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V.

A CONFLICT OF SCHOOLS.

A TELEGRAM from Mr. Norrisson, awaiting Philip on his return from the cañon, announced the manager's return by train that night, bringing guests for whom rooms were to be prepared. The prompt wording of the despatch was like. the click of a latch-key preceding his father's stamp in the hall. In his sleep that night he felt the hot breath of the cañon wind again upon his sunburned face. He sighed and tossed, and presently he was forcing his horse up those tottering rock-slides, slipping and falling, with a din of waters in his ears. Again it was along the brink of the bluffs he picked his way, and woke with a strong start as the footing dropped off and left him facing an abyss, the booming of the river confusing his senses. Later in the night he labored through a conversation with Alan that he felt to be critical, yet in which he was singularly helpless to say the right word. He attempted a comparative analysis of the genius of their respective fathers; he gave Alan good advice, and promised to assist him in his studies; to all of which Dolly seemed to listen, with sweet eyes of approval lingering upon him. Great was Philip's relief, on waking, to find that none of these utterances were actually on record against him; yet he was loath to part with those tender dream-glances which the unconscious Dolly had given him, in the lawless travesty of sleep.

The air had changed to the chill of early morning. Carriages were rolling through the streets; one stopped, and Philip heard hushed sounds of an arrival in some distant part of the house. It was after this that he fell into his first deep slumber, which held him long past the breakfast hour. He was introduced to his father's guests only as the carriage drove up to take the party, including Mr. Norrisson, away; where, or for how long, Philip was not informed. "Does my father give a dinner to-night?" he asked, chancing toward evening to pass through the dining-room, where Wong, in full starched panoply, was laying the table for six. "Little dinner. Not muchee people. Two lady."

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What time dinner?" "Same time. Ha' pa' six."

"You will take in Miss Summercamp," Mr. Norrisson posted Philip, in the library, where they met before dinner. "She is a very pretty girl, though, I suspect, a trifle spoiled. The Summercamps have had hard luck with their children- this is the last one of five, and it's a pity, for there is plenty of money."

"Have I heard you speak of the Summercamps before?”

"Possibly not. The ladies came in with us

last night; they are stopping at the Transcontinental. Summercamp wants to go in on the new scheme, and his wife and daughter will take up a desert section apiece."

"Under Dunsmuir's ditch?" Philip inquired, surprised at the progress affairs were making.

"Under our ditch. We shall have the contractors here next week, or week after, to look over the work. The estimates must be ready for them. I must have a talk with you about that."

"And how have you managed with Dunsmuir?"

"Haven't approached him yet, directly. Our man in London has seen the people Dunsmuir has been working with. He had got things in very good shape; but our man put them on to the situation here, and they have concluded they don't want to buy a fight. It is the game we have worked before; but Dunsmuir has never before been so near the close of a bargain. It will cinch him, I expect. These men are his own crowd. He will never get a better hearing, and he knows it. When he's had time to think over their alternative, we will step in with an offer which he 'll be forced to take. He has banked on this scheme about as long as he can. There 's nothing left but the personal pull on men that he has n't paid; and, if I'm not mistaken, Dunsmuir 's too proud a man to try to make that go."

Messrs. Leete and Maynard entered the room, and Philip heard no more at the time of his father's strategy.

The ladies were unfeignedly late. They had spent half an hour, they said, beating the dust from their traveling-dresses, to make themselves tolerably fit for a dinner-table. Both, in a breath, began praising the house "Such a lovely house to be wasted on a couple of men!"

"Planned and built and furnished by men, Mrs. Summercamp," Mr. Norrisson retorted.

Ah, but when you plan and build and furnish for yourselves, do you do it like this? You need not tell me there is no Mrs. Norrisson!"

Mrs. Summercamp approached her host on his domestic side with the fearlessness of a woman happy in her own relations.

"I hear there is a very charming Mrs. Norrisson," Mr. Maynard interposed, with flattering emphasis.

"There is," said that lady's husband, imperturbably; "but she looks upon this house as a sort of caravansary for the convenience of first-class tourists, like yourselves. It 's rather too far inland to suit her."

"But she comes sometimes ?"

"Well — she is waiting till we get rid of the smoke of the sage-brush bonfires.'

"Why, I don't think it is at all noticeable,"

said Mrs. Summercamp, amiably surprised at this novel objection to the country. "Is it considered unhealthy?" There was a general laugh, and Mr. Norrisson admitted that he had been somewhat figurative in his reference to the virgin crop of the desert.

The dinner went forward as the dinners of a man of experience do. It was a trifle too elaborate, perhaps, but it suited the house and the host, and the ladies frankly enjoyed the display in their honor. The men discussed locations for water-power on the line of the new canal, probable town-sites and railroad-stations, and joked the ladies about their artless behavior in the land office, when asked to declare their intentions as desert settlers. The four travelers appeared to be old friends and to know one another's plans. There were frequent references to Mr. Summercamp as “ papa,” in a style of easy comradeship, and Miss Summercamp openly guyed her mother with fond impertinence, as if they were girls of one age. She was a pretty little coquette, with large eyes, deceptively solemn. She looked scarcely more than sixteen, whereas in the land office she had calmly sworn to twenty-five.

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"I hope we shall have a nice day to-morrow for our picnic," she remarked to Philip.

He inquired, with polite interest, where the picnic was to be.

"Now, Mr. Norrisson," exclaimed Miss Summercamp, turning from Philip to his father, "what sort of an arrangement is this you have been putting up on us? Here is your son perfectly unconscious there 's to be a picnic, still less that he's expected to take care of us, and show us the way!

"My dear young lady, my son was not on hand this morning in time to go with us to look at the lands; and so he was n't aware there were any charming desert settlers in the party, and could n't offer his own services; so I did what I hold to be a father's duty-put in his bid for him. Was n't that right? I'll own it was bad of me to forget to tell him this evening before you arrived; but in the matter of the invitation my conscience is clear. Consider how seldom such chances occur! Is a poor young fellow to be knocked out because he happens to oversleep himself? Not while he has a father to look out for him.”

"Well, I consider the whole business canceled from this moment," cried Miss Summercamp. "I don't accept invitations by proxy." "As a trifling matter of fact, Estelle, it was your mother who accepted," suggested quiet Mr. Leete.

"Well, mama may go if she chooses, but she will have to leave her daughter behind. Mr. Norrisson has trifled with my vanity in a way that can't be overlooked."

Philip submitted, with all due gratitude to his father, that his own vanity was in a more trampled condition than even Miss Summercamp's; and proposed the picnic should start afresh, with invitations at first hand.

"Now you 're talkin'," said the young lady, lightly, dropping into slang; "but remember, the place must be the same. I don't know that anybody has mentioned that we are going to a place in a cañon called Dunsmuir's Location." Nobody had, and Philip, taken by surprise, could not at once conceal his consternation; the cañon being the last place where he would have chosen to exhibit himself as Miss Summercamp's vassal, even of a summer's day. The idea struck him as a sort of comical profanation. "Behold the victim writhe," said she. "He can't hide his sufferings now the thing begins to look as if there was no getting out of it."

Neither could the young lady altogether hide the note of vexation in her voice. Her mother looked uncomfortable; and Mr. Norrisson tactfully turned to her with some commonplace about the next day's arrangements, taking it for granted that all was going forward as before.

Miss Summercamp quickly recovered herself, and graciously accepted Philip's offer to go with the party in the impersonal character of driver, since she would put no faith in his professions as a cavalier. The ladies took an early leave, escorted by their friends, who had telegrams to send out that night. The father and son were alone in the library, smoking their bedtime cigars.

"You must be tired," said Philip, observing the change in his father's features, from which the society smile had vanished, as a frugal host puts out the extra lights when the hall door closes upon company.

Mr. Norrisson passed over the remark with the abrupt question: "You were up the river yesterday, I hear, to look at the location?" "I saw it, from a distance."

"It shows what it is a natural dam-site, rock bottom and all."

"Is it known whether the rock bottom is

continuous?" asked Philip. "There is one spot, in the middle, where the water boils up in a curious way. How does it look when the river is low?"

"The river is never so low over that spot, nor so quiet, that you can see what the channel bed is made of. Dunsmuir was never satisfied on that point. There was another — the capacity of the waste-weir. In every other particular his design for the head-works was complete. I have copies of his plans and drawings for the works. I wish you would look them over now, pretty soon, and, if you like his design, carry it out; and I'll give you help about

working up the specifications. Or, if you can improve on it, why, of course, we want the latest advices. Engineering must have advanced some since Dunsmuir laid out his scheme."

Do you mean, sir," asked Philip, in sheer amazement, "that you expect me to take charge of the building of the head-works in the cañon?"

"Certainly. What did you suppose I brought you over here for? To carry a chain ?"

"But that is work for an engineer-in-chief of the first class; and I should not rank, on the government corps, above the grade of ingénieur ordinaire !"

"You are not working for the French government; you are working for me. You will have my advice in practice, and my knowledge of organization to help you, and I shall give you as good a consulting engineer as the country affords. I must have an engineer who will push things as I want him to— no buts, and ifs, and cheeky conditions. The conditions of this scheme nobody is going to dictate but myself. They are matters of finance first, and engineering afterward."

Philip was aware from a certain violence of manner that his father was arguing on a sore point, one on which he had learned to expect opposition. He got up from the table, where he felt cramped under observation, and went over to the fireplace. It was decorated with a mass of yellow and white azaleas in a blue Leeds pot, within the tiled jambs; the whole darkly reflected in the black marble hearth-slab. Philip stooped and picked up a petal that had fallen, rolling it in his cold fingers as he talked. "I should have supposed that Dunsmuir would build the head-works. No one could carry out his plans so well as himself; and by this time he must have the facts he needed: he must have tabulated the river's rise and fall for every season he has watched it, and sounded every inch of the bottom. Those two points you speak of are the vital points in constructron, I need not remind you. If time is an obJeet, Dunsmuir has had plenty of it. No one, not the best man in the profession, could come in here and decide those two points off-hand." "We need not discuss Dunsmuir's place on the work, my son. He is not going on it at all in a position of authority. That shall be my first condition when we come to terms on the Compromise. I can't work with Dunsmuir. I could n't when he was fifteen years younger and suppler than he is now. If you are in charge I expect you will defer on practical questions to the manager, and on technical ones the manager will defer to you; but the practical questions shall come first."

"I should call the size of the waste-weir, in a country without records of rainfall, a practi

cal question of the first magnitude in the building of a dam."

"There are records-just as good as public records; only Dunsmuir would never take any man's word for a fact unless he knew him to be a trained specialist in that particular line of observation. I can find plenty of old miners and log-drivers up and down this river who can give you the average flood-discharge of the Wallula for the last twenty-five years just as close as you could come to it with your scientific apparatus. Talk of training! Haven't they got eyes and ears-those fellows, trained like the beavers and the muskrats? Don't they stay on top of the earth by using the faculties nature gave them? When they make a mistake the penalty is death."

"Still, as a matter of experience," said Philip, pleased but not moved by his father's rhetoric, "testimony of that sort has not always been found trustworthy."

"Always, no; no testimony is always trustworthy."

"I find here among your blue-books a case in point, the chief engineer's report on the breaking of the Kali Nadi aqueduct—a most pathetic, manly document. He had no data on which to base his calculations but hearsay and the look of things; the records had been destroyed in the last Indian mutiny. And he made a mistake which cost the Government an unmentionable sum of money, and to a man of his reputation must have been worse than death."

"My dear boy, the Kali Nadi aqueduct be hanged! If we listened to all those tales of heroic failures, and counted the cost of them as so much likely to come out of our own pockets, there would n't be any need of ditches. The men who settled up this country did n't wait to hear about the failures; they went ahead, somehow, and did what they had to do. Our conditions here are no more mysterious than in hundreds of places in the West where big works have gone through — without records, without time to hunt up even such testimony as you despise-simply because they had to. The people could n't wait for a sure thing. Some of them were failures, but more of 'em have stood. I am not taking any serious chances on this scheme, mind you, though I have taken my share of chances, and maybe I've had more than my share of luck. I know what I 'm offering you, and I am sorry you have n't the nerve to make the venture. I suppose it's the aim of your schools to lower a man's conceit of himself, but the modest layout can be overdone. I am not asking you, now, how little you know about engineering."

Philip looked down and trifled with the loop of his watch-guard. "Every one must work in

his own way," he said. "I am not prepared, myself, to take the plunge in the dark which seems to be called for here. Modesty is perhaps too charitable a name for it."

"Is it partly some scruple about Dunsmuir?" Mr. Norrisson asked. Philip did not reply.

"You are too fine-spun," said his father, observing him; "but I don't blame you. The school is everything."

"I am sorry you don't like my school." "I do like it. It is a school I could never afford to work in myself, but if my son can, why, so much has been done for the improvement of the race."

"I hope you will believe how it pains me to disappoint you, sir. I hoped to show myself equal to whatever work you intended me for; but I had n't an idea so much would be expected."

"You are wrong, Philip-thinking I expect so much; I don't place this responsibility upon you alone. Don't you understand I intend to back you, straight through, with my experience? It looks to me more like distrust of your father than of yourself, this bashfulness of yours."

It was a difficult position for Philip; but he thought it altogether due his father that he should be answered with plainness equal to his own.

"Frankly," he said, "I should prefer to make my maiden venture under a professional engineer; but a chief's place I could not take under any man. I had rather work up to it, and hold it alone. Between Dunsmuir's design and my father's experience I should be a poor figure of a chief."

"I concluded there was pride, as well as modesty, at the bottom of it. The young Westerner is a more conservative man than his father, more careful of himself in every way. He can afford to pick his steps and take his time; but, by the Lord, he owes it to his father that he can."

Philip responded with such heartiness as the conversation had left him master of. He was a prouder man than his father, although his training had made him less self-confident. It was bitter to be judged by standards for which he had not been taught the highest respect; and the fact that his father was such a power in practical affairs, had done so much where he had done nothing, made his refusal to coöperate with him seem an exhibition of stupid, irrational, boyish conceit. They shook hands for the night earnestly, dissembling the slight chill of estrangement which both felt. Each had begun to analyze the other, comforting himself for the sense of mutual unlikeness, on the old theory of types inseparable from the generation which has produced them.

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My father is a man of resources, of practical foresight, of courage in combination; in a word, a born promoter," Philip asserted, in answer to the sad whisper which said, "You can never trust him as a counselor, nor yield him unquestioning obedience as a chief."

Mr. Norrisson put away from him, as he had done many another bitterness, the discovery that his son was a man of the Dunsmuir type, a stubborn, fastidious "obstructionist," a stickler for impossible ideals. But he never allowed himself to dwell upon a disappointment; it tended to weaken that nerve upon which he depended, as a professional man depends upon conviction, and the soundness of his method.

VI.

CAPITALISTS IN THE CAÑON.

THE effect of the cañon upon Miss Summercamp was to rouse in her a vivid and very practical curiosity as to the resident family; a phase of liveliness which her mother was too indolent or too indulgent to attempt to check, although it might have been seen to annoy their young host in his unsought part of showman. Miss Summercamp had caught sight of Alan picturesquely engaged in fishing from the rocks, a boyish pretense for the sake of seeing and being seen of a very striking young lady visitor, strolling with her friends on the sands below. As the group drew near, he recognized Philip, and snatched off his cap in greeting; but Philip managed to get his party headed another way. Miss Summercamp perceived that he was bent on frustrating her whenever she manoeuvered for a nearer view of the inmates of that queer, low house on the hill, the "asylum," she named it," for victims of a scheme." Partly for teasing, and more because she resented his indifference to her pleasure, she set herself to gain her end in spite of him. She had heard, she said, that the Dunsmuirs were all cranks. The young man in the pink shirt did not look a crank; he was merely a beauty. Why could n't they ask him to show them that much-talked-of spot called "Dunsmuir's Location"? It was pointed out straight beyond her, but she could see nothing but two low, black buttes seated on opposite shores of the river. Still, it was interesting to know that a dam was " "going in " there, and that water for her desert claim would eventually flow through the big cut, where they had lunched after the manner of picnickers, though without the festal paperbag or beer-bottle left behind in token of their visit. Philip had been respectful to the place, nor did he vauntingly prophesy concerning the future canal; this he left to Messrs. Leete and Maynard, who had been posted by his father.

Miss Summercamp declined to drink the

warmish river-water; she would not accept any of the substitutes provided; apollinaris, claret, ginger-ale, she would none of them. Philip offered to fetch her some of the creek-water which came down the gulch above the house, and it pleased the young lady to go with him. The favor of her company he could not refuse, although he imagined she had an ulterior purpose in offering it. After a hot walk they rounded the wire fence, and came upon a clear pool some distance above Dunsmuir's boundaries. But this water, also, she refused to drink. It was tepid; it tasted of cattle; the pool was lined with decayed leaves.

"How very squeamish you seem to be about those people; one would think you were here to look out for them instead of us," she complained. "Are they really so peculiar that one may not ask for a glass of ice-water at the door?"

"I will ask for one, certainly. This is the first time you have mentioned ice-water."

"Are you going to leave me here to be hooked to death by wild cattle ? "

"There is not a pair of horns in sight." "A hundred will rise up the moment you get on the other side the fence. I declare, you treat me exactly as a bad brother treats a helpless little sister. I 've a great mind to be one, and just tag you wherever you go."

"Very well," said Philip; " stick to your part, and I'll try to do justice to mine."

"But goodness! I cannot go as fast as that," she called after him, as he strode down the gulch.

"Bad brothers never wait for little sisters who tag," Philip answered. Nevertheless he did wait, and with gibes and laughter, and some ill humor on Philip's side, they arrived at length at a small gate in the fence, close to a circle of poplars which guarded some invisible retreat.

"Now," said Philip, opening the gate, "it will be perfectly safe for you to proceed. One is quite enough to ask for that glass of water, and bad brothers never wait upon their sisters if they can help it."

"You overdo the part," Miss Summercamp objected; "brothers are never so consistently

bad."

"You have dubbed me; I am merely the creature of your fancy."

Miss Summercamp went through the gate alone, leaving it open, however, on the chance of Philip's changing his mind. He did so, after a little, not knowing how far her freak might carry her. The gate of the cañon garden led to the poplar alley, at the upper end of which the explorers had come out. Dunsmuir had modeled this feature of his plantation after the lady's walk at a small hacienda where he had

once spent a night on one of his southern journeys. This was before he had a lady of his own, but not before he had dreams wherewith to people such a moonlighted vista as that which he paced, alone, under the black-ash trees of Mexico templada. He had been forced to substitute poplars for his lady of the north; otherwise he had faithfully copied the little deserted calzada, even to the glorieta at the top of it, where the trees, opening in a circle, inclosed two stone benches that faced each other, in an appealing silence and emptiness, on opposite sides of a dry fountain. As if invoked by the spell of that resemblance he had fondly sought, silence had taken possession, and the stone benches held only drifts of yellow leaves.

When Dolly Dunsmuir first set up housekeeping with her dolls in the cañon arbor, and Alan occasionally consented to visit her, the sunken tank of the fountain was filled with dead leaves, and the white-painted urn was dingy and choked with dust. The following spring saw both children busy filling up the tank with earth, and planting it with such hardy perennials as they could beg from their father's beds. These, coming up in due time, brimmed the useless basin with life and color, while the urn overflowed with garlands of white and purple clematis. When Dunsmuir saw what the children were doing, he surreptitiously added to their humble collection a regal Lilium Auratum for his girl-gardener, and a "giant of battles" rose for the boy. Before many seasons both rose and lily were left to Dolly's tending. Alan had stepped forth into his bold teens, and took no more interest in gardening. He had fitted up a bower of his own,-the cave underneath the bluffs,-whence he could look afar and downward, and spy the cattle on the hills, and hoot and howl to his heart's content. But Dolly remained faithful to the place of their childish trysts. It was her out-door chamber of dreams, where she sat and mused with idle hands and bright, unseeing eyes. When the dream grew too strong, and pushed her hard, she would walk round and round, like a somnambulist, her face alight, her lips moving. What she whispered at such moments she would have died, girlishly speaking, sooner than have confessed. There was little heart in these dreams and not much real imagination; only the young instinct to people empty walls with pictures of action: and Dolly's fancy was limited by the material her narrow life and her reading supplied. The cañon could not make a genius of Dolly, neither could it spoil her for a happy woman.

The morning of the picnic being a Saturday, she had given her beautiful long hair its weekly washing, and now she had retired to the arbor, with a lapful of mending to employ the

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