PRELUDE

Eight hundred and fifty miles of winding coast line bend in and out. So far as the eye can reach over the wrinkling sheet of the Pacific, to where its giant swells beat against bare, brown cliffs and break in smothers of hissing foam, not a sail is seen, not a sign of life, save flocks of white-winged gulls and sea-mews, or herds of barking seals that swarm on rocky islets. Mountains spring from the sea and climb, mount on mount, three miles into the air, or sloping sea-washed sands stretch dry and barren and forbidding, to rise at length in verdure-clad hills and snow-capped mountains. In the mountains are savage beasts and more savage men. On the plains a few straggling herds of cattle, with uncouth vaqueros, cluster around a seeping spring of bitter water. Here and there white-washed adobe mission houses, all but hidden in a clamber of vines and trees, mark a feeble stream that trickles from the distant mountains. Olive-skinned sigñors and olive-skinned sigñoritas round out the circle of their lives and there lie down and die, unknowing and unknown; they and their fellows, undreamed of, the land of their abode a hazy myth.

As by the wave of a magic wand, all is changed. The ocean now is dotted with sails from the uttermost parts of the earth. They choke the Golden Gate with their numbers. From their crowded decks, swarms of men, ministers of God and ministers of the devil – learned, ignorant, murderers, thieves – women, traitors to their kind, pour forth and swarm over the land. Mad with the lust of Gold, they burrow in the beds of streams, tear and claw at mountain-gulch and slope. Tented towns rise like night-grown fungi, and wither away, to spring again into existence, lawless, in a land where law is not, in a land that no man owns. Through days that are full of sweating toil and nights that cover vigils of lust and death, the ferment of hell grows in the blood of human beings who have left their God with their country.

Another wave of the wand and God reclaims his own. The courthouse and the gibbet, without mercy but full of stern justice, have taken the place of the murderer's greed that sharpened the murderer's knife.

From a thousand hills, a thousand streams have quickened the arid acres of drifting sand into fruitful life. League on league are fields of waving grain. League on league are green vineyards with their clustered fruit blushing and sweetening in the sun. League on league happy homes are all but hidden by dark-leaved trees, with fruit yellow as the golden apples of the Hesperides.

And this is California! For unknown ages more desolate and terrible than Dante's wildest dream of the Inferno, in fifty years surpassing his picture of Paradise. Barred from the world on one side by ten thousand miles of stormy seas, on the other by tier on tier of mountains and miles on miles of dreary desert, were the whole United States to fade as did the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, California would still live in song and story, more golden than the mines of Ophir, more beautiful than the storied plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

CHAPTER ONE

"But I know what I need. I need you."

There was a dogged tone in Elijah Berl's voice that was almost sullenly insistent.

"I have given you all that I have to give, Elijah. You don't need me. What you need is money, and that's what I haven't got."

"And I say again that I have thought of this for five years. Ever since I left New England. I have not been alone, I have been guided. Step by step I have gone over my ground up to this point. I have studied men as carefully as I have my work. You are the man I have selected, and you are the man I want."

Ralph Winston looked thoughtfully into the glowing eyes bent full upon him. The impulse was strong within him to do as the man before him wished – almost compelled – him to do; but because of this subtle power which moved him so strongly, he hesitated. To what further lengths might it not impel him when the first step had been taken? Clear-eyed, clear-headed, never so cautious as when his desires called most loudly to him, he hesitated to take the first step in the path which Elijah Berl had so insistently opened before him. Therefore he spoke deliberately, almost coldly.

"Don't misunderstand me, Elijah. I have faith in you and I have more faith in your idea. For this very reason I hesitate to accept your offer. You and I are so different. I – "

Elijah interrupted impatiently.

"I have thought of all that. I have prayed over it. 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,' and as the voice from heaven came to Paul, even so it came to me – 'What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.'"

A smile flickered for a moment on the lips of the young engineer as he turned to a pretty little woman who, with her light sewing in her hands, was rocking gently on the wide verandah.

"What do you think about it, Amy?"

Amy Berl drew her needle the full length of the thread and held it poised for a moment as she made reply.

"Elijah knows what is best, Ralph." Then, with a swift glance at her husband, she again bent over her work.

"Of course he knows some things – "

"He knows every thing." Amy did not raise her eyes from her work this time.

With a sigh of impatience, Elijah threw himself into a chair near his wife. The needle dropped from the hand which she timidly rested upon his, while her eyes sought his face. Absorbed in himself, not a quiver responded to the touch of Amy's hand, not a glance answered the caress of her eyes.

It was a pretty picture in a grandly beautiful setting. A wide verandah, covered with climbing roses in full bloom, opened upon a scene almost tropical in its beauty. Down the redwood steps the eyes wandered across a luxuriant flower garden, still lower they rested upon a great square of dark, shining green; below this, in sharp contrast, and surrounding the shining green, tawny sand pricked in with tufts and clumps of dusty, green sage, rolling hills in descending cadence, till, in the far distance, a grayer, wimpling gray, the great Pacific marked the limits of the desert.

To the left, the eyes leaped the rock-strewn bed of the Rio Sangre de Cristo, climbed rock-ribbed, wooded slopes, up and up to the dizzy snow-clad peaks of the San Bernardinos that rested purple and white against the constant azure of a California sky. Within the limits of the cottage, the flower garden, and the irrigated orange grove, the sun seemed to hold its fierceness in awesome leash only to let loose its fervid power upon the glowing sands and their tortured growths.

The characters were in harmony with their setting. The blue-eyed little woman, delicate, with tawny hair, a sweet-scented mountain gentian ready to shrink and fold upon itself at a shadow that could not harm, but could only feebly threaten; the young engineer, with close-cropped hair, a face chiselled with strong, undoubting strokes, a mouth half hidden by a mustache that gave a glimpse of lips too thick to be merciless, too thin to be sensuous. There was an air of alertness about the man, a suggested tireless energy that renewed its strength on the food of humor gathered even from the most monotonous commonplaces. Ralph Winston was not a rare type of man, but he was a saving one. With him was an air of inflexibility of purpose, softened with mercy; a rugged honesty that made no compromise with evil-doers, an honesty that, with laughing eyes, left the uncovered sinner ashamed and repentant, instead of defiant and revengeful in his defeat.

A tyro, looking at the smooth-shaven, boyish face of Elijah Berl, would fail to note the hardly defined lines that ran from mouth to eyes; lines broad, undulating through the whole gamut of enthusiasm, but lines that grew hard and merciless as they converged to eyes narrowed before opposition and lightened with fanatical zeal.

Winston's footing with the Berls was intimate, though upon short acquaintance. This was not strange in California. Twenty miles from the Berl ranch was a booming town that had attracted Winston. Here was a good opening for an engineer, with large and sure pay. Winston made light of the town and its promoters, and among these he had no intimates. On a hunting trip he had discovered the Berl ranch and had found it worthy of the more intimate acquaintance to which he was cordially invited. Little by little he had drawn from Elijah the story of his life in California. It had been an isolated life, full of hardship, but devoted to a single idea, that of reclaiming the vast extent of country which now lay barren and unfruitful.

The young engineer's eyes grew deep and thoughtful. This offer of an equal partnership meant even more to him than Elijah realized. Why not accept it? It was what he had hoped for, had sought for – a life work in which he could enlist his strength and his sense of honor. It was worth while, grandly worth while. His heart beat high at the thought of it. The building of a great storage dam in the mountains, the laying out of canals that should lead the stored waters to the sun-parched deserts; this was an engineer's work, and he was an engineer. In imagination he could see, as Elijah saw, the bare brown hillsides clothed in verdure and teeming with prosperity. Why did he hesitate? Was it lack of money? That would come. Yet he hesitated. Why? Clearer than ever before came the thought of Elijah, and Winston knew that his question was answered. Elijah was his answer. Elijah himself was the obstacle in the way of his acceptance. There was no doubt of the worth of Elijah's idea, no doubt of his enthusiasm, no doubt of his patient, tireless energy. Of his integrity? There was the doubtful point.

If he accepted Elijah's offer, he could foresee the struggle that would follow. His own sense of right pitted against Elijah's fanatical zeal that recognized no right except its own desires. When the fully expanded idea of redeeming the desert hillsides should open before Elijah, before the eyes of men, when wealth and power should beckon, just a little at first, from the path of stern uncompromising honor, Elijah would not restrain himself. Would he be able to control him? Winston's lips set firmly. He knew that he would conquer in the end.

Elijah was pacing restlessly up and down the verandah, now and then casting an impatient look upon the young engineer who sat motionless, his eyes on the hillsides below them. At length he paused abruptly before Winston.

"Well?" he exclaimed explosively, "you haven't given me an answer yet."

Winston's words were measured.

"No; I haven't. If you insist upon an answer today, it will be no."

"You want time to think it over?" Elijah's voice was sarcastic.

"That's just it. I do want time. I know that if I accept your offer, you and I are going to come into collision. You have one way of looking at things, I have another. Not once, but many times, you and I are going to look at the same thing at the same time and in different ways. When these times come, one of us will have to give way." Winston waved aside Elijah's attempt to interrupt. "When these times come, I may be the one to give up, but if I am, it will be because your way appeals to my reason as being better than my own."

Winston's meaning was clear to Elijah. The "word" that he reverenced, the voice to which he listened and which he followed, meant not the weight of a feather to the man before him. Elijah moistened his nervous lips with his tongue. He had been guided to seek Winston – Winston he must have. Impatiently he put Winston's words aside.

"All this is not to the point."

"What is?" Winston asked curtly.

"This. Will you accept my offer?"

"An equal partnership with yourself?"

"Yes."

"I suppose you realize that if I accept, the management is no longer yours alone, but yours and mine?"

"Yes."

"And that it is my right to put forth every effort to compel you to my way of thinking?" Winston deliberately used the word compel, instead of persuade.

"Yes, yes!"

"Then I will think it over, Elijah, and will give you my final answer the next time you are in Ysleta."

"Suppose I come tomorrow?" Elijah's voice was assured.

"My answer will be ready."