"You know what I want, if you can use me."
"I could manage your present salary for this trip but beyond that you know how uncertain it all is. Hunt can't wait any longer."
"Look here," said Abe, angrily, "I understood when I made my proposition that our salaries would stop when we cut the outfit. Do you think I meant for you to take all the risk? I'm only a surveyor and you an educated engineer but this thing means as much to me as it does to you. Let me share the expense and I'm with you but not on any other terms. Hunt and his job can go hang. I don't see why you should assume that it's only my pay that I work for." It was a long speech for Abe.
The engineer put his big hand on the young man's shoulder. "Thank you,
Abe," he said. "That does me good. I've always known that it was there.
But it's a hard road, lad, a mighty hard road!" Then: "I wonder if we
have an Indian in the outfit who knows this country."
"Yes, sir," Abe answered promptly. "Jose knows it well. I've been pumping him for a month. I'll get him."
As the tall figure of the surveyor disappeared in the direction of the Oocopah camp the Seer smiled to himself. "Been pumping him for a month," he repeated. "That means that he saw almost before I did that the other proposition was no good. Humph!"
He faced toward the river and looked away into the night where The King's Basin lay—a weird dream-country under the light of the moon. And because it was impossible to think of Barbara's Desert without thinking of Barbara he smiled again, musing that there would be little sleep that night for the girl in Rubio City if she knew what he and Abe were considering. From across the river came the shrill, snarling, yelping coyote chorus and the engineer saw again the body of a dead woman at the dry water hole, an empty canteen, and a big-eyed, brown-haired baby stretching out her arms to him.
While the Seer was too careful an engineer to take quickly the suggestion of Abe, he had seen too many tests of the desert-bred surveyor's genius not to consider his proposition seriously. He was also too much of a dreamer not to be influenced by thoughts of Barbara and her association in his mind with this particular project. Could it be that the land which had so tragically given the child into his life was now to realize his dreams of Reclamation.
He was interrupted by the return of Abe, who was followed by an old, grizzly-haired Cocopah.
"Tell the Chief what you have told me, Jose," said the surveyor and, stepping aside, he rolled the inevitable cigarette with an air of taking himself wholly out of the matter under consideration.