“Now,” RoBards announced to his clients, “Now we’ve got the old wolf by the throat. His teeth and claws are falling out and he’ll have to let go of us as he is letting go of everything else.”
But this was not to be. The great aqueduct that was to rival the works of Rome offered the despondent town a vision and a pride it needed and would not relinquish. It seemed all the more splendid to defy the hardship of the times and rear an edifice that would defy time. If the city were to be buried in poverty, it would at least have left a monument above its head.
Even RoBards could not resist the fire of this resolve. After all he was an American, and New York was the American metropolis. And, besides, he was a lawyer and he loved an opponent who knew how to fight and had the guts to fight hard.
And so the embattled farmers of Westchester knuckled to the inevitable, and the construction of the aqueduct began in the very hour of the general disaster.
The legislature at Albany had all along been coerced by the members from New York City. It had made no difficulty about granting a right of way across the lands of the State Prison.
Through this unhappy territory went the Sing Sing Kill, and the kidnapped Croton River must be conveyed across that brook on a great stone bridge, with an arch of eighty-foot span, and twenty-five-foot rise with stout abutments of stone.
In the allotments of the first thirteen sections of construction, Harry Chalender secured the Sing Sing field. RoBards would have been glad to see him inside the walls of the penitentiary, or in one of the chained gangs that constructed roads thereabout.
But Patty was afraid that some of the desperate convicts might attack him, and she was as anxious for him as if he had gone to war.
CHAPTER XI
One day, while sinking an exploratory shaft, Chalender came upon a vein of the snowflake marble that underlay that region. He bored a tunnel through this frost that had become stone; and laid a royal pavement for the rural Croton to march upon to town.