"Let us sit down here." She led the way to a homemade bench in the open. "Daddy has had a hard day and has gone to bed, and I don't want to disturb him. He's very tired and has been upset over this lease business."

That was an opening, but before he could take advantage of it she abruptly changed the conversation:

"But you haven't told me why you didn't bring your fiddle this time.

I'd love to hear it on a night like this." Dusk was coming swiftly and the stars had begun to glimmer.

"Oh, I don't carry it round as a business," he answered. "Fact is, until the other night I had not played it but twice in eight years."

"Why?" She turned to him with curious interest.

"It hasn't usually brought me good luck."

"What happened the other two times?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jenkins and Lolita awed by Percy's fiddling.]

He looked off at the very bright star in the west and smiled with whimsical ruefulness. "I love music--that is, what I call music. When I was in the Ozarks I fiddled a lot, but discovered it did not bring me what I wanted, so I went to work. I got a job in a bank at Oakville; was to begin work Monday. I was powerful proud of that job, and had got a new suit of clothes and went to town Sat.u.r.day. That night there was a dance, and they asked me to play for it." He stopped to chuckle, but still a little regretfully. "My playing certainly made a hit.

Sunday morning a preacher lambasted the dance, and called me the special messenger of the devil. My job was with a pillar of his church. I didn't go to work Monday morning. It's a queer world; that preacher was the father of Noah Ezekiel Foster, who is now working for Benson."

She was looking out at the west, smiling; the desert wind pushed the hair back from her forehead. "And the other time you played?"

"That was up at Blindon, Colorado." He showed some reluctance to go ahead.

"Yes?"

"An old doctor and his daughter came to the camp to invest. I overheard them in the next room at the boarding house, and knew a gang of sharks was selling them a fake mine. I tried to attract their attention through the part.i.tion by playing a fool popular song--'If you tell him yes; you are sure to cry, by and by.'"

"Did you make them understand?" She had locked her hands round her knees and leaned interestedly toward him.

"Yes--and also the gang. The camp made up money to pay the undertaker to bury me next day. I still have the receipt."

"You have had a lot of experience," she said with a touch of envy.

"More than the wisdom I have gathered justifies, I fear," he replied.

"Experiences are interesting," she observed. "I haven't had many, but I'm beginning. Daddy was professor of Sanskrit in a little one-horse denominational college back in the hog-feeding belt of the Middle West.

Heavens!" she spoke with sudden fierceness, "can you imagine anything more useless than teaching Sanskrit? His salary was two hundred dollars a year less than the janitor's. I hated being poor; and I hated worse the dry rot of that little faculty circle. The deadly seriousness of their piffling, pedantic talk about fine-spun scholastic points that were not interesting nor useful a thousand years ago, and much less now that they are absolutely dead. I hated being prim and pretentious. I could not stand it any longer, and made Daddy resign and go somewhere to plant something. We came out here and I thought I saw a fortune in cotton.

"Daddy's worked like a galley slave getting this field in; he's done the work of two men. With one Chinaman's help part of the time he's got in a hundred and sixty acres of cotton. We've put through two hot summers here; and spent every dollar we got for our household goods and his life insurance. And now"--she was frowning in the dark--"we are warned to get out."

"Who warned you?" Bob asked quickly.

"A Mexican named Madrigal. He has been right friendly to us; and warned us last week that the Mexican Government is going to raise the duty on cotton so high this fall that it will take all the profit. He advises us to sell our lease for anything we can get."

"Have you had an offer?"

"Yes," she shrugged in the dusk and spoke with bitter weariness, "a sort of an offer. Mr. Jenkins offered us $500. Daddy wanted to take it, but I objected. I guess, though, it is better than nothing."

Bob stood up, his muscles fairly knotted. He understood in a flash why the Mexican Jew was going to Jenkins' office. They were stampeding the small ranchers out of the country, and virtually stealing their leases.

The stars ran together in an angry blur. He felt a swelling of the throat. It was lucky he was miles away from Reedy Jenkins.

"Don't take it!" he said with vehemence.

Reedy Jenkins had just opened his office next morning and sat down at the desk to read his mail when Bob Rogeen walked in. Reedy looked up from a letter and asked greedily:

"Did you get it?"

"No." There was something ominous in Rogeen's tone.

"Couldn't you persuade them to sell?" Jenkins was openly vexed.

"I persuaded them not to." Bob's hands opened and shut as though they would like to get hold of something. "I don't care for this job. I'm done."

"What's the idea?" There was a little sneer in Jenkins' tone.

"Decided you would go back to the old job selling pots and pans?"

"No," and Bob's brown eyes, almost black now, looked straight into Reedy's flushed, insolent face, "I'm going across the line to _raise cotton_."

Reedy's wide mouth opened in a contemptuous sneer.

"It's rather hot over there for rabbits."

"Yes," Bob's lips closed warningly, "and it may become oppressive for wolves."

Their eyes met defiantly for a moment, and each knew the other understood--and it meant a fight.

CHAPTER V

Bob had never known a resolution before. He thought he had, but he knew now that all the rest compared to what he felt as he left Reedy Jenkins' office were as dead cornstalks to iron rods.

One night nearly nine years ago, when returning through the hills with his fiddle under his arm, he had stopped at the door of his cabin and looked up at the stars. The boisterous fun of an hour ago had all faded out, leaving him dissatisfied and lonesome. He was shabbily dressed, not a dollar in his pocket--not a thing in the world his own but that fiddle--and he knew he was no genius with that. He was not getting on in the world; he was not making anything of himself. It was then that the first big resolution came to him: He would quit this fooling and go to work; he would win in this game of life. Since then in the main he had stuck to that resolution. He had not knowingly pa.s.sed any opportunity by; certainly he had dodged nothing because it was hard. He had won a little here, and lost there, always hoping, always tackling the new job with new pluck. Yet these efforts had been simple; somebody had offered him a job and he tried to make good at it--and usually had. But to win now, and win big as he was determined to do, he must have a job of his own; and he would have to create that job, organize it, equip it.

"What I'll make it with--or just how--I don't know. But by all the G.o.ds of the desert I'm going to win right here--in spite of the thermometer, the devil, and Reedy Jenkins."

To raise cotton one must have a lease, tools, teams, provisions--all of which costs money; and he had just $167.35. But if that girl and her Sanskrit father could get in a cotton crop, he could. It was not too late. Cotton might be planted in the Imperial Valley even up to the last of May. He would get a field already prepared if he could; if not, then he would prepare it.

And a man with a good lease and a good reputation could usually borrow some money on which to raise a crop. Bob's mind again came back to the Red b.u.t.te Ranch. It was so big that it almost swamped his imagination, but if he was going to do big things he must think big. If he could possibly sublease that ranch from Benson. But it would take $100,000 to finance a five-thousand-acre cotton crop. Then he thought of Jim Crill, the old man of the Texas oil fields who was looking for investments.

It was daring enough to seem almost fantastic, but Bob quickened his step and turned toward the depot. He could yet catch the morning train for Los Angeles.

But he pa.s.sed Benson on the way. The same morning Bob called at the Los Angeles office Benson went to Reedy Jenkins in Calexico.

The Red b.u.t.te lease had three years to run. Benson began by offering the lease and all the equipment for $40,000. He had spent more than $90,000 on it.