Jim was running "with his nerves," head forward, teeth clenched, fists tight to his side, long, lean and lithe. His magnificent head outlined itself for an instant against the sky line of the Hudson, fine, tense, like the painting of a Saxon warrior. Pen carried this picture of him in her heart for years.

The moment the boys had passed, Uncle Denny made a run for the machine. The three entered the grand stand just as the white dots appeared under the elevated tracks at 66th street. There was a roar, a fluttering of banners, a crash of music from a band and a single runner broke from the group and staggered against the line. Saradokis had won the race.

Jim was not to be seen. Uncle Denny was frantic.

"Where's me boy?" he shouted. "He was fit to finish at the Battery when he passed us. Give me deck room here. I'm going to find him!"



CHAPTER VI

THE MARATHON

"I have seen a thing that humans call friendship. It is clearer, higher, less frequent than the thing they call love."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

At 66th street, Jim had passed the Californian and caught up with Sara. He held Sara's pace for the next block. Try as he would, the young Greek could not throw Jim off and instinct told him that Jim had enough reserve in him to forge ahead in the final spurt at Columbus Circle, six blocks away.

But at 63rd street something happened. A fire alarm was turned in from a store in the middle of the block. The police tried to move the crowd away without interfering with the race, but just as the runners reached the point of the fire, the crowd broke into the street. A boy darted in front of Sara and Jim, and Sara struck at the lad. It was a back-handed blow and Sara brought his elbow back into Jim's stomach with a force that doubled Jim up like a closing book. Sara did not look round. A policeman jerked Jim to his feet.

"After 'em, boy. Ye still can beat the next bunch!" cried the policeman. But Jim was all in. The blow had been a vicious one and he swayed limply against the burly bluecoat.

"Dirty luck!" grunted the Irishman, and with his arm under Jim's shoulders he walked slowly with him to the rooms at Columbus Circle, where the runners were to dress. There Uncle Denny found Jim, still white and shaken, dressing slowly.

"What happened to you, me boy?" asked Uncle Denny, looking at him keenly.

Jim sat limply on the edge of a cot and told Dennis what had happened.

"The low scoundrel!" roared Uncle Denny. "Leave me get at him!"

Jim caught the purple-faced Irishman by the arm. "You are to say nothing to anyone, Uncle Denny. How could I prove that he meant to do it? And do you want me to be a loser that bellyaches?"

Uncle Denny looked Jim over and breathed hard for a moment before he replied: "Very well, me boy. But I always suspected he had a yellow streak in him and this proves it. Have you seen him do dirty tricks before?"

"I never had any proof," answered Jim carefully. "And it was always some money matter and I'm no financier, so I laid it to my own ignorance."

"A man who will do dirt in money matters can't be a clean sport," said Uncle Denny. "This ends any chance of your going into business with him, Jim, I hope."

"I gave that idea up long ago, Uncle Denny. Pen is not to hear a word of all this, remember, won't you?"

At this moment, Saradokis burst in the door. He was dressed and his face was vivid despite his exhaustion.

"Hey, Still! What happened to you? Everybody's looking for you. Congratulate me, old scout!"

Jim looked from Sara's outstretched hand to his beaming face. Then he put his own hand in his pocket.

"That was a rotten deal you handed me, Sara," he said in the drawl that bit.

"What!" cried Sara.

"What's done's done," replied Jim. "I'm no snitcher, so you know you're safe. But I'm through with you."

Sara turned to Uncle Denny, injured innocence in his face. "What is the matter with him, Mr. Dennis?" he exclaimed.

"Still Jim, me boy, go down to the machine while I talk with Sara," said Dennis.

"No, there is no use talking," insisted Jim.

"Jim," said Dennis sternly, "I ask you to obey me but seldom."

Without a word Jim picked up the suit case containing his running togs and went down to the automobile where his mother and Penelope were waiting. To their anxious questions he merely replied that he had fallen. This was enough for the two women folk, who tucked him in between them comfortably and his mother held his hand while Pen gave him a glowing account of the finish of the race.

Jim listened with a grim smile, his gray eyes steadily fixed on Pen's lovely face. Not for worlds would he have had Penelope know that Sara had won the race on a foul. Whatever she learned about the Greek he was determined she should not learn through him. He was going to win on his own points, he told himself, and not by tattling on his rival.

It was fifteen minutes before Dennis and Sara appeared. Sara's face was red with excitement and drawn with weariness. He walked directly to the machine and, looking up into Pen's face, exclaimed:

"If Jim has told you that I gave him a knockout to win the race, it's a lie, Pen!"

Penelope looked from Jim to Uncle Denny, then back to Sara in utter bewilderment.

"Why, Sara! He never said anything of the kind! He said he had a bad fall when the crowd closed in and that it put him out of the race."

"I told you to keep quiet, Sara, that Jim would never say anything!" cried Uncle Denny.

"Get in, both of you," said Jim's mother quietly. "Don't make a scene on the street."

"If Saradokis gets in, I'll take the Elevated home," said Jim slowly.

"Don't worry!" snapped Sara. "I'm meeting my father in a moment. Pen, you believe in me, don't you?"

Pen seized his outstretched hand and gave the others an indignant look. "Of course I do, though I don't know what it's all about."

Sara lifted his hat and turned away and the machine started homeward.

"Now, what on earth happened?" Pen cried.

Uncle Denny looked at Jim and Jim shook his head. "I'm not going to talk about it," he said. "I've a right to keep silence."

Pen bounced up and down on the seat impatiently. "You haven't any such right, Jim Manning. You've got to tell me what you said about Sara."

"Aw, let's forget it!" answered Jim wearily. "I'm sorry I ever even told Uncle Denny."

He leaned back and closed his eyes and his tired face touched Pen's heart. "You poor dear!" she exclaimed. "It was awfully hard on you to lose the race."

Jim's mother patted her boy's hand. "You are a very blind girl, Penelope," she said. "And I'm afraid it will take long years of trouble to open your eyes. We all must just stand back and wait."

The little look of pre-knowledge that occasionally made Pen's eyes old came to them now as she looked at Jim's mother. "Did you learn easily, Aunt Mary?"

The older woman shook her head. "Heaven knows," she answered, "I paid a price for what little I know, the price of experience. I guess we women are all alike."

When they reached the brownstone front, Jim went to bed at once and the matter of the race was not mentioned among the other three at supper. Pen was offended at what she considered the lack of confidence in her and withdrew haughtily to her room. Uncle Denny went out and did not return until late. Jim's mother was waiting for him in their big, comfortable bedroom.

Dennis peeled off his coat and vest and wiped his forehead. "Mary," he said, "I've been talking to the policeman who helped Jim. He says it was a deliberate knockout Sara gave Jim. He was standing right beside them at the time."

Jim's mother threw up her hands. "That Greek shall never come inside this house again, Michael!"

Dennis nodded as he walked the floor. "I don't know what to do about the matter. As a lawyer, I'd say, drop it. As Jim's best friend, I feel like making trouble for Saradokis, though I know Jim will refuse to have anything to do with it."

Jim's mother looked thoughtfully at the sock she was darning. "Jim has the right to say what shall be done. It means a lot to him in regard to its effect on Pen. But I think Pen must be told the whole story."

Uncle Denny continued to pace the floor for some time, then he sighed: "You're right, as usual, Mary. I'll tell Pen meself, and forbid Sara the house, then we'll drop it. I'm glad for one thing. This gives the last blow to any hope Sara may have had of getting Jim into business with him. Jim will take that job with the United States Reclamation Service, I hope. Though how I'm to live without me boy, Mary, its hard for me to say."

Uncle Denny's Irish voice broke and Jim's mother suddenly rose and kissed his pink cheek.

"Michael," she said, "even if I hadn't grown so fond of you for your own sake, I would have to love you for your love for Jim."

A sudden smile lighted the Irishman's face and he gave the slender little woman a boyish hug.

"We are the most comfortable couple in the world, Mary!" he cried.

Uncle Denny told the story of the boys' trouble to Penelope the next morning. Pen flatly refused to believe it.

"I don't doubt that Jim thinks Sara meant it," she said. "But I am surprised at Jim. And I shall have to tell you, Uncle Denny, that if you forbid Sara the house I shall meet him clandestinely. I, for one, won't turn down an old friend."

Pen was so firm and so unreasonable that she alarmed Dennis. In spite of his firm resolution to the contrary, he felt obliged to tell Jim of Penelope's obstinacy.

"I wish I'd kept my silly mouth shut," said Jim, gloomily. "Of course that's just the effect the story would have on Pen. She is nothing if not loyal. Here she comes now. Uncle Denny, I might as well have it out with her."

The two men were standing on the library hearth rug in the old way. Pen came in with her nose in the air and fire in her eyes. Uncle Denny fled precipitately.

Jim looked at Penelope admiringly. She was growing into a very lovely young womanhood. She was not above medium height and she was slender, yet full of long, sweet curves.

"Jim!" she exclaimed, "I don't believe a word of that horrid story about Sara."

Jim nodded. "I'm sorry it was told you. I'm not going to discuss it with you, Pen. You were told the facts without my consent. You have a right to your own opinion. Say, Pen, I can get my appointment to the Reclamation Service and I'm going out west in a couple of weeks. I—I want to say something to you."

Jim moistened his lips and prayed for the right words to come. Pen looked a little bewildered. She had come in to champion Sara and was not inclined to discuss Jim's job instead. But Jim found words and spoke eagerly:

"I'm going away, Pen, to make some kind of a name to bring back to you and then, when I've made it, I'm coming for you, Penelope." He put his strong young hands on Pen's shoulders and looked clearly into her eyes. "You belong to me, Penelope. You never can belong to Sara. You know that."

Pen looked up into Jim's face a little pitifully. "Still Jim, way back in my heart is a feeling for you that belongs to no one else. You—you are fine, Jim, and yet—Oh, Jim, if you want me, you'd better take me now because," this with a sudden gust of girlish confidence, "because, honestly, I'm just crazy about Sara, and I know you are better for me than he is!"

Jim gave a joyful laugh. "I'd be a mucker to try to make you marry me now, Penny. You are just a kid. And just a dear. There is an awful lot to you that Sara can never touch. You show it only to me. And it's mine."

"You'd better stay on the job, Still," said Pen, warningly.

Again Jim laughed. "Why, you sent me out west yourself."

Pen nodded. "And it will make a man of you. It will wake you up. And when you wake up, you'll be a big man, Jimmy."

Pen's old look was on her face. "What do you mean, Pen?" asked Jim.

The girl shook her head. "I don't quite know. Some day, when I've learned some of the lessons Aunt Mary says are coming to me, I'll tell you." Then a look almost of fright came to Pen's face. "I'm afraid to learn the lessons, Still Jim. Take me with you now, Jimmy."

The tall boy looked at her longingly, then he said:

"Dear, I mustn't. It wouldn't be treating you right." And there was a sudden depth of passion in his young voice as he added, "I'm going to give you my sign and seal again, beloved."

And Jim lifted Penelope in his strong arms and laid his lips to hers in a hot young kiss that seemed to leave its impress on her very heart. As he set her to her feet, Penelope gave a little sob and ran from the room.

Nothing that life brings us is so sure of itself as first love; nothing ever again seems so surely to belong to life's eternal verities. Jim went about his preparations for graduating and for leaving home with complete sense of security. He had arranged his future. There was nothing more to be said on the matter. Fate had no terror for Jim. He had the bravery of untried youth.

The next two weeks were busy and hurried. Pen, a little wistful eyed whenever she looked at Jim, avoided being alone with him. Saradokis did not come to the house again. He took two weeks in the mountains after graduation before beginning the contracting business which his father had built up for him.

As the time drew near for leaving home, Jim planned to say a number of things to his Uncle Denny. He wanted to tell him about his feeling for Pen and he wanted to tell how much he was going to miss the fine old Irishman's companionship. He wanted to tell him that he was not merely Jim Manning, going to work, but that he was a New Englander going forth to retrieve old Exham. But the words would not come out and Jim went away without realizing that Uncle Denny knew every word he would have said and vastly more, that only the tender Irish heart can know.

Jim's mother, Uncle Denny and Pen went to the station with him. He kissed his mother, wrung Pen's and Dennis' hands, then climbed aboard the train and reappeared on the observation platform. His face was rigid. His hat was clenched in his fist. None of the watching group was to forget the picture of him as the train pulled out. The tall, boyish figure in the blue Norfolk suit, the thick brown hair tossed across his dreamer's forehead, and the half sweet, half wistful smile set on his young lips.

There were tears on Jim's mother's cheeks and in Pen's eyes, but Uncle Denny broke down and cried.

"He's me own heart, Still Jim is!" he sobbed.



CHAPTER VII

THE CUB ENGINEER

"Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which it was created."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

It was hard to go. But Jim was young and adventure called him. As the train began its long transcontinental journey, Jim would not have exchanged places with any man on earth. He was a full-fledged engineer. He was that creature of unmatched vanity, a young man with his first job. And Jim's first job was with his government. The Reclamation Service was, to Jim's mind, a collection of great souls, scientifically inclined, giving their lives to their country, harvesting their rewards in adventure and in the abandoned gratitude of a watching nation.

Jim was headed for the Green Mountain project which was located in the Indian country of the far Northwest. There were not many months of work left on the dam or the canals. But Jim was to report to the engineer in charge of this project to receive from him his first training.

This was Jim's first trip away from the Atlantic coast. He was a typical Easterner, accustomed to landscapes on a small scale and to the human touch on everything. Until he left St. Paul, nothing except the extreme width of the map really surprised him. But after the train had crossed the Mississippi valley, it began to traverse vast rolling plains, covered from horizon to horizon with wheat. At endless intervals were set tiny dwellings like lone sentinels guarding the nation's bread. After the plains, came an arid country where a constantly beaten vegetation fought with the alkali until at last it gave way to a world of yellow sand and purple sky.

After a day of this, far to the west appeared a delicate line of snowcapped peaks toward which the flying train snailed for hours, until Jim, watching eagerly, saw the sand give way to low grassy hills, the hills merge into ridges and the ridges into pine-clad mountain slopes.

For the last two days of the trip the train swung through dizzy spaces, slid through dim, dripping canyons, crossed trestles even greater than the trestles of Jim's boyhood dreams; twisted about peaks that gave unexpected, fleeting views of other peaks of other ranges until Jim crawled into his berth at night sight-weary and with a sense of loneliness that appalled him.

At noon of a bright day, Jim landed at a little way station from which a single-gauge track ran off into apparent nothingness. Puffing on the single-gauge track was a "dinky" engine, coupled to a flat car. Wooden benches were fastened along one end of the car. The engineer and fireman were loading sheet iron on the other end. They looked Jim over as he approached them.

"Do you go up to the dam?" he asked.

"If we ever get this stuff loaded," replied the engineer.

"I'd like to go up with you," said Jim. "I've got a job up there."

The engineer grunted. "Another cub engineer. All right, sonny. Load your trousseau onto the Pullman."

Jim grinned sheepishly and heaved his trunk and suit case up on the flat car. Then he lent a hand with the sheet iron and climbed aboard.

"Let her rip, Bill," said the fireman. And she proceeded to rip. Jim held his hat between his knees and clung to the bench with both hands. The dinky whipped around curves and across viaducts, the grade rising steadily until just as Jim had made up his mind that his moments were numbered, they reached the first steep grade into the mountain. From this point the ride was a slow and steady climb up a pine-covered mountain. Just before sunset the engine stopped at a freight shed.

"Go on up the trail," said the fireman. "We'll send your stuff up to the officers' camp."

Jim saw a wide macadam road leading up through the pines. The unmistakable sounds of great construction work dropped faintly down to him. His pulse quickened and he started up the road which wound for a quarter of a mile through trees the trunks of which were silhouetted against the setting sun. Then the road swept into the open. Jim stopped.

First he saw ranges, stretching away and away to the evening glory of the sky. Then, nearer, he saw solitary peaks, etched black against the heavens, and groups of peaks whose mighty flanks merged as if in a final struggle for supremacy.

The boy saw a country of mighty distances, of indescribable cruelty and hostility, a country of unthinkable heights and impassable depths. And, standing so, struggling to resist the sense of the region's terrifying bigness, he saw that all the valleys and canyons and mountain slopes seemed to focus toward one point. It was as if they had concentrated at one spot against a common enemy.

This point, he saw, was a huge black canyon that carried the waters from all the hundred hills around. It was the point where the war of waters must be keenest, where the stand of the wilderness was most savage and where lay the one touch of man in all that area of contending mountains.

A vast wall of masonry had been built to block the outlet of the ranges. A curving wall of gray stone, so huge, so naked of conscious adornment that the hills might well have disbelieved it to be an enemy and have accepted it as part and parcel of their own silent grandeur.

Jim lifted his hat slowly and moistened his lips. This, then, was the labor to which he had so patronizingly offered his puny hands.

After a while, details obtruded themselves. Jim saw black dots of men moving about the top of the dam. He heard the clatter of concrete mixers, the raucous grind of the crusher, the scream of donkey engines and the shouts of foremen. Back to the right, among the trees, was a long military line of tents. Above the noise of construction the boy caught the silent brooding of the forest and, poured round all, the liquid glory of the sunset. Suddenly he saw the whole great picture as his own work, and it was a picture as elusive, as tantalizing, as a boy's first dreams of pirate adventure. Jim had come to his first great dam.

When he had shaken himself together and had swallowed the lump in his throat, he asked a passing workman for Mr. Freet, the Project Engineer. He was directed to a tent with a sheet iron roof. Jim stopped bashfully in the door. A tall man was standing before a map. Jim had a good look at him before he turned around.

Mr. Freet wore corduroy riding breeches and leather puttees, a blue flannel shirt and soft tie. He was thin and tall and had a shock of bright red hair. When he turned, Jim saw that his face was bronzed and deeply lined. His eyes were black and small and piercing.

"Mr. Freet," said Jim, "my name is Manning."

The project engineer came forward with a pleasant smile. "Why, Mr. Manning, we didn't look for you until tomorrow, though your tent is ready for you. Come in and sit down."

Jim took the proffered camp chair and after a few inquiries about his trip, Mr. Freet said: "It's supper time and I'll take you over to the mess and introduce you. Only a few of the engineers have their wives here and all the others, with the so-called 'office' force, eat at 'Officers' Mess'. I'm not going to load you up with advice, Mr. Manning. You are a tenderfoot and fresh from college. You occupy the position of cub engineer here, so you will be fair bait for hazing. Don't take it too seriously. About your work? I shall put you into the hands of the chief draughtsman for a time. I want you to thoroughly familiarize yourself with that end of the work. Then, although most of that part is done, you will go into the concrete works, then out on the dam with the superintendent. Remember that you have no record except some good college work. Forget that you ever were a senior. Look at yourself as a freshman in a difficult course, where too many cons means a life failure."

Jim listened respectfully. At that moment Arthur Freet was the biggest man on earth to him.

"Yes, sir," he said. "Thank you."

Freet pulled on a corduroy coat. "Come over to supper, Manning. Too much advice on an empty stomach is bad for the digestion."

Jim followed meekly after the Big Boss.

Jim reported to Charlie Tuck, the head draughtsman the next morning. Tuck was a plump, middle-aged man, bald headed and clean shaven, with mild blue eyes. Jim put him down in his own mind as a sissy and chafed a little at being put into Tuck's care. But his discontent was shortlived.

Tuck proved to be a hard taskmaster. Before the end of the week Jim realized that he would not get out of Tuck's hands until he knew every inch of the design of the great dam from the sluice gates and the drainage holes to the complete vertical section. He had no patience with mistakes and Jim took his grilling in silence, for the fat little man showed a deep knowledge of the technical side of dam building that reduced the cub engineer to a humble pulp.

Also, Jim discovered that Tuck was an old Yale man and that his avocation in life seemed to be tennis. The engineers had a good court in the woods and after Tuck found that Jim liked the game, he took the boy over to the court every afternoon before supper and beat him with monotonous regularity. And Jim was a good player.

The dam was far from civilization and the engineers welcomed Jim, although they treated him with the jocularity that his youth and inexperience demanded. The novelty of his environment, the romance of the great gray dam, built with such frightful risk and difficulty, absorbed Jim for the first week or so. He had no thought of homesickness until the excitement of his new work began to recede. And then, quite unexpectedly, it descended on him like a leaden cloud.

The longing for home! The helpless, hopeless sickness of the heart for dear familiar faces! The seeing of alien places through tear-dimmed eyes, the answering to strange voices with an aching throat, and the poignancy of memory! Jim's mind dwelt monotonously on the worn spot in the library hearth rug where he and Uncle Denny had spent so many, many hours. There was the crack in the brown teapot that his mother would not discard because she had poured Big Jim's tea from it. There was Uncle Denny's rich Irish voice, "Ah, Still Jim, me boy!" And there was Pen—dear, dear Penelope, with her woman's eyes in her child's face—with her halo of hair. Pen's "Take me with you, Still," was the very peak of sorrow now to the boy. Jim was homesick. And he who has not known homesickness does not know one of life's most exquisite griefs.

It seemed to Jim now that he hated the Big Country. At night in his tent he was conscious of the giant dam lying so silent in the darkness and it made him feel helpless and alone. By day he hid his unhappiness, he thought. He worked doggedly and did not guess that Charlie Tuck understood that many times he saw the designs for the wonderful bronze gates of the sluicing tunnel over which Charlie heckled him for days, through tear-dimmed eyes.

The camp was lighted by electricity. Jim would sit watching the lights flare up after supper, watching the night shift on the broad top of the dam which was as wide as a street and try to pretend that the noise and the light and the figures belonged to 23rd street. Jim was sitting so in the door of his tent one night after nearly a month in camp. He held his pipe but could not smoke because of the ache in his throat. He had not been there long when Charlie Tuck came up the trail and with a nod sat down beside Jim.

"Let me have a light," he said. "The fellows are having a rough house over in the office tonight. Why don't you go over?"

"I don't feel like it, somehow," replied Jim.

Tuck nodded. "You may have hated New York while you lived there, but it looks good now, eh?"

"Yes," answered Jim.

"You'll feel better when the Boss begins to give you some responsibility. Were you ever up in the Makon country, Manning?"

"No," said Jim.

"Don't strain yourself talking," commented Tuck, sarcastically. "You are rather given to blathering, I see. Well, the Makon country wants a dam. It wants it bad but the Service doesn't see how to get in there. There is a big valley that has been partially farmed for years. It is enormously fertile, but there is only enough water in it to irrigate a limited number of farms.

"Now, ten miles to the north, is the Makon river that never fails of water. But as near as anyone can find out the only feasible place for damming it is somewhere in a beastly canyon that no man has ever gone through alive. The river is treacherous and the country would make this look as well manicured as the Swiss Alps."

Jim listened intently. Charlie Tuck pulled at his pipe for a time, then he said: "My end of this job is about finished. I like the exploring end of the work best, anyhow. I was with the Geological Survey for ten years before the Reclamation Service was created. I made the preliminary surveys for this project and for the Whitson. I tell you, Manning, that's the greatest work in the world—getting out into the wilderness and finding the right spot for civilization to come and thrive. There's where you get a sense of power that makes you feel like a Pilgrim Father. The Reclamation Service is a great pipe dream. Some of the finest men in the country are in it today and nobody knows it."

"Like Mr. Freet," said Jim.

Jim thought that Tuck hesitated for a moment before he answered. "Yes, and a dozen others. I consider it a privilege to work with them. Say, Manning, if some way they could find the right level in that canyon and drive a tunnel through its solid granite walls, they could send the Makon over into the valley."

"Why doesn't the Service send a man to explore the crevice?" asked Jim.

"That's what I say!" cried Tuck. "Just because a lot of cold feet claim it can't be done, just because no man has come through that crevice alive, is no reason one won't. Say, Manning, if I can get the Service to send me up there, will you go with me?"

"Me!" gasped Jim.

Tuck nodded in his gentle way. "Yes, you see I like you. You are more congenial than most of the fellows here to me. On a trip like that you want to be mighty sure you like the fellow you are going to be with. Then I think you would learn more on a trip like that than in a year of the sort of work Freet plans for you. And last, because I think you've got the same kind of feeling for the Service that I have though you've been here so short a time. It's something that's born in you. What do you say, Manning?"

Jim never had felt so flattered in his life. And Adventure called to him like a ship to a land-locked mariner.

"Gee!" he cried, "but you're good to ask me, Mr. Tuck! Bet your life I'll go!"

Tuck emptied his pipe and rose. "I'll go see Freet now and persuade him to get busy with the Chief in Washington. One thing, Manning. It will be a dangerous undertaking. We may not come through alive. You must get used to the idea, though, that every Project demands its toll of deaths. People don't realize that. Are you willing to go, knowing the risk?"

With all the valor of youth and ignorance, Jim answered, "I'm ready to start now."

Mr. Freet was not adverse to the undertaking and the Washington office shrugged its shoulders. The Project engineer talked seriously to Jim, though, about the danger of the mission and insisted that he write home about it before finally committing himself. Jim's letter home, however, would have moved a far more stolid spirit than Uncle Denny, for he sketched the danger hazily and dwelt at length on the honor and glory of the undertaking. The reply from the brownstone front was as enthusiastic as Jim could desire.

Tuck undertook the preparations for the expedition with the utmost care. Only the two of them were to go. The outfit must be such as they could handle themselves, yet as complete as possible. Two folding canvas boats, two air mattresses, life preservers, waterproof bags, first aid appliances, brandy, sweet oil, surveying implements, food in as compact form as possible, guns and fishing tackle made a formidable pile for two men to manage. But at Jim's protest Charlie answered grimly that they would not be heavily laden when they came out of the canyon.

It was mid-August when the two men reached the Makon country. They arranged with a rancher to take them and their outfit up to the river. There was no road, scarcely even a trail up to the canyon. The green of the ranches was encircled by a greasewood-covered plain that, toward the river, became rock covered and rough so that a wagon was out of the question and the sturdy pack horses themselves could move but slowly.

Jim's first view of the Makon Canyon was of a black rift in a rough brown sea of sand, with a blue gray sky above. As the little pack train drew nearer he saw that the walls of the rift were weathered and broken into fissures and points of seeming impassable roughness. So deep and so craggy were these walls that the river a half mile below could be seen only at infrequent intervals. The labor of getting into the crevice would be quite as difficult, Jim thought, as going through it.

They made camp that night close beside the canyon edge. Early the next morning the rancher left them and Charlie and Jim prepared to get themselves and their outfit down over the mighty, bristling walls. Lowering each other and the packs by ropes, sliding, rolling, jumping, crawling, it was night before they reached the river's edge, where they made camp. There was a narrow sandy beach with a cottonwood tree growing close to the granite wall. Under this they put their air mattresses and built their fire.

Jim did not like the feeling of nervousness he had in realizing how deep they were below the desert and how narrow and oppressive were the canyon walls. He was glad that the strenuous day sent them off to bed and to sleep as soon as they had finished supper. They were up at dawn.

Charlie's purpose was to work down the river, surveying as he went until he found a level where the river would flow through a tunnel out onto the valley. And this level, too, must be at a point where construction work was possible. The river was incredibly rough and treacherous. From the first they packed everything in waterproof bags. The canvas canoes were impractical. The river was full of hidden rock and by the third day the second canoe was torn to pieces and they were depending on rafts made from the air mattresses.

After the canoes were gone, they spent practically all the daylight in the water, swimming or wading and towing or pushing the mattresses. The water was very cold but they were obliged to work so hard that they scarcely felt the chill until they made camp at night. Jim discovered that a transit could be used in a cauldron of water or on a peak of rock where a slip meant instant death or clinging to steep walls that threatened rock slide at the misplacing of a pebble.

One arduous task was the locating of a camp at night. The second night in the camp they were lucky. They found a broad ledge in a spot that at first seemed hopeless, for the blank walls appeared here almost to meet above the deep well of water. There was a little driftwood on the ledge and they had a fire. The following two nights they were less fortunate. The best they could find were chaotic heaps of fallen rock on which to lay their mattresses, and they slept with extreme discomfort.

The fifth day was a black day. They were swimming slowly behind their laden mattresses through deep, smooth black water when, without warning, the river curved and swept over a small fall into heavy rapids. Instantly the mattresses were whirling like chips. The two men fought like mad to tow them to a rock ledge, the only visible landing place the crevice had to offer. But long before this haven was reached the mattresses were torn to shreds and Jim and Charlie were glad to reach the ledge with their surveying instruments and two bags of "grub." Here they sat dripping and exhausted. It was nearly dark. Night set in early in the canyon. They dared not try to look for a better camping ground that night. The ledge was just large enough for the two of them, with what remained of their dunnage.

Charlie grinned. "Welcome to our city. Well, it's as good as a Pullman berth at that."

"And no harder to dress on," said Jim, standing up carefully and beginning to peel off his wet clothes. "I guess if we wring these duds out and rub with alcohol, they won't feel so cold."

Charlie rose and began to undress gingerly. "You can stand up to make your toilet," he said, "which is more than the Pullman offers you."

They ate a cold canned supper and afterward, as they sat shivering, Jim said, "If we fail to locate the dam site, no one will have any sympathy with our troubles."

"We will find it," said Charlie with the calm certainty he never had lost. "Jupiter looks as big as a dinner plate down here. Sometimes when I look at the stars I wonder what is the use of this kind of work."

Jim looked up at the stars which seemed almost within hand touch. Their nearness was an unspeakable comfort to the two in the crevice. He spoke slowly but with unusual ease. Charlie Tuck had grown very near to him in the past few days.

"I've had a feeling," he said, "ever since we actually got down here and on the job, that I'm doing the thing I've always been intended to do. I don't know how I got that feeling because I've always lived in towns."

"I feel that way every time I go out exploring," answered Tuck. "I can stand the draughting board just so long and then I break loose. I suppose someone has got to do these jobs and there is always someone willing to take the responsibility. Kipling calls it being a Son of Martha. Do you know those verses?"

"No," said Jim. "I'd like to hear them."

Charlie chuckled. "Me reciting Kipling is like hearing a 'co-ed yell'—it's the only poem I know, though, and here goes. The Sons of Martha

'—say to the Mountains, Be ye removed! They say to the lesser floods, run dry! Under their rods are the rocks reproved. They are not afraid of that which is high. Then do the hilltops shake to their summits, then is the bed of the deep laid bare, That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts break loose, They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their work whenever they choose. As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand, Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's days may be long in the land.

Lift ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat, Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that. Not as a ladder from Earth to Heaven, not as an altar to any creed, But simple Service, simply given, to their own kind, in their common need.'"

The two men sat in silence after Charlie had finished until he said: "If I were you I'd read Kipling a good deal. He's good food for a man of your type. People don't realize what their comforts cost. I hope that when I die it will be on a Son of Martha job. I'm built that way. My people were New Englanders, then middle west pioneers, and now here I am, still breaking the wilderness."

Jim sat with his heart swelling with he knew not what great dream. It was the divine fire of young sacrifice, the subtle sense of devotion that has made men since the world began lay down their lives for the thing not seen with the eye.

"I wish you'd teach me those verses," said Jim. "We've got to keep awake or roll off the ledge."

And so the night passed.

The next day the way was unspeakably difficult. They made progress slowly and heavily, clambering from rock to rock, clinging to the walls, fighting through rapids. It was past mid afternoon when they ran a level in a spot of surpassing grandeur. A rock slide had sent a great heap of stone into the river. Close beside this they set the transit. Forward the river swept smoothly round a curve. Back, the two looked on a magnificent series of flying buttresses of serrated granite, their bases guarding the river, their tops remotely supporting the heavens. The buttresses nearest the rock heap and on opposite sides of the river were not two rods apart.

They ran the levels carefully and then looked at each other in silence. Then they made another reading and again looked at each other. Then they packed the transit into its rubber bag, sat down on the rock heap and gazed at the marching, impregnable line of buttresses.

"It will be even higher than the Green Mountain and a hundred times more difficult to build," said Charlie, softly.

"She'll be a wonder, won't she!" exclaimed Jim. "The Makon dam. It will be the highest in the world."

"Granite and concrete! Some beauty that! Eternal as the hills!" said Charlie. "We will make camp and finish the map here."

They lay long, looking at the stars that night. "Some day," said Jim, "there will be a two hundred feet width of concrete wall right where we are lying. Doesn't it make you feel a little hollow in your stomach to think that you and I have decreed where it shall be?"

"Yes," said Charlie. "It's a good spot, Manning. I hope I get a chance to lay out the road down here. They will have to blast it out of the solid granite. It will eat money up to make it."

"Let me in on it, won't you," pleaded Jim.

"Well, slightly!" exclaimed Charlie. "Now for a good night's sleep. We ought to be out in three days. That will make ten days in all, just what I planned."

Jim hardly knew Charlie the next day. No college freshman on his first holiday ever acted more outrageously. He sang ancient college songs that reverberated in the canyon like yells on a football field. He stood solemnly on his head on the top of rock pinnacles. He crowned himself and Jim with wreaths made of water cress that he found on a tiny sandy beach. When they were obliged to take to the water he pretended that he was an alligator and made uncouth sounds and lashed the water with the grub bag in lieu of a tail.

Late in the afternoon, while they were swimming through a whirlpool, he insisted on giving Jim a lecture on the gentle art of bee-hunting as he had seen it practiced in Maine.

"Now we will pretend that I am the bee!" he shouted at Jim. "You will admit that I look like one! I am drunk with honey and I hang to the comb thus!"

He caught a point of rock with one hand and lazily waved the other.

"This is my proboscis," he explained.

"For heaven's sake, be careful!" yelled Jim. "This is no blooming ten-cent show! Keep both hands on the rock and climb up for a rest."

Charlie suddenly went white. "God! I've got cramp!" he screamed. "Both legs. Help me, Manning!"

He struggled to get his free hand on the rock, but the water tore at him like a ravening beast and he lost his hold. Jim swam furiously after him. The white head showed for a moment, then disappeared around a turn of the wall.



CHAPTER VIII

THE BROKEN SEAL

"When I was young I thought the world was made for love. Now I know that love made the world."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

How he passed the night that followed Jim never was sure. He knew that he fought his way down stream until long after darkness set in. Then, utterly exhausted, bleeding and bruised, he crawled up onto a rock under the wall and lay dripping and shivering until dawn.

He watched the light touch the far top of the crevice, saw the azure strip of the sky appear and then with a deep groan he forced himself to eat from his grub bag and started hurriedly on down the river. The stream was much deeper below the point of the accident, with several large falls. Jim worked his way along carefully, swimming or floating for the most part, for the walls for many miles offered not even a hand-hold nor did they once give back in beach or eddy.

The loneliness was appalling. The hardship of the work was astonishingly increased, robbed of Tuck's unfailing cheerfulness and faith. There was one moment when, toward sunset, Jim's strength almost failed him. The walls were rougher now. He had found a hand-hold but no place for the night. He clung here until his exhausted arms were able to endure no more.

"I can't do any more!" panted Jim. "I'll have to go down." And then he gave a little childish sob. "'Hang on to what you undertake like a hound to a warm scent, Jimmy!'" he said, brokenly. And new strength flowed into his arms and he swam on for a few moments, finding then a bit of shore on which to spend the night. He and Charlie had each carried a map and a set of instruments. Jim felt that he bore now not only his own but Charlie's responsibility to deliver the maps to Freet. As he lay looking up at the stars, that second night alone in the crevice, Jim realized ever since he and Charlie had started on the expedition, he had ceased to be homesick. He realized this when, on this second night, he tried to keep his nerves in order by thinking very hard of home and he found that he dwelt most on Exham and his father and the Sign and Seal he had given Penelope. And that while he longed vaguely for the old brownstone front, he felt with a sudden invigorating thrill that he belonged where he was and that he was nearer to Exham than he had been since he had left there.

It was nearing evening of the fourth day after Charlie's disappearance that Jim suddenly saw the canyon walls widen. He struggled at last up onto a sandy beach and looked about him. The canyon walls here, though very rough, gave promise of access to the top. Jim examined the beach carefully for trace of Charlie and, finding none, he prepared to spend the night in resting before the stiff climb of the next day. He built a fire and ate his last bit of grub, a small can of beans, and fell asleep immediately.

At dawn the next morning he began his climb up the bristling walls of the canyon. Eleven days before he would have said that to scale these sickening heights was impossible. But Jim would never be a tenderfoot again. He had been on short rations for three days and was weak from overwork. But he had a canteen of water and rested frequently and he went about the climb with the care and skill of an old mountaineer. He had learned in a cruel school.

Late in the afternoon he crawled wearily over one last knife-edged ledge and hoisted himself up onto the canyon's top. He was greeted by a faint shout.

Three men on horseback were picking their way carefully toward him. Jim waved his hand and dropped, panting, to await their arrival. When they were within speaking distance, he rose weakly and called:

"Where's Charlie Tuck?"

The three men did not answer until they had dropped from their horses beside Jim; then the rancher who had packed the expedition to the crevice said:

"They picked his body up near Chaseville this morning. We come up as quick as we could for trace of you. You look all in. Here, Dick, get busy! We brought some underclothes; didn't know what shape you'd be in. Here is the suit you left at my place. God! I thought you'd never need it. Billy, start a fire and cook the coffee and bacon. You've had an awful experience, Mr. Manning, I guess. You don't look the tenderfoot kid that went into the canyon!"

"We found the dam site," said Jim hoarsely.

"Don't try to talk till you get some grub," said the man called Billy.

Clothed and fed, Jim told his story, a little brokenly. The group of men who listened were used to hardy deeds. They had seen Nature demand her toll of death again and again in the wilderness. And yet as they sat looking at the young fellow with his gray eyes shocked and grief-stricken and perceived his boyish idolatry of Charlie Tuck, something like moisture shone in their eyes. They shook hands with Jim when he had finished, silently for the most part, though the rancher said:

"You're the only man ever came through there alive. They had to bury Tuck right off. They'd ought to build a monument for him. Where is his folks?"

"He had none," said Jim. "I want to put up his headstone for him, and I know just what lines are going to be put on the stone."

"They ought to be blamed good," said Dick.

"What are they?" asked the ranchman.

Jim sat for a moment looking down into the fearful depths where Charlie and he had lived a lifetime. Then he said:

"'Lift ye the stone or cleave the wood, to make a path more fair or flat, Lo, it is black already, with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that! Not as a ladder from Earth to Heaven, not as an altar to any creed, But simple Service, simply given, to his own kind, in their common need.'"

And so Charlie Tuck crossed the Great Divide.

Jim stopped two days with the rancher and then went back to the Green Mountain dam. The story of the trip through the crevice had preceded him. The men of the Service were inured to the idea of the sacrifice of blood for the dams. There was little said, some silent handshakes given, and they ceased to haze Jim. He had become one of them.

The plans for the preliminary surveys of the Makon Project were begun at once. Jim remained at Green Mountain during the winter, serving his apprenticeship to the concrete works and the superintendent as Mr. Freet had planned. But in the spring he had his wish and was sent to lay out the road on the Makon project.

All this time letters came regularly from the brownstone front, but they were from Jim's mother and his Uncle Denny for the most part, and they were very silent about Penelope. Jim wrote Pen from time to time, but he was not an easy writer and Pen wrote him only gay little notes that were very unsatisfactory. But Jim was absorbed in his work and did not worry over this.

Mr. Freet explained to Jim that he needed an "Old Timer" in laying out the Makon road whose practical experience would supplement Jim's theories. When Jim reached the survey camp in the Makon valley he found waiting for him a small man of about fifty, with a Roman nose, bright blue eyes and a shock of gray hair. This was Iron Skull Williams, whom Freet had described in detail to Jim and who was to be Jim's right hand. He was an old Indian fighter. The Apaches, Freet said, had given him his nickname because they claimed he would not be killed. Bullets glanced off his head like rain. Williams was an expert road maker and had worked much for Freet in various parts of the west.

Jim and Williams looked each other over carefully and liked each other at once. They found immediately in each other's society something very choice. The friendship had not been a week old before Iron Skull had heard of Exham and the brownstone front and of Penelope. While Jim had learned what no other man knew, that Williams' life-long, futile passion had been for a college education and that he was a bachelor because a blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl had been buried in the Arizona ranges, twenty-five years before.

Jim's quiet ways and silent tongue did not make him an easy mixer. The opening up of a project is a rough and lonesome job. Running surveys through unknown country where supplies are hard to get and distances are huge, makes men very dependent on one other for companionship. Jim liked the young fellows who ran the road surveys with him. He enjoyed the "rough necks," the men who did the actual building of the road. They all in turn liked Jim. But Jim had not the easy coin of word exchange that makes for quick and promiscuous acquaintanceship. So he grew very dependent on Iron Skull, who, in a way, filled both Sara's and Uncle Denny's place.

The old Indian fighter had that strange sense of proportion, that eagle-eyed view of life that the desert sometimes breeds. All the love of a love-starved life he gave to Jim.

One evening in April Jim came in from a hard day on horseback. The spring rains were on and he was mud-splashed and tired but full of a great content. He had found a short cut on the crevice end of the road that would save thousands of dollars in time and material.

He lighted the lamp in his tent and saw a letter from Uncle Denny on the table. There was nothing unusual about a letter from Uncle Denny and ordinarily Jim waited for his bath and clean clothes before reading it. But this time, with an inexplicable sense of fear, he picked it up and read it at once.

"STILL JIM, MY BOY:

We've had a blow. All the year Penelope has been seeing Saradokis. She has made no bones of it, and he would not let her alone. I could do nothing, though I talked till I was no better than a common scold. But it never occurred to your mother and me that Pen could do what she did.

Day before yesterday, just at noon, she called me up at the office and told me she and Sara had just been married at the Little Church Round the Corner and were leaving for Montauk Point in Sara's new high power car. She rang off before I could answer.

I sat at my desk, paralyzed. I couldn't even call your mother up. I sat there for half an hour, seeing and hearing nothing when your mother called me up. There had been an accident. Sara had disobeyed a traffic policeman, they had run into a truck at full speed. His car was wrecked. Pen escaped with a broken arm. Sarah had been apparently paralyzed. Pen had him brought to our house.

Well, I got home. It has been a fearful two days. Sara is hopelessly paralyzed from the waist down. He may live forever or die any time. He is like a raving devil.

Pen—Still Jim, my boy—Little Pen is paying a fearful price for her foolishness. She is like a person wakened from a dream. She says she cannot see what made her give in to Sara.

I've made a bad job of telling you this, Jimmy. Your mother says to tell you she understands. She will write later.

Love, dear boy, from UNCLE DENNY."

Jim crumpled the letter into his pocket and dashed out into the night. For hours he walked, heedless of rock or cactus, of rain or direction. He took a fiendish satisfaction in the thought of Sara's tragedy. Other than this he did not think at all. He felt as he had at his father's death, rudderless, derelict.

It was dawn when Iron Skull found Jim sitting on a pile of rock five miles from camp. He put his hand on Jim's shoulder.

"Boss Still," he said, "what's broke loose? I've trailed you all over the state."

Jim looked up into the kindly face and his throat worked. "Iron Skull," he got out at last, "my—my girl has thrown me down!"

Williams sat down beside him. "Not Penelope?"

Jim nodded and suddenly thrust the crumpled letter into his friend's hands. In the dawn light Williams read it, cleared his throat, and said:

"God! Poor kids! I take it your folks don't like this Sara, though you never said so."

Jim put his hand on Iron Skull's knee. "Iron Skull," he said, hoarsely, "I'd rather see Pen laid away there in the Arizona ranges beside your Mary than married to him. He's got a yellow streak."

The two sat silent for a time, then Williams said: "This love business is a queer thing. Some men can care for a dozen different women. But you're like me. Once and never again. I ain't going to try to comfort you, partner. I know you've got a sore inside you that'll never heal. It's hell or heaven when a woman gets a hold on your vitals like that.—My Mary—she had blue eyes and a little brown freckle on her nose—I was just your age when she died. And I never was a kid again. You gotta face forward, partner. Work eighteen hours a day. Marry your job. You still owe a big debt for your big brain. Go ahead and pay it."

Jim did not answer, but he did not remove his hand from Williams' knee, and finally Williams laid a hard palm on it. They watched the sun rise. The rain had ceased. Far to the east where the little camp lay, crimson spokes shot to the zenith. Suddenly the sun rolled above the desert's brim and leading straight and level to its scarlet center lay the road that Jim was building.

"It's a good road," said Jim unevenly. "It's my first one. I'd planned to show it to her, this summer. And now, she'll never see it—nor any of my work. Iron Skull, she had a bully mind. Just the little notes she's sent me, show she got the idea of the Projects. I guess I'm a quitter. If I can't keep my girl, what's the use of living?"

The old Indian fighter nodded. "Life is that away, partner. You mostly do what you can and not what you dream. Some day you'll have to marry. That's where I fell down. These days all us old stock Americans ought to marry. First you marry your job, Boss Still, then you marry a mother for your children."

Jim shook his head. "Pen's thrown me down," he said drearily.

Iron Skull waited patiently. At last Jim rose and held out his hand.

"Thank you, Williams," he said.

"Don't mention it," said Iron Skull Williams. "Glad to do it any time—that is, I ain't but—Hell, you know how I feel. Come home for some breakfast."

Before he went to work that day, Jim wrote a note to Pen.

"DEAR PENELOPE: If there is anything I can do, send for me. I can't bear to think of that occasional look of tragedy in your eyes standing for fact. I shall not get over this. Good-by, little Pen!

JIM."

Pen's answer to this reached Jim the following week.

"DEAR STILL: There is nothing you or anyone else can do. Sara and I must pay the price for our foolishness. I have learned more in the past two weeks than in all my life before. And I shall keep on learning. I can't believe that I'm only eighteen. Write to me once in a while.

PENELOPE."

This was Jim's answer:

"DEAR PEN: Uncle Denny wrote that you are to stay with him and mother and that Sara's father has arranged matters so that money pinch will not add to your burdens. We three are still mere kids in years so I suppose we shall get over our griefs to some extent. Let me keep at least a part of my old faith in you, Pen. In spite of the Hades you are destined to live through, keep that fine, sweet spirit of yours and keep that unwarped clarity of vision that belonged to the side of you, you showed me. It will help you to bear your trouble and I need this thought of you as much as Sara needs your nursing. I can't write you, Pen, but wire me if you need me.

JIM."

And then, as Iron Skull had bade him, Jim married his job.



CHAPTER IX

THE MAKON ROAD

"Always the strongest coyote makes the new trail. The pack is content to continue in the old."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

The building of the road from the valley to the crevice edge was not a difficult task, although the country was rough. The material for making the road was at hand, for the most part, and by the end of the summer there was a broad oiled macadam road, grade carefully proportioned to grade, leading to the canyon's brim. It was a road built to withstand the wear of thousands of tons of freight that must be hauled over it.

But the throwing of the road three thousand feet down into the canyon was a more difficult matter. Here must be built through solid granite a road down which mule teams could haul all the machinery for the making of the dam and the tunnel and all the necessities for building the workingmen's camp in the canyon bottom.

It must be wide enough to safeguard life. It must be as steep as the mules could manage in order to save distance and cost. It must be strong enough to carry enormous weights. Its curves must accommodate teams of twenty mules, hauling the great length of beam and pipe needed in the work below. And it must be a road that would endure with little expense of up-keep as long as the dam below would endure.

It was not a complicated engineering feat. But it was Jim's first responsible job. It was his first experience in handling men and a camp. Moses, showing the children of Israel the way across the desert, could have felt no more pride or responsibility than did Jim breaking the trail to the Makon.

The crevice road was blasted from the granite. It was widened to hang like a shelf over sickening depths or built up with concrete to withstand the wash from some menacing gorge, or tilted to cling desperately to a blank wall that offered not even claw hold for the eagles. And always it must drop with a grade that took no account of return freightage.

"We'll wear the machinery out and leave it at the bottom," Freet had said. "Even a 25 per cent. grade will do when necessary. Hustle it along, Manning. I'll be ready to leave the Green Mountain by the time you are ready for me at the Makon."

And Jim hustled. But labor was hard to get. The country was inaccessible and extraordinarily lonely. There was no place for women or children until the camp in the canyon should be built, so it was a crowd of wandering "rough-necks" who built the road. A few were friends of Iron Skull, who followed him from job to job. The rest were tramp workmen, men who had toiled all over the world. They were not hoboes. They were journeyman laborers. They were world workers who had lent willing and calloused hands to a thousand great labors in a thousand places.

They came and went like shifting sands. Jim never knew whether he would wake to find ten or a hundred men in the camp. He tried for a long time to solve the problem. Iron Skull considered it unsolvable. He had a low opinion of the rough-neck. At last he disappeared for a couple of weeks and returned with twenty-five Indians. They were Apaches and Mohaves under the leadership of a fine austere old Indian whom Iron Skull introduced to Jim as "Suma-theek."

"His name means 'I don't know,'" explained Williams. "It's the extent of his conversation with the average white who considers an Injun sort of a cross between a cigar sign and a nigger. Him and I did scout service together for ten years in Geronimo's time. He's my 'blood' brother, which means we've saved each other's lives. He knows more than any two whites. Color don't make no difference in wisdom, Boss Still, and I guess the Big Boss up above must have some quiet laughs at the airs the whites give themselves."

This was Jim's introduction to another friendship, though it was slow in growth. But before the Makon was finished Jim, in the long evening pipes he smoked under the stars with Suma-theek, learned the truth of Iron Skull's statements as to the Indian's wisdom.

The evening of the day the Indians arrived, a short, heavy man came to Jim's tent. He was a foreman and a good one. Jim liked his voice, which had a peculiar, tender quality, astonishing in so rough a man.

"Hello, Henderson," said Jim. "What can I do for you?"

"Us boys is going out tomorrow. We ain't going to live like Injuns!"

Jim's heart sank. He already was behind on the work. "What's the matter with the way we live?" he asked.

"Young fella," said the man pityingly, "I've worked all over the world, including New York. And I'm telling you that when you try to mix colors in camp, you've got to grade their ways of living. Now I went to Mr. Williams, but he's one of these queer nuts who thinks what's good enough for an Injun is good enough for anyone."

Jim knew that this was in truth Iron Skull's attitude. He had had no idea, however, that it might breed trouble. He thought rapidly, then spoke slowly.

"Look here, Henderson, what would you do in my place? The Director of the Service sends out word he'll be here to look the dam site over next month. I want to get the road ready for him to get down there. For six months I've tried to keep a hundred white men on the job and I can't do it. I'll give the Indians a camp of their own. But will that keep you men here?"

Henderson looked at Jim keenly to see whether or not Jim was sincerely asking his advice. Jim suddenly smiled at his evident perplexity and that flashing wistful look got under the red-faced man's skin.

"Well," he said, "if I was trying to keep men on a job I'd make things pleasant for 'em."

"You have everything I have," said Jim. "I eat with you."

"No, we ain't got all you have. We ain't got your job and your chance. You get homesick yourself even on your pay and your chance. What do you think of us boys, with nothing but wages and a kickout? Let me tell you, boss, it's the man that takes care of his men's idle hours that gets the work out of 'em."

Jim looked at the camp. It was merely a straggling line of tents set along the crevice edge. The day's work was ended and the men lounged listlessly about the tents or hung over the corral fence where the mules munched and brayed. At that moment Jim made an important stride in his education in handling men. He saw the job for the first time through the workmen's eyes. Why should they care for the job?

"Look here," said Jim, "if I send to Seattle and get a good phonograph and a couple of billiard tables and some reading matter and set them up in a good big club tent, will you agree to keep a hundred men on the job until I finish the road?"

"Government won't pay for them," said Henderson.

"I'll pay for them myself," returned Jim. "I tell you, Henderson, this road means a lot to me. It's my—my first important job and the rest of my work on the Makon depends on it. And—and a friend of mine lost his life finding the dam site and he wanted to build this road. I feel as if I'm kind of doing his work for him. If doing something to give you boys amusement will keep you here, I'll do it gladly. I haven't anything to save my money for."

Henderson cleared his throat and looked down into the awful depths of the Makon Canyon. "I heard about that trip," he said. "If—if you feel that way about it, Mr. Manning, I guess us boys'll stand by you. And much obliged to you."

"I'm grateful to you," exclaimed Jim. "Tell the boys the stuff will be here in less than a month."

There was a noticeable change in the atmosphere of the camp after this episode. The Indians, in their own camp, were perfectly contented with their quarters and their hoop game and "kin-kan" for recreation. The phonograph and billiard tables arrived on time and were set up in the club tent and Jim and his camp began to do team work. The trouble with shifting labor disappeared except for the liquor trafficking that always hounds every camp. From dawn until dark, the canyon rang periodically with the thunder of blasts. Scoops shrieked. Mules brayed. Drivers yelled. Pick and shovel rang on granite.

Jim grew to know every inch of that granite wall. He lived on the road with the men. No detail of the job was too trivial for his attention. A more experienced man would have left more to his foremen. But Jim was new to responsibility and his nervousness drove him into an intimate contact with his workmen that was to stand him in good stead all his life. It was in building this road on the Makon that Jim learned the hearts of those who work with their hands.

When a fearful slide cost him the lives of two men and half a dozen mules, it was Jim who, in his boyish contrition and fear lest the catastrophe might have been due to his lack of foresight, insisted on first testing the wall for further danger and risked his life in doing so. When a cloudburst sent to the bottom in a half hour a concrete viaduct that had taken a month to build, it was Jim who led the way and held the place at the head of the line of men, piling up sacks of sand lest the water take out a full half mile of the road. He dreamed of the road at night, waking again and again at the thought of some weak spot he had left unprotected.

The rough-necks felt Jim's anxiety and it proved contagious. It may have been due to many things, to Jim's youth and his simple sincerity, to his example of indefatigable energy and his willingness to work with his hands; it may have been that the men felt always the note of domination in his character and that that forced some of the cohesion. But whatever the causes, by the time the road lay a coiling thread from the top of the crevice to the spot where poor Charlie Tuck went down, Jim had built up a working machine of which many an older engineer would have been proud.

The day before the Director and Mr. Freet were expected, Jim and Iron Skull left for the railway station, twenty-five miles away, to meet their two superiors. As he mounted his horse, Jim said to Iron Skull:

"I'm a little worried about the wall at the High Point curve."

"So am I," answered Iron Skull. "Shall I blast back? I don't need to go in with you."

"No," replied Jim. "We couldn't clear out in a week. Wait till the Big Bosses go."

"Better tend to it now," warned Iron Skull.

"I'll risk it," said Jim. And he rode away, Iron Skull following.

The two were held at the little desert station for a day, waiting for the two visitors who were delayed at Green Mountain. They returned in the stage with the Director and Freet, the two saddle horses leading behind. Just about a mile outside the camp they were met by Henderson, mounted on one of the huge mules, that shone with much grooming.

The stage pulled up and Henderson dismounted and bowed.

"I come out to meet you gents," he said, in his tender voice, "representing the Charles Tuck Club of Makon, to tell you we hope you'd not try to go down the Canyon this afternoon, as us citizens of Makon had got up a few speeches and such for you."

Jim and Iron Skull were even more amazed than the two visitors, and sat staring stupidly, but the Director rose nobly to the occasion.

"Thank you," he said. "What is the Charles Tuck Club?"

Henderson mounted his mule and rode on the Director's side of the stage.

"It's the club we formed for using the phonograph and billiard tables the Boss give us. If you gents don't care, I'll ride ahead and tell 'em you're coming."

"Gee!" exclaimed Jim, as the mule disappeared up the broad ribbon of road. "What do you suppose they are up to?"

"This is going some for a small camp!" said the Director. "The men usually don't care whether I come or go."

Jim shook his head. They reached the camp shortly after Henderson and were led by that gentleman to the club tent, where fully half the camp was gathered. The phonograph was set to going as they came in and following this, Baxter, the orator of the camp, got up and made a speech of welcome that consumed fifteen minutes of time and his entire vocabulary. It was concerned mostly with praises of Jim and his work with the men. When he had finished, the phonograph gave them "America" by a very determined male quartet. The perspiring Henderson then led them to the mess tent, where a late dinner or an early supper was set forth that had taxed the resources of the desert camp to its utmost.

It was dusk when the meal was finished, and then and then only did Henderson allow Iron Skull to lead the visitors to their tents while he took Jim by the arm and drew him to the crevice edge.

"Boss," he said, "not half an hour after you left, the whole dod dinged wall on the High Point curve slid out. Well, sir, we all know'd there'd be hell to pay for you if the two Big Bosses come and see that. We couldn't stand for it after all you'd worried over it. We fixed up three shifts. It's moonlight and, say, if we didn't push the face off that slide! Old Suma-theek, why he never let his Injuns sleep! They worked three shifts. Even at that you'd a beat us to it if we hadn't thought of this here committee of welcome deal. If I do say it, I've mixed with good people in my time. We kept the big mitts in there and one of the Injuns just brought me word the road was clear."

Jim stared at his rough-neck friend for a minute, too moved to speak. Then he held out his hand.

"Henderson, you've saved me a big mortification. I knew that wall should have been blasted back. Gee! Henderson! I'll remember this!"

"You're welcome," replied Henderson gently. "Don't let on to anyone but Williams and us fellows is mum."

And so the Director made his trip down and up the Makon Road and praised much the forethought and care that Jim had expended on it. And Jim, because the secret meant so much to his men, did not tell of their devotion until the Director had gone and Arthur Freet was established on the job. And after he had heard the story Freet said, looking at Jim keenly:

"You know what that kind of carelessness deserves, Manning?"

Jim nodded and Freet laughed at his serious face. "Pshaw, boy! Your having gotten together an organization with that sort of motive power would offset worse carelessness than that. Get ready to shove them into the tunnel."

So Jim's rough-necks began to open the tunnel.

The Makon Project was a six years' job. Freet gave Jim a chance at every angle of the work. Jim admired his chief ardently and yet the two never grew confidential. Freet, in fact, had no confidants among the government employees, but he seemed to know a great many of the politicians of the valley and of the state. And when he was not too deeply immersed in the work at hand Jim felt vaguely troubled by this.

And the problems of actual construction were so many that the dam and tunnel were completed and Jim had begun work on the ditches before he realized that there was a whole group of questions he must face that had nothing to do with technical engineering.

For the first mile the tunnel had to be driven through solid granite. Then the way led through adobe hills, so soft that the sagging walls were a constant menace. Not until six workmen had died at the job was the adobe finally sealed with concrete. After the adobe came sand, spring riddled. More rough-necks gave up their lives fighting the gushing floods and falling walls, until at last the tunnel emerged into the open foothills of the valley.

During all this time, the men for whom Jim had spent his first savings stayed solidly by him, save those whom death called out. After the camp in the canyon was built, many of them, including Henderson, developed unsuspected families and Jim became godfather to several namesakes. After the road was finished, however, old Suma-theek had to take his braves back to the Apache country. They did not like the work in the tunnel, and it was several years before Jim saw his old friend again.

Uncle Denny and Jim's mother came out to visit him, his second summer on the dam, and they enjoyed their visit so much that it became a yearly custom.

Jim's mother, with a mother's wisdom, never spoke of Pen to Jim except casually, of her health or of Sara's effort to carry on real estate business through Pen and his father. On the first visit Uncle Denny undertook to tell Jim of how the accident had developed all the latent ugliness of Sara's character and of his heavy demands on Penelope's strength and time. And he told Jim how Pen's girlishness had disappeared, leaving behind a woman so sweet, so patient, so sadly wise, that Uncle Denny could not speak of her without his voice breaking.

But Uncle Denny never repeated this recital, for before he had finished, Jim, white-lipped, had said hoarsely, "Uncle Denny, I can't stand it! I can't!" and had rushed off into the desert night.

Even Uncle Denny could not know, as Iron Skull who had lived with him for the past years knew, of Jim's silent anguish in the loss of Penelope. There was a little picture of Pen in tennis clothes at sixteen that always was pinned to Jim's tent wall. Once in a while when Iron Skull found him looking at it, Jim would tell him of Pen's beauty. But other than this he never mentioned her name to anyone.

Under the excitement of what Uncle Denny told him, Jim wrote a note to Pen:

"DEAR LITTLE PEN: This desert country claims one's soul as well as one's body. It is as big as the hand of God. If life gets too much for you in New York, come to me here, and I will show you and the desert to each other.

JIM."

And though Pen did not answer the note she carried it next her heart for many a day.

After the tunnel was delivering water to the valley, Jim moved into the valley with his henchmen and took charge of the canal building. Not until he undertook this work did he realize that there were economic features connected with the work on the Projects that were baffling and irritating.

The conditions in the valley were complex. A small portion of it had been farmed for many years. These farmers felt that the canals ought to come to them first. As soon as it had become known that the Reclamation Service was to undertake the Makon project, real estate sharks had gotten control of much land and by misinforming advertisements had induced eastern people to buy farms in the valley.

Other people, sometimes farmers, oftener folk who had failed in every other line of business, took up land long before even the road to the dam was finished. These people waited in a pitiful state of hardship five years for water. They blamed the Service and they fought for first water.

There were Land Hogs in the valley; men who by illegal means had acquired thousands of acres of land, although the law allowed them but one hundred and sixty acres. After the Project was nearing completion these Land Hogs sold parcels of their land at inflated prices. The Land Hogs were wealthy and had influence in the community. They threatened trouble if canals were not built first to them.

Jim turned a deaf ear to all the contending forces. His reply was the same to each:

"There is just one way to build a canal and that is where, influenced only by the lie of the land, it will do the greatest good to the greatest number. I'm an engineer, not a politician. Get out and let me work."

Yet for all his deaf ear, there percolated to Jim's inner mind facts and insinuations that disturbed him. Day after day there poured into his office not only complaints about the actual work, but accusations of graft. "The Service was working for the rich men of the valley." "The Service had its hand behind its back." "The Service was extravagant and wasteful of the people's money." "Every cent that the Project cost must be paid back by the farmers. What right had the Service to make mistakes?"

In all the cloud of complaints, Jim maintained a persistent silence and placed his canals without fear or favor. One morning in March, it was Jim's fifth year on the Makon, Mr. Freet sent for him.

"Manning," he said, as Jim dropped off his horse and stood in the doorway, "how about the canal through Mellin's place?"

Jim tossed his hair back from his face and lighted a cigarette. "Mellin, the Land Hog?" he asked. "Well, his canal's like the apple core. There ain't going to be one!"

Freet's small black eyes met Jim's clear gaze levelly. "Why?" he asked.

Jim looked surprised. "Why, you know, Mr. Freet, that to run it through Mellin's place will cost $5,000 more and will force half a dozen farmers to double the length of their ditches. The lie of the canal in relation to grade, too, is a half mile east of Mellin's place."

Arthur Freet raised his eyebrows. "I think that the canal had better go through Mellin's place."

Jim drew a quick breath. There was silence in the little sheet iron office for a moment and then Jim said, "I can't do it, Mr. Freet."

"This is not a matter for you to decide, Manning," replied Freet. "A man in my position has more to consider in building a dam than the mere engineering 'best.' I must think of the tactful thing, the thing that will save the Service trouble. Mellin has pull with Congress, enough to start an investigation."

"Let them investigate!" cried Jim. "I'd like them to see what I call some darn good engineering! I do think you got soaked on some of the contract work, though. Those permanent caretakers' houses could have been built for half the price."

Freet raised his eyebrows. "Put the canal through Mellin's place, Manning."

Jim flushed. "I can't do it! The west canal had to go through that Land Hog Howard's place, I'm sorry to say. It was the cheapest and best site. Every farmer in the valley dressed me down about it, in person and by mail. But I haven't cared! It was the right thing. But nothing doing on Mellin's place."

Freet smiled a little. "Do you want me to go over your head?"

Jim gave him a clear look. "You can have my resignation whenever you want it, Mr. Freet."

And Jim mounted and rode heavily back to his office.



CHAPTER X

THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK

"The lone hunter finds the best hunting but he must fight and die alone."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

That night, when Iron Skull Williams stopped at Jim's tent to speak of some detail of the work, Jim told him about the conversation with Freet.

"Iron Skull," he said in closing, "if I've got to mix up in politics, I'll quit, that's all. It's not my idea of engineering. My heavens! If the engineers of the country are not going to be left unsmirched to do their work, what's going to become of civilization? You know how I've always admired Arthur Freet. You know how I appreciate the chances he's given me to get ahead. And now——"

Iron Skull grunted. "I guess he hasn't hurt his own reputation any by letting you do a lot of his work for him while he played another end of the game. You are a great pipe dreamer, Boss Still. You want to remember that the Service is made up of human beings."

"Do you mean there is graft in the Service?" asked Jim sharply.

The older man answered gently, for he knew he was hurting Jim. "The Service is the cleanest bureau in the government. I'll bet you can count on one hand the men in it who don't toe quite straight."

Jim drew a quick breath. "I don't believe there is a crook in the Service."

"How about the sale of the water power up at Green Mountain?" asked Williams. "Do you think that was an open deal? Did the farmers have their chance?"

Jim flushed. "I never let myself think about it," he muttered.

Iron Skull nodded. "You've lived in a fool's paradise, Boss Still, and I for one don't see that you help the Service by shutting your eyes. You know as well as I do that the United States Reclamation Service is developing some mighty important water power propositions. Do you think it's like poor old human nature to argue that the Water Power Trust ain't going to get hold of that power if it can or try to destroy the Service if it can't?"

Jim rubbed his forehead drearily. "Iron Skull, isn't there anything a fellow can keep his faith in?"

"Pshaw!" answered Williams, "you can keep your faith in the Service! This here is just like finding out that, though your wife is a mighty fine woman, she has her weak points!"

Jim stared at the lamp for a long time.

"What you looking at, partner?" asked Iron Skull.

"Oh, I was seeing the Green Mountain dam the way I first saw it and I was seeing Charlie Tuck and those days of ours in the canyon and thinking of what he said about the Service. He believed in it the way I have. And then I was thinking about the bunch of men who've stuck together and by me for five years, like a pack of wolves, by jove! And I was thinking of those lines, you know, 'The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack.' That is what the Service ought to be like, the Pack, and if one man goes bad the strength of the pack is hurt."

The older man nodded. Then he said, "What are you going to do about it all, Boss Still?"

Jim brought his fist down on the table. "I'm an engineer. I deal with hard facts, not intrigues. Freet must take me so or not at all."

"Well, you are half right and half wrong," commented Iron Skull, rising.

"What do you mean?" asked Jim.

"I mean that you have got an awful lot to learn yet before you will be of big value to the Service, but you've got to learn it with your elbows and sweating blood. You're that kind. Nothing I can say will help you. Good night, partner!"

The next morning Jim reported at Freet's office. "Mr. Freet," he said carefully, "I have a lot of pride in the reputation of the Reclamation Service. If we put a canal through Mellin's place it'll give people a real cause for complaint. I shall have to resign if you insist on my doing it."

Freet laughed sardonically. "The Service can't afford to lose you, even if you do live in the clouds! Why, I broke you in myself, Manning, and you are one of the best men in the Service today, bar none. We will let the Mellin matter rest for a while."

Jim blushed furiously under his chief's praise and with a brief "Thank you," he turned away.

It was a little over two months later that Jim received an order from Washington to proceed to the Cabillo Project in the Southwest. The engineer in charge there was in poor health and Jim was to act as his assistant. Jim was torn between pleasure at his promotion and displeasure over Freet's obvious purpose of getting him away from the Makon.

But the utter relief in not having to fight the Mellin matter to a finish triumphed over the displeasure and Jim left the Makon for the Southwest with Iron Skull, while trailing after him came the Pack who, to a man, suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to winter in the desert.

Jim missed the Makon very much at first. He had all the love of a father for his first born for the Project, for which Charlie Tuck had died. At first, he felt very much a stranger on this new Project. Watts, the engineer in charge, was a sick man. He was a gentle, lovable fellow of fifty, and he was taking very much to heart the heckling that the Service was receiving on his Project. His illness had caused the work on the dam to fall behind. Jim closed his ears and his mouth, placed Iron Skull and his Pack judiciously on the works and started full steam ahead to build the Cabillo dam.

Six months after Jim's arrival Watts died and Jim succeeded to his job, which day by day grew more complicated. The old simple life of the Makon when, heading his faithful rough-necks, Jim ate up the work, with no thought save for the work, was gone. Jim's job on the Cabillo was not that of engineer alone. He had not only to build the dam but to rule an organization of two thousand souls. He was sole ruler of an isolated desert community and he was the buffer between the office at Washington and all the contending and jealous forces that were rapidly developing in the valley.

The United States Reclamation Service is in the Department of the Interior. Jim had been at Cabillo two years when the new Secretary of the Interior summoned him to Washington.

The new Secretary had found his office flooded with complaints about the Reclamation Service. He had found, too, a report from the Congressional Committee which had the year before investigated several of the Projects. Being of a patient and inquiring turn of mind, the Secretary had decided to go to the heart of the matter. Therefore he invited the complainants to come to Washington to see him. He summoned the Director and Jim with several other of the Project engineers, Arthur Freet among them, to appear before him, with the complainants.

May in Washington is apt to be very warm, although very lovely to look upon. Jim, so long accustomed to the naked height and sweep of the desert country, felt half suffocated by the low hot streets of the capitol. He went directly from the train to the Hearing, which was held in one of the Secretary's offices. The room was large and square, with a desk at one end, where the Secretary was sitting. When Jim entered, the place already was filled to overflowing with irrigation farmers or their lawyers, with land speculators, with Congressmen and reporters.

The Secretary was a large man with a smooth shaven, inscrutable face and blue eyes that were set far apart under overhanging brows. He looked at Jim keenly as the young engineer made his way to his seat in the front of the room. He saw the same Jim that had said good-bye to the little group in the station eight years before; the same Jim, with some important modifications.

He was tanned to bronze, of course. He had sun wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was thinner and the corners not so deep. The old scowl between his eyes had traced two permanent lines there. The mass of brown hair still swept his dreamer's forehead. His jaws had become the jaws of a man of action.

Jim sat down, folded his arms and crossed his knees, fixing his gaze on the patch of blue sky above the building opposite the open window. For five days he sat so, without answering a charge that was brought against him.

For five days the Secretary sat with entire patience urging every man to speak his mind fully and freely. And if bitterness toward the Service betokened free speaking, the complainants held back nothing.

A heavy set man, tanned and cheaply dressed, said: "Mr. Secretary, I was born in Hungary. I am a tinner by trade. I lived in Sioux City. I have a wife and six children. I got consumption and a real estate man fixed it up with a friend of his on the Makon Project that I go out there, see? It took all I saved but they told me crops the first year will pay all my living expenses. I buy forty acres.

"Mr. Secretary, I get no crops for five years. I hauled every drop of water we use seven miles from a spring for five years. Some days we got nothing to eat. Me and my oldest boy, we work for Mellin when we can and we stayed alive till the water come. I get cured of my consumption. But my money is gone. I can buy no tools, no nothing. And, Mr. Secretary, when the canal do come they run it through Mellin's place. My money is gone and I can't afford to dig the long ditch to Mellin's. Mellin's place is green and mine is still desert."

"Are there no small farmers or settlers who are succeeding on the Makon Project?" asked the Secretary.

"Yes, sir," replied the man, "many, but also, many like me."

"Then is your complaint against the real estate sharks or the government?" persisted the Secretary.

"Against both!" cried the man. "Why did that Freet give Mellin and the other big fellow first choice in everything? Why must I pay for what I can't get?"

There were several farmers from different projects who had stories that matched the ex-tinner's. When they had finished, the Secretary called on a real estate man who had come with a protest about the running of the canals on the Makon.

"What was the net value of the crops on the Makon Project last year," asked the Secretary.

"About $500,000, I think."

"What was it, say the year before the Reclamation Service went in there?"

"Perhaps $100,000."

"We are to believe, then, that some people have found the Service useful?"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Secretary, there are a whole lot of contented farmers up there who are too busy with their bumper crops to come to Washington, even if they wanted to."

The real estate man sat down and the Secretary called on the Chairman of the Congressional investigating committee to make a brief summary of his charges.

The Chairman said, succinctly: "I charge the Service with graft, gross extravagance and inefficiency. I call on you to remove the Director and four of his engineers, including Arthur Freet and James Manning, who are present."

"Of what specific things do you accuse Mr. Manning?" asked the Secretary, with a glance at Jim's impassive face.

"His Project is full of mistakes, some of them small, that, nevertheless, aggregate big and show the trend of the Service. Up on the Makon he made a road at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars that only the Service used. He's put a thousand dollars into telephone booths where two hundred would have been ample. Some of the canal concrete work has had to be dynamited out and done over and over again. The farmer pays for all this. Manning refuses to take any advice from the farmers on the Project, men who were irrigating before he was born. His every idea seems hostile to the farmer, whose land the farmer himself is paying him to irrigate. Manning was trained by Freet, Mr. Secretary."

The Secretary tapped his desk softly for several moments, as if turning over in his mind the opposing evidence brought out during the several days of the Hearing. Jim had not been called on but Arthur Freet and two other Project engineers had spent an entire day on the stand, quizzed unmercifully by everyone in the room. They had disclaimed every accusation. The Director of the Service, a quiet man of marvelous executive ability, had made a bitter return attack on the Congressional Committee, the farmers, the real estate men and the lawyers, accusing them of being the conscious or unconscious tools of the Water Power Trust, whose object was to destroy the Service.

An elderly Senator had risen and had addressed the Hearing. "I was one of the fathers of the Reclamation Act. One of the fundamental ideas of the Act was that it was not governmental charity but that every farmer whose arid acres were watered would be willing to pay for it. I see but one thing in all these protests against the Service and that is the attempt to repudiate the debt incurred by the farmers to the Service. And the attempt to repudiate is most bitter with the very men who pleaded most loudly with the Government to irrigate their land and who voluntarily pledged themselves to pay back during an easy period of years the cost of the Projects. If it is a fact that this tainted idea of Repudiation is creeping among the land owners on the Projects, I warn you all that I shall use all my influence to have the Reclamation Act repealed."

As the old Senator had finished half the men in the room had risen to their feet, angrily denying any thought of repudiation.

Now, after tapping his desk thoughtfully, the Secretary looked at Jim.

"Mr. Manning, please take the stand."

Jim unfolded his long legs and strode up beside the Secretary's desk. He stood there struggling for words that would not come. For five days he had sat thinking of the three Projects that he knew. He recalled Charlie Tuck and the two other engineers who had laid down their lives for the dams. He pictured again the drowned and mangled workmen at the cost of whose lives the Makon tunnel had been driven. A slow, bitter anger had risen in him against Freet. It seemed to Jim a fearful thing that one crooked man could taint such faithfulness and sacrifice as he had known, could blind intelligent men to the marvel of engineering work that marked the progress of the Reclamation Service through the arid country. But when Jim's words came, they were futile.

"I don't know," he said in his father's casual drawl, "that I have anything to say to the specific charges against me. The Director has covered the ground better than I can. I have the feeling that if the actual work we have done out west, the actual acreage we have brought to profitable bearing won't speak to you people who have seen it, nothing else will. The flood season is coming on, Mr. Secretary. I would suggest that you send either me or my successor out to my dam."