“I’ve barely kept our garden alive,” she said, “but it won’t be for much longer.”

“That’s too bad, Mrs. Stevenson,” Lee Bryant replied.  “However, one can’t do anything without water.  Still, your sheep are doing well, I suppose; the grass is good on the mountains this summer.”

An answer was not immediately forthcoming from the rancher; he sat staring absently at the backs of his roughened hands, now and again rubbing one or the other, and enveloped in a gloom that Bryant could both see and feel.  Then all at once Stevenson began to talk, in a voice querulous and morose.

“We’re going to quit here, sell the sheep, and go back East.  I was swindled when I bought this ranch, and I want to get away before I lose my last cent.  Came out to this country five years ago from Illinois with forty thousand dollars, and now we’re going back with what I can sell my sheep for, maybe twenty-five hundred cash.  Menocal robbed me right at the start, selling me this place for twenty-five thousand—­twenty thousand down and a mortgage for the remaining five thousand—­when the place was just five thousand acres of sagebrush, with no more water than runs in this creek.  I was a tenderfoot all right!  The land agent at Kennard showed it to me in June when the Perro was booming, and I believed him when he said it ran that way all the year around.  Look at it now!  I didn’t have sense enough to inquire and learn about it, being in a hurry to get into the sheep business and thinking I should be rich in no time.  That agent sold it to me for irrigated land, and a bargain at five dollars an acre.  Menocal, who owned it and deeded it to me, pretends he isn’t responsible for what the man said.  Five dollars an acre!  It’s worth about fifty cents for winter range, and no more.”

“If it could be irrigated, it would be a bargain sure enough at five dollars,” Lee stated.  “And there’s another water right for the place you said when I was here before.”

“Yes, there is—­on paper.  Water was appropriated out of the Pinas River, but that’s eight miles north of here, and it would cost a hundred thousand dollars, if not more, to build a dam and a canal along the mountain side.  No, sir; that appropriation was just some more of Menocal’s tricky work!  He jammed it through the land office thirty years ago and, they say, never did any more to comply with the law requiring delivery of the water on this ground than to have a man drive around pouring a bucketful out of a barrel upon each quarter section.”

“Some pretty shady transactions were put across in those early days,” Bryant commented.