"It's disappeared!" said Bud in a low voice. "The water has taken another course! This means the end of Flume Valley, I reckon!"
CHAPTER II
A NIGHT RIDE
The boy ranchers stood looking down into the reservoir, which was almost full of water, but which was slowly running out through the different gates, some to concrete drinking troughs where thirsty cattle congregated, and some to distant meadows where it supplied moisture for the grass on which the steers of Diamond X Second fed. From the slightly ruffled surface of the reservoir, as the evening wind blew across the water, the gazes of Bud, Nort and Dick sought the faces of one another.
"This looks had!" murmured Bud, while Buck Tooth, the Zuni Indian, grunted something in his own incomprehensible dialect.
"What does it mean?" asked Nort, as he looked down the slope from the reservoir to the group of tents that was to form the home of himself, his brother and cousin for several months, while they were in camp.
"It means the water supply, on which I depended to raise these steers, has petered out," answered Bud, and there was a worried note in his voice.
"You mean stopped for good?" asked Dick.
"I hope not," went on Bud. "But from what you can see—no water coming through the pipe line that dad laid to the Pocut River—I should say there was a break in it somewhere, and it will have to be fixed right away—that is, if I'm to keep these cattle here," and he looked down the valley where the bunches of steers were ever on the move, seeking new places to feed, or coming to drink water from the supply flowing out of the reservoir.