these debouched into the glare of the outer
offices, they hesitated, making up their slow minds which way to turn.
In that instant or so the gray man, like a captain, assigned his
salesmen. The latter were of all sorts--fat and joking, thin and very
serious-minded, intense, enthusiastic, cold and haughty. The gray man
sized up his prospective customers and to each assigned a salesman to
suit. Bob had no means of guessing how accurate these estimates might
be, but they were evidently made intelligently, with some system
compounded of theory or experience. After a moment Bob became conscious
that he himself was being sharply scrutinized by the gray man, and in
return watched covertly. He saw the gray man shake his head slightly.
Bob passed out the door unaccosted by any of the salesmen.

At half-past seven the following morning he boarded the local train. In
one car he found a score of "prospects" already seated, accompanied by
half their number of the young men of the real estate office. The utmost
jocularity and humour prevailed, except in one corner where a very
earnest young man drove home the points of his argument with an
impressive forefinger. Bob dropped unobtrusively into a seat, and
prepared to enjoy his never-failing interest in the California landscape
with its changing wonderful mountains; its alternations of sage brush
and wide cultivation; its vineyards as far as the eye could distinguish
the vines; its grainfields seeming to fill the whole cup of the valleys;
its orchards wide as forests; and its desert stretches, bigger than them
all, awaiting but the vivifying touch of water to burst into
productiveness. He heard one of the salesmen expressing this.

"'Water is King,'" he was saying, quoting thus the catchword of this
particular concern. He was talking in a half-joking way, asking one or
the other how many inches of rainfall could be expected per annum back
where they came from.

"Don't know, do you?" he answered himself. "Nobody pays any great and
particular amount of attention to that--you get water enough, except in
exceptional years. Out here it's different. Every one knows to the
hundredth of an inch just how much rain has fallen, and how much ought
to have fallen. It's vital. Water is King."

He gathered close the attention of his auditors.

"We have the water in California," he went on; "but it isn't always in
the right place nor does it come at the right time. You can't grow crops
in the hig