e Mexican was seen clinging limpet-like to the
rocks, his courage gone and his death-warrant signed. For while he
clung, the great wall lost its perfect alignment, sagged, swayed outward
under the irresistible pressure from above, crumbled, and was gone in a
thunder-burst of sound that stunned the watchers and shook the solid
earth of the mesa where they stood.

* * * * *

"Are you quite sure it wasn't all a frightful dream?" asked the young
woman in a charming house gown and pointed Turkish slippers of the young
man with his left arm in a sling; the pair waiting the breakfast call in
the hammock-bridged corner of the great portico at Castle 'Cadia.

It was a Colorado mountain morning of the sort called "Italian" by
enthusiastic tourists. The air was soft and balmy; a rare blue haze lay
in the gulches; and the patches of yellowing aspens on the mountain
shoulders added the needed touch of colour to relieve the dun-browns and
grays of the balds and the heavy greens of the forested slopes. Save for
the summer-dried grass, lodged and levelled in great swaths by the
sudden freeing of the waters, the foreground of the scene was unchanged.
Through the bowl-shaped valley the Boiling Water, once more an
August-dwindled mountain stream, flowed murmurously as before; and a
mile away in the foothill gap of the Elbow, the huge steel-beamed
derrick lined itself against the farther distances.

"No, it wasn't a dream," said Ballard. "The thirty-mile, nerve-trying
drive home in the car, with the half-wrecked railroad bridge for a river
crossing, ought to have convinced you of the realities."

"Nothing convinces me any more," she confessed, with the air of one who
has seen chaos and cosmos succeed each other in dizzying alternations;
and when Ballard would have gone into the particulars of that with her,
the King of Arcadia came up from his morning walk around the homestead
knoll.

"Ah, you youngstehs!" he said, with the note of fatherly indulgence in
the mellow voice. "Out yondeh undeh the maples, I run across the Bigelow
boy and Madge Cantrell;--'Looking to see what damage the water had
done,' they said, as innocent as a pair of turtle-doves! Oveh in the
orcha'd I stumble upon Mistuh Wingfield and Dosia. I didn't make them
lie to me, and I'm not going to make you two. But I should greatly
appreciate a word with you, Mistuh Ballard."

Elsa got up to go in, but Ballard sat in the hammock and drew he