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“Oh, you exquisite, hopeless thing! Why can’t I let you alone!” she cries; “and why can’t you let me alone!”

“It is rather hard, the way the thing doubles up on you,” says Tom. “The real fall, right side up, is bad enough; but when it comes to the reflection of it, standing on its head in the lagoon, I should lie right down myself. I wouldn’t pull another pound.”

(” Lay down,” he said; but I thought you wouldn’t stand it. Tom would never spoil a cherished bit of dialect because of shocking anybody with his grammar.)

Kitty throws herself back in the dry salt-grass with which the whole of our little peninsula is bedded. The willows and brakes are our curtains, through which the rising moon looks in at us, and the setting sun; the sun rises long before we see him, above the dark-blue mountains beyond the shore.

“Won’t somebody repeat

‘There is sweet music here that softlier lies?'”

Kitty asks, letting her eyelashes fall on her sun-flushed cheeks. Her face, as I saw it, sitting behind her in the grass, was so pretty–upside down like the reflection of the waterfall, its colors all the more wonderfully blended.

We did not all speak at once. Then Harshaw said, to break the silence, “I will read it to you, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, have you the book?” Kitty asked in surprise.

He went to his tent and returned with a book, and sitting on the grass where she could hear but could not see him, he began. I trembled for him; but before he had got to the second stanza I was relieved: he could read aloud.

“Now there is a man one could live on a Snake River ranch with,” I felt like saying to Kitty. Not that I am sure that I want her to.

When he had finished,

“O rest ye, brother mariners; we will not wander more!”

Tom remarked, after a suitable silence, that it was all well enough for Harshaw, who would be in London in six weeks, to say, “We will not wander more!” But how about the rest of us?

Kitty sat straight up at that.

“Will Mr. Harshaw be in London six weeks from now?” The question was almost a cry.

“Will you?” she demanded, turning upon him as if this was the last injury he could do her.

“I suppose so,” he said.

“And you will see my mother, and all of them?”

“I think so–if you wish.”

She rose up, as if she could bear no more. Harshaw waited an instant, and then followed her; but she motioned him back, and went away to have it out with herself alone.

I took up the book Harshaw had left on the grass. It was “Copp’s Manual”–“For the use of Prospectors,” etc.

* * * * *

After all, it is not so sure that Harshaw will go to London. There has been an engineer on the ground since last summer, when all this water was free. He has located a vast deal of it, perhaps the whole. Tom says he can hold only just as much as he can use; I hope there will be no difference of opinion on that point. There generally is a difference of opinion on points of location when the thing located is proved to have any value. The prior locator has gone East, they tell us at the ranch, on a business visit, presumably to raise capital for his scheme; which, as I understand it, is to force the water of the springs up on the dry plains above, for irrigation (the fetich of the country), by means of a pneumatic pumping arrangement. His ladders and pipes, and all his hopeful apparatus, are clinging now like cobwebs to the face of the bluff, against that flashing, creaming broadside of the springs at their greatest height and fall. I was pitying the poor man and his folly, but Tom says the plan is perfectly feasible.