Kitabı oku: «Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation», sayfa 9

“Well, I’m not so sure–”

“Have you told him what lands you have deeds to?”

“No, but if he knows as much about the West as I figure he does, he can guess it. Fence every swallow of get-at-able water to be found on my range this time of year, and you won’t have to dig a posthole off of land I hold in fee simple. Plum Creek sinks just below where Dry Fork junctions.”

“But you can’t have all the water?” exclaimed Ashton incredulously.

“Yes, every drop to be found outside Deep Cañon this time of year. There’s my seven and a half mile string of quarter-sections blanketing Plum Creek from the springs to down below Dry Fork, and five quarter-sections covering all the waterholes. That makes up five sections. A bunch of tenderfeet came in here, years ago, and preëmpted all the quarter-sections with water on them. Got their patents from the government. Then the Utes stampeded them clean out of the country, and I bought up their titles at a fair figure.”

“And you own even that splendid pool up where I had my camp?”

“Everything wet on this range that a cow or hawss can get to, this time of year.”

Ashton considered, and advised craftily: “Don’t tell him this. Does Miss Chuckie know it?”

“She knows I have five sections, and that most of it is on Plum Creek. I don’t think anything has ever been said to her about the waterholes. But why not tell Blake?”

“Don’t you see? Even if he finds a way to get at the water in Deep Cañon, he will first have to bore his tunnel. He and his construction gang must have water to drink and for their engines while they are carrying out his plans. You can lie low, and, when the right time comes, get out an injunction against their trespassing on your land.”

“Say, that’s not a bad idea. The best I could figure was that they might need one of my waterholes for a reservoir site. But why not call him when he first takes a hand?” asked Knowles.

“No, you should not show your cards until you have to,” replied Ashton. “With all Leslie’s money against you, it might be hard to get your injunction if they knew of your plans. But if you wait until they have their men, machinery and materials on the ground, you will have them where they must buy you out at your own terms.”

“By–James!” commented Knowles. “Talk about business sharps!”

“I was in Leslie’s office for a time,” explained Ashton. “Your interests are Miss Chuckie’s interests. I’m for her–first, last, and all the time.”

“Um-m-m. Then I guess I can count on you as sure as on Gowan.”

“You can. I am going to try my best to win your daughter, Mr. Knowles. She’s a lady–the loveliest girl I ever met.”

“No doubt about that. What’s more, she’s got grit and brains. That’s why I tell you now, as I’ve told Kid, it’s for her to decide on the man she’s going to make happy. If he’s square and white, that’s all I ask.”

“About my helping Blake with his levels,” Ashton rather hastily changed the subject. “I am in your employ–and so is he, for that matter. Don’t you think I have a right to keep you posted on all his plans?”

“Well–yes. But he as much as says he will tell them himself.”

“Perhaps he will, and perhaps he won’t, Mr. Knowles. I’ve told you what Leslie is like; and Blake is his son-in-law.”

“Well, I’m not so sure. You and Kid, between you, have shaken my judgment of the man. It can’t do any harm to watch him, and I’ll be obliged to you for doing it. If it comes to a fight against him and the millions of backing he has, I want a fair deal and–But, Lord! what if we’re making all this fuss over nothing? It doesn’t stand to reason that there’s any way to get the water out of Deep Cañon.”

“Wait a week or so,” cautioned Ashton. “In my opinion, Blake already sees a possibility.”

CHAPTER XV
LEVELS AND SLANTS

At sunrise the next morning Blake screwed his level on its tripod and set up the instrument about a hundred yards away from the ranch house. Ashton held the level rod for him on a spike driven into the foot of the nearest post of the front porch. Blake called the spike a bench-mark. For convenience of determining the relative heights of the points along his lines of levels, he designated this first “bench” in his fieldbook as “elevation 1,000.”

From the porch he ran the line of level “readings” up the slope to the top of the divide between Plum Creek and Dry Fork and from there towards the waterhole on Dry Fork. At noon Isobel and Mrs. Blake drove out to them in the buckboard, bringing a hot meal in an improvised fireless-cooker.

“And we came West to rough-it!” groaned Blake, his eyes twinkling.

“You can camp at the waterhole where Lafe did, and I’ll send Kid out for that bobcat,” suggested the girl. “You could roast him, hair and all.”

“What! roast Gowan?” protested Blake. “Let me tell you, Miss Chuckie–you and my wife and Ashton may like him that much, but I don’t!”

“You need not worry, Mr. Tenderfoot,” the girl flashed back at him. “Whenever it comes to a hot time, Kid always gets in the first fire, without waiting to be told.”

“Don’t I know it?” exclaimed Ashton. “Maybe you haven’t noticed this hole in my hat, Mrs. Blake. He put a bullet through it.”

“But it’s right over your temple, Lafayette!” replied Mrs. Blake.

“Lafe was lifting his some-berero to me, and Kid did it to haze him–only a joke, you know,” explained Isobel. “Of course Lafe was in no danger. It was different, though, when somebody–we think it was his thieving guide–took several rifle shots at him. Tell them about it, Lafe.”

Ashton gave an account of the murderous attack, more than once checking himself in a natural tendency to embellish the exciting details.

“Oh! What if the man should come back and shoot at us?” shuddered Mrs. Blake, drawing her baby close in her arms.

“No fear of that,” asserted Isobel. “Kid found that he had fled towards the railroad. That proves it must have been the guide. He would never dare come back after such a crime.”

“If he should, I always carry my rifle, as you see,” remarked Ashton; adding, with a touch of bravado, “I made him run once, and I would again.”

“I’m glad Miss Chuckie is sure he will not come back,” said Blake. “I don’t fancy anyone shooting at me that way.”

“Timid Mr. Blake!” teased the girl. “Genevieve has been telling me how you faced a lion with only a bow and arrow.”

“Had to,” said Blake. “He’d have jumped on me if I had turned or backed off.–Speaking about camping at that waterhole, I believe we’ll do it, Ashton, if it’s the same thing to you. It would save the time that would be lost coming and going to the ranch.”

“Save time?” repeated Isobel. “Then of course we’ll bring out a tent and camp kit for you tomorrow. Genevieve and I can ride or drive up to the waterhole each day, to picnic with you.”

“It will be delightful,” agreed Mrs. Blake.

“You ride on ahead and wait for us in the shade,” said her husband. “We’ll knock off for the day when we reach that dolerite dike above the waterhole.–If you are ready, Ashton, we’ll peg along.”

He started off to set up his level as briskly as at dawn, though the midday sun was so hot that he had to shade the instrument with his handkerchief to keep the air-bubble from outstretching its scale. His wife and the girl drove on up Dry Fork to the waterhole.

Mrs. Blake was outstretched on her back, fast asleep, and Isobel was playing with the baby under the adjoining tree, when at last the surveyors came up on the other side of the creek and ended their day’s run with the establishment of a bench-mark on the top of the dike above the pool. Blake seemed as fresh as in the morning. He took a moderate drink of water dipped up in the brim of his hat, and without wakening his wife, sat down beside her to “figure up” his fieldbook.

Ashton had come down to the pool panting from heat and exertion. It was the first time that he had walked more than half a mile since coming to the ranch, for he had immediately fallen into the cowboy practice of saddling a horse to go even short distances. He had his reward for his work when, having soused his hot head in the pool and drunk his fill, he came up to rest in the shade of Isobel’s tree. Very considerately the baby fell asleep. To avoid disturbing him and his mother, the young couple talked in low tones and half whispers very conducive to intimacy.

Ashton did his utmost to improve his opportunity. Without openly speaking his love, he allowed it to appear in his every look and intonation. The girl met the attack with banter and raillery and adroit shiftings of the conversation whenever his ardent inferences became too obvious. Yet her evasion and her teasing could not always mask her maidenly pleasure over his adoration of her loveliness, and an occasional blush betrayed to him that his wooing was not altogether unwelcome.

He was in the seventh heaven when Mrs. Blake awoke from her health-giving sleep and her husband closed his fieldbook. The girl promptly dashed her suitor back to earth by dropping him for the engineer.

“Mr. Blake! You can’t have figured it out already?” she exclaimed. “What do you find?”

“Only an ‘if,’ Miss Chuckie,” he answered. “If water can be stored or brought by ditch to this elevation, practically all Dry Mesa can be irrigated. Our bench-mark there on the dike is more than two hundred feet above that spike we drove into your porch post.”

“Is that all you’ve found out today?”

“All for today,” said Blake. “I could have left this line of levels until later, but I thought I might as well get through with them.”

“You would not have run them if you had thought they would be useless,” she stated, perceiving the point with intuitive acuteness.

“I like to clean up my work as I go along,” he replied. “If you wish to know, I have thought of a possible way to get water enough for the whole mesa. It depends on two ‘ifs.’ I shall be certain as to one of them within the next two days. The other is the question of the depth of Deep Cañon. If I had a transit, I could determine that by a vertical angle,–triangulation. As it is, I probably shall have to go down to the bottom.”

“Go down to the bottom of Deep Cañon?” cried the girl.

“Yes,” he answered in a matter-of-course tone. “A big ravine runs clear down to the bottom, up beyond where your father said you first met Ashton. I think it is possible to get down that gulch.–Suppose we hitch up? We’ll make the ranch just about supper-time.”

Ashton hastened to bring in the picketed horses. When they were harnessed Isobel fetched the sleeping baby and handed him to his mother; but she did not take the seat beside her.

“You drive, Lafe,” she ordered. “I’m going to ride behind with Mr. Blake. It’s such fun bouncing.”

All protested in vain against this odd whim. The girl plumped herself in on the rear end of the buckboard and dangled her slender feet with the gleefulness of a child.

“Mr. Blake will catch me if I go to jolt off,” she declared.

The engineer nodded with responsive gayety and seated himself beside her. As the buckboard rattled away over the rough sod, they made as merry over their jolts and bounces as a pair of school-children on a hayrack party.

Mrs. Blake sought to divert Ashton from his disappointment, but he had ears only for the laughing, chatting couple behind him. The fact that Blake was a married man did not prevent the lover from giving way to jealous envy. Chancing to look around as he warned the hilarious pair of a gully, he saw the girl grasp Blake’s shoulder. Natural as was the act, his envy flared up in hot resentment. Except on their drive to Stockchute, she had always avoided even touching his hand with her finger tips; yet now she clung to the engineer with a grasp as familiar as that of an affectionate child. Nor did she release her clasp until they were some yards beyond the gully.

Mrs. Blake had seen not only the expression that betrayed Ashton’s anger but also the action that caused it. She raised her fine eyebrows; but meeting Ashton’s significant glance, she sought to pass over the incident with a smile. He refused to respond. All during the remainder of the drive he sat in sullen silence. Genevieve bent over her baby. Behind them the unconscious couple continued in their mirthful enjoyment of each other and the ride.

When the party reached the ranch, the girl must have perceived Ashton’s moroseness had she not first caught sight of her father. He was standing outside the front porch, his eyes fixed upon the corner post in a perplexed stare.

“Why, Daddy,” she called, “what is it? You look as you do when playing chess with Kid.”

“Afraid it’s something that’ll annoy Mr. Blake,” replied the cowman.

“What is it?” asked Blake, who was handing his wife from the buckboard.

As the engineer faced Knowles, Gowan sauntered around the far corner of the house. At sight of the ladies he paused to adjust his neckerchief.

“Can’t understand it, Mr. Blake,” said the cowman. “Somebody has pulled out that spike you drove in here this morning.”

“Pulled the spike?” repeated Gowan, coming forward to stare at the post. “That shore is a joke. The Jap’s building a new henhouse. Must be short of nails.”

“That’s so,” said Knowles. “I forgot to order them for him. I’m mighty sorry, Mr. Blake. But of course the little brown cuss didn’t know what he was meddling with.”

“Jumping Jehosaphat!” ejaculated Gowan. “That shore is mighty hard luck! I reckon pulling that spike turns your line of levels adrift like knocking out the picket-pin of an uneasy hawss.”

Blake burst into a hearty laugh. “That’s a fine metaphor, Mr. Gowan. But it does not happen to fit the case. It would not matter if the spike-hole had been pulled out and the post along with it, so far as concerns this line of levels.”

“It wouldn’t?” muttered Gowan, his lean jaw dropping slack. He glowered as if chagrined at the engineer’s laughter at his mistake.

Without heeding the puncher’s look, Blake began to tell Knowles the result of his day’s work. While he was speaking, they went into the house after his wife and the girl, leaving Gowan and Ashton alone. Equally sullen and resentful, the rivals exchanged stares of open hostility. Ashton pointed a derisive finger at the spike-hole in the post.

“‘Hole … and the post along with it!’” he repeated Blake’s words. “On bridge work it might have caused some trouble. But a preliminary line of levels–Mon Dieu! A Jap should have known better–or even a yap!” With a supercilious shrug, he swung back into the buckboard and drove up to the corral.

Gowan’s right hand had dropped to his hip. Slowly it came up and joined the other hand in rolling a thick Mexican cigarette. But the puncher did not light his “smoke.” He looked at the spike-hole in the post, scowled, and went back around the house.

CHAPTER XVI
METAL AND METTLE

At dawn Blake and Ashton drove up to the waterhole on Dry Fork with their camp equipment. There they left the outfit in the buckboard and proceeded with the line of levels on up the creek bed into the gorge from which it issued.

For more than a mile they carried the levels over the bowlders of the gradually sloping bottom of that stupendous gash in the mountain side. So far the work was fairly easy. At last, however, they came to the place where the bed of the gulch suddenly tilted upward at a sharp angle and climbed the tremendous heights to the top of High Mesa in sheer ascents and cliff-like ledges. Blake established a bench-mark at the foot of the acclivity, and came forward beside Ashton to peer up the Titanic chute between the dizzy precipices. From where they stood to the head of the gulch was fully four thousand feet.

“What do you think of it?” asked the engineer.

“I think this is where your line ends,” answered Ashton, and he rolled a cigarette. He had been anything but agreeable since their start from the ranch.

“We of course can’t go up with the level and rod,” said Blake, smiling at the absurdity of the suggestion. “Still, we might possibly chain it to the top.”

Ashton shrugged. “I fail to see the need of risking my neck to climb this goat stairway.”

“Very well,” agreed Blake, ignoring his companion’s ill humor. “Kindly take back the level and get out the chain.”

Ashton started off without replying. Blake looked at the young man’s back with a regretful, half-puzzled expression. But he quickly returned to the business in hand. He laid the level rod on a rock and inclined it at the same steep pitch as the uptilt of the gorge bottom. Over the lower end of this he held a plumb bob, and took the angle between the perpendicular line of the bob-string and the inclined line of the rod with a small protractor that he carried in his notebook. The angle measured over fifty degrees from the horizontal.

Having thus determined the angle of inclination, the engineer picked a likely line of ascent and started to climb the gulch chute. He went up in rapid rushes, with the ease and surefootedness of a coolheaded, steel-muscled climber. He stopped frequently, not because of weariness or of lack of breath, but to test the structure and hardness of the rocks with a small magnifying glass and the butt of his pocket knife.

At last, nearly a thousand feet up, his ascent was stopped by a sheer hundred-foot cliff. He had seen it beetling above him and knew beforehand that he could not hope to scale such a precipice; yet he clambered up to it, still examining the rock with minute care. As he walked across the waterworn shelf at the foot of the sheer cliff, his eye was caught by a wide seam of quartz in the side wall of the gulch.

Going on over to the vein, he looked at it in several places through his magnifying glass. Everywhere little yellow specks showed in the semi-translucent quartz. He drew back across the gorge to examine the trend of the vein. It ran far outward and upward, and in no place was it narrower than where it disappeared under the bed of the gorge.

His lips pursed in a prolonged, soundless whistle. But he did not linger. Immediately after he had estimated the visible length and dip of the seam, he began his descent. Arriving at the foot without accident, he picked up the level rod and swung away down the gulch.

He saw nothing of Ashton until he had come all the distance down across the valley to the dike above the pool. His assistant was in the grove below, assiduously helping Miss Knowles to erect a tent that the girl had improvised from a tarpaulin. Genevieve and Thomas Herbert were interesting themselves in the contents of the kit-box. The two ladies had ridden up to the camp on horseback, Isobel carrying the baby.

When Blake came striding down to them, the girl left Ashton and ran to meet him, her eyes beaming with affectionate welcome.

“What has kept you so long?” she called. “Lafe says the gulch is absolutely unclimbable. I could have told you so, beforehand.”

“You are right. I tried it, but had to quit,” replied Blake, engulfing her outstretched hand in his big palm.

When he would have released her, she caught his fingers and held fast, so that they came down to his wife hand in hand. Oblivious of Ashton’s frown, the girl dimpled at Mrs. Blake.

“Here he is, Genevieve,” she said. “We have him corralled for the rest of the morning.”

“Sorry,” replied Blake, stooping to pick up his chuckling son. “We can’t knock off now.”

“But if you cannot continue your levels?” asked his wife. “From what Lafayette told us, we thought you would not start in again until after lunch.”

“No more levels until tomorrow,” said Blake. “But I must settle one of my big ‘ifs’ by night. To do it, Ashton and I will have to go up on High Mesa and measure a line. There’s still two hours till noon. We’ll borrow your saddle ponies, Miss Chuckie, and start at once, if Jenny will put us up a bite of lunch.”

“Immediately, Tom,” assented Mrs. Blake, delighted at the opportunity to serve her big husband.

“When shall we take Genevieve to see the cañon?” asked the girl. “I am sure she can ride up safely on old Buck.”

“We have only the two saddle horses today,” replied Blake. “If our measurement settles that ‘if’ one way, I shall start a line of levels up the mountain tomorrow morning, if the other way, any irrigation project is out of the question, and we shall go up to the cañon merely as a sightseeing party.”

“Ah!” sighed the girl. “‘If!’ ‘if’–I do so hope it turns out to be the last one!”

Blake looked at her with a quizzical smile. “Perhaps you would not, Miss Chuckie, if you could see all the results of a successful water system.”

“You mean, turning our range into farms for hundreds of irrigationists,” she replied. “I suppose I am selfish, but I am thinking of what it would mean to Daddy. Just consider how it will affect us. For years this land has been our own for miles and miles!”

“Well, we shall see,” said Blake, his eyes twinkling.

“Yes, indeed!” she exclaimed. “Lafe, if you’ll help me saddle up and help Mr. Blake rush up to do that measuring, I’ll–I’ll be ever so grateful!”

Though all the more resentful at Blake over having to leave her company, Ashton eagerly sprang forward to help the girl saddle the ponies. When they were ready, she filled his canteen for him and took a sip from it “for luck.” Genevieve had packed an ample lunch in a gamebag, along with her husband’s linked steel-wire surveyor’s chain.

Ten minutes after Blake’s arrival, he handed the baby to its mother and swung into the saddle. Ashton had already mounted, fired by a kind glance from the girl’s forget-me-not eyes. In his zeal, he led the way at a gallop around the craggy hill and across the intervening valley to the escarpment of High Mesa. Had not Blake checked him, he would have forced the pace on up the mountain side.

“Hold on,” called the engineer. “We want to make haste slowly. That buckskin you’re on isn’t so young as he has been, and my pony has to lug around two hundred pounds. We’ll get back sooner by being moderate. Besides you don’t wish to knock up old Buck. He is about the only one of these jumpy cow ponies that is safe for Jenny.”

“That’s so,” admitted Ashton. “Suppose you set the pace.”

He stopped to let Blake pass him, and trailed behind up the mountain side. He had headed into a draw. The engineer at once turned and began zigzagging up the steep side of the ridge that thrust out into the valley between the draw and the gulch of Dry Fork. At the stiffest places he jumped off and led his pony. None too willingly, Ashton followed the example set by his companion. There were some places where he could not have avoided so doing–ledges that the old buckskin, despite his years of mountain service, could hardly scramble up under an empty saddle.

Long before they reached the point of the ridge, Ashton was panting and sweating, and his handsome face was red from exertion and anger. But his indignation at being misguided up so difficult a line of ascent received a damper when he reached the lower end of the ridge crest. Blake, who had waited patiently for him to clamber up the last sharp slope, gave him a cheerful nod and pointed to the long but fairly easy incline of the ridge crest.

“In mountain climbing, always take your stiffest ground first, when you can,” he said. “We can jog along pretty fast now.”

They mounted and rode up the ridge, much of the time at a jog trot. Before long they came to the top of High Mesa, and galloped across to one of the ridges that lay parallel with Deep Cañon. Climbing the ridge, they found themselves looking over into a ravine that ran down to the right to join another ravine from the opposite direction, at the head of Dry Fork Gulch. Blake turned and rode to the left along the ridge, until he found a place where they could cross the ravine. The still air was reverberating with the muffled roar of Deep Cañon.

From the ridge on the other side of the ravine, they could look down between the scattered pines to the gaping chasm of the stupendous cañon. But Blake rode to the right along the summit of the ridge until they came opposite the head of Dry Fork Gulch. Here he flung the reins over his pony’s head, and dismounted. Ashton was about to do the same when he caught sight of a wolf slinking away like a gray shadow up the farther ravine. He reached for his rifle, and for the first time noticed that he had failed to bring it along. In his haste to start from camp he had left it in the tent.

“Sacre!” he petulantly exclaimed. “There goes twenty-five dollars!”

“How’s that?” asked Blake. He looked and caught a glimpse of the wolf just as it vanished. “Why don’t you shoot?”

“Left my rifle in camp, curse the luck!”

“Keep cool,” advised Blake. “It’s only twenty-five dollars, and you might have missed anyway.”

“Not with my automatic,” snapped Ashton. “You needn’t sneer about the money. You’ve seen times when you’d have been glad of a chance at half the amount.”

“That’s true,” gravely agreed the engineer. “What’s more, I realize that it is far harder for you than it ever was for me. I want to tell you I admire the way you have stood your loss.”

“You do?” burst out the younger man. “I want to tell you I don’t admire the way you ruined me–babbling to my father–when you promised to keep still! You sneak!”

Blake looked into the other’s furious face with no shade of change in his grave gaze. “I have never said a word to your father against you,” he declared.

“Then–then how, after all this time–?” stammered Ashton, even in his anger unable to disbelieve the engineer’s quiet statement. He was disconcerted only for the moment. Again he flared hotly: “But if you didn’t, old Leslie must have! It’s all the same!”

“No, it is not the same,” corrected Blake. “As for my father-in-law, if he said anything about–the past, I feel sure it was not with intention to hurt your interests.”

“Hurt my interests! You know I am utterly ruined!”

“On the contrary, I know you are not ruined. You have lost a large allowance, and a will has been made cutting you off from a great many millions that you expected to inherit. But you have landed square on your feet; you have a pretty good job, and you are stronger and healthier than you were.”

“If you break up Mr. Knowles’ range with your irrigation schemes, I stand to lose my job. You know that.”

“If the project proves to be feasible, I shall offer you a position on the works,” said Blake.

“You needn’t try to bribe me!” retorted Ashton. “I’m working for Mr. Knowles.”

“Well, he directed you to help me with this survey,” replied the engineer, with imperturbable good nature. “The next move is to chain across to the cañon.”

He pulled his surveyor’s chain from the bag and descended the ridge to an out-jutting rock above the head of the tremendous gorge in the mountain side. Ashton followed him down. Blake handed him the front end of the chain.

“You lead,” he said. “I’ll line you, as I know where to strike the nearest point on the cañon.”

Ashton sullenly started up the ridge, and the measurement began. As Blake required only a rough approximation, they soon crossed the ridge and chained down through the trees to the edge of Deep Cañon. Ashton was astonished at the shortness of the distance. The cañon at this point ran towards the mesa escarpment as if it had originally intended to drive through into Dry Fork Gulch, but twisted sharp about and curved back across the plateau. Even Blake was surprised at the measurement. It was only a little over two thousand feet.

“Noticed this place when out with Mr. Knowles and Gowan,” he remarked, gazing down into the abyss with keen appreciation of its awful grandeur. “They told me it is the nearest that the cañon comes to the edge of the mesa, until it breaks out, thirty or forty miles down.”

“How–how about that ‘if’ you said this measurement would settle?” asked Ashton.

“What’s the time?”

Ashton looked at his watch, frowning over the evasive reply. “It’s two-ten.”

“I’ll figure on the proposition while we eat lunch,” said Blake. “I can answer you better regarding that ‘if’ when I have done some calculating. Luckily I climbed up to examine the rock in the gulch.” He smiled quizzically at his companion. “You were right as to its being unclimbable; but I found out even more than I expected.”

Ashton silently took the bag from him and arranged the lunch and his canteen on a rock under a pine. The engineer figured and drew little diagrams in his fieldbook while he ate his sandwiches. Ashton had half drained the canteen on the way up the mountain. Before sitting down Blake had rinsed out his mouth and taken a few swallows of water. After eating, he started to take another drink, noticed his companion’s hot dry face, and stopped after a single sip.

“Guess you need it more than I do,” he remarked, as he rose to his feet. “Time to start. I wish to go around and down the mountain on the other side of the gulch.”

“How about the–the ‘if’?” inquired Ashton.

“Killed,” answered Blake. “There now is only one left. If that comes out the same way, Dry Mesa will have good cause to change its name.”

“You can tunnel through from the gulch to the cañon?” exclaimed Ashton.

“Yes; and I shall do so–if Deep Cañon is not too deep.”

“I hope it is a thousand feet below Dry Mesa!” said Ashton.

“In the circumstances,” Blake replied to the fervent declaration, “I am glad to hear you say it.”

Ashton stared, but could detect no sarcasm in the other’s smile of commendation.