Still Jim

by Honoré Morrow

  CHAPTER XI

  OLD JEZEBEL ON THE RAMPAGE

  "Old Jezebel is a woman. For years she keeps her appointed trail until the accumulation of her strength breaks all bounds and she sweeps sand and men before her."

  MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

  There is a butte in the Cabillo country that they call the Elephant.

  Picture a country of lavenders and yellows and blues; an open, barrenland, with now a wide sweep of desert, now a chaos of mesa and mountain,dead volcano and eroded plain. The desert, a buff yellow where bluedistance and black shadow and the purple of volcano spill have notstained it. The mountains, bronze and lavender, lifting scarred peaks toa quiet sky; a sky of turquoise blue. The Rio del Norte, a brown streak,forcing a difficult and roundabout course through ranges and desert.

  In a rough desert plain, which is surrounded by ranges, stands a broadbacked butte that was once a volcano. The Rio del Norte sweeps in acurve about its base. Time and volcanic crumblings and desert wind havecarved the great beast into the semblance of an elephant at rest. Thegiant head is slightly bowed. The curved trunk droops, but the eyes arewide open and the ears are slightly lifted. By day it is a rich, redbronze. By night, a purple that deepens to black. Watching, brooding,listening, day or night, the butte dominates here the desert and theriver and the ranges.

  This is the butte that they call the Elephant.

  Below this butte the Service was building a dam. It was a hugeundertaking. When finished the dam would be as high as a twenty-storybuilding and as long as two city blocks. It would block the river,turning it into a lake forty miles long, that would be a perpetual watersupply to over a hundred thousand acres of land in the Rio del Nortevalley.

  The borders of the Rio del Norte have been cultivated for centuries.Long before the Puritans landed in New England, the Spanish who followedCoronado planted grape vines on the brown river's banks. The Spanishfound Pueblo Indians irrigating little hard-won fields here. Theirrigation ditches these Indians used were of dateless antiquity and yetthere were traces left of still older ditches used by a people who hadgone, leaving behind them only these pitiful dumb traces of heroic humaneffort. After the Spanish came the Americans, patrolling their ditcheswith guns lest the Apaches devastate their fields.

  Spanish, Indians, Americans all fought to bring the treacherous Rio delNorte under control, but failure came so often that at last they unitedin begging the Reclamation Service for aid. It was to help these peopleand to open up the untouched lands of the valley as well, that the damwas being built. And the building of it was Jim's job.

  Jim jumped off the bobtailed train that obligingly stopped for him at alone shed in the wide desert. In the shed was the adobe splashedautomobile which Jim had left there on his trip out. He threw his suitcase into the tonneau, cranked the engine and was off over the roughtrail that led to the Project Road.

  A few miles out he met four hoboes. They turned out for the machine andJim stopped.

  "Looking for work at the dam?" he asked.

  "What are the chances?" asked one of the group.

  "Fine! Get in! I'm engineer up there. You're hired."

  With broad grins the three clambered aboard. The man who sat beside Jimsaid: "We heard flood season was coming on and thought you'd like extrahelp. Us boys rode the bumpers up from Cabillo."

  Jim grunted. Labor-getting continued to be a constant problem for allthe valuable nucleus formed by the Park. Experts and the offscourings ofthe earth drifted to the great government camp and Jim and all hisassistants exercised a constant and rigid sifting process. He did nottalk much to his new help. His eyes were keen to catch the first glimpseof the river. The men caught his strain and none of them spoke again.Cottontails quivered out of sight as the automobile rushed on. Anoccasional coyote, silhouetted against the sky, disappeared as if bymagic. Swooping buzzards hung motionless to see, then swept on into theheavens.

  Jim was taking right-angled curves at twenty-five miles an hour. Thehoboes clung to the machine wild-eyed and speechless. Up and up, round atwisted peak and then, far below, the river.

  "She's up! The old Jezebel!" said Jim.

  The machine slid down the mountainside to the government bridge. Thebrown water was just beginning to wash over the floor. Across thebridge, Jim stopped the machine before a long gray adobe building. Ittopped a wide street of tents. Jim scrawled a line on an old envelopeand gave it to one of the hoboes.

  "Take that to the steward. Eat all you can hold and report wherever thesteward sends you."

  Then he went on. Regardless of turn or precipice the road rose in asteady grade from the lower camp where the workmen lived, a half mile tothe dam site. Jim whirled to the foot of the cable way towers and jumpedout of the machine.

  The dam site lay in a valley, a quarter of a mile wide, between twomountains. Above the dam lay the Elephant. A great cofferdam built nearthe Elephant's base diverted the river into a concrete flume that ranalong the foot of one of the mountains. The river bed, bared by thediverting of the stream, was filled with machinery. An excavation sixtyfeet below the river bottom and two hundred feet wide was almostcompleted. Indeed, on the side next the flume there already rose abovethe river bed a mighty square of concrete, a third the width of theriver. Jim had begun the actual erection of the dam.

  The two mountains were topped by huge towers, supporting cables thatswung above the dam site. The cables carried anything from a man to alocomotive, from the "grab buckets" that bit two tons of sand at amouthful from the excavation, to a skid bearing a motion picture outfit.

  Work was going on as usual when Jim arrived. The cable ways sang andshrieked. The concrete mixer roared. Donkey engines puffed and dinkeessquealed. Jim dashed into a telephone booth and called up the office.

  "This is Mr. Manning. Where is Williams?"

  The telephone girl answered quickly: "Oh, how are you, Mr. Manning?We're glad you are back. Why, Mr. Williams was called down to Cabillo tomake a deposition for the Washington hearing, several days ago. And theymade Mr. Barton and Mr. Arles go, too. I'm trying to get them on longdistance now. You came by the way of Albuquerque, didn't you? We triedto reach you in Washington, but couldn't."

  Jim groaned. His three best men were gone.

  "We didn't expect high water for a week," the girl went on, "orelse----"

  "Miss Agnes," Jim interrupted, "call up every engineer on the job andtell them to report at once to me at Booth A. Whom did Iron Skull leaveon his job?"

  "Benson, the head draughtsman."

  Jim hung up the receiver and stood a moment in thought. Iron Skull wasnow Jim's superintendent and right hand. His mechanical and electricalengineers were gone, too, leaving only cubs who had never seen a flood.Benson came running down the trail from the office.

  "For the Lord's sake, Benson, have you been asleep?" said Jim.

  Benson looked at the roaring flume. "She'll carry it all right, don'tyou think? I haven't been able to get in touch with the hydrographer fortwenty-four hours. The water only began to rise an hour ago."

  "The poor kid may be drowned!" exclaimed Jim. He turned to the group ofmen forming about him. "We're in for a fight, fellows. This flood hasjust begun and it's higher now than I've ever seen the water in theflume. I'm going to fill the excavation with water from the flume and soavoid the wash from the main flow. Save what you can from the river bed.Leave the excavation to me."

  Five minutes later the river bed swarmed with workmen. The cable waysgroaned with load after load of machinery. Jim ran down the trail,around the excavation and up onto the great block of concrete. The topof this was just below the flume edge. The foreman of the concrete gangwas aghast at Jim's orders.

  "We may have a couple of hours," Jim finished, "or she may come down onus as if the bottom had dropped out of the ocean. See that everyone getsout of the excavation."

  The foreman looked a little pitifully at the concrete section.

  "That last pouring'll
go out like a snow bank, Mr. Manning."

  Jim nodded. "Dam builders luck, Fritz. Get busy." He hurried into atelephone booth, even in the stress of the moment smiling ruefully as heremembered the complaint at the hearing. The booths _had_ been too wellbuilt. Jim's predecessor had been a government man of the old school injust one particular. Honest to his heart's core, he still could notunderstand the need of economy when working for Uncle Sam.

  "Have you heard from Iron Skull?" Jim asked the operator.

  "He ought to be here now, Mr. Manning," she replied. "I sent the carover to the kitchen."

  "You are all right, Miss Agnes," said Jim. "Tell Dr. Emmet to be nearthe telephone. I don't like the looks of this."

  Jim hung up the receiver, pulled off his coat and hurried out to theedge of the concrete section. A derrick was being spun along thecableway, just above the excavation. A man was standing on the greathook from which the derrick was suspended. Men were clambering throughthe heavy sand up out of the excavation. The man on the edge of the pitwho was holding the guide rope attached to the swinging derrick wascaught in the rush of workmen. He tripped and dropped the rope, then ranafter it with a shout of warning. For a moment the derrick spunawkwardly.

  The man in the tower rang a hasty signal and the operator of thecableway reversed with a sudden jerk that threw the derrick from thehook. The man on the hook clung like a fly on a thread. The derrickcrashed heavily down on the excavation edge, and slid to the bottom,carrying with it a great sand slide that caught two men as it went.

  Jim gasped, "My God! I hate a derrick!" and ran down into theexcavation, the foreman at his heels. Men turned in their tracks andwallowed back after Jim.

  The derrick had fallen in such a way that its broken boom held back aportion of the slide. From under the boom protruded a brown hand withalmond-shaped nails; unmistakably the hand of an Indian. The leastmovement of the boom would send the sand down over the wreckage of thederrick.

  Uncontrollably moved for a moment, Jim dropped to his knees and crawledclose to touch the inert hand. "Don't move!" he shouted. "We will getyou out!" For just a moment, an elm shaded street and a dismantledmansion flashed across his vision. Then he got a grip on himself andcrawled out.

  "Get a bunch of men with shovels!" he cried. "Dig as if you were diggingin dynamite."

  "They are dead under there, Boss!" pleaded the foreman. "And they ain'tnothing but an Injun and a Mexican, an ornery _hombre_! And if you don'tlet the flume in this whole place'll wash out like flour. It'll take anhour to get them out."

  Jim's lips tightened. "You weren't up on the Makon, Fritz. My rule is,fight to save a life at any cost. Keep those fellows digging like thedevil."

  He hurried back up onto the section, thence up to the flume edge. Thenhe gave an exclamation. The brown water had risen an inch while he wasin the excavation. He ran for the telephone again.

  In a moment a new form of activity began in the river bed. Every man whowas not digging gingerly at the sand slide was turned to throwing bagsof sand on cofferdam and flume edge to hold back the river as long asmight be. Jim stood on the concrete section and issued his orders. Hisvoice was steel cool. His orders came rapidly but without confusion. Heconcentrated every force of his mind on driving his army of workmen tothe limit of their strength, yet on keeping them cool headed that everymoment might count.

  It was an uneven fight at that. Old Jezebel gathered strength minute byminute. The brown water was dripping over onto the concrete whensomeone caught Jim's arm.

  "Where shall I go, Boss Still?"

  "Thank God, Iron Skull!" exclaimed Jim. "Go down and get that _hombre_and Apache out."

  Iron Skull ran down into the excavation. The brown water began to seepover the edge of the pit. The men who were digging above the slide sworeand threw down their shovels. Jim tossed his megaphone to the cementengineer and ran to meet the men.

  "Get back there," he said quietly. The men looked at his face, thenturned sheepishly back.

  Jim picked up a shovel. Iron Skull already was digging like a madman.

  One of the workmen, who never had ceased digging, snarled to another:"What does he want to let the whole dam go to hell for two niggerrough-necks for?"

  "Bosses' rule," panted the other. "Up on the Makon we'd risk our livesto the limit and fight for the other fellows just as quick. How'd youlike to be under there? Never know who's turn's next!"

  The brown water rose steadily, running faster and faster over into theexcavation. The water was touching the brown hand which now twitched andwrithed, when Jim said:

  "Now, boys, catch the cable hook to the boom and give the signal."

  The derrick swung up into the air. Jim and a Makon man seized theIndian, Iron Skull and another man the _hombre_. Both of them were alivebut helpless. The cement engineer shouted an order through the megaphoneand just as a lifting brown wave showed its fearful head beyond theElephant, the river bed was cleared of human beings.

  Up around the cable tower foot was gathered a great crowd of workmen,women and children. Jim, greeted right and left as he relinquished hisburden, looked about eagerly. Penelope must have heard of the flood andhave come to see it. But surrounded by his friends, Jim missed thegirlish figure that had hovered on the outskirts of the crowd and that,after he had reached the tower foot in safety, disappeared up the trail.

  Jim, with his arm across Iron Skull's shoulder, turned to watch theriver. The moving brown wall had filled the excavation. It rushed like aNiagara over the flume edge. In half an hour it ran from bank to bank,with a roar of satisfaction at having once more regained its bed.

  Jim sighed and said to Iron Skull: "She's taken a hundred thousanddollars at a mouthful. I'll put that in my expense account for my tripto Washington."

  Iron Skull grunted: "We'll be lucky if we get off that cheap. This willmake talk for every farmer on the Project. They'll all be up to tell youhow you should have done it."

  Jim shrugged his shoulders. "This isn't the first flood we've weathered,Iron Skull. Come up to the house while I change my clothes."

  The two started along the road that wound up to the low mountain topwhere the group of adobe cottages known as "officers' quarters" waslocated. The cottages were occupied by Jim's associate engineers andtheir families.

  "I suppose you learned that your friends came," said Iron Skull. "Theywanted a tent for his health, so I put them in the tent house back onthe level behind the quarters.

  "I didn't know of their coming until I was leaving Washington," saidJim. "How are they?"

  "She stood the trip fine. He was pretty well used up, poor cus! She isawful patient with him. She's all you've said about her and then some.The ladies have all called on her but he don't encourage them. I stood agood deal from him, then I just told him to go to hell. Not when she wasround, of course."

  Jim listened intently. He knew the whole camp must be alive with gossipand curiosity over his two guests. An event of this order was a godsendin news value to the desert camp.

  "Much obliged to you," was Jim's comment.

  "How'd the Hearing go?" asked Iron Skull.

  Jim shook his head and sighed. "They are convinced down there, I guess,that the Service is rotten. I kept my mouth shut and sawed wood. TheSecretary is good medicine. You should have heard Uncle Denny jump inand make a speech. Bless him. I felt like a fool. What the Secretarythinks about the whole thing nobody knows."

  Iron Skull grunted. After a moment he said: "Folks down at Cabillo arepeeved at the way you are making the main canal. Old Suma-theek is backwith fifty Apaches. That's one of them we pulled out of the sand. I'vefixed a separate mess for them. I think we can reorganize one of theshifts so as to reduce the number of foremen."

  Jim paused before the door of his little gray adobe. "Will you come in,Iron Skull?"

  "I'll wait for you in the office," replied Williams. He turned down themountainside toward a long adobe with a red roof.

  Jim walked in at the open door of his house. The living room was
longand low, with an adobe fireplace at one end. The walls were left in thedelicate creamy tint of the natural adobe. On the floor were a blackbearskin from Makon and a brilliant Navajo that Suma-theek had givenhim. The walls were hung with Indian baskets and pottery, withphotographs of the Green Mountain and the Makon, with guns and canteensand a great rack of pipes. This was the first home that Jim had hadsince he had left the brownstone front and he was very proud of it. Hehad inherited his predecessor's housekeeper, who ruled him firmly.

  Jim dropped his suit case and called, "Hello, Mrs. Flynn!"

  A door at the end of the room opened and a very stout woman came in, herruddy face a vast smile, her gray hair flying. She was wiping her handson her apron.

  "Oh, Boss Still, but I'm glad to see you! You look pindlin'. Ain't itawful about the dam! I bet you're hungry this minute. God knows, if I'dthought you'd be here for another hour I'd have had something againstyour coming. And if God lets me live to spare my life, it won't happenagain."

  She talked very rapidly and as she talked she was patting Jim's arm,turning him round and round to look him over like a mother.

  Jim flashed his charming smile on her. "Bless you, Mother Flynn! I knowit's a hundred years since you've told me what God knows! I'll have abath and go down to the office. I've had nothing to eat since morning."This last very sadly.

  It had the expected effect on Mrs. Flynn, whose idea of purgatory was ofa place where one had to miss an occasional meal.

  She groaned: "Leave me into the kitchen! At six o'clock exactly therewill be fried chicken on this table!"

  Mrs. Flynn made breathlessly for the kitchen pausing at the door to callback: "And how's your mother and your Uncle Denny? I've been doing thebest I can for your company. They ate stuff I took 'em only the firstday, then she went to housekeeping."

  "Thank you," said Jim, absently. He went into his bedroom. This, too,was uncolored. It was a simple little room with only a cot, a bureau anda chair in it. The walls were bare except for the little old photographof Pen in her tennis clothes.

  In half an hour Jim had splashed in and out of his bath, was shaved andclad in camp regalia; a flannel shirt, Norfolk coat and riding breechesof tan khaki, leather puttees and a broad-brimmed Stetson. At his officeawaiting him were his engineer associates and Iron Skull, and he put ina long two hours with them, his mind far less on the flood and theHearing than on the fact that Penelope was waiting for him, up in thelittle tent house.

  It was not quite eight o'clock when Jim stood before the tent house,waiting for courage to rap.

  Suddenly he heard Sara's voice. "I won't have women coming up here tosnoop! Understand that, Pen, right now. Hand me the paper and be quickabout it."

  Jim felt himself stiffened as he listened for Pen's voice in answer.