sun-baked mud bricks, plastered within and smoothly surfaced without,
defying alike the heat of midsummer and the icy blasts of winter and
lasting in that dry clime half a century. This ranch house of the
Stevensons', originally built by some Mexican, as Bryant judged, had
been standing twenty-five or thirty years and was still tight and
staunch.

"Your creek's pretty dry, I see," the young fellow remarked
afteratime, when they had exchanged news.

"By August there won't be any water in it at all," Stevenson said,
"except a little that always runs in the cañon. I'll have to haul it
from there then. You see now why I can't keep stock here."

His wife stopped the needle with which she mended an apron while they
talked, and looked out of a window. On her face was the same tired,
anxious expression that marked her husband's countenance.

"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.