"I've been at this kind of work 'most all my life, and that's 'bout how I would fix it," said the other man.
"Well," said Brooke, "there's just another point. Once you get started, you'll go right on, and there'll be very little sleep for any one until it's done, but we'll credit you with half extra on every hour's time in the pay-bill."
The man laughed and waved his hand. "You needn't worry 'bout that. I guess the boys will see you through," he said.
He disappeared into the rain, and the struggle commenced when he came back with the men. There were but a handful of them in all, and their task appeared almost beyond accomplishment, even to those born in a country where man and Nature unsubdued come to the closest grapple, and human daring and endurance must make head against the tremendous forces that unloose the rivers and slowly grind the ranges down. It is a continuous struggle, primitive and elemental, in which brute strength and the animal courage that plies axe and drill with worn-out muscle and bleeding hands plays at least an equal part with ingenuity, for man has arrayed against him sun and frost, roaring water, crushing ice, and sliding snow; and those who fall in it lie thick by towering trestle bridge and along each railroad track. Worn out, aching in every limb, and with heavy eyes, Brooke braced himself to bear his part in it.
For three days they toiled with pick and shovel and clinking drill, and the roar of the blasting charges shook the wet hillside, but while the trenches deepened slowly the water rose. By night the big fires snapped and sputtered, and the feeble lanterns blinked through the rain, while wild figures, stained with mire and dripping water, moved amidst the smoke, and those who dragged themselves out of the workings lay down on the wet ground for a brief hour's sleep. Brooke, however, so far as he could afterwards remember, did not close his eyes at all, and where his dripping figure appeared the shovels swung more rapidly, and the ringing of the drills grew a trifle louder. The pace was, however, too fierce to last, and, though even the men who work for another toil strenuously in that land, it was evident to him that while their task was less than half-done, they could not sustain it long.
Baffled in one direction, he had also changed his plans, for the ridge was singularly hard to cut through, even with giant powder, and he had withdrawn most of the men from it and sent them to the trench, which would, he hoped, afford a passage to, at least, part of the water that must eventually come down upon the mine. It was late on the third night when it became evident that this would very shortly happen, and he sat, wet through and very weary, in his tent on the hillside, when Jimmy and another man came in.
"Water's riz another foot since sundown, and I guess there's lakes of it ready to come down yonder," said the miner, who stretched out a wet hand, and pointed towards the dripping canvas above him, though Brooke surmised that he intended to indicate the range. "So far as I could make out, there's quite a forest of smashed-up logs sailing along to pile up in the jam."
Brooke lifted a wet, grey face, and blinked at him with half-closed eyes.
"Then I'm afraid there are only two courses open to us," he said. "We can wait until the jam breaks up, when there'll be water enough to fill the Dayspring up and wash the plant above ground right down into the cañon, or we must try to cut it now."
"And turn the lake loose on us with the trench 'bout half big enough to take it away?" said Jimmy.