# Ample Water

Extracted from Sunset Magazine, Jan 1925, pp. 17–20, 58, 60, 62. Illustrations by Louis Rogers may be omitted.
AMPLE WATER
By Murray Leinster
THE shadows were deepening at the bases of the irregular low cliffs that bounded the arroyo on every hand. Bare red rocks they were, which during the day had emitted a baking heat and now still poured out a perceptible radiation into the cooling air. The sun was almost gone. Its golden rays still tinted the top of a single peak that could be seen from the level floor between the cliffs, but the little clump of straggling, parched willows that clustered about the water-hole were long since lost in a dusky obscurity.
A thin and ragged stream of smoke came feebly from the jagged chimney of the hut. Everything was desolation. Even the kindly veil of gathering darkness could not hide the dry, starved nature of all the ground within the red stone barriers. A wagon stood neglected, partly unloaded. A horse cropped hungrily at the thin vegetation nearest the water-hole. Bits of household furniture were scattered about on the earth—a chair, a bureau, a part of a bed. Darkness had interrupted the process of taking possession.
Within the house a woman sat in a rocking-chair. She was moving uneasily back and forth, her hands folding and unfolding as she waited. She had been crying. Not a young woman, her face was marked by struggles long past and now seemed to become older as she contemplated struggles yet ahead. The numbness of anticipated exhaustion seemed to hold her in her chair, in the face of unlimited things to be done.
The man stumbled up on the porch, shaking in a terrible combination of uncomprehending despair and a choking blinding rage that was the more bitter because helpless. He was a huge figure of a man, six feet and more, broad of shoulder and with wiry muscles that stood out like cords. And yet the very distinctness of his muscles proved that he was past his youth, had not the beginning flecks of gray in his roughened beard told the fact more patently. His eyes were full of bitterness. He came heavily into the room, the flimsy floor trembling under his weight. He flung out his arm.
“We're swindled!” he cried hoarsely. “Eight thousand dollars! All we've got—for nothing!”
The woman was silent, her hands twisting and untwisting. Her eyes were oddly dulled. She had not needed to look as closely as the man. The wife of a farmer, fighting ever-present drought, learns much. She had seen the ground they had bought, and went sick within her. The man had had to go over every foot, exhaustively, before he could give up hope.
“Six hundred acres,” said the man, again hoarsely, “and not a drop of water. Swindled! Fooled! We've lost everything!”
He flung himself crashingly into a chair, sitting there with his eyes staring. His great hands began to clench and unclench. There was silence for perhaps five minutes. There was no need for speech nothing to be said. For ten years the man and woman had fought together against bitter want. Barren acres had been built up to a certain fertility by a terrible struggle. They had been close to starvation that the land might wax fat. And at the end they wanted rest. They were desperately weary of grudging, greedy soil. They had dreams of rich earth, just a little land, but bountiful. The place they had made fertile had worn them out. They were growing old, and men offered them what seemed a fortune. Eight thousand dollars!
THEY had sold, and now that eight thousand dollars had been spent for yet more grudging acres. Too much preoccupied with their fight against barrenness to have become intent upon the wiles of the world, they had bought what seemed to be the place of their dreams. They were shown photographs, and the photographs showed a sparkling stream, winding between willow-lined banks. Fat cattle, grazing. Fields that were uncultivated, but yet were thick with lush grass. And dull, red sand-stone cliffs all about for a background.
The man had found the bed of the stream. It was a stretch of wind-smoothed sand. And he had seen where the willows had been. They were dried and desiccated stumps. And he had even found the natural, bubbling pool of cool and mineralized water, coming up from the depths of the earth, that had fed that stream. The pool was now a quiet and turgid pond, perhaps ten feet by twenty-five. All that the seller had claimed had once been true, but now no more.
A huge vein was standing out on the man's forehead. Black killing wrath was written on his face. A rumble came from his throat. His teeth grated suddenly.
His wife looked at him, and then with a woman's strange capacity for forgetting all else for the sake of her man, she got up quickly.
“Now, Harry,” she said anxiously. “Remember, you mustn't get too mad. Remember, you're apt—”
“'Ample water,'” said the man hoarsely, evidently quoting from a letter that had purported to describe the place. “He said 'ample water.' And he said that this was the sort of ground on which water was worth its weight in gold!”
The woman put her hands on his shoulders.
“Please, Harry—”
“It's a water-hole, no more,” the long fingers clenched convulsively. “We couldn't irrigate half an acre from it. There's barely enough water for us to drink. And he knew it! He knew it! There's been no water here for years! We're swindled!
His eyes roved about the room, tensely. They fell upon a shot-gun laid against the wall when brought in. His muscles stiffened.
“Eight thousand dollars,” he growled, choking upon his rage. “And swindled. 'Ample water'!”
He stood up, his muscles standing out like ropes beneath his skin.
“I'll give him his chance,” he said hoarsely. “I'll give him every chance. But he lied, and he's got to make his lie good.”
His wife put her arms about his shoulders.
“You know, Harry,” she said anxiously, “we had to work to build up the other place. Maybe this will be still better, with water. And—and don't springs get low sometimes, only to come out again full once more? Maybe this one—”
“No,” he said savagely, his voice shaking with a terrible, all-pervading rage. “He said there was ample water here, why,” he roared suddenly, “he said that if he were a beef-critter he'd ask nothing better than to be pastured on the banks of the stream here. And the stream's sand! He knew he was lying!” He paused, and his eyes were flaming. “But I shall give him his chance to make good.”
He strode to the door, gazing out at the night that had fallen. It was glamorous and beautiful. The low cliffs were lurking places of mystery. Now, the starlight softened the harshness of the sun-baked earth. The place could have been a paradise, with water. But all the water within many miles was a shallow, turgid pool with a winding, twisting passageway leading down into the bowels of the earth, whence the water came.
A wild rabbit crept beneath the starveling willows and to the edge of the pond. His big ears alert, he listened. His nostrils twitching, he scented the wind. Then, cautiously, he dipped his head and drank. The water, cool and delicious, seeped into his body. For a space of minutes there was utter silence and no movement, save the tiny ripples radiating away from the rabbit's muzzle. Then a sound cut through the night. It was the man's voice, hoarse and hugely bitter.
“'Ample water'! he barked sardonically to the skies. “'Ample water'!”
The rabbit could not understand the irony nor the despair. He was drinking. But he seemed to feel a hint of danger in the air. He slipped quickly and quietly away into the darkness.
THE world was baking as if in an oven heated from above. A fierce, blistering glare poured down from a brazen sun, and the earth had browned and shriveled from the super-cookery. The encircling cliffs impounded the heat and radiated it out again, unrelieved by any breath of wind. Far overhead a tiny dark speck soared and circled effortlessly, waiting for something to die. But it seemed that everything was dead already.
In the valley, certainly, there was little sign of life. The lone horse drooped, and sought the insufficient shade of the willows. The house seemed to dance in the heat, while the rocks jumped and wavered and slipped this way and that, sometimes joining in a momentary illusion of amalgamation, then slipping away again soundlessly. The glare was terrible, the heat horrible, and the silence that of something strangling in the choking stillness of the air.
The man was standing by the water-hole, a grim figure, listening to another man who had slipped in furtively. A stolid patient burro flicked its ears lazily as it waited.
“Your name's Scarsdale, aint it?” the stranger began timidly. “They told me down in Prentice that you'd bought this place.”
The bearded man nodded, staring at the shallow pool of water.
“I bought it,” he said harshly. “Why?”
The other put out his hand in an appealing gesture.
“You bought it from that—from Mr. Blake. He—” The stranger looked about, and lowered his voice. “He swindled you, didn't he?”
“He lied to me,” said the broad man, his voice full of a queer muffled fury. “Yes, he swindled me.”
The other man had the beaten look that you see on some men's faces. His eyes were dulled, as if a film had come over them, and a discouraged droop was never absent from his pose.
“He—swindled me too,” he said pathetically. “I bought two hundred acres from him. For dry-farming. And I have to haul all my water four miles. I've been down in Prentice after supplies.”
“What did you do?” demanded the other, his voice booming. “What did you do to him when he'd swindled you?”
The stranger seemed to shrink a little.
“There wasn't anything to do. He'd been careful. The law was on his side. I couldn't do anything at all.”
Big hands clenched and unclenched.
“Why didn't you kill him?”
Again the other looked cautiously about before replying.
“I—I thought of it,” he said confidentially, “but he carries two revolvers. And he shoots straight. I thought of it after my wife died. She—sort of drooped when she saw how we'd been swindled. And I went down to Prentice. But it wouldn't have been any use.”
The big man moved. His eyes held a certain something that made the other shift uneasily from one foot to the other.
“It wouldn't have been any use,” he repeated. “He had the law on his side. He was careful about that.”
“What do you know about this place?” demanded the other, harshly. “What about this water-hole? Isn't it ever any bigger than this?”
“Sometimes,” the stranger admitted. “It gets a little larger. I've been here three years, and I've seen it half as big again. I've wished I had it on my place. That's when the snow melts on the mountains. They tell me there's an underground drainage.”
“And it gets smaller, too?”
“Yes. It does get smaller. It's a sort of artesian spring, you know. Somebody told me that hole, there, goes on down like an artesian well, and taps the water maybe five hundred feet down. But it got stopped up, mostly; after an earthquake, somebody told me.”
Had they known of such things, the two men could have proved the fact easily enough. The surface rocks were sandstone, all sandstone. But tiny pebbles in the pool, brought up by the current when it was a rushing stream, were granite, and even a little black lava, and here and there translucent quartz. No man could tell but that somewhere down in darkness there was a mighty stream pouring through a channel forever unvisited of men, deep down in the bowels of the earth, full of cool melted snow water, rushing, rushing on somewhere, all moisture and coolness, while above it the earth gasped in heat and perpetual drought.
“It got stopped up,” repeated the stranger timidly. “Maybe some rocks got loosened, way down there, and plugged it up. Or maybe just little pebbles gathered, or something. But it don't flow now.”
The big man stared at the placid pool. His face was set in harsh lines.
“'Ample water'! he quoted again, bitterly—and raging. “I'll give him his chance to make good! I'll give it to him, but if he don't—”
The stranger stared, uneasily.
“You aint thinkin' of tryin' to do anything about it, are you?” he asked uncertainly. “He's got the law on his side—”
“He said,” growled the big man, “that if he were a beef-critter, he'd ask nothing better than to be pastured on the banks of this stream.” His hands twisted, as if aching to be about some one's throat. “By God!” he cried suddenly, his voice rising in pitch, “when I get to him—”
The stranger looked, and blinked, and moved uneasily. He turned his head and looked all about him, at the parched and thirsty earth, at the hot rocks, leaping and rippling in the glare, at the starveling trees and the silent blistering cliffs all about.
“He's goin' to be by,” he said confidentially, “in two or three days mere. He's got a big place forty miles away. A wonderful place. He's building a dam. He'll go by, down there—and most likely alone.”
He pointed, and waited.
“I—I aint the sort to do anything,” he said timidly, yet eagerly. “But I thought I'd tell you.”
The big man's eyes blazed. Then he caught himself in hand.
“I shall give him every chance,” he said fiercely. “Every chance. But he lied to me!”
The stranger caught at his burro's lead-rope. He started away, hurriedly. Then he stopped.
“I—I wish somebody would do something,” he said, with an effect of furtiveness. “I—I daren't. He carries two revolvers.” He paused. The big man did not move. “Anyway—I—I won't say anything.”
He was gone, leading the burro over the unfamiliar ground, then presently driving it on before him. Presently the big man broke off a branch from the willows and extracted a knife from his pocket. He whittled the stick to a point with meticulous precision.
“He shall have every chance,” he muttered. “Every one.”
Presently he stooped over.
THAT night the rabbit came to drink, and shied away from a strange thing he found. It was a little stick, sharpened to a point and driven accurately at the edge of the water, to mark the spot. The rabbit drank stealthily from another than his usual place. He was afraid of the stick. Somehow, he associated it with the man.
But he need not have been afraid. The man was up in the house, staring at the wall with smouldering eyes, while his wife watched him anxiously. He was muttering hoarsely.
“Every chance. But he lied to me. 'Ample water'!”
THE next night the rabbit found the stick a good three inches from the water's edge, though it had not been moved, and the night after that it was six inches. By that time, though, he had come to disregard it. He drank peacefully, his great ears twitching, not afraid at all.
Had he seen within the house, however, his fears might have returned in double measure. The rabbit knew what shotguns were, and might have considered—being not unlike most humans in thinking all things were done more or less because of him—that the bearded man, sitting there and oiling and re-oiling a shot-gun, was preparing for a hunt. And he would have heard nothing to dispel his fears, either, because the bearded man was silent, his lips compressed. He did not even mutter. But the face of his wife was deathly white as she looked at him.
The sun came up thunderously out of the east. From a pale and sickly green, the sky lightened to yellow, then pink, then crimson, and at last the great red ball of carmine fire peered above the horizon, climbed slowly upward, lingered a moment touching the edge of the world and then broke loose, swimming up toward mid-heaven.
Slowly, the desert awoke. Little furtive squeaking noises came from here and there. There was a tiny rustling as the infrequent creatures of the night fled, and the stranger things of the day awoke. Lizards stirred from their nightly torpor. Things twined sinuously to soak in the first warmth of the sun. The golden sunbeams stretched out widely and first tinted, then warmed, and then baked the occasional clumps of sage and mesquite, and the rarer groups of cacti, ungainly spined things that grew weirdly into uncouth or unseemly shapes.
The man waited, grimly. His shot-gun, across his knees, was for a time uncomfortably cold, then pleasantly cool, and then unbearably hot as its blackened barrel absorbed the sun's heat. He looked as if he had not slept. He sat waiting, his eyes fixed upon some spot far over the waste-land, the picture of inexorable patience.
At first it was only the merest haze, such as might have been the dust aroused by some vagrant eddy of wind, but it remained in the one place, and presently it seemed thicker. Then it was an indubitable cloud, which could only come from the hoofs of horses being driven. And then tiny, bobbing specks appeared in the midst of it. It was a team of horses, hitched to a buck-board.
The man stood up slowly and stiffly. Methodically, he looked to his shot-gun, broke it and inspected the shells—buckshot. He replaced them and slipped off the safety. Then he stepped out into the middle of the barely distinguishable trail.
The team was traveling swiftly, and yet it was a long time on the way. Blake was evidently no sparer of horseflesh, because he sent them on at a steady trot, without a pause for breath. The man who was waiting noted this calmly. He was very calm. His hands were steady. There was no stiffness in his movements once he was afoot, and even his face showed no sign of any great emotion—save only his eyes. They were full of a queer fire.
Two miles away. Then a mile. Then half a mile. A quarter. The horses trotted smartly on—queer affectation in the desert. Then the man held out his arm and they drew up in a smother of dust.
“Hello. What's up?” Blake peered from the seat through the dust that followed him. He stiffened. “Oh,” he said shortly. “It's Scarsdale. What is it?”
“I want you to look at the place you sold me,” said the man harshly. “That stream is dried up. There's no water.”
“There hasn't been for years,” said Blake pleasantly. “That's why I sold it to you.”
“I'm giving you every chance,” said the man hoarsely. “You said there was ample water. What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” said Blake. His hand dropped inconspicuously to his side. A man with a shot-gun, resting its butt on the ground, against a man with a revolver at his hip. That was easy.
BUT the shot-gun came up very swiftly. And Blake, in the act of drawing his own weapon, stiffened. There were two boxes of dynamite strapped behind him for the blasting at the dam, forty miles beyond. Any man may fight a gun-duel, but few men will care for it when there is a case of high-explosive close to him and adding to the target his body offers. Blake went suddenly very pale. He had forgotten that. Buckshot will go through flimsy pine boxes, and dynamite will explode with some violence, and a man sitting close beside a two-case lot will be separated into very small pieces when it detonates.
Blake sat very still. The shot-gun pointed unwaveringly at him.
“Throw your guns out,” ordered the bearded man, harshly. “I gave you every chance. Every chance.”
Blake threw a single one into the dust.
“The other one. You carry two.”
The other followed. The bearded man picked them up. His face was still calm, full of a set purpose. Only his eyes were smouldering, and into them was coming a strange expression of peace, as if the thing he was about to do had become a thing necessary beyond debate.
“Now drive to the place you sold me. You know the way.”
He perched on the back of the buckboard, one great hand assuring him against being jolted off, even if Blake had dared such a maneuver with the dynamite strapped so closely to his body.
He drove onward, while the sun rose higher and became more hot. The heat became terrible, blistering, but he felt queerly cold. There was dead silence behind him. Once he glanced over his shoulder.
“You said there was ample water,” said the man.
Blake's lips whitened. He drove on.
And they came to the narrow opening between the low red cliffs. There was an instant's grateful shadow, and then the deadly heat smote them once more. The starved, baked earth. The stunted, shriveling willows by the water-hole. Heat, gathering as if impounded in a pool by the encircling sandstone bluffs.
He came to a stop.
“You said”—the voice was even, with the inexorable quality of fate itself,—“that if you were a beef-critter you'd ask nothing better than to be pastured on the banks of this stream. Get down.”
Slowly the man in the buck-board descended to the ground—and sprang, with lightning swiftness, his fists flailing. And then there was an impact as the two bodies met. And then, inexorably, two huge hands fastened upon the smaller man's throat. They closed, while a vein stood out hugely upon the bearded man's forehead and his eyes glittered insanely.
There was a choking sound, there in the midst of the burning heat and deathly silence, and the sound of cloth ripping. The sleeve of the bearded man's shirt ripped away from his wrists. Then there was no sound at all for a time, until one of the two men dropped to the earth when the hands released his throat.
The big man stood above him, shaking with rage and blood-lust. Then he stooped and felt of the other's heart. He rose again and strode away, only to return with a long length of chain.
When he had finished his task he stood up and waited, grimly.
“You lied to me,” came hoarsely when the prostrate man stirred weakly. “I could have killed you, but I shall give you every chance.”
Dulled eyes stared, then cleared. The fallen man put his hand to his throat. The muscles moved as if he were swallowing painfully. Then he stirred again and half-rose, bracing himself by a hand in the blistering-hot sand.
“God!” he said chokingly. “I—I—” He gazed up at the implacable figure above him. Fear came into his face. “What—what do you want?”
The bearded man swept out his arms in a convulsive gesture.
“You said there was ample water here. You said if you were a beef-critter you'd ask nothing better than to be pastured on the banks of the stream here. You said water was worth its weight in gold on ground like this.”
Slowly the fallen man struggled to his feet. A. metallic tinkling followed his movements. He stood drunkenly erect.
“All right,” he mumbled with difficulty.“I'll give you back your money.”
“You lied to me!” growled the other man fiercely. “You said there was ample water!”
“I'll give it back.....” A hand went again to Blake's throat. Again the muscles worked. “Give me a drink and I'll write you a check.”
The bearded man's eyes were glowing.
“Ample water!” he barked hoarsely. “Give me ample water to irrigate this land. You lied! Make good your lie!”
He turned and strode away. He did not turn. His figure passed from the range of lucid vision into that grotesque area wherein all things shimmered and wavered and danced soundlessly. He became small. He vanished into the house.
And the man who was left fumbled for his check-book in his pocket, and seemed to find difficulty in his movements. He looked down stupidly at a chain that was wound about his body, over and under his arms, round his chest. He took a staggering step, and turned at the tinkling that followed it. A serpentine chain trailed behind him to the trunk of a dying willow, where it was coiled and doubly stapled fast.
Sudden panic shone in the chained man's face. He gazed about him like a hunted thing. And then he saw a thing that drove all other thoughts from his mind. It was a pool of water, a shallow, turgid pool of water, that once had been the fountainhead of a rushing stream.
Stumbling a little, he moved toward it, then was jerked back. He had reached the end of his chain. Then he gazed about him, at the land he had sold. Barren, utterly barren, utterly sterile for lack of water, sun-baked, parched. There was no shade, save beneath the dying stunted trees. There was no vegetation, except the bitter things of the desert outside. Nothing could grow there. Nothing could live there. It was the place he had sold for eight thousand dollars.
LATE that night, the rabbit came to drink. He heard a curious, clanking sound and a hoarse whispering. The rabbit was timid, but thirst drove him to the pool—with all due caution, of course. He saw a dark figure moving in the starlight, half-sunken in the dried and powdery sand that had been the stream-bed. For a long time the rabbit watched, his big ears alert. But then he crept to the water's edge and dipped in his muzzle.
A stone struck close beside him, and then another, and a man's voice rose in hysterical cursing. No other creature should drink while he thirsted. There was a rain of small stones to enforce the decree, flung by a panting raging man.
The rabbit fled in panic, but he was very thirsty. Toward morning he crept back again. And again he was driven away.
THE morning sun rose upon the arroyo, and the long shadows of the cliffs retreated to huddle beneath their bases. Slowly the flood of heat accumulated and the deadly dazzling glare began. The three horses foraged hungrily upon the thin herbage near the water-hole. There were two wagons in the basin, now. One was the buckboard, standing where it had been deserted, the two cases of dynamite still strapped behind the seat.
The bearded man came out of the house and went slowly toward the wind-smoothed stream-bed. Once he stopped and picked up a bit of the baked earth in his fingers. He crushed it, and let it trickle slowly to the ground.
“He said,” he muttered, “water on this ground was worth its weight in gold.”
There was a tragedy in the dried earth of the valley. Mid-western farmer as he was, he could see that the land was virgin, fertile, infinitely desirable—with water. And that without it, there was nothing more than a corner of the desert enclosed by the sandstone bluffs.
His prisoner was squatted in a huge hole he had dug with his bare hands, down to the damp sand of the old stream-bed. But the sand was damp no longer. The continual slow seepage from the pool left an underlayer of moisture for a little distance. It was upon that moisture that the willows lived, and to which the man had dug. But the sun, striking fiercely, sucked up the dampness almost as soon as the man's hands cleared it. He seized a compacted mass of moist sand in his hand that his skin might soak in refreshment, and as he held it, it dried, from compactness became powdery, and presently trickled in a stream of fine grains through his fingers.
He lifted blood-shot, inflamed eyes to the man he had swindled.
“I've been reading over a paper,” said the big man slowly. “It's the abstract of title to this ground. It tells who's owned this place before me.”
The man in the sand-pit swallowed, croaked something unintelligible.
“You've owned it three times,” the bearded man went on, in his voice all the inexorable quality of fate itself. “Twice you've sold it, and twice you've bought it back again. And there are two graves up yonder.”
The man in the sand-pit croaked again, digging for moisture in the powdery stuff below him.
“I don't know what happened, but didn't you sell it for a good price and then buy it back for next to nothing when they'd gotten discouraged, or died?”
From the pit, tortured eyes looked up. The man there licked his lips with a dry and swollen tongue.
“I'll buy it back,” he articulated with difficulty. “You aint like the others. I'll buy it back.”
The big man shook his head deliberately. Implacable lines were etched about his eyes.
“I don't go back on my bargains, or lie when I make them. You said there was ample water here.” Rage came over him. “You said there was ample water! You swindled me—and there are two graves up yonder. Where is that water?”
Blake's eyes went to the pool, with infinite longing. The pool was noticeably smaller than it had been.
“I'll buy it back,” he mumbled.“I'll pay you a profit.”'
The bearded man heard him, and turned away.
“Come back,” shrilled Blake suddenly. “Look! Look!”
He held out his cupped hands, full and brimming with gold-pieces.
“My pay-money for the blasting gang,” he shrilled. “If you're afraid of my giving you a check and then stopping it, I'll pay you in gold! I'll pay you gold just to give me back the place and let me go! I'll pay you a profit!”
The big man's voice was grating and full of rage.
“You sold me land to till,” he cried hoarsely, “and you sold me ample water! What do I care for profits? What do I want with money? I want water for the land you've sold me. Ample water!”
He strode away, his great hands closing and unclosing convulsively.
And then there was silence, while the sun rose higher, and the heat grew greater, and the red cliffs reflected the heat into the valley. It grew oven-like, all dry earth and sand, with a drying pool to taunt the eye.
The rabbit came early that night, and was driven away. And it came again, and yet again, and each time a shower of stones from a frantic, raving man drove it back from the water. For hours the rabbit tried to creep to the water's edge unobserved, and each time failed. The man in the sand-pit was watching with a strange, insane ferocity. While he thirsted, no other creature should drink.
The first thin crescent of the moon shone upon the water in the early darkness, and the splashes of the stones were small darts of blue flame, infinitely cool and infinitely tormenting in their liquid sound. The man tried to swallow when he heard them. Then, presently, he flung stones just to hear the splashing. Any man may endure one day of insensate thirst and remain sane. Most men may endure even two, with the coolness of the night for refreshment. But in the basin, here, the nights did not cool as on the open desert. The encircling cliffs stored up the heat of the sun and poured it out again during darkness. And the air was dry with a dryness that sucked out moisture from every pore.
TOWARD morning strange sounds came from the pit the man had dug. Much of it was unintelligible, but the rest was a succession of cunningly contrived phrases, put together with a mad, specious cleverness. It was a rehearsal of arguments why his captor should go to the other side of the pool and throw rocks into it, so that the splashes would reach the man in the sand-pit. Merely the splashes, nothing more. He could not drink them, he repeated cunningly. They would be dirty water, unfit to drink. But it would prove that the whole farm could be irrigated from the pool. There was ample water, only one should stand and throw rocks into it, so it would splash.
And then, at sunrise, the babbling suddenly stopped. The man's eyes were very bright. An expression of eagerness came over his face.
“Dynamite,” he said raptly. “Dynamite! It would splash—”
He lay quite still, watching the pool. In broad day the rabbit crept down to the water, driven by intolerable thirst. And stones and small rocks fell all about it, in the chained man's childish rage.
The bearded man stopped outside the door of his house and brushed absently at some small glistening drops upon his shirt. He was trembling, and in revolt. The droplets were salt. They might have been tears, only certainly they had not come from his eyes.
His face set grimly, then softened, and then he spoke without turning his head.
“All right, then. Pack up. But—” his voice rose to the heights of rebellion, “he lied to me!”
Slowly he went toward his prisoner. The flecked beard rested on his chest. Grimness unabated, hatred unappeased, he stalked toward the man who had swindled him. He carried a huge pair of wire-cutters in one of his great hands.
His prisoner raised his head joyfully at sight of him, and began to speak. The big man gazed at him somberly.
“I'm going to turn you loose,” he said harshly. “You can thank a woman for it, if you like.”
Blake continued to make uncouth sounds. His eyes were bright and he waved and gesticulated. He was all eagerness, all plausibility. Then he seemed to make a superhuman effort to articulate, despite his roughened, swollen tongue. He was horrible to look at. Unshaven, blear-eyed, his hands raw and bleeding from his digging in the sand. He pointed to the pool and to the buckboard.
“You said there was ample water,” said the big man somberly. “You swindled me. I could have killed you. I could let you die, now. God! I wonder why—”
He fell silent. The thing in the sandpit made sounds with its mouth, struggling frantically to be understood.
Dynamite—Water—Down the hole—Explode—Place stopped up. Dynamite loosen it.
“You want me to lower dynamite down the hole there, and explode it,” said the big man somberly.
The thing in the sand-pit watched him in a terrible, tremulous hope. His speech of release simply had not been understood. The bearded man watched without pity.
“Is that your way of bringing water?” The bearded mouth opened in a bitter laugh. “All right, I'll do it. It's my place, now. You'll never have the chance to swindle another man with it.”
Within the house, his wife was beginning to pack. They were bound for other acres, other places, to begin again the fight they had fought for ten years, and won, only for the benefit of the man lying there in the dried-up stream-bed. Ten years, gone! The best of his life—wasted! Beginning old age with empty hands—
Some thing of fire came into the bearded man's eyes. Hatred had not been appeased by the suffering of the man in the sand-pit. Nothing short of utter destruction could give him peace, now. And since he must not destroy the man who had caused it all, who had swindled him of all he possessed, there might be some relief in destroying something else.
His great hands were strangely supple as he bent to his task with a grim pleasure. He took heavy rope and bound the dynamite-sticks along its length, padding the first lest they go off too soon. He packed them closely. A full case he bound along the length of the rope, so that he had a flexible cartridge ten feet long. And to the uppermost he fastened the. fulminate-caps. Blake had had all things ready for his blasting. Even a coil of wire and batteries were in the buckboard.
Slowly, grimly, the big man took his strange bomb to the water-hole. There was the tube-like orifice, winding down through the rock to unknown depths below. Working in a frenzy of destruction to annihilate the thing that had mocked him, he lowered the end of the rope. It caught. He twisted, and it sank sinuously. He paid out all the rope, with attendant wire. Then he laughed.
“While I'm at it, I might as well blow the whole place up,” he said harshly. “Then it won't mock another man.”
It was clever with something of the cleverness of insanity. The dynamite was nitro-glycerin dynamite, not designed for use under water, but it would withstand the moisture for twenty minutes or more, and the whole mass would go off if a single stick were detonated. It only required that the wire connections to the fulminate cap be taped against a water short-circuit to make the thing fiendishly certain. The spark would set off one stick of explosive and the concussion would ignite the others in turn. And Scarsdale, with his serpenting bomb sinking slowly downward, grinned queerly to himself. The padded end of the rope seemed to feel its way down to the bowels of the earth, like some monster blind worm. The rounded water-passage curved and twisted. The weighted rope followed every curvature. It sank down, down, down, sometimes catching for a moment but inevitably slipping free and sinking further.
He bent yet another rope to the first. The other man watched with mad cunning. Soon the dynamite would explode. The man in the sand-pit staggered to his feet. He balanced himself precariously, his mouth open, to catch a precious swallow of water when the exploding dynamite sent a column of water spouting madly upward. He would be soaked to the skin. He might, if he were quick, swallow twice!
The big man looked up and laughed again, recklessly, bitterly.
“And now, may it blow us both to hell! You lied! Here's for your ample water!”
And he touched the wires.
For a space there was dead silence.
And then there was a deep-throated bellow far below, which before it had time to register upon a man's eardrums had become a deafening roar. From the tube-like hole in the sandstone came a column of water, yards high, spouting, roaring, rushing skyward. It went upward in a screaming mass, and came down again in a pelting downpour that was only partly divided. Great masses of water, cubic yards in size, fell with mighty crashes upon the parched earth. From the pool arose smoke and nauseous gases and monster bubbles. And then the flow ceased.
The man in the sand-pit was down on his hands and knees. The water drained naturally to the old stream-bed. It formed, momentarily, a tiny stream, perhaps three inches deep, at which Blake was lapping like an animal. He flung himself down in the water, wallowing, rolling, insane with joy.
The bearded man laughed hoarsely.
“Ample water!” he barked, “Ample water!”
He heard something behind him, a soft, plashing, gurgling sound. He turned. The rocky bed of the old pool was shattered. Great rents and fissures marked the stone. And from those rents and openings, water was bubbling up. It came up softly, everywhere, but from the gaping hole where the dynamite had been lowered, it poured upward in a solid stream that rippled and gurgled, and made soft cooing noises, as if the water were joyful to be upon the surface of the earth once more. It filled the pool, and overflowed it. A little stream trickled down to the wind-smoothed sand that had been the ancient stream-bed. The thirsty sand drank it up. But more came. A little tongue of water reached exploratively down toward its ancient channel. It reached farther, and farther. The stream had begun to run!
And far, far down, there were scars in the age-old tunnel. Once, the water had found its way up through small crevices and cracks. Through innumerable tiny openings it had seeped into the shaft that went above. And later, those cracks and openings had been stopped with sand or earth or powdered rock. But now the explosive had crushed them with a gigantic hand. Monster cracks offered escape for the water, down below. The soft rock for many yards was pulverized and rent by the concussion. And the water could go freely, more freely than ever before, up to the sunlight and the thirsty world above it.
The big man staggered when he saw. He fell upon his knees beside the pool, feeling the water with his hands, feasting his eyes and his skin upon its touch.
After a long time he roused himself. With his great nippers he cut loose the chain that had bound his prisoner. He led him to the buckboard. With the coming of water, something of his old self came back.
He put the reins into the hands of the man who had swindled him.
“Go,” he said slowly. “You've made your lie good. Go!”
IT was late that night that the man came back to his house. The starlight shimmered upon a silvery stream, flowing where there had been only wind-blown sand. It seemed that one could hear the parched earth drinking, gratefully.
The man stood upon the porch, gazing over the ground he had bought. Six hundred acres. It would be a paradise.
His wife rested her head against his shoulder.
“On land like this,” said the big man, his voice booming, “water is worth its weight in gold. Its weight in gold!”
He watched, and listened to the lulling, lilting, liquid note of the stream as it burbled between its newfound banks. He could hear thirsty little sighs, as the pores of the parched earth sucked it up.
His hands itched.
“I don't like to see it going to waste,” he said slowly. “I'll go get a tool or so and begin to dig some ditches to spread it. I can work in the dark. Thank God! We've got ample water!”
DOWN by the pool, a wild rabbit crept to the water's edge. He listened, and heard nothing save the water bubbling up. And he dipped in his muzzle and drank, and drank, and drank. ...
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1975, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 49 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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