ot risk the precious handkerchief
in the hands of the cook. No one else was visible. Two or three workmen
were sleeping in the large tent under the wild grapevine. She could hear
them breathing in loud nasal discord. It was better to go on up the
canon, she persuaded herself with transparent logic.

"It's purty hard walkin' when you've got your shoes on," she said,
justifying her course by its difficulties, with the touch of Puritanism
that makes the whole theological world kin, "but if I give it to him
myself I'll know he's got it."

She glanced in at the door of the engineer's tent, as she passed. The
banjo was there, a point of dazzling light to her eyes, but otherwise
the disorder was far from elegant; resulting chiefly from that reckless
prodigality in head and foot gear which seems to be a phase of masculine
culture.

"I don't see what they want of so many hats and shoes," commented
Melissa. "I sh'd think they could go barefooted sometimes, to rest their
feet; an' I didn't know folks' heads ever got tired." The thought
recalled her own disappointment in the matter of millinery. She put her
hand up to the broken rim of her hat. "I've a notion to take it off when
I ketch up to him," she soliloquized. "I would if my hair wasn't so
awful red."

Old Withrow had preceded his daughter, stumbling along the flume path,
muttering sullenly. All his groundless elation had suddenly turned to
equally groundless wrath. Having allied himself in a stupid, servile way
with Forrester, he clung to the alliance and its feeble reflected glory
with all the tenacity of ignorance. There were not many connected links
of cause and effect in the old man's muddled brain, but the value of
water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along
with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a
winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester.

"They're blastin', be they? Forrester never said nothin' 'bout blastin'.
He'll give it to 'em when he knows it. He'll blast 'em!"

He staggered on past the cut-off that led to the camp, keeping well up
on the bank along the path beside the ditch that Lysander had dug from
Flutterwheel Spring. Once there, the sight of the ruin that had befallen
his plans seemed to strike him dumb for a little. The slime still clung
to the rocks, and a faint trickle of water oozed into the pool. He sat
down a moment, mumbling sullen curses, and then staggered t