CHAPTER II.
LAYING HOLD OF OPPORTUNITY.
Nash folded the letter, returned it to the envelope, and thoughtfully continued over to Broadway, walking up this busy street to Seventh, where he went into the big lobby of his hotel, the Lankershim.
After lighting a cigar, he sank into the nearest chair, and read the letter again. Several remarks passed by the stranger during their scene in the park now came back to him.
“He said he had had a line on a job,” Nash reflected. “This letter must have been the answer. Some one in authority has given it to him. And that Los Angeles Aqueduct is some big undertaking, too,” he added. “I’d like mighty well to land a job on it. Now, if it had only been my luck to get a letter——”
He stared out through the big hotel windows upon the hurrying crowds of shoppers and tourists.
“By Jove!” he said to himself. “Why not? There’s no name mentioned in this letter. I wouldn’t be sailing under false colors. Besides, the fellow said he refused to go after the job because he’d probably have to work as a laborer.”
The idea grew more inviting. Nash needed work, and needed it badly, in spite of the fact that he was well dressed and smoking a good cigar and living at one of the best hotels. About sixteen dollars was all that stood between him and——
Nash was businesslike in all his affairs; his father had drilled that trait into him; and he knew that in seeking the kind of work he desired, a good front was a desirable asset. If it came to a question of a meal or a clean collar, the collar would win out. He always remembered that a clean shave had gained many a man an opportunity which otherwise might have been denied him.
“I’ve got just sixteen dollars and thirty-five cents,” he said, after counting his capital. “That will last me until the end of the week. I’ve tried my best to get a job, but somehow jobs are scarce as snowballs on Main Street. Now, here’s old Opportunity knocking at my door. The man the letter was given to doesn’t want the job. The man into whose hands it has fallen does want it. I won’t be harming any one by getting myself a necessary position. And even if it is mixing cement with the wops, or digging in the trenches with the greasers, I guess I can show my worth.”
So the affair was settled, and he went upstairs to his room, tossing the book of poems into an opened trunk.
“Wonder where he picked up that volume?” Nash asked himself. “I’d return it if I had half a chance. Something unusual to find a vag reading Kipling. I always did like Rudyard, anyhow, so I’ll retain charge of it for the time being.”
Elliot Nash, a native son of Los Angeles, had been taken East to school by his parents nearly eight years previous to this; he had been graduated with engineering honors, and had immediately accepted a position on the Barge Canal—that wonderful New York State project, which will give passage for thousand-ton vessels between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving this, he had become identified with both the New York aqueduct and the Cape Cod canal. Both parents had died recently, and because of it a lonesome feeling had come upon him—a yearning to be back in California, to bask in the perpetual sunlight, to smell the fragrance of the orange groves, to dip in the calm, turquoise Pacific, and to visit once more the scenes he had loved in his boyhood days.
In addition to this, an unfortunate affair made it necessary for him to quietly disappear in order to avoid trouble. He left New York in a raging snowstorm, and traveled two thousand miles overland amid the desolation of ice and snow and freezing winds. Then came the stretch of level desert, the vast waste of red and yellow sand. When his train stopped at rare intervals, he got out and mingled with the usual crowd of excited tourists and the colorful, leather-faced Navahos with their reed baskets, their silver trinkets, decorated pottery, and gaudy rugs. Following this came the long, steady ascent of the coast range, a touch of winter again, and then a straight, breathless drop into paradise. That last night, he went to sleep in his narrow Pullman berth, weary and eyesore with the monotony of it all, only to awaken in the morning with a green world about him and the perfume of the orange blossoms in his nostrils.
A dash through endless groves, where the golden fruit beckoned alluringly, a stop for breakfast at the dreamy little town of San Bernardino, and then on again, past Arrowhead Springs, where nature has marked a gigantic white arrow on the gray of the mountainside, through Pasadena, the home of the millionaires, and at last into Los Angeles—City of the Angels.
With less than fifty dollars in his pocket, Nash had engaged quarters at the Lankershim, and started in to find a position. But a ten-day quest had proved fruitless. He was disappointed, but far from being discouraged, when this chance adventure in Central Park sent Opportunity into a head-on collision with him.
“It’s the aqueduct for me,” he murmured to himself that night, as he crept between his sheets. “I can’t stay here any longer. I’ve got enough coin to square up my bill and pay my passage to San Fernando. I’ll leave my trunk here for a while.” He fell silent for the interval, staring up at the ceiling. “I wonder what it’ll be? Mixing cement? Well, if it is, I’ll show them I am one peach of a mixer!”