Brayley was driving the work in the Valley now.  Tommy Garton had his new legs from Chicago, and from the seat of a buckboard, sometimes from the ground where his crutches sank into the soft sand, he advised Brayley and watched the work.  Conniston was in the mountains, and the Lark with fifty men was with him.

Once in Deep Creek, with the site of Dam Number One before him, Conniston studied long before he gave the order to the Lark to begin work.  Here were the stakes of Truxton’s survey, here were the foundations already laid, here was a nature-made dam-site.  He had not needed the stakes to show him the spot.  And still he hesitated.

Here, where plans had been made for the chief dam, Deep Creek belied its name.  It ran clear and untroubled over a gentle slope, widening out until from edge to edge of the water it measured close upon forty feet.  Still farther back upon either hand the sides of the canon stood in perpendicular walls thirty feet high.  Above the site the walls widened gradually until they formed a pocket, flat-bottomed, half a mile wide.  Still farther up the creek’s course these natural walls grew steadily closer together until perhaps three-eighths of a mile deeper in the canon they drew so close together that there was scarcely more than the width of an ordinary room between them.

It was this point—­the Lark had been here with Bat Truxton when the survey was made and called it the “Jaws”—­that inspired Conniston’s hesitation.  Here was a second dam-site, and not until he had studied both long and carefully, with a keen eye to advantage and disadvantage, did he give the word to begin work.

If it were only a question of a site, with time not an element to success, he would have chosen as Truxton had done and without a second’s doubt.  Had he had only to consider the building of a dam across Deep Creek in the shortest possible time, he would have chosen the site at the Jaws.  But the thing which he wanted now was the largest possible dam in the shortest possible time.  There was a pocket above the Jaws, but it was shorter, narrower.  And above it the creek-bed plunged downward, at times broken into perpendicular waterfalls, until, yonder at a sharp bend, the water as it now frothed through its narrow, rocky canon was on a level with the top of the Jaws.  He needed to take out water in vast quantities, countless millions of gallons of it, to turn into the ditches thirty miles away across the dry desert.

“The one question,” he told himself, as he stood upon a boulder whence he could overlook the two sites, “is, can I get the dam finished where Bat Truxton planned it—­get it done in time?”

And in the end he told himself that if the five hundred men came he could have his dam completed in time; and that if the five hundred men did not come the whole task before him was hopeless.  Then he waved his hand to the Lark, and the Lark shouted a command which set fifty idle men to work before the echoes of his voice had died away between the rocky walls of the canon.