“I’m going to hike out before breakfast,” said he before turning in, “so if you’ll just show me where the lantern is, I won’t bother you in the morning.”

“Lantern!” snorted the mountaineer.  “You turn on the switch.  It’s just to the right of the door as you go in.”

So Bob encountered another of the curious anomalies not infrequent to the West.  He entered a log stable in the remote backwoods and turned on a sixteen-candle-power electric globe!  As he extended his rides among the low mountains of the First Rampart, he ran across many more places where electric light and even electric power were used in the rudest habitations.

The explanation was very simple; these men had possessed small water rights which Baker had needed.  As part of their compensation they received from Power House Number One what current they required for their own use.

Thus reminded, Bob one Sunday visited Power House Number One.  It proved to be a corrugated iron structure through which poured a great stream and from which went high-tension wires strung to mushroom-shaped insulators.  It was filled with the clean and shining machinery of electricity.  Bob rode up the flume to the reservoir, a great lake penned in canon walls by a dam sixty feet high.  The flume itself was of concrete, large enough to carry a rushing stream.  He made the acquaintance of some of the men along the works.  They tramped and rode back and forth along the right of way, occupied with their insulations, the height of their water, their watts and volts and amperes.  Surroundings were a matter of indifference to them.  Activity was of the same sort, whether in the city or in the wilderness.  As influences—­city or wilderness—­it was all the same to them.  They made their own influences—­which in turn developed a special type of people—­among the delicate and powerful mysteries of their craft.  Down through the land they had laid the narrow, uniform strip of their peculiar activities; and on that strip they dwelt satisfied with a world of their own.  Bob sat in a swinging chair talking in snatches to Hicks, between calls on the telephone.  He listened to quick, sharp orders as to men and instruments, as to the management of water, the undertaking of repairs.  These were couched in technical phrases and slang, for the most part.  By means of the telephone Hicks seemed to keep in touch not only with the plants in his own district, but also with the activities in Power Houses Two, Three and Four, many miles away.  Hicks had never once, in four years, been to the top of the first range.  He had had no interest in doing so.  Neither had he an interest in the foothill country to the west.

“I’d kind of like to get back and kill a buck or so,” he confessed; “but I haven’t got the time.”

“It’s a different country up where we are,” urged Bob.  “You wouldn’t know it for the same state as this dry and brushy country.  It has fine timber and green grass.”