There was another silence. In the orchestra, out beyond the palms and screens of the Venetian room, the first violin was playing the _Humoresque_. The girl leaned forward slightly, watching Jimmie's face. Her lips were parted, and an unexpected sympathy softened her eyes.
"She had been a school teacher back in Iowa," he resumed, "and long winter evenings and Sundays when she could, she always had her books out. Up to the year I was twenty, she taught me all I knew. She tried her best to make a man of me, and I can see now how she turned my mind to journalism. She said some day there was going to be an opening for a newspaper right there in the Columbia desert. Where a great river received the waters of another big stream, there was bound to be a city. She saw farther than we did. The High Line canal was only a pipe dream then, but she believed it would come true. When she died, we hadn't the heart to stay on with the ranch, so Dad gave it to me, to sell for what I could get, and went back to Iowa. He said he had promised her he would give me a chance at the State University, and that was the best he could do. And, well, you see I had to come to the U. of W. to stay, and I was used to work. I did all sorts of stunts out of hours and managed to pull through the second semester. Then I hiked over the mountains to the Wenatchee valley and earned enough that summer vacation to tide me over the next year. I had a friend there in the sage-brush country, a station agent named Bailey, who had blown a thousand dollars into a tract of desert land he hadn't seen off the map. He was the kind of fellow to call himself all kinds of a fool, then go ahead and make that ground pay his money back. He saw a way to bring it under irrigation and had it cleared and set to apples. But, while he was waiting for the trees to grow, he put in fillers of alfalfa and strawberries. He was operating for the new Milwaukee railroad then, and hired me to harvest his crops. They paid my wages and the two Japs I had to help, with a snug profit. And his trees were doing fine; thrifty, every one in the twenty acres. Last year they began to bear, only a few apples to a tree, but for flavor and size fit for Eden. This year he is giving up his position with the Milwaukee; his orchards are going to make him rich. And he wrote me the other day that the old ranch I threw away is coming under the new High Line ditch. The company that bought it has platted it into fruit tracts. Think-of that! Trees growing all over that piece of desert. Water running to waste, where mother and I carried it in buckets through the sand, in the sweltering heat, up that miserable slope."