Imogene put out a hand in protest.

“You know why, Lee; I’ve told you,” she said, earnestly.

“No more can I, for the same reason,” was his reply.  He turned and lifted his hat and gloves from the table.  “I will have no act of mine cut her adrift and push her under.  Much better to stand the gaff.  I suppose one hardens to anything in time.”  His look wandered about the room.  “And the diabolic part of it all is that this squeamish feeling of responsibility for another may achieve as much harm in the long run as its lack.  Who knows?”

He glanced at her as if expecting an answer.  Imogene remained silent; indeed, nothing need be said to so evident an enigma.  For that matter, nothing more said at all.  Bryant drew on his gloves and bade her good-night.  At the door he remarked, quite in his accustomed manner: 

“I’ll send Dave over in the morning with more blankets and have him chop some wood.  There’s a drop in the temperature coming.”

CHAPTER XX

The predicted cold weather came, bringing winter in earnest.  The frost went deeper into the ground and construction grew slower, but the days continued fine and without gales, those fierce and implacable winds that sometimes rage over the frozen mesa hours at a time under a dull, saffron sun, sharp as knives, shrieking like demons, and driving man and beast to cover.  They had not yet been unleashed.

Night work was begun, amid a flare of gasolene torches that gave a weird aspect to the plain.  The yellow lights; the moving, shadowy forms of the workmen and horses; the cries and shouts—­all made a scene gnome-like in character.  Frost gleamed upon the earth in a silvery sheen under the torches’ smoky flames.  The headquarters building and the mess tents now glowed from dusk until dawn.  Fires where workmen could warm their cheeks and hands were burning continually, fed from the great piles of wood brought from the mountains.  And so by day and by night, without halt and despite cold, the restless life was maintained and the toil kept going and the hard furrow driven ahead.

With the approach of Christmas the advance of the project was marked.  The dam was nearing completion, with its long, gently inclined, upstream face constructed of smooth cobbles—­a slope up which any vast and sudden rush of cloudburst water would slide unchecked to the crest and harmlessly pass over.  All of the drops, as well as the head-gate and flood weirs, were finished, standing as if hewn out of solid white stone.  The miners had blasted out a channel through the reef of rock, and gone.  From the dam the canal section all along the hillside and following the ridge, from drop to drop, and out to a point on the mesa a mile beyond, was excavated, a great clean ditch; while from Perro Creek the canal ran northward for six miles to the main camp, curving in the great arc that constituted its line.  Three and a half miles, and complements, constructed at one end; six miles at the other.  Between, five miles of unbroken mesa.  Seven weeks remained for the small camp working down from the north and the great camp pushing from the south to dig through those miles and meet—­seven weeks; but in the most bitter season of the year.