For days Rawley watched the might of the rushing Colorado and wondered at the temerity of men who would calmly plan to check its headlong progress to the sea. A splendid dream, he was compelled to own; a dream worthy a better man than old Jess Cramer. But every man must have one vision of great things during his life, else he would lack the spark of immortality. He may distort the vision to baser depths, but to each life is given one dream, one glimpse into the realm of beautiful possibilities. So Jess Cramer had dreamed his dream, had seen his vision, and had held aside the curtain so that others might see.
It interested Rawley in his days of helplessness to observe the reactions of that dream upon the diverse natures that dwelt within the basin. Old Jess Cramer had become a vulture in human form, his whole soul enslaved by the greed fostered by his individual conception of the vision. Rawley could look at the river and picture Old Jess down in its slimy bed of mud bars, rocks and groping streamlets, wildly scrabbling amongst the gravel and stones for the gold his insatiable soul craved. He pictured Old Jess gloating over his gold, weighing it in his hands, stupidly goggling without the wit to give it for what pleasures his spent old life could still enjoy.
Young Jess, too, had pulled the splendid vision down to his dull understanding. Young Jess, low-browed, sullen, would like to throw the gold with both hands into the lap of brutish gratifications. Young Jess was a gambler by nature, Rawley gleaned. He must never be let loose in a town, because he would have to be hauled out in a drunken torpor, his pockets empty, his credit strained, his soul fresh blotted by vice. Young Jess had “sprees”; from Gladys Rawley learned that. So Young Jess was kept on a leash of family watchfulness.
“When we make our big clean-up,” Gladys confided from the bench on the screened porch, her baby nursing desultorily in its sleep, “Jess has gotta give me half of his share fast as he rakes it in. I’m going to have Peter see’t he does that—or we’ll be broke ag’in in no time. I’m going to put it where he can’t git his fingers on it to gamble, you bet! And he runs with women—that sure makes the money fly! But I guess they’ll be two of us, at that!” she tittered. “I ain’t so old yet I can’t git up some speed—give me some decent clothes and di’mon’s. I’m going to Salt Lake, an’ I’m going to have me the biggest car they is on the market. My folks is got a car, down to Needles—”
Anita,—Rawley was long in learning what was Anita’s bright, particular vision. One day he asked her outright, since he could not lead her to talk about her expectations in a general way. And straightway he was humbled and ashamed.
Anita looked at him stolidly, turned her great bulk and stared down at the river hurrying by in the midday sunlight. She lifted a hand to her eyes and stared out from beneath the flat of her brown palm.
“Gol’—if it can buy me back—t’ings I have love’—t’ings I have los’ long time ago,” she murmured. “Gol’—it don’t buy young body—pretty face—voice to sing like a bird. Gol’ don’t give back my girl—modder of Nevada. Pah-h!” She spat at the river contemptuously. “W’at I care for gol’?”
Nevada,—to her the dream was a splendid vision indeed. To her it was achievement—success—the open door through which she might pass to a glorified future. Nevada, when pressed, admitted that she loved pretty things—“And then, the world is so full of people who want to be helped!”
Rawley nodded. “I know. I’ve felt that.”
“And if there is gold to be had, so that they can be helped, I think it’s wicked not to use every ounce of energy we possess to get it, so that we can use it,” she declared with more enthusiasm than Rawley had ever seen her show. “When it’s fought for, just for sake of self-indulgence, it ought to be fought for in the interests of good. I’d found a home for—well, almost anybody that needed it. And I want so to travel, Fifth Cousin! I don’t mean to spend more than two or three millions, just myself. I’m afraid I might grow reckless and extravagant. So I shall only hold out three million, at the most, for my own personal needs. The rest I shall give away.” Whereupon she laughed at him.
“You don’t really expect to be a lady billionaire?” Nevada sobered. “It’s such a big, untamed land,” she dreamed aloud, her young eyes on the river, as Anita’s had been. “If you don’t dream splendidly, you somehow feel that you’re too small for the desert. It’s a land of splendid visions, Fifth Cousin. Never mind if they don’t come true. They’re like the sunsets and the sunrises. They live, and they die, and they live again, on and on—forever.” She lifted a tanned, rounded arm and pointed away to the floating, hazy blue of the horizon.
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Can you look at that and think small? Why, every old prospector who follows a burro along the desert trail has his visions. The dim distances promise him heart’s desire. Why else would he keep going? He’s a millionaire—in his dreams. The next gulch may change his vision to reality. Think how the Spaniards came dreaming up this very river, as long ago as when Washington was praying for boots at Valley Forge! What brought them, but the splendid dreams—their visions of what lay over the next hill?”
Her gaze dropped to the river. Just as every other adult member of the Cramer family looked at the hurrying water, so Nevada gazed and saw—not lost youth and lost love, as did Anita, but the splendid future that would be hers when the river gave up its hoarded gold. She smiled and forgot to speak. Her vision held her entranced.
Peter’s dream was very like Nevada’s. Peter, as Rawley knew, exulted over the achievement itself; the constructive thinking that left the beaten path of thought and plunged boldly into the realm of unguessed possibilities. The taming of a river that called itself untamable meant more to Peter than to Nevada, even. The gold would be his just reward for having dared to achieve the improbable.
Peter also craved emancipation from the petty round of his isolated life. Around the world Peter would sail and learn of other lands and other peoples and the problems which Fate had set them to solve. Peter was willing to divert a part of his gold to the welfare of his fellow men, but he did not dream of that as did Nevada. The building of the dam, the actual getting of the gold, the splendid hazards of the undertaking, these things set Peter’s indigo-blue eyes alight with the flame of his enthusiasm.
So even the tribe of Cramer dreamed, each according to the quality of his soul. And Rawley knew why his Uncle Peter stayed and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with men whose half-relationship humiliated and embittered him. He knew why Nevada chose to remain here, in an environment ludicrously unsuitable, inharmonious. Indian and white, they held, in various forms, the same vision. There was something fine, something splendid in their even daring to dream.