ater ran in a gentle, eddying
current from one basin to another, guided now and then by Lysander's
hoe.

The boom of the blasting could be heard up the canon, fainter as the
afternoon sea-breeze arose, and Melissa, standing barefoot in the warm,
sandy soil, let the water swirl about her ankles as she mended the
basins, and thought of the tall young surveyor who had bound up her
wounded arm.

"I'm a-goin' to take his hankecher to him to-morruh. Bein' it's Sunday
they won't be blastin'."

She leaned on her hoe and looked up the canon, where the blue of the
distant mountains showed soft and smoky among the branches of the
sycamores.

"M'lissy!" Lysander called from the lower end of the row of
orange-trees, "hain't the ditch broke som'ers, or the water got into a
gopher-hole? There ain't no head to speak of."

The girl turned quickly and looked about her. The water had settled into
the loose soil of the basins, and was no longer running in the furrow.
She walked across, following the main ditch to the edge of the canon,
looking anxiously for the break. The wet sand rippled and glistened in
the bottom of the ditch, but no water was to be seen. Lysander, tired of
waiting, came striding through the tarweed, with his hoe on his
shoulder.

"I guess it's broke furder on up the canon, Sandy."

Melissa stepped back, as she spoke, to let him precede her on the narrow
path, and the two walked silently beside the empty ditch. Lysander's
face gathered gloom as they went.

"It's some deviltry, I'll bet!" he broke out, after a while. "Danged if
I don't begin to think yer maw's right!"

Melissa did not ask in what her mother was vindicated; she had a dull
prescience of trouble. Things seemed generally to end in that way. She
turned to her poor hopeless little dream again, and kept close behind
Lysander's lank form all the way to Flutterwheel Spring.

Alas! not to Flutterwheel Spring. Where the spray had whirled in a
fantastic spiral the day before, the moss was still wet, and the ferns
waved in happy unconsciousness of their loss; but the stream that had
flung itself from one narrow shelf of rock to another, in mad haste to
join the rush and roar of Sawpit Canon, had utterly disappeared.

Lysander turned to his companion, his face ashen-gray under the week-old
stubble of his beard. Neither of them spoke. The calamity lay too near
the source of things for bluster, even if Lysander had been capable of
bluster. In swift dual v