Until she introduced herself to Willard Holmes, Barbara
had never known eastern people. Tourists she
had seen and, at rare intervals, met in a casual way.
But they had always examined her with such frankly
curious eyes that she had felt like some strange animal
on exhibition and had repaid their interest with all
the indifference she could command. Occasionally
also she had been introduced to eastern business men,
whom she chanced upon talking with her father in the
bank, but they had turned quickly away to the matters
of their world after the usual polite nothings demanded
by the introduction. The home-land and life of
Willard Holmes were as foreign to her as her land
and life were strange to him.
So it happened in this instance also that in the education
of the eastern engineer the teacher learned quite
as much as the pupil.
The traits that stood out so prominently in the western
men whom Barbara knew and so much admired were, in
Willard Holmes, buried deeply under the habits and
customs of the life and thought of the world to which
he belonged—buried so deeply that the man
himself scarcely realized that they were there and
so was led to wonder at himself when his blood tingled
with some strong presentation of this western girl’s
views.
But Barbara knew. Beneath the conventionalities
of his class the girl felt the man a powerful character,
with all the latent strength of his nation-building
ancestors. She wanted him—as she put
it to herself—to wake up. Would he?
Would he learn the language of her Desert? She
believed that he would, even as she believed in the
reclamation of The King’s Basin lands.
And she was glad—glad that the Seer and
Abe and Tex and Pat and her father—the
men who had brought her out of the Desert—were
going now back into that land of death to save that
land itself from itself. And—she whispered
it softly under the stars—she was glad—
glad that Willard Holmes had come to go with them—to
learn the language of her land.
WHY WILLARD HOLMES STAYED.
Slowly, day by day, the surveying party under the
Seer pushed deeper and deeper into the awful desolation
of The King’s Basin Desert. They were the
advance force of a mighty army ordered ahead by Good
Business—the master passion of the race.
Their duty was to learn the strength of the enemy,
to measure its resources, to spy out its weaknesses
and to gather data upon which a campaign would be
planned.
Under the Seer the expedition was divided into several
smaller parties, each of which was assigned to certain
defined districts. Here and there, at seemingly
careless intervals in the wide expanse, the white
tents of the division camps shone through the many
colored veils of the desert. Tall, thin columns
of dust lifted into the sky from the water wagons
that crawled ceaselessly from water hole to camp and
from camp to water hole—hung in long clouds
above the supply train laboring heavily across the
dun plain to and from Rubio City—or rose
in quick puffs and twisting spirals from the feet of
some saddle horse bearing a messenger from the Chief
to some distant lieutenant.
