Incomparable Woman!"

It was Argyl who spoke first, and only after nearly an inch of white
ash had formed at the end of Conniston's cigar.

"People who do not understand--they are aliens to whom the desert has
never spoken!--ask why father gives the best part of a ripe manhood to
a struggle with such a country. Does not an evening like this answer
their question? No people in the world can so love their land as do
the children of the desert. For when they have made it over they are
still a part of it and it has become a part of them."

He told her all that he could of the work and Truxton and the men,
going into detail as he found that she followed him, that Tommy Garton
had not exaggerated when he had said that she knew every sand-hill and
hollow. She listened to him silently, only now and then asking a
pertinent question, her eyes upon his face as she leaned forward in
her chair, her hands clasped about her knees. And when he had finished
he found that his cigar had long since gone out and that she was
smiling at him.

"It has got you, too!" she cried, softly. "You are as enthusiastic
already as Tommy Garton is. I wonder if you realized it? And I
wonder," her eyes again upon the fading colors in the west, the smile
gone out of them, "what it would mean to you if, after all, our dream
came to nothing, if it proved that we were more daring than wise, if
we lost everything where we are staking everything?"

"I have been a small, unnecessary cog in a great machine for only a
week," he told her, slowly. "And yet you will know that I am telling
you the plain truth when I say that such a failure would bring to me
the biggest disappointment I have ever felt. Failure," he cried,
sharply, as though he had but grasped the full significance of the
word after he himself had employed it--"there won't be failure at the
end of it for us! There can't be. It means too much. I tell you that
we are going to drive the thing to a successful conclusion. It's got
to be!"

"Yes," she repeated, quietly, after him, "it has got to be. I don't
doubt the outcome for one single second. Down in my heart I _know_.
And I know, too, how much there is yet to be done, how much you men
have to contend with, how swiftly the time is slipping by us. Do you
realize, Mr. Conniston, how little time we have ahead of us before the
first of October?"

"Yes, I know. And there are four miles of main canal to dig, mile
after mile of smaller cross ditches, t