Part 26 (1/2)

”All these tickets are placed in a hat,” explained the man, ”and one is drawn. The lucky ticket gets a free ride to Lucky on one of our weekly homeseekers' excursions. Others pay one fare for round trip.”

”I see,” said Bob, signing, ”and in return you get the names and addresses of every one here.”

He glanced up at his interlocutor with a quizzical expression that changed at once to one of puzzlement. Where had he seen the man before?

He was, perhaps, fifty-five years old, tall and slender, slightly stooped, slightly awry. His lean gray face was deeply lined, his close-clipped moustache and hair were gray, and his eyes twinkled behind his gla.s.ses with a cold gray light. Something about these gla.s.ses struck faintly a chord of memory in Bob's experience, but he could not catch its modulations. The man, on his side, stared at Bob a trifle uncertainly. Then he held the card up to the dim light.

”You are interested in Lucky Lands--Mr. John Smith, of Reno?” he asked, stooping low to be heard.

”Sure!” grinned Bob.

The man said nothing more, but glided away, and in a moment the flare of light on the screen announced that the lecture was to begin.

The lecturer, was a glib, self-possessed youth, filled to the brim with statistics, with which he literally overwhelmed his auditors. His remarks were accompanied by a rapid-fire snapping of fingers to the time of which the operator changed his slides. A bewildering succession of coloured views flashed on the screen. They showed Lucky in all its glories--the blacksmith shop, the main street, the new hotel, the grocery, Brown's walnut ranch, the ditch, the Southern Pacific Depot, the Methodist Church and a hundred others. So quickly did they succeed each other that no one had time to reduce to the terms of experience the scenes depicted on these slides--for with the glamour of exaggerated colour, of unaccustomed presentation, and of skillful posing the most commonplace village street seems wonderful and attractive for the moment. The lecturer concluded by an alarming statement as to the rapidity with which this desirable ranching property was being snapped up. He urged early decisions as the only safe course; and, as usual with all real estate men, called attention to the contrast between the Riverside of twenty years ago and the Riverside of to-day.

The daylight was then admitted.

”Now, gentlemen,” concluded the lecturer, still in his brisk, time-saving style, ”the weekly excursion to Lucky will take place to-morrow. One fare both ways to homeseekers. Free carriages to the Lands. Grand free open-air lunch under the spreading sycamores and by the babbling brook. Train leaves at seven-thirty.”

In full sight of all he threw the packet of tickets into a hat and drew one.

”Mr. John Smith, of Reno,” he read. ”Who is Mr. Smith?”

”Here,” said Bob.

”Would you like to go to Lucky to-morrow?”

”Sure,” said Bob.

One of the attendants immediately handed Bob a railroad ticket. The lecturer had already disappeared.

To his surprise Bob found the street door locked.

”This way,” urged one of the salesmen. ”You go out this way.”

He and the rest of the audience were pa.s.sed out another door in the rear, where they were forced to go through the main offices of the Company. Here were stationed the gray man and all his younger a.s.sistants. Bob paused by the door. He could not but admire the ac.u.men of the barker in selecting his men. The audience was made up of just the type of those who come to California with agricultural desires and a few hundred dollars--slow plodders from Eastern farms, Italians with savings and ambitions, half invalids--all the element that crowds the tourist sleepers day in and day out, the people who are filling the odd corners of the greater valleys. As these debouched into the glare of the outer offices, they hesitated, making up their slow minds which way to turn.

In that instant or so the gray man, like a captain, a.s.signed his salesmen. The latter were of all sorts--fat and joking, thin and very serious-minded, intense, enthusiastic, cold and haughty. The gray man sized up his prospective customers and to each a.s.signed a salesman to suit. Bob had no means of guessing how accurate these estimates might be, but they were evidently made intelligently, with some system compounded of theory or experience. After a moment Bob became conscious that he himself was being sharply scrutinized by the gray man, and in return watched covertly. He saw the gray man shake his head slightly.

Bob pa.s.sed out the door unaccosted by any of the salesmen.

At half-past seven the following morning he boarded the local train. In one car he found a score of ”prospects” already seated, accompanied by half their number of the young men of the real estate office. The utmost jocularity and humour prevailed, except in one corner where a very earnest young man drove home the points of his argument with an impressive forefinger. Bob dropped un.o.btrusively into a seat, and prepared to enjoy his never-failing interest in the California landscape with its changing wonderful mountains; its alternations of sage brush and wide cultivation; its vineyards as far as the eye could distinguish the vines; its grainfields seeming to fill the whole cup of the valleys; its orchards wide as forests; and its desert stretches, bigger than them all, awaiting but the vivifying touch of water to burst into productiveness. He heard one of the salesmen expressing this.

”'Water is King,'” he was saying, quoting thus the catchword of this particular concern. He was talking in a half-joking way, asking one or the other how many inches of rainfall could be expected per annum back where they came from.

”Don't know, do you?” he answered himself. ”n.o.body pays any great and particular amount of attention to that--you get water enough, except in exceptional years. Out here it's different. Every one knows to the hundredth of an inch just how much rain has fallen, and how much ought to have fallen. It's vital. Water is King.”

He gathered close the attention of his auditors.

”We have the water in California,” he went on; ”but it isn't always in the right place nor does it come at the right time. You can't grow crops in the high mountains where most of the precipitation occurs. But you can bring that water down to the plains. That's your answer: irrigation.”

He looked from one to the other. Several nodded.