Still Jim

sing that little bird to Elephant. And he stop, stop so long here by river while that little bird build her nest in his side, he turn to stone and live forever.

"Then Theeka, he sabez. He lead his beautiful girl back to chief and he say to chief: 'I have found strongest thing in world. It is love.'

"And chief, he say: 'You and your children's children shall be chiefs. I have not known love and so I die.'"

Suma-theek's mellow voice merged into the desert silence. "But the eagle and the flag?" asked Jim.

"Injuns no understand about them," replied the old chief. "You sabez the story old Suma-theek tell you?"

"I understand," replied Jim.

"Then I go home to sleep," said Suma-theek, and he left Jim alone on the Elephant's back.

Jim sat long alone on the night stars. The sense of failure was heavy upon him. Wherein, he asked himself, had he failed? How could he find himself? Was his life to be like his father's after all? Had he put off until too late the mission he had set himself so long ago, that of seeking the secret of his father's inadequacy? For a few wild moments, Jim planned to answer the Secretary's letter with his resignation, to give up the thankless fight and return—to what?

Jim could not picture for himself any work or life but that which he was doing; could not by the utmost effort of imagination separate himself from his job. His mind went back to Charlie Tuck. He wondered what Charlie would have said to the Secretary's letter. It seemed to Jim that Charlie had had more imagination than he. Perhaps Charlie would have been able to have helped him now. Then he thought of Iron Skull and of that last interrupted talk with him. What had Iron Skull planned to say? What had he foreseen that Jim had been unable to see? It seemed to Jim that he would have given a year of his life to know what advice had been in his old friend's mind.

A useless death! A life too soon withdrawn! Suddenly Jim's whole heart rose in longing for his friend and in loyalty to him. His death must not be useless! The simple sweetness of the sacrifice must not go unrewarded. His life would not be ended!

Jim looked far over the glistening, glowing night and registered a vow. So help him God, he would not die childless and forlorn as Iron Skull had done. Some day, some way, he would marry Penelope. And somehow he would make the dam a success, that in it Iron Skull's last record of achievement might live forever.

Strangely comforted, Jim went home.

The Secretary's letter remained unanswered for several days. The next morning Henderson reported that a section of the abutments showed signs of decomposition. At the first suggestion of a technical problem with which to wrestle, Jim thrust the Secretary's elusive one aside. He started for the dam site eagerly, and refused to think again that day of the shadow that haunted his work.

In excavating for the abutments a thick stratum of shale had been exposed that air-slaked as fast as it was uncovered. Jim gave orders that drifts be driven through the stratum until a safe distance from possible exposure was reached. These were to be filled with concrete immediately. It was careful and important work. The concrete of the dam must have a solid wall to which to tie and drift after drift must be driven and filled to supply this wall. Jim would trust no one's judgment but his own in this work. He stayed on the dam all the morning, watching the shale and rock and directing the foremen.

At noon he went to the lower mess where he could talk with the masonry workers. Five hundred workmen were polishing off their plates in the great room. Jim chuckled as he sat down with Henderson at one of the long tables.

"If I could get the hombres to work as fast as they eat," he said, "I could take a year off the allotted time for the dam."

The masonry workers and teamsters at whose table Jim was sitting grinned.

"There's only one form of persuasion to use with an hombre," commented Henderson, gently. "There's just one kind of efficiency he gets, outside of whisky."

"What kind is that?" asked a teamster.

"The kind you get with a good hickory pick-handle across his skull," said Henderson in a tender, meditative way as he took down half a cup of coffee at a gulp. "I've worked hombres in Mexico and in South America and in America. You must never trust 'em. Just when you get where their politeness has smoothed you down, look out for a knife in your back. I never managed to make friends for but one bunch of hombres."

Henderson reached for the coffee pot and a fresh instalment of beef and waited patiently while Jim talked with the master mason. Finally Jim said: "Go ahead with the story, Jack. I know you'll have heartburn if you don't!"

"It was in Arizona," began Henderson. The singing quality in his voice was as tender as a girl's. "I had fifty hombres building a bridge over a draw, getting ready for a mining outfit. No whites for a million miles except my two cart drivers, Ryan and Connors. The hombres and the Irish don't get on well together and I was always expecting trouble.

"One day I was in the tent door when Ryan ran up the trail and beckoned me with his arm. I started on the run. When I got to the draw I saw the fifty hombres altogether pounding something with their shovels. I grabbed up a spade and dug my way through to the middle."

Henderson's voice was lovingly reminiscent. "There I found Ryan and Connors in bad shape. Connors had backed his cart over an hombre and the whole bunch had started in to kill him. Ryan had run for me and then gone in to help his friend. I used the spade freely and then dragged the two Irishmen down to the river and stuck their heads in. When they came to, they were both for starting in to kill all the hombres. I argued with 'em but 'twas no use, so I had to hit 'em over the head with a pick-handle and put 'em to sleep. Then I went back and subdued the hombres to tears with the same weapon."

"Did you ever have any more trouble?" asked a man.

"Trouble?" said Henderson, gently. "They didn't know but a word or two of English, but from that time on they always called me 'Papa'!"

Jim roared with the rest and said as he rose, "If you think you've absorbed enough pie to ward off famine, let's get back to the dam."

Henderson followed the Big Boss meekly. They started up the road in silence, Jim leading his horse. Suddenly Jack pulled off his hat and ran his fingers through his bush of hair.

"Boss," he said, "I chin a lot to keep me cheered up while I finish Iron Skull's job. I wish he could have stayed to finish it. Of course he helped on the Makon but he never had as good a job as he's got here. Ain't it hell when a man goes without a trace of anything living behind him! A man ought to have kids even if he don't have ideas. I often told Iron Skull that. But he said he couldn't ask a woman to live the way he had to. I always told him a woman would stand anything if you loved her enough."

Jim nodded. Iron Skull's life in many ways seemed a personal reproach to Jim for his own way of living.

The work at the abutments absorbed Jim until late afternoon; absorbed him and cheered him. About five o'clock he started off to call on Pen, and tell her about the Secretary's letter. He found her plodding up the road toward the tent house with a pile of groceries in her arms.

"I missed the regular delivery," she replied to his protests as he took the packages from her, "and I love to go down to the store, shopping. It's like a glorified cross-roads emporium. All the hombres and their wives and the 'rough-necks' and their wives and the Indians. Why it's better than a bazaar!"

Jim laughed. "Pen, you are a good mixer. You ought to have my job. You'd make more of it than I do."

"That reminds me," said Pen. "Jim, that man Fleckenstein is going to run for United States Senator. He's going to promise the ranchers that he'll get the government to remit the building charges on the dam. Will that hurt you?"

"Where did you hear this?" asked Jim.

"Fleckenstein and Oscar came up this morning and they talked it over with Oscar. Sara was guarded in what he said before me, but I believe he's going to get campaign money back East. Why should he, Jim?"

She eyed Jim anxiously. There was hardly a moment of the day that the thought of the responsibility that Iron Skull had placed on her shoulders was not with her. But she was resolved to say nothing to Jim until she had a vital suggestion to make to him.

Jim looked at the shimmering lavenders and grays of the desert. It had come. A frank step toward repudiation. A blow at the fundamental idea of the Service. That was to be the next move of the Big Enemy. And what had Sara to do with it? All thought of the Secretary's letter left Jim. He must see Sara. But Penelope must not be unduly worried. He turned to her with his flashing smile.

"Some sort of peanut politics, Pen. Is Sara alone now? I'll go talk to him."

As if in answer Sara's voice came from the tent which they were almost upon. "Pen, come here!"

Pen did not quicken her pace. "I don't like to change speeds going up a steep grade," she called.

"You hustle when I call you!" roared Sara.

Jim pulled the reins off his arm and dropped them to the ground over the horse's head, the simple process which hitches a desert horse. He left Pen with long strides and entered the tent.

"Sara, if I hear you talk to Pen that way again, I don't care if you are forty times a cripple, I'll punch your face in! What's the matter with you, anyhow? Did your tongue get a twist with your back?"

"Get out of here!" shouted Sara.

Jim recovered his poise at the sight of Pen's anxious eyes. "Now Sweetness," he said to Sara, "don't hurry me! You make me so nervous when you speak that way to me! I think I'll get a burro up here for you to talk to. He'd understand the richness of your vocabulary. Look here now, Sara, we all know you're having a darned hard time and there isn't anything we wouldn't do for you. Don't you realize that Pen is sacrificing her whole life to being your nurse girl? Don't you think you ought to make it as easy for her as you can?"

"Easy!" mocked Sara. "Easy for anyone that can walk and run and come and go? What consideration do they need?"

Pen and Jim winced a little. There was a whole world of tragedy in Sara's mockery. He looked fat and middle-aged. His hair was graying fast. His fingers trembled a good deal although the strength in his arms still was prodigious. Yet Pen and Jim both had a sense of resentment that Sara should take his life tragedy so ill, a feeling that he was indecorous in flaunting his bitterness in their faces. As if he sensed their resentment, Sara went on sneeringly:

"Easy for you two, with your youth and good looks and health to patronize me and fancy how much more decently you could die than I. I wish the two of you were chained to my inert body. How sweet and patient you would be! Bah! You weary me. Pen, will you go over to Mrs. Flynn's for the root beer she promised me?"

Pen made her escape gladly. When she was out of hearing Jim said, "Sara, why do you want the building charges repudiated?"

"Who said I wanted them repudiated?" asked Sara.

"A tent is a poor place to hold secrets," replied Jim. "Did you come here to do me dirt, Sara? Did I ever do you any harm?"

Sara turned purple. He raised himself on his elbow. "Why," he shouted, "did you destroy my chances with Pen by getting her love? You wanted it only to discard it!"

CHAPTER XVII

Jim stood with his arms folded fighting desperately to keep his hands off Sara. Deep in his heart Jim realized, there was none of the pity for Sara's physical condition that civilized man is supposed to feel for the cripple. Far within him was the loathing of the savage for something abnormal; the loathing that once left the physically unfit to die. Yet superimposed on this loathing was the veneer of civilization, that forces kindness and gentleness and self-denial toward the fit that the unfit may be kept alive.

So Jim gripped his biceps and ground his teeth and the crippled man in the chair stared with bitter black eyes into Jim's angry gray ones. Jim fought with himself until the sweat came out on his lips, then without a word he left the tent, mounted his horse and rode back to the dam site.

He wanted time to think. It was very evident that Sara meant mischief, but just how great was his capacity for doing him harm Jim could only guess. The idea of his extremely friendly relations with Arthur Freet bothered Jim now. If Freet were really trying to influence the sale of the water power through Sara, the wise thing to do would be to send Sara back to New York. And yet, if Sara went, Pen would go, too! Jim's heart sank. He could not bear to think of the dam now without Pen. He squared his shoulders suddenly. He would not send Sara away until he had some real proof that his threats were more than idle. At any rate, it was not his business to worry over the sale of the water power. If he produced the power he was doing his share. And when he had fallen back on his old excuse Jim gave a sigh of relief and went home to supper.

Henderson was in the office the next morning when Jim opened a letter from the Director of the Service. He was sorry, said the director, that there had been so much loss of time and property in the flood. He realized, of course, that Jim had done his best, but people who did not know him so well would not have the same confidence. The Congressional Committee on Investigation of the Projects, on receipt of numerous complaints regarding the flood, had decided to proceed at once to Jim's project and there begin its work.

Jim tossed the Director's letter to Henderson and laid aside the Secretary's letter, which he had planned to answer that morning.

"More time wasted!" grumbled Jim. "There will be a hearing and talky-talk and I must listen respectfully while the abutments crumble. Why in thunder don't they send a good engineer or two along with the Congressmen? A report from such a committee would have value. How would Congress enjoy having a committee of engineers passing on the legality of the work it does?"

Henderson laid the letter down, rumpling his hair. "Hell's fire!" he said gently. "My past won't stand investigating. You ask the Missis if it will! I'm safe if they stick to Government projects and stay away from the mining camps and the ladies."

Jim's eyes twinkled. "Perhaps your past is black enough to whiten mine in contrast. I'll ask Mrs. Henderson."

Henderson suddenly brightened. "I've got a dying favor to ask of you. Let me take the fattest of 'em to ride in Bill Evans' auto?"

Jim looked serious. "Your past must have been black, all right, Jack! You show a naturally vicious disposition. Really, I haven't anything personal against these men. It's just that they take so much time and insist on treating us fellows as if we were pickpockets."

"I ain't as ladylike as you," said Henderson, in his tender way. "I just naturally hate to be investigated. My Missis does all that I can stand. I won't do anything vicious, though. I'll just show a friendly interest in them. I might lasso 'em and hitch 'em behind the machine, but that might hurt it and, anyhow, that wouldn't be subtle enough. These here Easterners like delicate methods. I do myself. At least, I appreciate them. The delicatest attention I ever had that might come under the head of an investigation was by an Eastern lady. It was years ago on an old irrigation ditch. Her husband was starting a ranch and I caught him stealing water. I was pounding him up when she landed on me with a steel-pronged garden rake. She raked me till I had to borrow clothes from her to go home with. That sure was some delicate investigation."

"The world lost a great lyric soloist in you, Jack," commented Jim. "Jokes aside, it's fair enough for them to investigate us. If the members of the committee are straight, it ought to do a lot toward stopping this everlasting kicking of the farmers. We've nothing to fear but the delay they cause."

Jack sighed regretfully. "Well, I'll be good, if you insist. Let's give 'em a masquerade ball while they're here."

"Good," said Jim. "Will you take charge?"

"Bet your life!" replied Henderson, whose enthusiasm for social affairs had never flagged since the day of the reception to the Director, up on the Makon.

Jim spent a heavy morning on the dam, climbing about, testing and calculating. Already the forms were back in place ready to restore the concrete swept away by the flood. Excavation for the next section of the foundation was proceeding rapidly. At mid-afternoon, Jim was squatting on a rock overlooking the excavation when Oscar Ames appeared.

"Mr. Manning," he said angrily, "that main ditch isn't being run as near my house as I want it. You'd better move it now, before I make you move it."

"Go to my irrigation engineer, Mr. Ames," replied Jim shortly. "He has my full confidence."

"Well, he hasn't mine nor nobody's else's in the valley, with his darned dude pants! I am one of the oldest farmers in this community. I had as much influence as anybody at getting the Service in here and I propose to have my place irrigated the way I want it."

"By the way," said Jim, "you folks use too much water for your own good, since the diversion dam was finished. Why do you use three times what you ought to just because you can get it from the government free? Don't you know you'll ruin your land with alkali?"

Ames looked at Jim in utter disgust. "Did you ever run an irrigated farm? Did you ever see a ditch till eight years ago? Didn't you get your education at a darned East college where they wouldn't know a ditch from the Atlantic Ocean?"

"Look here, Ames," said Jim, "do you know that you are the twelfth farmer who has been up here and told me he'd get me dismissed if we didn't put the ditch closer to his ranch? I tell you as I've told them that we've placed the canal where we had to for the lie of the land and where it would do the greatest good to the greatest number when the project was all under cultivation. Some of you will have to dig longer and some shorter ditches. I can't help that. Isn't that reasonable?"

"It would be," sniffed Ames, "if you knew enough to know where the best place was. That's where you fall down. You won't take advice. Just because I don't wear short pants and leather shin guards is no reason I'm a fool."

Jim's drawl was very pronounced. "The shin guards would help you when you clear cactus. And if you'd adopt a leather headguard, it would protect you in your favorite job of butting in."

"I'll get you yet!" exclaimed Ames, starting off rapidly toward the trail. "I've got pull that'll surprise you."

Jim swore a little under his breath and began again on his interrupted calculations. When the four o'clock whistle blew and the shifts changed, some one sat down silently near Jim. Jim worked on for a few moments, finishing his problem. Then he looked up. Suma-theek was sitting on a rock, smoking and watching Jim.

"Boss," he began, "you sabez that story old Suma-theek tell you?"

Jim nodded. "Why don't you do it, then?" the old Indian went on.

Jim looked puzzled. Suma-theek jerked his thumb toward the distant tent house. "She much beautiful, much lonely, much young, much good. Why you no marry her?"

"She is married, Suma-theek," replied Jim gently.

"Married? No! That no man up there. She no his wife. Let him go. He bad in heart like in body. You marry her."

Jim continued to shake his head. "She belongs to him. The law says so."

Suma-theek snorted. "Law! You whites make no law except to break it. Love it have no law except to make tribe live. Great Spirit, he must think she bad when she might have good babies for her tribe, she stay with that bad cripple. Huh?"

"You don't understand, Suma-theek. There is always the matter of honor for a white man."

Suma-theek smoked his cigarette thoughtfully for a moment and then he said, wonderingly: "A white man's honor! He will steal a nigger woman or an Injun woman. He will steal Injun money or Injun lands. He will steal white man's money. He will lie. He will cheat. Where he not afraid, white man no have honor. But when talk about steal white man's wife, he afraid. Then he find he have honor! Honor! Boss, white honor is like rain on hot sand, like rotten arrow string, like leaking olla. I am old, old Injun. I heap know white honor!"

Old Suma-theek flipped his cigarette into the excavation and strode away. Jim rose slowly and looked over at the Elephant with his gray eyes narrowed, his broad shoulders set.

"On your head be it!" he murmured. "I am going to try!"

He climbed the trail to his house, washed and brushed himself and went over to the tent house. Pen was sitting on the doorstep. Oscar Ames was talking to Sara.

"Hello, Sara!" said Jim coolly. "Pen, I've got a free hour. Will you come up back of the camp with me and let me show you the view from Wind Ridge? It's finer than what you get from the Elephant."

Sara's face was inscrutable. Oscar said nothing. Pen laid aside her book and picked up her hat.

"I knew there was something the matter with me," she said gaily. "It was Wind Ridge I was missing though I never heard of it before! I won't be long, Sara."

"Don't hurry on my account," said Sara, with a sardonic glance at Jim.

The trail led up the mountain slope with a steady twist toward a ridge at the top that showed a sawtooth edge. Almost to the top the mountain was dotted with little green cedars, dwarfed and wind-tortured. Up at the saw edge they stopped. Here the wind caught them, wind flooding across desert and mountain, clean, sweet, with a marvelous tang to it, despite the desert heat.

"Why, it's a world of lavenders!" cried Pen.

Jim nodded and steadied her against the great warm rush of the wind. Far to the east beyond the purple Elephant the San Juan mountains lay on the horizon. They were the faintest, clearest blue lavender, with iridescent peaks merging into the iridescent sky. The desert that swept toward the Elephant was a yellow lavender. The mountain that bore the ridge was a gray lavender. To the west, three great ranges vied with each other in melting tints of purple, that now were blue, now were lavender. The two might have been sitting at the top of the world, the sweep of the view and the sense of exaltation in it were so great.

Mighty white clouds rushed across the sky, sweeping their blue shadows over the desert, like ripples in the wake of huge sailing ships.

When Pen had looked her fill, Jim led her to a clump of cedars that broke the wind and made a seat for her from branches. Then he tossed his hat down and stood before her. Pen looked up into his face.

"Why so serious, Still Jim?" she asked.

"Penelope," asked Jim, "do you remember that twice I held you in my arms and kissed you on the lips and told you that you belonged to me?"

Pen whitened. If he could only dream how the pain and sweetness of those embraces never had left her!

"I remember! But let's not talk of that. We settled it all on the day you got back from Washington. We must forget it all, Jim."

"We can never forget it, Pen. We're not that kind." Jim stood struggling for words with which to express his emotion. It always had been this way, he told himself. The great moments of his life always found him dumb. Even old Suma-theek could tell his thoughts more clearly than he. Jim summoned all his resources.

"Pen, it never occurred to me you wouldn't wait. There has never been any other woman in my life and I suppose I just couldn't picture any other man having a hold on you. But it all goes in with my general incompetence to grasp opportunity. I felt that I had no right to go any farther until I had more than hopes to offer you. I planned to make a reputation as an engineer. I knew money didn't interest you. I wanted to offer myself to you as a man of real achievement. You see how I failed. I have made a reputation as a grafting, inefficient engineer with the public. You are another man's wife. But, Penelope, I am not going to give you up!

"One gets a new view of life out here. You are wrong in staying with Saradokis. Why should three lives be ruined by his tragedy? Pen! Pen! If I could make you understand the torture of knowing you are married to Sara! You are mine! From the first day I came upon you in the old library, we belonged to each other. Pen, I've tramped the desert night after night on the Makon and here, sweating it out with the stars and I have determined that you shall belong to me."

Pen, white and trembling, did not move her gaze from Jim's face. All her tired, yearning youth stood in her eyes.

Jim spoke very slowly and clearly. "Penelope, I love you. Will you leave Saradokis and marry me?"

Pen did not answer for a long moment. A to-hee trilled from the cedar:

The Elephant lay motionless. The flag rippled and fluttered, a faint red spot far below on the mountainside. Pen's youth was fighting with her bitterly won philosophy. Then she summoned all her fortitude.

"Jim, dear, it would be a cowardly thing for me to leave Sara."

"It would be greater cowardice to stay. Pen, shall you and I die as Iron Skull did? I can marry no other woman feeling as I do about you. Sara's life is useless. Let the world say what it will. Marry me, Penelope."

"Jim, I can't."

"Why not, Penelope?"

"I love you very dearly, but I've had enough of marriage. I've done my duty. I don't see how I could keep on loving a man after I married him, even if he weren't a cripple. The process of adjustment is simply frightful. Marriage is just a contract binding one to do the impossible!"

Jim scowled. More and more he was realizing how Sara had hurt Pen.

"You don't care a rap about me, Pen. Why don't you admit it?"

Pen gave a sudden tearful smile. "You know better, Jim. But just to prove to you what a silly goose I am, I'll show you something. Girls in real life do this even more than they do it in novels!"

Pen opened a flat locket she always wore. A folded bit of paper and a tiny photograph fluttered into her lap. She gave both to Jim. The picture was a snapshot of Jim in his football togs. The bit of paper, unfolded, showed in Pen's handwriting a verse from Christina Rossetti:

Jim put the bit of paper into his pocket and gave Pen the picture. His eyes were full of tears.

"Pen! Pen!" he cried. "Let me make it up to you! We care so much! Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery of marriage!"

White to the lips, Pen answered once more: "Jim, I will never leave Sara. There is such a thing as honor. It's the last foundation that the whole social fabric rests on. I promised to stay with Sara, in the marriage service. He's kept his word. It's my business to keep mine, until he breaks his."

Jim stood with set face. "Is this final, Penelope?"

"It's final, Still."

"Do you mind if I go on alone, Pen?"

Pen shook her head and Jim turned down the mountainside. And Pen, being a woman, put her head down on her knees and cried her heart out. Then she went back to Sara.

That night Jim answered the Secretary's letter:

"My work has always been technical. I know that the Projects are not the success their sponsors in Congress hoped they would be, but I feel that you ask too much of your engineers when you ask them not only to make the dam but to administer it. I have about concluded that an engineer is a futile beast of triangles and n-th powers, unfitted by his very talents for associating with other human beings. I suppose that this letter must be interpreted as my admission of inefficiency."

It was late when Jim had finished this letter. He was, he thought, alone in the house. He laid down his pen. A sudden overpowering desire came upon him for Exham, for the old haunts of his childhood. There it seemed to him that some of his old confidence in life might return to him. He dropped his arm along the back of his chair and with his forehead on his wrist he gave a groan of utter desolation.

Mrs. Flynn, coming in at the open door, heard the groan and saw the beautiful brown head bowed as if in despair. She stopped aghast.

"Oh, my Lord!" she gasped under her breath. "Him, too! Mrs. Penelope ain't the only one that's broken up, then! Ain't it fierce! I wonder what's happened to the poor young ones! I'd like to go to Mr. Sara's wake. I would that! Oh, my Lord! Let's see. He's had two baths today. I can't get him into another. I'll make him some tea. You have to cheer up either to eat or take a bath."

She slipped into the kitchen and there began to bang the range and rattle teacups. When she came in, Jim was sitting erect and stern-faced, sorting papers. Mrs. Flynn set the tray down on the desk with a thud. She was going to take no refusal.

"Drink that tea, Boss Still Jim, and eat them toasted crackers. You didn't eat any supper to speak of and you're as pindlin' as a knitting needle. Don't slop on your clean suit. That khaki is hard to iron."

She stood close beside him and made an imaginary thread an excuse for laying her hand caressingly on Jim's shoulder. "You're a fine lad," she said, uncertainly. "I wish I'd been your mother."

The touch was too much for Jim. He dropped the teacup and, turning, laid his face against Mrs. Flynn's shoulder.

"I could pretend you were tonight, very easily," he said brokenly, "if you'd smooth my hair for me."

Mrs. Flynn hugged the broad shoulders to her and smoothed back Jim's hair.

"I've been wanting to get my hands on it ever since I first saw it, lad. God knows it's as soft as silk and just the color of oak leaves in winter. There, now, hold tight a bit, my boy. We can weather any storm if we have a friend to lean on, and I'm that, God knows. It's a fearful cold I've caught, God knows. You'll have to excuse my snuffing. There now! There! God knows that in my waist I've got a letter for you from Mrs. Penelope. She seemed used up tonight. Her jewel of a husband took dope tonight, so she and I sat in peace while she wrote this. I'll leave it on your tray. Good-night to you, Boss. Don't slop on your suit."

CHAPTER XVIII

But it was nearly two weeks before Jim talked with Pen again. For a number of days he devoted himself day and night to the preparations for starting the second section of the dam in the completed excavation. Then formal notice came that the Congressional committee would arrive at the dam nearly a week before it had been expected and Jim was overwhelmed in preparations for its reception. The first three days of the investigation were to be devoted to inspecting the dam. Jim brought the committee to the dam from the station himself.

There were five men on the committee, two New Englanders and three far westerners. They were the same five men who a year before had investigated Arthur Freet's projects and they were baffled and suspicious. And Jim's silence irritated them far more than Arthur Freet's loquacity. The members from the West and from Massachusetts were, in spite of this, open-minded, eager for information and interested in the actual work of the dam building. The member from Vermont pursued Jim with the bitterness of a fanatic.

"A Puritan hang-over is what ails him," Jim remarked to Henderson. "He would burn a woman for a witch for having three moles on her back, as easy as—as he'd fire me!"

Henderson snorted: "I wish he was fat. I'd take him to ride in Bill Evans' machine. But, gee! he's so thin he'd stick in the seat like a sliver!"

Henderson had devoted himself to the entertainment of the visitors. He had organized a picnic to a far canyon where the "officers" and their wives offered the committee a wonderful camp supper, by a camp fire that lighted the desert for miles. He had induced the Mexicans in the lower camp to give one of their religious plays for the second night's entertainment. The moving picture hall was turned into a theater and the play, in queer Spanish, a strange mixture of miracle-play and buffoonery, delighted the hombres and astounded the whites. But the consummation of Henderson's art as an entertainment provider was to be the Mask Ball. This was to take place after the hearing at Cabillo was finished.

Jim gave all his time to the committee. He turned the office and its force over to them; gave them the freedom of the account books and the safe. Let them rummage the warehouse and its system. Explained his engineering mistakes to them. Went over and over the details of the flood, of the weathering abutments, of the concrete that did not come up to specifications, of the new system of concrete mixture that he and his cement engineer were evolving and which Jim believed in so ardently that he was using it on the dam. But in regard to Freet or to any graft in the Service he was persistently silent.

The Hearing was like and yet unlike the May hearing. It lacked the dignity of the first occasion and the Vermont member who presided was not the calm, inscrutable judge that the Secretary had been. The hall in Cabillo was packed with farmers and their wives and sweethearts and with Del Norte citizens.

The main effort of the speakers at the Hearing was to prove the inordinate extravagance and incompetence of Jim and his associates. For three days Jim answered questions quietly and as briefly as possible. But he was not able to compass the cool indifference that had kept him staring out the window of the Interior Department. There was growing within him an overwhelming desire to protest. He saw that, however fair the other members of the committee were inclined to be, their certainty of Freet's dishonesty, coupled with the fact that he was a pupil of Freet's, would be used by the restless vindictiveness of the Vermont member without doubt, to bring about his dismissal.

He felt an increasing desire to make a last stand against the wall of the nation's indifference, to make the people of the Project and the people of the world understand his viewpoint. But words failed him until the last day of the Hearing.

On this last day, Sara and Pen attended the hearing, as guests of Fleckenstein, who had sent his great touring car for them. Jim nodded to them across the room but made no attempt to speak to them. It was nearing five o'clock when Fleckenstein closed his testimony.

"The Reclamation Service," he said, "is like every other department of the government. It is a refuge for the incompetent whose one skill is in grafting. The cost of this dam has jumped over the estimates by hundreds of thousands. Forty dollars an acre is what the farmers of this project must pay the government instead of the estimated thirty. I do not lay the whole blame on Mr. Manning, even though he is Freet's pupil. Part of it is due to the criminal ignorance and weakness of Mr. Manning's predecessor. We farmers——"

"Stop!" thundered Jim. He jumped to his feet. Fleckenstein gasped. Jim threw back his hair. His gray eyes were black. His thin brown face was flushed. Under his khaki riding suit his long steel muscles were tense.

"My predecessor was Frederick Watts. I grew to know him well. He was a master mind in his profession, but he was gentle and sensitive and, like many men who have lived long in the open, silent. About the time that he started to build this dam the money interests in this country decided that the nation was getting too much water power control. They decided that the best way to stop the nation's growth in this direction was to discredit the Service. Frederick Watts was one of their first targets. By means too subtle for me to understand, they set machinery going in this vicinity by which every step that Watts took was made a kick against him.

"They never let up on him. They hounded him. They put him to shame with the nation and in the privacy of his own family. Watts was over fifty years old. He was no fighter. All he wanted was a chance to build his dam. He was gentle and silent. He went into nervous prostration and died, still silent, a broken-hearted man.

"Up in the big silent places you will find his monuments; dams high in mountain fastnesses, an imperishable part of the mountains; trestles that bridge canyons which birds feared to cross. He spent his life in utter hardships making ways easy for others to follow. These monuments will stand forever. But the name of their builder has become a blackened thing for rats like Fleckenstein to handle with dirty claws.

"And now they are after me. And you, many of you, in this audience, are the sometimes innocent and sometimes paid instruments of my downfall. You accuse me of grafting, of lying and stealing. You don't understand."

Jim paused and moistened his lips. The room was breathless. Pen could hear her heart beat. She dug her fingernails into her palm. Could he, could he find the words? Even if these people did not understand, could he not say something that would teach her how to help him? Jim did not see the crowded room. Before him was his father's dying face and Iron Skull's. His hands felt their dying fingers.

"I am a New Englander. My people came to New England 250 years ago and fought the wilderness for a home. We were Anglo-Saxons. We were trail makers, lawmakers, empire builders. We founded this nation. We threw open the doors to the world and then we were unable to withstand the flood that answered our invitation. The New Englander in America is as dead as the Indian or the buffalo. My people have failed and died with the rest. I am the last of my line.

"But I have the craving of my ancestry with something more. I can see the tragedy of my race. I know that the day will come when the civilization of America will be South European; that our every institution will be altered to suit the needs of the South European and Asiatic mind.

"I want to leave an imperishable Anglo-Saxon thumb print on the map; a thumb print that no future changes can obliterate, a thumb print that shall be less transitory than the pyramids because it will be a part of the fundamental needs of a people as long as they hunger or thirst.

"Look at the roster of the Reclamation Service. You will find it a roster of men whom the old vision has sent into dam building and road making. Here in the Service you will find the last stand of the Anglo-Saxon trail makers.

"I want to build this dam. I want to build it so that, by God, it shall be standing and delivering water when the law that makes it possible shall have passed from the memory of man! And you won't let me build it. You, some of you Anglo-Saxons yourselves, destined to be obliterated as I shall be, are fighting me. You say that I am stealing. I, fighting to leave a thumb print!"

Jim dropped into his seat and for a moment there was such silence in the room that the palm leaves outside the window could be heard rattling softly in the breeze. Then there broke forth a great round of handclapping, and during this Jim slipped out. He was not much deceived by the applause. He knew that it would take more than a burst of eloquence to overcome the influences at work against the Service.

He returned to the dam that night, Pen and Sara came up the next day and that evening Jim went over to call. It was his first word with Pen since the walk to Wind Ridge. He found Sara sleeping heavily. Pen greeted him casually.

"Hello, Still! Sara was suffering so frightfully after his trip that he took his morphine. It was insane of him to go to the Hearing, but he would do it. Sit down. We won't disturb him a bit."

She pulled the blanket over the unconscious man in her usual tender way.

"You are mighty good to him, Pen," said Jim.

"I try to be. I guess I'm as good to him as he'll let me be, poor fellow. Jim, he was fine in his college days, wasn't he?"

"I never saw a more magnificent physique," answered Jim. "He was a great athlete and I used to believe he was a greater financier than Morgan."

Pen looked at Jim gratefully. "And if it hadn't been for the accident he would have been just as easy to get along with as the average man."

Jim chuckled. "I don't know whether that's a compliment to Sara or an insult to the average man. What have you done with yourself during the investigation?"

"Taken care of Sara, communed with my soul and the laundry problem and had several nice talks with Jane Ames. She is a dear."

Jim nodded. Then he pulled the Secretary's letter from his pocket with a copy of his own answer and handed them to Pen. "I've come for advice and comment," he said.

Pen read both and her cheeks flushed. "Have you sent your answer?"

Jim nodded.

Pen stared at him a moment with her mouth open, then she said, with heartfelt sincerity, "Jim, I'm perfectly disgusted with you!"

Jim gasped.

"Like the average descendant of the Puritan," Pen sniffed, "you are lying down on your job. Thank God, I'm Irish!"

"Gee, Pen, you're actually cross!"

"I am! If I were not a perfect lady I'd slap you and put my tongue out at you, anything that would adequately express my disdain! For pig-headed bigotry, bounded on the north by high principles and on the south by big dreams, give me a New Englander! You make me tired!"

"For the Lord's sake, Pen!"

Pen laid down her bit of sewing and looked at Jim long and earnestly, then she said, quietly, "Jim, why don't you go to work?"

Jim looked flushed and bewildered. "I work eighteen hours a day."

Pen groaned. "I'm talking about your capacity, not your output. You are only using half of what is in you, Still. You build the dam and you refuse to do anything else. Why, with your kind of creative, engineering mind, you are perfectly capable of administering the dam, too. Of handling all the problems connected with it in a cool, scientific way that would come very near being ideal justice. You know that the projects are an experiment in government activity. You know that the people who will control them have no experience or training that will fit them for handling the projects. Yet you refuse to help them. You are just as stupid and just as selfish as if you had built a complicated machine and had turned it over to children to run, refusing them all explanation or guidance."

Pen paused, breathless, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glowing. Jim watched her, his face pitifully eager. Perhaps, he thought, Pen was actually going to lay her finger on the cause of his inadequacy.

"Instead of antagonizing every farmer on the Project, you ought to be making them feel that you are their partner and friend in a mighty difficult business. You told us yesterday that your ancestors not only made the trail but also the law of the trail. What are you doing? It's your own fault if you lose your job, Still!"

Pen got up and turned Sara's pillow and shaded the light from his face, mechanically.

"You are just like all the rest of what you call the Anglo-Americans. You go about feeling superior and abused and calling the immigrants hard names. You are just a lot of quitters. You have refused national service. If you are a dying race and you are convinced that the world can't afford to lose your institutions, how low down you are not to feel that your last duty to society is to show by personal example the value of your institutions."

"I don't see what I can do," protested Jim.

"That's just what I'm trying to show you," retorted Pen. "I have to plow through your ignorance first—clear the ground, you know! After you Anglo-Americans founded the government most of you went to money making and left it to be administered by people who were racially and traditionally different from you. You left your immigration problems to sentimentalists and money-makers. You left the law-making to money-makers. You refused to serve the nation in a disinterested, future-seeing way which was your duty if you wanted your institutions to live. You descendants of New England are quitters. And you are going to lose your dam because of that simple fact."

Jim began to pace the floor. "Did you ever talk this over with Uncle Denny, Penelope?"

"No!" she gave a scornful sniff. "If ever I had dared to criticize you, he'd have turned me out of the house. No one can live in New York and not think a great deal about immigration problems. And—I have been with you much in the past eight years, Jimmy. I can't tell you how much I have thought about you and your work. And then, just before old Iron Skull was killed, he turned you over to me."

Jim paused before her. "He was worried about you, too," she went on. "He said you were not getting the big grasp on things that you ought and that I must help you."

"I wonder if that was what he was trying to tell me when he was killed," said Jim. "The dear old man! Go on, Pen."

"I've just this much more to say, Jim, and that is that if the Reclamation Service idea fails, it's more the fault of you engineers than of anyone else. The sort of thing you engineers do on the dam is typical of the Anglo-American in the whole country. You are quitters!"

"Pen, don't you say that again!" exclaimed Jim, sharply. "I'm doing all I can!"

CHAPTER XIX