The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-02-14

large. And little heap of sand | stacked up to scare 1t off It's screamI"
 Mrs. Hardin found 1t difficult to meet with diplomacy the condolences which inevitably came her way. AS Hardin's wife she was expected to en- joy the universal censure the new man was acquiring. Gerty's light touches, too slight for championship, passed as a sweet charity. Her own position those days was trying. She did not yet know her diplomatic lesson.
 Apparently unaware of the talk, Rickard spent the greater part of his time experimenting the levee. He could trust no one else to do it, no one unless it were Estrada, who was rushing his steel rails through to the front and was needed there.
 Things were moving under his con- stant goading. The extra pay was showing results. He should be at the Heading now, he kept telling himself, but he was convinced that the instant he turned his back, the work on the levee would stop; and all the reasons excellent! Some emergency would be cooked up to warrant the withdrawal of the hands. Chafe as he might at the situation, it was to be guerrilla warfare. Not 0 fight In the open, he knew how to meet that, but that baf- fling resistance, the polite silence of the office when he entered-"Well they'll be doing my way pretty soon, or my name isn't Rickard. That's flat"
 He was fretting to be at work, to start the wheels of the o. P, its vast machinery toward his problem. He knew that that organization, like we'll drilled militia, was ready for his call. The call Jagged, not that he did not need men, but there was no place ready for them. The camp, that was another rub. There was no campl It was not equipped for a sudden infia- tion of men. The ineficiency of the projectors of this desert scheme had never seemed so criminal as when he had surveyed the equipment at the in- take. Get ready first; your tools, your stoves, your beds" That was the training of the good executive, of men like Marshall and MacLean. Nothing to be left to chance; to foresee emer- gencies, not to be taken by them un- aware. The reason of Hardin's down. fall was his slipshod habits. How could he be a good officer who had never drilled as a soldier? There was the gap at the intake, Hardin's grotesque folly, widened from one hundred feet to ten times the original cut; widening every day, with neither equipment nor camp adequate to push through work of half the original magnitude. Gut ting away, moreover, was the island, Disaster island; 1t had received apt christening by the engineers, it's bap- tismal water the Colorado. The last floods had played with it as though 1t were a bar of sugar. There was no rock at hand; no rock on the way, no rock ordered. Could anyone piece to- gether such recklessness?
 Rickard knew where he would get his rock. Already he had requisitioned the entire output of the Tacna and Patagonia quarries. He had ordered steam shoveIs to be installed at the quarry back of old Hamlin's. That rock pit would be his first crutch, and the gravel bed-that was a fndl As he paced the leYee west of the towns he was planning his campaign. Por- ter was securing zacatecas for men he himself had offered, as bait, free transportation the 0. P. he knew would back him. He was going tc throw out a spur track from the Head ing, touching at the quarry and gravel pit, on to the main road at Yuma Double track most of the way; sidings every three miles. Rock must bt rushed; the trains must be pushed through. He itched to begin. It never occurred to him that, like Hardin, ht might fail.
 Though It's no pink tea" he tolt himself, fits no picnic" At Tucsor he knew that the situation was : grave one, but his talk with Brandon who knew his river as does a good In dian, made the year a significant eyentfuI one. Matt Hamlin, too, whose shrewd eyes had grown river-Wise, he too, had had tales to tell Of the trick! river MaldOpadO inc half-breed ha(