Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/101

Rh of Lake of the Woods by local enterprise and capital. There were other matters he talked of, the improving of grade stock, the importation of good bulls for that purpose and an ultimate end of making Chico Mesa a headquarters for the shipment of thoroughbred, one-purpose beef cattle; fed on alfalfa grown from the mesa-soil, seven crops to the year. There would be a Chico Mesa Cattle Shippers' Association, strong enough to obtain cars when they needed them, a stockyards-agent, a financial manager, a hundred details that were still in the background. And, with them all, went the clearance of Metzal from the crowd that now controlled it, grafting officials and small politicians. All these he worked out in his own mind, not all of them he mentioned. He knew he had to go slowly to start a co-operative plan among men who represented several racial types, slow and fast thinking, suspicious each of the other's motive and possible advantage.

If Sheridan could come to them with gifts in his hands, with Lake of the Woods developed, the water ready to turn into the laterals from a main ditch, they might listen to him. He realized that in such a community a one-man directorship was best for the public good until such time as common law and common wealth might be fairly well established. The deeper he went into the plan the more questions he was asked that could not be immediately answered, matters of expert engineering that Sheridan builded upon faith but which, with his own limited experience, would not stand the