“You can buy at the commissary,” Lee said.  “Why should you lose five dollars a day because of Menocal’s bad feeling for me?  You remain idle—­but does he pay you, or feed you?  And the wages I offer you, and the doctor’s services, and the other accommodations, I also offer to other Mexicans who will work.  You may tell them so.  Remember, there will be teaming on the ditch until it freezes up, then work on the dam throughout the winter, then scraper work on the mesa in the spring.  Five dollars a day coming in the door!  You can buy meat and flour and clothes and tobacco and candy for the children and a new wagon and pictures of the Madonna, yes, all.  But now I must go.”

“But Menocal would be very angry,” said the man, with a shake of his head.

Bryant bade them good-night and departed.  He went up the muddy road through the wet darkness to the camp.  Domination of the native mind by Menocal appeared too strong for him to break.

But to his surprise next morning the Mexican came driving his team into the camp.  Lee sent him to Pat Carrigan, who gave him a scraper and set him to work on the ditch.  Toward noon the engineer encountered him moving dirt from the deepening excavation; the sight had an amusing feature.  The man, Pedro Saurez, laboured in his own field building the canal at about the spot where he had warned Bryant away when surveying.

When Saurez beheld Lee, he grinned and removed the cigarette from his lips.

“It will be a fine ditch, this,” was his remark.

CHAPTER XIII

Work on the canal section near the river advanced without incident until, one morning early in November, the plows unexpectedly uncovered a forty-foot-wide body of granite just beneath the surface.  This particular difficulty was not serious, and was the contractor’s; but Pat Carrigan was no more pleased than any other contractor would have been at finding rock, even a small amount, when he had figured his excavation costs on a dirt basis.

“That wipes out a piece of my profits,” he remarked to Bryant, after a first profane explosion.  “I’ll send out for some dynamite and shoot it.  If it wasn’t for damned troubles like this, I’d been a retired man and fat and rich long ago.  Don’t grin, you heartless blackguard!  You’ll have miseries of your own before we’re done.”

Pat Carrigan was a true prophet.  A blow of fatal nature, indeed, was preparing at the moment and fell within a week.  From the state engineer Lee received a letter advising him that an application for use of the water appropriated to Perro Creek ranch had been made by a man of the name of Rodriguez, of Rosita, under an old statute long forgotten.  This law was mandatory upon the Land and Water Board.  It required the latter to cancel rights and to reappropriate water elsewhere to the amount in excess of what a canal actually carried, or what a canal had failed to carry for five successive years if it were not shown within ninety days after a filing for reappropriation that the said canal had been enlarged to a capacity to carry the original appropriation, and proof given of the owner’s intention to employ said appropriation.