Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/243

Rh why they should always continue to do it," she answered the Colonel's protest. "There is no reason why we should pay men to make a garden when a lot of them are lying around doing nothing. I'm beginning to believe that that is most of the trouble here—too many people doing nothing."

The result was that a few acres in the flat below were set aside as a garden spot for the families living on the ranch. Those who pleased to do so could there raise vegetables. As to fruit, Allie established a rough system of credit for work done in the orchard payable in fruit. It must be confessed that this system was only partially successful. Most of the Spanish families fell back on canned goods, or a little resentfully paid Lo for vegetables from the ranch gardens. Lo sold vegetables cheap, but he drove rigid bargains. Allie's bustling, practical genius had devised a scheme by which Lo went shares. Perched atop a rattle-trap old box wagon resurrected from the ranch's scrap heap, Lo early each morning drove into Arguello with a load of fresh truck. This he peddled from door to door. From the results he paid himself and his two assistants and turned over half the net profits to Allie. This and the poultry business, which was conducted on similar lines, were the only details of this miserable and depressing economy that tickled the Colonel. He used to chuckle and ask Allie how the Oriental Trading Company was coming on.

"Just the same," the latter averred, stoutly, "we are getting our own supplies absolutely for nothing, and a very neat little sum besides. Do you know what our vegetable garden and our poultry yard were costing us before?"

"No; and I don't want to!" cried the Colonel in pretended dismay. "If you and your Chinese partners are satisfied, I am!"

But for the time being, at least, all these changes from the traditional open handed methods of the past made the Colonel miserable. He felt mean and penny pinching. It was somehow as though he were depriving all these people of something that was rightfully theirs. He felt that they must be secretly despising him as a skinflint; and so he was unable to meet them in his old hearty, open-souled fashion. Only with a few of the