The word of big wages ran everywhere.
The drive was on.
By the dam and on the tongue of ground extending from the mountain side where the canal would swing out upon the mesa, excavation for the intake gate and weir and the drops was in progress, with a crew of carpenters swiftly erecting wooden forms to receive the concrete when the diggers finished and retired.

On the mesa half a dozen young engineers, using Bryant's notes and fixed points, ran anew the ditch line and set grade stakes.

North of Perro Creek white tents gleamed in the sunshine; and beyond these a swarm of men and horses gashed a yellow streak in the mesa, ever extending as the days passed--cutting sagebrush, ripping through sod, flinging up earth with plow and scraper.
Yes, the fight was on.

The fight to secure and keep horses, to get and hold workmen, to feed and use them both mercilessly, to press them ahead like a shaft of steel, to drive them forward under lash, mile by mile, rod by rod, foot by foot, forcing a channel through the resistant earth and across the mesa--a fight to outwit frost, to outstrip time, to outreach and overcome the impossible.
Bryant himself was everywhere, now at the dam, now with the carpenters, now at Perro Creek.

Morgan, in charge of the north camp, succumbed to Bryant's own restless energy and matched it.