"Yes, I think it is. Of course I never measured the water, an' I didn't
admit it when Forrester said so; but I'd 'a' resked sayin' it was, if
anybody else'd asked me."

"Why wouldn't you say so to him?"

Lysander laughed, and flipped a pebble toward a gray squirrel, who gave
a little rasping, insulted bark, and whisked into his hole in high
dudgeon.

"Well, because he ain't a-lackin' for information, an' I hain't got none
to spare, M'lissy."

The young girl rocked herself gently in the clover.

"I don't understand it," she said hopelessly. "It looks as if he was
tryin' to be fair, an' mother wouldn't let him. I should think she'd be
glad, even if he did used to be mean,--an' I can't see as he was any
meaner than the law 'lowed him to be. I s'pose the law's right. You went
to the war for the law, didn't you, Sandy?"

Her companion winced. There was one thing dearer to him than his
neutrality in the family feud.

"Mebbe I did, M'lissy,--mebbe I did," he answered, with a trifling
accession of dignity: "fer the law as I understood it. The law's all
right, but it ain't every judge nor every jury that knows what it is;
they think they do, but they're liable to be mistaken. Seems to me
they're derned liable to be mistaken!" he added, with some asperity.

And so the paths that to Melissa's straightforward consciousness seemed
so simple and direct ended, one and all, in hopeless confusion. Even
Lysander had failed her. The foundations of human knowledge were
certainly giving way when Lysander indulged in the mysterious.

Melissa turned and left him, walking absently up the little path that
led to the canon. She had not noticed a speck crawling like an
overburdened insect along the winding road in the valley. Visible and
invisible by turns, as the sage-brush was sparse or high, and emerging
at last into permanent view where the wild growth came to an end and
Mrs. Withrow's "patch" began, it resolved itself, to Lysander's intent
and curious gaze, into a diminutive gray donkey, bearing a confused
burden of blankets and cooking utensils, and followed by a figure more
dejected, if possible, than the donkey himself.

"I'll be hanged if the old man hain't showed up!" said Lysander,
dropping down on the sled, and throwing back into the pile two boulders
he held, as if to indicate a general cessation of all logical sequence
and a consequent embargo on industry.

Evidently the old man was conscious that he "showed up" to poo