Still Jim

by Morrow, Honore

  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 h
ad 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 b
y 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.