While she spoke his memory was busy with the associations she recalled.
He saw the deserted flat on the river bank by the Klondike, and he saw the log cabins and warehouses spring up, and all the log structures he had built, and his sawmills working night and day on three shifts.
"Why, dog-gone it, Miss Mason, you're right—in a way.
I've built hundreds of houses up there, and I remember I was proud and glad to see them go up.
I'm proud now, when I remember them.
And there was Ophir—the most God-forsaken moose-pasture of a creek you ever laid eyes on. I made that into the big Ophir.
Why, I ran the water in there from the Rinkabilly, eighty miles away.
They all said I couldn't, but I did it, and I did it by myself.
The dam and the flume cost me four million.
But you should have seen that Ophir—power plants, electric lights, and hundreds of men on the pay-roll, working night and day.
I guess I do get an inkling of what you mean by making a thing.
I made Ophir, and by God, she was a sure hummer—I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to cuss.
But that Ophir!—I sure am proud of her now, just as the last time I laid eyes on her."
"And you won something there that was more than mere money," Dede encouraged.
"Now do you know what I would do if I had lots of money and simply had to go on playing at business?
Take all the southerly and westerly slopes of these bare hills. I'd buy them in and plant eucalyptus on them.
I'd do it for the joy of doing it anyway; but suppose I had that gambling twist in me which you talk about, why, I'd do it just the same and make money out of the trees. And there's my other point again.
Instead of raising the price of coal without adding an ounce of coal to the market supply, I'd be making thousands and thousands of cords of firewood—making something where nothing was before.
And everybody who ever crossed on the ferries would look up at these forested hills and be made glad.
Who was made glad by your adding four dollars a ton to Rock Wells?"
It was Daylight's turn to be silent for a time while she waited an answer.
"Would you rather I did things like that?" he asked at last.
"It would be better for the world, and better for you," she answered noncommittally.
CHAPTER XVI
All week every one in the office knew that something new and big was afoot in Daylight's mind.
Beyond some deals of no importance, he had not been interested in anything for several months.
But now he went about in an almost unbroken brown study, made unexpected and lengthy trips across the bay to Oakland, or sat at his desk silent and motionless for hours.
He seemed particularly happy with what occupied his mind.
At times men came in and conferred with him—and with new faces and differing in type from those that usually came to see him.
On Sunday Dede learned all about it.
"I've been thinking a lot of our talk," he began, "and I've got an idea I'd like to give it a flutter.
And I've got a proposition to make your hair stand up.
It's what you call legitimate, and at the same time it's the gosh-dangdest gamble a man ever went into.
How about planting minutes wholesale, and making two minutes grow where one minute grew before?
Oh, yes, and planting a few trees, too—say several million of them.
You remember the quarry I made believe I was looking at?
Well, I'm going to buy it.
I'm going to buy these hills, too, clear from here around to Berkeley and down the other way to San Leandro.
I own a lot of them already, for that matter.
But mum is the word.
I'll be buying a long time to come before anything much is guessed about it, and I don't want the market to jump up out of sight.
You see that hill over there.
It's my hill running clear down its slopes through Piedmont and halfway along those rolling hills into Oakland.
And it's nothing to all the things I'm going to buy."
He paused triumphantly.
"And all to make two minutes grow where one grew before?" Dede queried, at the same time laughing heartily at his affectation of mystery.
He stared at her fascinated. She had such a frank, boyish way of throwing her head back when she laughed. And her teeth were an unending delight to him.
Not small, yet regular and firm, without a blemish, he considered then the healthiest, whitest, prettiest teeth he had ever seen. And for months he had been comparing them with the teeth of every woman he met.
It was not until her laughter was over that he was able to continue.
"The ferry system between Oakland and San Francisco is the worst one-horse concern in the United States.