or stretching before him, still in a northeasterly
direction, he saw a great, green-brown level sweeping away from his
feet and melting into some rimming mountains--a vast, natural basin of
gigantic proportions.

Sanderson was almost at the end of his journey, it was early morning,
and he was in no hurry. He leisurely prepared his breakfast, sitting
on a flat rock as he ate, and scanning the basin.

Mere bigness had never impressed Sanderson; the West had shown him
greater vistas than this mammoth basin. And yet his eyes glowed as he
looked out and down at the country that lay, slumbering in the pure
white light of the dawn.

He saw, dotting the floor of the basin, the roofs of houses. From his
height they seemed to be close together, but Sanderson was not misled,
and he knew that they were separated by miles of virgin soil--of
sagebrush and yucca, and soapweed and other desert weeds that needed
not the magic of water to make them live.

When Sanderson finally mounted Streak, the sun was up. It took Streak
two hours to descend the slope leading down into the basin, and when
once horse and rider were down, Sanderson dismounted and patted
Streak's moist flanks.

"Some drop, eh, Streak?" he said. "But it didn't fool us none. We
knowed it was some distance, didn't we? An' they ain't foolin' us
about the rest of it, are they? The Drifter said to head toward the
Big Peak. The Double A would be right near there--in the foothills.
Looks easy, don't it? But I reckon we'll have to hump ourselves to get
there by feedin' time, this noon, eh?"

A little later, Streak having rested, Sanderson mounted and rode
forward, toward the peak of a majestic mountain that loomed far above
them.

CHAPTER IV

IH WHICH A MAN IS SYMPATHETIC

It was shortly after noon when Sanderson, urging Streak to the crest of
an isolated excrescence of earth surrounded by a level of sage and
cactus, saw within several hundred yards of him a collection of
buildings scattered on a broad plain that extended back several hundred
yards farther until it merged into the rock-faced wall of a butte that
loomed upward many feet.

Sanderson halted Streak on the hilltop to glance around. The
buildings, evidently, belonged to the Double A ranch, and the country
was all the Drifter had claimed for it.

The big stretch of plain--in fact, the entire basin--could be made
fertile by the judicious use of water. Sanderson was not an engineer,
but h