Under the noon-day sun the top ground even softened a little.

The camps awoke, the rested men and horses fell upon their task with new spirit, and excavation went ahead steadily.

If there had been a full force, as Carrigan pointed out, he could have moved at the rate of a mile in six days instead of in eight.

Still the canal was being built, yard by yard, rod by rod, until by the middle of January another mile of the total was finished.

The two camps were now easily within sight of each other, the larger in the south, the smaller in the north, and but three miles apart across the sagebrush.