o the manager of the Boone Ditch Company at 'Jules'.' Perhaps
I ought to see him first."

"All right; he's Stanton."

"And"--hesitated the secretary, "YOU, who appear to understand the
locality so well,--I trust I may have the pleasure"--

"Oh, I'm Jules."

The secretary was a little startled and amused. So "Jules" was a person,
and not a place!

"Then you're a pioneer?" asked Hemmingway, a little less dictatorially,
as they passed out under the dripping trees.

"I struck this creek in the fall of '49, comin' over Livermore's
Pass with Stanton," returned Jules, with great brevity of speech and
deliberate tardiness of delivery. "Sent for my wife and two children the
next year; wife died same winter, change bein' too sudden for her, and
contractin' chills and fever at Sweetwater. When I kem here first thar
wasn't six inches o' water in the creek; out there was a heap of it over
there where you see them yallowish-green patches and strips o' brush
and grass; all that war water then, and all that growth hez sprung up
since."

Hemmingway looked around him. The "higher ground" where they stood was
in reality only a mound-like elevation above the dead level of the flat,
and the few trees were merely recent young willows and alders. The area
of actual depression was much greater than he had imagined, and its
resemblance to the bed of some prehistoric inland sea struck him
forcibly. A previous larger inundation than Jules' brief experience had
ever known had been by no means improbable. His cheek reddened at his
previous hasty indictment of the settlers' ignorance and shiftlessness,
and the thought that he had probably committed his employers to his
own rash confidence and superiority of judgment. However, there was no
evidence that this diluvial record was not of the remote past. He smiled
again with greater security as he thought of the geological changes that
had since tempered these cataclysms, and the amelioration brought by
settlement and cultivation. Nevertheless, he would make a thorough
examination to-morrow.

Stanton's cabin was the furthest of these temporary habitations, and
was partly on the declivity which began to slope to the river's bank. It
was, like the others, a rough shanty of unplaned boards, but, unlike the
others, it had a base of logs laid lengthwise on the ground and parallel
with each other, on which the flooring and structure were securely
fastened. This gave it the appearance of a box slid o