The Vision of Elijah Berl Part 5

"It may be, Helen. It is full of promise, but it may not mature. I know the proposition pretty thoroughly and I know Elijah Berl. The elements of this may not be so solid as they appear."

"The watershed is all right, isn't it?"

"Without a question."

"The water can be brought from the reservoir to the lands?"

"No question about that, either."

"And the land is fertile and suited to oranges?"

"That's true too, but it needs money."

"You'll get that all right."

"I expect to, without doubt."

Helen had spoken with growing animation.

"Then the whole doubt in your mind centres in Elijah Berl?"

"You've hit it exactly."

"And yet you are a friend of Elijah's?" There was a touch of contempt in her voice.

"Yes."

"Then I must say that I don't value your friends.h.i.+p quite so highly as I did." Helen made no attempt to conceal her disapproval.

Winston spoke deliberately, weighing every word.

"I'm sorry to hear you say that, Helen. Your friends.h.i.+p means a great deal to me. Just remember that in a way you have come to me for advice.

If not advice exactly, you really ask for the approval of what I cannot approve without reserve. I have counted you as my friend. If I have seemed to be a traitor to Elijah, it is only that I might be true to you. I would not say to any one else what I have said to you."

Helen's resentment died away before Winston's words.

"You haven't answered my first question yet. You seem able, if you only will."

"In a way, yes. Elijah Berl and I are partners."

"Partners!" Helen did not try to conceal her surprise.

"Yes. The agreement was signed today. Elijah was more than generous in his terms."

"And yet you could say what you did of him!"

"Yes. I gave him fair warning. I didn't tell him in so many words that I distrusted him; I simply said that our different views of things might in the future bring us into conflict. If he couldn't understand that, it was useless to say more."

"And yet, distrusting him, you have tied yourself to him. It doesn't seem quite harmonious to me and not a bit like you."

"It isn't harmonious. Nothing is, for that matter, unless you make it so."

"Then the success of the whole business depends upon your ability to manage Elijah Berl?"

"That's about the gist of it."

"Yours must be a comfortable state of mind." There was sarcasm in the voice.

"I am speaking as freely to you, Helen, as I do to myself. I thought our standing would allow that."

Helen made no reply. She sat gazing absently into the street. She was in an uncomfortable frame of mind. Twice that day she had been swept hither and thither under influences outside herself. It was unusual for her and it was discomposing. The Las Cruces Irrigation Company had looked so safe as a permanent and a big paying investment, and Elijah Berl himself had stirred her as she had never before been stirred. And now Ralph Winston had told her in so many words that she did not know what she was about. She resented this hotly. She resented it the more strongly, because she recognized the injustice she was doing Ralph. It was long before she had herself under control. At length she turned from the street and looked at Winston.

"I had a letter from home today."

Winston responded eagerly to her changed mood.

"How are they all?"

"Just as well as ever. Mother says that father bobbed up from under that anti-debris decision like a cork in salt water. He says he is going to put up a dam that the debris commission can't look over in a week's climbing. Jimmie is his ablest a.s.sistant."

"Little rascal! Say, Helen, you ought to take him in hand and make him go to college. You're the only one who can manage him. He has the making of one of the biggest engineers in the country."

"Why don't you try your hand, Ralph? Mother says that you are his G.o.d yet. When he gets cornered, he insists that his way is just what Mr.

Winston would do, and there he sticks. Father and mother both ask when you are coming back."

Winston shook his head almost regretfully. "I sometimes wish I had never left, but that's too late now. When I get a little despondent, the roar of the monitors eating into the gravel, the swish of the water and the clatter of boulders in the sluices get into my ears till I'm nearly wild."

"That is all over now. When I came away there were only a few discouraged miners digging in the banks and listening for the officers to come around and stop even that."

Winston went on even more regretfully.

"And I remember when you and I went barefoot, wading around with gold pans and sc.r.a.pping as to which had the biggest pan--"

Helen rose to go. Her intuition told her that they were on dangerous ground.

"Old things and times are gone. We have put away childish things and gold pans, for something new."

Winston took her hand. A momentary pressure on her part and she withdrew it. She could not look into his eyes.

"Be careful about the new, Helen. There's fool's gold in these diggings too."

"Which reminds me, our last sc.r.a.p as children was over that very thing."

Then the door closed behind her and Winston was alone.