one of the new foremen nearest him, "take these
forty men, add ten of the old section to them, and go to work on the
dam. Wait a minute. Have you boys had any breakfast?"

They had not.

"Go to the cook, then," he ordered. "Tell him to give you the best he
can sling out at quick notice. Tell him that there will be one hundred
and sixty more to feed. I'll send for more grub right away."

The men passed on to the cook's tent, and one after another Conniston
counted off the other sections of forty and sent them to be fed.

"The rest of you," he called to the three hundred men who had watched
their fellows move away, "go to the Valley. You can loaf until we
scare up something to eat for you and until the horses rest a bit.
I'll send right away to Crawfordsville--"

"Mr. Conniston," interrupted Jimmie Kent, "in those two wagons back
there is a lot of grub. And tools," he added. "Mr. Crawford had me
pick them up in Littleton."

CHAPTER XXI

Never had Conniston known a busier forenoon, never a happier. The
fatigue, the despondency, the utter hopelessness of the early morning
was swept away. He felt a new life course through his veins, there
came a fresh elasticity to his stride, his voice rang with confidence.
For he was as a leader of a lost hope within the walls of a
beleaguered city to whom, when all hope was gone, reinforcements had
come.

He felt that now nothing could tire him in body or in mind, nothing
drive from his heart his glorious conviction of success to come.

And yet he had no faintest idea how busy the day was to be. When two
hours had passed and the wagons carrying three hundred men had started
for the Valley, Conniston had the two hundred and fifty men at Deep
Creek working with a swiftness, an effectiveness which would have told
a chance observer that they had been familiar many days with the work.
He was to leave them before noon, to hurry on horseback to overtake
the wagons that he might personally oversee the arrangements to be
made upon their coming into the Valley. And there was much to be done,
many specific orders to give the Lark, before he dared leave.

Upon the dam itself he put a hundred men to work. The remaining
hundred and fifty he set to building the great flume which was to
carry the stored water for five hundred yards along the ridge, then
into the cut in the crest of the ridge and into Dam Number Two. He saw
that he must have more horses, more plows and scrapers. But fo