night. At the door he remarked, quite in his accustomed manner:

"I'll send Dave over in the morning with more blankets and have him
chop some wood. There's a drop in the temperature coming."

CHAPTER XX

The predicted cold weather came, bringing winter in earnest. The frost
went deeper into the ground and construction grew slower, but the days
continued fine and without gales, those fierce and implacable winds
that sometimes rage over the frozen mesa hours at a time under a dull,
saffron sun, sharp as knives, shrieking like demons, and driving man
and beast to cover. They had not yet been unleashed.

Night work was begun, amid a flare of gasolene torches that gave a
weird aspect to the plain. The yellow lights; the moving, shadowy
forms of the workmen and horses; the cries and shouts--all made a
scene gnome-like in character. Frost gleamed upon the earth in a
silvery sheen under the torches' smoky flames. The headquarters
building and the mess tents now glowed from dusk until dawn. Fires
where workmen could warm their cheeks and hands were burning
continually, fed from the great piles of wood brought from the
mountains. And so by day and by night, without halt and despite cold,
the restless life was maintained and the toil kept going and the hard
furrow driven ahead.

With the approach of Christmas the advance of the project was marked.
The dam was nearing completion, with its long, gently inclined,
upstream face constructed of smooth cobbles--a slope up which any vast
and sudden rush of cloudburst water would slide unchecked to the crest
and harmlessly pass over. All of the drops, as well as the head-gate
and flood weirs, were finished, standing as if hewn out of solid white
stone. The miners had blasted out a channel through the reef of rock,
and gone. From the dam the canal section all along the hillside and
following the ridge, from drop to drop, and out to a point on the mesa
a mile beyond, was excavated, a great clean ditch; while from Perro
Creek the canal ran northward for six miles to the main camp, curving
in the great arc that constituted its line. Three and a half miles,
and complements, constructed at one end; six miles at the other.
Between, five miles of unbroken mesa. Seven weeks remained for the
small camp working down from the north and the great camp pushing from
the south to dig through those miles and meet--seven weeks; but in the
most bitter season of the year.

It seemed that it wa