irlpool, and sank with a gurgle into the earth.

For a moment we stood gazing spellbound at this natural phenomenon,
hardly realizing what it meant, and then, with one impulse, we both
threw our hats into the air with a shout, seized each other's hands, and
danced a wild and unconventional dance, with no witness but a solitary
eagle, which, passing high overhead, paused for an instant in his flight
to wonder, probably, what those crazy, unaccountable human beings were
up to now.

At length, out of breath, we stopped, when Joe, clapping his hands
together to emphasize his words, cried:

"At last we've found it, Phil! This, _surely_, is the water-supply that
keeps the 'forty rods' wet!"

"It must be," I replied, no less excited than my partner. "It must be;
it can't be anything else. But how are we going to prove it, Joe?"

"The only way I see is to divert the flow here; then, if our underground
stream stops, we shall know this is it."

"Yes, but how are we to divert it?"

"Why, look here," Joe answered. "The spring, I suppose, is a little
extra-strong just now, causing that slight overflow up above here. Well,
what we must do is to take the line marked out for us by the overflow,
and following it from the channel down to the crack in the crater-wall,
break up and throw aside all the rocks that get in the way; then cut a
new channel and send the whole stream off through the crack, when it
will pour into the canyon, run across the ranch on the surface, and the
'forty rods' will dry up!"

He gazed at me eagerly, with his fists shut tight, as though he were all
ready to spring upon the impeding rocks and fling them out of the way at
once.

"That's all right, Joe," I replied. "It's a good programme. But it's a
tremendous piece of work, all the same. There are scores of rocks to be
broken up and moved; and when that is done, there is still the new
channel to be cut in the solid stone bed of the crater. The present
channel is about eighteen inches deep; we shall have to make the new one
six inches deeper, and something like a hundred feet long: a big job by
itself, Joe."

"I know that," Joe answered. "It's a big job, sure enough, and will take
time and lots of hard work. Still, we can do it----"

"And what's more we will do it!" I cried. "What's the best way of
setting about it?"

"We shall have to blast out the channel and blow to pieces all the
bigger rocks," Joe replied. "It would take forever to do it with pi