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 main camp at Perro Creek Pat Carrigan
extracted the last ounce of effort from man and beast.
In Kennard Bryant had said to McDonnell, "Give me a good man for this
end, one who can work twenty hours a day." And the banker had given
him such an one: a short, bow-legged clerk with a pugnacious jaw, who
took the typewritten list of Bryant's immediate requirements, read it,
jerked on his hat, and bolted out of the door. He it was who kept the
road north from Kennard a-jiggle with freight wagons.
The fierce struggle against time became generally known. Ranchers
visited the mesa for a sight of the toiling camps. Wagonloads of
Mexican families, curious, observant, came and went. Automobile
parties from Kennard and elsewhere made inspection trips to the spot.
Even a journalist representing a Denver paper appeared, made
photographs, and obtained an interview from Bryant consisting of
"Finish it on time? Certainly. Can't talk any longer." Which, together
with the pictures and the special writer's account, filled a page of a
Sunday issue.
The anxiety ever in Bryant's and Carrigan's minds was of that grim and
implacable enemy, cold. Autumn had lasted amazingly; November yielded
to December, with the days still fine; but who could tell when the
white spectre, Winter, would lay his icy hand upon the earth? The
peaks and upper slopes of the mountains were already mantled with
snow. Each morning the engineer and the contractor marked with care
the fall of the thermometer during the night, examined the frost upon
the grass and tested its depth in the soil. They watched the barometer
like hawks. They observed every cloud along the Ventisquero Range.
They studied the wind, the sun, the sky. But the weather held fair. So
calm was the air that at times sounds of the dynamite blasts at the
granite outshoot, where a pair of miners were clearing a path for the
canal, came travelling down to Perro Creek.
"The Lord surely has his arms around us," said Pat, one morning.
Bryant nodded, but Dave spoke up, "A cattleman who went by here
yesterday, an old-timer, said: 'When December's clear, then January's
drear.'"
"And an old-timer once told me that same thing when I was building a
railroad grade in Kansas," Pat remarked, "and I had to ship in
palm-leaf fans and ice to keep my 'paddies' from fainting with the
January heat." A slight exaggeration, to be sure, but showing the old
contractor's contempt for wise saws pertaining to weather. Yet 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.