l Valley?
Hell's too good for you, but it's all we've got."'"

The telephone message was given.

"It sounded all right," said Noah to the water keeper. "Sit down over
there and be comfortable, while we wait and see; and keep your eye on
the muzzle of the gun. It is the only way to keep it from smokin'."

Forty minutes passed. Noah's eyes were on his prisoners, but his ears
kept listening. Fifty minutes, then he heard a loud woosh--almost a
roar. The water was coming!

"Now let's go out and open up all gates," ordered Noah. The water
keeper obeyed.

"For the time being," drawled Noah, "you can lie down out there in the
open beside the canal and take a nap. Shootin' craps has been sort of
hard on your nerves. I'll look after the water for a spell."

About nine o'clock at night Imogene Chandler came in from the cotton
field.

Out there in the dim starlight stretched the long rows of cotton,
erect, green, luxuriant. The water had come in time. It had flowed
into their ditches at four o'clock the morning after Noah Ezekiel
passed. They had been ready for it. For three days it had flowed
abundantly, and all their fields were watered.

Imogene lifted her face to the wind. She loved the desert again. And
yet there was restlessness in her movements; even in the stillness her
ears strained to catch some other sound than the soft rustle of the
wind.

Nothing had happened to him of course or she would have heard. But she
had watched for him that first night after the water was turned in; the
next night she was expecting him, and last night she felt sure he would
come. If he did not come tonight---- Maybe something had happened,
maybe he had been shot by some of Jenkins' hired assassins? Fear,
which really had been hovering about for three days, but put off by her
faith in Bob's utter competence to take care of himself, swooped down
on her suddenly. Her throat grew dry, her heart beat like a frightened
bird's, she whirled and started to run for the house. She would start
in search at once.

Then came the sound that her ears had been straining for--the chuck,
chuck of his little machine.

She dropped down on the bench under the arrowwood shelter and let
herself go. But the sobs were over, her eyes dry, her lips smiling, as
he came across the yard in the dusk with a dark bulk under his arms.

He had brought his fiddle. She did not stir from the bench. She felt
utterly, blissfully relaxed. Her