we've been falling into, and what he did it for?"

"An Englishman," Gordon answered. "Nobody knew much about him. He was
probably an exile, too. Anyway, he saw this valley, and it seemed to
strike him that he could make a ranch in it."

"Why should he fix on this particular valley?"

"The thing's plain enough. How many years does a man usually spend
chopping a clearing out of the Bush? Isn't there a demand for anything
that you can eat from our miners and the men on our railroads and in
our mills? Why do we bring carloads of provisions in? Can't you get
hold of the fact that a man can start ranching right away on natural
prairie, if he can once get the water out of it?"

"Oh, yes," assented Nasmyth. "The point is that one has to get the
water out of it. I would like Mattawa and Wheeler to notice it. You
can go on."

"Well," said Gordon, "that man pitched right in, and spent most of two
years cutting four-foot trenches through and dyking up the swamp. He
went on every day from sun-up to dark, but every time the floods came
they beat him. When he walked over the range to the settlement, the
boys noticed he was getting kind of worn and thin, but there was clean
grit in that man. He'd taken hold of the contract, and he stayed with
it. Then one day a prospector went into the valley after a big freshet
and came across his wrecked shanty. The river had got him."

Wheeler nodded gravely. "It seems to me this country was made by men
like that," he commented. "They're the kind they ought to put up
monuments to."

There was silence for a moment or two after that, except for the
sighing of the wind among the firs and the hoarse murmur that came up,
softened by the distance, from the canyon. It was not an unusual story,
but it appealed to those who heard it, for they had fought with rock
and river and physical weariness, and they could understand the grim
patience and unflinching valour of the long struggle that had
resulted, as such struggles sometimes do, only in defeat. Still, the
men who take those tasks in hand seldom capitulate. Gordon glanced at
Nasmyth.

"Now," he said, "if you have anything to say, you can get it out."

Nasmyth raised himself on one elbow. "That Englishman put up a good
fight, but he didn't start quite right," he said. "I want to point out
that, in my opinion, the river has evidently just run into the canyon.
It's slow and deep until you reach the fall, where it's merely held up
by the ridge of r