“You’re terribly good,” she repeated.
She watched the flowing river, swollen with wreckage. She saw, with comprehension, a section of a fence; somebody’s crop gone. There was a railway tie, another! The river was eating up Estrada’s new road-bed? A cry broke from her as a mesquit on the coffee-colored tide caught on a buried snag. The current swirled dangerously around it. Instantly, the water rose toward the top of the levee. Men came running to pry away the tree. A minute later, it was dancing down the stream. They raised the bank against the pressing lapping waves. There, the tree had stuck again. They ran down the levee with their long poles. Each time that happened, unless the obstruction were swiftly dislodged, she knew it meant an artificial fall somewhere, a quick scouring out of the channel. The men were working like silent parts of a big machine; the confusion of the first night was gone. From their faces one would not guess that their fortunes, their homes, hung on the subduing of that indomitable force which had not yet known defeat, which had turned back explorer and conquistador. Ah, there was the lurking fear of it! Victory still lay to its credit; the other column was blank.
“Mr. Parrish,” she called.
A man on the bank paused, shovel in hand.
She spurred her horse abreast of him.
“How is your wife?”
“Pretty bad. I had to leave her at midnight. I couldn’t get no one to stay with her. The women have to mind the ranches these days. She had a spell of her neuralgia. She couldn’t have come with me any way.” He was torn between his duty and his fears.
“When do you go back?”
“I don’t know. We are all needed here. Mexicali’s going. I’ll be lucky if I get sent back to-night.”
“It’s going down the Wistaria?”