ill, worked early and late running his lines,
establishing a dam site, and surveying the river bottom near the mouth
of Pinas Canon, and remained practically unseen except by a few
incurious Mexicans. His instrument proved the correctness of his
conclusion regarding the crescent-shaped elevation as a practical
grade for a canal, which though necessitating a longer course would
nevertheless immensely lessen the time, expense, and difficulties of
digging when compared with a line along the mountains' flanks with its
danger of washouts and earth slides. Nor did he stop there. He made
rapid but reliable topographical measurements, on a general scale, of
the mesa for five miles out from the mountains, between Bartolo and
Perro Creek, locating among other things a large depression in the
plain, three miles southwest of the town, which might by diking be
converted into a flood water reservoir. Then he folded his tent and
again disappeared for a week. When, finally, he rode to Stevenson's
ranch house that hot July afternoon and made a trade for the five
thousand acres of land, he was the possessor of considerably more
knowledge of the locality and its possibilities than any one would
have guessed.

And now he was owner of the ranch and committed to the enterprise.

A few days after Bryant's visit to Bartolo Stevenson disposed of his
sheep to Graham, the owner of the large ranch on Diamond Creek, loaded
his household goods, except the stove and some of the furniture which
the engineer bought, and with his wife and boy drove away in his sheep
wagon for Kennard and for the new farm in Nebraska. Bryant's own
effects--trunk, bedding, provisions, surveying instruments,
draughting-board, and the like, came up from the railroad town by
wagon, and with them the fourteen-year-old lad, Dave Morris, a
gangling, long-legged boy extremely dependable and extraordinarily
serious, who had carried rod for the engineer during the week of
preliminary surveying.

The man and boy now attacked the canal line in earnest, with Bryant
intent on establishing its course, location, and displacement exactly,
so that he could make necessary blueprints and compile construction
estimates. It was while they were working along the first mile of the
line, where it ran from the Pinas River along the base of a hill to
the low ridge that bore out upon the mesa, that they received their
first interruption. The worst and most expensive part of the canal to
build w