Still Jim Part 29

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 h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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."