"Well, that settles it," said Creede. "One of us stays here and cuts brush, and the other works around Hidden Water. This ain't the first drought I've been through, not by no means, and I've learned this much: the Alamo can be dry as a bone and Carrizo, too, but they's always water here and at the home ranch. Sooner or later every cow on the range will be goin' to one place or the other to drink, and if we give 'em a little bait of brush each time it keeps 'em from gittin' too weak. As long as a cow will rustle she's all right, but the minute she's too weak to travel she gits to be a water-bum--hangs around the spring and drinks until she starves to death. But if you feed 'em a little every day they'll drift back to the ridges at night and pick up a little more. I'm sorry for them lily-white hands of yourn, pardner, but which place would you like to work at?" "Hidden Water," replied Hardy, promptly, "and I bet I can cut as many trees as you can." "I'll go you, for a fiver," exclaimed Creede, emulously. "Next time Rafael comes in tell him to bring me up some more grub and baled hay, and I'm fixed. And say, when you write to the boss you can tell her I've traded my gun for an axe!" As Hardy turned back towards home he swung in a great circle and rode down the dry bed of the Alamo, where water-worn bowlders and ricks of mountain drift lay strewn for miles to mark the vanished stream. What a power it had been in its might, floating sycamores and ironwoods as if they were reeds, lapping high against the granite walls, moving the very rocks in its bed until they ground together! But now the sand lay dry and powdery, the willows and water-moodies were dead to the roots, and even the ancient cottonwoods from which it derived its name were dying inch by inch. A hundred years they had stood there, defying storm and cloudburst, but at last the drought was sucking away their life. On the mesa the waxy greasewood was still verdant, the gorged _sahuaros_ stood like great tanks, skin-tight with bitter juice, and all the desert trees were tipped with green; but the children of the river were dying for a drink.