f water," he murmured
in gentle, subdued reminiscence. "The darned old no-good things!"

Then, as the bitterness of his lonely life rose up and dulled his mind
and soured his tongue, "Why don't yuh get some mineral into yuh?" he
yelled with abrupt ferocity. "Why ain't yuh some good tuh a feller?
_Zing, zing, zing_--I _hate_ your old heat a-singin' in my ears all
the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh _do_ something? Huh? Yuh don't
make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't
give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest lay there and make
_heat!_"

[Illustration: "'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"]

[Illustration: "NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH
LOWERED EYES"]

Across the mesa the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his
angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side.
Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges.
Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet,
and alluring.

Cassidy burst into a howl of derision that startled his blacks into a
jogging trot: "Oh, yuh cain't fool me, yuh darned old fake!" He shook
a huge red fist in defiance of his ancient foe. "I'll beat yuh
yet--darn yuh!"

Late that night, a large man with a red face and a sunburned neck on
which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of
Number One Commissary Tent.

"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no
more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.

"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.

"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young
feller?"

"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy
repeated.

"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance.
He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite
still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick,
fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and
dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of
all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment
before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight,
and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.

For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of
surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together
they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing