Blaze was addicted to rhetorical extravagance.  His voice was loud; his fancy ran a splendid course.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “you-all interest me with your talk about your prize Northern stock; but I claim that the bigger the state the bigger the cattle it raises.  That’s why old Texas beats the world.”

“But it doesn’t,” some one contradicted.

“It don’t, hey?  My boy”—­Blaze jabbed a rigid finger into the speaker’s ribs, as if he expected a ground-squirrel to scuttle forth—­“we’ve got steers in this valley that are damn near the size of the whole state of Rhode Island.  If they keep on growin’ I doubt if you could fatten one of ’em in Delaware without he’d bulge over into some neighboring commonwealth.  It’s the God’s truth!  I was up at Las Palmas last month—­”

“Las Palmas!” The name was enough to challenge the buyers’ interest.

Blaze nodded.  “You-all think you know the stock business.  You’re all swollen up with cow-knowledge, now, ain’t you?” He eyed them from beneath his black eyebrows.  “Well, some of our people thought they did, too.  They figured they’d inherited all there was to know about live stock, and they grew plumb arrogant over their wisdom.  But—­pshaw!  They didn’t know nothing.  Miz Austin has bred in that Brayma strain and made steers so big they run four to the dozen.  And here’s the remarkable thing about ’em—­they ’ain’t got as many ticks as you gentlemen.”

Some of the cattlemen were incredulous, but Blaze maintained his point with emphasis.  “It’s true.  They’re a grave disappointment to every kind of parasite.”

But Alaire had not confined her efforts to cattle; she had improved the breed of “Box A” horses, too, and hand in hand with this work she had carried on a series of agricultural experiments.

Las Palmas, so people used to say, lay too far up the river to be good farming-land; nevertheless, once the pumping-plant was in, certain parts of the ranch raised nine crops of alfalfa, and corn that stood above a rider’s head.

There was no money in “finished” stock; the border was too far from market—­that also had long been an accepted truism—­yet this woman built silos which she filled with her own excess fodder in scientific proportions, and somehow or other she managed to ship fat beeves direct to the packing-houses and get big prices for them.

These were but a few of her many ventures.  She had her hobbies, of course, but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so.  For instance, she had started a grove of paper-shelled pecans, which was soon due to bear; the ranch house and its clump of palms was all but hidden by a forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen everything from moth-balls to bicycle tires.  Blaze Jones was perhaps responsible for this report, for Alaire had shown him several thousand eucalyptus saplings and some ornamental rubber-plants.

“That Miz Austin is a money-makin’ piece of furniture,” he once told his daughter Paloma.  “I’m no mechanical adder—­I count mostly on my fingers—­but her and me calculated the profits on them eucher—­what’s-their-name trees?—­and it gave me a splittin’ headache.  She’ll be a drug queen, sure.”