Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/97

85 permanent improvements, for after the latter were completed Brainerd rarely employed men. He tried to attend to his own cultivation, but had not the overplus energy necessary to make a success. It was not through lack of intelligence, nor ambition, nor diligence; it was plain lack of strength to carry good beginnings to good endings. The little ranch ran the classic gamut: ground squirrels took more than their share of the potatoes; the chickens and quail ruined most of the vegetables; the wildcats and foxes got in at the chickens; deer and rabbits destroyed the vines; swarms of birds took the first bearing of the fruit; gophers by thousands ruined the hardly dug irrigating ditch that was designed to bring water from the upper spring to the orange grove. These were all difficulties usual to such a situation, but to meet them successfully requires youth, strength, optimism. They superimpose themselves on the hard, physical labour required to plough, harrow, plant, cultivate, keep in repair. Brainerd did not die. The red spots in his cheeks became less vivid. But at times if it had not been for the very jackrabbits, his enemies, he might have died—of starvation. Nowadays people do not eat jackrabbit knowingly. Then they did, and blessed him as the saviour of the situation.

But Brainerd survived, and somehow made a little headway. The bungalow did not get painted; the brown grass grew in the garden; the fruit trees produced a scant crop for lack of full cultivation; there were many loose odds and ends. Still, by the time the jackrabbits learned to keep away from the immediate vicinity of the house, it was no longer necessary to depend on them for a meat supply. Brainerd worked his soil and read his books and raised his daughter after his own ideas. The books were varied and old-fashioned, Frank Forrester's Sporting Scenes, Dickens in toto, Handley Cross, Moby Dick, The Cloister and the Hearth, were some of them. Without discrimination he liked to read them aloud to little Daphne, who thereby acquired mixed and incomplete ideas beyond her years. He also took considerable pains with that young lady's education. The most noticeable result was a certain directness of vision resulting from an almost frantic persistence against sham and subterfuge.

"Don't pretend, Daffy, and don't dodge," he would tell her