“No, sir; I have said exactly what I mean.”
“Good-by, sir.”
“Good-by.”
When the office door had closed behind the engineer,
James Greenfield stood motionless in the center of
the room. Once he took a step toward the door
but checked himself. Then turning slowly, wearily,
he sank into the chair before his desk. For a
few moments he fumbled aimlessly over the papers and
documents, then from his pocket took a flat leather
case and, opening it, held in his hand a portrait
of the engineer’s mother. As he looked at
the face of the woman who had never ceased to hold
the first place in his heart, his lips framed words
he could not speak aloud.
Slowly his form drooped, his head bowed. Then,
with the picture held close, he buried his face in
his arms among the business papers on his desk.
OUT OF THE HOLLOW OF GOD’S HAND.
The first train from Republic to Barba over the new
King’s Basin Central arrived in the town by
the old Dry River Crossing shortly after noon.
Later in the day Jefferson Worth with his daughter,
his superintendent and the Seer went to the power
plant on the bank of Dry River.
When the plant was built it was placed as low in the
old wash as the depth of the ancient channel would
permit, so that the greatest possible fall from the
Company canal above might be secured. As Jefferson
Worth and his companions stood now on the bank of the
river they saw the waste-way from the turbine wheel
that ran the generators nearly thirty feet above the
bottom of the channel. The flood that had cut
the deep canyons through the heart of the Basin, destroying
Kingston on its course, had worked on a smaller scale
in the old Dry River wash, cutting a narrow gorge
nearly fifty feet deep from its outlet at the new
sea past the power plant at Barba and nearly to the
spillway of the main canal.
Standing almost on the very spot where they had found
the baby girl years before, the Seer asked Barbara’s
father: “Jeff, does your contract with
The King’s Basin Land and Irrigation Company
call for a certain amount of water, or for water to
develop a certain amount of power?”
Jefferson Worth answered in his careful, exact voice:
“The first contract called for water to develop
a certain amount of power. This new one is a
contract for three hundred inches of water. There’s
nothing in it about the amount of power, but it gives
me the sole rights to all the power privileges on
the Company property. You see, when Greenfield
tried to change the line of their canal so as to cut
me out, Abe and I had begun to figure that some day
the water from the spillway might cut down the channel
and give us a little more drop. But we never
counted on this, of course. I simply figured that
I might just as well make the new contract safe.”
The Seer smiled. “You made it safe all
right, Jeff. Do you know what this cut means
to you?”
