han one occasion had to
share her company with Charlie Menocal, much to his impatience. When
Imogene sometimes succeeded in detaining the fellow at her side,
Bryant silently gave her unutterable thanks. And Ruth seemed day by
day more receptive to his passion.

"I think of only two things, my canal and you," he declared to her one
night.

"When you put me first and the canal second, why, who knows what I may
think then?" she said, tantalizingly. "But to esteem an irrigation
ditch before me, the idea! What if you had to choose between us?" And
she continued thus to tease him, fanning the fires hotter in his
breast.

By the end of August Bryant had completed the survey of the canal line
down to a point where it touched the northern boundary of the ranch,
tapping the latter's system of distributing ditches. Pinas River,
Perro Creek, and the tract to be watered were thus united. Though
later, doubtless, it would be necessary to make minor corrections, as
always, the surveying was finished. One tracing showed the entire
irrigation scheme from the dam on the Pinas to the tips of the
laterals branching out in a gridiron over the land. There were other
tracings, too, on a larger scale and of successive sections, ready to
be taken to Kennard in order to make blueprints.

"Town for us to-morrow, Dave," Lee exclaimed one day, as he rolled and
tied his maps in a waterproof canvas. "We're due for a rest; our job
is done for the present. We'll leave the instruments and note-books
with the girls at Sarita Creek, who've agreed to keep them until we
return. The Mexicans are still hanging around."

Toward the middle of the afternoon they appeared at the cabins, where
they disengaged Dick from his burden of freight and turned him out to
graze. Imogene was nursing an obstinate headache in her darkened
bedroom, and Dave immediately settled himself under a tree with a
novel of the girls'. So Ruth and Lee were left to themselves.

"I'm going up the creek to gather raspberries, and you came just in
time to carry the basket," said she. "I discovered a large thicket of
them half way up the canon; the more you pick, the more you'll have
for supper to-night. And if you don't bring Imo and me a box of
chocolates, and a big box, when you come back from wherever you're
going to-morrow, you need never show your lean brown face again at our
doors! I'm dying for some. Oh, Lee, I really am. They help so when
one's lonely."

The pathetic tone in