saying."
"That's a fact, that's a fact," said Dysart, rather too cheerfully acquiescent. "A man that can talk like that makes you ashamed to open your head."
Palmerston fell asleep that night to the placid monotone of the newcomer's voice, and awoke at daybreak to hear the same conversational flow just outside the tent. Perhaps it was Dysart's explosive "Good-morning, professor!" which seemed to have missed the trumpet and hurled itself against the canvas wall of the tent close to the sleeper's ear, that awoke him. He sat up in bed and tried to shake off the conviction that his guest had been talking all night. Dysart's greeting made no break in the cheerful optimism that filtered through the canvas.
"Last night I was an old man and dreamed dreams; this morning I am a young man and see visions. I see this thirsty plain fed by irrigating-ditches and covered with bearing orchards. I am impatient to be off on our tramp. This is an ideal spot. With five acres of orange-trees here, producing a thousand dollars per acre, one might give his entire time to scientific investigation."
"He'd want to look after the gophers some," yelled Dysart.
"I am astonished that this country is so little appreciated," continued Brownell, blindly unheeding. "It is no doubt due to the reckless statements of enthusiasts. It is a wonderful country – wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!"
There was a diminuendo in the repeated adjective that told Palmerston the speaker was moving toward the house; and it was from that direction that he heard Mrs. Dysart, a little later, assuring her visitor, in a high, depressed voice, that she hadn't found the country yet that would support anybody without elbow-grease, and she didn't expect to till it was Gawd's will to take her to her heavenly home.
John Dysart and his visitor returned from their trip in the mountains, that evening, tired, dusty, and exultant. The professor's linen duster had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston's tent door, his finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content.
"This is certainly the promised land," he said gravely, "a land flowing with milk and honey. Nature has done her share lavishly: soil, climate, scenery – everything but water; yes, and water, too, waiting for the brain, the hand of man, the magic touch of science – the one thing left to be conquered to give the sense of mastery, of possession. This country is ours by right of conquest." He waved his hands majestically toward the valley. "In three months we shall have a stream flowing from these mountains that will transform every foot of ground before you. These people seem worthy, though somewhat narrow. It will be a pleasure to share prosperity with them as freely as they share their poverty with me."
Palmerston glanced conversationally toward the trumpet, and his companion raised it to his ear.
"Dysart is a poor man," shouted Palmerston, "but he is the best fellow in the world. I should hate to see him risk anything on an uncertainty."
Brownell had been nodding his head backward and forward with dreamy emphasis; he now shook it horizontally, closing his eyes. "There is no uncertainty," he said, lowering his trumpet; "that is the advantage of science: you can count upon it with absolute certainty. I am glad the man is poor – very glad; it heightens the pleasure of helping him."
The young man turned away a trifle impatiently.
"A reservoir will entail some expense," the professor rambled on; "but the money will come. 'To him that hath shall be given.'"
Palmerston's face completed the quotation, but the speaker went on without opening his eyes: "When the water is once flowing out of the tunnel, capital will flow into it."
"A good deal of capital will flow into the tunnel before any water flows out of it," growled Palmerston, taking advantage of his companion's physical defect to relieve his mind.
Later in the evening Dysart drew the young man into the family conference, relying upon the sympathy of sex in the effort to allay his wife's misgivings.
"The tunnel won't cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do myself," maintained the little man, "and the professor says we'll strike water that'll drown us out before we've gone a hundred feet. Emeline here she's afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her it's pure science. It isn't any more wonderful than a needle traveling toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off it is, something like a compass – I don't understand it, but I can see that it ain't any more meraculous than a telegraph. It's science."
"Oh, yes, I know," mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small rocking-chair on the piazza; "there's folks that think the creation of the world in six days is nothin' but science, but they're not people for Christians to be goin' pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of dirt on top of