You mean? queried Mr. Crockett.
Sure. Thats just what I mean. I havent gone wild yet, but just watch me when I start.
And you will start when you graduate?
The remarkable youngster shook his head.
After I graduate Im going to take at least a year of post-graduate courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, Im developing a hobby farming. I want to do something something constructive. My father wasnt constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a virgin placer
My lad, Ive some little experience in Californian farming, Mr. Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.
Sure you have, but you werent constructive. You were well, facts are facts you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of 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 cant get your seed back.
Youve destroyed. Thats what my father did. They all did it. Well, Im going to take my fathers money and construct. Im 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 Dicks threatened period of wildness.
Soon as Im done with cow college, was his answer. Then Im going to buy, and stock, and start a ranch thatll be a ranch. And then Ill 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. Im going to play unearned increment to the limit. People havent 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.
And at fifty it means twenty-five million, Dick laughed.
But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an unthinkable thing.
Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to large-salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but he hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his team, so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven, the Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street in San Francisco.
In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a five years contract.
Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.
But this was only one of Dick Forrests similar dissipations. He stole from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the wizard of farm management.