Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/218

206 He bought in a slope of the sagebrush foothills back of the town, and bore much good humoured joking from his friends. His refusal to explain himself ended by fastening upon him the rumour of fantastic projects, for nobody could imagine any possible use for that waste and worthless land. As a matter of cold fact Boyd was himself a little vague on that subject. He got it very cheap, for almost nothing; he believed enthusiastically in the ultimate expansion of Arguello; certainly the view out over the valley, the town, to the wide slumbering Pacific But Boyd was a shrewd business man, with plenty of leisure and an enquiring and restless mind. He rode often on his horse up over the slope of his new purchase, sometimes alone, sometimes with Saxon or Marcus Oberman or others of his winter cronies. They called it his Horned Toad Ranch, not that anyone had ever seen a horned toad there, but it was considered that horned toads represented the only possibility. Boyd grinned and replied in kind. But one day he dropped into Spinner's office with an idea.

"Know those boulders up on the Tract, the ones near the little grove of live oaks at the head of the barranca?" he asked. "Well, they're an outcrop of a ledge down below; and the stuff is a real fine-grained sandstone. Makes the best building material I know of. There's a quarry of it there."

"There's mighty little demand for building stone here," said Spinner. "And the whole range is made of that sort of rock."

"Nobody's getting any of it out: and this is the nearest to town. People use quite a little for one thing and another—foundations and garden walls and such. They'd use less bricks and more stone if they could get the stone handier. There's a nice little steady business there."

Spinner looked doubtful.

"Look here, Spinner," said Boyd, suddenly. "How many miles of street are there in this town? You ought to know. Well, they're in frightful state every year with the run-off of the flood waters every time it rains. It's a disgrace. They ought to be curbed and guttered, every foot of them; and an ordinance