en an hour or so after they had finished their meal they alighted
from their Pullmans at Kennard, the echo of his forced reply still
sounded in his mind with persistent irony. He was glad he had an
interview with McDonnell before him that would silence it, the
negotiating of a large private loan.

CHAPTER XVI

For Bryant there now began a period of activity compared to which his
earlier efforts were mere play. Headquarters were moved down to Perro
Creek, ten miles nearer Kennard. In an endless procession streamed
northward automobiles crammed with labourers, wagons heaped with
lumber, cement, implements, food, tents, forage, and long lines of
fresnos. From distant Mexican settlements came natives in ramshackle
wagons and driving half-wild ponies. Out of the hills came
sheep-herders and prospectors. The word of big wages ran everywhere.
The drive was on.

By the dam and on the tongue of ground extending from the mountain
side where the canal would swing out upon the mesa, excavation for the
intake gate and weir and the drops was in progress, with a crew of
carpenters swiftly erecting wooden forms to receive the concrete when
the diggers finished and retired. On the mesa half a dozen young
engineers, using Bryant's notes and fixed points, ran anew the ditch
line and set grade stakes. North of Perro Creek white tents gleamed in
the sunshine; and beyond these a swarm of men and horses gashed a
yellow streak in the mesa, ever extending as the days passed--cutting
sagebrush, ripping through sod, flinging up earth with plow and
scraper.

Yes, the fight was on. The fight to secure and keep horses, to get
and hold workmen, to feed and use them both mercilessly, to press them
ahead like a shaft of steel, to drive them forward under lash, mile by
mile, rod by rod, foot by foot, forcing a channel through the
resistant earth and across the mesa--a fight to outwit frost, to
outstrip time, to outreach and overcome the impossible.

Bryant himself was everywhere, now at the dam, now with the
carpenters, now at Perro Creek. Morgan, in charge of the north camp,
succumbed to Bryant's own restless energy and matched it. The gang,
now beginning to pour concrete behind the carpenters, caught the
infection of his ardor. Foreman and crew on the hillside section, at
his word that they had the most difficult part of the dirt work,
toiled the harder. The other engineers promised to give him their best
and gave him more. And in the m