lawyer knows!" said his wife. "Why, you old silly,
don't you see that she couldn't have given it to him any other
way--with all those people in the room? Clyde Burnaby can think about
as fast as anybody I know."

CHAPTER IV

Casey Dunne pulled a fretful buckskin to a halt as he topped a rise and
looked down on Talapus Ranch. It lay before him, the thousand-odd acres
of it, lush and green beneath the sloping, afternoon sun, an oasis in a
setting of brown, baked earth and short, dry grasses which seldom felt
the magic of the rains. The ranch was owned by Donald McCrae, a pioneer
of the district, and it was the show place of the country. It was
Exhibit A to incomers, a witness to the results of irrigation. The
broad, fat acres were almost level. There was no waste land, no
coulees, no barren hills to discount its value. Every foot of it could
be irrigated, and most of it was actually irrigated and cultivated.

Dunne's eye followed the lines of the ditches, marked by margins of
green willows. They cut through the fields of wheat, of oats, of
alfalfa, timothy, and red clover. They were the main arteries. From
them branched veins supplying the fields with the water that gave them
life--the water without which the land was waste and barren; but with
which it bore marvellously with the stored fertility of fallow
centuries. Away at one end of the ranch, sheltered to north and west by
low hills, was the ranch house itself, surrounded by young orchards,
the stables, the corrals, the granaries, the cattle sheds, tool and
implement houses. At that distance, in the clear, dry air, they looked
like toys, miniatures, sharply defined in angle and shadow. So, too,
the stock grazing in the fields were of lilliputian dimensions.

From where he sat in the saddle Dunne could see the Coldstream,
scarcely more than a large creek, dignified in that land of dryness by
the name of river, whose source was in the great green glaciers and
everlasting snows of the hills. Its banks were green with willow and
cottonwood. It was a treasure stream of untold value. With it the land
prospered; without it the land and the men who peopled the land must
fail.

"And that ranch, and others like it," Dunne muttered through his teeth,
"must go dry and back to brown prairie unless the owners sell out to
that old holdup, York, at his own price. Well, Mr. York----You yellow
devil!"

The last words did not refer to Cromwell York. For, without provocati