To-day the telephone line had been completed to Valley City. All day he had looked forward to a talk with Argyl. Now he swept by the little office without lifting his head. He could not talk with her; he could not talk with Tommy Garton even. They would know soon enough, and they would know from other lips than his.
That night he slept little, but sat staring at the stars, searching stubbornly to find his lost hope, struggling over and over to see the way. And all that he could see was a long, dry, ugly cut in the desert, a vain, foolish, stupid thing; Mr. Crawford a ruined, broken man; Argyl smitten with sorrow and disappointment; himself the vanquished leader of a mad campaign; Oliver Swinnerton and his servitors flushed with victory. Still he fought to find the way, and shut his lips tight together, and strove to shut from his mind the pictures which his insistent fancy painted there. And when morning came and he walked to the dam which was taking form, pale, worn with the fatigue of the night after the fatigue of the day, he snapped out his orders half viciously, and watched with a hard smile while his handful of men resumed their mammoth task.
"Take it from me"—the Lark was regarding him curiously—"you better go git some sleep, or it's goin' to be a redwood box for yours."
The sun had just pushed a shining edge of its burning disk over the mountain-tops when Conniston suddenly cried out like a man awaking from the clutch of a frightful nightmare, and pointed with shaking finger to the road winding up the cañon.
"What's up, 'bo?" asked the Lark, swinging upon him.
"I don't know," Conniston said, harshly. "I—guess I'm just seeing things. Look!"
A wagon had crept around a turn in the road, and its long bed was close packed with the forms of men standing upright, their hands upon the back of the high seat or upon one another's shoulders to steady themselves as the wagon pitched and lurched over the ill-defined road. Around the bend another wagon, similarly loaded with a human freight which taxed the strength of four puffing horses, came into view. And behind that another and another—
"Am I seeing things?" snapped Conniston, his hand biting into the Lark's shoulder. "What is that?"
"Them," grunted the Lark, wriggling like an eel in Conniston's grip, "is your five hundred new guys, or I'm a liar! An' fergit you're the strong man in a sideshow doin' stunts with a rag doll—"
But Conniston did not hear him. Already he was running toward the wagons. And there was a light in his eyes which had not been there for many days. A little, youngish man, sandy of hair, with bird-like brightness of eye and the grin of a sanctified cherub, swung down from the seat of the foremost wagon, lifted his hand, thereby stopping the laboring procession, and came forward to meet Conniston.