CHAPTER XIV

By noon Bryant and Carrigan had concluded their interviews with members of the Land and Water Board.  All of them had listened, asked questions, expressed their regret at the situation in which Perro Creek project found itself, but stated that the Board had no course other than that of executing the law evoked in the case.  They suggested that Bryant bring an action in the courts to test the law; they admitted that his company might be forced into the hands of a receiver; they inquired concerning the possibility of gaining the consent of the adverse party to a withdrawal of his application.  Their hands, however, said one and all, were tied in the matter.

The engineer and the contractor went down the steps of the state house and found a seat on a bench at a shady spot of the grounds.

“Just as I expected it would be,” Bryant said, grimly.

He sat humped over, his elbows on his knees and his cheeks between his fists.  His eyes were dull, heavy; he had not closed them during the previous night.  He wore the mud-caked lace boots and stained khaki, as did Carrigan, in which he had departed from camp.

“Well, we haven’t quit breathing yet,” Pat remarked, licking the wrapper on the cigar he was about to light.

Lee sat silent for several minutes.

“Anyway, I’ll see you don’t lose, Pat,” he said.  “You can figure out what profit you would have made on your contract if the ditch had been built and I’ll pay you that.  Then you can call off your crew.”

“Oh, I’ll let you down easy, Lee.  That wasn’t worrying me any,” was the rejoinder.  “I was just thinking——­” But his words broke off there, and he again gave his attention to the cigar wrapper that persisted in coming loose.

Bryant continued his gloomy cogitation.  The muscles of his cheeks moved in hard lumps beneath his fists as if he were champing some resistant substance.  Over his eyes his lids from time to time drooped sleepily.  But all at once he leaped up.

“If I but had something I could take hold of, Pat!” he exclaimed.  “Something I could lay hands on and move, like that bed of rock you uncovered!  So I could go ahead!  A law is so damned immaterial that one has nothing to work against.  It leaves a man nowhere, helpless.  It lifts him off the ground and holds him kicking futilely in the air.  Just that.  By God, I’m desperate enough to try anything—­to try building the ditch—­try whipping Menocal even under this moth-eaten law he’s dug up!”

Pat shut one eye against the smoke curling into it.

“I was speculating a little along the same line,” said he, slowly.

“But twelve miles of ditch in ninety days!  The whole mesa line!  We’d be crazy to think of it.  Let’s talk of something else.”

Lee’s mouth, nevertheless, was twitching, while gleams like light came and went on his face.