"Here's the map of the canal line. It isn't inked in yet, but you can see how it's going to come out. There must be two long tunnels; but that's no great matter. It's one of three things. Tunnels, aqueducts, or inverted siphons. It's a toss-up between tunnels and aqueducts, so far as cost is concerned. Siphons will cost about half, but you know what a choke or a break means, so out go siphons." "You favor tunnels?" "By all means. The ditch line is shortened by them, anyway. You'll save there." Elijah gazed long and lovingly at the map, then looked up with a relieved sigh. "Just a little dam will turn the whole stream into the canal." "Yes. Just a little dam. That's easy." Winston drew a dust cloth over the map and weighted it down. "I wish I could get reliable data on the size of the dam it will take to turn some of this fool-money into a channel of common sense. What I am afraid of is, that when this boom breaks, the fools who have not been ruined, will be too badly scared to put money into government bonds, let alone an irrigation plant, and before they recover their wits, they'll either forget that there is such a place as California, or use it to slug themselves with when they feel another fool attack coming on." "You leave that to me. I've got something more to show than a sand-flat pegged full of white stakes. Oranges will do better than that. Dry hillsides at nothing a square mile are going to be a thousand an acre when we get water on them." "Let up, Elijah. Keep your chips off from that spot. That's a safer proposition than Ysleta lots with hot-air values, but it's the same kind of a wheel after all. If you once get the hum of it in your ears you'll go to pieces like all the rest." "Are your estimates completed?" "Yes; ready to be typed. You think they'd better be typed first, don't you?" "Yes. We can have them printed afterward. I don't want anything gorgeous. Just plain, conservative figures. I have my statement of what has been done in the three years on my ranch. There is just one thing I have left out. It would be a telling thing to put in, but I think we can use it to better advantage by keeping it to ourselves." "What's that?" Elijah drew a neatly folded sheet from his pocket. It was filled with columns of figures. "It's an idea of my own. What do you think of it?" Winston looked rapidly over the sheet, then gave a low, meditative whistle. "Are you sure of this?" "Dead sure. I've been making observations with self-registering thermometers. That's the result." Elijah pointed to the sheet. "A frostless belt!" Winston snatched the sheet from his drawing-board and bent over the map, one finger on the sheet, the other eagerly tracing lines on the surface of the map. "That's the greatest thing yet! There is a big fortune for all of us in that alone." Elijah half closed his eyes, his teeth bared with a smile suggestive of malice. "May I offer you some of your advice to me?"