He drew his hand over his smooth, close-cut, dark hair and took a long draught from his glass of ice-water.  “I can’t make you understand how I felt about it,” he went on, “but that two thousand was the price of my father’s ranch over near the Columbia.  It stood for years of privation, heart-breaking toil, and disappointment—­the worst kind.  Two seasons of drouth we saw the whole wheat crop blister and go to ruin.  I carried water in buckets from the river up to that plateau day after day, just to keep our home garden and a little patch of grass alive.  And mother carried too up that breaking slope in the desert sun.  It was thinking of that made me—­ all in.  She worked the same way with the stock.  Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft.  It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother.  She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed.  It was just the thing.  She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish.  And we, Dad and I, didn’t know what it was costing her—­till she was gone.”

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