“Was there no way to stop it but half drowning him, and insulting him besides?”
“Yes, there is another way; inform the company, and have him shut up in the Pen. I thought I let the old man off pretty easy. But if you prefer the other way, why, next time there's a break, we can try it.”
“I'm sure we ought to thank you for your kindness,” said Nancy. “And if we are Companied out of house and home, and father made a criminal, we shall thank you still more. Good-morning.”
Their eyes met and hers fell. She turned away, and he remounted and rode on up the ditch, angry, as a man can be only with one he might have loved, down to those dregs of bitterness that lurk at the bottom of the soundest heart.
III.
He was but an idle watchman all that day, so sure he was that the ditch was right and Solomon the author of all his troubles; and Solomon was “fixed” at last. Weariness overcame him, and at the end of his beat he slept, under the lee of the ditch-bank, instead of returning to his camp.
Next morning he was riding along at his usual pace when it struck him how incredibly the ditch had fallen. The line of silt that marked the water's normal depth now stood exposed and dry, full two feet above its running, and the pulse of the current had weakened as though it were ebbing fast.
He put his horse to a run, and lightened ship as he went, casting off his sack of oats, then his coat and such tools as he could spare; he might have been traced to the scene of disaster by his impedimenta strewing the ditch-bank.
The water had had hours the start of him; its work was sickening to behold. A part of the bank had gone clean out, and the ditch was returning to the river by way of Solomon Lark's alfalfa fields. The homestead itself was in danger.
He cut sage-brush and tore up tules by the roots, and piled them as a wing-dam against the outer bank, and heaped dirt like mad upon the mats; and as he worked, alone, where forty men were needed, came Nancy, with glowing face, flying down the ditch-bank, calling the word of exquisite relief:—