moderate drink of water dipped up in the brim of his hat, and without
wakening his wife, sat down beside her to "figure up" his fieldbook.

Ashton had come down to the pool panting from heat and exertion. It
was the first time that he had walked more than half a mile since
coming to the ranch, for he had immediately fallen into the cowboy
practice of saddling a horse to go even short distances. He had his
reward for his work when, having soused his hot head in the pool and
drunk his fill, he came up to rest in the shade of Isobel's tree. Very
considerately the baby fell asleep. To avoid disturbing him and his
mother, the young couple talked in low tones and half whispers very
conducive to intimacy.

Ashton did his utmost to improve his opportunity. Without openly
speaking his love, he allowed it to appear in his every look and
intonation. The girl met the attack with banter and raillery and
adroit shiftings of the conversation whenever his ardent inferences
became too obvious. Yet her evasion and her teasing could not always
mask her maidenly pleasure over his adoration of her loveliness, and
an occasional blush betrayed to him that his wooing was not
altogether unwelcome.

He was in the seventh heaven when Mrs. Blake awoke from her
health-giving sleep and her husband closed his fieldbook. The girl
promptly dashed her suitor back to earth by dropping him for the
engineer.

"Mr. Blake! You can't have figured it out already?" she exclaimed.
"What do you find?"

"Only an 'if,' Miss Chuckie," he answered. "If water can be stored or
brought by ditch to this elevation, practically all Dry Mesa can be
irrigated. Our bench-mark there on the dike is more than two hundred
feet above that spike we drove into your porch post."

"Is that all you've found out today?"

"All for today," said Blake. "I could have left this line of levels
until later, but I thought I might as well get through with them."

"You would not have run them if you had thought they would be
useless," she stated, perceiving the point with intuitive acuteness.

"I like to clean up my work as I go along," he replied. "If you wish
to know, I have thought of a possible way to get water enough for the
whole mesa. It depends on two 'ifs.' I shall be certain as to one of
them within the next two days. The other is the question of the depth
of Deep Canyon. If I had a transit, I could determine that by a
vertical angle,--triangulation. As it is, I probably sh