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. The gang, now beginning to pour concrete behind the carpenters, caught the infection of his ardor. Foreman and crew on the hillside section, at his word that they had the most difficult part of the dirt work, toiled the harder. The other engineers promised to give him their best and gave him more. And in the main 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.