“No.  I have been within a couple of miles of it.  I saw it one day from Blue Ridge.”

“Well, then you know something of it.  It is in a valley ten miles long which has always been one of the richest valleys I ever saw; sheltered by the mountains, watered by the springs which create the source of Indian Creek.  The climate is like that of the California foothills.  And the soil is fertile—­anything will grow there.  I saw that twenty years ago.  I knew that the place was made for a town-site—­and I made the town.  There are a lot of smaller valleys about it; there are orchards there now and vineyards.  There are mines, paying mines.  There is no end to the herds of cattle running through the valleys and at the bases of the hills.  The town has a railroad, a narrow-gage from Bolton on the Pacific Central & Western.  Building such a town, giving it railroad connection, electric lights, and all the things which go with unlimited water-power was simple enough.”

Conniston sat back and watched the man who spoke of city building as of the making of a summer home.  Mr. Crawford was leaning forward in his chair, his cigar between his fingers, his eyes very steady upon Conniston’s.

“But now,” he went on, his eyes clear, but his brows drawn over them, “we come to something different—­entirely different.  Out yonder in the lap of the desert is what they call Rattlesnake Valley.  It is no valley at all, merely a great depression, a sort of natural sink.  It is twenty miles wide, forty miles long.  I have found no drop of water within thirty miles of it, no single spring, no creek.  It is nothing but sand—­dry, barren, unfertile sand—­five hundred square miles of it, to look at it.  And right there, in the heart of that sink, I am going to build a town.”

He spoke quietly, his voice low, no hint of boastfulness in his tone, no hint of doubt.  He spoke as a man who has studied his ground and who knows both the difficulties which lie ahead of him and the possibilities.  Conniston, seeing only the impossibility, the madness of such a project, looked questioningly from him to the girl.  Argyl’s face was flushed, her eyes were very bright with an intense eager interest.

“It sounds so big,” Conniston hesitated, his gaze coming back to the older man’s face.  “So daring, so impossible!”

“It is big!  Bigger than I have even hinted at.  It is daring.  Of course, I take a chance of sinking everything I have out there and finding only failure in the end.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and Conniston noticed for the first time how big and broad they were.

“But it is not impossible.  It is merely the repetition of such work as has been done successfully in the Imperial Valley.  The stuff which looks to be sand—­barren, unfertile sand—­is the richest soil in the world.  Put water on it and you can raise anything.  Reclamation work is a fairly new thing with us, Conniston.  Men have been content heretofore to squat in the green valleys