He worked all that day with Rawhide Jones, his left hand upon his reins, his right thrust into his open vest as a rude sort of sling.  He met Rawhide’s surprise, answered his quick question by saying, simply, without explanation, “I got hurt.”  Rawhide had grunted and dropped the subject.

All day long one matter surged uppermost in Conniston’s mind to the exclusion of anything else:  he was to be transferred from the Half Moon to Rattlesnake Valley.  He did not know whether to be glad at the change or sorry.  He was growing to know the men with whom he worked, growing to like them, to find pleasure in their rude companionship.  Now, just as he was making friends of them he was to be shifted among strangers.  To-day he had found heretofore unsounded depths in the nature of Brayley; he wanted to know the man better, to show him that he had not been blind to rough, frank generosity, nor unappreciative of it.  Through these latter days, during which the scales had been dropping from his eyes in spite of prejudice, he had been forced into a grudging admiration of the man’s capability.  Brayley could read little and spell less; he was a clown and a boor in the matter of the finer, exacting social traditions; but he could run a cattle-range, and he read his men as other men read books.  Conniston realized suddenly, shocked with the realization, that in Brayley there was that same sort of thing which he had come to respect in Argyl Crawford, the same open frankness, the same straightforward honesty, the same deep, wide generosity.

Argyl, too, entered into the confusion of his gladness and disappointment at the coming change of sphere.  He had planned to spend many an evening with her; and now, just as he was finding the door to her comradeship opened to him, he was to be whisked away from her.

But on the other hand Conniston’s optimism saw ahead of him, in the new field of work, the dim, shadowy, and at the same time alluring outline of a new and rare opportunity.  He had not forgotten the things which Mr. Crawford had said of his big project.  And in spite of his own deprecatory answer to Mr. Crawford’s straightforward question, Greek Conniston had not forgotten all of the engineering he had absorbed during four years in the university.  There was work to be done, there were men wanted, above all, men who could understand something beyond the pick-and-shovel end of the thing, men who knew the difference between a transit and a telescope.

And the work itself appealed to him strangely now that that labor was not without independence, not without a stern sort of dignity even.  To take a stretch of dry, hot sand, innocent of vegetation, to wrest it from the clutch of the desert as from the maw of a devastating giant, to bring water mile upon mile from the mountain canons, to make the sterile breast of the mother earth fertile, to drive back the horned toad and the coyote, to make green things spring up and flourish, to carve out homes, to cause trees and flowers and vines to give shade and disseminate fragrance, even as time went on to wring moisture from the lead-gray sky above—­it was like being granted the might of a magician to touch the desert with the tip of his wand, bringing life gushing forth from death.