and five-peso men when I showed them. And the same old smile and the same old itching palm, and the same old acceptability of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of the revolution. By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent robber. I said to Arranzo: 'If we shut down, here's five thousand Mexicans out of a job—what'll you do with them?' And Arranzo smiled and answered me pat. 'Do with them?' he said. 'Why, put guns in their hands and march 'em down to take Mexico City.'»
In imagination Paula could see Dick's disgusted shrug of shoulders as she heard him say:
«The curse of it is—that the stuff is there, and that we're the only fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can't do it. They haven't the brains. All they've got is the guns, and they're making us shell out more than we make. There's only one thing for us, Jeremy. We'll forget profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the engineer force on and the pumping going.»
«I threw that into Arranzo,» Jeremy Braxton's voice boomed. «And what was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he'd see to it that the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to us.—No, he didn't say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant the same thing. For two cents I'd a-wrung his yellow neck, except that there'd have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next day proposing a stiffer gouge.
«So Arranzo got his 'bit,' and, on top of it, before he went across to join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three hundred of our mules—thirty thousand dollars' worth of mule-flesh right there, after I'd sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!»
«Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?» Paula heard her husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old time tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and proceeding to action.
«Raoul Bena.»
«What's his rank?»
«Colonel—he's got about seventy ragamuffins.»
«What did he do before he quit work?»
«Sheep-herder.»
«Very well.» Dick's utterance was quick and sharp. «You've got to
play-act. Become a patriot. Hike back as fast as God will let you.
Sweeten this Raoul Bena. He'll see through your play, or he's no
Mexican. Sweeten him and tell him you'll make him a general—-a second
Villa.»
«Lord, Lord, yes, but how?» Jeremy Braxton demanded.
«By putting him at the head of an army of five thousand. Lay off the men. Make him make them volunteer. We're safe, because Huerta is doomed. Tell him you're a real patriot. Give each man a rifle. We'll stand that for a last gouge, and it will prove you a patriot. Promise every man his job back when the war is over. Let them and Raoul Bena depart with your blessing. Keep on the pumping force only. And if we cut out profits for a year or so, at the same time we are cutting down losses. And perhaps we won't have to flood old Harvest after all.»
Paula smiled to herself at Dick's solution as she stole back down the spiral on her way to the music room. She was depressed, but not by the Harvest Group situation. Ever since her marriage there had always been trouble in the working of the Mexican mines Dick had inherited. Her depression was due to her having missed her morning greeting to him. But this depression vanished at meeting Graham, who had lingered with Ware at the piano and who, at her coming, was evidencing signs of departure.
«Don't run away,» she urged. «Stay and witness a spectacle of industry that should nerve you up to starting on that book Dick has been telling me about.»
CHAPTER XVI
On Dick's face, at lunch, there was no sign of trouble over the Harvest Group; nor could anybody have guessed that Jeremy Braxton's visit had boded anything less gratifying than a report of unfailing earnings. Although Adolph Weil had gone on the early morning train, which advertised that the business which had brought him had been transacted with Dick at some unheard of hour, Graham discovered a greater company than ever at the table. Besides a Mrs. Tully, who seemed a stout and elderly society matron, and whom Graham could not make out, there were three new men, of whose identity he gleaned a little: a Mr. Gulhuss, State Veterinary; a Mr. Deacon, a portrait painter of evident note on the Coast; and a Captain Lester, then captain of a Pacific Mail liner, who had sailed skipper for Dick nearly twenty years before and who had helped Dick to his navigation.
The meal was at its close, and the superintendent was glancing at his watch, when Dick said:
«Jeremy, I want to show you what I've been up to. We'll go right now.
You'll have time on your way to the train.»
«Let us all go,» Paula suggested, «and make a party of it. I'm dying to see it myself, Dick's been so obscure about it.»
Sanctioned by Dick's nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses the next moment.
«What is it?» Graham queried, when she had finished.
«Oh, one of Dick's stunts. He's always after something new. This is an invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming—that is, small farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven't seen it set up yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable or something concerning an adjustment.»
«There's billions in it… if it works,» Dick smiled over the table. «Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty for me… if it works.»
«But what is it?» O'Hay asked. «Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly?»
«Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch,» Dick baffled back. «In fact, the labor- eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre farmer between here and Jericho.»
In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres.
«Behold,» he said, «the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch.»
In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet in height and guyed very low.
From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.
«This is the porch,» Dick said. «Just imagine we're all that future farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the manless, horseless plowing goes on.»
Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center winding up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by the cable, turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or, rather, an inward trending spiral about the field.
«No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way,» Dick exulted, as the uncanny mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field's center. «Plow, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize, cultivate, harvest—all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her pie-crust.»
«All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect,» Graham praised, «is to square the circle.»
«Yes,» Mr. Gulhuss agreed. «As it is, a circle in a square field loses some acreage.»
Graham's face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when he announced: «Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten.»
«Sure,» Dick concurred. «But the farmer has to have his front porch somewhere on his ten acres. And the
