The Iron Furrow

by George C. Shedd

With his mind kindling to the idea Bryant rode northward next morning along the base of the mountains, studying the hillsides where a canal naturally should run, all the way up to the Pinas River. Afterward he reconnoitered the mesa, hitting at last on a slight elevation, hardly to be called a ridge, that projected from a hillside a mile below Bartolo and curved in a gentle crescent for about three miles from the range of mountains down the mesa, again bending in toward the hills close to the north line of the Perro Creek ranch.

Next, he absented himself for a week at the state capital, where he industriously studied the water and land records pertaining to the district. When he returned, he brought with him a surveying instrument and a boy for helper. He pitched a tent out of sight in a hollow at the foot of a hill, worked early and late running his lines, establishing a dam site, and surveying the river bottom near the mouth of Pinas Cañon, and remained practically unseen except by a few incurious Mexicans. His instrument proved the correctness of his conclusion regarding the crescent-shaped elevation as a practical grade for a canal, which though necessitating a longer course would nevertheless immensely lessen the time, expense, and difficulties of digging when compared with a line along the mountains' flanks with its danger of washouts and earth slides. Nor did he stop there. He made rapid but reliable topographical measurements, on a general scale, of the mesa for five miles out from the mountains, between Bartolo and Perro Creek, locating among other things a large depression in the plain, three miles southwest of the town, which might by diking be converted into a flood water reservoir. Then he folded his tent and again disappeared for a week. When, finally, he rode to Stevenson's ranch house that hot July afternoon and made a trade for the five thousand acres of land, he was the possessor of considerably more knowledge of the locality and its possibilities than any one would have guessed.

And now he was owner of the ranch and committed to the enterprise.

A few days after Bryant's visit to Bartolo Stevenson disposed of his sheep to Graham, the owner of the large ranch on Diamond Creek, loaded his household goods, except the stove and some of the furniture which the engineer bought, and with his wife and boy drove away in his sheep wagon for Kennard and for the new farm in Nebraska. Bryant's own effects—trunk, bedding, provisions, surveying instruments, draughting-board, and the like, came up from the railroad town by wagon, and with them the fourteen-year-old lad, Dave Morris, a gangling, long-legged boy extremely dependable and extraordinarily serious, who had carried rod for the engineer during the week of preliminary surveying.

The man and boy now attacked the canal line in earnest, with Bryant intent on establishing its course, location, and displacement exactly, so that he could make necessary blueprints and compile construction estimates. It was while they were working along the first mile of the line, where it ran from the Pinas River along the base of a hill to the low ridge that bore out upon the mesa, that they received their first interruption. The worst and most expensive part of the canal to build would be this section, and the engineer was therefore taking especial care in its surveying; near the river the line traversed several fenced tracts of ground extending part way up the hillside, fields owned by natives; and it was one of these Mexicans who slouched forward to the spot where Bryant and Dave worked and ordered them to get out of his field.

Bryant straightened up from sighting through his transit, and asked, "What's on your mind? What's disturbing your brain, hombre?"

"You get off," was the unkempt fellow's answer.

"Why?"

"You can't come on my ranch; get off."

The engineer pulled a map from his hip pocket—a copy made from one filed in the land commissioner's office thirty years previous. He spread it open before the Mexican.