"I guess you need me," said Jane, "as much as I need you. There comes Oscar and I haven't set the table." Oscar was coming up the dooryard. He stepped a little high, in the gait of one accustomed to walking in shifting sands. He was big and upstanding, with a look of honesty that Pen liked. No one who has not known a desert farmer can realize what his acres meant to Oscar Ames. The farmer of northern lands loves his acres. But he did not create them--he did not fight nature for them, until he had made himself over along with his land. Nature fights inch by inch every effort of man to harness the desert to his uses. She scorches the soil with heat. She poisons it with alkali. She infests it with deadly vermin and--last and supreme touch of cruelty--she forbids the soil water unless she surrounds the getting of it with infinite travail and danger. Heat and sandstorm, failure and famine, toil unutterable, these had been Oscar Ames' portion. When at last he had won his acres, had brought the barren sand to bearing, had made three hundred acres of desert a thing of breathing beauty from January to January, the ranch meant something to him that a northern farmer could not understand. And these three hundred acres were Oscar's world. He could not see beyond them. The dam was a mere adjunct to the Ames ranch. He would leave no stone unturned to see that it served his own ranch's needs as he saw them. If Sara saw this quality in Oscar and had any motive for playing on it, he could do infinite harm to Jim. It was something of all this that Pen was thinking as Oscar crossed the yard. He came into the kitchen in a leisurely way and greeted Pen with the cordiality that belongs to the desert country. Penelope helped Jane to put the dinner on the table and the three sat down to eat. The two were eager to hear details of Iron Skull's death, and after Pen had described it to them, Oscar began to talk about Sara. "How long's your husband been bedridden?" he asked. "Oscar!" exclaimed Jane. "Jane, you keep quiet. What's the use of being secret about it? I guess both him and her know he's bedridden." Pen told them the story of the accident. "Isn't that fierce!" exclaimed Oscar. "He's the smartest young fellow I've met in years. I wish even now he was running the dam instead of Manning." "Why?" asked Penelope. "He'd build it for the farmer and have some business sense about it." "You don't understand Mr. Manning," said Pen. "I wish you'd try to get to know him better." Oscar grunted. "Does the doctors think your husband will get well?" he asked, finishing off his pie. "Oscar!" cried Jane. "Jane, you keep quiet. These are business questions. If Sardox and I are going to run this dam, we got to understand each other's limitations. I can't ask _him_ if he's going to die." "We just don't know anything about it," said Pen, gently. "Mr. Ames, I'm curious to know just how you and Sara are going to run the dam."