In a dark canyon drab bars of silt stretched like gigantic crocodiles upon the river’s bed, with the shiny humps of moss-slimed bowlders in between. Rosy pools of still water reflected the barbaric dawn clouds above. Ridges of water-worn gravel. A thin swift current was fighting the huge rocks in the channel with a great splutter and turmoil of spray flung up. Smaller streams were worming impatiently aslant the river bed to join the stream fighting so valiantly in the channel. Already the main current was yielding, choked by the neighbor mountain that had suddenly assailed it from above. Against the rocks the sun painted inexorably the mark of its surrender. Peter looked down upon the river bed and saw his splendid dream come true. For a moment his exultation returned. He looked at the Governor. “I believe, sir, that the Cramer Dam is a complete success!” A ringing note of pride was in his voice. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE THE VULTURE FEASTS They walked on, heads turned toward the spectacle. The sun, rising higher, splashed a mellow light into the deep crannies between the bowlders, set the bald pates of smoothed granite rocks a-gleam,--rocks never before uncovered in the history of man. Rawley turned and looked curiously at Peter, whose eyes were upon the river bed while his feet stumbled along the trail. They were anxious to reach the dam, every man of them. The engineer was stepping out briskly, keen glances going to the cliffs up-river; but for all their haste they could not forebear to gaze down at the stark, denuded canyon bottom, where a great river had been halted in its headlong rush. “Well, Uncle Peter, you’ve had your wish,” Rawley said at last. “You said you were waiting for the day when you could show the Colorado who was boss. You wanted to stop it. It’s stopped.” Peter looked at him, smiling faintly. “I was just thinking of Johnny Buffalo, that last night,” he said, speaking so that the others, straggling along the trail, would not hear. “What was that he said? ‘You will succeed, and fail in the succeeding. And from the failure you will rise to greater things’--or something like that. It just struck me. I wonder if he meant,--this.” He tilted his head toward the river. “I’ve succeeded. I’ve stopped the Colorado, and shown it who’s boss. But it isn’t like I dreamed it, after all. I’ve got a hunch, boy, that we’ll never work that dredger. Maybe the government will have other ideas about that. It was a self-centered plan, I admit that now. It had no right to succeed. The folks below need the river. I hadn’t figured them into the calculations at all.” Jerry Newton overheard that last observation and stepped faster until he was just behind them.