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.

The materials he should require--the lumber for the great flume which
was to turn the water from the weir into the cut which was to be made
across the spine of the ridge separating Deep Creek from the wider
canon through which Indian Creek shot down upon the uplands of the
Half Moon, the kegs of giant powder, the horses and implements--he had
brought with him or had conveyed hither yesterday from Crawfordsville.
He knew that in a very few days now the main canal would be completed,
stretching like a mammoth serpent over the five miles of rolling
hills through which it twisted intricately to avoid rocky ridges and
knolls to follow natural hollows; that when at last Dam Number One
should be an actuality of stone and mortar, with the water rising high
above the flood-gates through which he could send it hissing and
boiling into the flume, the way was open to shake his victorious fist
in the face of nature itself, to drive water across thirty miles of
desert and into the heart of Rattlesnake Valley.

Upon one thing Conniston had set his heart before he had been