an't_ fail. Everything has got to come out right! And now,"
in the manner native and natural to her--frank, hearty, even eager--"I
am going to tell you some good news. In the first place, I see that I
have been doing nothing too long, and that always makes one morbid, I
think. I am going to get back to work. Isn't that good news? It is to
me, at least. And, secondly, I have made a discovery. You'd never
guess."

Conniston shook his head. "What is it?"

"What," she asked him, laughingly, and yet with a serious note in her
voice, "is the one thing which we should like to discover here? If a
good old-style genie straight from between the covers of the _Arabian
Nights_ were to drop down in front of you and say, 'Name the thing
which thou wouldst have, and thou shalt have it!' what would that
thing be?"

And Conniston, with his thoughts upon the Great Work, knowing that her
thoughts were with his there, answered quickly:

"Water! But that is impossible!"

"My secret--yet," she answered him. "I had not meant to say anything
about it so soon. Promise to say nothing about it until I give you
leave, and I'll tell you a little--oh, a very little--about my
secret."

Conniston promised, and she went on, speaking swiftly, earnestly:

"It was last week. I was riding out into the desert to the north of
here--no matter how far--when I came upon it. It is a spring. Oh, not
much of a spring to look at it. Just a few square feet of moist soil,
here and there a sprig of drying grass, three or four brown willows.
But those things mean that there is water there. How it came there
while all of the rest of the desert so far as we know it is bone-dry
does not matter so much as _what can we do with it?_ I hardly dare
hope," she finished, thoughtfully, "that my spring is going to prove a
factor in our irrigation scheme. But I hope that it may help to supply
us here with drinking-water, water for our horses. That in itself
would mean a good deal, wouldn't it, Mr. Conniston?"

"There is no end to what it might mean--may mean. If your spring can
be made to supply Valley City and the men working out yonder with
water, to supply the horses and mules, it will mean that all the men
and teams being used daily to haul from the Half Moon creek can be put
to active work on the ditch. And--who knows?--if you can find water at
all in the desert we may be able to use it to irrigate! God knows we
want water on this land soon--and the mountains are sti