“What’s wrong? How came you there?”

He pointed downward, and she shaded her eyes from the blinding sunshine to see why, but could discover nothing new in the familiar scene.

“The water! That’s where it goes! The flume is cut!”

Even at that pitch, his tones were full of excited indignation, and her own anger leaped at once.

“Somebody’s cut the flume? Who dared! Wait–wait–I’m coming!”

“No, no! Don’t. You can’t help it–you’ll break your neck! Oh! Lady Jess!”

22“I’m coming! Wait for me!”

22

The carpenter laughed. “Might have known she would, and wanted she should, I suppose. Surest-footed little thing in the world. Guess I needn’t fret. Though when I think what this old ranch would be without her, I don’t feel any great call to send her into danger, myself. My! she’s as nimble as a squirrel! Down to the bottom a’ready. Up this side in a jiffy, and won’t her blue eyes snap when she sees this lowdown trick? If I knew whose job it was, well, I’m a peaceable man if I’m let, but there wouldn’t be room enough in this here valley for the two of us. And it’s all on a piece with the rest. One thing after another. There’s a snake in this wigwam, but which ’tis? H-m-m! Beats me. Beats me clear to Jericho.”

Then he fell to watching the slower, steady ascent of Jessica, who had descended the further side so swiftly, and who had clambered lightly enough over the roughness of the gulch bottom; at times filled with a roaring torrent, but now quite dry after a long, hot summer.

“Well, here I am!”

“And a sorry sight to show you. Look a’ that now. Isn’t that a regular coyote piece of work?”

Along this face of the canyon descended a line of small wooden troughs, closely joined, and supported upon slender but strong cedar uprights. This flume connected with the distant reservoir of an irrigating company and had been built by Jessica’s dead father at a great and ill-afforded expense. But of all good things there was nothing so precious to the tillers of that thirsty land as water, and the cutting off of this supply meant ruin to Sobrante.

Young as she was, Jessica fully understood this, though 

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