Still Jim Part 14

"I can't do any more!" panted Jim. "I'll have to go down." And then he gave a little childish sob. "'Hang on to what you undertake like a hound to a warm scent, Jimmy!'" he said, brokenly. And new strength flowed into his arms and he swam on for a few moments, finding then a bit of sh.o.r.e on which to spend the night. He and Charlie had each carried a map and a set of instruments. Jim felt that he bore now not only his own but Charlie's responsibility to deliver the maps to Freet. As he lay looking up at the stars, that second night alone in the crevice, Jim realized ever since he and Charlie had started on the expedition, he had ceased to be homesick. He realized this when, on this second night, he tried to keep his nerves in order by thinking very hard of home and he found that he dwelt most on Exham and his father and the Sign and Seal he had given Penelope. And that while he longed vaguely for the old brownstone front, he felt with a sudden invigorating thrill that he belonged where he was and that he was nearer to Exham than he had been since he had left there.

It was nearing evening of the fourth day after Charlie's disappearance that Jim suddenly saw the canyon walls widen. He struggled at last up onto a sandy beach and looked about him. The canyon walls here, though very rough, gave promise of access to the top. Jim examined the beach carefully for trace of Charlie and, finding none, he prepared to spend the night in resting before the stiff climb of the next day. He built a fire and ate his last bit of grub, a small can of beans, and fell asleep immediately.

At dawn the next morning he began his climb up the bristling walls of the canyon. Eleven days before he would have said that to scale these sickening heights was impossible. But Jim would never be a tenderfoot again. He had been on short rations for three days and was weak from overwork. But he had a canteen of water and rested frequently and he went about the climb with the care and skill of an old mountaineer. He had learned in a cruel school.

Late in the afternoon he crawled wearily over one last knife-edged ledge and hoisted himself up onto the canyon's top. He was greeted by a faint shout.

Three men on horseback were picking their way carefully toward him. Jim waved his hand and dropped, panting, to await their arrival. When they were within speaking distance, he rose weakly and called:

"Where's Charlie Tuck?"

The three men did not answer until they had dropped from their horses beside Jim; then the rancher who had packed the expedition to the crevice said:

"They picked his body up near Chaseville this morning. We come up as quick as we could for trace of you. You look all in. Here, d.i.c.k, get busy! We brought some underclothes; didn't know what shape you'd be in.

Here is the suit you left at my place. G.o.d! I thought you'd never need it. Billy, start a fire and cook the coffee and bacon. You've had an awful experience, Mr. Manning, I guess. You don't look the tenderfoot kid that went into the canyon!"

"We found the dam site," said Jim hoa.r.s.ely.

"Don't try to talk till you get some grub," said the man called Billy.

Clothed and fed, Jim told his story, a little brokenly. The group of men who listened were used to hardy deeds. They had seen Nature demand her toll of death again and again in the wilderness. And yet as they sat looking at the young fellow with his gray eyes shocked and grief-stricken and perceived his boyish idolatry of Charlie Tuck, something like moisture shone in their eyes. They shook hands with Jim when he had finished, silently for the most part, though the rancher said:

"You're the only man ever came through there alive. They had to bury Tuck right off. They'd ought to build a monument for him. Where is his folks?"

"He had none," said Jim. "I want to put up his headstone for him, and I know just what lines are going to be put on the stone."

"They ought to be blamed good," said d.i.c.k.

"What are they?" asked the ranchman.

Jim sat for a moment looking down into the fearful depths where Charlie and he had lived a lifetime. Then he said:

"'Lift ye the stone or cleave the wood, to make a path more fair or flat, Lo, it is black already, with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!

Not as a ladder from Earth to Heaven, not as an altar to any creed, But simple Service, simply given, to his own kind, in their common need.'"

And so Charlie Tuck crossed the Great Divide.

Jim stopped two days with the rancher and then went back to the Green Mountain dam. The story of the trip through the crevice had preceded him. The men of the Service were inured to the idea of the sacrifice of blood for the dams. There was little said, some silent handshakes given, and they ceased to haze Jim. He had become one of them.

The plans for the preliminary surveys of the Makon Project were begun at once. Jim remained at Green Mountain during the winter, serving his apprenticeship to the concrete works and the superintendent as Mr. Freet had planned. But in the spring he had his wish and was sent to lay out the road on the Makon project.

All this time letters came regularly from the brownstone front, but they were from Jim's mother and his Uncle Denny for the most part, and they were very silent about Penelope. Jim wrote Pen from time to time, but he was not an easy writer and Pen wrote him only gay little notes that were very unsatisfactory. But Jim was absorbed in his work and did not worry over this.

Mr. Freet explained to Jim that he needed an "Old Timer" in laying out the Makon road whose practical experience would supplement Jim's theories. When Jim reached the survey camp in the Makon valley he found waiting for him a small man of about fifty, with a Roman nose, bright blue eyes and a shock of gray hair. This was Iron Skull Williams, whom Freet had described in detail to Jim and who was to be Jim's right hand.

He was an old Indian fighter. The Apaches, Freet said, had given him his nickname because they claimed he would not be killed. Bullets glanced off his head like rain. Williams was an expert road maker and had worked much for Freet in various parts of the west.

Jim and Williams looked each other over carefully and liked each other at once. They found immediately in each other's society something very choice. The friendship had not been a week old before Iron Skull had heard of Exham and the brownstone front and of Penelope. While Jim had learned what no other man knew, that Williams' life-long, futile pa.s.sion had been for a college education and that he was a bachelor because a blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl had been buried in the Arizona ranges, twenty-five years before.

Jim's quiet ways and silent tongue did not make him an easy mixer. The opening up of a project is a rough and lonesome job. Running surveys through unknown country where supplies are hard to get and distances are huge, makes men very dependent on one other for companionship. Jim liked the young fellows who ran the road surveys with him. He enjoyed the "rough necks," the men who did the actual building of the road. They all in turn liked Jim. But Jim had not the easy coin of word exchange that makes for quick and promiscuous acquaintanceship. So he grew very dependent on Iron Skull, who, in a way, filled both Sara's and Uncle Denny's place.

The old Indian fighter had that strange sense of proportion, that eagle-eyed view of life that the desert sometimes breeds. All the love of a love-starved life he gave to Jim.

One evening in April Jim came in from a hard day on horseback. The spring rains were on and he was mud-splashed and tired but full of a great content. He had found a short cut on the crevice end of the road that would save thousands of dollars in time and material.

He lighted the lamp in his tent and saw a letter from Uncle Denny on the table. There was nothing unusual about a letter from Uncle Denny and ordinarily Jim waited for his bath and clean clothes before reading it.

But this time, with an inexplicable sense of fear, he picked it up and read it at once.

"STILL JIM, MY BOY:

We've had a blow. All the year Penelope has been seeing Saradokis. She has made no bones of it, and he would not let her alone. I could do nothing, though I talked till I was no better than a common scold. But it never occurred to your mother and me that Pen could do what she did.

Day before yesterday, just at noon, she called me up at the office and told me she and Sara had just been married at the Little Church Round the Corner and were leaving for Montauk Point in Sara's new high power car. She rang off before I could answer.

I sat at my desk, paralyzed. I couldn't even call your mother up. I sat there for half an hour, seeing and hearing nothing when your mother called me up. There had been an accident. Sara had disobeyed a traffic policeman, they had run into a truck at full speed. His car was wrecked. Pen escaped with a broken arm. Sarah had been apparently paralyzed. Pen had him brought to our house.

Well, I got home. It has been a fearful two days. Sara is hopelessly paralyzed from the waist down. He may live forever or die any time. He is like a raving devil.

Pen--Still Jim, my boy--Little Pen is paying a fearful price for her foolishness. She is like a person wakened from a dream. She says she cannot see what made her give in to Sara.

I've made a bad job of telling you this, Jimmy. Your mother says to tell you she understands. She will write later.

Love, dear boy, from UNCLE DENNY."

Jim crumpled the letter into his pocket and dashed out into the night.

For hours he walked, heedless of rock or cactus, of rain or direction.

He took a fiendish satisfaction in the thought of Sara's tragedy. Other than this he did not think at all. He felt as he had at his father's death, rudderless, derelict.

It was dawn when Iron Skull found Jim sitting on a pile of rock five miles from camp. He put his hand on Jim's shoulder.

"Boss Still," he said, "what's broke loose? I've trailed you all over the state."

Jim looked up into the kindly face and his throat worked. "Iron Skull,"

he got out at last, "my--my girl has thrown me down!"

Williams sat down beside him. "Not Penelope?"

Jim nodded and suddenly thrust the crumpled letter into his friend's hands. In the dawn light Williams read it, cleared his throat, and said:

"G.o.d! Poor kids! I take it your folks don't like this Sara, though you never said so."

Jim put his hand on Iron Skull's knee. "Iron Skull," he said, hoa.r.s.ely, "I'd rather see Pen laid away there in the Arizona ranges beside your Mary than married to him. He's got a yellow streak."

The two sat silent for a time, then Williams said: "This love business is a queer thing. Some men can care for a dozen different women. But you're like me. Once and never again. I ain't going to try to comfort you, partner. I know you've got a sore inside you that'll never heal.

It's h.e.l.l or heaven when a woman gets a hold on your vitals like that.--My Mary--she had blue eyes and a little brown freckle on her nose--I was just your age when she died. And I never was a kid again.

You gotta face forward, partner. Work eighteen hours a day. Marry your job. You still owe a big debt for your big brain. Go ahead and pay it."

Jim did not answer, but he did not remove his hand from Williams' knee, and finally Williams laid a hard palm on it. They watched the sun rise.

The rain had ceased. Far to the east where the little camp lay, crimson spokes shot to the zenith. Suddenly the sun rolled above the desert's brim and leading straight and level to its scarlet center lay the road that Jim was building.