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“Oh, yes, I know,” mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small rocking-chair on the piazza; “there’s folks that think the creation of the world in six days is nothin’ but science, but they’re not people for Christians to be goin’ pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of dirt on top of that water, I tell Jawn he had his reasons, and I can’t think it’s right for anybody whose treasure ought to be laid up in heaven to go pryin’ into the bowels of the earth huntin’ for things that our heavenly Fawther’s hid.”

“But there’s gold, Emeline.”

“Oh, yes; I know there’s gold, and I know ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’ I don’t say that the Lord don’t reign over the inside of the earth, but I do say that people that get their minds fixed on things that’s underground are liable to forget the things that are above.”

“Well, now, I’m sure they hadn’t ought,” protested Dysart. “I’m sure ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,’ Emeline.”

Mrs. Dysart sank slowly back in her chair at this unexpected thrust from her own weapon, and then rallied with a long, corpulent sigh.

“Well, I don’t know. You recollect that old man was up here last winter, hammerin’ around among the rocks as if the earth was a big nut that he was tryin’ to crack? I talked with him long enough to find out what he was; he was an atheist.”

Mrs. Dysart leaned forward and whispered the last word in an awe-struck tone, with her fat eyes fixed reproachfully upon her husband.

“Oh, I guess not, Emeline,” pleaded John.

Mrs. Dysart shut her lips and her eyes very tight, and nodded slowly and affirmatively. “Yes, he was. He set right in that identical spot where Mr. Palmerston is a-settin’, and talked about the seven theological periods of creation, and the fables of Jonah and the whale and Noah’s ark, till I was all of a tremble. Mebbe that’s science, Jawn, but I call it blasphemin’.”

Dysart rested his elbows on his knees and looked over the edge of the porch as if he were gazing into the bottomless pit.

“Oh, come, now, Mrs. Dysart,” Palmerston broke in cheerfully; “I’m not at all afraid of Mr. Dysart losing his faith, but I’m very much afraid of his losing his money. I wish he had as good a grip on his purse as he has on his religion.”

Mrs. Dysart glanced at the young man with a look of relief to find him agreeing with her in spite of his irreverent commingling of the temporal and the spiritual.

“Well, I’m sure we’ve lost enough already, when it comes to that,” she continued, folding her hands resignedly in her convex lap. “There was that artesian well down at San Pasqual”–

“Well, now, Emeline,” her husband broke in eagerly, “that well would have been all right if the tools hadn’t stuck. I think yet we’d have got water if we’d gone on.”

“We’d ‘a’ got water if it had ‘a’ been our heavenly Fawther’s will,” announced Mrs. Dysart, with solemnity, rising slowly from her chair, which gave a little squeak of relief. “I’ve got to set the sponge,” she went on in the same tone, as if it were some sacred religious rite. “I wish you’d talk it over with Mr. Palmerston, Jawn, and tell him the offer you’ve had from this perfessor–I’m sure I don’t know what he’s perfessor of. He ain’t a perfessor of religion–I know that.”

She sent her last arrow over her wide shoulder as she passed the two men and creaked into the house. Her husband looked after her gravely.

“Now that’s the way with Emeline,” he said; “she’s all faith, and then, again, she has no faith. Now, I’m just the other way.” He rubbed his bald head in a vain attempt to formulate the obverse of his wife’s character. “Well, anyway,” he resumed, accepting his failure cheerfully, “the professor he wants to find a claim, as I was telling you, but he wants one that’s handy to the place he’s selected for the tunnel. Of course he won’t say just where that is till we get the papers made out, but he gave me a kind of a general idea of it, and the land around there’s all mine. He’d have to go ‘way over east to find a government section that hasn’t been filed on, and of course there’d be a big expense for pipe; so he offers to locate the tunnel for half the water if we get ten inches or over, and I’m to make the tunnel, and deed him twenty acres of land.”