“Yes, Greek.”  She answered him softly, her face turned up to his, her eyes frankly filled with love and pride for what he had done, what he was.  “I understand.”

“Then, Argyl Crawford, just so sure as I have done a little thing or a big thing in working the reclamation of this desert, just so certainly have you done a big thing or a little thing in making less barren the waste places in my own soul.  Don’t you see what you have done, Argyl?  It is not I who have done anything; it is you who have done everything.  If I am in any way responsible for success to our work, then are you responsible for every bit of it.  That dam, that ditch, everything, all of it belongs to you!  The success belongs to you!”

“Greek”—­she smiled at him through a sudden gathering of tears—­“you mustn’t say such things—­”

“And so,” he went on, quietly, “since the whole work has been your work, I want the completion of the work to be yours.  Look here, Argyl.”

He touched a long, slender lever reaching from the flume to the bank where they stood.

“When the sun comes up it is going to bring a new day for all of us,” he continued, slowly.  “A new day which, for me, you have made possible.  And just as the sun comes up will you put your hand to this lever and press it down?”

She looked up at him quickly.  “Oh,” she cried, her hand clutching at his arm, her voice quivering, “you mean—­”

He laughed happily.  “I mean that when you press that lever it will throw open the water-gates.  I mean that it will be your hand which turns the first mad current down into the flume.  I mean that it will be you, Argyl, who actually sends the first water to reclaim Rattlesnake Valley.  Are you glad, Argyl?”

If Argyl was glad, she did not say so.  For a moment she stood with her face in her two hands, sobbing.  And then, laughing softly, the tears upon her cheeks catching fire from the first rays of the rising sun, she lifted her face to Greek Conniston’s, and, drawing his face down, kissed him.

The new day had leaped out at them, whipping the last shreds of misty darkness from the face of the earth.  Down yonder, below them upon the slope of the hills, they saw the Lark and his hundred men preparing for breakfast.  Only in the bed of Deep Creek alone, below the dam where a trickle of water ran thread-like, was there any shadow.  And suddenly something moving within the breaking darkness there caught Conniston’s eye.

It was a man running, running swiftly downstream, running as though pursued by no less terrible a thing than death, stumbling, rising, running again.  Something in the man’s carriage struck Conniston as familiar, while he could not make out who it was.  Then the light grew stronger, rosier, and he cried out in surprise.

“Hapgood!” he exclaimed.  “Roger Hapgood!”

And almost before the words had left his lips he cried out in a new tone, a tone of horror, and, seizing Argyl’s hand in his, ran with her, crying for her to hurry, urging her to run with him, away from the dam.  For his eyes had seen another thing in the creek-bed, a something just at the base of the dam at its lowest side.  It was a little sputtering flame, such a flame as is made by a burning bit of fuse.