Still Jim

by Morrow, Honore

  Charlie grinned. "Welcome to our city. Well, it's as good as a Pullman berth at that."

  "And no harder to dress on," said Jim, standing up carefully and beginning to peel off his wet clothes. "I guess if we wring these duds out and rub with alcohol, they won't feel so cold."

  Charlie rose and began to undress gingerly. "You can stand up to make your toilet," he said, "which is more than the Pullman offers you."

  They ate a cold canned supper and afterward, as they sat shivering, Jim said, "If we fail to locate the dam site, no one will have any sympathy with our troubles."

  "We will find it," said Charlie with the calm certainty he never had lost. "Jupiter looks as big as a dinner plate down here. Sometimes when I look at the stars I wonder what is the use of this kind of work."

  Jim looked up at the stars which seemed almost within hand touch. Their nearness was an unspeakable comfort to the two in the crevice. He spoke slowly but with unusual ease. Charlie Tuck had grown very near to him in the past few days.

  "I've had a feeling," he said, "ever since we actually got down here and on the job, that I'm doing the thing I've always been intended to do. I don't know how I got that feeling because I've always lived in towns."

  "I feel that way every time I go out exploring," answered Tuck. "I can stand the draughting board just so long and then I break loose. I suppose someone has got to do these jobs and there is always someone willing to take the responsibility. Kipling calls it being a Son of Martha. Do you know those verses?"

  "No," said Jim. "I'd like to hear them."

  Charlie chuckled. "Me reciting Kipling is like hearing a 'co-ed yell'—it's the only poem I know, though, and here goes. The Sons of Martha

  '—say to the Mountains, Be ye removed! They say to the lesser floods, run dry!

  Under their rods are the rocks reproved. They are not afraid of that which is high.

  Then do the hilltops shake to their summits, then is the bed of the deep laid bare,

  That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

  They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts break loose,

  They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their work whenever they choose.

  As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,

  Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's days may be long in the land.

  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 their own kind, in their common need.'"

  The two men sat in silence after Charlie had finished until he said: "If I were you I'd read Kipling a good deal. He's good food for a man of your type. People don't realize what their comforts cost. I hope that when I die it will be on a Son of Martha job. I'm built that way. My people were New Englanders, then middle west pioneers, and now here I am, still breaking the wilderness."

  Jim sat with his heart swelling with he knew not what great dream. It was the divine fire of young sacrifice, the subtle sense of devotion that has made men since the world began lay down their lives for the thing not seen with the eye.

  "I wish you'd teach me those verses," said Jim. "We've got to keep awake or roll off the ledge."

  And so the night passed.

  The next day the way was unspeakably difficult. They made progress slowly and heavily, clambering from rock to rock, clinging to the walls, fighting through rapids. It was past mid afternoon when they ran a level in a spot of surpassing grandeur. A rock slide had sent a great heap of stone into the river. Close beside this they set the transit. Forward the river swept smoothly round a curve. Back, the two looked on a magnificent series of flying buttresses of serrated granite, their bases guarding the river, their tops remotely supporting the heavens. The buttresses nearest the rock heap and on opposite sides of the river were not two rods apart.

  They ran the levels carefully and then looked at each other in silence. Then they made another reading and again looked at each other. Then they packed the transit into its rubber bag, sat down on the rock heap and gazed at the marching, impregnable line of buttresses.

  "It will be even higher than the Green Mountain and a hundred times more difficult to build," said Charlie, softly.

  "She'll be a wonder, won't she!" exclaimed Jim. "The Makon dam. It will be the highest in the world."

  "Granite and concrete! Some beauty that! Eternal as the hills!" said Charlie. "We will make camp and finish the map here."

  They lay long, looking at the stars that night. "Some day," said Jim, "there will be a two hundred feet width of concrete wall right where we are lying. Doesn't it make you feel a little hollow in your stomach to think that you and I have decreed where it shall be?"

  "Yes," said Charlie. "It's a good spot, Manning. I hope I get a chance to lay out the road down here. They will have to blast it out of the solid granite. It will eat money up to make it."

  "Let me in on it, won't you," pleaded Jim.

  "Well, slightly!" exclaimed Charlie. "Now for a good night's sleep. We ought to be out in three days. That will make ten days in all, just what I planned."

  Jim hardly knew Charlie the next day. No college freshman on his first holiday ever acted more outrageously. He sang ancient college songs that reverberated in the canyon like yells on a football field. He stood solemnly on his head on the top of rock pinnacles. He crowned himself and Jim with wreaths made of water cress that he found on a tiny sandy beach. When they were obliged to take to the water he pretended that he was an alligator and made uncouth sounds and lashed the water with the grub bag in lieu of a tail.

  Late in the afternoon, while they were swimming through a whirlpool, he insisted on giving Jim a lecture on the gentle art of bee-hunting as he had seen it practiced in Maine.

  "Now we will pretend that I am the bee!" he shouted at Jim. "You will admit that I look like one! I am drunk with honey and I hang to the comb thus!"

  He caught a point of rock with one hand and lazily waved the other.

  "This is my proboscis," he explained.

  "For heaven's sake, be careful!" yelled Jim. "This is no blooming ten-cent show! Keep both hands on the rock and climb up for a rest."

  Charlie suddenly went white. "God! I've got cramp!" he screamed. "Both legs. Help me, Manning!"

  He struggled to get his free hand on the rock, but the water tore at him like a ravening beast and he lost his hold. Jim swam furiously after him. The white head showed for a moment, then disappeared around a turn of the wall.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE BROKEN SEAL

  "When I was young I thought the world was made for love. Now I know that love made the world."

  Musings of the Elephant.

  How he passed the night that followed Jim never was sure. He knew that he fought his way down stream until long after darkness set in. Then, utterly exhausted, bleeding and bruised, he crawled up onto a rock under the wall and lay dripping and shivering until dawn.

  He watched the light touch the far top of the crevice, saw the azure strip of the sky appear and then with a deep groan he forced himself to eat from his grub bag and started hurriedly on down the river. The stream was much deeper below the point of the accident, with several large falls. Jim worked his way along carefully, swimming or floating for the most part, for the walls for many miles offered not even a hand-hold nor did they once give back in beach or eddy.

  The loneliness was appalling. The hardship of the work was astonishingly increased, robbed of Tuck's unfailing cheerfulness and faith. There was one moment when, toward sunset, Jim's strength almost failed him. The walls were rougher now. He had found a hand-hold but no place for the night. He clung here until his exhausted arms were able to endure no more.

 
"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 shore 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, Dick, get busy! We brought some underclothes; didn't know what shape you'd be in. Here is the suit you left at my place. God! 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 hoarsely.

  "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 Dick.

  "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 passion 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, sh
e 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."