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He was accompanied by the man who had first led her through the wheat. He gazed upon her with apparently all the curiosity and concern that the other had lacked.

“You want to get to San Jose as quick as you can?” he said interrogatively.

“Yes,” she said quickly, “if you can help me.”

“You walked all the way from the major’s here?” he continued, without taking his eyes from her face.

“Yes,” she answered with an affectation of carelessness she had not shown to Bent. “But I started very early, it was cool and pleasant, and didn’t seem far.”

“I’ll put you down in San Jose inside the hour. You shall have my horse and trotting sulky, and I’ll drive you myself. Will that do?”

She looked at him wonderingly. She had not forgotten his previous restraint and gravity, but now his face seemed to have relaxed with some humorous satisfaction. She felt herself coloring slightly, but whether with shame or relief she could not tell.

“I shall be so much obliged to you,” she replied hesitatingly, “and so will my father, I know.”

“I reckon,” said the man with the same look of amused conjecture; then, with a quick, assuring nod, he turned away, and dived into the wheat again.

“You’re all right now, Miss Mallory,” said Bent, complacently. “Dawson will fix it. He’s got a good horse, and he’s a good driver, too.” He paused, and then added pleasantly, “I suppose they’re all well up at the house?”

It was so evident that his remark carried no personal meaning to herself that she was obliged to answer carelessly, “Oh, yes.”

“I suppose you see a good deal of Miss Randolph–Miss Adele, I think you call her?” he remarked tentatively, and with a certain boyish enthusiasm, which she had never conceived possible to his nature.

“Yes,” she replied a little dryly, “she is the only young lady there.” She stopped, remembering Adele’s naive description of the man before her, and said abruptly, “You know her, then?”

“A little,” replied the young man, modestly. “I see her pretty often when I am passing the upper end of the ranch. She’s very well brought up, and her manners are very refined–don’t you think so?–and yet she’s just as simple and natural as a country girl. There’s a great deal in education after all, isn’t there?” he went on confidentially, “and although”–he lowered his voice and looked cautiously around him–“I believe that some of us here don’t fancy her mother much, there’s no doubt that Mrs. Randolph knows how to bring up her children. Some people think that kind of education is all artificial, and don’t believe in it, but I do!”

With the consciousness that she was running away from these people and the shameful disclosure she had heard last night–with the recollection of Adele’s scandalous interpretation of her most innocent actions and her sudden and complete revulsion against all that she had previously admired in that household, to hear this man who had seemed to her a living protest against their ideas and principles, now expressing them and holding them up for emulation, almost took her breath away.

“I suppose that means you intend to fix Major Randolph’s well for him?” she said dryly.

“Yes,” he returned without noticing her manner; “and I think I can find that water again. I’ve been studying it up all night, and do you know what I’m going to do? I am going to make the earthquake that lost it help me to find it again.” He paused, and looked at her with a smile and a return of his former enthusiasm. “Do you remember the crack in the adobe field that stopped you yesterday?”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a slight shiver.

“I told you then that the same crack was a split in the rock outcrop further up the plain, and was deeper. I am satisfied now, from what I have seen, that it is really a rupture of the whole strata all the way down. That’s the one weak point that the imprisoned water is sure to find, and that’s where the borer will tap it–in the new well that the earthquake itself has sunk.”