orral."

They went behind the house, where the young man removed saddle and
bridle from Dick and turned him into the enclosure. Stevenson gathered
an armful of hay from a small heap near by and tossed it over the
fence to the horse, which began to eat eagerly. Lee glanced about,
gave a sharp whistle; from the trail by the creek a bark answered him.
Then an Airedale came racing through the sagebrush, now and again
leaping high to gain a view of his master and finally breaking out
upon the clear ground about the ranch house.

"Mike, you're too inquisitive about other animals' dwellings," Lee
addressed him as he arrived, wet from an immersion in the creek and
panting from his run. "Some day a rattler in a hole you're digging
into will nip you on the nose and you'll wish you'd been more polite.
Come along now and be good."

He walked with Stevenson back to the house, where leaving the dog to
drop in the shade outside they entered. The interior was cool and dim
after the hot, glaring sunshine; and Bryant, having greeted Mrs.
Stevenson, sat down gratefully in a rocking-chair, glad to avail
himself of the room's comfort. Crude as an adobe house is both in
appearance and in construction, it is admirably adapted to the climate
of the arid Southwest; its flat dirt roof and thick walls built of
sun-baked mud bricks, plastered within and smoothly surfaced without,
defying alike the heat of midsummer and the icy blasts of winter and
lasting in that dry clime half a century. This ranch house of the
Stevensons', originally built by some Mexican, as Bryant judged, had
been standing twenty-five or thirty years and was still tight and
staunch.

"Your creek's pretty dry, I see," the young fellow remarked
afteratime, when they had exchanged news.

"By August there won't be any water in it at all," Stevenson said,
"except a little that always runs in the canon. I'll have to haul it
from there then. You see now why I can't keep stock here."

His wife stopped the needle with which she mended an apron while they
talked, and looked out of a window. On her face was the same tired,
anxious expression that marked her husband's countenance.

"I've barely kept our garden alive," she said, "but it won't be for
much longer."

"That's too bad, Mrs. Stevenson," Lee Bryant replied. "However, one
can't do anything without water. Still, your sheep are doing well, I
suppose; the grass is good on the mountains this summer."

An answer was not imm