Never had Conniston seen a crowd of men like these.  There were Americans there, and from the broken bits of conversation which floated to him he knew that they hailed from east, west, north, and south.  There were Hungarians, Slavonians, Swedes—­heavy, stolid, slow-moving men whose knowledge of the English language rose and set in “damn” and “hell.”  There were Chinamen and Japs—­a dozen of the slant-eyed, yellow-faced Orientals—­the Chinamen all big, gaunt men with their queues coiled about their heads.  There were Italians, the lower class known to the West as “Dagoes.”  And almost to the last man of them they were the hardest-faced men he had ever seen.

There was a big, loose-limbed giant of an Englishman who walked like a sailor, who carried a great white scar across his cheek and upper lip, and who wore a long unscabbarded knife swinging from his belt.  There was a wiry little Frenchman who showed a deep scar at the base of his throat, from which his shirt was rolled back, and who snarled like a cat when another man accidentally trod upon his foot.  Conniston saw a dozen faces scarred as though by knife-cuts; twisted, evil faces; dark, scowling faces; faces lined by unbridled passions; brutal, heavy-jawed faces.

But if their faces showed the handiwork of the devil, from their chins down they were men cast in the mold of the image of God.  From the biggest Dane standing close to six feet six inches to the smallest Jap less than five feet tall, they were men of iron and steel.  Quick-eyed, quick-footed, hard, they were the sort of men to drive the fight against the desert.

Breakfast finished, the men dropped their cups and plates into one of two big tubs as they passed by the tent, their knives and forks into another, and went quietly and promptly to work.  Each man had his duty and went about it without waiting to be told.  They filled buckets at the water-barrels and watered their horses; they harnessed and hitched up to plows and scrapers; half a dozen of them hitched four horses to each of six of the wagons whose barrels had been emptied, and swung out across the plain toward the Half Moon for more water.

Truxton beckoned to Conniston and led him toward the south.  And suddenly, coming about the foot of a little knoll, Conniston had his first glimpse of the main canal.

Here it was a great ditch, ten feet deep, thirty feet wide, its banks sloping, the earth which had been dragged out of it by the scrapers piled high upon each side in long mounds, like dikes.  Truxton stood staring at it, his eyes frowning, his jaw set and stern.

“There she is, Conniston.  A simple enough thing to look at, but so is the business end of a mule.  This thing is goin’ to make the Old Man a thousand times over—­or it’s goin’ to break him in two like a rotten stick.”