noon
Upward of seven hundred men worked as they had never worked before . As the end of the time drew nearer , as success became ever more assured , they worked longer hours , they accomplished swifter results . For each man of them , from Brayley to the ditch-diggers , was laboring not only for the company , but for himself . Each and every man had been promised a bonus for every day between the time when water was poured down into the sunken Valley and the coming of high noon upon October the first . And Conniston still held to his determination to have everything in readiness by the twenty-fifth of September . Upon the evening of the twenty-fourth of September Conniston called upon Mr. Crawford at his cottage in Valley City . He found his employer smoking upon the little porch alone .