he Wenatchee showing beyond the mouth,
but as he came back along the ridge, he saw she had turned her shoulder on
the crouching mountain. At his far "Hello!" she waved her hand to him and
rose to start across the bench to meet him. He was descending a broken
stairway below two granite pillars that topped a semi-circular bluff and,
springing from a knob to avoid a dry runnel, he shaped his way diagonally
to abridge the distance. He moved with incredible swiftness, swinging by
his hands to drop from a ledge, sliding where he must, and the ease and
expediency with which he accomplished it all brought the admiration
sparkling to her eyes.

"I am sorry," he said, as he drew near, "but there isn't any easy way.
It's too bad to have traveled so far and miss the spring, for the whole
project hinges on it; but the climb is impossible for you in this heat."

"Then you found the spring?" she asked quickly. "It was all the plans
promised?"

"Yes." He began to walk on across the bench, suiting his steps to hers.
"And Weatherbee had put in a small dam there to create his first
reservoir. I found his old camp, too; a foundation of logs, open now to
the sky, with a few tatters left of the canvas that had roofed it over."
There was a silent moment, then he added, with the emotion still playing
gently in his voice: "I wish I could show you that place; the pool is
crystal clear and cool, rimmed in pines, like a basin of opals."

When they reached the flat rock in the shade of the pine tree, he took the
reclamation plan from his inner pocket and seated himself beside her.
"This is Weatherbee's drawing," he said. "See how carefully he worked in
the detail. This is the spring and that upper reservoir, and this lower
one is a natural dry basin up there under that bluff, a little to the left
of those granite chimneys; you can see its rocky rim. All it needs is this
short flume sketched in here to bring the water down, and a sluice-gate to
feed the main canal that follows this bench we are on. Spillways would
irrigate a peach orchard along this slope below us and seep out through
this level around us to supply home gardens and lawn. Just imagine it!" He
paused, while her glance followed his brief comparisons, moving from the
plan to the surface of the bench and down over the slope to the vale.
"Imagine this tract at the end of four years; a billowing sea of green;
with peach trees in bearing on this mountainside; apples, the finest
Jonathans