He cast his eyes about at the strings of evergreen and the suspended red bells and holly wreaths.
"I'll run down again, if I may, before the holidays are over," said he. "If only for another look at those things. They give a fellow a pull—out of the ditch, so to speak." And he rose.
"Come, by all means," Louise replied, with a nod.
CHAPTER XXII[ToC]
A week of twenty-below-zero weather opened the month of January and halted work on the mesa. At that time four miles of canal remained to be dug. Bryant and Pat Carrigan sat by the stove in Lee's shack and waited, as the whole camp waited, for the thermometer to rise. On one of these mornings, when Dave had gone across the street to the engineers' building, Lee informed the contractor that company funds were not far from exhausted and related his talk with Gretzinger before the latter's departure for New York.
"So he would squeeze you out," Pat remarked. "What you might expect from him, nothing more! I've had the notion for some time that your cash was getting low, from the way the money has gone."
"I've spent five thousand on engineering, medical, and general accounts," Lee stated, "twenty thousand on concrete work, and paid you forty thousand. I've fifteen thousand left from the sale of bonds and a personal loan I obtained from McDonnell. That will pay for about two weeks' work. And I think we've made every dollar go as far as it would under the circumstances."