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None of the men below had heard the cry, and Poindexter refused to lash himself into any retrospective excitement.

“Confound the girl!” fumed Sterling, vexed, after the manner of men, over the smallest waste of emotion; “why must she frighten a fellow limp by screaming when she wasn’t hurt?”

“Possibly for the same reason that the fellow became limp before he knew she was hurt,” suggested Poindexter; “or she may have thought it an eminently ladylike thing to do; she looks like a designing creature. If the killed and wounded are properly cared for, suppose we examine the result of the blast.”

IV.

It was Saturday morning, and Lysander and Melissa were irrigating the orange-trees. Old Withrow sat by the ditch at the corner of the orchard, watching them with a feeble display of interest, while two or three of the children climbed and tumbled over him as if he were some inoffensive domestic animal.

The old man had hung about the place longer than was his wont, filled with a maudlin glee over his own importance as having been in some way instrumental in the trade with Forrester; and he had followed Lysander to the orchard this morning with a confused alcoholic idea that he ought to be present when the water from Flutterwheel Spring was turned on for the first time.

“You’ll git a big head,” he had said to his wife, as he started,–“a deal bigger head ‘n ever. I tole Forrester I’d tell ye it was a good trade, an’ I done what I said I’d do. Forrester knowed what he was doin’ when he got me”–

“G’long, you old gump!” his spouse had hurled at him wrathfully, ceasing from a vigorous wringing of the mop to grasp the handle with a gesture that was not entirely suggestive of industry.

The old man had put up his hand and wriggled in between Melissa and Lysander with a cur-like movement that brought a grim smile to his son-in-law’s face, and made Melissa shrink away from him noticeably. Out in the orchard, however, he ceased to trouble them, being content to smoke and doze by the ditch, while the water ran in a gentle, eddying current from one basin to another, guided now and then by Lysander’s hoe.

The boom of the blasting could be heard up the canon, fainter as the afternoon sea-breeze arose, and Melissa, standing barefoot in the warm, sandy soil, let the water swirl about her ankles as she mended the basins, and thought of the tall young surveyor who had bound up her wounded arm.

“I’m a-goin’ to take his hankecher to him to-morruh. Bein’ it’s Sunday they won’t be blastin’.”

She leaned on her hoe and looked up the canon, where the blue of the distant mountains showed soft and smoky among the branches of the sycamores.

“M’lissy!” Lysander called from the lower end of the row of orange-trees, “hain’t the ditch broke som’ers, or the water got into a gopher-hole? There ain’t no head to speak of.”

The girl turned quickly and looked about her. The water had settled into the loose soil of the basins, and was no longer running in the furrow. She walked across, following the main ditch to the edge of the canon, looking anxiously for the break. The wet sand rippled and glistened in the bottom of the ditch, but no water was to be seen. Lysander, tired of waiting, came striding through the tarweed, with his hoe on his shoulder.

“I guess it’s broke furder on up the canon, Sandy.”

Melissa stepped back, as she spoke, to let him precede her on the narrow path, and the two walked silently beside the empty ditch. Lysander’s face gathered gloom as they went.

“It’s some deviltry, I’ll bet!” he broke out, after a while. “Danged if I don’t begin to think yer maw’s right!”

Melissa did not ask in what her mother was vindicated; she had a dull prescience of trouble. Things seemed generally to end in that way. She turned to her poor hopeless little dream again, and kept close behind Lysander’s lank form all the way to Flutterwheel Spring.