by Lou Cameron
He thanked her politely and, dismounting, led the mule toward the barn. One of the Mex hands fell in beside him to help. As they unsaddled, watered, and fed the mule in the barn, Stringer had the chance to ask the helpful Mex how much he ought to offer for the unexpected hospitality.
The Mex replied sharply, “No, señor, no money. La Señora is most sensitive about dinero. I fear they have put their life savings into this new spread and, as you shall see, the food they have to share will be simple fare. If you wish to show your gratitude, just do not ask for second helpings.”
Stringer said he understood, and as they walked back to the house to run some water over their hands he pumped the hired hand for information about his hosts.
It seemed that the young family had sunk everything they owned into the purchase and improvement of this full section at the north end of a sort of skinny irrigation ditch, and whether they made it or not depended on the forty acres of cash crop they’d just drilled in. When Stringer asked about the windmill Gomez explained it didn’t pump ground water since there was no ground water. The grade here was so flat, the loquacious Mexican told Stringer, that water had to be pumped from the feeder ditch to the fields and up to an attic tank that fed the tap they were using. Now Stringer understood why the wash water had felt so warm.
Dinner, as he had been warned, was meager and plain, boiled spuds, beans, a mighty skinny slice of raisin pie, and even thinner coffee. After dinner, while Mrs. Cooper and the two daughters did the dishes, Fred Cooper and his young son took Stringer for a stroll around the family estate. Most of it was still covered with greasewood which Big Fred said was a bitch to grub up. “However,” he added, “our neighbors to the south have a steam tractor. Come some cash I mean to hire it to plow these infernal roots right. You have to kill every root and then soak the soil deep, more’n once, afore anything else will grow in it.”
Stringer knew better than to ask why Cooper didn’t want to ask a new neighbor for the free loan of his tractor. Instead, he inquired about the amount of water it took to farm such soil and, more casually, how much the Southern Pacific was charging an acre-foot for the same.
Cooper explained, “We didn’t buy this section off the railroad. Got it at better terms off Imperial Land Management in Yuma. The water comes with, for the first year or more. They say once they have the whole irrigation scheme laid in and metered, our water ought to cost us less than a dollar an acre-foot. I reckon we can live with that.” Stringer knew the man already had a lot of worries, so he felt he had no call to ask what Cooper and the other suckers would do if the water lords who had them at their mercy decided to charge more.
By now they’d come to a ditch about four feet wide and filled almost to the top with still, scummy water. Cooper frowned. “Haven’t had much wind, lately, so that water’s far too high.” Then he turned to his son and said, “You’d best run down to the gate and spill some, Freddy.”
His young son, already bored with the men’s conversation, was only too happy to oblige. He ran on ahead as Stringer and his father followed along the already weed-grown edge of the ditch. When they caught up with the boy, Stringer watched him crank the wheel of a wood and angle-iron floodgate, damming the water behind it. As brown ditch water ran out in a widespread fan, Stringer noticed it didn’t seem bound for anywhere in particular. Seeing his visitor’s interest, Cooper explained, “You can see how flat the grade is. They only ditched this far north. They told us that once our drainage runs down such grade as there is a spell, it’ll dig its own channel. Meanwhile, it just sort of oozes off toward Salton’s Sink. It soaks in long before it can get there, of course.”
Stringer turned to stare at the southern horizon as he absently rolled a smoke. “No offense,” he observed, “but if this ditch runs as much as ten miles from the main feeder, it must start out a heap wider.” Cooper said it surely did, since it had to feed eight or ten other fair-sized spreads before it trickled on to this one.
“What happens if there’s a real rain, or someone sends too much water down this way for your ditches to handle,” Stringer asked him. “I don’t see no place for all that excess water to drain to.”
Cooper shrugged. “Hell, it’ll just soak in. This here desert silt is like blotting paper. There’s no limit to how much water it can absorb. I have to water my beans and barley just about every day.”
Stringer sealed his smoke and lit it. After he had drawn a few puffs, he observed as casually as possible, “It’s a good thing you’re getting so much water free then. As to blotting paper, there’s a limit to how much ink a blotter will soak up before it commences to puddle all over your desk.”
It was the sharp-eared kid, cuss his curious hide, who picked up on Stringer’s words, asking him how come he knew so much about writing desks. Had Stringer wanted them to know he was a writer he’d have already told them so. So he cussed himself silently for the slip and explained he’d been to high school in his misspent youth.
By now the muddy puddle on the south side of the flood gate had formed a vast but only inches-deep spread of water. Despite this, the water in the deeper ditch had only dropped a couple of inches, and Cooper observed glumly that it soaked in faster when there hadn’t been any rain. But since there wasn’t much more anyone could do about it, the men went back to the house.
The next morning, after a good night’s sleep in the Cooper’s hay loft and a mighty poor breakfast at their table, Stringer rode on.
He’d ridden no more than a mile along the irrigation ditch before he came upon another gent standing ankle-deep in what looked to be a half acre of mud. The nester was cussing at the floodgate wheel he’d cranked all the way up to no avail. Beyond him, on slightly higher ground, stood a big stream tractor with its brass polished and its wheels freshly painted a bright fire-engine red. Stringer reined in at pistol range to call out, “Morning. I’d be Don MacEwen, and with your permission I’d like to cross your land. I’m bound for the work camp to the south.”
The nester nodded graciously. “Ride anywhere you like as long as it ain’t over my wife and kids, stranger. I’m W.R. Brown and I’m at peace with everyone in the world this morning but my disconsiderate neighbors to the north. That damned Cooper has his damned floodgate closed after all that rain, and opening this one hasn’t done me a lick of good, as you can see.”
“I just come from the Cooper place,” Stringer told the man. “I can tell you for a fact that your neighbor opened his floodgate last night. He ain’t the problem here. The problem both of you have is that once you get to the north end of this ditch, the water has no place to drain when and if the ground is too wet to just soak it up.” He hesitated a moment, then decided to speak up anyway. “Do you mind if I make a suggestion?”
Brown told him to suggest away, since anything beat standing in a mud puddle.
“I’m no engineer,” Stringer said. “But as I see it, the water company counted on the natural slope to the north to drain away excess water. It may, sooner or later. Meanwhile it’s not much of a slope. So if I were you and Cooper I’d use that handsome tractor yonder to plow a deep furrow through and beyond that slight dip north of Cooper’s floodgate. Nobody seems to be living there but lizards. A quarter mile of furrow ought to soak up a lot more water than the sun-baked surface and, who knows, you might even find another dip out there to use as a soak-in.”
W.R. Brown was a man who could think on his feet, which may have explained why he looked more prosperous than his ragged-ass neighbor to the north. He said, “By gum, that sure might help. But, seeing you seem to be on good terms with Cooper, would you mind approaching him about it for me? Me and my woman don’t seem to meet their fancy for some reason. We sent one of the kids over with a cherry pie when they moved in. But they never even thanked us.”
Stringer smiled understanding. “New neighbors can take some getting used to. Still, I think it would be better if you and Cooper worked it out man to man. Since you seem willing to take my advice about drainage, ar
e we talking man to man, no woman allowed, about what could have caused some misunderstanding betwixt you and the Coopers?”
Brown said he was listening and that his old woman didn’t have to know everything. So Stringer explained. “They’re decent folk. But they’re poor as well. As one man to another, you surely know how shitty it makes a man feel when he can’t spring for a round of drinks when it’s his turn. Cooper admires you and your fine tractor. He told me so. I suspect he’s just a mite jealous of you, in fact. He says that when and if he ever has the money he means to approach you for the hiring of your machine. Meanwhile, since he’s broke, he feels no call to. His wife was no doubt shy about thanking your wife for that cherry pie because she had no way to thank her proper. I doubt they got a cup of sugar to spare. Do you follow my drift?”
Brown nodded in understanding. “I sure do. I had them down as natural stuck-ups and I thank you for setting me straight, old son. How come Cooper said he wanted to borrow my tractor?”
Stringer replied, “He never said he wanted to borrow it. He said he’d like to hire it to grub out greasewood. Like I said, they’re poor but proud.”
Brown snorted at the notion. “Hell, all it takes to run old Betsy, as I calls her, is water and the free firewood all about. What if I was to start by just asking him permit to cross his land with my old Betsy to run some drainage out across the desert? We’d naturally get to talking and I could offer the use of the tractor later. How does that sound to a gent who seems to know Cooper better than me?”
Stringer said, “Right neighborly, Mister Brown. Well, it’s been nice talking with you. But I got to get it on up the road now.”
So they parted friendly and Stringer rode on, feeling even madder at the water company. Both the nesters he’d talked to so far had struck him as decent, hardworking folk, suckered out here to sink or swim, dumb as that sounded, in the middle of a damned near worthless desert. He saw now what Lockwood had been so concerned about. The engineer had no doubt overstated the dangers of draining ditch water the wrong way, since there seemed no way the water could do anything but spread out, a few inches deep, on all this nearly dead-flat land. But it only took a few inches of flood water to drown a standing crop and drive snakes and worse from miles around into any house surrounded by any depth of unexpected water. The poor farmers investing in the scheme were more likely to be wiped out financially than drowned. But going broke could hurt almost as bad when one had a wife and kids to worry about.
By the time he reached the next section, the water in the ditch stood just about right. He only stopped there long enough to water his mule and chat a spell. He had to do the same at the next spread, and the one after that, since a stranger riding past without so much as a howdy struck most country folk as stuck-up if not suspicious.
He could tell he was gradually getting higher because, while he couldn’t see any change in the grade, nobody this close to the rail and main water lines seemed to have noticed any standing water on their spreads after yesterday’s unexpected rain.
Everyone he passed treated him decent. He was even forced to stop for coffee and cake later in the afternoon. And with each visit he heard tales of being dusted out in Kansas or of coming all the way out from the Ohio Valley because the price of land back east was so high these days. Most of the newcomers were young farmers, just starting out, with kids too bitty to really help. Some had taken on Mex hired hands. Stringer liked them too. Like most Anglo natives of the Southwest, he’d been reared to feel, rightly or wrongly, that while some Mexicans seemed ornery by nature, no Mex who was willing to work could be all bad, and the harder workers tended to be natural gentlemen with shy, sincere good manners. He hated to think that all the hard work both ethnic groups were putting into this project might turn out to be a flim-flam. Nobody he talked to had ever read The Octopus by Frank Norris. Hence it hadn’t occurred to them they were captives of an oddly run water monopoly. He found it interesting, however, that so far he hadn’t met a native Californian who’d bought a speck of land out here. He wondered if he would find out what the Octopus might have in mind for these poor greenhorns.
One of Lockwood’s survey maps put both the railroad line and main feeder canal almost anywhere ahead of him now. The tracks of the S.P. had been laid across the desert years ago. The fool canal running out across the desert from the Colorado, just about where it met the Gila, got fatter and ran more twisty than the tracks. Running water was a lot better at reading any slope at all than the human eye. The irrigation lines branching off the main feeder canal ran both north and south, through railroad culverts when necessary. It seemed obvious the water outfits and the Southern Pacific had to be in cahoots if the Huntington clan had given permission to run water under its tracks.
Juanita had intimated that Lockwood had a drinking problem. That, along with a habit of telling his bosses they were digging their ditches all wrong, would have explained their firing him easy enough. Stringer would have accepted Lockwood’s news tip as no more than the word of a drunken worrywart, if they’d had the sense to let things go at that. But they hadn’t. They’d tried to kill him, and they’d been successful in killing Lockwood and Juanita. So there had to be more to the tale. Something that didn’t show on paper.
Toward late afternoon, Stringer finally spied the forward work camp in the distance. A dotted line on the southern skyline, farther west than he’d originally estimated, materialized into a massive steam shovel and a mess of tent tops as he crossed the railroad and rode toward it. As he rode into the tent city, he spied a saloon sign and decided that was as good a place to start as any.
The camp, while portable, was set up pretty good. There was a watering trough for his mule by the hitching rail in front of the saloon tent, and when he ducked inside he saw they had a real bar set up, with chairs and tables and even a piano spread across the bare dirt floor. There weren’t many other customers, this still being a working hour. Nobody was playing the piano and a once-pretty fancy-gal at one end of the bar flashed a heap of gold teeth and fake eyelashes at Stringer until she saw he only seemed to want a beer.
The wiry barkeep who served him waited pointedly for Stringer to lay some coinage on the bar before he smiled. “It pays to be cautious,” he explained. “You just get off work, son?”
Stringer sipped some suds before he answered. “Just got here in hopes of finding some. Would you know who I’d want to talk to about that?”
The barkeep told him to look for a gent called Blacky over by the steam shovel. Stringer finished the beer, deciding they didn’t give much for a whole nickel, and ducked back out into the harsh sunlight. He left his mule where it was and ambled toward the huffing steam shovel. His path took him close enough to the water course it had already dug to notice with interest how deep the dark water stood in the big ditch. Had he been in charge he’d have been dumping the spoil north instead of south of the canal, just in case. But he wasn’t in charge, so he just joined the cluster of gents standing near the steam shovel as it picked up yet another great mouthful of soft desert silt and dropped it on the far side. He asked if anyone there might be Blacky. One of the onlookers pointed to a nearby tent and told him he might find the project supervisor there.
He did. The dark Irish gent seated at a chart table just inside admitted to being Blacky Burke. The heavier-set gent scowling at Stringer from a nearby camp chair was the one he’d backed down in El Centro in front of Juanita. Stringer nodded pleasantly and drawled, “Howdy. I figured I might find you here.”
“That’s him, the pistolero I had so much trouble with in El Centro,” the burly man nearly shouted.
Blacky Burke stared soberly up at Stringer. “Who are you and how come my security man, Gus, here, had so much trouble with you?”
Stringer smiled and said, “Call me Don MacEwen. I didn’t know this cuss was working for you. I thought he just liked to beat up women. It’s been my experience you can get more out of ladies by sweet-talking ’em. Are you boys still interested
in them papers she had stowed in her gypsy cart?”
Gus growled deep in his throat. But Burke ignored him and eyed his visitor with speculation. “We might be, MacEwen. Are you saying you have such papers on you?”
Stringer patted the front of his denim jacket. “I sure do. Like I said, sweet-talking will get a man further with a gal in the end than yelling at her.”
Burke grimaced, but replied friendly enough, “What can I tell you? Good help can be hard to find. How much do you want for ’em, MacEwen?”
“Nothing,” Stringer drawled. “They seem to be your property.”
Stringer was not surprised to see Black Burke smiling up at him almost sweetly as he hauled out the dead engineer’s papers and handed them across the chart table. Then, as Burke hurriedly spread them out, Stringer added, “I could use a job, if you’re still hiring. The deal I hoped to make in town never panned out.”
Burke didn’t answer until he’d scanned the charts Lockwood had scribbled on and erased a couple of lines. “We may be hiring,” he said cautiously. “What can you do? No offense, but you don’t look like a born ditchdigger to me.”
“I’m not. I used to ride top hand. Then I found out some outfits will pay more for a man who’s good with a gun as well,” Stringer informed him.
The hired gun called Gus broke in, addressing his boss. “You don’t want this one, Blacky. He’s a fresh-mouthed saddle tramp and no more.”
Stringer smiled pleasantly at him, asking none too politely, “Is that how come I backed you down so easy, you tin-horn nothing-much?”
As Gus half rose from his chair, Burke growled. “Not in here if you boys want to have it out.”
