'If the water is under the stone!' I cried. 'Father, we blasted out the mesquite stumps in the far pasture. Can't we blast the stone-' Father's steps were long and swinging as he hurried to the barn. 'I haven't ever done this except with stumps,' he said. He sent Mama and Merry out behind the barn. He made Timmy and me stay away as he worked in the bottom of the well, then he scrambled up the ladder and I ran out to help pull it up out of the well and we all retreated behind the barn, too. Timmy clung to my wrist and when the blast came, he cried out something I couldn't understand and wouldn't come with us back to the well. He crouched behind the barn, his face to his knees, his hands clasped over the top of his head. We looked at the well. It was a dimple in the front yard. The sides had caved in. There was nothing to show for all our labor but the stacked-up dirt beside the dimple, our ladder, and a bucket with a rope tied to the bale. We watched as clod broke loose at the top of the dimple and started a trickle of dirt as it rolled dustily down into the hole. ''And streams in the desert,'' said Father, turning away. I picked up the bucket, dumped out a splinter of stone, and put the bucket carefully on the edge of the porch. 'Supper,' said Mama quietly, sagging under Merry's weight, I went and got Timmy. He came willingly enough. He paused by the dimple in the front yard, his hand on my wrist, then went with me into the shadowy cabin. After supper I brought our evening books to the table, but Timmy put out seeking hands and gathered them to him. He put both hands, lapping over each other, across the top of the stack and leaned his chin on them, his face below the bandage thoughtful and still. 'I have words enough now,' he said slowly. 'I have been learning them as fast as I could. Maybe I will not have them always right, but I must talk now. You must not go away, because there is water.' Father closed his astonished mouth and said wearily, 'So you have been making fools of us all this time!' Timmy's fingers went to my wrist in the pause that followed Father's words. 'I have not made fools of you,' Timmy went on. 'I could not speak to anyone but Barney without words, and I must touch him to tell and to understand. I had to wait to learn your words. It is a new language.' 'Where are you from?' I asked eagerly, pulling the patient cork out of my curiosity. 'How did you get out there in the pasture? What is in the-' Just in time I remembered that I was the only one who knew about the charred box. 'My cahilla!' cried Timmy-then he shook his head at me and addressed himself to Father. 'I'm not sure how to tell you so you will believe. I don't know how far your knowledge-' 'Father's smarter than anyone in the whole Territory!' I cried. 'The Territory-' Timmy paused, measuring Territory. 'I was thinking of your world-this world-' 'There are other planets-' I repeated Father's puzzling words. 'Then you do know other planets,' said Timmy. 'Do you-' he groped for a word. 'Do you transport yourself and things in the sky?' Father stirred. 'Do we have flying machines?' he asked. 'No, not yet. We have balloons-' Timmy's fingers were on my wrist again. He sighed. 'Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay. 'My world is another planet. It was another planet. It is broken in space now, all to pieces, shaking and roaring and fire-and all gone.' His blind face looked on desolation and his lips tightened. I felt hairs crisp along my neck. As long as he touched my wrist I could see! I couldn't tell you what all I saw because lots of it had no words I knew to put to it, but I saw! 'We had ships for going in Space,' he said. I saw them, needlesharp and shining, pointing at the sky and the heavy red-lit clouds. 'We went into space before our Home broke. Our Home! Our-Home.' His voice broke and he leaned his cheek on the stack of books. Then he straightened again. 'We came to your world. We did not know of it before. We came far, far. At the last we came too fast. We are not Space travelers. The big ship that found your world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life- slip. I fell-' He put his hands to his bandages. 'I think maybe I will never see this new world.' 'Then there are others, like you, here on Earth,' said Father slowly. 'Unless they all died in the landing,' said Timmy. 'There were many on the big ship.' 'I saw little things shoot off the big thing!' I cried, excited. 'I thought they were pieces breaking off only they-they went instead of falling!' 'Praise to the Presence, the Name, and the Power!' said Timmy, his right hand sketching his sign in the air, then dropping to my wrist again. 'Maybe some still live. Maybe my family. Maybe Lytha-' I stared, fascinated, as I saw Lytha, dark hair swinging, smiling back over her shoulder, her arms full of flowers whose centers glowed like little lights. Daggone, I thought, Daggone! She sure isn't his Merry! 'Your story is most interesting,' said Father, 'and it opens vistas we haven't begun to explore yet, but what bearing has all this on our water problem?' 'We can do things you seem not able to do,' said Timmy 'You must always touch the ground to go, and lift things with tools or hands, and know only because you touch and see. We can know without touching and seeing. We can find people and metals and water-we can find almost anything that we know, if it is near us. I have not been trained to be a finder, but I have studied the feel of water and the-the-what it is made of-' 'The composition,' Father supplied the word. 'The composition of water,' said Timmy. 'And Barney and I explored much of the farm. I found the water here by the house.' 'We dug,' said Father. 'How far down is the water?' 'I am not trained,' said Timmy humbly. 'I only know it is there. It is water that you think of when you say 'Las Lomitas.' It is not a dipping place or-or a pool. It is going. It is pushing hard. It is cold.' He shivered a little. 'It is probably three hundred feet down,' said Father. 'There has never been an artesian well this side of the Coronas.' 'It is close enough for me to find,' said Timmy. 'Will you wait?' 'Until our water is gone,' said Father. 'And until we have decided where to go. 'Now it's time for bed.' Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the 'When I consider the heavens' one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn't even one we had a name for-! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world-or my imagination, the extent of God's creation! I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy. 'Barney,' he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist. 'My cahilla-You found my cahilla?' 'Your what?' I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. 'Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I'll get it for you in the morning.' 'Not tonight?' asked Timmy, wistfully. 'It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-' 'I can't find it tonight,' I said. 'I buried it by a rock. I couldn't find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning.' 'Oh yes,' sighed Timmy, 'oh, yes.' And he lay back down. 'Sleep well.'
