at 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