Roger pulled off his coat, preparatory to dropping down into the well, then paused. The sun was just lifting over the peaks. The ranch house was in black shadow. No man with Roger's capacity for work could be lonely with that work at hand. No man with Roger's fine imagination could have failed to have felt his pulses quicken at the sudden conception of the desert's wonders that flashed before his mind as his outward eye took in the sunrise. He saw in flashing panorama the desert's magnificent distances, its unbelievable richness of coloring, its burning desert noons, its still windswept nights, and a vague waking of passions he never had known stirred within his self and work-centered soul. The air was full of bird song. What Ernest called the dawn's enchantment was just ending. Blackbird and robin, oriole and mocking bird, piped full-throated from every cactus. To Ernest this was the one redeeming touch to the desert's austerity. To Roger it was the crowning of an almost unbearable charm. The sun wheeled in full glory over the peaks. The adobe flashed out from the shadow and Roger slid down into the well. He loaded the bucket with broken rock and called to Qui-tha to hoist away. To his surprise, there was no response. Roger climbed hurriedly out, calling to the Indian. He looked in the cook tent and the living tent and then his eye caught Qui-tha's tall figure already diminished by distance, moving rapidly westward toward the River Range. "By Jove," he exclaimed, "that's cool! I wonder if he took anything with him but the peroxide bottle?" A quick inventory showed nothing missing, and with a sigh Roger returned to the well. It was slow work, filling the bucket, clambering out to hoist it, then down again. But at noon, when the sun shone full into the well, Roger noticed a sudden darkening of the brown rock at the bottom. He seized a pick and worked rapidly. Water! Not a gushing spring, but a steady increase of moisture that, as he dug on, became a trickle, then a slowly rising pool about his ankles. No discoverer of a noble river ever felt prouder than Roger as, after he had hoisted out the bucket and tools, he stood at the well's edge gazing far down at the dirty pool. He was standing so, a tall figure, his face streaked with dirt and sweat but with satisfaction radiating from every line of his thin tanned face, when, "Hello!" called a man's voice behind him. Roger turned with a jerk. A little gray-headed man and a little gray burro were standing by the work tent. "Perhaps I could get something to eat here," said the stranger. "Certainly," returned Roger, not too enthusiastically. He did not know desert hospitality, excepting what he had met at the Preble ranch. The man turned promptly to the burro. "I'll take off your pack, Peter, if you see to it that you don't stray."