It Is Difficult To Come Into Intimate
Relations With Appropriated Waters; Like Very Busy People They Have
No Time To Reveal Themselves.
One needs to have known an
irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it,
To
mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and
falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the
valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the
shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons
stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.
Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to
have seen old Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun,
guarding his water-right toward the end of a dry summer.
Amos owned the half of Tule Creek and the other half pertained to
the neighboring Greenfields ranch. Years of a "short water crop,"
that is, when too little snow fell on the high pine ridges, or,
falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took all the water
that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a
Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor of
Greenfields,--you can see at once that Judson had the racial
advantage,--contesting the right with him, walked into five of
Judson's bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion.
That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition.
Twelve years later one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so
very green by now, shot one of the Judsons.
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