“What color!” she exclaimed.  “How barbarous!  How ages old!  But don’t say this is the Columbia, Mr. Tisdale.  I know it is the Nile.  Those are the ruins of Thebes.  In a moment we shall see the rest of the pyramids and the Sphinx.”

Tisdale brought the horses around a sand-pit in the road which began to parallel the river, rolling wide and swift and intensely blue, where the rapids ceased, then he glanced at the other shore, where fantastic columns and broken walls of granite rose like a ruined city through a red glory.

“It is worth coming from New York to see, but you have traveled abroad.  Do you know, that disappoints me.  A true American should see America first.”

“Then I confess.”  The girl laughed softly.  “I haven’t been nearer the Nile than a lantern-slide lecture and the moving-picture show.  But my father knew Egypt when he was a boy; maybe I’ve inherited some memories, too.”

Her enthusiasm was irresistible.  Looking into her glowing face, the mirth-provoking lines broke and re-formed at the corners of his own mouth and eyes.

“But,” he explained after a moment, “this desert of the Columbia is not old; it’s tremendously new; so new that Nature hasn’t had time to take the scaffolding away.  You know—­do you not—­this was all once a great inland sea?  Countless glacial streams brought wash down from the mountains, filling the shallows with the finest alluvial earth.  Then, in some big upheaval, one or perhaps several of these volcanic peaks poured down a strata of lava and ash.  As the ice tongues receded, the streams gradually dried; only the larger ones, fed far back in the range, are left to-day.”

“How interesting!” Her glance swept upward and backward along the heights and returned to the levels.  “And naturally, as the bed of the sea was laid bare, these last streams found the lowest depression, the channel of the Columbia.”

Her quickness, her evident desire to grasp the great scheme of things, which other women received with poorly veiled indifference, often hurried to evade, warmed his scientist soul.  “Yes,” he answered, “Nature remembered, while she was busy, to construct the main flume.  She might as well have said, when it was finished:  ’Here are some garden tracts I reclaimed for you.  Now get to work; show what you can do.’”

“And are you going to?” Her voice caught a little; she watched his face covertly yet expectantly, her breath arrested, with parted lips.

“Perhaps.  I am on my way to find a certain garden spot that belonged to David Weatherbee.  He knew more about reclamation than I, for he grew up among your California orchards, but I have the plans he drew; I ought to be able to see his project through.”

“You mean you may buy the land, Mr. Tisdale, if—­things—­are as you expect?”

“Yes, provided I have Mrs. Weatherbee’s price.”

“What do you consider the tract is worth?”