CHAPTER XI
One of the hardest layers of civilization for a woman to throw off isthe cook stove. She can tear up her fashion plates, dodge women'sclubs, drop her books, forsake cosmetics and teas, and yet be fairlyhappy. But to the last extremity she clings to her cook stove.
Imogene Chandler had her stove out in the open at a safe distance fromthe inflammable weed roof of the "house." The three joints ofstovepipe were held up by being wired to two posts driven in the groundbeside it.
The girl alternately stuffed light, dry sticks into the stove box, andthen lifted the lid of a boiling kettle to jab a fork into the potatoesto see if they were done. The Chandler larder was reduced to the pointwhere Imogene in her cooking had to substitute things that would do forthings that tasted good.
Chandler, in from the field, filled a tin washbasin at the tank, set iton a cracker box, and proceeded to clean up for supper. He rolled hissleeves up far above his elbows and scrubbed all the visible parts ofhis body from the top of his bald head to the shoulder blade under theloose collar of his open-necked shirt. About the only two habits fromhis old life that clung to the ex-professor were his use of big wordsand soap.
Chandler sat down at the little board table, also out in the open. Itwas after sundown and the heat was beginning to abate. As Imogenepoured coffee into the pint tin cup beside his plate she looked down athim with protective admiration.
"Dad, I'm proud of you. You've got a tan that would be the envy of anAfrican explorer; and you are building up a muscle, too; you are almostas good a man in the field as a Chinese coolie--really better than aMexican."
"It has been my observation," said the ex-professor, tackling theboiled potatoes with a visible appetite, "that when a man quits thescholarly pursuits he instinctively becomes an agriculturist. Businessis anathema to me; but I must confess that it gives me pleasure towatch the germination of the seed, and to behold the flower andfruitage of the soil."
Imogene laughed. "It is the fruitage that I'm fond of--especially whenit is a bale to the acre. And it is going to make that this year ormore; I never saw a finer field of cotton."
"It is doing very well," Chandler admitted with pride. "Yet, ah,perhaps there is one field better, certainly as good, and that is theAmerican's north of here; the person you referred to as a fiddler."
"Daddy," and under the tone of raillery was a trace of wistfulness,"we've lived like Guinea Negroes here for three years, and yet Ibelieve you like it. I don't believe you'd go back right now asprofessor of Sanskrit at Zion College."
The little professor did not reply, but remarked as he held out the cupfor another pint of coffee:
"I notice I sleep quite soundly out here, even when the weather isexcessively hot."
The girl smiled and felt fully justified in the change she had forcedin his way of living.
"I think," remarked Chandler, reflectively, "at the end of the monthI'll let Chang Lee go. I think I can some way manage the rest of theseason alone."
"Perhaps," assented Imogene, soberly, as she began to pick up theknives and forks and plates. She had not told him that when ChangLee's wages for June were paid it would leave them less than twentydollars to get through the summer on. "I've been learning to irrigatethe cotton rows and I can help," she said. "It will be a lot of fun."
The ex-professor was vaguely troubled. He knew in a remote sort of waythat their finances were at a low ebb. Imogene always attended to thebusiness.
"Do you suppose, daughter," he asked, troubled, "that it is practicalfor us to continue in our present environment for another season?"
"Surest thing, you know," she laughed reassuringly. "Run along now tobed; you are tired." He sighed with a delicious sense of relief andsleepiness, and went.
But Imogene was not tired enough either to sit still or to sleep. Shegot up and walked restlessly round the camp. Known problems andunknown longings were stirring uneasily in her consciousness.
She stood at the edge of the field where the long rows of cottonplants, freshly watered, grew rank and green in the first intense heatof summer. There was a full moon to-night--a hazy, sleepy full moonwith dust blown across its face creeping up over the eastern desert.
Just a little while ago and it was all desert. Two years ago when theyfirst came this cotton field was uneven heaps of blown sand, desertcactus, and mesquite--barren and forbidding as a nightmare of thirstand want. It had taken a year's work and nearly all their meagrecapital to level it and dig the water ditches. And the next year--thatwas last year--the crop was light and the price low. They had barelypaid their debts and saved a few hundred for their next crop. Now thatwas gone, and with it six hundred, the last dollar she could borrow atthe bank. Just how they were going to manage the rest of the summershe did not know. And worst of all were these vague but persistentrumours and warnings that the ranchers were somehow to be robbed oftheir crops.
She turned and walked back into the yard of the little shack and stoodbareheaded looking at the moon, the desert wind in her face. Anothersummer of heat was coming swiftly now. She had lived through twoseasons of that terrific heat when the sun blazed all day, day afterday, and the thermometer climbed and climbed until it touched the 130mark. And all these two years had been spent here at this shack, withits dirt yard and isolation.
The desert had bit deeply into her consciousness. Even the heat, thewind-driven sand, the stillness, the aloneness of it had entered intoher soul with a sort of fascination.
"I'm not sorry," she shut her hands hard and pressed her lips closetogether, "even if we do lose--but we must not lose! We can't go on inpoverty, either here or over there. We must not lose--we must not!"
She turned her head sharply; something toward the road had moved; somefigure had appeared a moment and then disappeared. A fear that wasnever wholly absent made her move toward the door of her own shack. Arevolver hung on a nail there.
And then out on the night stole the singing, quivering note of aviolin. Instantly the fear was gone, the tension past, and the tearsfor the first time in all the struggle slipped down her cheeks. Sheknew now that for weeks she had been hoping he would come again.
When the violin cords ceased to sing, Imogene clapped her hands warmly,and the fiddler rose from beside a mesquite bush and came toward her.
"I'm glad you brought it this time," she said as he approached and satdown on a box a few feet away. "That was the best music I have heardfor years."
"The best?" he questioned.
She caught the meaning in his emphasis and smiled to herself as sheanswered: "The best violin music." Although her face was in theshadow, the moonlight was on her hair and shoulders. Something in herfigure affected him as it had that night when she stood in thedoorway--some heroic endurance, some fighting courage that held iterect, and yet it was touched by a yearning as restless and unsatisfiedas the desert wind. Bob knew her father was incapable of grapplingalone with the problems of life. This project had all been hers; itwas her will, her brain, her courage that had wrought the change on theface of this spot of desert. Yet how softly girlish as she sat therein the moonlight; and how alone in the heart of this sleeping desert inan alien country. He wished she had not qualified that praise of hisplaying. Bob knew very little about women.
"How do you like being a cotton planter?" She was first to break thesilence.
"Oh, very well." He turned his eyes from her for the first time,looked down at his fiddle, and idly picked at one of the strings. "Butof course I can't truthfully say I love manual labour. I can do itwhen there is something in it; but I much prefer a hammock and a shadeand a little nigger to fan me and bring me tall glasses full of iceddrinks."
She laughed, for she knew already he had the reputation of being one ofthe best workers in the valley.
"But this country has me," he added. "It fascinates me. When I make afortune over here I'm going across on the American side and buy a bigranch.
"You know"--he continued
softly to strum on the violin strings--"thisImperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some landof fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneaththe sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of thedesert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the ColoradoRiver, and then it swiftly put forth such luxuriant wealth of food andclothes and fruit and flowers that its story sounds like the dementeddreams of a bankrupt land promoter."
"I am glad you like it," she said, "and I hope you'll get your share ofthe fabled wealth that it is supposed to grow--and, oh, yes, by theway, do you happen to need another Chinaman?"
"No, I've got more than I can pay now."
"We are going to let Chang Lee go the last of the month. He's a goodChinaman, and I wanted him to have a job."
"Why let him go?"
"We won't need him."
"Won't need him!" Bob exclaimed. "With a hundred and sixty acres ofcotton to irrigate and keep chopped out?"
"I can do a lot of the irrigating"--the girl spoke a littleevasively--"and daddy can manage the rest."
He knew this was another case of exhausted funds.
"Can't you borrow any more?"
She laughed a frank confession.
"You guessed it. We haven't money to pay him. I've borrowed sixhundred on the crop, and can't get another dollar."
He sat silent for several minutes looking off toward the cotton fieldsthat would cry for water to-morrow in their fight against the eternaldesert that brooded over this valley, thinking of her pluck. It madehim ashamed of any wavering thought that ever scouted through his ownmind.
He stood up. "And are you going to see it through?"
Alone beside the field as the moon rose she had wavered in doubt; butthe answer came now with perfect assurance.
"Most surely."
"So am I," he said. "Good-night."
But before he turned she put out her hand to touch his violin--herfingers touched his hand instead.
"Please--just once more," she asked.
He laughed whimsically as he sat down on the box and drew the bow.
"I'm proud of the human race," he said, "that fights for bread andstill looks at the stars."
He began to play: he did not know what. It might have been somethinghe had heard; but anyway to-night it was his and hers, the song of therose that fought the desert all day for its life and then blossomedwith fragrance in the night.
At the sound of the violin a man sitting on the edge of the canal bythe cottonwood trees stirred sharply. There was a guitar across hisknee. He had been waiting for the sound of voices to cease; and nowthe accursed fiddle was playing again. He spat vindictively into thestream.
"Damn the Americano!"