"We just don't know anything about it," said Pen, gently. "Mr. Ames, I'm curious to know just how you and Sara are going to run the dam."

Oscar closed his mouth importantly to open it again and say, "I never talk business with ladies."

Jane laughed suddenly. "Gracious, Oscar! I'm not worrying but what I'll get all the details. He's the original human sieve, Mrs. Penelope."

Oscar joined in Pen's laugh and started for the door, shaking his head and picking his teeth. Pen looked after him uneasily.

That afternoon Pen and Jane went with Bill and Oscar for an automobile ride over the desert. The two women sat in the tonneau, Oscar in front with Bill. The desert road was rough, full of bowlders and ruts. But neither Oscar nor Bill was hampered by roads. Whenever some distant spot roused their curiosity, the machine left the road and plunged madly across the desert, through cactus thickets and yucca clumps, through draws and over sand drifts.

Oscar and Bill kept up a shouted conversation with each other. But Pen and Jane each clutched a side of the machine, braced their feet and gave their entire attention to keeping from being flung bodily from the car. Forewarned for miles, no living creature crossed their path. The din and the dust, the hairbreadth escapes made the discomfort of the ride for the two women indescribable.

When Bill finally drew up before the ranch house door with his usual flourish of staccato explosions, Oscar alighted and watched Pen and his wife crawl feebly from the tonneau.

"Caramba!" he said. "That was a fine ride! I've been wanting to get a look at that country and a talk with you, Bill, for a month. I feel well rested."

Pen and Jane looked at each other and at the two men's grins of complaisance. Then, without a word, the two women sank against each other on the doorstep and laughed until the men, bewildered and exasperated, took themselves off to the barn. Finally Jane rose and wiped her eyes.

"There's not an inch on my body that isn't black and blue," she said weakly.

Pen pulled herself up by clinging to the door knob. "That was a real 'pleasure exertion,'" she whispered feebly. "But I'd do it twice over for a laugh like this. I haven't laughed so for eight years."

Jane gave Pen a kitchen apron and tied one on herself while she nodded. "Thank heaven! I always could laugh. It's saved my reason many a time. I don't want you to do a thing about getting supper, but you'll be sitting round in the kitchen and that'll keep your skirt clean."

Pen picked up a pan of cold boiled potatoes and began to peel them with more good will than skill. "I do like you, Jane Ames," she said. "Two people couldn't laugh together like that and not have been meant to understand each other."

Jane set the tea kettle firmly on the stove. "We'll see each other a lot if we have to walk. Peel them thin, dear child. I'm a little low on potatoes."

"I'm not very expert," apologized Pen. "Sara is putting up with a good deal just now, for I'm learning how to cook."

"I guess he don't suffer in silence!" sniffed Jane.

The next morning, when Penelope climbed regretfully onto the front seat of the automobile, Oscar came hurriedly from the corral with a dark-mustached young man in a business suit.

"This is Mr. Fleckenstein, Mrs. Sardox," he said. "He's a lawyer and him and I are going up to the dam with you. He just stopped here on his way. I'm leaving his horse in the corral, Jane."

Jane and Penelope exchanged puzzled looks. "Your hair needs fixing, Mrs. Penelope," said Jane. "Come in the house for a minute."

Pen clambered down obediently and Jane led her far into the parlor bedroom. "Your hair was all right," she whispered, "but I want to warn you. Oscar is just a great big innocent. He is crazy over anyone he thinks is smart. That Fleckenstein is a shyster lawyer. I wouldn't trust a hot stove in his hands. You see that your husband don't get thick with him. Do you trust your husband in business?"

Pen winced but she looked into Jane's blue eyes and answered, "No."

"Do you like Mr. Manning and want him to succeed?"

"Yes," replied Pen.

"Well then, it's time I took notice of things on this project and you can help me by watching things up there. I won't take time to say any more right now. Oscar will be storming in here in a minute."

When they reached the dam that afternoon, Oscar and Fleckenstein called on Sara. Pen found that they would talk nothing but land values while she was in the tent, so she wandered out in search of Jim.

She found him at the dam site. He was talking to a heavy-set, red-faced man in khaki. He was considerably older than Jim, who introduced the stranger as Mr. Jack Henderson.

"Henderson will take Iron Skull's place," explained Jim. "You must remember how I wrote home of him and how he helped me save my reputation as a road-builder on the Makon. He's been down on the diversion dam."

Penelope held out her hand. "I shall never cease regretting that I didn't get to see the Makon," she said.

Henderson's gray eyes lost their keenness for a moment. "It was hard for me to come up knowing I was to take Iron Skull's job." Pen listened in surprise to his low, gentle voice. "You know, Boss Still Jim, if he'd had a better chance for a education he'd have made his mark. He was just naturally big. He could see all over and around a thing and what it had to do with things a hundred years back and a hundred years on. That's what I call being big. A good many fellows that lives a long time in the desert gets a little of that, but Iron Skull had it more than anyone I know. I wish he'd had a better chance. I can fill his job, Boss, as far as the day's work goes, but I can't give you the big look of things he could."

Henderson was standing with his hat off, and now he rumpled his gray hair and shook his head. Pen liked him at once.

Jim nodded. "I miss him. I always shall miss him. I often thought that if my father had come out to this country, he'd have grown to be like Iron Skull. And they are both gone."

"That's the way life acts," said Henderson. "It's always the man that ought to stay that goes. And there's never any explanation of how you're going to fill the gap. He's jerked out of your life and you will go lame the rest of your life for all you know. These here story books that try to show death has got a lot of logic about it are liars. There ain't any reason or sense about death. It just goes around, hit or miss, like a lizard snapping flies."

There was a moment's silence during which the three stared at the Elephant. Then Jack cleared his throat and said casually, in his gentle voice:

"You're going to have a devil of a job enforcing your liquor ruling, Boss. It'll make trouble with the whites and more with the hombres."

Jim's steel jaw set. "There's not to be a drop of liquor on this dam except in the hospital. I expect you to back me in this, Jack. You know what trouble I had on the Makon because I never came down hard."

"Sure, I'll back you," said Henderson gently. "But I just wanted you to realize that it's going to be hell round a half mile track to enforce it. You never saw me backward about getting into a fight, did you?"

Jim smiled reminiscently and then said, "I'm going to start an ice cream and soft drink joint next to the moving picture show."

Here Pen laughed. "I asked one of the oilers in the cable tower the other day if he liked to work for the government. He grunted. I asked him if Uncle Sam didn't take good care of him and he said: 'Yes, and so does a penitentiary! What does men like the Big Boss know about what we want? Why don't he ask me?'"

Jim nodded. "That's typical. One of the hoboes I brought in half-starved the other day came to my office this morning and told me how to feed the camp. He doesn't like our menu. As near as I can make out this was his first experience at three meals a day and he never saw a bathtub before. There isn't a rough-neck in the camp that isn't convinced he could build that dam better than I. Eh, Jack?"

"Sure, all except the old Makon bunch."

"Well, we're up against the same old problem here, Henderson. We've got to have better co-operation and yet enough rivalry to keep every man on the job working his limit. The foremen don't pull together."

"In that case," said Henderson tenderly, "I'll begin by going over and kick the head off the team boss."

He smiled at Pen and started up the trail. Pen watched the workmen who were cleaning up the top of the concrete section.

"Did you have a good time with Mrs. Ames?" asked Jim.

"Still, she's a dear! And Oscar isn't so bad when you know him. Do you know, Jim, he actually believes that you are not building the dam for the farmers! Can't you do something to make him understand you?"

"Look here, Pen," replied Jim, "I'm building this dam for this valley, for all time, not for Oscar Ames or Bill Evans, nor for any one man. I'm doing my share in building. I'm not hired to educate these idiots."

Pen eyed Jim intently, trying to get his viewpoint and turning old Iron Skull's words over in her mind. Jim was standing with his hat under his arm and his brown hair blowing across his forehead.

"Pen," he said suddenly, "you are the most beautiful woman in the world."

Pen blushed clean to her eyebrows. Jim went on eagerly: "Penelope, I want to tell you how I feel about you. Will you let me?"

Pen looked at the Elephant helplessly. But the great beast lay mute and inscrutable in the sun. There was a look in Jim's eyes that Pen would have found hard to control had not Jim's secretary chosen that moment to interrupt them.

"Mr. Manning," he said, "a letter has just come in for you from the Secretary of the Interior. You told me to notify you when it came."



CHAPTER XVI

THE ELEPHANT'S LOVE STORY

"Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other, which the coyote will not do."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

"Don't let me keep you here, Jim," exclaimed Pen so hastily that Jim could not help smiling. She scuttled hastily up the trail ahead of him, her heavy little hunting boots doing wonders on the rough path.

The Secretary's letter disturbed Jim very much. It was not the result he had expected from the Hearing at all. Nor was the letter itself easy for Jim to understand.

"MY DEAR MR. MANNING:

"There are several facts connected with your work that I would like to call to your attention. The Reclamation Service is an experiment, a magnificent one. It is not a test of engineering efficiency, except indirectly. Engineers as a class are efficient. It is an experiment to discover whether or not the American people is capable of understanding and handling such an idea as the Service idea. It is a problem of human adjustment. Is an engineer capable of handling so gigantic a human as well as technical problem? I shall be interested in getting your ideas along this line.

"—— Secretary of the Interior."

Jim laid the letter down. He recalled the Secretary's fine, inscrutable face and that something back of its mask that he had liked and understood. He felt sure that the letter had been impelled by that far-seeing quality that he knew belonged to the Secretary but for which he had no lucid word. And yet the letter roused in Jim the old sense of resentment. What did the Secretary want him to do; turn peanut politician and fight the water power trust? Did no one realize that the erecting of the dam was heavy enough responsibility for any one man?

His first impulse was to take the letter over to Pen. Then he smiled wryly. He must not take all his troubles to her or she would get no relief from the burdening that Sara put upon her. So he brooded over the letter until supper time when he went with Henderson down to the lower mess. Jim ate with the lower mess frequently. It was almost the only way he had now of keeping in touch personally with his workmen.

After supper and a pipe in the steward's room Jim climbed the long road to the dam. The road hung high above the dam site. The mountains and the bulk of the Elephant were black in the shadowy regions beyond the arc lights. Black and purple and silver below lay the mighty section of concrete, with black specks of workmen moving back and forth on it, pygmies aiding in the birth of a Colossus. The night sky was dim and remote here. Despite the roar of the cableways, the whistles of foremen, the rushing to and fro of workmen, the flicker of electric lights, one could not lose the sense of the project's isolation. One knew that the desert was pressing in on every side. One knew that old Jezebel, having crossed endless wastes, having fed on loneliness, whispered threats of trouble to the narrow flume that for a moment throttled her. One knew that the Elephant never for a moment lost his sardonic sense of the impermanence of human effort.

When Jim reached his house, he found old Suma-theek camped on the doorstep.

"What is it, Suma-theek?" asked Jim.

"Old Suma-theek, he want make talk with you," replied the Indian.

Jim nodded. "I'd like to talk with you, Suma-theek. Wait till I get enough tobacco for us both and we'll go up on the Elephant's back, eh?"

Suma-theek grunted. The two reached the Elephant's top without conversation and sat for perhaps half an hour, smoking and mute. This was quite an ordinary procedure with them.

Finally Suma-theek said, "Why you make 'em this dam?"

"So that corn and cattle and horses will increase in the valley," replied Jim.

The Indian grunted. "Much talk! Why you make 'em?"

"It's my job; the kind of work I like."

"What use?" insisted Suma-theek. "People down in valley they much swear at you. Big Sheriff at Washington, he much swear at you. You much lonely. Much sad. Why you stay? What use? Much old Suma-theek wonder at that. Why old Iron Skull work on this dam? Why you, so young, so strong, no have wife, no have child, marry dam instead? You tell old Suma-theek why."

Jim had learned on the Makon that while war and hunting might have been an Indian's business in life, his avocation was philosophizing. He had learned that many a pauperized and decrepit old Indian, warming his back in the sun, despised of the whites, held locked in his marvelous mind treasures of philosophy, of comment on life and living, Indian and white, that the world can ill afford to lose, yet never will know.

Jim struggled for words. "Back east, five sleeps, where I was born, there are many people of many tribes. They fight for enough food to eat, for enough clothes to wear. When I was a boy I said to myself I would come out here, make place for those people to come."

"But," said Suma-theek, "the dam it will no keep whites from fighting. They fight now in valley to see who can get most land. What use?"

"What use," returned Jim, "that you bring your young men up here and make them work? I know the answer. You are their chief. It is your business to do what you can to keep their stomachs full and their backs warm. You don't ask why or the end."

The Indian rolled another cigarette. He was like a fine dim cameo in the starlight. "I sabez!" he said at last. "Blood of man, it no belong to self but to tribe. So with Injuns. So with some whites. Not so with hombres."

Again the eagle, disturbed by voices, dipped across the canyon. "See, Suma-theek, make the story for me," said Jim. "There are the eagle and the flag so young and the Elephant so old. Make the story for me."

There was a long silence once more. The desert wind sighed over the two men. The noise of building came up faintly from below but the radiance of the stars was here undimmed.

Finally Suma-theek spoke:

"Long, long, many, many years ago, before whites were born, Injuns lived far away to the west, maybe across the great water. All Injuns then had one chief. He very great, very wise, very strong. But he no have son. He heap wise. He know, man no stronger than number of his sons. He get old. No have son. Then he call all young men of tribe to him, and say: 'That young man shall be my son who shows me in one year the strongest thing in world, stronger than sun, stronger than wind, stronger than desert, than mountains, than rivers at flood.'

"All young men, they start out to hunt. All time they bring back to old chief strong medicine, like rattlesnake poison, like ropes of yucca fiber, like fifty coyotes fastened together. But that old chief he laugh and shake his head.

"One day young buck named Theeka, he start off with bow and arrow. He say he won't come back until he sure. Theeka, he walk through desert many days. Injuns no have horses then. Walk till he get where no man go before. And far, far away on burning sand, he see heap big animal move. It was bigger than a hundred coyotes made into one. Theeka he run, get pretty close, see this animal is elephant.

"And he say to self, 'There is strongest thing in world.' And he start follow this elephant. Many days he follow, never get closer. The more he follow, the more he want that elephant. One morning he see other dot move in desert. Dot come closer. It woman, young woman, much beautiful. She never say word. She just run long by Theeka.

"All time he look from elephant to her. All time he feel he love her. All time he think he no speak to her for fear he lose sight of elephant. By'mby, beautiful girl, she fall, no get up again. Theeka, he run on but his heart, it ache. By'mby he no can stand it. He give one look at elephant, say, 'Good-by, you strongest thing! I go back to her I love.' Then his spirit, it die within him, while his heart, it sing.

"He go back to girl. She no hurt at all. She put her arms round Theeka's neck and kiss him. Then Theeka say, 'Let strongest thing go. I love you, O sweet as arrow weed in spring!'

"And beautiful girl, she say: 'I show you strongest thing in world. Come!' And she take him by hand and lead him on toward elephant. And that elephant, all of a sudden, it stand still. They come up to it. They see it stand still because little To-hee bird, she circle round his head, sing him love songs.

"'O yahee! O yahai! Sweet as arrow weed in spring!'

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

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

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

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

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

"I understand," replied Jim.

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

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

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

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

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

Strangely comforted, Jim went home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What kind is that?" asked a teamster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where did you hear this?" asked Jim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get out of here!" shouted Sara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVII

TOO LATE FOR LOVE

"Honor is the thing that makes humans different from dogs—some dogs! When women have it, it is mingled always with tenderness."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

Jim jumped to his feet and took a stride toward Sara's couch, then checked himself.

"Oh, I'm not accusing you of planning the thing!" sneered Sara. "I'd have more respect for you if you had. Pen doesn't know that I know. If I hadn't got hurt I'd probably never dreamed of it. Pen and I would have raised a family and I'd have had no time to think of you. But it didn't take more than a year of lying on my back and watching her to see that it was more than my crippled condition that was changing Pen. Damn you! Why should you have it all, health and success and Pen's love? I'll get you yet, Jim Manning!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"O yahee! O yahai! Sweet as arrow weed in spring!"

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

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

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

"Jim, I can't."

"Why not, Penelope?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Too late for love, too late for joy; Too late! Too late! You loitered on the road too long, You trifled at the gate: The enchanted dove upon her branch Died without a mate: The enchanted princess in her tower Slept, died, behind the grate: Her heart was starving all this time You made it wait."

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

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

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

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

"It's final, Still."

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

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

That night Jim answered the Secretary's letter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVIII

JIM MAKES A SPEECH

"I am permanent so I cannot fully understand the tragedy that haunts humans from their birth, the tragedy of their own transitoriness."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

Jim drank his tea, staring the while at the envelope that lay on the tray. Then he opened the envelope and read:

"DEAR STILL: Don't say that I must go away. I want to stay and help you. I promised Iron Skull that I would. I don't want to add one breath to your pain—nor to my own!—and yet I feel as if we ought to forget ourselves and think only of the dam. No one knows you as I do, dear Jim. Iron Skull felt, and so do I, that somehow, sometime I can help you to be the big man you were meant to be. I have grown to feel that it was for that purpose I have lived through the last eight years. If it will not hurt you too much, please, Jim, let me stay.

PENELOPE."

Jim answered the note immediately.

"DEAREST PEN: Give me a day or so to get braced and we will go on as before. Stand by me, Pen. I need you, dear.

JIM."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim nodded.

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

Jim gasped.

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

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

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

"For the Lord's sake, Pen!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XIX

THE MASK BALL

"I have seen in the coyote pack that coyotes who will not hunt and fight for the pack must starve and die."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

"You are not!" returned Pen flatly. "You don't see the human side of your problem at all. You have made Oscar Ames hate you. Yet no man could live the life and do the things that Oscar has and not have developed a fine big side to his nature. You never see that. And the dam is more Oscar's than it is yours. It is for him. Still, somehow you have got to make every farmer on the Project your partner. Make them feel that you and the dam are theirs. Show them how to take care of the things the dam will produce. Jim, dear, make your thumb print in the hearts of men as well as in concrete, if you would have your work endure."

Jim paced the floor steadily. Old visions were passing before his eyes. Once more he saw the degraded mansions on the elm-shaded streets. Old Exham, with its lost ideals. Ideals of what? Was Pen right? Was it the ideal of national responsibility that Exham had lost—the ideal that had built the town meeting house and the public school, that had produced the giants of those early days, giants who had ruled the nation with an integrity long lost to these later times.

"My father said to me, 'Somehow we Americans have fallen down on our jobs!'" said Jim, pausing before Pen, finally. "Pen, I wonder if he would have thought your reason the right one?"

Then he lifted Pen's chin to look long into her eyes. Slowly his wistful smile illumined his face. "Thank you, dear," he said and, turning, he went out into the night.

The next night was given the Mask Ball in honor of the committee. Nobody knew what conclusion the eminent gentleman had reached in regard to Jim and his associates. But everyone did his best to contribute to the hilarity of the occasion.

The gray adobe building where the unmarried office men and engineers lived was gay with colored lights and cedar festoons. The hall in the rear of the building had an excellent dancing floor. The orchestra was composed of three Mexicans—hombres—with mandolins and a guitar, and an Irish rough-neck who brought from the piano a beauty of melody that was like a memory of the Sod. The four men produced dance music that New York might have envied.

Several Cabillo couples attended the dance. Oscar Ames and Jane and one or two other ranchers and their wives were there. All the wives of the officers' camp came and the bachelors searched both the upper and lower camps for partners, with some very charming results. Mrs. Flynn sat with Sara, and Jim insisted that instead of going with Jane and Oscar, as she had planned, that he be allowed to take Pen to the first ball she had attended since her marriage.

Henderson had ordered that the costumes be kept a great secret. Through a Los Angeles firm he provided dominoes for the five committeemen. But there were half a dozen other dominoes at the ball, so the committee quickly lost its identity. Oscar Ames came as a hobo. Henderson had a policeman's uniform, while the two cub engineers wore, one, a cowboy outfit; the other, an Indian chief's. Mrs. Henderson was dressed as a squaw.

Penelope wore a flower girl's costume, improvised from the remains of the chintz she had brought from New York. Jim viewed her with great complaisance. No one could look like Pen, he thought, and he would dance with her all the evening. Jim went as a monk. To his chagrin, when they reached the hall he found that Pen had made Mrs. Ames a costume exactly like her own, and with the complete face masks they wore, they might have been twins. They were just of a height and Mrs. Ames danced well. The children and the phonograph had long ago attended to that.

There was nothing stupid about the ball from the very start. The policeman ended the grand march by arresting the hobo, who put up a fight that included two of the dominoes. The orchestra swung into "La Paloma" and in a moment the hall was full of swaying colors, drifting through the golden desert dust that filled the room. There were twice as many men at the ball as women. The latter were popular to the point of utter exhaustion.

Henderson looked over the tallest domino, seized him by the throat and with wild flourishes of his club, backed him into a corner.

"Say, Boss Still Jim," he whispered, "that old nut of a chairman doesn't look as if he had anything but skim milk in his veins. But do you sabez he's danced three times with that little fat ballet girl and he's hugging the daylights out of her. He'd ought to be investigated."

The tall domino looked at the couple indicated. "I'll start investigating, myself," he whispered.

"Wish I could get a dance with her, but I can't," said Henderson. "My Missis knows who I am. I ain't got her spotted yet, though. Yes, I have. That flower girl's her. I'd know the way she jerks her shoulders anywhere."

He cut neatly in and separated the flower girl from the monk. "Look here, Minnie," he said gently. "You ain't called on to dance like a broncho, you know. Remember, you're the mother of a family! Cut out having too many dances with that monk. He holds you too tight. I think he's one of the committee men. You floss up to the tallest domino and give him a good time. That's the Boss."

The flower girl sniggered and Henderson pushed her from him with marital impatience and took an Indian squaw away from the hobo.

"Come on, little girl," he said. "You can dance all right. If my wife wasn't here I'd show you a time."

The squaw stiffened and the monk swung her away from Jack, who immediately arrested old Dad Robins, the night watchman, who was taking a sly peak off his beat at the festivities. Henderson forced the delighted old man through a waltz, with himself as a very languishing partner.

The hobo, dancing with one of the flower girls, said: "Jane, I've been trying to get a chance to warn you not to say anything to Mrs. Penelope about that deal with Freet. I was a fool to let you see that letter tonight. Now I'm getting into national politics, you've got to learn to keep your mouth shut."

"How'd you know me?" whispered the flower girl.

"You don't dance as good as Mrs. Pen," he replied.

Here the monk stole the flower girl and danced off with her, firmly.

"Remember the dance at Coney Island and how mean you were to me?" he whispered.

"And how bossy and high-handed you were about the bathing? How did you know me?"

The monk hugged the flower girl to him. "You haven't lived in my heart for all these years without my getting to know you!"

And the flower girl sighed ecstatically.

The tall domino, dancing with the other flower girl, felt the strains of Espanita creeping up his backbone, and he said,

"There is something in the air out here that is almost intoxicating!"

The flower girl answered: "It'll do more than that for you, if you'll give it a chance. It will make you see things."

"I don't understand you," replied the domino in a dignified way.

"I mean you'd see if you stayed here long enough that what Jim Manning needs is help, not investigating."

"How do you know I'm not Manning?"

The flower girl sniffed. "I'm an old woman so I can tell you that no woman would ever mistake him for anyone else after she'd once danced with him."

"He is making a most regrettable record here," very stiffly from the domino.

"Shucks! Why don't you fire Arthur Freet? I warn you right now that he's trying to get his hooks into this dam."

"The Service might well dispense with both of them, I believe," said the domino.

The flower girl sniffed again. "You politicians—" she began, when she was interrupted by a call at the door.

The music stopped. A white-faced boy had mounted a chair and was shouting hysterically: "Where's the Boss? The hombres have shot my father!"

"It's Dad Robins' boy! Why, the old man was here a bit ago!" cried someone.

The monk pulled off his mask and flung his robe in the corner. "Oscar," he said to the hobo, who had unmasked, "see to Mrs. Penelope."

Then he grasped young Robins by the arm and rushed with him from the hall.

Oscar hurried Pen and Jane up to the tent house with scant ceremony, then ran for the lower town. Mrs. Flynn and Sara were greatly surprised by the early return of the merrymakers. The four waited eagerly for news. Sara would not let any of the women stir from the tent, saying that it was unsafe until they knew what had happened. At midnight Oscar returned.

"They got poor old Dad. After he left the hall, he was going past a lighted tent in the lower town when he heard sounds of a fight. He went in and found two drunken Mexicans fighting over a flask of whiskey. He took the whiskey and told them to go to bed. He started out into the street and the two jumped him and started to stab him to death. He yelled and the sheriff and his boy was the only folks in all that town dared to go help him. The two hombres shot the sheriff in the arm before he located them and got away. They had finished poor old Dad, though. Mr. Manning's got posses out and will start more at daylight. If you'll put Jane up for the night, Mrs. Flynn, I'll go back to the lower town. You'd ought to see those committeemen. Three of them would have gone out with a posse, I'll bet, if they hadn't remembered their dignity in time!"

Jim had his hands full. By daylight the next morning there was every prospect of a wholesale battle between the Americans and the Mexicans. The camp was at fever pitch with excitement. The two shifts not at work swarmed the streets of the lower camp, the Mexicans at the far end, the Americans at the upper end near Dad Robins' house, whence came the sound of an old woman's hard sobs. After a hurried breakfast at the lower mess, Jim joined this crowd. The men circled round him, all talking at once. Jim listened for a time, then he raised his arm for silence. "It was booze did it! Booze and nothing else! Am I right?"

Reluctant nods went around the crowd. "And yet," Jim went on, "there's hardly a white man in the camp who hasn't fought me on my ruling that liquor must not come within the government lines. You all know what booze means in a place like this. Those of you who were with me at Makon know what we suffered from it up there. I know you fellows, decent, kindly men now, in spite of your threats to lynch the hombres. But if you could get booze, you'd make this camp a hell on earth right now. No better than a drunken Mexican is a drunken white. Am I right?"

Again reluctant nods and half-sheepish grins.

"Now, you fellows forget your lynching bee. Commons, Ralston, Schwartz, you make a committee to raise enough money to send Mrs. Robins and the boy back to New Hampshire with the body. Here is ten to start with. They must leave this noon. Tom Weeks, you make the funeral arrangements. I'll see that transportation is ready at noon. Bill Underwood, you get a posse of fifty men and quarantine this camp for booze."

A little laugh went through the crowd. Billy Underwood had been the chief malcontent under Jim's liquor ruling. Bill did not laugh. He began to pick his men with the manner of a general.

"One word more," said Jim. "You all know that the United States Reclamation Service is under the suspicion of the nation. They call you and me a bunch of grafters. It's up to you as much as it is to me to show today that we are men and not lawless hoboes."

A little murmur of applause swept through the crowd as Jim turned on his heel. He made his way into the Mexican end of the camp. There was noise here of talking and quarreling. Jim walked up to a tall Mexican who was in a way a padrone among the hombres.

"Garces," said Jim, "send the night shift to bed."

Garces eyed Jim through half-shut eyes. Jim did not move a muscle. "Why?" asked the Mexican.

"Because I shall put them to bed unless they are gone in five minutes."

Jim pulled out his watch. In just four minutes, after a shouted order from Garces, the street was cleared of more than half the hombres.

"Now," said Jim, "except when the shifts change, you are to keep your people this side of the ditch," pointing to the line that separated the Mexican and American camps. "I have fifty men scouring the camp for whiskey. Anybody found with liquor will be arrested. If there is a particle of trouble over it in your camp, I'll let the Gringos loose. Sabez?"

Garces shivered a little. "Yes, senor," he said.

Jim took a turn up and down the street on his horse, then started for the dam site. As he cantered up the road, Billy Underwood, mounted on a moth-eaten pony, saluted with dignity.

"Boss, that saloon keeper up the canyon has got a billion bottles of booze. Worst whiskey you ever smelled. He says he's laying for you and if you cross his doorstep, he'll shoot you up."

Jim looked at Bill meditatively. "Bill, I'm going to call his bluff!"

"Us fellows in my posse'll shoot his place up if you say the word," cried Bill eagerly.

"No, that won't do," replied Jim. "But I have an idea that he's a four-flusher. Keep your eye on 'Mexico City,' Bill. I am afraid of trouble, though I've got Garces buffaloed so far."

Jim turned his horse and cantered back through Mexico City along the narrow river trail to Cactus Canyon. Just off the government reserve was a tent with a sheet iron roof. The trail to the tent was well worn. Jim dropped the reins over the pony's head and walked into the tent. There was a rough bar across one end, behind which stood a quiet-faced man with a black mustache. Drinking at the bar were two white men whom Jim recognized as foremen.

"You two fellows are fired," drawled Jim. "Turn in your time and leave camp this afternoon."

The Big Boss is king on a project. The two men meekly set down their glasses and filed out of the tent. It was something to have been fired by the big boss himself.

"And who are you?" asked the saloonkeeper.

"Don't you recognize me, Murphy?" asked Jim, pleasantly. "I have the advantage of you there. My name is Manning."

The saloonkeeper made a long-armed reach for a gun that stood in the corner.

"One moment, please," said Jim. As he spoke he jumped over the bar, bearing the saloonkeeper down with him before the long-armed reach encompassed the gun. Jim removed Murphy's knife, then picked up the gun himself.

Murphy started for the door with a jump. "Break nothing!" he yelled. "I'll have the law of New Mexico on you for this."

Murphy leaped directly into Bill Underwood's arms. "Hello, sweetie," said Bill, holding Murphy close. "Thought I'd come up and see how you was making it, Boss."

"Nicely, thanks," said Jim. "I'll be finished as soon as he breaks up his stock."

"It'll be some punishment for me to watch a job like that," said Bill, "but I'm with you, Boss."

He shifted his gun conspicuously as he released Murphy. Bill owed the saloonkeeper something over six weeks' pay. The occasion had an unholy joy for him. Murphy looked Jim over, scratched his head and started to whistle nonchalantly. In ten minutes he had destroyed his stock in trade. When he had finished, he handed Jim the key of the tent with a profound bow.

"Now," said Jim, "drop a match on the floor."

When the flames were well caught Jim said, "See that he leaves camp, Bill." Then he mounted and rode away.

Murphy looked after him curiously. "Some man, ain't he?" he said to Bill.

"I'll eat out of his hand any time," replied Bill. "Get your pony, Murphy."

"I'll join your posse," suggested Murphy. "I bet I can ferret out more booze than any three of you."

"Nothing doing!" growled Bill. "Should think you would have better taste than to wanta do that."

Murphy shrugged his shoulders. "I want you to let me go up to that Greek fellow's place before I go," he said.

Bill stared but made no comment.

As Jim rode back through the lower town he stopped young Hartman, the government photographer.

"Hartman," he asked, "have the films for the movies come in yet?"

"Came in yesterday, Mr. Manning."

"Good work! Hartman, will you give us a show this evening?"

"The hall's in pretty rough shape but if you want it——"

"I want it to keep things quiet, Hartman, till we find those hombres and get them in jail at Cabillo."

The young fellow nodded. "I'll have things ready at seven. After the funeral, I'll get the word out."

Jim rode on to his neglected work at the office. There he found the members of the committee awaiting him. Even the chairman was eager to know details of occurrences since they had gone reluctantly to bed after midnight.

When Jim had finished his story, the Vermont man said pompously: "You seem to manage men rather well, Mr. Manning. In behalf of my colleagues I wish to thank you for your hospitality to us. As you know, we must leave this afternoon."

Jim nodded. "I shall have my superintendent take you over to the train. You will understand that I do not want to leave the camp myself."

"I wish we could stay and see the end of this," said one of the members. "It's like life in a dime novel."

"My chief regret is that we only had half of the Mask Ball. After this, when my constituents are tempted to give me a dinner, I shall urge a Mask Ball instead. Never had one given for me before and no debutante ever had anything on my feelings last night," said another.

"Henderson should have been a country squire," said Jim. "He's a perfect host."

The camp was quiet during the afternoon. Jim saw the committee off at five o'clock, then went up to the tent house. Sara and he glanced at each other coolly and nodded. Pen started the conversation hurriedly.

"What word from the two hombres?"

Jim shook his head. "One posse got away last night before I warned them. I'm afraid that if the murderers are brought into camp I can't avert a lynching bee."

Pen shivered. Sara grunted. "You'd think Pen had lived in a convent all of her life instead of a death pen like New York."

"It's so lonesome out here, human life means more to you," said Jim.

"Some philosopher you are," sneered Sara. "Fine lot of drool you got off at the hearing. Why didn't you keep to the main issue? The yokels are still saying with the rest of us, He must be dishonest or he'd give an honest 'No' to our accusations."

Jim answered slowly: "When a man says that sort of thing to me I usually knock him down, or completely ignore him."

"You can't knock us all down and the time is rapidly coming when we will be ignoring you, minus a job."

"Still," pleaded Pen, "he couldn't understand your speech. Once and for all, Jim, give him and all the rest the lie."

Jim ground his teeth and did not speak. Sara was obviously enjoying himself.

"You are mistaken, Pen. Jim and I have often discussed the divine origin of the New Englander. They are a pathetic lot of pifflers. They have no one to blame but themselves that they are going. Everywhere else the Anglo-Saxon has gone he has insisted that he had the divine right to rule and has kept it. Outsiders have had to conform or get out. But over here he promulgated the Equality idea. Isaac Gezinsky and Hans Hoffman and Pedro Patello are as fit to rule according to the Equality idea as anyone else. It didn't take much over two hundred years of this to crowd the New Englander out of the running. And who cares?"

"I do," said Jim, "because I believe in the things my race has stood for. Emerson says it's not chance but race that put and keeps the millions of India under the rule of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race is a thing to be reckoned with. Nations progress as their race dictates."

"Emerson!" jibed Sara. "Another inefficient highbrow!"

"I can't help believing," replied Jim doggedly, "that the world will lose in the submerging of the New England element in America."

"And yet right here, in your America," said Sara, "the leaders of the money trust are descendants of Puritans."

Jim winced. "'The strength of the pack is the wolf,' When we produced men of that type we should have recognized them and have controlled them. They are helping the pack down hill, all right. Be satisfied, Sara! Only you will not get me off this Project until it is finished."

"No?" sneered Sara.

Pen interrupted nervously: "A couple of men are coming up the trail."

Bill Underwood appeared at the tent door. Murphy was with him. "Boss," said Bill, "Murphy has got to see your Greek friend. I got him started south this noon, but he circled on me and I just picked him up on the mesa, headed this way. He wanted to come here on the quiet, but I brought him up in the open."



CHAPTER XX

THE DAY'S WORK

"Women know a loyalty that men scorn while they use it. This is the sex stamp of women."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

With a quick glance at Sara, Jim rose. "Give Mr. Saradokis and his friend a chance to talk, of course, Bill. But shut Murphy up tonight and bring him round to me in the morning."

Bill essayed a salute that was so curiously like bringing his thumb to his nose that Pen had to turn a laugh into a cough and Jim smiled as he hurried out of the tent. As soon as the murder trouble was settled, Jim thought, he would have some sort of a settlement with Sara. His calm effrontery was becoming unbearable.

After a hurried supper Jim went back to the lower town to keep his eye on the moving picture show. As he mounted the steps of the little sheet iron building, a girlish figure hurried to meet him from the shadow of the ticket office.

"Pen!" cried Jim. "This is no place for you!"

"Oh, lots of women have gone in," protested Pen. "Please, Jim! Sara was so ugly this evening I just walked out and left him alone and I'm crazy to see what goes on down here."

Jim glanced in at the open door. The hall was nearly full. "If anything goes wrong, Penny, I would have my hands full and you might be hurt."

Pen gave a little shiver of anticipation. "Oh, please let me stay, Still! Just think how shut in I've been all these years."

Even though his common sense protested, Jim was an easy victim to Pen's pleading eyes and voice. He led the way into the hall. It was an enthusiastic crowd, that crunched peanuts and pinons and commented audibly on the pictures. Pictures of city life were the most popular.

"God! That's Fulton street, Brooklyn!" cried a man's voice as a street scene glided across the screen. "Wish I'd never left it."

"Gee! Look at the street car!" called another man. "I'd give a year of my life for a trolley ride."

"Look at them trees!" said someone as a view of a middle west farm followed. "Them are trees, boys, not cable way towers! How'd you like to shake the sand out of your eyes and see something green?"

"What are you peeved about?" exclaimed another voice. "Ain't you working for our great and glorious government that'll kick you out like a dead dog whenever it wants to? Look what it's doing to the Big Boss!"

"Hi! Man-o'-War at San Diego!" screamed a boy. "See all that wet water! Me for the navy! See how pretty that sailor looks in his cute white panties!"

Hartman held the crowd for a good two hours, then he called, "That's all, boys! Come again!"

"All? Nothing stirring," answered several voices. "Begin over again, Hartman. You can collect another nickel from us as we go out."

There was laughter and applause and not a soul offered to leave. In the darkness Hartman was heard to laugh in return and shortly the first film appeared again. Fields of corn shimmered in the wind. Cows grazed in quiet meadows. The audience stared again, breathlessly. Suddenly from without was heard a long-drawn cry. It was like the lingering shriek of a coyote. Few in the hall had heard the call before, yet no one mistook it for anything but human.

"An Apache yell!" exclaimed an excited voice.

There was a sudden overturning of benches and Pen and Jim were forced out into the street with the crowd.

An arc light glowed in front of the hall. Under this the crowd swayed for a moment, uncertain whither to move. Jim held Pen's arm and looked about quickly.

"I don't know where you will be safest, Pen. I wish I'd heeded the itching of my thumb and taken you home an hour ago."

"Jim," said Pen, "I certainly like your parties. They are full of surprises."

"You are a good little sport," said Jim, "but that doesn't make me less worried about you. Hang onto my arm now like a little burr."

He began to work his way through the crowd. "I don't want to attract their attention," he said. "They will follow me like sheep."

"Was it an Apache cry, Jim?" asked Pen.

"Yes! Old Suma-theek, with a bunch of his Indians has been riding the upper mesa for me tonight. Just to watch Mexico City. I told him to keep things quiet, so there must have been some imperative reason for the cry. I'll take you to the upper camp and get my horse."

Jim breathed a sigh of relief as they cleared the crowd and could quicken their pace. But they were scarcely out of the range of the arc light when a dark group ran hurriedly down from the mesa back of the town. It was old Suma-theek with four of his Indians. They held, tightly bound with belts and bandanas, two disheveled little hombres.

"Take 'em to jail, Boss?" panted Suma-theek. "I find 'em trying get back to lower town!"

"No! No! Back up into the mountains. I'll get horses to you and you must take them to Cabillo. Lord, I forgot to warn you!"

Suma-theek turned quickly but not quickly enough. A man ran up to the little group then plunged back toward the hall.