Lee could not escape that feeling of perfunctoriness in her twitter of talk. It went no further than that, however; he had no chagrin or repugnance or anger at the thin duplicity, not even at her complacent confidence in his stupidity and infatuation. For to count on his being blind to the past and deluded by her words, she could only believe him both stupid and infatuated. He was quite calm. His actual state of mind was, more than anything else, one of detachment. He imagined that he had come to a point where she was incapable of arousing in him any kind of sentiment or passion.

Presently she took up her furs and walked humming about the office as she adjusted them.

"I'd like to stay all day, but must be going," she said. "Imo and I were wondering, by the way, if you could send us a man with some tar-paper to line our cabins."

"Of course. I'll send him after dinner. And he can chop you some wood and bring your water."

She stood for a little examining a blue-print tacked on the wall.

"That's like the one Mr. Gretzinger sometimes carries," she remarked. "I suppose he'll be returning one of these days. Not that it matters; he was tiresome at times, like Charlie Menocal." She studied the lines of the map attentively. "He appeared anxious to get to New York. Said something about a sweetheart there. You'll be glad if he doesn't come back to bother you again, won't you, Lee dear?" She swung about, laughing.

"Oh, he'll show up."

"I wasn't sure; he said he thought not."

Lee emptied and put away his pipe.

"He'll come," was his assured reply.

"Then he must have been 'kidding' me."

Her thoughtful air returned. She picked a raveling from her sleeve, and stroked her fur, and inspected the tips of her gloves, and untied and retied the strings of her cap—all with an inscrutable face. Then suddenly her mind appeared to be made up.

"Well, dear, run and bring your car and we'll pick up Imogene," she said, giving him a quick pat on the cheek.

Lee experienced an inward and involuntary shrinking at that touch. He no more could have returned the caress than he could have risen off the ground into the air, like those floating figures depicted in sacred paintings. After all, she was quite capable of stirring a sentiment in his heart—a sentiment of aversion.

"Go join Imo," he replied. "One of the boys will bring the car to the hospital and take you home. Impossible for me to drive you there to-day."

That was it—impossible, literally impossible, for his whole being was in revolt. The threshold of the door might have been a dead-line; he was unable to cross it, at any rate. With a stony aspect he watched her depart and wave a hand back at him from a distance and at last disappear. Then he closed the door and leaned his head against it, with his features drawn in an expression of pain and desperation. His position was diabolical. She meant to hold him to his word; she believed he loved her; and, anyway, she had him fast in a coil. Yes, she had him fast. And he did not love her, not at all. On the contrary, he detested her—detested her with all his heart, almost to hatred, utterly.



CHAPTER XXIII

"Will you be so kind as to come here?" Mr. Menocal inquired of Bryant.

It was an afternoon in late January, and the banker, bundled in a great overcoat and numerous rugs, had reined his team to a halt at the spot where he found the engineer. The air was cutting. Steam in sharp jets came from the nostrils of his pair of bays, as from those of the horses straining at the plows and scrapers in the stretch of partially excavated canal near by.

Lee went forward to the buggy, slapping his gloved hands together to quicken their circulation.

"What do you want of me, Mr. Menocal?" he asked. "You're picking a frosty day to look at the scenery."

"Well, there's a matter that's been troubling my mind for some time and I decided to let it go no longer. We have our differences, Mr. Bryant, but I wouldn't wish you to believe me responsible for a number of annoyances to which you've been put. I am a gentleman; I fight fair. For instance, I was quite within my rights in suggesting those men take homesteads down yonder along the base of the mountains, though I was wrong in my guess. Also, in taking advantage of the law under which you were limited by the Land and Water Board, I wasn't stepping out of bounds. But I've learned that some time ago a man introduced whisky into camp against your rules, and I wish to tell you that I knew nothing of it at the time and would countenance no sort of disgraceful act like that."

"I judged that you wouldn't," said Lee.

"Then again last summer someone killed your dog, I understand. That was a bad deed. I am fond of dogs, and had I been able to learn who did it I should have informed you so that you could have had Winship arrest him. Since that time, too, there have been other things, many of them—men cutting your telephone wire, removing your survey stakes, and the like. All making you angry. Well, I was angry when I heard that those things were being done. Resorting to questionable and criminal tactics against any man is the worst possible course a person can follow. I do not do it in your case; I will prevent any one else from doing it if I can. You have the right to work undisturbed."

"I never connected you with these underhanded acts," the engineer stated.

"Thank you, Mr. Bryant. It pleases me to hear you say that. I should like to see you lose your water right, of course; it would mean much money in my pocket; but I'll not do contemptible things or crooked things to get possession of it."

Lee glanced at the speaker's face. It was sincere, earnest, and now relieved. He felt an increase of respect for the man, opponent though he was. Menocal appeared, to be sure, unable to comprehend the ethics involved in seeking to thwart Bryant, but he was scrupulous and honourable within his understanding. Far more so than Gretzinger, for instance. Or Charlie Menocal. The thought of the banker's son pulled Bryant up. Should he mention his conviction that Charlie was the instigator of the mischief discussed? As he was still in doubt when his visitor turned the subject, he let it rest.

"The way you're going ahead with your canal, I'm afraid that my chance of retaining the water is poor, very poor," Menocal said, with a lugubrious sigh. He drew his fat chin deeper into his coat collar, tugged at the ice on his big white moustache, and ran his eyes up and down the long line of moving teams. "And it will cost me a lot of money." Again the sigh. "I didn't think you could do it; I didn't think any man in the world could do it. In cold weather, in ninety days! I said it was impossible. Charlie said it was impossible. Everyone said it was impossible."

"Everyone except my contractor and me," Lee interjected, smiling a tight smile.

The other nodded. "Except you, yes. And you're showing us that after all it's not impossible. I shall never say again that anything is impossible. If I ever have a big ditch to build, I shall insist, Mr. Bryant, that you take charge. Then I would say, 'I should like to have it built so and so, and by such a time,' and sit down at my desk and think no more of it, knowing it would be built."

Bryant laughed softly. He could not help doing so. That naive avowal from the one whom he considered his chief enemy tickled his fancy. And presently Menocal, catching the humour of it, himself began to smile.

"I shouldn't be surprised if we have had a misconception of each other," Lee stated.

"Ah, cielos! That is nothing less than the truth. What a pity, too, my young friend, that we could not have found it out earlier. Our affair, perhaps—we might have reached a satisfactory agreement. This winter work, it is costing you something."

"A good many extra thousand."

"And, alas, costing me even more! But it is too late now." He made a tragic gesture. "It has gone too far. Within two or three weeks it will be settled one way or the other. For you if the weather remains good; for me if the weather becomes stormy." He again studied the moving horses along the canal. "For me then—perhaps. You might not allow even a great storm to stop you, in some way. This winter is remarkable; there seem to be no storms to happen. You're very lucky."

"Yes, I am in that respect."

"Well, I've done all that I shall do in the matter. I've become quite calm, fatalistic. There's nothing else to be." He gathered up his reins.

"That's a good team you have," Lee remarked.

"Of the very best. I disliked to use them in this cold, but Charlie had gone with the car to Kennard. Va! He is never at home any more. It would be well if I made him drive a team on your ditch."

"Send him along; I'll give him a job," Lee said.

The banker shook his head.

"He would say I was crazy and he wouldn't come. He doesn't even attend to matters that require attention. This winter he has been running too much with idle men in town and spending money as if it took no effort to get it, as if it could be picked off of weeds. It's very perplexing. I am too easy with Charlie, I let him have his way too much. I should put him in a pair of overalls for a while and say, 'You are going out with a band of sheep; you have to work.' Several times I've made up my mind to do that, but when the moment came I couldn't say it. He isn't robust, he has always had the best of everything, and he's been educated in a college."

"Cut off his allowance and take away his automobile. He would stay at home and attend to business then," Lee offered.

"But it would shame him. He isn't a little boy any longer; he's thirty years old. The trouble is that he isn't like me, particular and careful; he's wild and impatient and reckless. His mother wasn't that way, I am not that way—I don't know where he got that nature."

Menocal senior drove off and Bryant turned back to his work. The pity of the thing was, as the banker had stated, that they had been hasty in the beginning, that they had not sought to come to an understanding, some arrangement. It was another mistake. To Lee his whole past here was beginning to appear a record of oversights, incredible misjudgements, blinded blunders, and ghastly mistakes.



CHAPTER XXIV

Ghastly mistakes! Some cynic has said the only mistake in life a man can make is "to go broke." Bryant did not realize until afterward the irony lurking in the penumbra of the talk with Menocal. He was broke, unable to proceed, even while he listened to the banker's commendation. The workmen were busy, it was true, and the horses were pulling loaded fresnos, and plows were cutting the trench deeper; but that was an expiring motion, a last falling gesture. Only a few wretched dollars lay at the bottom of the money chest. A day more, and Menocal would have won.

That evening Lee climbed in his car and drove away from camp. Carrigan had said nothing, but he as well as Bryant knew the company's bank account was drained; he would expect a settlement and when it was made, discharge the crews, pull up stakes, and move his property to Kennard. At Sarita Creek Bryant alighted.

"I wish to see Ruth," he told Imogene. "Is she away? Her cabin is dark and I obtained no answer to my knock."

"She's gone to town."

"Well, I wanted to tell her I've failed. Work stops to-morrow. Out of money. And less than two miles to build!"

Imogene's face became a picture of dismay.

"Oh, no, Lee! There must be some way to go on, some place to obtain money," she cried.

"None. I've tried, but have reached the end of my rope. Only twenty thousand more needed, or maybe twenty-five. Just enough to hammer through during the next two weeks. But it might as well be a million. I decided to inform Ruth at once; she might consider it important."

"She would," said she, positively.

"I haven't been to Sarita Creek before since you returned. You can guess why."

"Yes."

"Does Ruth suspect that I've ceased to love her?" he asked, frowning.

"I think not. There was considerable talk on her part about being bored with Kennard and how happy she would be when she was married, but it was on the surface. She's really waiting for something I'm not able to divine. I'm reminded when I observe her of a card-player studying a hand before the cards begin to fall."

"Where is she to-night? With Charlie Menocal?"

"With Gretzinger."

"Gretzinger back?"

"Arrived in Kennard this morning. Two days ago Ruth received a letter with a New York post-mark and became very animated. I'm sure she has had none before. Then late this afternoon the man himself appeared here, ate supper with us, and took Ruth off to a concert in town. He said he had business in camp with you to-morrow."

"Ruth's spirits have revived and her retirement has ended," Lee remarked, with sarcasm. "Well, don't say anything about this now to either of them."

"Oh, I'll be long asleep when they return, and I'll not speak of it to Ruth in the morning. She'll not rise before noon, I suspect, as it will be one or two o'clock before they're home. Or she may stay with one of the girls she's chummy with and come up with him to-morrow. Probably that."

Lee made ready to go. He gave Imogene a sardonic smile.

"May the music she hears to-night strengthen her soul for the morrow's smash," he said; and went out.

Where the trail from the cabins debouched upon the main mesa road he slowed the car to a stop and sat for a time in thought, with the engine humming softly and the freezing night air biting at his cheeks. It seemed to make little difference where he went, or if he went at all. Nothing worth while was at the end of any road. His inclination, however, was working and at last he set out for the Graham ranch.

Since his Christmas visit he had made a number of calls there, a rather large number, indeed, considering everything. He had schooled his face and words on those occasions to a passivity he was far from feeling, and had left Louise's presence each time with a greater torment of mind. Now this was the end—of her as of everything so far as he was concerned. To-morrow the project came down in wreckage. Then he should go from Perro Creek, poorer in purse, poorer in spirit, poorer in faith, sore, and bitterly disillusionized.

Louise Graham observed a shadow upon his countenance as she invited him to a seat before the fireplace. Her father was absent and she had been reading a book when Bryant's knock came. She had been wondering, too, if the engineer might not choose this night to call again. How much these calls of his now meant to her she did not dare consider.

"What's wrong, Lee?" she asked at once, anxiously. "I see something has happened."

He moved round on the divan that he might fully face her.

"Everything so far as my affairs go," he replied. "Work stops on the canal to-morrow. That will result, of course, in the water right lapsing and in the ditch never being finished or used, except under the circumstance of my handing over my interest gratis to Gretzinger and the bondholders. If I did that even, I don't believe Gretzinger could finish it on time, for neither Carrigan nor the men would exert themselves for him as they have for me, and they would be sure of their pay in any case. The trouble is, I've used up all the money and can borrow no more. I'm through. And I can't bring myself to the point of surrendering my interest in the company to the bondholders merely to pull them out. They're trying to strangle me in order that they may profit; they could put up the cash needed easily enough if they would; but they count on my yielding. I shall not do so. And so the project fails. Those New Yorkers will wait too long if ever they do put up the funds; and I can do nothing myself. The uncompleted ditch will remain simply a scar on the mesa."

"I never dreamed you were in this strait!"

"No, probably not. One always hopes to the last that somehow—by a credulous belief in one's own letter of credit with Providence, I presume—one will pull through. So I delayed telling you of what was impending."

"If—perhaps father——"

"Your father? No. Above all persons, no. That's a suggestion I can't consider for an instant."

"But what will you do?" she exclaimed, nervously.

Lee glanced at her, then compressed his lips.

"I'm going away; I couldn't stay here on the scene of this disaster. It would be intolerable. Before long people will be describing the unfinished project by the name of 'Bryant's Folly', or the like. Haven't you seen old, windowless structures that were never completed, or grass-grown railroad enbankments never ironed, or rusting mine machinery never assembled? Men's failures, men's 'follies'."

"Lee, Lee! It never will be so!" she cried. "Nor will your project be a failure to me who have known how you've striven and sacrificed."

Bryant looked past her and about the room, but his eyes in the end came back to hers.

"You have always been generous in your thoughts of me," he said, in an unsteady voice.

"No more than you deserved."

"Listen, Louise," he went on, after a pause. "This is the last time I shall see you for a long time, possibly for all time, and it's of your kindness I wish to speak—and of another matter. Of course, I shouldn't be quite human if I hadn't complained a bit about this blow, but my complaints are done now. I'll possibly do some grimacing to myself hereafter, though. What I came to say is that wherever I go in the future I'll always carry with me as a treasure the memory of your goodness and of your face."

Louise's lips had parted, while the colour slowly receded from her cheeks.

"But we shall see each other," she gasped. "We'll meet, we can keep in touch." After a silence there came in a whisper, "Friends should."

Bryant began to tremble. He turned away from her in order to gaze into the fire. Her low utterance had wrung the chords of his heart; he dared not allow his eyes to continue to dwell upon her face.

"What good in that?" he asked. Then he gave a passionate shake of his head. "The risk for me is too great. I shall seek an engineering billet altogether out of the country, in South America, in Asia, wherever one is open. A job without responsibility, preferably. No, no; I can't remain and play with fire—any longer."

An intense stillness rested in the room after these words. He doubted if Louise even breathed.

"Would it be that?" she asked, at last.

"Of course. Haven't you seen?"

"I—I——" Her voice failed her.

"I could no more help loving you, Louise, after I came to know you, than can the earth its blooming under a summer sun. The thing was inevitable." He was speaking now in a slow, fixed attempt at restraint. "And this love coming when it did, after I was betrothed to Ruth Gardner, is the capping madness of the whole nightmarish situation in which I find myself. 'Nightmarish' isn't an exaggeration, honestly. By all the empty, senseless conventions I ought to seal my lips on my love and to go dumbly away, because I'm engaged to Ruth Gardner." He turned abruptly to her. "Do you think I should?"

Her hands were locked together in a clasp that expelled the blood and left them white. Her regard had the intentness of a stare.

"If you love me, if you're going away—" She suddenly became agitated. "Oh, I am unhappy!" And with a quick movement she bent her head aside.

"Louise, forgive me for causing this distress," he exclaimed.

Without looking about she put out a hand, touched and pressed his. The unexpected act filled Bryant with amazement. He sat gazing stupidly at the hand until she withdrew it. Then he found an explanation.

"You feel compassion for me," he said. "You would." A sound, low, inarticulate, reached him. "It's your kind nature to make some return for my love even if it's not love you can give. Or ought to give! I'm expecting nothing, can expect nothing. That is out of the question. If I were entirely calm and rational, I should doubtless be asking myself why I should speak of my passion instead of trying to tear it out of my heart. But, of course, being in love I'm neither the one nor the other. The only explanation for the impulse to pour out a confession like this is overcharged nerves. Or, after all, is it just unconscious egotism?" His composure had slipped off and his tone had grown savage.

"Don't, don't, Lee! Don't cut at yourself!"

"What was it I had started to say? Oh, yes. I had said I felt no compunction in brushing aside the usual conventions of duty as proscribed for an engaged man. Cobwebs in my case! Why pretend lies? No honour is involved that I can discover. I don't love Ruth, and I think she's incapable of loving me or any one else. She never felt half the affection I did for her, and mine withered quickly, God knows! A dash of passion on my part, and lonesomeness and the belief I should have wealth on her side—there's the salad."

Louise leaned forward a little breathlessly.

"And if she believes you're ruined?" she asked.

"She'll hold me if she thinks she can't do better," Lee responded, bitterly. "I at least beat homesteading."

"Lee!"

Louise had risen. The pallor of her face startled him. Her hands were fast clenched.

"What is it?" he asked, fearfully.

"I can bear this. To have you love me—love me and go away! It will break my heart. To stay here alone!"

The words struck his brain as if they were cast in a fierce glare of light. The suddenness of the knowledge they gave, the revelation they made, left him speechless. Louise loved him in return. The first effect upon his mind was to produce a blank incredulity; he stared at her as if to ascertain whether or not this was in truth she; for though he well knew he possessed her friendship, he had never conceived so fantastic a possibility as that of winning her love. Then a swift exaltation succeeded. He swam in a kind of spiritual ether.

"Louise, Louise, my dear beloved!" he murmured.

He caught her hand, pressed it. She glanced at him without replying, looked away, back again. Her bosom rose and fell with a slow and tremulous movement, as though stirring with deep, soundless sighs. A little smile hovered on her lips, tender, rapturous.

But at length she withdrew her hand, while the soft gladness passed from her face.

"It cannot be; you must go, Lee," she said.

Bryant remembered—and felt the ice forming about his heart. He shivered slightly. The full cruelty of the situation was reached. Ruth Gardner not only held him, but he held her as well by a thread to which she could cling for safety against the blandishments of scoundrels, and her own desires, and the dark uncertainty of the future. And much as he loved Louise Graham, he could not snap that thread; much as he detested Ruth, he lacked the flintiness of heart to let her slip into the abyss. Nor would Louise have it otherwise.

She was seeking his eyes, questioning them.

"Well, this hour is worth it all to me," he said, calmly. "All of the unhappiness of the past, and all the loneliness of the future! I am poor now; in that fact lies what hope I have."

A gentle inclination of her head answered him.

"I am happy to-night, anyway," said she.

"The only thing for me to do is to remain away from you," he answered. "Heaven knows I shall be miserable enough then, but I should grow desperate if I were near."

"I know. We mustn't see each other, Lee dear."

He walked to where his storm coat and cap lay on a chair by the door. In silence he drew on and buttoned the former. She had accompanied him to the spot and watched with moisture on her lashes his preparation for departure. His eyes were lowered while his fingers were engaged with the buttons.

"You should understand about this," he said, grimly. "That man Gretzinger is after her. She has no money, no training to earn money, is crazy for pleasure and attention and clothes. I ought in all decency to break our engagement. She has given me grounds enough. But it's keeping her straight. If I broke it"—his hand dropped to his side and he stood for a moment quite still—"he drags her under." His gaze rose to hers.

"I guessed it long ago," she said, in a choked voice. "And loved you for it." Next instant she leaned forward, took his temples between her hands, and lightly touched his brow with her lips. "Go, go!" she exclaimed, with an accent of despair.

She herself turned and went quickly out of the room.



CHAPTER XXV

Bryant had asked Carrigan to come to the office at two o'clock, stating that the company was insolvent and but enough money remained to square accounts with the contractor. Pat had cast a shrewd glance at Lee and nodded. This was during the morning. Afterward the engineer had gone for a visit to the dam, the drops, and the canal line, a last view of the project as a whole; and the ride was pursued in that peculiar melancholy of spirit which appertains to mortuary events. To him, indeed, the ride marked a burial, a burial of high hopes and ambition, and of his youth, with the partially excavated canal providing their pit and the concrete work standing as a headstone.

He came back to camp somewhat late for his appointment and found Pat waiting in the office, but not alone. Gretzinger stood, back to the stove, smoking a Turkish cigarette.

"Well, Bryant, I've returned to discuss our little business transaction," he greeted. "Judged this to be about the right time. How's the exchequer?"

"Little in it," said Lee, hanging his coat and cap on a hook. "But I made sure it was locked before leaving here; you might come any moment."

"Oh, I don't waste time on an empty box," was the light answer. "Mind if Carrigan hears what we say? Don't, eh? Neither do I. He knows, or ought to know, you're through. And besides, I'll want to discuss construction matters with him when you and I are done."

"Perhaps Bryant can yet secure a loan somewhere," the contractor remarked, mildly.

"From Menocal, possibly," Gretzinger suggested, cocking his eyebrows at Carrigan with mock enthusiasm. "If Bryant could have secured a loan, he would have had it in his pocket before this. I made inquiry of McDonnell when I reached Kennard concerning the company's cash account and discovered that it looked awful sick. No, he can't get money for the company except through me."

"I see," said Pat.

Gretzinger turned to Bryant.

"Now, Lee, let's get down to brass tacks. You're played out as manager and engineer-in-chief, so it's time for you to step out and give the men who are able a chance to complete the work. I made you one offer; I'm prepared to-day to make even a better one. The bondholders went thoroughly into the subject with me of what they could afford to pay you for your stock and a decision was finally reached to give you ten thousand dollars for your interest in the company. Considering everything, that's exceedingly liberal. I'm authorized to draw a check for that amount to your order when you've assigned the shares."

"Not enough," Lee replied. He sat down at his desk, lifted his feet to a window ledge, and held a match to his pipe.

"That's the limit."

"It's not enough; I need more."

"What you need and what you'll take are two different things," the other stated, sarcastically.

"Go higher," Lee said, with his gaze upon the window.

"Not a cent!"

"I owe McDonnell twenty thousand that has gone into the canal. I've put in my ranch, and land I traded for it, and months of work and organization—value twenty thousand; and I figure my present control of things worth twenty thousand more. But let us say fifty thousand. I'll sell for fifty thousand; that gives you my stock at fifty cents on the dollar. Exceedingly liberal, I call it."

The look the other directed at him was heavy with contempt.

"Ten thousand is all—and make up your mind to that," said he. Then he faced round toward Carrigan, whom he addressed. "I want you to increase the force to double its strength at once, so that the work—"

"What are you paying a yard for moving dirt?"

"The same as before."

"Not to me," Pat responded, complacently.

"What do you mean?" Gretzinger demanded, angrily.

"It's not enough."

"Not enough! You seem to imagine your contract doesn't bind you."

Pat slowly uncrossed his knees and stared at the speaker with a countenance of bewilderment.

"Now what in the world is the man talking about! Contract? The only contract I had with Bryant was an oral agreement to build the dam and move dirt at a certain day rate per man and per team, terminable at his option. Oh, you mean the first contract to construct the ditch in a year! We tore that up after he got notice from the Land and Water Board."

"Well, we'll continue the oral arrangement."

"Not any more," said Pat.

Gretzinger inspected the coal of his cigarette, replaced the latter between his lips, and glanced at Bryant. But the engineer was maintaining his consideration of objects on the outside of the window.

"So you're trying to hold me up," was Gretzinger's remark.

"You're slicing the fat off Bryant, and therefore I'll trim a bit off you," Carrigan replied. "You're not the only one who can work a knife. Once I used to sit back and let others keep all the easy money, but I don't any more, not any more." With considerable relish he rolled the words upon his tongue and nodded at Gretzinger.

The latter scowled.

"How much do you want?" he demanded.

Pat spat, then remained pursing his lips while he engaged in calculation. Once he shook his head and muttered, "Not enough," and again after a time repeated the words. The man by the stove glared at the seated contractor during the prolonged period of study as if he hoped his look would consume him.

"How much?" he questioned a second time, impatiently.

Pat looked up at Gretzinger from under his bushy eyebrows with a steely glint showing. The lines of his weather-beaten face had hardened.

"I don't like you," he stated. "I don't like you at all. When I work for people I don't like, it costs them money. I like you less and less all the time. If I go ahead and finish the ditch, I'll be liking you so little that I'll be hating myself. And when I don't like any one that much, I don't do it cheap. The job will cost you one hundred thousand dollars."

"You—you——" Gretzinger choked.

"Cash down before I move a wheel," Pat added, calmly.

The other was white with rage. He cast his cigarette upon the floor and ground it under his heel. His lips worked and twisted in a vicious snarl. Carrigan observed him unmoved; and Bryant had turned his head about to see.

"You grafters, you infernal thieves, you pair of rotten crooks!" he shouted, shooting murderous glances from one to the other. "You've 'framed' me! Arranged it between you. Been waiting for me to come back so you could spring your game! If there's any law in this state, I'll have you both where you belong for deliberately wrecking this company—in a cell!"

His raving outburst continued for a while in this strain. His voice had the high and squealing pitch of a wild pig caught fast by a foot; on his pink, fleshy face, now distended with anger, was a look, too, of porcine hate and fury. The cynical and patronizing manner he usually affected had dropped off, leaving revealed his actual coarse, spiteful, greedy, craven spirit—a creature of infinite meanness. At length, however, Gretzinger's torrent of abuse diminished until it ended in a last muddy dripping of threats and curses. With an effort he strove to pull himself together and assume a composure his eyes belied, while he lighted another of his offensive Turkish cigarettes.

After a time he said shortly:

"You can't bluff me. When you fellows get down to my figures, then we'll do business."

"Look out! Your coat is scorching—or is it only that tobacco?" Bryant rejoined.

Gretzinger stepped hastily aside and felt behind him, where his hand moved about on the hot cloth fabric with searching movements. The solicitude for his garment thus quickened seemed to effect the final dispersion of his inward heat.

"Well, are we going to get together on an arrangement?" he questioned, when assured his coat was uninjured.

"I stated my terms—fifty thousand," Lee said. "That or nothing."

"You won't get it."

"Then there's the alternative of the bondholders putting up money enough to finish the work."

"That, neither."

"All right, Gretzinger," Bryant stated, rising. "You have an idea that I'll give in——"

"Yes, I have. You'll grab this ten thousand I offer, grab it quick by to-morrow night, which is the limit I set for it to remain open. I've seen men before in a tight hole who swore they wouldn't take the terms handed them, but they always did in the end, and so will you. Only a fool wouldn't. And I fancy Carrigan won't sacrifice a good piece of work in a dull season and pull off his men and teams."

Pat hoisted himself off his seat stiffly.

"Why don't your outfit sell instead of trying to buy?" he asked, crossing to Lee's desk and obtaining a can of tobacco sitting there. "I suppose they'll sell." He began to stuff his pipe, pressing the tobacco into the bowl with a brown forefinger.

"Certainly; they would unload what they have in this rotten project so fast that the bonds would smoke. But who in the devil would touch them?"

"I might."

"You?" Gretzinger began to laugh. "What have you besides your outfit? They're not taking worn-out fresnos in exchange to-day, thank you."

"And what are the three bondholders you represent worth?" Pat inquired, in a nettled tone.

"Half a million each, or more."

Carrigan's brows rose contemptuously.

"Is that all?" he exclaimed. "Why, from the way you talked, I thought they were real financiers! And they're only piffling tin-horns, after all. What d'you know about that, Lee?" Pat turned to the engineer with an amazed air.

Gretzinger's anger surged up anew.

"You never saw half a million in your life," he sneered.

"I could buy out all three of them with what I have in one trust company in Chicago alone," was the unperturbed reply. "It's cheap sports like you that make a real man sick. How much for the bonds? You want to unload. Speak up; how much?"

Despite his anger, the other's brain perceived that the contractor was in earnest.

"The amount of the face of both bonds and stock, with interest on the former to date," he answered quickly.

"I buy only bargains," was Carrigan's dry statement.

"One hundred thousand then."

"You're still sailing way up in the clouds. The stock was a bonus, Gretzinger; it cost your parties nothing. So it's only the bonds that count. And the project is rotten, it may not be finished on time, be a dead loss; your men want to get out from under; they'll jump at the chance to sell, you say. All right. They can unload on me. Wire them to deposit the bonds and stock in any New York bank and draw on McDonnell for forty thousand dollars. That's what I'll give."

Gretzinger walked to the wall, where he reached down his overcoat and put it on.

"The ditch will go to weeds first," he said.

"The offer's open until to-morrow night," said Pat.

"You bloodsuckers can't put anything over on me," was the Easterner's departing declaration, as he opened the door. "I'm on to you, Carrigan. You're backing Bryant and will finish the ditch. We'll just sit tight on our bonds and stock."

Pat watched him go.

"I hate to make money for men like them," he remarked to the engineer, "but I guess I can't help it, because I'll not let you down, Lee, for a matter of cash payment. I'll advance what's necessary and take a company note. Maybe you're wondering why I let you sweat all this time? Because you needed the experience. You laid down too easy. All the time that you were thinking the game was up, I was waiting for you to grab my leg and begin to pull. But you never did."

"You had done too much for me already, Pat; and though I supposed you were well-fixed I had no idea you were wealthy. The thought you might risk twenty thousand dollars——"

"Why not? I know this project better than any banker; it's sound, it's about completed," the old man interrupted. "All that's necessary is to take a long breath and push hard for three weeks more. Sometimes I think you have the making of a fair engineer, Lee, but you discourage me dreadfully when I try to picture you as a financier. I'm afraid you'll wind up like one of these bondholders of Gretzingers, just piffling."

Lee went to stand at the window, so that Carrigan could not see his face. Emotion had unmanned him. He would not have even Pat know how strongly he was moved by this act of magnanimity.

"Well, I better be getting back to the ditch," said the contractor, presently.



CHAPTER XXVI

A week later the long-belated big storm appeared at hand. McDonnell telephoned Bryant one morning, a morning in February now, that the weather forecast predicted blizzard conditions sweeping down the Rocky Mountain region from the Northwest. A mile of excavation yet remained to do. Lee at once sent Saurez and other Mexicans abroad in the native settlements with offers of double wages and this drew the most indolent back to camp again. They were flung into the night shift, which toiled with increased vigour at news of the impending storm. For two days and nights the desperate effort was pushed while the sky continued clear, with the crews of both camps attacking the iron earth and steadily forging closer.

Bryant scarcely slept during that time, or ate. Toward morning, when the night shift went off, he would cast himself down fully dressed and drawing the blankets to his chin sleep restlessly for two or three hours, then again rise to drive the work. The third day came sunny and quiet, but with heavy warmth in the air wholly strange to the season. During the night both Lee and Pat had continually and anxiously watched the peaks of the Ventisquero Range for portent of the change imminent in the weather; and now on this morning they beheld about the crests long, low-lying layers of gray cloud.

Again McDonnell telephoned, but now with particulars of the storm. It was general in character, covering the states from the Canadian line southward, with very low temperatures and raging furiously, destroying wire communications and blocking railroads, and at the moment was bearing down across Utah, Colorado, and Kansas. The entire region from the Pacific coast to the Mississippi was in its grasp.

"Ten days is all that's left of our time," Lee said to the contractor, with a heavy heart. "And no one can tell how long this weather spree will last."

"It's not a mile we've got to go any more, any way. With what we'll do to-day it will be half a mile of dirt moved in three days. That leaves but half a mile. This storm may be played out when it reaches us." But the worry on his face showed that he put little faith in this possibility.

What he stated in regard to the ditch was true. The work of night and day had eaten well into the remaining mile between the two camps. To be sure, it had been rushed work: the sides of the ditch were gouged and ragged, the bottom uneven and rutted, and the removed dirt was piled anywhere along its banks. But nevertheless there was a canal, dug on grade and to measurement, and capable of carrying water.

During the afternoon a pair of men drove two lines of waist-high stakes to mark the survey of the short section of ground yet untouched, doing this under Carrigan's supervision. In case snow came, he told Lee, he wanted something he could see. "Nine hundred yards of unbuilt ditch will be lying buried," he added, "and I don't propose to paw up the whole mesa finding this section."

About four o'clock Bryant rejoined him.

"Still lovely," said Pat with a grin. "I've just set some plows tearing up the scalp on another two hundred yards. If this storm will just hang off for three or four days longer, it can come and welcome. I'll have my fresnos stacked and waiting to go down to Kennard."

"Take a look at the northwest," said Bryant, significantly.

A smoky haze lay along the horizon.

"Aye, I see. That's her hair blowing out ahead. There will be plenty of wind after awhile, I'm thinking. Get word to the men in camp, will you, to make all the tents tight."

At sundown the haze in the west had thickened somewhat. The air, however, remained warm, almost oppressive, and the sharp cold that usually fell at night was wanting. The Ventisquero Peaks were hidden by a mass of cloud. At seven o'clock the night crew began work, as ordinarily; no wind was stirring and the steam that came from the horses' nostrils was light.

"I'm taking a little time to skip down to Sarita Creek and see if those girls are still there. If they took a notion to stick, they'd try to do it, whether McDonnell sent after them or not. But I'll pry them out. If the storm breaks in a hurry, get the men and teams into camp at once. Don't take any chances, Pat." Thus spoke Bryant.

"Aye, I've seen blizzards before," was the reply.

Lee sped rapidly toward Sarita Creek, with the headlights of his car casting their glow before him upon the dark road. The silence of the night was broken only by the steady humming of his engine. The mesa seemed very hushed, unstirring, unnatural.

When he reached the girls' cabins, he saw that the windows of each were lighted. The girls were there. What incredible folly! Then his lamps brought into view an automobile. He breathed relief. Someone had come for them. Alighting he walked forward and knocked on Ruth's door. When it was opened by Ruth, he discovered Gretzinger seated within.

"Oh, it's you, is it? Well, come in," Ruth said.

She wore a pink party gown, with her throat and smooth, round arms showing through some filmy stuff that was part of the creation. Bryant had never seen her so dressed; she looked very youthful and charming, almost beautiful.

"There's a party at Kennard to-night," said she, before Lee could open his mouth to make an explanation of his presence, "and Mr. Gretzinger's taking me. He just came. Sorry you chose to-night to call, Lee. And we're starting immediately." She reached forth and gave Lee a pat on the cheek, at the same time smiling.

Bryant continued stony under the touch, under the smile, under the false affection. He gazed at her and detected beneath her apparent good spirits and loveliness a suppressed excitement. His glance went to Gretzinger; the man was observing them with a restless, frowning face. On the instant the truth flashed into Bryant's brain. She was cunningly playing him off against the New Yorker, using him as a lay figure in her despicable game, bestowing endearments to anger Gretzinger and arouse his jealousy.

"I came to tell you a big storm is brewing," he said quickly. "You and Imogene must plan to stay in Kennard for some time. If a heavy fall of snow occurs, the mesa will be closed for ten days or two weeks with the temperature very low."

"Then I'll pack my things in my suit-case so that I can remain that long," Ruth exclaimed. "I'll stay with Mabel Seybolt. Imogene's uncle sent up his car this morning, but I didn't imagine there was any really bad storm coming and sent it back. I doubt if the snow amounts to much, anyway. The weather's too warm." Nevertheless, she began to fill a suit-case.

"I'll tell Imogene also," Lee said.

Ruth's eyes turned toward Gretzinger with an inquiring look.

"There won't be room for three of us, will there?"

"No," he answered.

Her regard still continued directed at him.

"I'm sure there won't be," she said, with conviction. "It probably won't storm before to-morrow, in any case. I'll tell Mr. McDonnell in the morning and he can send up his big car for her."

"Or you can take her to town yourself," Gretzinger added in an indifferent tone.

"I can't spare the time," Lee said.

"But dearie, I'll be done packing in two minutes, while it will take Imogene half an hour," Ruth replied. "She's too slow to wait for. And she has one of her eternal headaches, too."

Ruth was hurriedly removing articles from her trunk to the suit-case.

"Listen, please," Lee said, addressing her. "If Imo remains she may become snowbound, and if snowbound, freeze. I can't go, I can't possibly go. With this storm coming, I must stay at camp. As things are, a blizzard may put me out of business."

Ruth straightened up to confront him.

"You mean the work would stop, that you couldn't finish it on time?"

"That's just what I mean."

"Why?" Gretzinger spoke. "You have ten days left."

"Yes, and what are ten days with two feet of snow on the ground and the mercury forty below zero?" Bryant retorted.

Gretzinger stood up, glanced at his watch, and buttoned his overcoat. He then bent down and set to work buckling the straps of the suit-case Ruth had closed.

"You do seem to get into every possible kind of trouble, Lee," the girl said.

"Perhaps I do. But the point now is about Imogene. Will you take her with you, or not?"

"Mr. McDonnell can send for her to-morrow; that will be soon enough."

"My God, you leave her! With a blizzard coming!"

"I don't think there'll be a blizzard. Or if there is, she can get along comfortably till her uncle comes."

"Are you ready, Ruth?" Gretzinger asked, impatiently.

"Yes, as soon as I fasten my gloves. Anyway, Lee, you can take her to Kennard if you want to. It's because you're just obstinate. Besides, she didn't have to come up here; I told her so; I could have got along without her—much better, probably, for she's always finding fault; she came on her own responsibility and so can look out for herself; and if you're so anxious for fear she'll freeze, why, take her. It won't make any difference about your ditch that I can see, for you say you'll very likely lose it, anyway. Now you'll have to excuse us; we're going. Blow out the light, please, and lock the door, our hands are full. Give the key to Imo to keep."

Two minutes later Gretzinger's car was gone with a swirl of the headlights as it circled and with a sudden roar of its exhaust. Lee extinguished the light and closed the cabin. To him that little house seemed poignant with tragedy; and he knew, whatever came, his foot would never be set in it again.

He found Imogene sitting beside her sheet-iron stove, wrapped in a quilt and coughing.

"I heard your car come after his; I knew it was you," she greeted him.

Lee regarded her closely.

"You're sick," he said. "You ought to be in bed. Ruth stated that you had a headache and now I discover you in a coughing fit bad enough to take off your head. Is your throat sore?"

"A little."

"Why in the name of all that's sensible haven't you gone to your uncle's? I begin to think you're unbalanced."

"I explained my reasons once, Lee." She coughed again, then continued, "Ruth and I quarrelled Christmas because of actions of hers and aunt said she must leave the house. That's why you were not asked then. But she made it up afterward and so I came when she did, for she was determined to live here where she could be free. I just had to come."

"And now she's leaving you in the face of the worst storm this winter, the ingrate!" Bryant exclaimed. "To-night's work finishes her with me. She may go to eternal damnation so far as I'm concerned. I'm done! She refused, she would have left you here to freeze, she set your life against her convenience! And after you had sacrificed your comfort and undergone hardships to save her good name! There's no limit to her selfishness and miserable hypocrisy. Our efforts and consideration haven't restrained her a particle, and she will tread the road she chooses irrespective of our desires or feelings. What fools we've been! You and I, Imogene Martin, aren't going to chase a will-o'-the-wisp any longer. We've wasted enough time on this delusion of saving Ruth Gardner; if she's to be saved, she must save herself—and if she will not do that, then the whole world together is of no avail. You're never going to come here again, or have anything to do with her, or let her have a part in your life. Nor am I. She walks out of our book, and we draw a pen across the bottom of the page."

Imogene had covered her face with her hands during his terrible denunciation and was weeping softly. She knew it was true. She knew that Ruth had gone out of her life, for such baseness as her one-time friend had shown was not to be forgiven.

"You're right—I can't go on here longer," she sobbed. "I'm sick, I'm really sick. I've been barely crawling about for the last two days. And she knew it and left me! Oh, Ruth, Ruth!"

"And would have left you, storm or no storm, and whether I came or not! In order to be alone with Gretzinger!" Her heart-breaking sobs went on. "Don't weep, Imogene. Put her out of your mind." He gently placed an arm about her shoulders. "Come, I will take you to Louise."

That she had been "crawling about the last two days" was apparent when she attempted to rise. Her strength suddenly vanished, her knees gave way. Bryant secured her coat and cap, wrapped her in blankets from the bed, and carried her out to the car. Then he put out her lamp and locked the door.

And that turning of the lock, Lee felt, terminated a painful chapter of his life.



CHAPTER XXVII

As by the girls' cabins, so before the Graham house, Lee perceived a motor car. He brought his own machine to a stop near it and cut off his engine. At the same instant the door opened in the house, where by the light shining through the portal he saw Louise's and Charlie Menocal's figures. Menocal stepped forth.

"You will please go now," Louise was saying. "When you telephoned I told you then that I shouldn't go with you, or go to the dance at all."

Bryant had alighted and was arranging the blankets about Imogene. Charlie's voice spoke, rather truculently:

"I told you I was coming for you, didn't I? Now see what a position that leaves me in! People think you're coming. I promised to bring you."

"Then you were too presumptuous," Louise said. "Now go. You're only making a bad matter worse."

"See here, Louise——"

"You had my refusal and I've repeated it a dozen times," she interrupted, indignantly. "Must I shut the door in your face to silence you? And here's another car. Have some regard for my personal feelings, sir."

Lee by now had lifted Imogene into his arms and started toward the speakers.

"Be a good sport, Louise," Menocal pursued, in a tone intended to be wheedling. "Run upstairs and put on a party dress while I wait for you. You don't understand how much I want you to come along to this dance." His words were a little thick and stumbling.

"Hush! Don't you see someone has come? You've been drinking; and you're sickening to me."

"I don't care if someone is there! Let 'em hear, Louise. Let all the world hear, let your father hear, let anybody hear! Because I love you, and so you must come to the dance." Suddenly his tone changed to an angry hiss. "You've been treating me like a cur, refusing to see me or go with me, and not letting me come here. I came to-night! I've stood for enough from you; you can't play me for a fool any longer. And you're going to marry me, too."

Bryant perceived by the lamplight of the doorway that the fellow had snatched her hand, that the two were struggling. Burdened with Imogene as he was, Lee was helpless to enterfere. But he went hastily up the steps toward them. Louise tugged herself free.

"Oh, you contemptible creature!" she cried, in a voice of quivering passion. "It's only because you know father is out caring for stock that you dare stay here to insult me." Then looking past Menocal, she exclaimed, "Who is that?"

"I, Bryant," said Lee. "With Imogene. She's ill, she needs to be put to bed. There was no time to ask your permission to bring her, but I knew——"

"Of course! If this beast will stop making a scene and go!"

Charlie Menocal was pulling on his fur cap.

"So here's our swell-headed crook of an engineer butting in again," he sneered. "You better be hunting up your own chicken, or Gretzinger will have her. Who y' say you got there?"

"Stand aside!"

Bryant's voice struck the other like the lash of a whip, and the half-drunken youth instinctively fell back a pace, so that Lee could pass with his charge into the house. But as Louise was about to follow Menocal seized her arm.

"Girlie, you're not going to throw me down? You'll be good to me and come——"

Louise shook off his hand, darted through the doorway, and quickly closing the door turned the key in the lock. Then still grasping the door-knob she leaned with her head against the panels, face white, lips trembling, and her breast rising and falling stormily.

"Oh, Lee! For you to be forced to see and hear that!" she said, in a tone of anguish.

"I think nothing of it; you could not avoid him."

After a moment she recovered herself and said, "Wait until I call Rosita."

When she returned with the Mexican girl, she conducted Bryant to an upper chamber where he placed Imogene upon a bed, pressed the latter's hand assuringly, and then left her in charge of the other two while he went below to telephone to her uncle. McDonnell had already set out for Sarita Creek, his wife informed Lee. He had started about half an hour before. Bryant went out of the house and entering his car drove down the lane to the main road, where he stopped.

Soon far away in the south there was a flash of light, repeated at intervals, until at length it grew into a steady, powerful glare that threw his own machine into strong relief, that dazzled and blinded him. Finally the other car stopped near by.

"What's the trouble, Jack?" McDonnell's voice came, addressed to his chauffeur.

Bryant went forward to the banker, who was leaning out of the limousine. He gave the information that neither of the girls was at Sarita Creek and explained that Imogene was at the Graham house, comfortable though ill.

"She's too sick to be removed and will probably need a nurse for a time," he concluded. "I brought her here as soon as I learned her condition. Miss Graham put her to bed."

"All right; I'll run in and see her. Much obliged to you, Bryant," was the answer. Then in a vexed strain he went on, "What I expected to happen has happened. Advice, pleadings, commands haven't prevented her from following out this crazy affair. You may not believe it, but she's as stubborn as a mule when she wants to be. My wife has been almost distracted all winter. Well, I'll send up a doctor and a nurse both as soon as I return to Kennard, if there's time before this storm. Still at work?"

"Still digging. Will keep at it till the last minute."

"Supposed you would. That's the lane there, isn't it?"

Next minute the big car had passed Lee's and was moving up the roadway between the rows of cottonwoods toward the house. But Bryant did not at once start for camp. His mind was busy with pictures—pictures of the two girls as he first had seen them at Perro Creek, and at their cabins afterward, and finally to-night: Imogene, weak and racked by a cough and huddling in a quilt beside her sheet-iron stove, and Ruth in her own cabin, standing in the lamplight in her pink party dress with round arms and throat showing through its filmy gauze, unconcerned and intent upon her own ends.

At last he glanced up at the impenetrable sky. Something soft and wet had floated against his cheek. Then he saw here and there in the funnel of light projected by his car lamps what looked like solitary bits of white down sinking through the radiance. Snow!



CHAPTER XXVIII

The first flakes were but the precursors of a heavy fall of snow that almost immediately began, soundless, without wind, filling the air and whitening the earth, and that was still continuing unabated two hours later. It mantled the shoulders of the workmen and the withers of the horses; it clogged the wheels of the fresnos so that dirt was moved with ever-increasing difficulty; it veiled the flaring gasolene torches and choked the night. Where a plow ran or a scraper scooped earth, snow speedily obliterated the mark, and with the passing of time both men and animals found it necessary to struggle more and more desperately in the dirt cut against mud and snow and gloom.

Carrigan contracted his working line, placing the torches at shorter intervals and keeping the scrapers in close succession. The foremen informed him frequently that the men were growing exhausted and rebellious, but he ordered them to hold the crews at the task. He and Bryant moved to and fro constantly, giving encouragement or lending a hand to help start a stalled fresno. By sheer power of their wills they were combatting the snow, forcing the work ahead, deepening the stretch of excavation that had been opened that afternoon; by iron determination they were wrenching out the last spadeful of earth possible and exacting the final ounce of man power before the snow had its way.

The strange warmth continued. The temperature was not even down to freezing and the men, muddied and wet to the knees, dripped with perspiration, while the horses' flanks were soaked with both sweat and melted snow. It was difficult to breathe, what with the heavy, oppressive air and what with the fall of suffocating snow, constantly growing thicker. Horses slipped and went down, but were raised again; fresnos were mired, but freed once more; men gave out and were sent to their camp. And the fight kept on.

But about eleven o'clock Bryant felt a cool puff of air on his cheeks, light and of brief duration. It was followed by a second, this time quicker and stronger, blowing from the northwest and sending the snow a-scurry in a slanting fog of flakes past the flames of the torches. He studied this change for a moment, then sought out Carrigan.

"Time to make a break for cover," he announced. "Wind is coming and the devil will be to pay when once it picks up all this loose snow."

"Well, we're about at a standstill, anyway," was the reply. "I'll have the crews draw the scrapers and plows off at one side where we can get at them. I had a spare horse tent put at the disposal of the Mexicans, and have had men in both camps piling baled hay all evening around the big tents for windbreaks. We'll issue extra blankets and crowd the crews into the shacks and mess quarters where there are stoves."

"What about water if our pipe freezes?"

"Then the horses will eat snow like the range ponies, I guess—and the rest of us, too."

At that he went off to order the work stopped, as did Bryant. For some time the wind blew only in those fitful puffs Lee had noted or died down entirely for short periods; and of this fact the night shift took advantage to assemble the fresnos and plows beside the canal and to drive their horses to shelter. The crews of the north camp, being fewer, got away first; and thither Bryant plowed through the snow with them to see all made safe. When he returned, Carrigan was just herding the last man and team toward the main camp. Together the contractor and the engineer extinguished the torches, then made their way, carrying a flare with them, toward the glow showing at the edge of the camp, where an oil-soaked bale of hay burned as a guide. At their backs the wind and snow blew with gradually increasing strength.

They made the rounds of the horse tents packed with animals, the mess tents packed with workmen—with those men only come and those newly aroused from sleep and gathered here—of the shacks, the hospital, the engineers' headquarters and the big commissary tent, all crowded with white men and Mexicans, steaming with moisture, smoking cigarettes and pipes, giving off a rank smell of clay and human bodies and wet clothes and horses, who talked and laughed and waited restlessly. The pair waded around examining guy-ropes, stakes, the protective walls raised of hay bales. They took advantage of a sudden dropping of the wind to go among the small tents, thrusting their flares within each and having a look, to make certain no sleeper of the day shift had been overlooked. Then at last they stumbled up the street to Bryant's shack.

The wind now had utterly died away. The snow had resumed its thick, silent fall straight to earth. Carrigan was kicking his boots clean against the door-sill when Lee exclaimed, "Listen to that, Pat!"

Carrigan wiped the moisture from his ears and harkened.

"That's the Limited coming, and making no stops," he remarked. "Get in!"

They entered the little building. The office contained the engineering staff and several others. Tobacco smoke lay thick in the room.

Outside, the faint whining sound was growing steadily in volume until at last it deepened into a roar very like that of an approaching express train, as Pat had suggested. Followed a smart blow on the shack. Then it reeled and the night was filled with a howling tumult that deafened the men inside; the blizzard had burst upon the mesa. Through the windows one could see nothing, for the air had become a black maelstrom of whirling snow and darkness where a choked roar persisted as steadily as the bass thunder of Niagara. The warmth had vanished; a cutting cold, as if striking direct from arctic ice, minute by minute drove the mercury in the thermometer on Bryant's wall downward with unbelievable swiftness. If anything, the fury of the storm seemed to increase as time passed, swelling to such terrible violence that one imagined nothing could withstand its force, its mad blasts, its deadliness.

"Those mess tents and horse tents," Lee said to Carrigan, anxiously.

"They're safer under their lee of hay than is this little paper box we're sitting in," the contractor replied. "I've been through blizzards before, and know how to meet them."

From by the stove one of the engineers spoke.

"But we'll never see some of those little tents any more. There are several travelling toward Mexico by now."

"And my new flannel shirt!" cried another, suddenly. "Washed it this noon and hung it out on a line and forgot all about it. Oh, Lord, where is it now?"

"Good-bye, little shirt, we'll never see you more!" said the first, sentimentally. "You'll be hanging on the Equator by morning."

"While we're left here in the drifts," said a third. "Oh, the lovely, big, white drifts there'll be to-morrow!"

Toward one o'clock the first furious rush of the storm had passed and it had settled into a fifty-mile-an-hour wind, bitterly cold, with snow that drove against the building in fine particles. Freezing air never ceased to enter the thin walls of boards and tar paper. It was necessary to keep the cast-iron stove red-hot to secure anything like comfort.

And to this dreadful cold and snow, thought Lee, Imogene would have been left deliberately by Ruth Gardner and Gretzinger!

Carrigan bade the others roll up in their blankets and get what sleep they could while he and Bryant tended the fire. Lee saw that Dave was warm and well-wrapped. The men, worn out by prolonged exertions, made themselves beds on the floor or stretched themselves out on their seats, drew their coverings closer, closed their eyes, slept.

The contractor and the engineer, together before the fire, continued to talk in low tones.

"Haven't told you yet," said Pat, presently, "but we picked up that Mexican this evening who was trying to start a drunk Christmas Eve. It was while you were at Sarita Creek. Saurez told me he had sneaked into camp and meant mischief. Some of us caught him behind the commissary tent with a can of oil, just ready to fire the camp."

"A fine night for us all to have been left without shelter," Lee remarked. "Where is he?"

"In the hospital tied up, with a trusty man to watch him. Here's what I found on him. Look inside." And Pat handed over a dirty leather bag with a long string. "Found this around his neck."

Lee extracted four pieces of paper from the sack—all checks drawn to the order of F. Alvarez. Besides these there were two twenty-dollar gold pieces, three rings, and several unset turquoises.

"Well, we can make use of these checks," he said, after thought. "I'll talk to the fellow to-morrow." He restored the miscellaneous collection of property to the sack.

On the panes of the small windows the snow beat and the wind hammered. Carrigan stuffed the stove with pine knots. Afterward he refilled his pipe, cast a sharp glance about at the sleeping occupants of the room, and said:

"You've got what you need now to mix medicine with the banker." He confirmed his words with several satisfied nods.

"Yes," said Bryant.

Carrigan proceeded to meditate.

"Awhile back I sent for some more dynamite," he stated, breaking the silence. "Didn't say anything to you about it at the time. It was there in the commissary tent under a stack of cases of peaches and bags of coffee. If this Alvarez had got his oil on that canvas and a fire going, there sure would have been some fire-works. You would have had a reservoir blown right in the middle of your project, I'm thinking."

"What in the name of heaven do you want with dynamite!"

"Well, my boy, there's a lot of ground that can't be dug, but I never saw any that nitro wouldn't move. What I got is dirt-blowing dynamite, the kind powder companies sell for making drainage ditches and blowing stumps and so on. I didn't know whether I should have to use it, but I always like to have a trick up my sleeve. Powder is ordinarily too expensive to employ when fresnos can work, yet it's just the thing in a pinch. We're in an emergency now. If it should set in and snow right along, with one storm on top of another, as may happen after so long a mild season, powder even may not help us out. These last eight hundred yards are going to make us weep before we're through, I'm guessing. But just the same, I'm counting on this dynamite. It can't blow like this forever, and the minute it quits we'll grab hold."

Lee twisted about to look at a window. The particles of snow were biting at the glass relentlessly, while the howl of the gale told only too plainly how the drifts were being heaped on the dark mesa.

"We'll finish this ditch on time even if hell freezes over," he said, slowly. "I'm not going to be beaten at this late day."

He continued to sit gazing at the frosted panes and harkening to the roaring blasts. On the floor and in the chairs the blanketed men slept heavily. Pat fed the fire anew. But through the cracks of the walls the cold sifted more and more intense, while along the edges of the boards there formed thick fringes of glistening frost.



CHAPTER XXIX

For four days the bitter cold and fierce wind held the camps in thrall, then the latter blew itself out. The cold, however, still endured though the sun shone. When one looked forth from camp, all that could be seen was a snowbound earth; mesa and mountains were as white and silent as some polar region; nothing moved; nothing seemed to live out yonder. It was like a dazzling, frigid, extinct world.

The main mesa road was blocked and telephone wires were down. What went on outside the limits of the camp's snow-drifted horizon its dwellers knew not—nor for the moment cared. Work was the only thought. With hastily constructed snow-plows roads had been broken among the tents and shacks as soon as the weather allowed, and afterward broad paths made to the working ground. The section of undug canal was now scraped bare. There, sheltered by tents and warmed by sagebrush fires, men bored in the iron-like earth powder-holes in rows that exactly aligned the canal. On the morning of the fifth day a first stretch of fifty yards was blown out, whereupon teams and scrapers were rushed into the ragged cavity to deepen and clear the ditch before the soil froze anew. This was at the north end. In the afternoon one hundred yards at the south end went up in a blast and crews from the main camp fell upon this area.

That night the sky clouded over again. All the next day snow came down steadily. The workmen played cards in the mess tents and waited. Carrigan busied himself at accounts and waited. Bryant waited, with impatience and anxiety gnawing at his heart. There were six hundred yards and more unexcavated, and but three days of his time remained.

The snow ceased at nightfall and work was instantly resumed by aid of the torches; again the desperate scraping of snow, bundled men at fires and sheltered by windbreaks, the drilling of holes in the frozen ground, the reliefs every two hours, the thawing of nipped fingers and toes and noses. All night hot food and boiling coffee were served at intervals to the cold and hungry labourers. At nine o'clock next morning two hundred yards of dirt went spraying into the air, with the subsequent struggle in the long hole: fresnos bearing forth what earth was loose and what the plows broke out; the horses, blinded by the glare of snow, staggering forward under curse and lash; the men toiling in a sort of grim fury. A maximum of effort finished one hundred and fifty yards more by eleven o'clock. Carrigan ordered all work to stop until nine next morning.

"The men are 'all in'," he told Lee. "We'll crack this last nut to-morrow."

"But what if it sets in to snow? More than two hundred and fifty yards left to do, and only to-morrow and the day after to work."

"We'll have to risk it."

"Will your powder hold out?"

"Yes." He regarded Bryant keenly. "Say, what you need isn't information but sleep. You worked all day yesterday, and all last night, and to-day again, and here it is going on midnight. I'm going to tell you the schedule for to-morrow to calm your mind, then you roll into your blankets. At nine o'clock in the morning all hands except the cooks go at the drills and stay by them till the stretch is holed. Whenever that's done, which should be about evening, we shoot the chunk. And after that we hit the bottom with every scraper and fresno and horse and man, with the cooks fighting the coffee-boilers, and never come out of the ditch till the last lump of dirt is moved. That's the programme. I figure it will be about midnight when the last card's turned, maybe an hour or so after. I promised the men double wages and a box of cigars apiece out of the store and a few other things perhaps—I don't remember. So you get your sleep, for there's a big day ahead to-morrow. That dirt all goes out before you'll have another chance to hit the hay."

Bryant arose next morning at seven. The sky was overcast and the thermometer was sixteen below zero when he examined it. Across the snow he could see the north camp stirring to life, awakening in the frosty, pallid light of dawn. Stretching thither ran uneven snowy ridges, save at one place where they lay bare and brown—the banks of the canal. When the small interval still undug was moved, the ditch would be finished from river to ranch, from the Pinas down to Perro. And this was to be the last day of toil! To-day the camps were to hurl themselves at that short remaining strip of earth and tear it out; the furrow so long pressed ahead through the iron ground was to be brought to an end; the enemy, frost, was to be conquered at last. When he thought of the inexorable labour done under heart-breaking conditions, in spite of cold and wind and snow, and with sufferings and deprivations little considered. Bryant felt for the workmen, rough though they were, a strong affection. They had done the bitter work.

"Out goes the chunk to-day," was Pat's greeting that morning.

A spirit of eagerness, almost of enthusiasm, pervaded the crews that first went forth in the cold to work at the drills. It was the final attack, and they went from their steaming breakfast with jests and laughter that rang back over the snow. Sixteen below zero, and they laughed! Bryant had a sudden conviction that nothing could stop such men—neither weather, nor elements, nor fate itself. They were heroes not to be daunted. They swung the hammer of Thor against the earth and were worthy of an epic.

Toward the middle of the afternoon of that day Carrigan said to the engineer:

"We're making better time than I calculated. The holes will all be drilled by five o'clock; we're loading them as they're done and we'll shoot at five-thirty."

"What about supper?"

"Supper at five. Then the men will be back and ready to jump in the ditch when the shot's fired."

"And be done twenty-four hours before the hour set by the Land and Water Board," said Lee.

"That's cutting it fine enough as it is. Who's that waving yonder toward camp?" And Carrigan pointed a mittened hand at a figure swinging an arm and shouting Bryant's name.

The engineer stared for a time.

"Charlie Menocal," he said, finally. "Morgan—Morgan, come here!" he called. And as Morgan came to join him, Lee addressed Pat, "I'll just run over to Bartolo with this young scoundrel. The road's open and I'll be back by dark. Want Morgan to come along to look after him and Alvarez, the man you caught."

"Better start back in plenty of time. The sky's thickening again. More snow in sight, Lee."

"I shall."

"You might invite old man Menocal to return with you," Pat remarked, with a grin, "and see us put the kibosh on his dream of owning the Pinas River. What are you going to do with this boy of his? Send him over the road?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"That's where he ought to go, after trying to burn us out the night of the blizzard." He turned away to the work.

"You're not to let this fellow over there waiting for us get away, Morgan," Lee stated.

"I'll freeze on to him."

They went along the snowy path toward camp, coming up with Menocal, who waited until they arrived and then accompanied them toward Bryant's office.

"Have a letter for you from Ruth," he said. "Had a terrible time getting up from Kennard. Road isn't half opened, but I found a man to drive me home. Promised Ruth to deliver this to you."

He drew the letter from an inner pocket and handed it to the engineer, who glanced at the writing on the envelope, his own name, and shoved the epistle into his glove. When they gained camp, Lee said:

"Morgan and I are going to Bartolo with you, and also a friend of yours called Alvarez. We nabbed him as he was trying to burn our camp about two hours before the blizzard. Take this man to headquarters, Morgan, and keep him till I come over."

Menocal's face became livid with anger and alarm.

"Let me go, damn you!" he shouted, shrilly.

Bryant waved a hand towards the engineers' shack and thither Charlie was propelled, cursing and struggling, in Morgan's firm grasp. Entering his office, Lee closed the door, walked to the stove, and standing there produced the letter. It was the first and only missive he had ever received from Ruth. He gazed at the envelope and the scrawled writing on it with an impression of strangeness, but this gave way to a curiosity as to the contents. He had a strong suspicion of the letter's purport. Ruth would have reviewed her conduct that night at Sarita Creek, and, with her instinctive cunning, perceived it would alienate Lee. The message doubtless carried an adroit explanation and excuse, ending up with numerous declarations of her affection and hypocritical assertions of her anxiety on his account. Disgust overwhelmed him. He was minded to cast the thing into the stove unread. At last, however, muttering to himself, he thrust a forefinger under the flap and ripped the envelope open. A newspaper clipping that had been enclosed in the letter dropped to the floor. He read:

DEAR LEE:

After thinking the matter over very carefully, I've decided to release you from our engagement. If this pains you, as I fear it will, I'm extremely sorry, but I've discovered that we're not temperamentally suited to each other. You've failed, besides, so I understand, which further convinces me of that. And in addition, I've learned of late that I love another, who loves me. Therefore it's much better that I take this step, much better and much wiser—don't you think so? However, Lee, I shall always be your friend.

It may interest you to know that this evening Mr. Gretzinger and I are to be married. Privately, with only a few close friends. We depart immediately after the ceremony for New York. Mr. Menocal is to pack my things at Sarita Creek, so you need not bother about them. I understand Imogene is visiting at the Graham ranch; I'm dropping her a note there telling her the news.

With best wishes, RUTH.

Bryant lifted from the floor and read the clipping. It was a short announcement, evidently from a Kennard paper, of the prospective wedding that night of Miss Ruth Gardner, of Sarita Creek, and Mr. J. Senton Gretzinger, of New York.

When he had read this, Lee gently tilted and shook the envelope. But no diamond solitaire dropped out.



CHAPTER XXX

They were waiting in the sheriff's office in the court house in Bartolo. They were waiting for Mr. Menocal. Winship had sent a messenger for him. At one place in the room, handcuffed and tied, sat the evil-eyed Alvarez; at another sat Charlie Menocal, silent and apprehensive and with a sickly pallor showing under his dusky skin; and between them lounged Morgan. The sheriff and Bryant stood across the room conversing of the storm.

"I thought your goose was cooked when that blizzard hit us," Winship was saying.

"Froze, you mean," was Lee's smiling reply. "I thought so myself for a while. We've hammered along, however. To-night the last dirt goes out."

"That was an idea now—powder."

"It was Carrigan's, not mine. It saved us. The old man has forgotten more than I ever knew. Here's the banker now."

The door swung open, admitting Menocal, blinking from the snow's sheen. He bade the sheriff and the engineer good day, glanced sharply at them and then at the others. When his look encountered his son, his eyebrows went up.

"So you're home finally," he addressed him. "After two weeks' time!" His regard moved about from one to another of the trio. "What does this mean, Charlie? Who is that fellow wearing handcuffs?" He paused, staring steadily at his son. "What have you been doing to bring you into Winship's office?" As Charlie continued to sit silent, he turned to the sheriff.

"I'll explain, Mr. Menocal, but what I have to say won't be pleasant hearing for you," Lee stated, at a nod from Winship. "Take this chair, if you please."

The banker sat down, heavily. He sighed, while his fat cheeks shook with a slight tremble.

"What has he done?" he asked, with his eyes fixed on an ink-well on the sheriff's desk.

Briefly and without temper Bryant related the circumstance of seeing Alvarez in Kennard one day during the previous summer, when the man appeared to be watching him. Charlie was also in town on that day. Alvarez was the man who had attempted to make the workmen drunk in camp on Christmas Eve, but he had escaped on that occasion. He had stolen into camp again on the afternoon preceding the blizzard and two hours after sundown had been captured seeking to fire the commissary tent. When made a prisoner, he had been searched. On his person were found several checks for sums ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars. Bryant drew the leather sack from his pocket, extracted the checks, and handed them to the banker.

"You see they are given by your son," said he. "I've questioned this Alvarez and he has finally admitted that he was employed by Charlie and instructed by him what to do. Your son, therefore, is the instigator of the attempted crime, and Alvarez, an ignorant and brutal outlaw from Mexico, was merely his tool. I pass over the matter of the whisky and the petty inconveniences earlier caused me and my men. But here is an act of a different character, Mr. Menocal. The man's endeavour to fire our camp, had it been successful, would perhaps have resulted in the death of scores of men, as the storm broke shortly after and they would have been without shelter."

Charlie Menocal sprang to his feet.

"Before God, I didn't know he would choose that night!" he cried, passionately. "I meant only to stop their work!"

His father shook his head sadly.

"That makes no difference, my son; you planned a wicked deed," he said, in a barely audible voice.

Morgan pushed the young man back upon his chair and Bryant went on. As he proceeded, he had found it harder and harder to address the parent; and his task was no easier now. The eyes of the father had gone to the slender, sagging figure of his son and seemed to be the eyes of an expiring man; his plump cheeks were working under an excess of emotion; then his head went down suddenly as under the blow of a club.

"Because of the character of the act," Lee said, "it wasn't only a stroke at me but at every animal and man in the entire south camp. I want to make this clear in order to show how black and dastardly the thing was. Whether Charlie understood or intended the destruction of all the lives and property there is no excuse; it was a deed that would have carried terrible results in its train. I don't even let my mind conceive them. All this has followed, Mr. Menocal, from the single fact that your son disliked me in the beginning. To that may be added an idea that I was depriving you of something to which I had no right, namely, the title to the Perro Creek canal appropriation. And there, I think, responsibility for his course touches you."

He paused to gaze at the Mexican, whose face had become drained of colour.

"Mr. Menocal, the water is mine," he continued, "and to-night some time it will be mine beyond all dispute, for then the ditch will be finished. So much for that. Some days ago we had a talk that, I believe, led us each to a better opinion of the other. I think that as a leader here in Bartolo and around about you're a force for good; you believe in law, order, and education; and I know, from what I've learned, that you carry many of the people on store accounts for long periods when crops are bad or when they are distressed by sickness. I'm confident you're endeavouring to elevate them so far as possible; and I admit frankly that I've modified very greatly my first estimation of you. That weighs in the scale against Charlie's actions.

"Then there's one kindness Charlie himself has done me, though he may not be aware of the fact. I'll not say what it is; let it suffice that it is the case. A very great kindness it was, indeed! I count that likewise in the opposite scale. And then there are other things to consider, one among them that after all no harm has come to me. The enmity he's held for me has simply recoiled upon his own head. All he has to show for it after months of hating and contriving is his position here in this room to-day—and a dead dog. Surely it must make plain to him that his course has been not only futile but foolish."

The engineer glanced at the young fellow. He sat in an attitude of despair that almost equalled his father's.

"Well, that brings me to the point," Bryant said. "You've been too indulgent with Charlie, Mr. Menocal, as you once acknowledged to me. You've given him too much money, too much admiration, too much head, and it has led him up against the bars of the state prison. The question is whether or not I shall open the gate and push him in, as at first I determined to do on securing the proof in this leather sack. If I thought he would keep on along his present line, I should say yes, merely as a matter of public policy, but I've had several days to think the thing over and have come to the conclusion he'll soon realize his folly, if he doesn't now. And another restraint should be the good name and the happiness of his father. I'm not vindictive, Mr. Menocal, and less on this day than I've ever been. I don't believe in causing people misery merely for the pleasure of inflicting it or because I happen to have the power. We all have enough to contend with, as it is. I don't propose to ruin your position here, and end your influence, and blast your life, by sending your son to the penitentiary. That would make me no happier, and would make a number of people infinitely wretched, while perhaps starting Charlie on the road to hell. Very likely so. I much prefer to see everyone cheerful and at work. Suppose we ship this fellow yonder back to Mexico—Winship can arrange that—and destroy the checks, and tear up this sheet of Charlie's record, so to speak. Only one or two persons besides ourselves know of the matter and I'll ask them to forget it."

Lee struck a match and ignited the checks, holding them while they burned until at last he dropped them on the floor, where they blazed, curled up in strips of black ash, and were no more. He glanced about at the others. Winship was picking his teeth with a quill toothpick, with his mind apparently far away on other matters. Morgan stolidly chewed tobacco and kept a wary eye on the bandit, Alvarez. Charlie sat pale, limp, gazing at nothing. The elder Menocal had lifted his eyes to Bryant, at whom he looked mistily; he appeared to have aged astonishingly, his cheeks having gone flabby, slack, and gray, while a slight tremour shook his head.

"That's all, I guess," Bryant said, briskly. "We'll just consider our relations established on the same footing they were before this occurrence."

He put out a hand, smiling. The banker struggled to his feet and clasped it in both of his.

"They shall not be on the same footing, but on a better one, Mr. Bryant, if it's in my power to make them so," he exclaimed, in a choked voice.

"That suits me right down to the ground, Mr. Menocal."

The Mexican was silent. His lips parted, quivered, and shut again. His hold on the engineer's hand tightened.

"I—I can't talk now, can't say what I wish to say," he said, mastered by feeling. "When I'm more myself, when I can talk—another time——" He ceased, but presently finished, "Another time I'll tell the gratitude in my heart. Now my shame for my son and for myself——Come, Charlie, take me home."

They went out. Winship came to life and crossing the room dragged the outlaw Mexican to his feet, then pushed him over the floor and into the hall on his way to the cells in the basement. Morgan pulled on his hat. Bryant glanced at the paper ashes on the floor, then did likewise. It was time to get back to camp.



CHAPTER XXXI

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."



CHAPTER XXXII

About the middle of the next afternoon Lee Bryant was riding southward from camp on the main mesa trail. The road was difficult and his horse Dick made slow time along the snowy path broken by wagons through the drifts, but the rider let the animal choose his own gait, as he had done that hot July day when coming up from the south to buy the Perro Creek ranch. On reaching the ford Lee pulled rein. How different now the creek from on that burning afternoon of his encounter with Ruth Gardner and Imogene Martin! Snow covered its bed; the sands where he had knelt, the little pool, the foot-prints, lay hidden from sight. How much had happened since! And how different was his life! He had suffered much and learned much since that hour of meeting; and he should never henceforth view this spot without a little feeling of melancholy. The youth and two girls who drank there at the rill were no more: they had become other persons.

Presently he dismissed thoughts of this and set Dick wading across the ford. Yonder he now could see the three bare cottonwoods, with the low adobe house near by where he and Dave had lived and laboured at the surveys for the project. The bones of his dog Mike, too, rested there under the ground. This brought to mind the meeting with Louise upon the road—and it was Louise to whom at this moment he was going. He began to urge Dick to greater efforts. Once on a stretch of road, bare and wind-swept, he pushed him into a gallop. It seemed interminable, this snow-bound trail. But at last he crossed Sarita Creek (with but a single glance at the canon's mouth where the two cabins stood untenanted and abandoned among the naked trees) and then covered the long miles to Diamond Creek, and rode up the lane between the rows of cottonwoods to the house, where Louise, who had perceived his approach from a window, appeared at the door to greet him.

"We were terribly alarmed for your safety the night of the blizzard," she said, "but the mail-man finally made his trip to Bartolo and back, and said you were still there and not blown away. And he also stated that you were working night and day."

"Not any more," said Lee, swinging from the saddle.

"You have finished! I can read it on your face!" she cried, joyfully.

"Yes; we threw out the last clod at one o'clock this morning."

"I needn't tell you that I'm proud and happy; you know that, Lee. Even happier than when I learned you were able to continue, at the time you supposed you were unable. Put up your horse and come in. You're half frozen."

Bryant endeavoured to discover from her face what he wished to know, but did not succeed. So he asked: