dog that was mere domesticated wolf stalked
the enticing bit of young life that Mab had brought so recently into
the world. And the mare, her own ancient instincts aroused and
quivering, circled ever between the foal and this menace of the wild
young days when all her ancestry had known fear of him and his hunting
brethren. Once, she whirled and tried to kick him, but usually she
strove to strike him with her fore-hoofs, or rushed upon him with open
mouth and ears laid back in an effort to crunch his backbone between
her teeth. And the wolf-dog, with ears flattened down and crouching,
would slide silkily away, only to circle up to the foal from the other
side and give cause to the mare for new alarm. Then Daylight, urged on
by Dede's solicitude, uttered a low threatening cry; and Wolf, drooping
and sagging in all the body of him in token of his instant return to
man's allegiance, slunk off behind the barn.

It was a few minutes later that Daylight, breaking off from his reading
to change the streams of irrigation, found that the water had ceased
flowing. He shouldered a pick and shovel, took a hammer and a
pipe-wrench from the tool-house, and returned to Dede on the porch.

"I reckon I'll have to go down and dig the pipe out," he told her.
"It's that slide that's threatened all winter. I guess she's come down
at last."

"Don't you read ahead, now," he warned, as he passed around the house
and took the trail that led down the wall of the canon.

Halfway down the trail, he came upon the slide. It was a small affair,
only a few tons of earth and crumbling rock; but, starting from fifty
feet above, it had struck the water pipe with force sufficient to break
it at a connection. Before proceeding to work, he glanced up the path
of the slide, and he glanced with the eye of the earth-trained miner.
And he saw what made his eyes startle and cease for the moment from
questing farther.

"Hello," he communed aloud, "look who's here."

His glance moved on up the steep broken surface, and across it from
side to side. Here and there, in places, small twisted manzanitas were
rooted precariously, but in the main, save for weeds and grass, that
portion of the canon was bare. There were signs of a surface that had
shifted often as the rains poured a flow of rich eroded soil from above
over the lip of the canon.

"A true fissure vein, or I never saw one," he proclaimed softly.

And as the old hunting instincts had arous