He went on to give a glowing account of the farming on the south side of the Snake River--a tract that an irrigation company had lately opened. "See here," he said suddenly, "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll exchange forty acres there, all proved up on, only a few payments left, for your homestead, if you'll commute on it. And I'm offering you the biggest price you'll ever get for it." "Why do you offer it if it's so big? Why don't you keep your forty?" "Well, it's just this way: I've got to have a water hole here for lambing. I've been coming here on my way to the reserve for twenty years. Never thought of filing on this land it's so poor, nothing but the water here but that's what makes it valuable to us stockmen." "That's what makes it valuable to me. I'm going to run cattle." Joyce laughed loudly. "My boy, cattle would starve where sheep grow fat. You'll be flat broke in five years." "Why haven't you taken it up before?" asked Rob. "It's been here a good while." "Well, us stockmen have got so used to having all the wild land we wanted that we haven't realized until too late that you fellows are coming in here and taking it all up." "Then I'm not the only greenhorn from back East who thinks it's good for something." "If you'll sell out to me, you'll never regret it." "If I ever decide to sell out, I'll give you first chance to bid on it," Rob promised; and that was as much as Joyce could get out of him. When Joyce was leaving, he turned in his saddle and called: "Well, so long, Holliday! Mebbe you'll be sorry you didn't close with me when the sheep begin coming in." A day or two after Joyce's visit, Harry called the dog--she had shortened Othello to 'Thello by this time--and went down to the side of the hundred and sixty where Rob was fencing. Having so little to occupy her time, she frequently went out to walk in the afternoon, and joined her brother on her way home; but this was the first time she had gone down so early, and she found the brush, under the afternoon sun, a very different place from what it had looked from the shade of the quaking aspens. Out in the brush there was no shade; even the largest clumps of sage, some as high as her head, gave little refuge from the glare of the sun. The desert, lying silent in the sunshine and heat, seemed to fill the visible universe, and to absorb all significance from the tiny human motes that inhabited it. What, Harry asked herself, could Rob do singlehanded against that inert opponent? As she watched him bore one hole after another, driving the post-hole digger down through the gravel and earth, repeating monotonously the same motions, never resting, seldom speaking, pausing only to pour a drink of water down his throat or to wipe the sweat from his face with his torn sleeve, he seemed to her to have become a helpless automaton that had been wound up and set going for the amusement of some invisible spectator.