He had reason to be sure. Body, brain, and career were long-proven
sure. A rich man's son, he had not played ducks and drakes with his
father's money. City born and reared, he had gone back to the land and
made such a success as to put his name on the lips of breeders
wherever breeders met and talked. He was the owner, without
encumbrance, of two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land--land
that varied in value from a thousand dollars an acre to a hundred
dollars, that varied from a hundred dollars to ten cents an acre, and
that, in stretches, was not worth a penny an acre. The improvements on
that quarter of a million acres, from drain-tiled meadows to dredge-
drained tule swamps, from good roads to developed water-rights, from
farm buildings to the Big House itself, constituted a sum gaspingly
ungraspable to the country-side.

Everything was large-scale but modern to the last tick of the clock.
His managers lived, rent-free, with salaries commensurate to ability,
in five--and ten-thousand-dollar houses--but they were the cream of
specialists skimmed from the continent from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. When he ordered gasoline-tractors for the cultivation of the
flat lands, he ordered a round score. When he dammed water in his
mountains he dammed it by the hundreds of millions of gallons. When he
ditched his tule-swamps, instead of contracting the excavation, he
bought the huge dredgers outright, and, when there was slack work on
his own marshes, he contracted for the draining of the marshes of
neighboring big farmers, land companies, and corporations for a
hundred miles up and down the Sacramento River.

He had brain sufficient to know the need of buying brains and to pay a
tidy bit over the current market price for the most capable brains.
And he had brain sufficient to direct the brains he bought to a