[2]

The summer progressed and the Salinas River retired underground or stood in green pools under high banks. The cattle lay drowsing all day long under the willows and only moved out at night to feed. An umber tone came to the grass. And the afternoon winds blowing inevitably down the valley started a dust that was like fog and raised it into the sky almost as high as the mountaintops. The wild oat roots stood up like nigger-heads where the winds blew the earth away. Along a polished earth, pieces of straw and twigs scampered until they were stopped by some rooted thing; and little stones rolled crookedly before the wind.

It became more apparent than ever why old Sanchez had built his house in the little draw, for the wind and the dust did not penetrate, and the spring, while it diminished, still gushed a head of cold clear water. But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the earth is sick in the rainless months.

Adam sent Lee with a note to the Hamilton place to ask Samuel to visit him and discuss the boring of some wells on his new place.

Samuel was sitting in the shade, watching his son Tom design and build a revolutionary coon trap, when Lee drove up in the Trask cart. Lee folded his hands in his sleeves and waited. Samuel read the note. “Tom,” he said, “do you think you could keep the estate going while I run down and talk water with a dry man?”

“Why don’t I go with you? You might need some help.”

“At talking?—that I don’t. It won’t come to digging for some time if I’m any judge. With wells there’s got to be a great deal of talk—five or six hundred words for every shovel of dirt.”

“I’d like to go—it’s Mr. Trask, isn’t it? I didn’t meet him when he came here.”

“You’ll do that when the digging starts. I’m older than you. I’ve got first claim on the talk. You know, Tom, a coon is going to reach his pretty little hand through here and let himself out. You know how clever they are.”

“See this piece here? It screws on and turns down here. You couldn’t get out of that yourself.”

“I’m not so clever as a coon. I think you’ve worked it out, though. Tom, boy, would you saddle Doxology while I go tell your mother where I’m going?”

“I bling lig,” said Lee.

“Well, I have to come home some time.”

“I bling back.”

“Nonsense,” said Samuel. “I’ll lead my horse in and ride back.”