no one
understood more than he the law of probabilities, or the balance of
seasons. Some time cold must follow warmth, foul follow fair, to work
the inevitable mean. And it was too much to hope that this natural law
would be suspended for them until the middle of February.

In fact, the nights while remaining clear were hardening. The mercury
in the tube sank by possibly a degree every two nights, at last
touching zero; and it correspondingly failed to arise by as much at
noon. The days were cruelly short. Darkness lasted until eight in the
morning; it dropped down again at five. The frost crept deeper into
the earth.

But construction advanced. The dam of brush and uncemented smooth
brown stones, stretching across the Pinas, was gradually rising. The
hillside section of ditch through the fields was finished and only the
miners continued at the granite reef, the ring of their hammers on
drills going steadily and the roar of the shots now and again booming
out at nightfall. Excavation went forward in the spaces between the
drops on the ridge leading forth upon the mesa. The carpenters had
finished and returned to Kennard. The concrete gang had moved their
mixer from the dam to the drops, for the intake gate and its
accompanying flood weir were made, and Bryant had had their wooden
frames knocked off so that the structures stood white and imposing
beside the dam, like pillars of accomplishment. From Perro Creek the
main camp had moved toward the northwest on the arc it must pursue,
until its tents touched the horizon and the clean yellow trench,
fifteen feet wide at the bottom, thirty feet wide at the top, and five
feet deep, with its flanking embankments, alone was left behind, a
forced and undeviating course through the sagebrush, the water way
driven by a determined man.

CHAPTER XVII

Meanwhile Lee, under relentless pressure of work, saw less and less of
Ruth. She had come a number of times at the beginning of the drive,
sometimes with Gretzinger, sometimes with Imogene, to watch the
feverish spectacle on the mesa; as had Louise Graham, her father, and
at rare intervals Mr. McDonnell. Bryant, on his part, had gone
evenings to Sarita Creek when he could spare an hour, and, for that
matter, when he could not. But the meetings with her were infrequent,
and always left him with a sense of inadequacy, of dissatisfaction,
because partly Ruth and he seemed to have no common interests and
partly that she now le