ain camp at Perro Creek Pat Carrigan
extracted the last ounce of effort from man and beast.

In Kennard Bryant had said to McDonnell, "Give me a good man for this
end, one who can work twenty hours a day." And the banker had given
him such an one: a short, bow-legged clerk with a pugnacious jaw, who
took the typewritten list of Bryant's immediate requirements, read it,
jerked on his hat, and bolted out of the door. He it was who kept the
road north from Kennard a-jiggle with freight wagons.

The fierce struggle against time became generally known. Ranchers
visited the mesa for a sight of the toiling camps. Wagonloads of
Mexican families, curious, observant, came and went. Automobile
parties from Kennard and elsewhere made inspection trips to the spot.
Even a journalist representing a Denver paper appeared, made
photographs, and obtained an interview from Bryant consisting of
"Finish it on time? Certainly. Can't talk any longer." Which, together
with the pictures and the special writer's account, filled a page of a
Sunday issue.

The anxiety ever in Bryant's and Carrigan's minds was of that grim and
implacable enemy, cold. Autumn had lasted amazingly; November yielded
to December, with the days still fine; but who could tell when the
white spectre, Winter, would lay his icy hand upon the earth? The
peaks and upper slopes of the mountains were already mantled with
snow. Each morning the engineer and the contractor marked with care
the fall of the thermometer during the night, examined the frost upon
the grass and tested its depth in the soil. They watched the barometer
like hawks. They observed every cloud along the Ventisquero Range.
They studied the wind, the sun, the sky. But the weather held fair. So
calm was the air that at times sounds of the dynamite blasts at the
granite outshoot, where a pair of miners were clearing a path for the
canal, came travelling down to Perro Creek.

"The Lord surely has his arms around us," said Pat, one morning.

Bryant nodded, but Dave spoke up, "A cattleman who went by here
yesterday, an old-timer, said: 'When December's clear, then January's
drear.'"

"And an old-timer once told me that same thing when I was building a
railroad grade in Kansas," Pat remarked, "and I had to ship in
palm-leaf fans and ice to keep my 'paddies' from fainting with the
January heat." A slight exaggeration, to be sure, but showing the old
contractor's contempt for wise saws pertaining to weather. Yet