But Alaire had not confined her efforts to cattle; she had improved the breed of "Box A" horses, too, and hand in hand with this work she had carried on a series of agricultural experiments. Las Palmas, so people used to say, lay too far up the river to be good farming-land; nevertheless, once the pumping-plant was in, certain parts of the ranch raised nine crops of alfalfa, and corn that stood above a rider's head. There was no money in "finished" stock; the border was too far from market--that also had long been an accepted truism--yet this woman built silos which she filled with her own excess fodder in scientific proportions, and somehow or other she managed to ship fat beeves direct to the packing-houses and get big prices for them. These were but a few of her many ventures. She had her hobbies, of course, but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so. For instance, she had started a grove of paper-shelled pecans, which was soon due to bear; the ranch house and its clump of palms was all but hidden by a forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen everything from moth-balls to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones was perhaps responsible for this report, for Alaire had shown him several thousand eucalyptus saplings and some ornamental rubber-plants. "That Miz Austin is a money-makin' piece of furniture," he once told his daughter Paloma. "I'm no mechanical adder--I count mostly on my fingers--but her and me calculated the profits on them eucher--what's-their-name trees?--and it gave me a splittin' headache. She'll be a drug queen, sure." "Why don't you follow her example?" asked Paloma. "We have plenty of land." Blaze, in truth, was embarrassed by the size of his holdings, but he shook his head. "No, I'm too old to go rampagin' after new gods. I 'ain't got the imagination to raise anything more complicated than a mortgage; but if I was younger, I'd organize myself up and do away with that Ed Austin. I'd sure help him to an untimely end, and then I'd marry them pecan-groves, and blooded herds, and drug-store orchards. She certainly is a heart-breakin' device, with her red hair and red lips and--" "FATHER!" Paloma was deeply shocked. Complete isolation, of course, Alaire had found to be impossible, even though her ranch lay far from the traveled roads and her Mexican guards were not encouraging to visitors. Business inevitably brought her into contact with a considerable number of people, and of these the one she saw most frequently was Judge Ellsworth of Brownsville, her attorney.