: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He
slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.

"I was looking forward to--not worrying for a while," he said wryly.
"But now I'll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the
time!"

"Maybe," said Sally, "you can look over my shoulder and I'll look over
yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally."

She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained
on his forehead.

Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It
may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a
restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too
many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched
before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here
was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts
against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out
widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally
reserved for traffic.

Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and
recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they
reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a
monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a
plume of falling water jetted out.

"The dam's for irrigation," said Sally professionally, "and the Shed
gets all its power from here. One of Dad's nightmares is that somebody
may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power."

Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall
in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly,
they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the
level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached
back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of
sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge.
There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in
the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.

"Here we are," said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.

He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already
stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He
reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from
the car carrying the basket between them.

"There's a nice place," said Sally, point