Then the companies of horses and men, fastening upon scrapers, hastened into the trench.  The remaining strip that joined the two sections of canal had been blown out and now this was the final, culminating assault.  When this two hundred and fifty yards of ditch line had been widened and deepened to correspond to the rest, water would flow of summers in a small river from the dam down to the broad acres of Perro Creek ranch.

Hour after hour the steady labour proceeded—­plows ran; flat scrapers and wheeled fresnos followed, scooped up the earth, bore it to the banks above; horses tugged and strained; men toiled, pausing only to thaw their feet and hands at fires burning by the ditch or to drain great tin-cups of the scalding coffee that the cooks dipped from cans.  And steadily the excavation widened and deepened hour by hour, the slope of the sides becoming apparent, the banks rising higher and the ditch assuming its desired shape and size.  At eleven o’clock the cooks wheeled immense canisters of sliced beef and bread among the workmen, who seized the food and ate it as they worked.  At midnight the plows were cutting near the bottom, and the work was going faster, as the frost did not strike this deep into the soil.  At one o’clock in the morning, amid thickening snow, the last scraperfuls of dirt were going out, while the engineers, with their long rules, were checking depths and slopes.

“By golly, she’s about done!” exclaimed Dave, who had been permitted to remain up on this eventful night and who had been moving about, here, there, and everywhere, in a great state of excitement.  “By golly, she is, Lee!”

“Yes, by golly; the ditch you helped me survey, too.”

“By golly, yes!” He had forgotten that.

The last dirt moved with a rush.  Then, even as the teams were dragging the loads from the excavation, Carrigan passed to a foreman the word that announced the end of work.  It ran along the canal from mouth to mouth, at first in a call but finally in a shout that swelled to a roar of exultation.  That roar rang over the snow and through the night like the cry of an army which has gained a walled city.

“Done!” said Bryant, to himself.

Back to the camps trooped the teams and men by the flare of the torches they carried in jubilation.  Not a soul in all that company but felt the triumph beating in Lee’s heart.  Finished, built!  Despite frost and snow they had driven the iron furrow through to the end, and on time.  Toil-weary though they were, their spirits were light.  They knew themselves fellow-workers in a redoubtable achievement.

Carrigan and Bryant were among the last to go.  To the latter there was in the fact of completion a sense of unreality.  As he took a final view of the ditch before setting out for camp, events raced through his mind—­his coming, his first labours, the confused interplay of his life with those of the Menocals, McDonnell, Gretzinger, Carrigan, Imogene, Ruth, and Louise; the months of incessant toil; of brain-racking and body-wearing endeavour to force the canal forward; of unresting strife with frost and snow and earth, of being under a pitiless hammer.  He could not easily realize that he was now free of all this.