The anxiety ever in Bryant's and Carrigan's minds was of that grim and implacable enemy, cold. Autumn had lasted amazingly; November yielded to December, with the days still fine; but who could tell when the white spectre, Winter, would lay his icy hand upon the earth? The peaks and upper slopes of the mountains were already mantled with snow. Each morning the engineer and the contractor marked with care the fall of the thermometer during the night, examined the frost upon the grass and tested its depth in the soil. They watched the barometer like hawks. They observed every cloud along the Ventisquero Range. They studied the wind, the sun, the sky. But the weather held fair. So calm was the air that at times sounds of the dynamite blasts at the granite outshoot, where a pair of miners were clearing a path for the canal, came travelling down to Perro Creek. "The Lord surely has his arms around us," said Pat, one morning. Bryant nodded, but Dave spoke up, "A cattleman who went by here yesterday, an old-timer, said: 'When December's clear, then January's drear.'" "And an old-timer once told me that same thing when I was building a railroad grade in Kansas," Pat remarked, "and I had to ship in palm-leaf fans and ice to keep my 'paddies' from fainting with the January heat." A slight exaggeration, to be sure, but showing the old contractor's contempt for wise saws pertaining to weather. Yet no one understood more than he the law of probabilities, or the balance of seasons. Some time cold must follow warmth, foul follow fair, to work the inevitable mean. And it was too much to hope that this natural law would be suspended for them until the middle of February. In fact, the nights while remaining clear were hardening. The mercury in the tube sank by possibly a degree every two nights, at last touching zero; and it correspondingly failed to arise by as much at noon. The days were cruelly short. Darkness lasted until eight in the morning; it dropped down again at five. The frost crept deeper into the earth.