Some men fail because they invest their money in bad business. More
fail because they invest themselves in sorry human material. They
trust their plans to people who cannot or will not carry them out.
Bob from his first day as an employer realized that to be able to plan
and work himself was only half of success. One must be able to pick
men who will carry out his plans, must invest his brains, his
generosity, his fair treatment, and his affections in human beings who
will return him loyalty for loyalty.
He had made no mistake in Noah Ezekiel Foster. Noah was a good cotton
planter; moreover, he knew a good deal about Chinese. Bob had employed
six Chinamen to help get the ground in shape and the cotton planted.
"Noah," Bob stopped beside the disk plow and its double team, "you
understand mules."
"I ought to." Noah rubbed his lean jaw. "I've been kicked by 'em
enough."
Bob smiled. Somehow Noah's look of drollery always put him in a good
humour. He noticed it also tickled the Chinamen, who thought "Misty
Zeekee" one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxons.
"You see," remarked Noah, picking up the lines again, "as my dad used
to say, 'He that taketh hold of the handles of a plow and looketh back,
verily, he shall be kicked by a mule.' I never calculate to be kicked
in the back. But if that Chinaman over there"--he frowned at a
Chinaboy who was fumbling over a cotton planter--"don't get a move on
him, he'll be kicked wherever he happens to hit my foot first. Hi,
there"--Noah threw up his head and yelled to the Chinaboy--"get a move
on. Plantee cotton. Goee like hellee." And the Chinaman did.
Bob laughed.
"Do you reckon you could let me have five dollars to-night?" Noah
Ezekiel asked, looking down at his plow. "I want to go up to the Red
Owl at Mexicali."
"Not going to gamble, are you?" Bob asked.
Noah Ezekiel shook his head. "No, I ain't goin' to gamble. Goin' to
invest the five in my education. I want to learn how many ways there
are for a fool and his money to part."
After supper, when Noah Ezekiel had ridden away to invest his five
dollars in the educational processes of the Red Owl, Bob brought a
stool out of the house and sat down to rest his tired muscles and watch
the coming night a little while before he turned in. Bob and his
foreman occupied the same shack--the term "house," as Noah Ezekiel
said, being merely a flower of speech. Although there were several
hundred thousand acres of very rich land under cultivation on the
Mexican side, with two or three exceptions there was not a house on any
of the ranches that two men could not have built in one day and still
observe union hours. Four willow poles driven in the ground, a few
crosspieces, a thatch of arrowweed, three strips of plank nailed round
the bottom, some mosquito netting, and it was done. A Chinaman would
take another day off and build a smoking adobe oven; but Bob and Noah
had a second-hand oil stove on which a Chinese boy did their cooking.
Bob sat and looked out over the level field in the dusk. A quarter of
a mile away the light glimmered in the hut of his Chinese help, and
there came the good-natured jabber of their supper activities. He felt
the expansive thrill of the planter, the employer--the man who
organizes an enterprise and makes it go.
The heat of the day was already gone, and pleasant coolness was on the
night wind that brought the smell of desert sage from beyond the
watered fields. Bob stirred from the chair and got up. His tiredness
was gone. The desert night had him. He went into the shack and took
from an old scarred trunk his fiddle, and started down the road that
passed his ranch to the south. He had not yet called on the Chandlers.
The little house was dark. Rogeen wondered if the Chandlers were
asleep. But his heart took a quicker turn; he fancied he saw something
white in the yard--the girl was also feeling the spell of the desert
night.
Then suddenly, but softly, a guitar thrummed, and a voice with the
half-wailing cadence of the Spanish took up the melody.
Bob stood still, the blood crowding his veins until his face was hot
and his whole body prickled. This was Madrigal, the Mexican Jew.
The song ended. Faintly came the clapping of hands, and the ripple of
a girl's laughter. Bob turned angrily and walked swiftly back up the
road, walked clear past his own ranch without noticing, and finally
turned aside by a clump of cottonwood trees along the levee of the main
irrigation canal. The water, a little river here, ran swiftly,
muddily, black under the desert stars. Bob lifted his fiddle and flung
it into the middle of the stream.
The heat of his anger was gone. He felt instantly cold, and infinitely
lonesome. There upon the muddy water floated away the thousand songs
of the hills--the melody, the ecstasy, the colour and light of his
early youth.
With sudden repentance he turned and dashed down the bank after the
hurrying current. The fall is rapid here, and the fiddle was already
far down the stream. He ran stumblingly, desperately, along the uneven
bank, dodging willows and arrowweed, stopping now and again to peer up
and down the stream.
It was nowhere in sight. A sort of frenzy seized him. He had a queer
fancy that in that moment of anger he had thrown away his soul--all of
him that was not bread and dollars. He must get it back--he must!
Another dash, and again he stopped on the bank. Something darker than
the current bobbed upon the muddy water. Without a moment's hesitancy
he plunged into the stream and waded waist deep into the middle of the
current.
Yes, it was his violin. Back on the bank, dripping wet, he hugged it
to him like a little girl with a doll that was lost and is found.