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“Yes, I think it is. Of course I never measured the water, an’ I didn’t admit it when Forrester said so; but I’d ‘a’ resked sayin’ it was, if anybody else’d asked me.”

“Why wouldn’t you say so to him?”

Lysander laughed, and flipped a pebble toward a gray squirrel, who gave a little rasping, insulted bark, and whisked into his hole in high dudgeon.

“Well, because he ain’t a-lackin’ for information, an’ I hain’t got none to spare, M’lissy.”

The young girl rocked herself gently in the clover.

“I don’t understand it,” she said hopelessly. “It looks as if he was tryin’ to be fair, an’ mother wouldn’t let him. I should think she’d be glad, even if he did used to be mean,–an’ I can’t see as he was any meaner than the law ‘lowed him to be. I s’pose the law’s right. You went to the war for the law, didn’t you, Sandy?”

Her companion winced. There was one thing dearer to him than his neutrality in the family feud.

“Mebbe I did, M’lissy,–mebbe I did,” he answered, with a trifling accession of dignity: “fer the law as I understood it. The law’s all right, but it ain’t every judge nor every jury that knows what it is; they think they do, but they’re liable to be mistaken. Seems to me they’re derned liable to be mistaken!” he added, with some asperity.

And so the paths that to Melissa’s straightforward consciousness seemed so simple and direct ended, one and all, in hopeless confusion. Even Lysander had failed her. The foundations of human knowledge were certainly giving way when Lysander indulged in the mysterious.

Melissa turned and left him, walking absently up the little path that led to the canon. She had not noticed a speck crawling like an overburdened insect along the winding road in the valley. Visible and invisible by turns, as the sage-brush was sparse or high, and emerging at last into permanent view where the wild growth came to an end and Mrs. Withrow’s “patch” began, it resolved itself, to Lysander’s intent and curious gaze, into a diminutive gray donkey, bearing a confused burden of blankets and cooking utensils, and followed by a figure more dejected, if possible, than the donkey himself.

“I’ll be hanged if the old man hain’t showed up!” said Lysander, dropping down on the sled, and throwing back into the pile two boulders he held, as if to indicate a general cessation of all logical sequence and a consequent embargo on industry.

Evidently the old man was conscious that he “showed up” to poor advantage, for he began prodding the donkey with a conscientious absorption that filled that small brute with amazement, and made him amble from one side of the road to the other, in a vain endeavor to look around his pack and discover the reason for this unexpected turn in the administration of affairs.

Lysander watched their approach with an expression of amused contempt. The traveler started, in a clumsy attempt at surprise, when he was opposite his son-in-law, and, giving the donkey a parting whack that sent him and his hardware onward at a literally rattling pace, turned from the road, and sidled doggedly through the tarweed toward the stone-pile.

Lysander folded his arms, and surveyed him in a cool, sidelong way that was peculiarly withering.

“Well,” he said, with a caustic downward inflection,–“well, it’s you, is it?”

The newcomer admitted the gravity of the charge by an appealing droop of his whole person.

“Yes,” he answered humbly, “it’s me,–an’ I didn’t want to come. I vum I didn’t. But Forrester made me. He ‘lowed you wouldn’t hev no objections to my comin’–on business.”

He braced himself on the last two words, and made a feeble effort to look his son-in-law in the face. What he saw there was not encouraging. It became audible in a sniff of undisguised contempt.

“Where’d you see Forrester?”

“At the winery. Ye see I was a-goin’ over to the Duarte, an’ I stopped at the winery”–