“All right; I’ll run in and see her.  Much obliged to you, Bryant,” was the answer.  Then in a vexed strain he went on, “What I expected to happen has happened.  Advice, pleadings, commands haven’t prevented her from following out this crazy affair.  You may not believe it, but she’s as stubborn as a mule when she wants to be.  My wife has been almost distracted all winter.  Well, I’ll send up a doctor and a nurse both as soon as I return to Kennard, if there’s time before this storm.  Still at work?”

“Still digging.  Will keep at it till the last minute.”

“Supposed you would.  That’s the lane there, isn’t it?”

Next minute the big car had passed Lee’s and was moving up the roadway between the rows of cottonwoods toward the house.  But Bryant did not at once start for camp.  His mind was busy with pictures—­pictures of the two girls as he first had seen them at Perro Creek, and at their cabins afterward, and finally to-night:  Imogene, weak and racked by a cough and huddling in a quilt beside her sheet-iron stove, and Ruth in her own cabin, standing in the lamplight in her pink party dress with round arms and throat showing through its filmy gauze, unconcerned and intent upon her own ends.

At last he glanced up at the impenetrable sky.  Something soft and wet had floated against his cheek.  Then he saw here and there in the funnel of light projected by his car lamps what looked like solitary bits of white down sinking through the radiance.  Snow!

CHAPTER XXVIII

The first flakes were but the precursors of a heavy fall of snow that almost immediately began, soundless, without wind, filling the air and whitening the earth, and that was still continuing unabated two hours later.  It mantled the shoulders of the workmen and the withers of the horses; it clogged the wheels of the fresnos so that dirt was moved with ever-increasing difficulty; it veiled the flaring gasolene torches and choked the night.  Where a plow ran or a scraper scooped earth, snow speedily obliterated the mark, and with the passing of time both men and animals found it necessary to struggle more and more desperately in the dirt cut against mud and snow and gloom.

Carrigan contracted his working line, placing the torches at shorter intervals and keeping the scrapers in close succession.  The foremen informed him frequently that the men were growing exhausted and rebellious, but he ordered them to hold the crews at the task.  He and Bryant moved to and fro constantly, giving encouragement or lending a hand to help start a stalled fresno.  By sheer power of their wills they were combatting the snow, forcing the work ahead, deepening the stretch of excavation that had been opened that afternoon; by iron determination they were wrenching out the last spadeful of earth possible and exacting the final ounce of man power before the snow had its way.