The little woman looked at Pen with her far-seeing eyes. "Oh, yes, I don't know that Oscar remembers, but we were married in York State. I was a school teacher." After the little laugh Pen asked, "Do you like the desert farming?" "I never did get through being homesick," answered Mrs. Ames. "My first two babies died there in that first little adobe. I was all alone with them and the heat and the work." "Jane, you let me talk," interrupted Oscar briskly. "We both worked. The worst of everything was the uncertainty about water. Us farmers built the dam that laid sixty miles below here. Just where government diversion dam is now. But we never knew when the spring floods came whether we'd have water that year or not. More and more people took up land and tapped the river and the main canal. Gosh! It got fierce. Old friends would accuse each other of stealing each other's water. Then we had a series of dry years. No rain or snow in the mountains. And green things died and shriveled, aborning: The desert was dotted with dead cattle. Three years we watched our crops die and----" Mrs. Ames suddenly interrupted. There was a dull red in her brown cheeks. "I wanted to go home the third year of the drought. All I had to show for fifteen years in the desert was two dead babies. I wanted to go home." "And I says to her," said Ames, "I said 'For God's sake, Jane, where is home if it isn't here? I can't expect you to feel like I do about this ranch for you've stuck to the house. I know every inch of this ranch. Ain't I fought for every acre of it, cactus and sand storm and water famine? Ain't I sweat blood over every acre? Ain't I given the best years of my life to it? And you say, 'Let's give it up! It ain't home!' I certainly was surprised at Jane." "I have worked too," said Jane Ames, gently, to Penelope. "I'd had no help and had cooked for half a dozen men and--and--then the babies! Having four babies is not play, you know!" "Oh, I know!" exclaimed Amos impatiently. "You worked. That was why I was so surprised at you wanting to let everything go. But you hadn't made things grow like I had. I suppose that's why you felt different. That winter the snows was heavy in the mountains and we were tickled at the thought of high water in the spring. We all got out in May to strengthen the dam, hauling brush and stone. But the water rose like the very devil. We divided into night and day shifts, then we worked all the time. But it was no use. The whole darned thing went out like Niagara. Forty-three hours at a stretch I worked and the dam went out! And the next year the same. Then it was that we began to ask for the Reclamation Service." Pen drew a long breath and looked from Ames' strong tanned face out at the breathless wonder of the landscape. Far beyond the brooding bronze Elephant lay the chaos of the desert, yellow melting into purple and purple into the faint peaks of the mountains.