“It has got you, too!” she cried, softly.  “You are as enthusiastic already as Tommy Garton is.  I wonder if you realized it?  And I wonder,” her eyes again upon the fading colors in the west, the smile gone out of them, “what it would mean to you if, after all, our dream came to nothing, if it proved that we were more daring than wise, if we lost everything where we are staking everything?”

“I have been a small, unnecessary cog in a great machine for only a week,” he told her, slowly.  “And yet you will know that I am telling you the plain truth when I say that such a failure would bring to me the biggest disappointment I have ever felt.  Failure,” he cried, sharply, as though he had but grasped the full significance of the word after he himself had employed it—­“there won’t be failure at the end of it for us!  There can’t be.  It means too much.  I tell you that we are going to drive the thing to a successful conclusion.  It’s got to be!”

“Yes,” she repeated, quietly, after him, “it has got to be.  I don’t doubt the outcome for one single second.  Down in my heart I know.  And I know, too, how much there is yet to be done, how much you men have to contend with, how swiftly the time is slipping by us.  Do you realize, Mr. Conniston, how little time we have ahead of us before the first of October?”

“Yes, I know.  And there are four miles of main canal to dig, mile after mile of smaller cross ditches, to irrigate the land after we get the water here, and two dams to complete.”  He got to his feet, his cigar again forgotten, his eyes frowning down upon her.  “Truxton is right.  We’ve got to get more men—­many more men.  And we’ve got to get them in a hurry.”

“Father, when he comes to-night, will know about the men we have been expecting from Denver.  He has been all day in Crawfordsville.  What do you think of Bat Truxton?”

“He is a good man who knows his business.  He is a skilful, practical engineer, and he knows how to get every ounce of power out of the men under him.  He is as much the man for the place as if he and the job had been created for each other.”

She was now standing with him, watching his face eagerly.

“Have you noticed,” she asked, quietly—­through the gathering dusk he thought that he could see a faint shadow upon her face which was not a part of the thickening night—­“any sort of change in the man since you went to work with him?”

Conniston hesitated, frowning, before he answered.  “He has been irritable,” he finally admitted, with slow reluctance.  “But the reason is not far to seek and does not discredit him.  He is heart and soul in this work, Miss Crawford.  Like all of us—­you, your father, Tommy Garton, me—­I think that he feels his responsibility heavily, very heavily.  And when day after day rushes by and finds the work far from being finished, and he has to have more men, and the men don’t come—­good heavens! isn’t it enough to make a man restive?”