On the way west Grant gradually unfolded his plan to Linder, who accepted it with his customary stoicism.
“I’m not very strong for a scheme that hasn’t got any profits in it,” Linder confessed. “It doesn’t sound human.”
“I don’t notice that you have ever figured very high in profits on your own account,” Grant retorted. “Your usefulness has been in making them for other people. I suppose if I would let you help to swell my bank account you would work for me for board and lodging, but as I refuse to do that I shall have to pay you three times Transley’s rate. I don’t know what he paid you, but I suspect that for every dollar you earned for yourself you earned two for him, so I am going to base your scale accordingly. You are to go on with the physical work at once; buy the horses, tractors, machinery; break up the land, fence it, build the houses and barns; in short, you are to superintend everything that is done with muscle or its substitute. I will bring Murdoch out shortly to take charge of the clerical details and the general organization. As for myself, after I have bought the land and placed the necessary funds to the credit of the company I propose to keep out of the limelight. I will be the heart of the undertaking; Murdoch will be the head, and you are to be the hands, and I hope you two conspirators won’t give me palpitation. You think it a mistake to work without profits, but Murdoch thinks it a sin. When I lay my plans before him I am quite prepared to hear him insist upon calling in an alienist.”
“It’s YOUR money,” Linder assented, laconically. “What are YOU going to do?”
“I’m going to buy a half section of my own, and I’m going to start myself on it on identically the same terms that I offer to the shareholders in my company. I want to prove by my own experience that it can be done, but I must keep away from the company. Human nature is a clinging vine at best, and I don’t want it clinging about me. You will notice that my plan, unlike most communistic or socialist ventures, relieves the individual of no atom of responsibility. I give him the opportunity, but I put it up to him to make good with that opportunity. I have not overlooked the fact that a man is a man, and never can be made quite into a machine.”
The two friends discussed at great length the details of the Big Idea, and upon arrival in the West Linder lost no time in preparing blue-prints and charts descriptive of the improvements to be made on the land and the order in which the work was to be carried on. Grant bought a tract suitable to his purpose, and the wheels of the machine which was to blaze a path for the State were set in motion. When this had been done Grant turned to the working out of his own individual experiment.
During the period in which these arrangements were being made it was inevitable that Grant should have heard more or less of Transley. He had not gone out of his way to seek information of the contractor, but it rather had been forced upon him. Transley’s name was frequently heard in the offices of the business men with whom he had to do; it was mentioned in local papers with the regularity peculiar to celebrities in comparatively small centres. Transley, it appeared, had become something of a power in the land. Backed by old Y.D.‘s capital he had carried some rather daring ventures through to success. He had seized the panicky moments following the outbreak of the war to buy heavily on the wheat and cattle markets, and increases in prices due to the world’s demand for food had made him one of the wealthy men of the city. The desire of many young farmers to enlist had also afforded an opportunity to acquire their holdings for small considerations, and Transley had proved his patriotism by facilitating the ambitions of as many men in this position as came to his attention. The fact that even before the war ended the farms which he acquired in this way were worth several times the price he paid was only an incident in the transactions.
But no word of Transley’s domestic affairs reached Grant, who told himself that he had ceased to be interested in them, but kept an alert ear nevertheless. It would seem that Transley rather eclipsed his wife in the public eye.
So Grant set about with the development of his own farm, and kept his mind occupied with it and with his larger experiment—except when it went flirting with thoughts of Phyllis Bruce. He was rather proud of the figure he had used to Linder, of the head, hands, and heart of his organization, but to himself he admitted that that figure was incomplete. There was a soul as well, and that soul was the girl whose inspiring presence had in some way jerked his mind out of the stagnant backwaters in which the war had left it. There was no doubt of that. He had written to Murdoch to come west and undertake new work for him. He had intimated that the change would be permanent, and that it might be well to bring the family....
He selected a farm where a ridge of foothills overlooked a broad valley receding into the mountains. The dealer had no idea of selling him this particular piece of land; they were bound for a half section farther up the slope when Grant stopped on the brow of the hill to feast his eyes on the scene that lay before him. It burst upon him with the unexpectedness peculiar to the foothill valleys; miles of gently undulating plain, lying apparently far below, but in reality rising in a sharp ascent toward the snow-capped mountains looking down silently through their gauze of blue-purple afternoon mist. At distances which even his trained eye would not attempt to compute lay little round lakes like silver coins on the surface of the prairie; here and there were dark green bluffs of spruce; to the right a ribbon of river, blue-green save where the rapids churned it white, and along its edge a fringe of leafy cottonwoods; at vast intervals square black plots of plowed land like sections on a chess-board of the gods, and farm buildings cut so clear in the mountain atmosphere that the sense of space was lost and they seemed like child-houses just across the way.
Grant turned to his companion with an animation in his face which almost startled the prosaic dealer in real estate.
“Wonderful! Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “We don’t need to go any farther if you can sell me this.”
“Sure I can sell you this,” said the dealer, looking at him somewhat queerly. “That is, if you want it. I thought you were looking for a wheat farm.”
The man’s total lack of appreciation irritated Grant unreasonably. “Wheat makes good hog fodder,” he retorted, “but sunsets keep alive the soul. What is the price?”
Again the dealer gave him a queer sidelong look, and made as though to argue with him, then suddenly seemed to change his purpose. Perhaps he reflected that strange things happened to the boys overseas.
“I’ll get you the price in town,” he said. “You are sure it will suit?”
“Suit? No king in Christendom has his palace on a site like this. I’d go round the world for it.”
“You’re the doctor,” said the dealer, turning his car.
Grant completed the purchase, ordered lumber for a house and barn, and engaged a carpenter to superintend the construction. It was one of his whims that he would do most of the work himself.
“I guess I’m rather a man of whims,” he reflected, as he stood on the brow of the hill where the material for his buildings had been delivered. “It was a whim which first brought me west, and a whim which has brought me west again. I have a whim about my money, a whim about my farm, a whim about my buildings. I do not do as other people do, which is the unpardonable sin. To Linder I am a jester, to Murdoch a fanatic, to our friend the real estate dealer a fool; I even noticed my honest carpenter trying to ask me something about shell shock! Well—they’re MY whims, and I get an immense amount of satisfaction out of them.”
The days that followed were the happiest Grant had known since childhood. The carpenter, a thin, twisted man, bowed with much labor at the bench, and answering to the name Peter, sold his services by the day and manifested a sympathy amounting to an indulgence toward the whims of his employer. So long as the wages were sure Peter cared not whether the house was finished this year or next—or not at all. He enjoyed Grant’s cooking in the temporary work-shed they had built; he enjoyed Grant’s stories of funny incidents of the war which would crop out at unexpected moments, and which were always good for a new pipe and a few minutes’ rest; he even essayed certain flights of his own, which showed that Peter was a creature not entirely without humor. He developed an appreciation of scenery; he would stand for long intervals gazing across the valley. Grant was not deceived by these little devices, but he never took Peter to task for his loitering. He was prepared almost to suspend his rule that money must not be paid except for service rendered. “If the old dodger isn’t quite paying his way now, no doubt he has more than paid it many times in the past,” he mused. “This is an occasion upon which to temper justice with mercy.”
But it was in the planning and building of the house he found his real delight. He laid it out on very modest lines, as became the amount of money he was prepared to spend. It was to be a single-story bungalow, with veranda round the south and west. The living-room ran across the south side; into its east wall he built a capacious fireplace, with narrow slits of windows to right and left, and in the western wall were deep French windows commanding the magic of the view across the valley. The dining-room, too, faced to the west, with more French windows to let in sun and soul. The kitchen was to the east, and off the kitchen lay Grant’s bedroom, facing also to the east, as becomes a man who rises early for his day’s labors. And then facing the west, and opening off the dining-room, was what he was pleased to call his whim-room.
The idea of the whim-room came upon him as he was working out plans on the smooth side of a board, and thinking about things in general, and a good deal about Phyllis Bruce, and wondering if he should ever run across Zen Transley. It struck him all of a sudden, as had the Big Idea that night when he was on his way home from Murdoch’s house. He worked it out surreptitiously, not allowing even old Peter to see it until he had made it into his plan, and then he described it just as the whim-room. But it was to be by all means the best room in the house; special finishing and flooring lumber were to be bought for it; the fireplace had to be done in a peculiarly delicate tile; the French windows must be high and wide and of the most brilliant transparency....
The ring of the saw, the trill of the plane, the thwack of the hammer, were very pleasant music in his ears. Day by day he watched his dwelling grow with the infinite joy of creating, and night after night he crept with Peter into the work-shed and slept the sleep of a man tired and contented. In the long summer evenings the sunlight hung like a champagne curtain over the mountains even after bedtime, and Grant had to cut a hole in the wall of the shed that he might watch the dying colors of the day fade from crimson to purple to blue on the tassels of cloud-wraith floating in the western sky. At times Linder and Murdoch would visit him to report progress on the Big Idea, and the three would sit on a bench in the half-built house, sweet with the fragrance of new sawdust, and smoke placidly while they determined matters of policy or administration. It had been something of a disappointment to Grant that Murdoch had not considered Phyllis Bruce one of “the family.” He had left her, regretfully, in the East, but had made provision that she was still to have her room in the old Murdoch home.
“Phyllis would have come west, and gladly, if I could have promised her a position,” Murdoch explained, “but I could not do that, as I knew nothing of your plans, and a girl can’t afford to trifle with her job these days, Mr. Grant.”
And Grant said nothing, but he thought of his whim-room, and smiled.
Grant was almost sorry when the house was finished. “There’s so much more enjoyment in doing things than in merely possessing them after they’re done,” he philosophized to Linder. “I think that must be the secret of the peculiar fascination of the West. The East, with all its culture and conveniences and beauty, can never win a heart which has once known the West. That is because in the East all the obvious things are done, but in the West they are still to do.”
“You should worry,” said Linder. “You still have the plowing.”
“Yes, and as soon as the stable is finished I am going to buy four horses and get to work.”
“I supposed you would use a tractor.”
“Not this time. I can admire a piece of machinery, but I can’t love it. I can love horses.”
“You’ll be housing them in the whim-room,” Linder remarked dryly, and had to jump to escape the hammer which his chief shied at him.
But the plowing was really a great experience. Grant had an eye for horse-flesh, and the four dapple-greys which pressed their fine shoulders into the harness of his breaking plow might have delighted the heart of any teamster. As he sat on his steel seat and watched the colter cut the firm sod with brittle cracking sound as it snapped the tough roots of the wild roses, or looking back saw the regular terraces of shiny black mould which marked his progress, he felt that he was engaged in a rite of almost sacramental significance.
“To take a substance straight from the hand of the Creator and be the first in all the world to impose a human will upon it is surely an occasion for solemnity and thanksgiving,” he soliloquized. “How can anyone be so gross as to see only materialism in such work as this? Surely it has something of fundamental religion in it! Just as from the soil springs all physical life, may it not be that deep down in the soil are, some way, the roots of the spiritual? The soil feeds the city in two ways; it fills its belly with material food, and it is continually re-vitalizing its spirit with fresh streams of energy which can come only from the land. Up from the soil comes all life, all progress, all development—”
At that moment Grant’s plowshare struck a submerged boulder, and he was dumped precipitately into that element which he had been so generously apostrophizing. The well-trained horses came to a stop as he gathered himself up, none the worse, and regained his seat.
“That WAS a spill,” he commented. “Ditched not only myself, but my whole train of thought. Never mind; perhaps I was dangerously close to the development of a new whim, and I am well supplied in that particular already. Hello, whom have we here?”
The horses had come to a stop a short distance before the end of the furrow, and Grant, glancing ahead, saw immediately in front of them a little chap of four or five obstructing the way. He stood astride of the furrow with widespread legs bridging the distance from the virgin prairie to the upturned sod. He was hatless, and curls of silky yellow hair fell about his round, bright face. His hands were stuck obtrusively in his trouser pockets.
“Well, son, what’s the news?” said Grant, when the two had measured each other for a moment.
“I got braces,” the boy replied proudly. “Don’t you see?”
“Why, so you have!” Grant exclaimed. “Come around here until I see them better.”
So encouraged, the little chap came skipping around the horses, and exhibited his braces for Grant’s admiration. But he had already become interested in another subject.
“Are these your horses?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Will they bite?”
“Why, no, I don’t believe they would. They have been very well brought up.”
“What do you call them?”
“This one is Prince, on the left, and the others are Queen, and King, and Knave. I call him Knave because he’s always scheming, trying to get out of his share of the work, and I make him walk on the plowed land, too.”
“That serves him right,” the boy declared. “What’s your name?”
“Why—what’s yours?”
“Wilson.”
“Wilson what?”
“Just Wilson.”
“What does your mother call you?”
“Just Wilson. Sometimes daddy calls me Bill.”
“Oh!”
“What’s your name?”
“Call me The Man on the Hill.”
“Do you live on the hill?”
“Yes.”
“Is that your house?”
“Yes.”
“Did you make it?”
“Yes.”
“All yourself?”
“No. Peter helped me.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“He is the man who helped me.”
“Oh!”
These credentials exchanged, the boy fell silent, while Grant looked down upon him with a whimsical admixture of humor and tenderness. Suddenly, without a word, the boy dashed as fast as his legs could carry him to the end of the field, and plunged into a clump of bushes. In a moment he emerged with something brown and chubby in his arms.
“He’s my teddy,” he said to Grant. “He was watching in the bushes to see if you were a nice man.”
“And am I?” Grant was tempted to ask.
“Yes.” There was no evasion about Wilson. He approved of his new acquaintance, and said so.
“Let us give teddy a ride on Prince?”
“Let’s!”
Grant carefully arranged teddy on the horse’s hames, and the boy clapped his hands with delight.
“Now let us all go for a ride. You will sit on my knee, and teddy will drive Prince.”
He took the boy carefully on his knee, driving with one hand and holding him in place with the other. The little body resting confidently against his side was a new experience for Grant.
“We must drive carefully,” he remarked. “Here and there are big stones hidden in the grass. If we were to hit one it might dump us off.”
The little chap chuckled. “Nothing could dump you off,” he said.
Grant reflected that such implicit and unwarranted confidence implied a great responsibility, and he drove with corresponding care. A mishap now might nip this very delightful little bud of hero-worship.
They turned the end of the furrow with a fine jingle of loose trace-chains, and Prince trotted a little on account of being on the outer edge of the semicircle. The boy clapped his hands again as teddy bounced up and down on the great shoulders.
“Have you a little boy?” he asked, when they were started again.
“Why, no,” Grant confessed, laughing at the question.
“Why?”
There was no evading this childish inquisitor. He had a way of pursuing a subject to bedrock.
“Well, you see, I’ve no wife.”
“No mother?”
“No—no wife. You see—”
“But I have a mother—”
“Of course, and she is your daddy’s wife. You see they have to have that—”
Grant found himself getting into deep water, but the sharp little intellect had cut a corner and was now ahead of him.
“Then I’ll be your little boy,” he said, and, clambering up to Grant’s shoulder pressed a kiss on his cheek. In a sudden burst of emotion Grant brought his team to a stop and clasped the little fellow in both his arms. For a moment everything seemed misty.
“And I have lived to be thirty-two years old and have never known what this meant,” he said to himself.
“Daddy’s hardly ever home, anyway,” the boy added, naively.
“Where is your home?”
“Down beside the river. We live there in summer.”
And so the conversation continued and the acquaintanceship grew as man and boy plied back and forth on their mile-long furrow. At length it occurred to Grant that he should send Wilson home; the boy’s long absence might be occasioning some uneasiness. They stopped at the end of the field and carefully removed teddy from his place of prestige, but just at that moment a horsefly buzzing about caused Prince to stamp impatiently, and the big hoof came down on the boy’s foot. Wilson sent up a cry proportionate to the possibilities of the occasion, and Grant in alarm tore off the boot and stocking. Fortunately the soil had been soft, and the only damage done was a slight bruise across the upper part of the foot.
“There, there,” said Grant, soothingly, caressing the injury with his fingers. “It will be all right in a minute. Prince didn’t mean to do it, and besides, I’ve seen much worse than that at the war.”
At the mention of war the boy suspended a cry half uttered.
“Were you at the war?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Did you kill a German?”
“I’ve seen a German killed,” said Grant, evading a question which no soldier cares to discuss.
“Did you kill ‘em in the tummy?” the boy persisted.
“We’ll talk about that to-morrow. Now you hop up on to my shoulders, and I’ll tie the horses and then carry you home.”
He followed the boy’s directions until they led him to a path running among pleasant trees down by the river. Presently he caught a glimpse of a cottage in a little open space, its brown shingled walls almost smothered in a riot of sweet peas.
“That’s our house. Don’t you like it?” said the boy, who had already forgotten his injury.
“I think it is splendid.” And Grant, taking his young charge from his shoulder, stepped up on to the porch and knocked at the screen door.
In a moment it was opened by Zen Transley.
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