"She is married, Suma-theek," replied Jim gently.
"Married? No! That no man up there. She no his wife. Let him go. He bad in heart like in body. You marry her."
Jim continued to shake his head. "She belongs to him. The law says so."
Suma-theek snorted. "Law! You whites make no law except to break it. Love it have no law except to make tribe live. Great Spirit, he must think she bad when she might have good babies for her tribe, she stay with that bad cripple. Huh?"
"You don't understand, Suma-theek. There is always the matter of honor for a white man."
Suma-theek smoked his cigarette thoughtfully for a moment and then he said, wonderingly: "A white man's honor! He will steal a nigger woman or an Injun woman. He will steal Injun money or Injun lands. He will steal white man's money. He will lie. He will cheat. Where he not afraid, white man no have honor. But when talk about steal white man's wife, he afraid. Then he find he have honor! Honor! Boss, white honor is like rain on hot sand, like rotten arrow string, like leaking olla. I am old, old Injun. I heap know white honor!"
Old Suma-theek flipped his cigarette into the excavation and strode away. Jim rose slowly and looked over at the Elephant with his gray eyes narrowed, his broad shoulders set.
"On your head be it!" he murmured. "I am going to try!"
He climbed the trail to his house, washed and brushed himself and went over to the tent house. Pen was sitting on the doorstep. Oscar Ames was talking to Sara.
"Hello, Sara!" said Jim coolly. "Pen, I've got a free hour. Will you come up back of the camp with me and let me show you the view from Wind Ridge? It's finer than what you get from the Elephant."
Sara's face was inscrutable. Oscar said nothing. Pen laid aside her book and picked up her hat.
"I knew there was something the matter with me," she said gaily. "It was Wind Ridge I was missing though I never heard of it before! I won't be long, Sara."
"Don't hurry on my account," said Sara, with a sardonic glance at Jim.
The trail led up the mountain slope with a steady twist toward a ridge at the top that showed a sawtooth edge. Almost to the top the mountain was dotted with little green cedars, dwarfed and wind-tortured. Up at the saw edge they stopped. Here the wind caught them, wind flooding across desert and mountain, clean, sweet, with a marvelous tang to it, despite the desert heat.
"Why, it's a world of lavenders!" cried Pen.
Jim nodded and steadied her against the great warm rush of the wind. Far to the east beyond the purple Elephant the San Juan mountains lay on the horizon. They were the faintest, clearest blue lavender, with iridescent peaks merging into the iridescent sky. The desert that swept toward the Elephant was a yellow lavender. The mountain that bore the ridge was a gray lavender. To the west, three great ranges vied with each other in melting tints of purple, that now were blue, now were lavender. The two might have been sitting at the top of the world, the sweep of the view and the sense of exaltation in it were so great.
Mighty white clouds rushed across the sky, sweeping their blue shadows over the desert, like ripples in the wake of huge sailing ships.
When Pen had looked her fill, Jim led her to a clump of cedars that broke the wind and made a seat for her from branches. Then he tossed his hat down and stood before her. Pen looked up into his face.
"Why so serious, Still Jim?" she asked.
"Penelope," asked Jim, "do you remember that twice I held you in my arms and kissed you on the lips and told you that you belonged to me?"
Pen whitened. If he could only dream how the pain and sweetness of those embraces never had left her!
"I remember! But let's not talk of that. We settled it all on the day you got back from Washington. We must forget it all, Jim."
"We can never forget it, Pen. We're not that kind." Jim stood struggling for words with which to express his emotion. It always had been this way, he told himself. The great moments of his life always found him dumb. Even old Suma-theek could tell his thoughts more clearly than he. Jim summoned all his resources.
"Pen, it never occurred to me you wouldn't wait. There has never been any other woman in my life and I suppose I just couldn't picture any other man having a hold on you. But it all goes in with my general incompetence to grasp opportunity. I felt that I had no right to go any farther until I had more than hopes to offer you. I planned to make a reputation as an engineer. I knew money didn't interest you. I wanted to offer myself to you as a man of real achievement. You see how I failed. I have made a reputation as a grafting, inefficient engineer with the public. You are another man's wife. But, Penelope, I am not going to give you up!
"One gets a new view of life out here. You are wrong in staying with Saradokis. Why should three lives be ruined by his tragedy? Pen! Pen! If I could make you understand the torture of knowing you are married to Sara! You are mine! From the first day I came upon you in the old library, we belonged to each other. Pen, I've tramped the desert night after night on the Makon and here, sweating it out with the stars and I have determined that you shall belong to me."
Pen, white and trembling, did not move her gaze from Jim's face. All her tired, yearning youth stood in her eyes.
Jim spoke very slowly and clearly. "Penelope, I love you. Will you leave Saradokis and marry me?"
Pen did not answer for a long moment. A to-hee trilled from the cedar:
"O yahee! O yahai!
Sweet as arrow weed in spring!"
The Elephant lay motionless. The flag rippled and fluttered, a faint red spot far below on the mountainside. Pen's youth was fighting with her bitterly won philosophy. Then she summoned all her fortitude.
"Jim, dear, it would be a cowardly thing for me to leave Sara."
"It would be greater cowardice to stay. Pen, shall you and I die as Iron Skull did? I can marry no other woman feeling as I do about you. Sara's life is useless. Let the world say what it will. Marry me, Penelope."
"Jim, I can't."
"Why not, Penelope?"
"I love you very dearly, but I've had enough of marriage. I've done my duty. I don't see how I could keep on loving a man after I married him, even if he weren't a cripple. The process of adjustment is simply frightful. Marriage is just a contract binding one to do the impossible!"
Jim scowled. More and more he was realizing how Sara had hurt Pen.
"You don't care a rap about me, Pen. Why don't you admit it?"
Pen gave a sudden tearful smile. "You know better, Jim. But just to prove to you what a silly goose I am, I'll show you something. Girls in real life do this even more than they do it in novels!"
Pen opened a flat locket she always wore. A folded bit of paper and a tiny photograph fluttered into her lap. She gave both to Jim. The picture was a snapshot of Jim in his football togs. The bit of paper, unfolded, showed in Pen's handwriting a verse from Christina Rossetti:
"Too late for love, too late for joy;
Too late! Too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate:
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died, behind the grate:
Her heart was starving all this time
You made it wait."
Jim put the bit of paper into his pocket and gave Pen the picture. His eyes were full of tears.
"Pen! Pen!" he cried. "Let me make it up to you! We care so much! Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery of marriage!"
White to the lips, Pen answered once more: "Jim, I will never leave Sara. There is such a thing as honor. It's the last foundation that the whole social fabric rests on. I promised to stay with Sara, in the marriage service. He's kept his word. It's my business to keep mine, until he breaks his."
Jim stood with set face. "Is this final, Penelope?"
"It's final, Still."
; "Do you mind if I go on alone, Pen?"
Pen shook her head and Jim turned down the mountainside. And Pen, being a woman, put her head down on her knees and cried her heart out. Then she went back to Sara.
That night Jim answered the Secretary's letter:
"My work has always been technical. I know that the Projects are not the success their sponsors in Congress hoped they would be, but I feel that you ask too much of your engineers when you ask them not only to make the dam but to administer it. I have about concluded that an engineer is a futile beast of triangles and n-th powers, unfitted by his very talents for associating with other human beings. I suppose that this letter must be interpreted as my admission of inefficiency."
It was late when Jim had finished this letter. He was, he thought, alone in the house. He laid down his pen. A sudden overpowering desire came upon him for Exham, for the old haunts of his childhood. There it seemed to him that some of his old confidence in life might return to him. He dropped his arm along the back of his chair and with his forehead on his wrist he gave a groan of utter desolation.
Mrs. Flynn, coming in at the open door, heard the groan and saw the beautiful brown head bowed as if in despair. She stopped aghast.
"Oh, my Lord!" she gasped under her breath. "Him, too! Mrs. Penelope ain't the only one that's broken up, then! Ain't it fierce! I wonder what's happened to the poor young ones! I'd like to go to Mr. Sara's wake. I would that! Oh, my Lord! Let's see. He's had two baths today. I can't get him into another. I'll make him some tea. You have to cheer up either to eat or take a bath."
She slipped into the kitchen and there began to bang the range and rattle teacups. When she came in, Jim was sitting erect and stern-faced, sorting papers. Mrs. Flynn set the tray down on the desk with a thud. She was going to take no refusal.
"Drink that tea, Boss Still Jim, and eat them toasted crackers. You didn't eat any supper to speak of and you're as pindlin' as a knitting needle. Don't slop on your clean suit. That khaki is hard to iron."
She stood close beside him and made an imaginary thread an excuse for laying her hand caressingly on Jim's shoulder. "You're a fine lad," she said, uncertainly. "I wish I'd been your mother."
The touch was too much for Jim. He dropped the teacup and, turning, laid his face against Mrs. Flynn's shoulder.
"I could pretend you were tonight, very easily," he said brokenly, "if you'd smooth my hair for me."
Mrs. Flynn hugged the broad shoulders to her and smoothed back Jim's hair.
"I've been wanting to get my hands on it ever since I first saw it, lad. God knows it's as soft as silk and just the color of oak leaves in winter. There, now, hold tight a bit, my boy. We can weather any storm if we have a friend to lean on, and I'm that, God knows. It's a fearful cold I've caught, God knows. You'll have to excuse my snuffing. There now! There! God knows that in my waist I've got a letter for you from Mrs. Penelope. She seemed used up tonight. Her jewel of a husband took dope tonight, so she and I sat in peace while she wrote this. I'll leave it on your tray. Good-night to you, Boss. Don't slop on your suit."
* * *
CHAPTER XVIII
JIM MAKES A SPEECH
"I am permanent so I cannot fully understand the tragedy that haunts humans from their birth, the tragedy of their own transitoriness."
Musings of the Elephant.
Jim drank his tea, staring the while at the envelope that lay on the tray. Then he opened the envelope and read:
"Dear Still: Don't say that I must go away. I want to stay and help you. I promised Iron Skull that I would. I don't want to add one breath to your pain—nor to my own!—and yet I feel as if we ought to forget ourselves and think only of the dam. No one knows you as I do, dear Jim. Iron Skull felt, and so do I, that somehow, sometime I can help you to be the big man you were meant to be. I have grown to feel that it was for that purpose I have lived through the last eight years. If it will not hurt you too much, please, Jim, let me stay.
Penelope."
Jim answered the note immediately.
"Dearest Pen: Give me a day or so to get braced and we will go on as before. Stand by me, Pen. I need you, dear.
Jim."
But it was nearly two weeks before Jim talked with Pen again. For a number of days he devoted himself day and night to the preparations for starting the second section of the dam in the completed excavation. Then formal notice came that the Congressional committee would arrive at the dam nearly a week before it had been expected and Jim was overwhelmed in preparations for its reception. The first three days of the investigation were to be devoted to inspecting the dam. Jim brought the committee to the dam from the station himself.
There were five men on the committee, two New Englanders and three far westerners. They were the same five men who a year before had investigated Arthur Freet's projects and they were baffled and suspicious. And Jim's silence irritated them far more than Arthur Freet's loquacity. The members from the West and from Massachusetts were, in spite of this, open-minded, eager for information and interested in the actual work of the dam building. The member from Vermont pursued Jim with the bitterness of a fanatic.
"A Puritan hang-over is what ails him," Jim remarked to Henderson. "He would burn a woman for a witch for having three moles on her back, as easy as—as he'd fire me!"
Henderson snorted: "I wish he was fat. I'd take him to ride in Bill Evans' machine. But, gee! he's so thin he'd stick in the seat like a sliver!"
Henderson had devoted himself to the entertainment of the visitors. He had organized a picnic to a far canyon where the "officers" and their wives offered the committee a wonderful camp supper, by a camp fire that lighted the desert for miles. He had induced the Mexicans in the lower camp to give one of their religious plays for the second night's entertainment. The moving picture hall was turned into a theater and the play, in queer Spanish, a strange mixture of miracle-play and buffoonery, delighted the hombres and astounded the whites. But the consummation of Henderson's art as an entertainment provider was to be the Mask Ball. This was to take place after the hearing at Cabillo was finished.
Jim gave all his time to the committee. He turned the office and its force over to them; gave them the freedom of the account books and the safe. Let them rummage the warehouse and its system. Explained his engineering mistakes to them. Went over and over the details of the flood, of the weathering abutments, of the concrete that did not come up to specifications, of the new system of concrete mixture that he and his cement engineer were evolving and which Jim believed in so ardently that he was using it on the dam. But in regard to Freet or to any graft in the Service he was persistently silent.
The Hearing was like and yet unlike the May hearing. It lacked the dignity of the first occasion and the Vermont member who presided was not the calm, inscrutable judge that the Secretary had been. The hall in Cabillo was packed with farmers and their wives and sweethearts and with Del Norte citizens.
The main effort of the speakers at the Hearing was to prove the inordinate extravagance and incompetence of Jim and his associates. For three days Jim answered questions quietly and as briefly as possible. But he was not able to compass the cool indifference that had kept him staring out the window of the Interior Department. There was growing within him an overwhelming desire to protest. He saw that, however fair the other members of the committee were inclined to be, their certainty of Freet's dishonesty, coupled with the fact that he was a pupil of Freet's, would be used by the restless vindictiveness of the Vermont member without doubt, to bring about his dismissal.
He felt an increasing desire to make a last stand against the wall of the nation's indifference, to make the people of the Project and the people of the world understand his viewpoint. But words failed him until the last day of the Hearing.
On this last day, Sara and Pen attended the hearing, as guests of Fleckenstein, who had sent his great touring car for them. Jim nodded to them across the room but made no attempt to speak to them. It was neari
ng five o'clock when Fleckenstein closed his testimony.
"The Reclamation Service," he said, "is like every other department of the government. It is a refuge for the incompetent whose one skill is in grafting. The cost of this dam has jumped over the estimates by hundreds of thousands. Forty dollars an acre is what the farmers of this project must pay the government instead of the estimated thirty. I do not lay the whole blame on Mr. Manning, even though he is Freet's pupil. Part of it is due to the criminal ignorance and weakness of Mr. Manning's predecessor. We farmers——"
"Stop!" thundered Jim. He jumped to his feet. Fleckenstein gasped. Jim threw back his hair. His gray eyes were black. His thin brown face was flushed. Under his khaki riding suit his long steel muscles were tense.
"My predecessor was Frederick Watts. I grew to know him well. He was a master mind in his profession, but he was gentle and sensitive and, like many men who have lived long in the open, silent. About the time that he started to build this dam the money interests in this country decided that the nation was getting too much water power control. They decided that the best way to stop the nation's growth in this direction was to discredit the Service. Frederick Watts was one of their first targets. By means too subtle for me to understand, they set machinery going in this vicinity by which every step that Watts took was made a kick against him.
"They never let up on him. They hounded him. They put him to shame with the nation and in the privacy of his own family. Watts was over fifty years old. He was no fighter. All he wanted was a chance to build his dam. He was gentle and silent. He went into nervous prostration and died, still silent, a broken-hearted man.
"Up in the big silent places you will find his monuments; dams high in mountain fastnesses, an imperishable part of the mountains; trestles that bridge canyons which birds feared to cross. He spent his life in utter hardships making ways easy for others to follow. These monuments will stand forever. But the name of their builder has become a blackened thing for rats like Fleckenstein to handle with dirty claws.
Still Jim Page 18