Chapter 31

The first snowflakes of another storm were beginning to flutter down by the time the two men reached camp, and dusk had set in. On the drifted road from Bartolo, over which but few wagons had passed, travel was slow and they had consumed an hour and a half on their return. The torches were burning along the canal, appearing at a distance like winter fireflies, but the crews of workmen had gone to supper. Bryant and Morgan, when they drove down the street in camp, could hear them at their meal in the glowing mess tents--a subdued hubbub of plates and knives and voices.

Half an hour later they were pouring forth toward the horse tents, while the engineers were making their way along the torch-lit path to the stretch of undug canal.

"We'll allow fifteen minutes for them to get the teams out, then shoot," Carrigan said to Lee, as they moved along. "All the shots are in and double-fused. Doesn't appear to be any wind behind this snow."

The air, though cold, was still. The flakes were not yet falling heavily and they lay on the hard crust of snow as light as silk fluff. What might be coming down in another hour from the darkness overhead, however, could not be foretold, while if both a gale and a great fall of snow occurred the labour of the night would be increased a hundred-fold.

Bryant's anxiety was no longer on account of the time limit fixed by the Land and Water Board. He knew that since the revelations made in the sheriff's office the claimant Rodriguez would never press his case, even were the canal never completed. But he had the keen desire of a tired man to clean up the job and be done, and a pride in keeping faith with himself in accomplishing what he had sworn he should do, build the project in ninety days. He would never have it said by any one that he had failed in that. By Gretzinger, for example. Ruth in particular! She believed that he had already failed when she wrote her letter.

By the end of the quarter of an hour prescribed by Carrigan teams and workmen were coming along the snowy road in a long line. From the north camp also a string of animals in pairs was advancing by light of the torches. A warning shout sounded from the ditch section. Men retreated. Then a roaring boom burst upon the night, with other thunderous reports following in rapid succession, until it seemed that the mined earth cascading upward in the darkness was the bombardment of scores of cannon. The flames of the torches and the falling snow tossed and whirled at the percussion of air. Showers of clay rained upon the earth. Vibrations jarred the ground.

Then the companies of horses and men, fastening upon scrapers, hastened into the trench. The remaining strip that joined the two sections of canal had been blown out and now this was the final, culminating assault. When this two hundred and fifty yards of ditch line had been widened and deepened to correspond to the rest, water would flow of summers in a small river from the dam down to the broad acres of Perro Creek ranch.

Hour after hour the steady labour proceeded--plows ran; flat scrapers and wheeled fresnos followed, scooped up the earth, bore it to the banks above; horses tugged and strained; men toiled, pausing only to thaw their feet and hands at fires burning by the ditch or to drain great tin-cups of the scalding coffee that the cooks dipped from cans. And steadily the excavation widened and deepened hour by hour, the slope of the sides becoming apparent, the banks rising higher and the ditch assuming its desired shape and size. At eleven o'clock the cooks wheeled immense canisters of sliced beef and bread among the workmen, who seized the food and ate it as they worked. At midnight the plows were cutting near the bottom, and the work was going faster, as the frost did not strike this deep into the soil. At one o'clock in the morning, amid thickening snow, the last scraperfuls of dirt were going out, while the engineers, with their long rules, were checking depths and slopes.

"By golly, she's about done!" exclaimed Dave, who had been permitted to remain up on this eventful night and who had been moving about, here, there, and everywhere, in a great state of excitement. "By golly, she is, Lee!"

"Yes, by golly; the ditch you helped me survey, too."

"By golly, yes!" He had forgotten that.

The last dirt moved with a rush. Then, even as the teams were dragging the loads from the excavation, Carrigan passed to a foreman the word that announced the end of work. It ran along the canal from mouth to mouth, at first in a call but finally in a shout that swelled to a roar of exultation. That roar rang over the snow and through the night like the cry of an army which has gained a walled city.

"Done!" said Bryant, to himself.

Back to the camps trooped the teams and men by the flare of the torches they carried in jubilation. Not a soul in all that company but felt the triumph beating in Lee's heart. Finished, built! Despite frost and snow they had driven the iron furrow through to the end, and on time. Toil-weary though they were, their spirits were light. They knew themselves fellow-workers in a redoubtable achievement.

Carrigan and Bryant were among the last to go. To the latter there was in the fact of completion a sense of unreality. As he took a final view of the ditch before setting out for camp, events raced through his mind--his coming, his first labours, the confused interplay of his life with those of the Menocals, McDonnell, Gretzinger, Carrigan, Imogene, Ruth, and Louise; the months of incessant toil; of brain-racking and body-wearing endeavour to force the canal forward; of unresting strife with frost and snow and earth, of being under a pitiless hammer. He could not easily realize that he was now free of all this.

"I have an empty feeling," he remarked to Carrigan.

"One always has a 'let-down' after a hard job," was Pat's sage rejoinder. "You'll feel restless for maybe a week now."

They went from the spot up the snowy road and turned in at Pat's shack for a smoke. Late as it was, neither felt the need of sleep as yet.

"Well, it's a comfort to know that we don't have to plug again at that ground in the morning," Lee remarked, with a sigh of satisfaction. He had his feet on the table, his body relaxed, and his pipe going.

"Yeah. The only disappointment I have," Pat said, "is not having lifted the bonds and stocks out of Gretzinger. If we hadn't been so pressed for time, we might have played him a little till he took the hook. I don't like his kind at all."

Bryant laughed.

"Why, he's the best friend I have," he exclaimed. "What do you think he did for me?"

"Well, what? Besides trying to shake you down?"

"Pat, he carried off and married my girl."

The contractor lowered his feet, placed his hands upon his knees, and gazed at Bryant, with brows down-drawn and under lip up-thrust.

"That good-for-nothing Ruth what's-her-name?" he demanded. In all the months of their association it was the first time he had ever spoken of her to Bryant.

"Ruth Gardner, yes."

Carrigan rose, gave Lee a long and solemn look, then went to a trunk in the corner of the room. This he unlocked and opened. From its interior he produced a black bottle.

"I don't take a drink very often," he announced, coming forward and setting the bottle on the table, "but this is one of the times. We'll take one to celebrate your luck."