As the building project required it, Merry Christmas and Cabot each carried a large bag of cement on their backs all the way from Garnet. The burro, his constant companion, was quickly becoming legend as she duplicated Cabot's diet, learned to chew tobacco and drink water from a bottle. During a server windstorm in the wash at Whitewater, 16 miles away, Merry Christmas saved Cabot's life when he lost his sense of direction and, laying his head down on her neck to protect his eyes from blowing sand, said "Take me home." Later the story appeared in the Riverside Enterprise Newspaper.
Cabot, Weary from the inconvenience of the water treks to Garnet, was determined to find his own water supply. He invested his meager savings to purchase well-digging material, calculating that the smallest space in which he could work would be a hole twenty for by thirty - two inches.
As the digging progressed, the heat became unbearable and when he finally hit what appeared to be a hollow stone floor, Cabot was too ill to continue.
After sharing his dilemma with a neighbor, they gauged the temperature of the hole and found it to be 110 degrees. The imminent natural hot water supply gave Cabot the impetus to continue digging. In spite of enormous difficulties. He secured ropes between him and a nearby greasewood bush and dug though a strata of hard rock to a depth of 27 feet in nearly unbearable heat. By standing in five-gallon cans half filled with sand and water he'd hauled from the railroad, he was able to withstand the heat and dig for fifteen minutes at a time before climbing to the surface to change the water. When he reached a depth of 36 feet, the water temperature registered 132 degrees. Not knowing what mineral were in the natural hot water, and fearful there might be arsenic, Cabot used it for bathing only.
Miracle Hill was named by Cabot in 1914 because of the two original wells he had dug about 600 yards apart. One produced hot water, the other cold water. Later geologists informed him that because the wells were on either side of an earthquake fault, both hot and cold water became available, and thus was named Miracle Fault.