The men looked at him curiously, then at one another.  Ben was the first to move.

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, with a grin, lifting his hand from his hip to his forelock, and dropping it to his hip again as he walked away.  The others followed.

“Hold on!” cried Conniston, suddenly, before they had gone ten paces.  “Do all of the men know about this?”

The men laughed.  “They ain’t blind,” explained one of them.

“And do they know—­does any one of you know—­where he got the whisky?”

They shrugged their shoulders.  Only the Lark answered.

“I know, pal,” he said, slowly.  “I seen it.”

“All right.  You wait a minute.  I want to talk with you.  You other fellows get busy.”

The little San-Franciscan dropped back and waited.  Conniston came up with him and demanded shortly: 

“Tell me about it.”

“It was last night, ’bo, about ’leven o’clock, I guess.  It was sure some dark, too, take it from me.  I woke up thirsty as a water-front bum, an’ beat it for the water-barrel.  Comin’ back, I come past the tent.  Bat was in there figgerin’ when I went to the wagon.  When I come back he was talkin’ to another guy.  I stops an’ listens, just for fun, you know.  The other guy I hadn’t never saw.  An’ he said as how Mr. Crawford had sent him out to ask how everything was runnin’.  Purty soon he puts a bottle on the table an’ says, ‘Have one?’ Bat says ‘No,’ but you could see with one eye shut an’ in the dark o’ the moon as he wanted it worse ’n I’d wanted the water I walked clean over to the barrel to git.  The stranger has one, an’ fills a glass an’ shoves it under Bat’s nose.  An’ if any longshoreman I ever seen had saw the way ol’ Bat put that red-eye under his vest he’d ‘a’ died with jealousy.  I knowed as how there wouldn’t be nothin’ in it for me, so I went an’ got another drink of water an’ hit the rag-pile.  That what you wanted to know, ’bo?”

“Who was the man?” Conniston insisted.  “What did he look like?”

“That’s dead easy.  I’m sure the gumshoe when it comes to pipin’ a man off so’s I got his photograph in my eye.  He was a little cuss an’ dressed to kill, with gloves on, an’ all that.  He was skinny an’ pale an’ weak-eyed-lookin’.”

“That will do!” cut in Conniston, brusquely.  “And now get your men going.  We’ve got a day’s work ahead of us.”

A little more than fifteen minutes later Conniston himself pounded one of the cook’s pans as a summons to breakfast.  The cook, surly, glowering as he moved, set forth the big pots of coffee.

Less than half an hour after he had ridden into the idle camp Conniston saw the two hundred men resume their work of yesterday as though nothing unusual had happened, saw the teams string out in the four sections of the ditch where Truxton had left off, watched the long lines of scrapers and plows cutting into the soft soil, scooping it out and piling it upon the banks of the canal.