between the rows of cottonwoods toward the house. But Bryant did not
at once start for camp. His mind was busy with pictures--pictures of
the two girls as he first had seen them at Perro Creek, and at their
cabins afterward, and finally to-night: Imogene, weak and racked by a
cough and huddling in a quilt beside her sheet-iron stove, and Ruth in
her own cabin, standing in the lamplight in her pink party dress with
round arms and throat showing through its filmy gauze, unconcerned and
intent upon her own ends.

At last he glanced up at the impenetrable sky. Something soft and wet
had floated against his cheek. Then he saw here and there in the
funnel of light projected by his car lamps what looked like solitary
bits of white down sinking through the radiance. Snow!

CHAPTER XXVIII

The first flakes were but the precursors of a heavy fall of snow that
almost immediately began, soundless, without wind, filling the air and
whitening the earth, and that was still continuing unabated two hours
later. It mantled the shoulders of the workmen and the withers of the
horses; it clogged the wheels of the fresnos so that dirt was moved
with ever-increasing difficulty; it veiled the flaring gasolene
torches and choked the night. Where a plow ran or a scraper scooped
earth, snow speedily obliterated the mark, and with the passing of
time both men and animals found it necessary to struggle more and more
desperately in the dirt cut against mud and snow and gloom.

Carrigan contracted his working line, placing the torches at shorter
intervals and keeping the scrapers in close succession. The foremen
informed him frequently that the men were growing exhausted and
rebellious, but he ordered them to hold the crews at the task. He and
Bryant moved to and fro constantly, giving encouragement or lending a
hand to help start a stalled fresno. By sheer power of their wills
they were combatting the snow, forcing the work ahead, deepening the
stretch of excavation that had been opened that afternoon; by iron
determination they were wrenching out the last spadeful of earth
possible and exacting the final ounce of man power before the snow had
its way.

The strange warmth continued. The temperature was not even down to
freezing and the men, muddied and wet to the knees, dripped with
perspiration, while the horses' flanks were soaked with both sweat and
melted snow. It was difficult to breathe, what with the heavy,
oppressive air and wh