rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed
four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four
inches under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and
now you can't get your seed back.

"You've destroyed. That's what my father did. They all did it. Well,
I'm going to take my father's money and construct. I'm going to take
worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the
plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you
fellows first farmed it."

It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned
Dick's threatened period of wildness.

"Soon as I'm done with cow college," was his answer. "Then I'm going
to buy, and stock, and start a ranch that'll be a ranch. And then I'll
set out after my careening riot."

"About how large a ranch will you start with?" Mr. Davidson asked.

"Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all
depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People
haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a
turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars
an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be
worth five hundred."

"A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million
dollars," Mr. Crockett warned gravely.