"One of these days I'll get you, Jim Galloway," he had grown into the
habit of musing. "Then they can look for another sheriff and I can do
what I want to do."
And his desire had grown very clearly defined to him; it was the old
longing of a man who comes into a wilderness such as this, the longing
to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before his coming.
With his water rights a man might work modern magic; far back in the
hills he had found the natural site for his storage dams; slightly
lower in a nest of hills there would be some day a pygmy lake whose
seductive beauty to him who dwells on desert lands calls like the soft
beauty of a woman; upon a knoll where now was nothing there would come
to be a comfortable, roomy, hospitable ranch-house to displace forever
the shacks which housed the men now farther down the slopes; and
everywhere, because there was water aplenty, would there be roses and
grape-vines and orange-trees. All this when he should get Jim Galloway.
From almost any knoll upon the Rancho de las Flores he could see the
crests of Mt. Temple lifted in clear-cut lines against the sky. If he
rode with Gaucho, his foreman, among the yearlings, he saw Mt. Temple;
if he rode the fifty miles to San Juan he saw the same peaks from the
other side.
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