ould turn it into the flume which was being
made for it even as the dam grew. Trees were lopped down, great, tall
pines, their branches shorn off with flashing ax-blades, the trunks
cut into logs upon which many men laid hold.

In the bed of the creek between the Jaws the logs were laid as one
lays logs to build him a log house. Sand and gravel and rock went
rattling and hissing into the log-surrounded spaces, piled high and
higher, with the water backing angrily up against it. Boulders were
rolled down from the mountain-side, hurled into the bottom of the
canon by blasts of giant powder and dynamite, gripped with rapidly
adjusted log-chains, and dragged to their places by straining horses.

Steadily the dam rose, and steadily the muddy water crept up with it.
Men toiled in the bed of the stream with the foaming, coffee-colored
water washing about their hips, seething as it climbed up to their
great, hairy, panting chests. With no thought of finishing the
breakfast which they had barely begun, they worked upon the banks
with sweaty, hot bodies and calm, cool minds. Stripped to their
waists, almost naked many of them, black with dirt and running sweat,
they strained and strove against the rising stream. The morning died,
noon came, and Conniston had a dozen men distribute sandwiches and hot
coffee. The afternoon wore on and brought with it the men whom Tommy
Garton had sent.

Then Conniston called to every man of the hundred who had toiled for
him since sunrise to drop his tools. In their places he put a hundred
new men. And again the work went on in great strides, and the strange
dam rose swiftly. The other men whom Garton had sent, Brayley with
them, he put to work to begin the restoration of the broken dam, that
the thing which the hapless Hapgood had torn down might be ready
against the time of need after the first of October. For he could find
no place for more than a hundred men working between the Jaws and upon
the banks above them.

* * * * *

Night had come down upon the mountain-slopes. Argyl and Conniston were
standing by a sinking camp-fire talking quietly. Lonesome Pete,
returned from his errand, had gone into the grove at the edge of which
their fire burned for fresh fuel. There came to them through the
silence the clatter of hoofs; the vague, shadowy form of horse and
rider rose against the sky-line, and Jocelyn Truxton threw herself to
the ground. Moaning hysterically,