It seemed that it was with infinitely greater effort that the two sections of the canals were forced ahead each day.  The surface of the ground was like stone, only by repeated attempts pierced by plows and torn apart; while the subsoil immediately froze if left unworked.  The weaker labourers began to break:  the scrawny Mexicans, the debilitated white men, the drifters and the dissatisfied; and they left the camps.  These the labour agencies found it harder and harder to replace as the cold weather persisted, so that the force showed a considerable diminishment.

A few days before Christmas Gretzinger paid Bryant a visit.  He had not been to camp for a week and therefore on this occasion examined the progress of work with care, studying the rate of excavation and calculating the result.

“You’ll just about make it through, Bryant, if nothing happens to put a crimp in your advance,” he stated when he was about to take his departure from the office, where he and Lee conferred.

“Yes,” said Bryant.

“And if anything should happen, then good-bye canal.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” said Lee, calmly.

Gretzinger ignored this reply.  He thrust an arm into his fur-lined overcoat and began to draw it on.  That evening he was leaving Kennard for New York, and now was desirous of returning to town by noon, where he had a luncheon engagement with Ruth Gardner.  He had casually mentioned to Bryant that the girls had gone the day before to the McDonnells for the holidays.

“My people were certainly handed a phony deal here,” he remarked shortly, as he buttoned the coat collar about his throat.  “Questionable title to the water!  Extravagance and poor management!  Rotten project all through!  If I had lined this thing up, I should have learned what I actually had before a cent was expended.  But of course if the thing goes smash, we in the East have to stand the loss; you’re losing no cash, you have nothing in it but a shoestring.  Well, I’m expecting you to put your back into the job and do no loafing and pull us out of the hole you’ve got us into.”

Bryant’s face remained impassive.

“I’ll attend to my end,” said he, “if the bondholders take care of theirs.  They’ll have to dig up more cash.”

“What’s that!”

“More money, I said.”

“They’ll see you in hell before they do.”

“Then that’s where they’ll look for payment of their bonds.  You’re not fool enough, are you, to imagine a system can be built in winter and under high pressure for what it could be constructed in summer and not in haste?  Strange the idea never occurred to you before—­you, Gretzinger, irrigation expert, though you never saw an irrigation ditch till you came West.  The sixty thousand dollars from bonds and twenty thousand more I’ve put with it will be gone sometime next month.  Possibly I can stretch it out to the first of February.  After that, the bondholders will have to come forward to save their investment.”