yourselves and your
workmen, to live in.'"

"Then there's the water. I'll come pretty close to owning the
watershed. Why not the waterworks too? There's two water companies in
Oakland now, fighting like cats and dogs and both about broke. What a
metropolis needs is a good water system. They can't give it. They're
stick-in-the-muds. I'll gobble them up and deliver the right article
to the city. There's money there, too--money everywhere. Everything
works in with everything else. Each improvement makes the value of
everything else pump up. It's people that are behind the value. The
bigger the crowd that herds in one place, the more valuable is the real
estate. And this is the very place for a crowd to herd. Look at it.
Just look at it! You could never find a finer site for a great city.
All it needs is the herd, and I'll stampede a couple of hundred
thousand people in here inside two years. And what's more it won't be
one of these wild cat land booms. It will be legitimate. Twenty years
for now there'll be a million people on this side the bay. Another
thing is hotels. There isn't a decent one in the town. I'll build a
couple of up-to-date ones that'll make them sit up and take notice. I
won't care if they don't pay for years. Their effect will more than
give me my money back out of the other holdings. And, oh, yes, I'm
going to plant eucalyptus, millions of them, on these hills."

"But how are you going to do it?" Dede asked. "You haven't enough
money for all that you've planned."

"I've thirty million, and if I need more I can borrow on the land and
other things. Interest on mortgages won't anywhere near eat up the
increase in land values, and I'll be selling land right along."

In the weeks that followed, Daylight was a busy man. He spent most of
his time in Oakland, rarely coming to the office. He planned to move
the office to Oakland, but, as he told Dede, the secret preliminary
campaign of buying had to be put through first. Sunday by Sunday, now
from this hilltop and now from that, they looked down upon the city and
its farming suburbs, and he pointed out to her his latest acquisitions.
At first it was patches and sections of land here and there; but as the
weeks passed it was the unowned portions that became rare, until at
last they stood as islands surrounded by Daylight's land.

It meant quick work on a colossal scale, for Oakland and the adjacent
country was not slow to feel th