The workmen were coming up, driving their teams with dragging trace-chains to be hitched to the scrapers and big plows standing where they had quit work the night before.  Truxton, tugging thoughtfully at his grizzled mustache, watched them a moment as they “hooked up” and dropped, one behind another, into a long, slow-moving procession, the great shovel-like scrapers scooping up ton after ton of the soft earth, dragging it up the slope where the end of the ditch was, wheeling and dumping it along the edge of the excavation, turning again, again going back down into the cut to scoop up other tons of dirt, again to climb the incline to deposit it upon the bank.  Here Conniston counted forty-nine teams and forty-nine drivers.  One man—­it was the big Englishman with the scarred lip and cheek and the unsheathed knife—­was standing ten feet away from the edge of the ditch, his great bare arms folded, watching.

“That’s one of your foremen,” Truxton said, his eyes following Conniston’s.  “Ben, his name is.  He knows his business, too.  He’ll take care of this gang for you while you come along with me.  I’ll show you your other shift.”

They followed a line marked by the survey stakes for a quarter of a mile past the camp.  Here another fifty men were at work; and here, where the top of the sand had already been scraped away, a harder soil called for the use of the big plows before the scrapers could be of any use.  The foreman here, a South-of-Market San-Franciscan by his speech, shouted a command to one of the drivers and came up to Truxton.

“Whatcher want to-day?” he demanded.  “Ten foot?”

“Nine,” Truxton told him, shortly.  “Nine an’ a half by the time you get to that first stake.  Nine three-quarters at the second.  Can you get that far to-day?”

The foreman turned a quid of tobacco, squinted his eye at the two stakes, and nodded.

“Sure thing,” he said.

And then he turned on his heel and went back to the point he had quit, yelling his orders as he went.

“Another good man,” Truxton muttered.  “Thank the Lord, we’ve got some of them you couldn’t beat if you went a thousand miles for ’em.”

Still farther on was the third gang, and beyond that the fourth.  These hundred men were at work on the “Seven Knolls.”  And there Truxton himself would superintend the work to-day.  He stopped and stood with Conniston upon one of the mounds, from which they could see all that was being done.  And with slow, thoughtful carefulness he told Conniston all that he could of the work in detail.

“You do a good deal of watchin’ to-day,” he ended.  “Ben an’ the Lark—­that’s what they call that little cuss bossin’ the second gang—­listen to him whistle an’ you’ll know why—­know well what to do.  Right now an’ right here the work’s dead easy, Conniston.  Only don’t go an’ let ’em drive you in a hole where you have to admit you don’t know.  You’ve got to know.”