V. Madden’s Ranch
Carefully Will Holley guided his car down the steep, rock-strewn grade. “Go easy, Horace,” he murmured. Presently they were on the floor of the desert, the road but a pair of faint wheel tracks amid the creosote brush and mesquite. Once their headlights caught a jack-rabbit, sitting firmly on the right of way; the next instant he was gone forever.
Bob Eden saw a brief stretch of palm trees back of a barbed-wire fence, and down the lane between the trees the glow of a lonely window.
“Alfalfa ranch,” Will Holley explained.
“Why, in heaven’s name, do people live out here?” Eden asked.
“Some of them because they can’t live anywhere else,” the editor answered. “And at that—well, you know it isn’t a bad place to ranch it. Apples, lemons, pears—”
“But how about water?”
“It’s only a desert because not many people have taken the trouble to bore for water. Just go down a ways, and you strike it. Some go down a couple of hundred feet—Madden only had to go thirty odd. But that was Madden luck. He’s near the bed of an underground river.”
