As it had been a thousand years before, so it was that day at Hidden Water. The earth was dead, it gave forth nothing; the sky was clean and hard, without a cloud to soften its asperity. Another month and the cattle would die; two months and the water would fail; then in the last agonies of starvation and thirst the dissolution would come--the Four Peaks would be a desert. Old Don Pablo was right, the world was drying up. Chihuahua and Sonora were parched; all Arizona lay stricken with the drought; in California the cattle were dying on the ranges, and in Texas and New Mexico the same. God, what a thing--to see the great earth that had supported its children for ages slowly dying for water, its deserts first, and then its rivers, and then the pine-topped mountains that gave the rivers birth! Yet what was there for a man to do but take care of his own and wait? The rest was in the hands of God. On the first morning that Hardy took his axe and went down to the river he found a single bunch of gaunted cattle standing in the shade of the big mesquites that grew against Lookout Point--a runty cow with her two-year-old and yearling, and a wobbly calf with a cactus joint stuck across his nose. His mother's face showed that she, too, had been among the _chollas_; there was cactus in her knees and long spines bristling from her jaws, but she could stand it, while it was a matter of life and death to the calf. Every time he came near his mother she backed away, and whenever he began to nudge for milk she kicked out wildly. So Hardy roped him and twitched the joint away with a stick; then he pulled out the thorns one by one and went about his work. Selecting a fine-leaved _palo verde_ that grew against the point, he cleared a way into its trunk and felled it down the hill. He cut a second and a third, and when he looked back he saw that his labor was appreciated; the runty cow was biting eagerly at the first tree-top, and the wobbly calf was restored to his own. As the sound of the axe continued, a band of tame cattle came stringing down the sandy riverbed, and before the morning was over there were ten or twenty derelicts and water-bums feeding along the hillside. In the afternoon he cut more trees along the trail to Hidden Water, and the next day when he went to work he found a little band of weaklings there, lingering expectantly in the shadow of the canyon wall. As the days went by more and more of them gathered about the water, the lame, the sick, the crippled, the discouraged, waiting for more trees to be felled. Then as the feed on the distant ridges grew thinner and the number of cut trees increased, a great band of them hung about the vicinity of the ranch house constantly--the herds from Hidden Water and the river, merged into one--waiting to follow him to the hills.