I.
The far-Eastern company was counting its Western acres under water contracts. The acres were in first crops, waiting for the water. The water was dallying down its untried channel, searching the new dry earth-banks, seeping, prying, and insinuating sly, minute forces which multiplied and insisted tremendously the moment a rift had been made. And the orders were to “watch” and “puddle;” and the watchmen were as other men, and some of them doubtless remembered they were working for a company.
Travis, the black-eyed young lumberman from the upper Columbia, had been sent down with a special word from the manager commending him as a tried hand, equal to any post or service. The ditch superintendent was looking for such a man. He gave him those five crucial miles between the head-gates and Glenn's Ferry, the notorious beat that had sifted Finlayson's force without yet finding a man who could keep the banks. Some said it was the Arc-light saloon at Glenn's Ferry; some said it was the pretty girl at Lark's.
Whatever it was, Travis raged at it in the silent hours of his one-man watch; and the report had gone up the line now, three times since he had taken hold, of breaks on his division. And the engineer would by no means “weaken” on a question of the work, nor did the loyal watchman ask that any one should weaken, to spare him. He was all eyes and ears; he watched by daylight, he listened by dark, and the sounds that he heard in his dreams were sounds of water searching the banks, swirling and sinking into holes, or of mud subsiding with a wretched flop into the insidious current.
It was a queer country along the new ditch below the head-gates; as old and sun-bleached and bony as the stony valleys of Arabia Petrea; all but that strip of green that led the eye to where the river wandered, and that warm brown strip of sown land extending field by field below the ditch.
Lark's ranch was the first one below the head-gates, lying between the river and the ditch, an old homesteader's claim, sub-irrigated by means of rude dams ponding the natural sloughs. The worn-out land, never drained, was foul and sour, lapsing into swamps, the black alkali oozing and spreading from pools in its boggy pastures.
A few pioneer fruit-trees still bloomed and bore, undiscouraged by neglect, and cast homelike shadows on the weedy grass around the cabin and sheds that slouched at all angles, with nails starting and shingles warping in the sun.
Similar weather-stains and odd kicks and bulges the old rancher's person exhibited, when he came out to sun himself of a rimy morning, when cobwebs glittered on the short, late grass, and his joints reminded him that the rains were coming. And up and down the cow-trail below the ditch, morning and evening, went his dairy-herd to pasture; and after them loitered Nancy, on a strawberry pony with milk white mane and tail.
The lights and shadows chased her in and out among the willows and fleecy cottonwoods and tall swamp-grasses; but Travis rode in the glare, on the high ditch-bank, and, although they passed each other daily, he had never had a good look at the “pretty girl at Lark's.” But one morning the white-faced heifer broke away and bolted up the ditch-bank, and in a cloud of sun-smitten dust Nancy followed, a figure of virginal wrath with scarlet cheeks and wind-blown hair. Reining her pony on the narrow bank, she called across to Travis in a voice as clear and fresh as her colors:—
“Head her off, can't you? What are you about!” This last to the pony, who was behaving “mean.”
“Ride to the bridge and head her this way. I can drive her up the bank,” Travis responded.
Nancy obeyed him, and waited at the bridge while he endeavored to persuade the heifer of the error of her ways. The heifer was not easily persuaded, and Travis was wet to the waist before he had got her out; but he lost nothing of the bright figure guarding the bridge, a slender shape all pink and blue and dark blue, with hair like the sun on brown water, and a perfect seat, and a ringing voice calling thanks and bewildering encouragement to her ally in the stream. And this was old Solomon's daughter!
But “Oh, my Nancy!” the boys would groan, with excess of appreciation beyond words, and for that Nancy heeded them not: and now Travis knew that the boys were right.
“Thank you ever so much!” her clear voice lilted, as the discomfited runaway dashed down the bank to the path she had forsaken. “I'm ever so sorry she dug all those bad tracks in the ditch. Will they do any harm?”
Travis assured her that nothing did harm if only it were known in time.
“What is the matter with it, anyhow,—the ditch? Isn't it built right?”
“The ditch is the prettiest I ever saw,” Travis responded, with all the warmth of his unrequited devotion to that faithless piece of engineering. “All new ditches need watching till the banks get settled.”
“Well, I should say that you watched! Don't you ever stir off that bank?”
“I eat and sleep sometimes.”
“You must have a pretty dry camp up above. Wouldn't you like some milk once in a while?”
“Thanks; I never happened to fall in with the milkman on my beat.”
“We have lots to spare, and buttermilk too, if you're not too proud to come for it. The others used to.”
“I guess I don't quite catch on.”
“The other watchmen, the boys who were here before you.”
“Oh,” said Travis coldly.
“Well, any time you choose to come down I'll save some for you,” said the girl, as if that matter were settled.
“I'm afraid it is rather off my beat,” Travis hesitated, “but I'm just as much obliged.”
Nancy straightened herself haughtily. “Oh, it is nothing to be obliged for, if you don't care to come.”
“I did not say I didn't care,” Travis protested; but she was gone. The dust flew, and presently her dark blue skirt and the pony's silver tail flashed past the willows in the low grounds.
“I shall never see her again,” he mourned. “So much for those other fellows spoiling her idea of a watchman's duty. Of course she thought I could come if I wanted to. Did she ask them, I wonder?”
Nancy was piqued, but not resentful. The more he did not come, as evening after evening smiled upon the level land; the more she thought of Travis, alone in his dusty camp, alone on his blinding beat; the more she dwelt upon the singularity and constancy of his refusal, the more she respected him for it.
So one day he did see her again. She was sitting on the bridge planks, leaning forward, her arms in her lap, her hat tipped back, a star of white sunlight touching her forehead. She lifted her head when she heard him coming and put her hand over her eyes, as if she were dizzy with watching the water.
“How's the ditch?” she called in a voice of sweetest cheer. She was on her feet now, and he saw how entrancing she was, in a blue muslin frock and a broad white hat with a wreath of pink roses bestrewing the tilted brim. Had they got company at the ranch? was his jealous reflection.
“How's the ditch behaving itself these days?” she repeated.
“Much as usual, thank you,” Travis beamed from his saddle.
“Breaking, as usual?”
“Yes; it broke night before last.”
“Well, I don't believe it's much of a ditch, anyhow. I wouldn't fret about it if I was you. Don't you think I'm very good-natured, after your snubbing me so? Here I've brought you a basket of apples, seeing you wouldn't spare time from your old ditch to come for them yourself. That in the napkin is a little pat of fresh butter.” She lifted the grape-leaves that covered the basket. “I thought it might taste good in camp.”
“Good! Well, I rather guess it will taste good! See here, I can't ever thank you for this—for bringing it yourself.” He had few words, but his looks were moderately expressive.
Nancy blushed with pleasure. “Well, I had to—when folks are so wrapped up in their business. There, with Susan's compliments! Susan's the heifer you rounded up for me in the ditch. I know she made you a lot of work, tracking holes in your banks you're so fussy about. Do you really think it is a good ditch?”
“I am positive it is.”
“Then if anything goes wrong down here they will lay the blame on you?”
“They are welcome to. That's what I am here for.”
Nancy openly acknowledged her approval of a man that stood right up to his work and would take no odds of any one.
“The other boys were always complaining and saying it was the ditch. But there, I know it is mean of me to talk about them.”
“I guess it won't go any further,” said Travis dryly.
“Well, I hope not. They were good boys enough, but pretty trifling watchmen, I shouldn't wonder.”
Travis had nothing to say to this, but he made a mental note or two.
“When will you give me a chance to return your basket?”
“Why, anytime; there's no hurry about the basket. Have you any regular times?”
He looked away, dissembling his joy in the question, and answered as if he were making an official report,—
“I leave camp at six, patrol the line to the ferry and back, lay off an hour, and down again at eleven. Back in camp at three, and two hours for dinner. On again at five, and back in camp at nine. I pass this bridge, for instance, at seven and nine of a morning, twelve and two afternoons, and six and eight in the evening.”
“Six and eight,” Nancy mused, with a slight increase of color. “Well, I can stop some evening after cow-time, I suppose; but it isn't any matter about the basket.”
Six evenings, going and coming, Travis delayed in passing the bridge, on the watch for Nancy; six times he filled the basket with such late field-flowers as he could find, and she never came. On the seventh evening his heart announced her, from as far off as his eyes beheld her. This time she was in white, without her hat, and she wore a blue ribbon in her gold-brown braids,—a blue ribbon in her braids, and a red, red rose in either cheek; and her colors, and the colors of the sky, floated like flowers on the placid water.
“Well, where is the basket, then?” she merrily demanded.
“I left it behind, for luck.”
“For luck? What sort of luck?”
“Six times I brought it, and you were never here; so to-night I just kicked it into the tent and came off without it. It seems to have been about the right thing to do.”
“What, my basket!”
“Your basket. And it was filled with wild flowers, the prettiest I could find. It's your own fault for not coming before.”
“I never set any day that I know of. I have been up to town.”
Travis was not pleased to hear it.
“Yes; and I saw your company's manager. What a young man he is! I had no idea managers were ever young. And stylish—my! I'm sure I hope he'll know me when he sees me again,” she added, coloring and dropping her eyes.
Travis grimly expressed the opinion that he probably would. Nancy continued to strike the wrong note with cruel precision; she could not have done better had she calculated her words; and all the while looking as innocent as the shining water under her feet,—and that last time she had been so kind!
And the ditch was as provoking as Nancy, rewarding his devotion with breaks that defied all explanation. It was not possible that the patience of the management could hold out much longer; and when he should have been dismissed in disgrace from his post, Nancy would lightly class him as another of those “good boys enough, but trifling watchmen.”