One of the hardest layers of civilization for a woman to throw off is the cook stove. She can tear up her fashion plates, dodge women's clubs, drop her books, forsake cosmetics and teas, and yet be fairly happy. But to the last extremity she clings to her cook stove.
Imogene Chandler had her stove out in the open at a safe distance from the inflammable weed roof of the "house." The three joints of stovepipe were held up by being wired to two posts driven in the ground beside it.
The girl alternately stuffed light, dry sticks into the stove box, and then lifted the lid of a boiling kettle to jab a fork into the potatoes to see if they were done. The Chandler larder was reduced to the point where Imogene in her cooking had to substitute things that would do for things that tasted good.
Chandler, in from the field, filled a tin washbasin at the tank, set it on a cracker box, and proceeded to clean up for supper. He rolled his sleeves up far above his elbows and scrubbed all the visible parts of his body from the top of his bald head to the shoulder blade under the loose collar of his open-necked shirt. About the only two habits from his old life that clung to the ex-professor were his use of big words and soap.
Chandler sat down at the little board table, also out in the open. It was after sundown and the heat was beginning to abate. As Imogene poured coffee into the pint tin cup beside his plate she looked down at him with protective admiration.
"Dad, I'm proud of you. You've got a tan that would be the envy of an African explorer; and you are building up a muscle, too; you are almost as good a man in the field as a Chinese coolie—really better than a Mexican."
"It has been my observation," said the ex-professor, tackling the boiled potatoes with a visible appetite, "that when a man quits the scholarly pursuits he instinctively becomes an agriculturist. Business is anathema to me; but I must confess that it gives me pleasure to watch the germination of the seed, and to behold the flower and fruitage of the soil."
Imogene laughed. "It is the fruitage that I'm fond of—especially when it is a bale to the acre. And it is going to make that this year or more; I never saw a finer field of cotton."
"It is doing very well," Chandler admitted with pride. "Yet, ah, perhaps there is one field better, certainly as good, and that is the American's north of here; the person you referred to as a fiddler."
"Daddy," and under the tone of raillery was a trace of wistfulness, "we've lived like Guinea Negroes here for three years, and yet I believe you like it. I don't believe you'd go back right now as professor of Sanskrit at Zion College."
The little professor did not reply, but remarked as he held out the cup for another pint of coffee:
"I notice I sleep quite soundly out here, even when the weather is excessively hot."
The girl smiled and felt fully justified in the change she had forced in his way of living.
"I think," remarked Chandler, reflectively, "at the end of the month I'll let Chang Lee go. I think I can some way manage the rest of the season alone."
"Perhaps," assented Imogene, soberly, as she began to pick up the knives and forks and plates. She had not told him that when Chang Lee's wages for June were paid it would leave them less than twenty dollars to get through the summer on. "I've been learning to irrigate the cotton rows and I can help," she said. "It will be a lot of fun."
The ex-professor was vaguely troubled. He knew in a remote sort of way that their finances were at a low ebb. Imogene always attended to the business.
"Do you suppose, daughter," he asked, troubled, "that it is practical for us to continue in our present environment for another season?"
"Surest thing, you know," she laughed reassuringly. "Run along now to bed; you are tired." He sighed with a delicious sense of relief and sleepiness, and went.
But Imogene was not tired enough either to sit still or to sleep. She got up and walked restlessly round the camp. Known problems and unknown longings were stirring uneasily in her consciousness.
She stood at the edge of the field where the long rows of cotton plants, freshly watered, grew rank and green in the first intense heat of summer. There was a full moon to-night—a hazy, sleepy full moon with dust blown across its face creeping up over the eastern desert.
Just a little while ago and it was all desert. Two years ago when they first came this cotton field was uneven heaps of blown sand, desert cactus, and mesquite—barren and forbidding as a nightmare of thirst and want. It had taken a year's work and nearly all their meagre capital to level it and dig the water ditches. And the next year—that was last year—the crop was light and the price low. They had barely paid their debts and saved a few hundred for their next crop. Now that was gone, and with it six hundred, the last dollar she could borrow at the bank. Just how they were going to manage the rest of the summer she did not know. And worst of all were these vague but persistent rumours and warnings that the ranchers were somehow to be robbed of their crops.
She turned and walked back into the yard of the little shack and stood bareheaded looking at the moon, the desert wind in her face. Another summer of heat was coming swiftly now. She had lived through two seasons of that terrific heat when the sun blazed all day, day after day, and the thermometer climbed and climbed until it touched the 130 mark. And all these two years had been spent here at this shack, with its dirt yard and isolation.
The desert had bit deeply into her consciousness. Even the heat, the wind-driven sand, the stillness, the aloneness of it had entered into her soul with a sort of fascination.
"I'm not sorry," she shut her hands hard and pressed her lips close together, "even if we do lose—but we must not lose! We can't go on in poverty, either here or over there. We must not lose—we must not!"
She turned her head sharply; something toward the road had moved; some figure had appeared a moment and then disappeared. A fear that was never wholly absent made her move toward the door of her own shack. A revolver hung on a nail there.
And then out on the night stole the singing, quivering note of a violin. Instantly the fear was gone, the tension past, and the tears for the first time in all the struggle slipped down her cheeks. She knew now that for weeks she had been hoping he would come again.
When the violin cords ceased to sing, Imogene clapped her hands warmly, and the fiddler rose from beside a mesquite bush and came toward her.
"I'm glad you brought it this time," she said as he approached and sat down on a box a few feet away. "That was the best music I have heard for years."
"The best?" he questioned.
She caught the meaning in his emphasis and smiled to herself as she answered: "The best violin music." Although her face was in the shadow, the moonlight was on her hair and shoulders. Something in her figure affected him as it had that night when she stood in the doorway—some heroic endurance, some fighting courage that held it erect, and yet it was touched by a yearning as restless and unsatisfied as the desert wind. Bob knew her father was incapable of grappling alone with the problems of life. This project had all been hers; it was her will, her brain, her courage that had wrought the change on the face of this spot of desert. Yet how softly girlish as she sat there in the moonlight; and how alone in the heart of this sleeping desert in an alien country. He wished she had not qualified that praise of his playing. Bob knew very little about women.
"How do you like being a cotton planter?" She was first to break the silence.
"Oh, very well." He turned his eyes from her for the first time, looked down at his fiddle, and idly picked at one of the strings. "But of course I can't truthfully say I love manual labour. I can do it when there is something in it; but I much prefer a hammock and a shade and a little nigger to fan me and bring me tall glasses full of iced drinks."
She laughed, for she knew already he had the reputation of being one of the best workers in the valley.
"But this country has me," he added. "It fascinates me. When I make a fortune over here I'm going across on the American side and buy a big ranch.
"You know"—he continued softly to strum on the violin strings—"this Imperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some land of fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneath the sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of the desert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the Colorado River, and then it swiftly put forth such luxuriant wealth of food and clothes and fruit and flowers that its story sounds like the demented dreams of a bankrupt land promoter."
"I am glad you like it," she said, "and I hope you'll get your share of the fabled wealth that it is supposed to grow—and, oh, yes, by the way, do you happen to need another Chinaman?"
"No, I've got more than I can pay now."
"We are going to let Chang Lee go the last of the month. He's a good Chinaman, and I wanted him to have a job."
"Why let him go?"
"We won't need him."
"Won't need him!" Bob exclaimed. "With a hundred and sixty acres of cotton to irrigate and keep chopped out?"
"I can do a lot of the irrigating"—the girl spoke a little evasively—"and daddy can manage the rest."
He knew this was another case of exhausted funds.
"Can't you borrow any more?"
She laughed a frank confession.
"You guessed it. We haven't money to pay him. I've borrowed six hundred on the crop, and can't get another dollar."
He sat silent for several minutes looking off toward the cotton fields that would cry for water to-morrow in their fight against the eternal desert that brooded over this valley, thinking of her pluck. It made him ashamed of any wavering thought that ever scouted through his own mind.
He stood up. "And are you going to see it through?"
Alone beside the field as the moon rose she had wavered in doubt; but the answer came now with perfect assurance.
"Most surely."
"So am I," he said. "Good-night."
But before he turned she put out her hand to touch his violin—her fingers touched his hand instead.
"Please—just once more," she asked.
He laughed whimsically as he sat down on the box and drew the bow.
"I'm proud of the human race," he said, "that fights for bread and still looks at the stars."
He began to play: he did not know what. It might have been something he had heard; but anyway to-night it was his and hers, the song of the rose that fought the desert all day for its life and then blossomed with fragrance in the night.
At the sound of the violin a man sitting on the edge of the canal by the cottonwood trees stirred sharply. There was a guitar across his knee. He had been waiting for the sound of voices to cease; and now the accursed fiddle was playing again. He spat vindictively into the stream.
"Damn the Americano!"
Bob saw as he turned into the Bungalow Court at El Centro a youngish woman in white sitting on the second porch. In spite of the absence of the weeds he recognized her as the widow who had come down the street that other morning to meet Jim Crill. This, then, was Crill's place. Evidently the twelve months of bereavement had elapsed, and Mrs. Barnett, having done her full duty, felt that the ghost of her departed could no longer have any just complaints if she wore a little white of her own.
Bob had come to see Crill. Since that evening with Imogene Chandler he had worried a good deal about their being without money. He had tried to get the ginning company that had advanced his own funds to make them a loan. But everybody had grown wary and quit lending across the line. Bob as a last resort had come up to see if Crill could be induced to help.
"Good morning." Rogeen lifted his straw hat as he stood on the first step of the porch, and smiled. "Is Mr. Crill at home?"
"No." Mrs. Barnett had nodded rather stiffly in response to his greeting, and lifted her eyes questioningly. She was waiting for someone else, and hence felt no cordiality for this stranger, whom she dimly seemed to remember.
"When will he be in?" The young man was obviously disappointed, and he really was good to look at.
"I don't know exactly." Mrs. Barnett relented slightly, having glanced down the road to be sure another machine was not coming. "But as I attend to much of his business, perhaps if you will tell me what it is you want I can arrange it for you. Won't you come up and have a chair?"
Bob accepted the invitation, not that he intended to mention his business to her, but he had a notion that Jim Crill was due to arrive about lunch time.
"Are you from the East?" That was Mrs. Barnett's idea of tactful flattery. She asked it of all callers.
"Yes."
"What part, may I ask?"
"All parts," he smiled, "east of here and west of the Mississippi."
"It is so different here," Mrs. Barnett lifted her brows and raised her eyes as though she were singing "The Lost Chord," "from what I am used to."
"Yes," assented Bob, "it is different from what I am used to. That is why I like it."
"Oh, do you?" Shocked disappointment in her tone implied that it was too bad he was not a kindred spirit. "I find everything so crude; and such loose standards here." A regretful shake of the head. "The women especially"—she thought of her tact again—"seem to have forgotten all the formalities and nice conventions of good society—if they ever knew. I suppose most of them were hired girls and clerks before they were married."
Reedy Jenkins makes a proposition to Imogene.Reedy Jenkins makes a proposition to Imogene.
Reedy Jenkins makes a proposition to Imogene.Reedy Jenkins makes a proposition to Imogene.
Bob made no comment. He did not know much about "nice formalities," but it had struck him that the women of Imperial Valley were uncommonly good, friendly human beings, and he had seen a number of college diplomas scattered round the valley.
"I heard of a woman recently," Mrs. Barnett went on, "who in the East was in college circles; now she's living in a hut. Think of it, a hut over on the other side among the Chinese and Mexicans! The only woman there, and practically alone. It seems perfectly incredible! I don't see how any decent woman could do a thing like that. Why, I'd rather work in somebody's kitchen. There, at least, one could be respectable."
Bob got up.
"I guess I'll not wait longer for Mr. Crill," he said, and he went down the steps, walking with rapid aversion. If Jim Crill left his business to this female, he didn't want any of his money for the Chandlers.
The ginning company had agreed to lend Bob up to $1,500 on the crop, advancing it along as he needed it. He was renting his teams, and had bought very little machinery, so he had managed to use less than his estimate. On his way back to the ranch he stopped at the company's office in Calexico, and drew two hundred dollars more on the loan.
A few days later Rogeen, watching his opportunity, saw Chandler riding alone toward town, and went out to the road and stopped him. After some roundabout conversation Bob remarked:
"By the way, a friend of mine has a little money he wants to lend to cotton growers at 10 per cent. Do you suppose you would be able to use a couple of hundreds of it?"
"Ahem!" The ex-professor ran a bony hand over a lean chin. "It is extremely probable, young man, extremely probable. I am very much inclined to think that I can—that is, provided he would esteem my personal signature to a promissory note sufficient guarantee for the payment of the indebtedness."
"That will be entirely sufficient." Bob smiled reassuringly, and pretended to write out—it was already prepared—a note. Chandler signed, and Bob gave him two hundred dollars in currency.
The next evening when Bob returned from the field he found a sealed envelope on the little board table in his shack. It contained $100 in currency and a note which read:
You can't afford this loan; but we need the money so darned bad I'm going to split it with you. I like the fiddle better than any musical instrument that is made.I. C.
Toward the last of June old cotton growers told Bob that his field was sure to go a bale and a quarter an acre, and Chandler's was about as good.
On the twenty-sixth of June a Mexican officer came to the ranch and arrested Rogeen's Chinese cook and one of his field hands. Bob offered bail, but it was refused. The day following the remaining Chinaman was arrested.
Bob got other hands, but on July first all three of these were arrested.
"I see," Bob said to himself, thinking it over that evening, "this is the first of Jenkins' schemes. They are going to make Chinamen afraid to work for me. Well, Noah and I can manage until I can hire some Americans."
At nine o'clock it was yet too hot to sleep, and Bob too restless to sit still. He got up and started out to walk. Without any definite intention he turned down the road south. He had gone about half a mile and thought of turning back when he saw something in the road ahead—something white. It was a woman, and she was running toward him.
Bob hastened to meet the figure in the road. He knew it was Imogene Chandler, and that her haste meant she was either desperately frightened or in great trouble.
"Is that you, Mr. Rogeen?" She checked up and called to him fifty yards away.
"Yes. What is the matter?"
"I've been frightened three times in the last week." She caught her breath. "A man hid in the weeds near the house, and his movements gave me a scare; but I didn't think so much about it until Saturday night, when I went out after dark to gather sticks for the breakfast cooking, a man slipped from the shadow of the trees and spoke to me and I ran and he followed me nearly to the house. I got my gun and shot at him.
"But to-night," she gasped for breath again, "just as I was going from papa's tent to my own, a man jumped out and grabbed me. I screamed and he ran away."
Bob put his hand on her arm. He felt it still quivering under his fingers.
"I'll walk back with you," he said in a quiet, reassuring tone.
"Can you lend me a blanket?" he asked when they reached the Chandler ranch. "And let me have your gun, I'll sleep out here to one side of your tent."
She protested, but without avail.
Next morning when Bob returned to his own ranch he spoke to Noah Ezekiel Foster.
"Noah, this afternoon move your tent down to the Chandler ranch. Put it up on the north side of Miss Chandler's so she will be between yours and her father's. I'm going to town and I'll bring out a double-barrelled riot shotgun that won't miss even in the dark. You and that gun are going to sleep side by side."
Noah Ezekiel grinned.
Bob went to the shack, put his own pistol in his pocket, and rode off to Calexico.
Reedy Jenkins sat at his desk in shirt sleeves, his pink face a trifle pasty as he sweated over a column of figures. He looked up annoyedly as someone entered through the open door; and the annoyance changed to surprise when he saw that it was Bob Rogeen.
"I merely came in to tell you a story," said Bob as he dropped into a chair and took a paper from the pocket of his shirt and held it in his left hand.
"This," Bob flecked the paper and spoke reminiscently, "is quite a curiosity. I got it up near Blindon, Colorado. A bunch of rascals jumped me one night when my back was turned.
"Next day my friends hired an undertaker to take charge of my remains, and made up money to pay him. This paper is the undertaker's receipt for my funeral.
"The rascals did not get either me or the cash they were after; but they taught me a valuable lesson: never to have my back turned again."
He stopped.
"You see," went on Bob in a tone that did not suggest argument, "there is a ranch over my way you happen to want—two of them, in fact. The last week the lessees have both been much annoyed; the one on the south one especially.
"Now, of course, we can kill Madrigal and any other Mexican that keeps up that annoyance. But instead, I suggest that you call them off. For the Chandlers have fully made up their minds not to sell, and so have I."
Bob rose. "If anything further happens down there, I'm afraid there'll be an accident on this side of the line. It was merely that you might be prepared in advance that I dropped in this morning to make you a present of this." He tossed the paper on Jenkins' desk and went out.
Reedy picked up the receipt. The undertaker, after Rogeen's recovery, had facetiously written on the back:
This receipt is still good for one first-class funeral—and it is negotiable.
Reedy felt all the sneer go out of his lips and a sort of coldness steal along his sweaty skin. Underneath this writing was another line:
Transferred for value received to Reedy Jenkins.BOB ROGEEN.
It was five minutes after Bob Rogeen had gone out of the door before Reedy Jenkins stirred in his chair. Then he gave his head a vicious jerk and swiped the angling wisp of hair back from his forehead.
"Oh, hell! He can't bluff me."
He sat gritting his teeth, remembering the insulting retorts he might have made, slapped his thigh a whack with his open hand in vexation that he had not made them; got up and walked the floor.
No, he was not afraid of Rogeen, not by a damned sight. Afraid of a twenty-dollar hardware clerk?Not much!He would show him he had struck the wrong town and the wrong man for his cheap bluffs. And yet Reedy kept remembering a certain expression in Rogeen's eye, a certain taut look in his muscles. Of course a man of Reedy's reputation did not want to be mixed up in any brawls. Whatever was done, should be done smoothly—and safely.
He telephoned for Madrigal, the Mexican Jew. Madrigal could manage it.
While waiting for his agent, Reedy lighted a cigar, but became so busily engaged with his thoughts that he forgot to puff until it went out. Jenkins was taking stock of the situation. He had boasted of his influence with the Mexican authorities; but like most boasters he was talking about the influence he was going to have rather than what he had. Just now he was not sure he had any pull across the line at all. Of course as a great ranch owner and a very rich man—as he was going to be inside of three years—he could have great influence. And yet he remembered that the present Mexican Governor of Baja California was an exceedingly competent man. He was shrewd and efficient, and deeply interested in the development of his province. Moreover, he was friendly to Americans, and seemed to have more than an ordinary sense of justice toward them.
Reedy shook his head. He did not believe he could have much chance with the Governor—not at present, anyway. But perhaps some minor official might help put over his schemes. Anyway, Madrigal would know.
The Mexican Jew came directly, dressed in light flannels, a flower in his buttonhole. Debonairly he lifted his panama and bowed with exaggerated politeness to Jenkins.
"What great good has Señor Reedy clabbering in his coco now?" He grinned impudently.
Jenkins frowned. His dignity was not to be so trifled with.
"Sit down," he ordered.
Reedy relighted his cigar, put his thumbs in his vest holes, and began slowly puffing smoke toward the ceiling. He liked to keep his subordinates waiting.
"Madrigal," he said, directly, "I want those two ranches—Chandler's and Rogeen's."
"Si, si." The Mexican nodded shrewdly. "And Señor Jenkins shall have them."
"We've got to get rid of Rogeen first. Then the other will be easy."
"Et es so, señor," Madrigal said, warmly. He abated Rogeen on his own account, for Señor Madrigal had formed a violent attachment for the Señorita Chandler. And the damned Americano with his fiddle was in the way.
"If," suggested Reedy, smoking slowly, "Rogeen should be induced to leave the country within three weeks—or in case he happened to some accident so he could not leave at all—we'd make four thousand out of his ranch. Half of that would be two thousand."
Madrigal's black eyes narrowed wickedly, and his thick lips rolled up under his long nose.
"Mexico, señor, is the land of accidents."
"All right, Madrigal," Reedy waved dismissal and turned to his desk and began to figure—or pretend to figure.
The Mexican turned in the door, looked back on the bulky form of Jenkins, started to speak, grinned wickedly, and went down the outside stairway.
On the evening of the third of August Bob came in from the fields and prepared his own supper. Since the arrest of his Chinamen a few weeks before Rogeen had not employed any other help. The cotton cultivation was over, and he and Noah could manage the irrigation. The hill billy had gone to town early in the afternoon, and would return directly to the Chandler ranch where he was still on guard at nights. Bob believed his warning to Jenkins had stopped all further molestation, but he was not willing to take any chances—at least not with Imogene Chandler.
Bob had been irrigating all day and was dead tired. After supper he sat in front of his shack as usual to cool a little before turning in. The day had been the hottest of the summer, and now at eight o'clock it was still much over a hundred.
In that heat there is little life astir even in the most luxuriant fields. It was still to-night—scarcely the croak of a frog or the note of a bird. There was no moon, but in the deep, vast, clear spaces of the sky the stars burned like torches held down from the heavens. A wind blew lightly, but hot off the fields. The weeds beside the ditches shook slitheringly, and the dry grass roof of the shack rustled.
To be the centre of stillness, to be alone in a vast space, either crushes one with loneliness or gives him an unbounded exhilaration. To-night Bob felt the latter sensation. It seemed instead of being a small, lost atom in a swirling world, he was a part of all this lambent starlight; this whispering air of the desert.
He breathed slowly and deeply of the dry, clean wind, rose, and stretched his tired muscles, and turned in. So accustomed had he become to the heat that scarcely had he stretched out on the cot before he was asleep. And Bob was a sound sleeper. The sides of the shack were open above a three-foot siding of boards, open save for a mosquito netting. An old screen door was set up at the front, but Bob had not even latched that. If one was in danger out here, he was simply in danger, that was all, for there was no way to hide from it.
A little after midnight two Mexicans crept along on all-fours between the cotton rows at the edge of Bob's field. At the end of the rows, fifty yards from the shack, they crouched on their haunches and listened. The wind shook the tall rank cotton and rustled the weeds along the ditches. But no other sound. Nothing was stirring anywhere.
Bending low and walking swiftly they slipped toward the back of the shack. Their eyes peered ahead and they slipped with their hearts in their throats, trusting the Americano was asleep.
He was. As they crouched low behind the shelter of the three-foot wall of boards they could hear his breathing. He was sound asleep.
Slowly, on hands and knees, they crawled around the west side toward the entrance. In the right hand of the one in front was the dull glint of a knife. The other held a revolver.
Cautiously the one ahead tried the screen door—pushing it open an inch or two. It was unlatched. Motioning for the other to stand by the door, he arose, pushed the door back with his left hand very slowly so as not to make a squeak. In the right he held the knife.
Bob stirred in his sleep and turned on the cot. The Mexican stood motionless, ready to spring either way if he awoke. But the steady breathing of a sound sleeper began again.
The Mexican let the door to softly and took one quick step toward the bed.
Then with a wild, blood-curdling yell he fell on the floor. Something from above had leaped on him, something that enveloped him, that grappled with him. He went down screaming and stabbing like a madman. His companion at the door fired one shot in the air, dropped his gun, and ran as if all the devils in hell were after him.
The commotion awoke Bob. Instantly he sat up in bed, and as he rose he reached for a gun with one hand and a flashlight with the other. In an instant the light was in the Mexican's face—and the gun also.
"Hold up your hands, Madrigal." Bob's tone brought swift obedience. Around the Mexican and on him were the ripped and torn fragments of a dummy man—made of a sack of oats, with flapping arms and a tangle of ropes. Bob had not felt sure but some attempt might be made on his life, and half in jest and half as a precaution, he and Noah had put this dummy overhead with a trip rope just inside the door. They knew the fright of something unexpected falling on an intruder would be more effective than a machine gun.
"Get up," Bob ordered, and the shaken Madrigal staggered to his feet, with his hands held stiffly straight up. "March out." Rogeen's decision had come quickly. He followed with the gun in close proximity to the Mexican's back.
Madrigal was ordered to pick up a hoe and a shovel, and then was marched along the water ditch toward the back of the field.
"Here." Bob ordered a stop. They were half a mile from the road, at the edge of the desert. The Mexican had recovered enough from his first fright to feel the cold clutch of another, surer danger. "Dig," ordered Bob. And the Mexican obeyed. "About two feet that way." Bob sat down on the bank of the water ditch and kept the digger covered. "Make it seven feet long," he ordered, coldly.
Slowly Madrigal dug and shovelled, and slowly but surely as the thing took shape, he saw what it was—a grave. His grave!
He glared wildly about as he paused for a breath.
"Hurry," came the insistent command.
Another shovelful, and he glanced up at the light. But the muzzle of the gun was level with the light! A wrong move and he knew the thing would be over even before the grave was done.
For an hour he worked. Off there at the edge of the desert, this grave levelled as a part of the cotton field—and no one would ever find it. His very bones seemed to sweat with horror. Was the American going to bury him alive? Or would he shoot him first?
All the stealth and cruelty he had ever felt toward others now turned in on himself, and a horror that filled him with blind, wild terror of that hollow grave shook him until he could no longer dig. He stood there in front of the flashlight blanched and shaking.
"That will do," said Rogeen. "Madrigal," he put into that word all the still terror of a cool courage, "that is your grave."
For a full moment he paused. "You will stay out of it just as long as you stay off my land—out of reach of my gun. Don't ever even pass the road by my place.
"Your boss has had his warning. This is yours. That grave will stay open, day and night, waiting for you.
"Good-night, Señor Madrigal. Go fast and don't look back."
The last injunction was entirely superfluous.
After the night had swallowed up the fleeing figure Bob rolled on the bank and laughed until his ribs ached.
"No more oat sacks for Señor Madrigal! I wonder who the other one was—and what became of him?"
It was October. The bolls had opened beautifully. The cotton was ready to pick. As Bob and Noah walked down the rows the stalks came up to their shoulders. It was the finest crop of cotton either of them had ever seen.
"As dad used to say," remarked Noah Ezekiel, "the fields are white for the harvest, but where are the reapers?" There was no one in the fields at work.
Bob shook his head gloomily. "I have no money for the pickers. I owe you, Noah, for the last two months."
"Yes, I remember it," said the hill billy, plucking an extra large boll of lint. "I've tried to forget it, but somehow those things sort of stick in a fellow's mind."
In August the great war had broke in Europe.
Ships were rushing with war supplies, blockades declared, factories shut down. The American stock exchanges had closed to save a panic. Buying and selling almost ceased. Money scuttled to the cover of safety vaults, and the price of cotton had dropped and dropped until finally it ceased to sell at all.
"It is going to bankrupt almost every grower in the valley," remarked Bob. "I'm certainly sorry for the Chandlers. They're up against it hard."
"As the poet says," Noah Ezekiel drew down the corners of his mouth, pulling a long face, "ain't life real?"
Bob laughed in spite of troubles. "Noah, I believe you'd joke at your own funeral."
"Why shouldn't I?" said Noah. "You joked with your undertaker's receipt." He grinned at the recollection of that event. "You sure broke that yellow dog Jenkins from suckin' eggs—temporarily."
"But ain't he stuck with his leases though. If I had as much money as he owes, I could fix these gamblers at the Red Owl so they wouldn't have to work any for the rest of their natural lives."
"Noah," Bob turned to his faithful foreman, "I want you to stick until we put this thing through. I'll see you don't lose a dollar."
"Don't you worry about me sticking," said Noah Ezekiel. "I never quit a man as long as he owes me anything."
The loyalty of the hill billy touched Rogeen, but as is the way of men, he covered it up with a brusque tone.
"You get the sacks ready. I'm going in to town and raise the money somehow to pick this cotton. I'll pick it if I never get a dollar out of it—can't bear to see a crop like that go to waste."
The cotton-gin people were in a desperate panic, but Bob went after them hard:
"Now see here, that war in Europe is not going to end the world; and as long as the world stands there will be a demand for cotton. This flurry will pass, and there's sure to be a big jump in the market for cotton seed. The war will increase the demand for oils of all kinds.
"That cotton has got to be picked, and you'll have to furnish the money. When it is ginned you can certainly borrow five cents a pound on it. That will pay for the water and the lease, the picking and the ginning—and the duty, too.
"Now you get the money for me to pick my field and Chandler's field. They owe only $600 on the crop; so you'll be even safer there than with me. We'll leave the cotton with you as security. And then after you have borrowed all you can on it, I'll give you my personal note for all the balance I owe, and see you get every dollar of it, if I have to work it out during the next three years at twenty dollars a week."
It was that promise that turned the scales. No man of discernment could look at Rogeen and doubt either his pluck or his honesty.
Two days later forty Chinamen, more eager for jobs now than ever, were picking cotton at the Chandler and Rogeen ranches—twenty at each place.
Tom Barton went up the outside stairway thumping each iron step viciously. Six months of gloomy forebodings had terminated even more disastrously than he had feared. He found Reedy Jenkins rumpled and unshaven, laboriously figuring at his desk.
Reedy looked up with a sly-dog sort of smile. There were little rims of red round his eyes, but it was plain he had something new to spring on his creditor.
"I'm not figuring debts"—Jenkins reached in the drawer and got out a cigar and lighted it—"but profits."
"Yes," said Barton, murderously, "that is what you are always figuring on. Debts don't mean anything to you, because you aren't worth a damn. But debts count with me. You owe me $40,000 on this bright idea of yours, and your leases aren't worth a tadpole in Tahoe."
"Easy, easy!" Reedy waved his hand as though getting ready to make a speech. "Perhaps I have temporarily lost my credit; but with a requisite amount of cash, a man can always get it back—or do without it.
"I admit this damn war has swamped me. I admit on the face of the returns I am snowed under—bankrupt to the tune of over $200,000. But nevertheless and notwithstanding I am going to get away with some coin."
"Well, I hope you don't get away with mine," growled Barton.
A laundry driver entered the door with a bill in his hand. Reedy grew a little redder and waved at the man angrily.
"Don't bother me with that now; don't you see I'm busy?"
"So am I," said the driver, aggressively, "and this is the third call."
"Leave it," said Jenkins, angrily, "and I'll have my secretary send you a check for it."
The driver threw it on Reedy's desk and left sullenly. Barton caught the figures on the unpaid bill—seventy-eight cents.
"I admit," Barton spoke sarcastically as he started for the door, "that your credit is gone. But if you don't dig up that forty thousand, you'll be as sorry you ever borrowed it as I am that I lent it."
The last of November Bob went down to the Chandler ranch to give an account of the cotton picking.
"You have 150 bales at the compress. I put up the compress receipts for the debts," said Bob to Imogene. "There is $3,123 against your cotton. I could not borrow another dollar on it."
"You have done so much for us already," the girl said, feelingly. "And we'll get along some way. If cotton would only begin to sell, we would have a little fortune."
"I have 180 bales," said Bob, "but I owe something over $4,000 on it. I am going up to Calexico and get a job until spring." He hesitated a moment, looking at the girl thoughtfully. The summer and hard work and constant worry had left her thin and with a look of anxiety in her eyes.
"Hadn't you also better move to town?"
She laughed at that. "Why, dear sir, what do you suppose we should live on in town? Out here we have no rent and can at least raise some vegetables. No, we'll stick it out until we see whether this war is merely a flurry or a deluge."
For a week Bob hunted a job in Calexico. His need for funds was acute. He had managed to get enough on his cotton to pay all his labour bills but had not kept a dollar for himself.
Tuesday evening he had gone up to his room at the hotel, a court room with one window and broken plaster and a chipped water pitcher. There was no job in sight. Everything was at a standstill, and the cotton market looked absolutely hopeless. His note for the $4,000 fell due January first. If he could not sell the cotton by that time, his creditors would take it over; and besides, he was held for any amount of the debt above what the cotton would bring at a forced sale.
He was bluer than he had been since he lost that first good job nine years ago. He went to the battered old trunk, opened the lid, and lifted the fiddle; stood with it in his hands a moment, put it against his shoulder and raised the bow. He was thinking of her, the girl left alone down there on the ranch—still fighting it out with the desert, the Mexicans, and the trailing calamities of this World War. He dropped the bow, he could not play. And just as he was returning the fiddle to his trunk there was a knock followed by the opening of the door. A chambermaid's head pushed in.
"There's a man down in the office wants to see you," announced the girl.
"Who is it?" asked Bob.
"Dunno—old fellow with eyebrows like a hair brush—and a long linen duster."
"I'll be right down," said Bob.