The Secret of Forlorn River

"Go--me?" repeat the Indian, pointing with the singular directness that
always made this action remarkable in him.

"Yes, Yaqui."

Gale ran to his room, put on hobnailed boots, filled a canteen, and
hurried back to the corral. Yaqui awaited him. The Indian carried a
coiled lasso and a short stout stick. Without a word he led the way
down the lane, turned up the river toward the mountains. None of
Belding's household saw their departure.

What had once been only a narrow mesquite-bordered trail was now a
well-trodden road. A deep irrigation ditch, full of flowing muddy
water, ran parallel with the road. Gale had been curious about the
operations of the Chases, but bitterness he could not help had kept him
from going out to see the work. He was not surprised to find that the
engineers who had constructed the ditches and dam had anticipated him
in every particular. The dammed-up gulch made a magnificent reservoir,
and Gale could not look upon the long narrow lake without a feeling of
gladness. The dreaded ano seco of the Mexicans might come again and
would come, but never to the inhabitants of Forlorn River. That
stone-walled, stone-floored gulch would never leak, and already it
contained water enough to irrigate the whole Altar Valley for two dry
seasons.

Yaqui led swiftly along the lake to the upper end, where the stream
roared down over unscalable walls. This point was the farthest Gale
had ever penetrated into the rough foothills, and he had Belding's word
for it that no white man had ever climbed No Name Mountains from the
west.