“I am sorry I missed those services,” said Tisdale.  “I meant to be here.”

Banks nodded.  “But it all went off fine.  She agreed with me it was the best place.  If I was to go back to Alaska, and she was off somewheres on a trip, it would be sure to get taken care of here in the park; and, afterwards, when neither of us can come around to keep things in shape any more.  And I told her how the ranchers up and down the valley would get to feeling acquainted and friendly with Dave, seeing his statue when they was in town; and how the fruit-buyers and the pickers, and maybe the tourists, coming and going, would remember about him and tell everybody they knew; and how the school children would ask questions about the statue, thinking he was in the same class with Lincoln and Washington, and be always telling how he was the first man that looked ahead and saw what water in this valley could do.”

“You were right, Johnny.  The memory of him will live and grow with this town when the rest of us are forgotten.”

They had turned from the park and went speeding up between the rows of new poplars along the Alameda, and the prospector’s eyes moved over the reclaimed vale, where acres on acres of young fruit trees in cultivated squares crowded out the insistent sage.  “And this town for a fact is bound to grow,” he said.

Then at last, when Cerberus loomed near, and they entered the gap, the little man’s big heart rose and his bleak face glowed, under Tisdale’s expressions of wonder and approbation at the advance the vineyards and orchards had made, so soon after the consummation of the project.  Fillers of alfalfa stretched along the spillways from the main canal like a green carpet; strawberry plants were blossoming; grapes reached out pale tendrils and many leaves.  But, at the top of the pocket, where the road began to lift gently in a double curve across the front of the bench, Hollis dismissed Banks and his red car and walked the rest of the way.  On the rim of the level, near the solitary pine tree, he stopped to look down on the transformed vale, and suddenly, once more he seemed to feel David’s presence.  It was as though he stood beside him and saw all this awakening, this responding of the desert to his project.  Almost it compensated—­for those four days.

Almost!  Tisdale drew his hand across his eyes and turned to follow the drive between the rows of nodding narcissus.  The irony of it!  That Weatherbee should have lived to find the Aurora; that, with many times the needed capital in sight, he should have lost.  The perfume of the flowers filled the warm atmosphere; the music of running water was everywhere.  As he left the side of the flume, the silver note of the fountain came to him from the patio, then, like a mirage between him and the low Spanish building, rose that miniature house he had found in the Alaska wilderness, with the small snow figure before it, holding a bundle in her arms.