In fact, the nights while remaining clear were hardening.  The mercury in the tube sank by possibly a degree every two nights, at last touching zero; and it correspondingly failed to arise by as much at noon.  The days were cruelly short.  Darkness lasted until eight in the morning; it dropped down again at five.  The frost crept deeper into the earth.

But construction advanced.  The dam of brush and uncemented smooth brown stones, stretching across the Pinas, was gradually rising.  The hillside section of ditch through the fields was finished and only the miners continued at the granite reef, the ring of their hammers on drills going steadily and the roar of the shots now and again booming out at nightfall.  Excavation went forward in the spaces between the drops on the ridge leading forth upon the mesa.  The carpenters had finished and returned to Kennard.  The concrete gang had moved their mixer from the dam to the drops, for the intake gate and its accompanying flood weir were made, and Bryant had had their wooden frames knocked off so that the structures stood white and imposing beside the dam, like pillars of accomplishment.  From Perro Creek the main camp had moved toward the northwest on the arc it must pursue, until its tents touched the horizon and the clean yellow trench, fifteen feet wide at the bottom, thirty feet wide at the top, and five feet deep, with its flanking embankments, alone was left behind, a forced and undeviating course through the sagebrush, the water way driven by a determined man.

CHAPTER XVII

Meanwhile Lee, under relentless pressure of work, saw less and less of Ruth.  She had come a number of times at the beginning of the drive, sometimes with Gretzinger, sometimes with Imogene, to watch the feverish spectacle on the mesa; as had Louise Graham, her father, and at rare intervals Mr. McDonnell.  Bryant, on his part, had gone evenings to Sarita Creek when he could spare an hour, and, for that matter, when he could not.  But the meetings with her were infrequent, and always left him with a sense of inadequacy, of dissatisfaction, because partly Ruth and he seemed to have no common interests and partly that she now let her affection go for granted.  Her talk was not of the subjects usually discussed by an engaged couple—­of their coming marriage (though no date had been fixed) and a home and prospective joys together; it dealt wholly with amusements, dances, friends at Kennard.  And though her own eyes glistened at the recital, Lee’s lost their light and his speech was quenched.  For his was the role of an outsider.

Certain friendships that she maintained, moreover, were exceedingly distasteful to him.

“Ruth, I’ve nothing against your going around so much with Gretzinger,” he said one evening, “except that I don’t like the fellow and believe he’s crooked, and it may, under the circumstances, create gossip.”