that from the great iron
pipe, which was wont to spout a sparkling stream, there came only a few
drops and trickles.

"It's disappeared!" said Bud in a low voice. "The water has taken
another course! This means the end of Flume Valley, I reckon!"

CHAPTER II

A NIGHT RIDE

The boy ranchers stood looking down into the reservoir, which was
almost full of water, but which was slowly running out through the
different gates, some to concrete drinking troughs where thirsty cattle
congregated, and some to distant meadows where it supplied moisture for
the grass on which the steers of Diamond X Second fed. From the
slightly ruffled surface of the reservoir, as the evening wind blew
across the water, the gazes of Bud, Nort and Dick sought the faces of
one another.

"This looks had!" murmured Bud, while Buck Tooth, the Zuni Indian,
grunted something in his own incomprehensible dialect.

"What does it mean?" asked Nort, as he looked down the slope from the
reservoir to the group of tents that was to form the home of himself,
his brother and cousin for several months, while they were in camp.

"It means the water supply, on which I depended to raise these steers,
has petered out," answered Bud, and there was a worried note in his
voice.

"You mean stopped for good?" asked Dick.

"I hope not," went on Bud. "But from what you can see--no water coming
through the pipe line that dad laid to the Pocut River--I should say
there was a break in it somewhere, and it will have to be fixed right
away--that is, if I'm to keep these cattle here," and he looked down
the valley where the bunches of steers were ever on the move, seeking
new places to feed, or coming to drink water from the supply flowing
out of the reservoir.

"We seem to have struck a job right off the bat!" remarked Dick, as he
picked up a stone and tossed it into the reservoir.

"Just as we did when we came west before, and had to jump out and help
the queer professors," added Nort. "But we're ready to go to work,
Bud. All you'll have to do is say the word and----"

But Bud did not seem to be paying much attention to what his cousin was
saying. Instead his gaze followed that of his Zuni Indian helper.
Buck Tooth was looking off up the hill under which the big pipe ran to
the distant Pocut River on the other side of the mountain. And as Bud
and Buck Tooth looked, and as the gaze of Nort and Dick was bent in the
same direction, they all beheld a figu