."

"You are impudent--and imprudent," she said, looking straight at him.

"An' hopeful," he answered, meeting her eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, stretched out on his bed, Sanderson saw the dawn
breaking in the east. It reminded him of the morning he had seen the
two riders above him on the edge of the arroyo. As on that other
morning, he lay and watched the coming of the dawn. And when later he
heard Mary moving about in the kitchen he got up, not having slept a
wink, and went out to her.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

"How could I," he asked, "with a new day dawnin' for me?"

CHAPTER XVI

THE HAND OF THE ENEMY

When in the bunkhouse the next morning Sanderson informed Barney Owen
of what had occurred during the night, the latter looked fixedly at
Sanderson.

"So she didn't take it hard," he said.

"Was you expectin' her to? For a brother that she hadn't seen in a
dozen years--an' which she knows in her secret heart wasn't any good?"
retorted Sanderson. "Shootin' your face off in Okar--or anywhere
else--don't go any more," added Sanderson. "She's pretendin',
publicly, that I'm her brother."

"I'm through talking," declared Owen.

"Or livin'. It's one or the other," warned Sanderson.

Sanderson took the seven thousand dollars that Mary gave him, rode to
Lazette--a town fifty miles eastward from the basin---and deposited the
money in a bank there. Then he rode eastward still farther and in
another town discovered a young engineer with a grievance against his
employers.

The result of this discovery was that on the following morning the
young engineer and Sanderson journeyed westward to the basin, arriving
at the Double A late in the afternoon of the next day.

On the edge of the plateau after the engineer and, Sanderson had spent
three or four days prowling through the basin and the gorge, the
engineer spoke convincingly:

"It's the easiest thing in the world! A big flume to the point I
showed you, a big main ditch and several laterals will do the trick.
I'm with you to the finish!"

Sanderson smiled at the engineer's glowing enthusiasm and told him of
the opposition he would meet in developing the project.

"There'll be a heap of schemin', an' mebbe shootin', Williams,"
Sanderson told him. "Puttin' through this deal won't be any
pussy-kitten affair."

"So much the better," laughed the engineer; "I'm fed up on soft snaps
and longing for action."

The engineer was thirty; big