"I took a vacation when I bought," he explained, "and planted the trees. Then I went back to work an' stayed with it till the place was cleared. Now I 'm here for keeps, an' soon as the house is finished I'll send for the wife. She's not very well, and it will do her good. We've been planning and working for years to get away from- the city." He stopped in order to give a happy sigh.
"And now we're free."
The water in the trough was warm from the sun.
"Hold on," the man said. "Don't let them drink that. I'll give it to them cool."
Stepping into a small shed, he turned an electric switch, and a motor the size of a fruit box hummed into action. A five-inch stream of sparkling water splashed into the shallow main ditch of his irrigation system and flowed away across the orchard through many laterals.
"Isn' tit beautiful, eh?--beautiful! beautiful!" the man chanted in an ecstasy. "It's bud and fruit. It's blood and life. Look at it! It makes a gold mine laughable, and a saloon a nightmare. I know. I . . . I used to be a barkeeper. In fact, I've been a barkeeper most of my life. That's how I paid for this place. And I've hated the business all the time. I was a farm boy, and all my life I've been wanting to get back to it. And here I am at last."
He wiped his glasses the better to behold his beloved water, then seized a hoe and strode down the main ditch to open more laterals.
"He's the funniest barkeeper I ever seen," Billy commented. "I took him for a business man of some sort. Must a-ben in some kind of a quiet hotel."
"Don't drive on right away," Saxon requested. "I want to talk with him."
He came back, polishing his glasses, his face beaming, watching the water as if fascinated by it. It required no more exertion on Saxon's part to start him than had been required on his part to start the motor.
"The pioneers settled all this in the early fifties," he said.
"The Mexicans never got this far, so it was government land.
Everybody got a hundred and sixty acres. And such acres! The stories they tell about how much wheat they got to the acre are almost unbelievable. Then several things happened. The sharpest and steadiest of the pioneers held what they had and added to it from the other fellows. It takes a great many quarter sections to make a bonanza farm. It wasn't long before it was 'most all bonanza farms."
"They were the successful gamblers," Saxon put in, remembering Mark Hall's words.
The man nodded appreciatively and continued.
"The old folks schemed and gathered and added the land into the big holdings, and built the great barns and mansions, and planted the house orchards and flower gardens. The young folks were spoiled by so much wealth and went away to the cities to spend it. And old folks and young united in one thing: in impoverishing the soil. Year after year they scratched it and took out bonanza crops. They put nothing back. All they left was plow-sole and exhausted land. Why, there's big sections they exhausted and left almost desert.
"The bonanza farmers are all gone now, thank the Lord, and here's where we small farmers come into our own. It won't be many years before the whole valley will be farmed in patches like mine. Look at what we're doing! Worked-out land that had ceased to grow wheat, and we turn the water on, treat the soil decently, and see our orchards!
"We've got the water--from the mountains, and from under the ground. I was reading an account the other day. All life depends on food. All food depends on water. It takes a thousand pounds of water to produce one pound of food; ten thousand pounds to produce one pound of meat. How much water do you drink in a year?
About a ton. But you eat about two hundred pounds of vegetables and two hundred pounds of meat a year--which means you consume one hundred tons of water in the vegetables and one thousand tons in the meat--which means that it takes eleven hundred and one tons of water each year to keep a small woman like you going."
"Gee!" was all Billy could say.
"You see how population depends upon water," the ax-barkeeper went on. "Well, we've got the water, immense subterranean supplies, and in not many years this valley will be populated as thick as Belgium."
Fascinated by the five-inch stream, sluiced out of the earth and back to the earth by the droning motor, he forgot his discourse and stood and gazed, rapt and unheeding, while his visitors drove on.
"An' him a drink-slinger!" Billy marveled. "He can sure sling the temperance dope if anybody should ask you."
"It's lovely to think about--all that water, and all the happy people that will come here to live--"
"But it ain't the valley of the moon!" Billy laughed.
"No," she responded. "They don't have to irrigate in the valley of the moon, unless for alfalfa and such crops. What we want is the water bubbling naturally from the ground, and crossing the farm in little brooks, and on the boundary a fine big creek--"
"With trout in it!" Billy took her up. "An' willows and trees of all kinds growing along the edges, and here a riffle where you can flip out trout, and there a deep pool where you can swim and high-dive. An' kingfishers, an' rabbits comin' down to drink, an', maybe, a deer."
"And meadowlarks in the pasture," Saxon added. "And mourning doves in the trees. We must have mourning doves--and the big, gray tree-squirrels."
"Gee!--that valley of the moon's goin' to be some valley," Billy meditated, flicking a fly away with his whip from Hattie's side.
"Think we'll ever find it?"
Saxon nodded her head with great certitude.
"Just as the Jews found the promised land, and the Mormons Utah, and the Pioneers California. You remember the last advice we got when we left Oakland' ''Tis them that looks that finds.'"
