Louis said half derisively and half with admiration, “He’s always thinking about how to change things. He’s never satisfied with the way they are.”

Samuel smiled at him. “They say men lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.” And then he laughed again. “I can see myself sitting on my dust heap making a world in my mind as surely as God created this one. But God saw this world. I’ll never see mine except—this way. This will be a valley of great richness one day. It could feed the world, and maybe it will. And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands—” A cloud seemed to come over his eyes and his face set in sadness and he was silent.

“You make it sound like a good place to settle,” Adam said. “Where else could I raise my children with that coming?”

Samuel went on, “There’s one thing I don’t understand. There’s a blackness on this valley. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it. Sometimes on a white blinding day I can feel it cutting off the sun and squeezing the light out of it like a sponge.” His voice rose. “There’s a black violence on this valley. I don’t know—I don’t know. It’s as though some old ghost haunted it out of the dead ocean below and troubled the air with unhappiness. It’s as secret as hidden sorrow. I don’t know what it is, but I see it and feel it in the people here.”

Adam shivered. “I just remembered I promised to get back early. Cathy, my wife, is going to have a baby.”

“But Liza’s getting ready.”

“She’ll understand when you tell her about the baby. My wife is feeling poorly. And I thank you for telling me about the water.”

“Have I depressed you with my rambling?”

“No, not at all—not at all. It’s Cathy’s first baby and she’s miserable.”

Adam struggled all night with his thoughts and the next day he drove out and shook hands with Bordoni and the Sanchez place was his.

Chapter 14

[1]

THERE IS SO MUCH TO TELL about the Western country in that day that it is hard to know where to start. One thing sets off a hundred others. The problem is to decide which one to tell first.

You remember that Samuel Hamilton said his children had gone to a dance at the Peach Tree School. The country schools were the centers of culture then. The Protestant churches in the towns were fighting for their existence in a country where they were newcomers. The Catholic church, first on the scene and deeply dug in, sat in comfortable tradition while the missions were gradually abandoned and their roofs fell in and pigeons roosted on the stripped altars. The library (in Latin and Spanish) of the San Antonio Mission was thrown into a granary, where the rats ate off the sheepskin bindings. In the country the repository of art and science was the school, and the schoolteacher shielded and carried the torch of learning and of beauty. The schoolhouse was the meeting place for music, for debate. The polls were set in the schoolhouse for elections. Social life, whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-night dance, could be held nowhere else. And the teacher was not only an intellectual paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher. Her children were presumed to have intellectual advantages both inherited and conditioned.