Dick Forrest proved himself no prodigy at the university, save that he
cut more lectures the first year than any other student. The reason for
this was that he did not need the lectures he cut, and he knew it. His
coaches, while preparing him for the entrance examinations, had carried
him nearly through the first college year. Incidentally, he made the
Freshman team, a very scrub team, that was beaten by every high school
and academy it played against.
But Dick did put in work that nobody saw. His collateral reading was
wide and deep, and when he went on his first summer cruise in the
ocean-going gasoline yacht he had built no gay young crowd accompanied
him. Instead, his guests, with their families, were professors of
literature, history, jurisprudence, and philosophy. It was long
remembered in the university as the "high-brow" cruise. The professors,
on their return, reported a most enjoyable time. Dick returned with a
greater comprehension of the general fields of the particular
professors than he could have gained in years at their class-lectures.
And time thus gained, enabled him to continue to cut lectures and to
devote more time to laboratory work.
Nor did he miss having his good college time. College widows made love
to him, and college girls loved him, and he was indefatigable in his
dancing. He never cut a smoker, a beer bust, or a rush, and he toured
the Pacific Coast with the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
And yet he was no prodigy. He was brilliant at nothing. Half a dozen of
his fellows could out-banjo and out-mandolin him. A dozen fellows were
adjudged better dancers than he. In football, and he gained the Varsity
in his Sophomore year, he was considered a solid and dependable player,
and that was all. It seemed never his luck to take the ball and go down
the length of the field while the Blue and Gold host tore itself and
the grandstand to pieces. But it was at the end of heart-breaking,
grueling slog in mud and rain, the score tied, the second half imminent
to its close, Stanford on the five-yard line, Berkeley's ball, with two
downs and three yards to gain--it was then that the Blue and Gold arose
and chanted its demand for Forrest to hit the center and hit it hard.
He never achieved super-excellence at anything. Big Charley Everson
drank him down at the beer busts. Harrison Jackson, at hammer-throwing,
always exceeded his best by twenty feet. Carruthers out-pointed him at
boxing. Anson Burge could always put his shoulders to the mat, two out
of three, but always only by the hardest work. In English composition a
fifth of his class excelled him. Edlin, the Russian Jew, out-debated
him on the contention that property was robbery. Schultz and Debret
left him with the class behind in higher mathematics; and Otsuki, the
Japanese, was beyond all comparison with him in chemistry.
But if Dick Forrest did not excel at anything, he failed in nothing. He
displayed no superlative strength, he betrayed no weakness nor
deficiency. As he told his guardians, who, by his unrelenting good
conduct had been led into dreaming some great career for him; as he
told them, when they asked what he wanted to become:
"Nothing. Just all around. You see, I don't have to be a specialist. My
father arranged that for me when he left me his money. Besides, I
couldn't be a specialist if I wanted to. It isn't me."
And thus so well-keyed was he, that he expressed clearly his key. He
had no flare for anything. He was that rare individual, normal,
average, balanced, all-around.
When Mr. Davidson, in the presence of his fellow guardians, stated his
pleasure in that Dick had shown no wildness since he had settled down,
Dick replied:
"Oh, I can hold myself when I want to."
"Yes," said Mr. Slocum gravely. "It's the finest thing in the world
that you sowed your wild oats early and learned control."
Dick looked at him curiously.
"Why, that boyish adventure doesn't count," he said. "That wasn't
wildness. I haven't gone wild yet. But watch me when I start. Do you
know Kipling's 'Song of Diego Valdez'? Let me quote you a bit of it.
You see, Diego Valdez, like me, had good fortune. He rose so fast to be
High Admiral of Spain that he found no time to take the pleasure he had
merely tasted. He was lusty and husky, but he had no time, being too
busy rising. But always, he thought, he fooled himself with the
thought, that his lustiness and huskiness would last, and, after he
became High Admiral he could then have his pleasure. Always he
remembered:
"'--comrades--
Old playmates on new seas--
When as we traded orpiment
Among the savages--
A thousand leagues to south'ard
And thirty years removed--
They knew not noble Valdez,
But me they knew and loved.
"'Then they that found good liquor
They drank it not alone,
And they that found fair plunder,
They told us every one,
Behind our chosen islands
Or secret shoals between,
When, walty from far voyage,
We gathered to careen.
"'There burned our breaming-fagots,
All pale along the shore:
There rose our worn pavilions--
A sail above an oar:
As flashed each yearning anchor
Through mellow seas afire,
So swift our careless captains
Rowed each to his desire.
"'Where lay our loosened harness?
Where turned our naked feet?
Whose tavern mid the palm-trees?
What quenchings of what heat?
Oh fountain in the desert!
Oh cistern in the waste!
Oh bread we ate in secret!
Oh cup we spilled in haste!
"'The youth new-taught of longing,
The widow curbed and wan--
The good wife proud at season,
And the maid aware of man;
All souls, unslaked, consuming,
Defrauded in delays,
Desire not more than quittance
Than I those forfeit days!'
"Oh, get him, get him, you three oldsters, as I've got him! Get what he
saws next:
"'I dreamed to wait my pleasure,
Unchanged my spring would bide:
Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,
I put my spring aside,
Till, first in face of Fortune,
And last in mazed disdain,
I made Diego Valdez
High Admiral of Spain!'
"Listen to me, guardians!" Dick cried on, his face a flame of passion.
"Don't forget for one moment that I am anything but unslaked,
consuming. I am. I burn. But I hold myself. Don't think I am a dead one
because I am a darn nice, meritorious boy at college. I am young. I am
alive. I am all lusty and husky. But I make no mistake. I hold myself.
I don't start out now to blow up on the first lap. I am just getting
ready. I am going to have my time. I am not going to spill my cup in
haste. And in the end I am not going to lament as Diego Valdez did:
"'There walks no wind 'neath heaven
Nor wave that shall restore
The old careening riot
And the clamorous, crowded shore--
The fountain in the desert,
The cistern in the waste,
The bread we ate in secret,
The cup we spilled in haste.'
"Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him
in hot blood--square to the jaw--and drop him cold? I want that. And I
want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I
want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while I
am young, but not while I am too young. And I'm going to have it. And
in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip
myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance of
my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights."
"You mean?" queried Mr. Crockett.
"Sure. That's just what I mean. I haven't gone wild yet, but just watch
me when I start."
"And you will start when you graduate?"
The remarkable youngster shook his head.
"After I graduate I'm going to take at least a year of post-graduate
courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I'm developing a
hobby--farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My
father wasn't constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you
fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money
like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a
virgin placer--"
"My lad, I've some little experience in Californian farming," Mr.
Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.
"Sure you have, but you weren't constructive. You were--well, facts are
facts--you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you
do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil
and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of
rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed
four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four inches
under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and now you
can't get your seed back.
"You've destroyed. That's what my father did. They all did it. Well,
I'm going to take my father's money and construct. I'm going to take
worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the
plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you
fellows first farmed it."
It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned
Dick's threatened period of wildness.
"Soon as I'm done with cow college," was his answer. "Then I'm going to
buy, and stock, and start a ranch that'll be a ranch. And then I'll set
out after my careening riot."
"About how large a ranch will you start with?" Mr. Davidson asked.
"Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all
depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People
haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a
turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars
an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be worth
five hundred."
"A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million
dollars," Mr. Crockett warned gravely.
"And at fifty it means twenty-five million," Dick laughed.
But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he
threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to
go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an unthinkable
thing.
Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his
class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable
achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls
and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had
signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first
victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to
large-salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but
he hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his
team, so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven,
the Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street
in San Francisco.
In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to
laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own
lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling
expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest
world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from
his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the
University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten
thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen
thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a
five years' contract.
Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror
and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.
But this was only one of Dick Forrest's similar dissipations. He stole
from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star
specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed
the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and
broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the
University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the
wizard of farm management.
"Cheap at the price, cheap at the price," Dick explained to his
guardians. "Wouldn't you rather see me spend my money in buying
professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the
trouble with you fellows is that you don't know the game of buying
brains. I do. That's my specialty. I'm going to make money out of them,
and, better than that, I'm going to make a dozen blades of grass grow
where you fellows didn't leave room for half a blade in the soil you
gutted."
So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his
promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on
the jaw. "One year more," he warned, while he delved in agricultural
chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California with
his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only
apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick
attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and
actually embarked on his agricultural folly.
The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that
extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was
consummated.
"An incredible price," said Mr. Crockett.
"Incredibly cheap," said Dick. "You ought to see my soil reports. You
ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen,
guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the song."
Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song to
the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:
"Hu'-tim yo'-kim koi-o-di'!
Wi'-hi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
Lo'-whi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
Yo-ho' Nai-ni', hal-u'-dom yo nai, yo-ho' nai-nim'!"
"The music is my own," he murmured apologetically, "the way I think it
ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung.
The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who
made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their
last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you
bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a
certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States Pacific
Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was formed out
of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the mountain flowers
in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for you in English."
And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and
bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent, Dick
sang:
"The acorns come down from heaven!
I plant the short acorns in the valley!
I plant the long acorns in the valley!
I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"
Dick Forrest's name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling
frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in
California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His
livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government,
in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain,
quickly to be known as Forrest's Folly, paying for that kingly animal
no less than five thousand guineas.
"Let them laugh," Dick told his ex-guardians. "I am importing forty
Shire mares. I'll write off half his price the first twelvemonth. He
will be the sire and grandsire of many sons and grandsons for which the
Californians will fall over themselves to buy of me at from three to
five thousand dollars a clatter."
Dick Forrest was guilty of many similar follies in those first months
of his majority. But the most unthinkable folly of all was, after he
had sunk millions into his original folly, that he turned it over to
his experts personally to develop along the general broad lines laid
down by him, placed checks upon them that they might not go
catastrophically wrong, bought a ticket in a passenger brig to Tahiti,
and went away to run wild.
Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner and
master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the English
flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because they had
been called upon for the purchase price, because they read Dick's name
in the papers as master when his ship rescued the passengers of the
ill-fated _Orion_, and because they collected the insurance when Dick's
ship was lost with most of all hands in the great Fiji hurricane. In
1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was in Kamchatka and
scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the American flag into the
Philippines. Once, although they could never learn how nor why, he was
owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer, long since rejected by
Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.
From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from
him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to
bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon
Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which
affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was
secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the
chancellories of Europe.
Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he pulled
through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he stood trial
for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice they read in
the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle, in Mexico; and
twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false flutterings, his
guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he crossed the Yellow Sea
in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of beri-beri, was captured from
the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden, and endured military
imprisonment in Japan.
The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to
promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to
California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married
several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr.
Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of
her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in
Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had
pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he
pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in
Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the
Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best
man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's
Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S. Grant
when all the little the western world knew of that young lieutenant was
that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker player.
And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not
a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on
the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave
him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a
purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten!
Philip Desten's daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the
Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten
of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were
even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his
treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the
traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick
laughed and broke in with the disconcerting statement that they were
talking like a bunch of fanciers or eugenics cranks--which was
precisely what they were talking like, although they did not care to be
told so crassly.
At any rate, the simple fact that he had married a Desten made them nod
unqualified approbation when he showed them the plans and building
estimates of the Big House. Thanks to Paula Desten, for once they were
agreed that he was spending wisely and well. As for his farming, it was
incontestible that the Harvest Group was unfalteringly producing, and
he might be allowed his hobbies. Nevertheless, as Mr. Slocum put it:
"Twenty-five thousand dollars for a mere work-horse stallion is a
madness. Work-horses are work-horses; now had it been running stock...."