Still Jim Part 19

"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 jacka.s.ses.

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 skysc.r.a.per 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 prost.i.tuting 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 acc.u.mulation of her strength breaks all bounds and she sweeps sand and men before her."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

There is a b.u.t.te 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 b.u.t.te 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 b.u.t.te dominates here the desert and the river and the ranges.

This is the b.u.t.te that they call the Elephant.

Below this b.u.t.te 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 b.u.mpers 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 a.s.sistants 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.