Breakfast finished, the men dropped their cups and plates into one of two big tubs as they passed by the tent, their knives and forks into another, and went quietly and promptly to work. Each man had his duty and went about it without waiting to be told. They filled buckets at the water-barrels and watered their horses; they harnessed and hitched up to plows and scrapers; half a dozen of them hitched four horses to each of six of the wagons whose barrels had been emptied, and swung out across the plain toward the Half Moon for more water.
Truxton beckoned to Conniston and led him toward the south. And suddenly, coming about the foot of a little knoll, Conniston had his first glimpse of the main canal.
Here it was a great ditch, ten feet deep, thirty feet wide, its banks sloping, the earth which had been dragged out of it by the scrapers piled high upon each side in long mounds, like dikes. Truxton stood staring at it, his eyes frowning, his jaw set and stern.
"There she is, Conniston. A simple enough thing to look at, but so is the business end of a mule. This thing is goin' to make the Old Man a thousand times over—or it's goin' to break him in two like a rotten stick."
The workmen were coming up, driving their teams with dragging trace-chains to be hitched to the scrapers and big plows standing where they had quit work the night before. Truxton, tugging thoughtfully at his grizzled mustache, watched them a moment as they "hooked up" and dropped, one behind another, into a long, slow-moving procession, the great shovel-like scrapers scooping up ton after ton of the soft earth, dragging it up the slope where the end of the ditch was, wheeling and dumping it along the edge of the excavation, turning again, again going back down into the cut to scoop up other tons of dirt, again to climb the incline to deposit it upon the bank. Here Conniston counted forty-nine teams and forty-nine drivers. One man—it was the big Englishman with the scarred lip and cheek and the unsheathed knife—was standing ten feet away from the edge of the ditch, his great bare arms folded, watching.
"That's one of your foremen," Truxton said, his eyes following Conniston's. "Ben, his name is. He knows his business, too. He'll take care of this gang for you while you come along with me. I'll show you your other shift."
They followed a line marked by the survey stakes for a quarter of a mile past the camp. Here another fifty men were at work; and here, where the top of the sand had already been scraped away, a harder soil called for the use of the big plows before the scrapers could be of any use. The foreman here, a South-of-Market San-Franciscan by his speech, shouted a command to one of the drivers and came up to Truxton.
"Whatcher want to-day?" he demanded. "Ten foot?"
"Nine," Truxton told him, shortly. "Nine an' a half by the time you get to that first stake. Nine three-quarters at the second. Can you get that far to-day?"
The foreman turned a quid of tobacco, squinted his eye at the two stakes, and nodded.