“So Mrs. McDonnell told me.  Just before I left I called at their cabins again.  But I had no more luck that time than the first; they were away somewhere.  Well,” she concluded, with a smile, “perhaps the third time will win; that’s the rule.  I’ll go another time soon.”

“You’ll like them, I’m sure.  They’re both charming, I think.  Unusual girls.”

“I’ll go soon,” she repeated.

“My desire possibly will be understood by you,” said he, after a slight hesitation, “when I say that Miss Gardner and I are engaged to be married.  So it would please me immensely if you two became good friends.”

Louise Graham showed some surprise.  But this immediately changed to smiling interest.

“Accept my congratulations, Mr. Bryant,” she said.  “You may count on our being friends.  Hereafter she and Miss Martin must come to our ranch whenever they will.  I suppose they ride up where you are nearly every day; Miss Gardner, in particular, must be tremendously devoted to your project and now tremendously excited, too, over your race against time.  Who wouldn’t be, in her place!”

“Naturally,” said Lee, with all the heartiness he could muster in his voice.  But to himself, at least, his tone rang hollow.

When an hour or so after they had finished their meal they alighted from their Pullmans at Kennard, the echo of his forced reply still sounded in his mind with persistent irony.  He was glad he had an interview with McDonnell before him that would silence it, the negotiating of a large private loan.

CHAPTER XVI

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.