farther that way would have--" He
stopped, swallowed hard, and rose unsteadily. "For God's sake, old man,
throw up this cursed job and get out of here, while you can do it
alive!"

"Not much!" said the new chief contemptuously. And then he asked which
of the two bunks in the adjoining sleeping-room was his.

VI

ELBOW CANYON

Ballard had his first appreciative view of his new field of labor before
breakfast on the morning following his arrival, with Bromley as his
sightsman.

Viewed in their entirety by daylight, the topographies appealed
irresistibly to the technical eye; and Ballard no longer wondered that
Braithwaite had overlooked or disregarded all other possible sites for
the great dam.

The basin enclosed by the circling foothills and backed by the forested
slopes of the main range was a natural reservoir, lacking only a
comparatively short wall of masonry to block the crooked gap in the
hills through which the river found its way to the lower levels of the
grass-lands.

The gap itself was an invitation to the engineer. Its rock-bound slopes
promised the best of anchorages for the shore-ends of the masonry; and
at its lower extremity a jutting promontory on the right bank of the
stream made a sharp angle in the chasm; the elbow which gave the outlet
canyon its name.

The point or crook of the elbow, the narrowest pass in the cleft, had
been chosen as the site for the dam. Through the promontory a short
tunnel was driven at the river-level to provide a diverting spillway for
the torrent; and by this simple expedient a dry river-bed in which to
build the great wall of concrete and masonry had been secured.

"That was Braithwaite's notion, I suppose?" said Ballard, indicating the
tunnel through which the stream, now at summer freshet volume, thundered
on its way around the building site to plunge sullenly into its natural
bed below the promontory. "Nobody but a Government man would have had
the courage to spend so much time and money on a mere preliminary. It's
a good notion, though."

"I'm not so sure of that," was Bromley's reply. "Doylan, the rock-boss,
tells a fairy-story about the tunnel that will interest you when you
hear it. He had the contract for driving it, you know."

"What was the story?"

Bromley laughed. "You'll have to get Mike to tell it, with the proper
Irish frills. But the gist of it is this: You know these hogback
hills--how they seem to be made up of all the geological