the road, then
the corrals and the flowers by the gate; and as they ran about
distracted the water crept up towards the house and out over the verdant
alfalfa. But just when it seemed as if the whole ranch would be
destroyed there was a smash from the lower point; the jamb went out,
draining the waters quickly away and rushing on towards the Sink. The
great mass of mud and boulders which had been brought down by the flood
ceased to spread out and cover their fields, and as the millrace of
waters continued to pour down the canyon it began to dig a new streambed
in the debris. Then the thunder of its roaring subsided by degrees and
by sundown the cloudburst was past.

Where the creek had been before there was a wider and deeper creek, its
sides cumbered with huge boulders and tree-trunks; and the mixture of
silt and gravel which formed its cut banks already had set like cement.
It _was_ cement, the same natural concrete which Nature combines
everywhere on the desert--gravel and lime and bone-dry clay, sluiced and
mixed by the passing cloudburst and piled up to set into pudding-stone.
And all the mud which had overlaid the garden and orchard was setting
like a concrete pavement. The ancient figs and peach-trees, half buried
in the slime, rose up stiffly from the fertile soil beneath; and the
Jail Canyon Ranch, once so flamboyantly green, was now shore-lined with
a blotch of dirty gray. Only the alfalfa patch remained, and the house
on the hill--everything else was either washed away or covered with
gravel and dirt. And the road--it was washed away too.

Wunpost worked late and hard, shoveling the muck away from the trees and
clearing a section of the corral; but not until Cole Campbell came down
the next day was the Stinging Lizard road even mentioned. It was gone,
they all knew that, and all their prayers and tears could not bring back
one rock from its grade; and yet somehow Wunpost felt guilty, as if his
impious words had brought down this disaster upon his friends. He rushed
feverishly about in the blazing sun, trying to undo the most imminent
damage; and Billy and Mrs. Campbell, half divining his futile regrets,
went about their own tasks in silence. But when Campbell came down over
the mountain-sheep trail and beheld what the cloudburst had done he
spoke what came first into his mind.

"Ah, my road," he moaned, talking half to himself after the manner of
the lonely and deaf, "and I let it lie idle six weeks! All my