which was assisting her to see startlingly things
exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When
she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was
revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was made
discouragingly plain.

All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and
the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil
around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and
sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears,
and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in
a gray world, waiting for the best.

All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits
of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the
land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least
twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each
thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of
scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country
to move three acres of land in order to make one.

But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid,
and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the
whole expanse of that reservation, for an example, to prove his point.
There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the
man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would
take down the money from the hook. That was Smith's contention.

He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river
to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the
wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed,
and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could
be setting her wheel.

"A person's got to plan ahead in this country," said Smith. "You must
know to a skinned knuckle just what you'll need a year, or five years,
ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin'. It ain't like it is
back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss,
and hit about as often as you miss. Here you've got to know."

Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company
to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to
be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was
indeed the head an