Tisdale looked back across the field.  Miss Armitage was holding the team in readiness at the wicket.  “I am going now,” he said.  “You will have to watch your goats until I get the horses through.  But if you will write that letter, madam, while I’m at work, I’ll be glad to mail it for you.”

The woman looked up.  A sudden hope transfigured her face.  “I wish I dared to.  But he wouldn’t know me now; I’ve changed so.  Besides, I don’t know his address.”

“That’s so.”  Tisdale met her glance thoughtfully.  “But leave it to me.  I think I can get into touch with him when I am back in Seattle.”

Miss Armitage watched him as he came swiftly across the field.  “Oh,” she cried, when he reached the waiting team, “how did you accomplish it?  Are you a magician?”

Hollis shook his head.  “I only tried to play a little on her heart-strings, to gain time, and struck an unexpected chord.  But it’s all right.  It’s going to do her good.”

CHAPTER XI

THE LOOPHOLE

The afternoon sun shone hot in that pocket; the arid slopes reflected the glare; heat waves lifted; the snow-peak was shut out, and when a puff of wind found the gap it was a breath from the desert.  Miss Armitage, who had trailed pluckily after Tisdale through the sage-brush and up the steep face of the bench, rested on the level, while he hurried on to find the easiest route to the high plateau and the spring.  He had left her seated on a flat rock in the shade of a sentinel pine tree, looking over the vale to Cerberus and the distant bit of the Wenatchee showing beyond the mouth, but as he came back along the ridge, he saw she had turned her shoulder on the crouching mountain.  At his far “Hello!” she waved her hand to him and rose to start across the bench to meet him.  He was descending a broken stairway below two granite pillars that topped a semi-circular bluff and, springing from a knob to avoid a dry runnel, he shaped his way diagonally to abridge the distance.  He moved with incredible swiftness, swinging by his hands to drop from a ledge, sliding where he must, and the ease and expediency with which he accomplished it all brought the admiration sparkling to her eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said, as he drew near, “but there isn’t any easy way.  It’s too bad to have traveled so far and miss the spring, for the whole project hinges on it; but the climb is impossible for you in this heat.”

“Then you found the spring?” she asked quickly.  “It was all the plans promised?”

“Yes.”  He began to walk on across the bench, suiting his steps to hers.  “And Weatherbee had put in a small dam there to create his first reservoir.  I found his old camp, too; a foundation of logs, open now to the sky, with a few tatters left of the canvas that had roofed it over.”  There was a silent moment, then he added, with the emotion still playing gently in his voice:  “I wish I could show you that place; the pool is crystal clear and cool, rimmed in pines, like a basin of opals.”