"Six hours more," said Duncan, looking at his watch. "Only six hours between us and triumph. Only six hours—and we must lose all, simply because the men are done up."
"We'll do it yet," answered young Temple.
"We never can. Those fellows are done for, I tell you. I know the symptoms. They've lost their morale, lost the ambition for success. I've seen soldiers fall in precisely that way, too far gone even to shelter themselves from a cannonade."
For the first time in his life, Guilford Duncan realized that there is such a thing as the Impossible. For the first time, he recognized the fact that there may be things which even courage and determination cannot achieve.
The simple fact was that the long strain had at last begun to tell, even upon his resolute spirit. For three days and nights now he had not slept. For three days and nights he had not sat down. For three days and nights he had been wading in water and struggling in mud, and exhausting all his resources of mind and character in efforts to stimulate the men to continued endeavor.
He was playing for a tremendous stake, as we know. His career, his future, all that he had ever dreamed of of ambition, hung upon success or failure in this undertaking, and now at last, and in spite of his heroic struggle, failure stared him in the face.
And apart from these considerations of self-interest, there were other and higher things to be thought of. If he failed now, an enterprise must be lost in which he had labored for a year to induce others to invest millions. If he failed, the diversion of this railroad from its original course must become an accomplished fact, to the ruin of his adopted city and the paralysis of growth in all that region, for perhaps ten years to come. Thus his own career, the millions of other men's money, which had been risked upon faith in his power to achieve, and, worst of all, the development of all this fair, but very backward region—all of good to others, of which he had dreamed, and for which he had hoped and toiled—depended upon his success or failure in keeping two hundred utterly worn-out men at work in the rain, the water, and the mud, for six hours more.
At last, this resolute man, whose courage had seemed unconquerable, was discouraged.
"Might as well give it up," said Will Hallam. "The men simply will not work any longer."
"It isn't a case of will not, but of cannot," answered Duncan.