The Secretary tapped his desk softly for several moments, as if turning over in his mind the opposing evidence brought out during the several days of the Hearing. Jim had not been called on but Arthur Freet and two other Project engineers had spent an entire day on the stand, quizzed unmercifully by everyone in the room. They had disclaimed every accusation. The Director of the Service, a quiet man of marvelous executive ability, had made a bitter return attack on the Congressional Committee, the farmers, the real estate men and the lawyers, accusing them of being the conscious or unconscious tools of the Water Power Trust, whose object was to destroy the Service.
An elderly Senator had risen and had addressed the Hearing. "I was one of the fathers of the Reclamation Act. One of the fundamental ideas of the Act was that it was not governmental charity but that every farmer whose arid acres were watered would be willing to pay for it. I see but one thing in all these protests against the Service and that is the attempt to repudiate the debt incurred by the farmers to the Service. And the attempt to repudiate is most bitter with the very men who pleaded most loudly with the Government to irrigate their land and who voluntarily pledged themselves to pay back during an easy period of years the cost of the Projects. If it is a fact that this tainted idea of Repudiation is creeping among the land owners on the Projects, I warn you all that I shall use all my influence to have the Reclamation Act repealed."
As the old Senator had finished half the men in the room had risen to their feet, angrily denying any thought of repudiation.
Now, after tapping his desk thoughtfully, the Secretary looked at Jim.
"Mr. Manning, please take the stand."
Jim unfolded his long legs and strode up beside the Secretary's desk. He stood there struggling for words that would not come. For five days he had sat thinking of the three Projects that he knew. He recalled Charlie Tuck and the two other engineers who had laid down their lives for the dams. He pictured again the drowned and mangled workmen at the cost of whose lives the Makon tunnel had been driven. A slow, bitter anger had risen in him against Freet. It seemed to Jim a fearful thing that one crooked man could taint such faithfulness and sacrifice as he had known, could blind intelligent men to the marvel of engineering work that marked the progress of the Reclamation Service through the arid country. But when Jim's words came, they were futile.
"I don't know," he said in his father's casual drawl, "that I have anything to say to the specific charges against me. The Director has covered the ground better than I can. I have the feeling that if the actual work we have done out west, the actual acreage we have brought to profitable bearing won't speak to you people who have seen it, nothing else will. The flood season is coming on, Mr. Secretary. I would suggest that you send either me or my successor out to my dam."
The Secretary's face was quite as inscrutable as Jim's. "Mr. Manning, why do you put so much money into roads?"
Jim's eyes fired a little. "I believe that one of the functions of government is to build good roads. Actually, the heavy freightage that must pass over these roads makes it essential that they be first class. A cheap road would be expensive in time and breakage."
"How about the accusations of mismanagement?"
"I have made mistakes," replied Jim, "and some of them have been expensive ones in lives and money. Many of our engineering problems are entirely new and we have to solve them without precedent. The punishment for a bad guess in engineering is always sure and hard. One can make a bad political guess and escape."
"How about the accusation of graft?" continued the Secretary.
Jim whitened a little. He looked over the Secretary's head out at the patch of blue sky and then back at the room full of hostile faces.
"If any man in the Service," he said slowly, "can be shown to be dishonest, no punishment can be too severe for him." Jim paused and then went on, half under his breath as if he had forgotten his audience. "The strength of the pack is the wolf. It's disloyalty in the pack that's helping the old American spirit down hill."
The Secretary's eyes deepened but he repeated, quietly, "And as to your graft, Mr. Manning?"
Jim hesitated and whitened again under his bronze. If ever a man looked guilty, Jim did.
There was at this point a sudden scraping of a chair, the clatter of an overturned cuspidor and a stout, elderly man at the rear of the room jumped to his feet.
"Mr. Secretary," he cried, "may I say a word?"
"Who are you?" asked the Secretary.
"I'm a New York lawyer, but I know the Projects like the back of me hand. And I know Jim Manning as I know me own soul. You've let everyone have free speech here. Manning didn't know till this minute that I was in town. My name is Michael Dennis, your honor."
The Secretary smiled ever so slightly as he glanced from Jim's face to that of the speaker. Jim's jaw was dropped. He was shaking his head furiously at Uncle Denny while the latter nodded as furiously at Jim.
"Mr. Manning seems unwilling to speak for himself. Since you know him so well, Mr. Dennis, we'll hear what you have to say. You may be seated, Mr. Manning."
Jim moved back to his place reluctantly and Uncle Denny made his way to the front, talking as he went.
"Of course, he won't speak for himself, Mr. Secretary. He never could. Still Jim we call him. Still Jim they name him on all the Projects and Still Jim he is here before this crowd of mixed jackals and jackasses. He never could waste his energy in speech, as I'm doing now. I've often thought he had some fine inner sense that taught him even as a child that if it's hard to speak truth, its next to impossible to hear it. So he just keeps still.
"You've heard him accused of graft, Mr. Secretary, and of inefficiency and of any other black phrase that came handy to these people. Your honor, it's impossible! It's not in his breed of mind! If you could have seen him as I have! A child of fifteen working in the pit of a skyscraper and crying himself to sleep nights for memory of his father he'd seen killed at like work, yet refusing money from me till I married his mother and made him take it. If you had seen him out on your Projects, cutting himself off from civilization in the flower of his youth and giving his young life blood to his dams! I know he's received offers of five times his salary from a corporation and stayed by his dam. I've seen him hang by a frayed cable with the flood round his arm pits, arguing, heartening the rough-necks for twenty-four hours at a stretch, the last man to give in, for his dam! I've seen him take chances that meant life or death for him and a hundred workmen and ten thousand dollars worth of material and win for his dam, for a pile of stones that was to bring money to the very men here who are howling him down. For his dam, that's wife and child to him, and they accuse him of prostituting it! Bah! You fools! Don't you know no money-getter works that way? He's a trail builder, Mr. Secretary. He's the breed that opens the way for idiots like these and they follow in and trample him underfoot on the very trail he has made for them!"
Uncle Denny stopped. There was a moment's hush in the room. Jim watched the patch of blue with unseeing eyes. As Uncle Denny started back to his seat there rose an angry buzz, but the Secretary raised his hand.
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Turn about is fair play. Remember that you have called the Reclamation Engineers some very foul names. Mr. Manning, I cannot see why you should not return to the flood at your dam and you other engineers to your respective posts, there to await word from your Director as to the results of this Hearing. You yourselves must realize after hearing all sides that I can take action only after careful deliberation. I thank you all for your frankness and patience with me."
As the room cleared, Uncle Denny puffed down on Jim. "Still Jim, me boy, don't be sore at me. I should have spoken if I'd been a deaf mute!"
Jim took Uncle Denny's hands. "Uncle Denny! Uncle Denny! You shouldn't have done it, yet how can I be sore at you!"
"That's right," said Uncle Denny. "You can't be! Oh, I tell you, I feel about you as I do about Ireland! I'm aching for some blundering fool to say something that I
may knock his block off! When are you going back?"
"Tonight," replied Jim. "Come up to the hotel and talk while I pack. I can't wait an hour on the flood. How are mother and Pen?"
"Fine! Your mother and I are the most comfortable couple on earth. We took it for granted you'd come up to New York. You got me letter about Sara and Pen before you left the dam, didn't you?"
"No. What letter?" asked Jim.
The two were walking up to the hotel now. Uncle Denny threw up both his hands. "Soul of me soul! They are out there by now. It all happened very unexpectedly and I did me best to head him off. I must admit Pen was no help to me there."
"But what——" exclaimed Jim.
Uncle Denny interrupted. "I don't know, meself. You gave Sara's name to Freet some time ago, two years ago, when he wanted to do some real estate business in New York. Well, ever since Sara has had the western land speculation bug, and lately nothing would do but he must get out to your Project. They are waiting there now for you if Sara killed no one en route. There is so much peace in the old brownstone front now, Still Jim, that your mother and I fear we will have to keep a coyote in the parlor to howl us to sleep!"
Jim turned a curiously shaken face on Dennis. "Do you mean that Pen, Pen is out at the Dam? That she will be there when I get back?"
Uncle Denny nodded. "Pen and Sara! Don't forget Sara. Me heart misgives me as to his purpose in going."
"Penelope at my dam?" repeated Jim.
Uncle Denny looked at Jim's tanned face. Then he looked away and his Irish eyes were tear-dimmed. He said no more until they were in Jim's room at the hotel. Jim began to pack rapidly and Uncle Denny remarked, casually:
"Penelope is Saradokis' wife, you know."
Jim's drawl was razor-edged. "Uncle Denny, she never was and never will be Saradokis' wife."
"Oh, I know! Only in name! But—I may as well tell you that I think she was unwise in going to you."
Jim walked over to the window, then slowly back again. His clear gray eyes searched the kindly blue ones. "Uncle Denny, why do you suppose this thing happened to Pen?"
The Irishman's voice was a little husky as he answered: "To make a grand woman of her. She's developed qualities that nothing else on earth could have developed in her. It's because of her having grown to be what she is that I didn't want her to go to you. I—Oh, Still Jim, me boy! Me boy!"
For just a moment Jim's lips quivered, then he said, "We shall see what the desert does for us," and he closed his suitcase with a snap.
* * *
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, barren land, 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 blue distance and black shadow and the purple of volcano spill have not stained it. The mountains, bronze and lavender, lifting scarred peaks to a 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 broad backed butte that was once a volcano. The Rio del Norte sweeps in a curve about its base. Time and volcanic crumblings and desert wind have carved the great beast into the semblance of an elephant at rest. The giant head is slightly bowed. The curved trunk droops, but the eyes are wide open and the ears are slightly lifted. By day it is a rich, red bronze. By night, a purple that deepens to black. Watching, brooding, listening, day or night, the butte dominates here the desert and the river and the ranges.
This is the butte that they call the Elephant.
Below this butte the Service was building a dam. It was a huge undertaking. When finished the dam would be as high as a twenty-story building 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 water supply to over a hundred thousand acres of land in the Rio del Norte valley.
The borders of the Rio del Norte have been cultivated for centuries. Long before the Puritans landed in New England, the Spanish who followed Coronado planted grape vines on the brown river's banks. The Spanish found Pueblo Indians irrigating little hard-won fields here. The irrigation ditches these Indians used were of dateless antiquity and yet there were traces left of still older ditches used by a people who had gone, leaving behind them only these pitiful dumb traces of heroic human effort. After the Spanish came the Americans, patrolling their ditches with guns lest the Apaches devastate their fields.
Spanish, Indians, Americans all fought to bring the treacherous Rio del Norte under control, but failure came so often that at last they united in begging the Reclamation Service for aid. It was to help these people and to open up the untouched lands of the valley as well, that the dam was being built. And the building of it was Jim's job.
Jim jumped off the bobtailed train that obligingly stopped for him at a lone shed in the wide desert. In the shed was the adobe splashed automobile which Jim had left there on his trip out. He threw his suit case into the tonneau, cranked the engine and was off over the rough trail that led to the Project Road.
A few miles out he met four hoboes. They turned out for the machine and Jim 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 Jim said: "We heard flood season was coming on and thought you'd like extra help. Us boys rode the bumpers up from Cabillo."
Jim grunted. Labor-getting continued to be a constant problem for all the valuable nucleus formed by the Park. Experts and the offscourings of the earth drifted to the great government camp and Jim and all his assistants exercised a constant and rigid sifting process. He did not talk much to his new help. His eyes were keen to catch the first glimpse of the river. The men caught his strain and none of them spoke again. Cottontails quivered out of sight as the automobile rushed on. An occasional coyote, silhouetted against the sky, disappeared as if by magic. Swooping buzzards hung motionless to see, then swept on into the heavens.
Jim was taking right-angled curves at twenty-five miles an hour. The hoboes clung to the machine wild-eyed and speechless. Up and up, round a twisted 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. The brown water was just beginning to wash over the floor. Across the bridge, Jim stopped the machine before a long gray adobe building. It topped a wide street of tents. Jim scrawled a line on an old envelope and gave it to one of the hoboes.
"Take that to the steward. Eat all you can hold and report wherever the steward sends you."
Then he went on. Regardless of turn or precipice the road rose in a steady grade from the lower camp where the workmen lived, a half mile to the dam site. Jim whirled to the foot of the cable way towers and jumped out of the machine.
The dam site lay in a valley, a quarter of a mile wide, between two mountains. Above the dam lay the Elephant. A great cofferdam built near the Elephant's base diverted the river into a concrete flume that ran along the foot of one of the mountains. The river bed, bared by the diverting of the stream, was filled with machinery. An excavation sixty feet below the river bottom and two hundred feet wide was almost completed. Indeed, on the side next the flume there already rose above the river bed a mighty square of concrete, a third the width of the river. Jim had begun the actual erection of the dam.
The two mountains were topped by huge towers, supporting cables that swung above the dam site. The cables car
ried anything from a man to a locomotive, from the "grab buckets" that bit two tons of sand at a mouthful from the excavation, to a skid bearing a motion picture outfit.
Work was going on as usual when Jim arrived. The cable ways sang and shrieked. The concrete mixer roared. Donkey engines puffed and dinkees squealed. 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 to make a deposition for the Washington hearing, several days ago. And they made Mr. Barton and Mr. Arles go, too. I'm trying to get them on long distance now. You came by the way of Albuquerque, didn't you? We tried to 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, "or else——"
"Miss Agnes," Jim interrupted, "call up every engineer on the job and tell them to report at once to me at Booth A. Whom did Iron Skull leave on his job?"
"Benson, the head draughtsman."
Jim hung up the receiver and stood a moment in thought. Iron Skull was now Jim's superintendent and right hand. His mechanical and electrical engineers 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't you think? I haven't been able to get in touch with the hydrographer for twenty-four hours. The water only began to rise an hour ago."
Still Jim Page 11
