Still Jim Part 18

Six months after Jim's arrival Watts died and Jim succeeded to his job, which day by day grew more complicated. The old simple life of the Makon when, heading his faithful rough-necks, Jim ate up the work, with no thought save for the work, was gone. Jim's job on the Cabillo was not that of engineer alone. He had not only to build the dam but to rule an organization of two thousand souls. He was sole ruler of an isolated desert community and he was the buffer between the office at Washington and all the contending and jealous forces that were rapidly developing in the valley.

The United States Reclamation Service is in the Department of the Interior. Jim had been at Cabillo two years when the new Secretary of the Interior summoned him to Washington.

The new Secretary had found his office flooded with complaints about the Reclamation Service. He had found, too, a report from the Congressional Committee which had the year before investigated several of the Projects. Being of a patient and inquiring turn of mind, the Secretary had decided to go to the heart of the matter. Therefore he invited the complainants to come to Washington to see him. He summoned the Director and Jim with several other of the Project engineers, Arthur Freet among them, to appear before him, with the complainants.

May in Washington is apt to be very warm, although very lovely to look upon. Jim, so long accustomed to the naked height and sweep of the desert country, felt half suffocated by the low hot streets of the capitol. He went directly from the train to the Hearing, which was held in one of the Secretary's offices. The room was large and square, with a desk at one end, where the Secretary was sitting. When Jim entered, the place already was filled to overflowing with irrigation farmers or their lawyers, with land speculators, with Congressmen and reporters.

The Secretary was a large man with a smooth shaven, inscrutable face and blue eyes that were set far apart under overhanging brows. He looked at Jim keenly as the young engineer made his way to his seat in the front of the room. He saw the same Jim that had said good-bye to the little group in the station eight years before; the same Jim, with some important modifications.

He was tanned to bronze, of course. He had sun wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was thinner and the corners not so deep. The old scowl between his eyes had traced two permanent lines there. The ma.s.s of brown hair still swept his dreamer's forehead. His jaws had become the jaws of a man of action.

Jim sat down, folded his arms and crossed his knees, fixing his gaze on the patch of blue sky above the building opposite the open window. For five days he sat so, without answering a charge that was brought against him.

For five days the Secretary sat with entire patience urging every man to speak his mind fully and freely. And if bitterness toward the Service betokened free speaking, the complainants held back nothing.

A heavy set man, tanned and cheaply dressed, said: "Mr. Secretary, I was born in Hungary. I am a tinner by trade. I lived in Sioux City. I have a wife and six children. I got consumption and a real estate man fixed it up with a friend of his on the Makon Project that I go out there, see?

It took all I saved but they told me crops the first year will pay all my living expenses. I buy forty acres.

"Mr. Secretary, I get no crops for five years. I hauled every drop of water we use seven miles from a spring for five years. Some days we got nothing to eat. Me and my oldest boy, we work for Mellin when we can and we stayed alive till the water come. I get cured of my consumption.

But my money is gone. I can buy no tools, no nothing. And, Mr.

Secretary, when the ca.n.a.l do come they run it through Mellin's place. My money is gone and I can't afford to dig the long ditch to Mellin's.

Mellin's place is green and mine is still desert."

"Are there no small farmers or settlers who are succeeding on the Makon Project?" asked the Secretary.

"Yes, sir," replied the man, "many, but also, many like me."

"Then is your complaint against the real estate sharks or the government?" persisted the Secretary.

"Against both!" cried the man. "Why did that Freet give Mellin and the other big fellow first choice in everything? Why must I pay for what I can't get?"

There were several farmers from different projects who had stories that matched the ex-tinner's. When they had finished, the Secretary called on a real estate man who had come with a protest about the running of the ca.n.a.ls on the Makon.

"What was the net value of the crops on the Makon Project last year,"

asked the Secretary.

"About $500,000, I think."

"What was it, say the year before the Reclamation Service went in there?"

"Perhaps $100,000."

"We are to believe, then, that some people have found the Service useful?"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Secretary, there are a whole lot of contented farmers up there who are too busy with their b.u.mper crops to come to Washington, even if they wanted to."

The real estate man sat down and the Secretary called on the Chairman of the Congressional investigating committee to make a brief summary of his charges.

The Chairman said, succinctly: "I charge the Service with graft, gross extravagance and inefficiency. I call on you to remove the Director and four of his engineers, including Arthur Freet and James Manning, who are present."

"Of what specific things do you accuse Mr. Manning?" asked the Secretary, with a glance at Jim's impa.s.sive face.

"His Project is full of mistakes, some of them small, that, nevertheless, aggregate big and show the trend of the Service. Up on the Makon he made a road at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars that only the Service used. He's put a thousand dollars into telephone booths where two hundred would have been ample. Some of the ca.n.a.l concrete work has had to be dynamited out and done over and over again. The farmer pays for all this. Manning refuses to take any advice from the farmers on the Project, men who were irrigating before he was born. His every idea seems hostile to the farmer, whose land the farmer himself is paying him to irrigate. Manning was trained by Freet, Mr. Secretary."

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 pa.s.s over these roads makes it essential that they be first cla.s.s.

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 sc.r.a.ping 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.