CHAPTER X
THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK
"The lone hunter finds the best hunting but he must fight and die alone."
MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.
That night, when Iron Skull Williams stopped at Jim's tent to speak ofsome detail of the work, Jim told him about the conversation with Freet.
"Iron Skull," he said in closing, "if I've got to mix up in politics,I'll quit, that's all. It's not my idea of engineering. My heavens! Ifthe engineers of the country are not going to be left unsmirched to dotheir work, what's going to become of civilization? You know how I'vealways admired Arthur Freet. You know how I appreciate the chances he'sgiven me to get ahead. And now----"
Iron Skull grunted. "I guess he hasn't hurt his own reputation any byletting you do a lot of his work for him while he played another end ofthe game. You are a great pipe dreamer, Boss Still. You want to rememberthat the Service is made up of human beings."
"Do you mean there _is_ graft in the Service?" asked Jim sharply.
The older man answered gently, for he knew he was hurting Jim. "TheService is the cleanest bureau in the government. I'll bet you can counton one hand the men in it who don't toe quite straight."
Jim drew a quick breath. "I don't believe there is a crook in theService."
"How about the sale of the water power up at Green Mountain?" askedWilliams. "Do you think that was an open deal? Did the farmers havetheir chance?"
Jim flushed. "I never let myself think about it," he muttered.
Iron Skull nodded. "You've lived in a fool's paradise, Boss Still, and Ifor one don't see that you help the Service by shutting your eyes. Youknow as well as I do that the United States Reclamation Service isdeveloping some mighty important water power propositions. Do you thinkit's like poor old human nature to argue that the Water Power Trustain't going to get hold of that power if it can or try to destroy theService if it can't?"
Jim rubbed his forehead drearily. "Iron Skull, isn't there anything afellow can keep his faith in?"
"Pshaw!" answered Williams, "you can keep your faith in the Service!This here is just like finding out that, though your wife is a mightyfine woman, she has her weak points!"
Jim stared at the lamp for a long time.
"What you looking at, partner?" asked Iron Skull.
"Oh, I was seeing the Green Mountain dam the way I first saw it and Iwas seeing Charlie Tuck and those days of ours in the canyon andthinking of what he said about the Service. He believed in it the way Ihave. And then I was thinking about the bunch of men who've stucktogether and by me for five years, like a pack of wolves, by jove! And Iwas thinking of those lines, you know, 'The strength of the pack is thewolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack.' That is what the Serviceought to be like, the Pack, and if one man goes bad the strength of thepack is hurt."
The older man nodded. Then he said, "What are you going to do about itall, Boss Still?"
Jim brought his fist down on the table. "I'm an engineer. I deal withhard facts, not intrigues. Freet must take me so or not at all."
"Well, you are half right and half wrong," commented Iron Skull, rising.
"What do you mean?" asked Jim.
"I mean that you have got an awful lot to learn yet before you will beof big value to the Service, but you've got to learn it with your elbowsand sweating blood. You're that kind. Nothing I can say will help you.Good night, partner!"
The next morning Jim reported at Freet's office. "Mr. Freet," he saidcarefully, "I have a lot of pride in the reputation of the ReclamationService. If we put a canal through Mellin's place it'll give people areal cause for complaint. I shall have to resign if you insist on mydoing it."
Freet laughed sardonically. "The Service can't afford to lose you, evenif you do live in the clouds! Why, I broke you in myself, Manning, andyou are one of the best men in the Service today, bar none. We will letthe Mellin matter rest for a while."
Jim blushed furiously under his chief's praise and with a brief "Thankyou," he turned away.
It was a little over two months later that Jim received an order fromWashington to proceed to the Cabillo Project in the Southwest. Theengineer in charge there was in poor health and Jim was to act as hisassistant. Jim was torn between pleasure at his promotion anddispleasure over Freet's obvious purpose of getting him away from theMakon.
But the utter relief in not having to fight the Mellin matter to afinish triumphed over the displeasure and Jim left the Makon for theSouthwest with Iron Skull, while trailing after him came the Pack who,to a man, suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to winter in the desert.
Jim missed the Makon very much at first. He had all the love of a fatherfor his first born for the Project, for which Charlie Tuck had died. Atfirst, he felt very much a stranger on this new Project. Watts, theengineer in charge, was a sick man. He was a gentle, lovable fellow offifty, and he was taking very much to heart the heckling that theService was receiving on his Project. His illness had caused the work onthe dam to fall behind. Jim closed his ears and his mouth, placed IronSkull and his Pack judiciously on the works and started full steam aheadto build the Cabillo dam.
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 Makonwhen, heading his faithful rough-necks, Jim ate up the work, with nothought save for the work, was gone. Jim's job on the Cabillo was notthat of engineer alone. He had not only to build the dam but to rule anorganization of two thousand souls. He was sole ruler of an isolateddesert community and he was the buffer between the office at Washingtonand all the contending and jealous forces that were rapidly developingin the valley.
The United States Reclamation Service is in the Department of theInterior. Jim had been at Cabillo two years when the new Secretary ofthe Interior summoned him to Washington.
The new Secretary had found his office flooded with complaints about theReclamation Service. He had found, too, a report from the CongressionalCommittee which had the year before investigated several of theProjects. Being of a patient and inquiring turn of mind, the Secretaryhad decided to go to the heart of the matter. Therefore he invited thecomplainants to come to Washington to see him. He summoned the Directorand Jim with several other of the Project engineers, Arthur Freet amongthem, to appear before him, with the complainants.
May in Washington is apt to be very warm, although very lovely to lookupon. Jim, so long accustomed to the naked height and sweep of thedesert country, felt half suffocated by the low hot streets of thecapitol. He went directly from the train to the Hearing, which was heldin one of the Secretary's offices. The room was large and square, with adesk at one end, where the Secretary was sitting. When Jim entered, theplace already was filled to overflowing with irrigation farmers or theirlawyers, with land speculators, with Congressmen and reporters.
The Secretary was a large man with a smooth shaven, inscrutable face andblue eyes that were set far apart under overhanging brows. He looked atJim keenly as the young engineer made his way to his seat in the frontof the room. He saw the same Jim that had said good-bye to the littlegroup in the station eight years before; the same Jim, with someimportant modifications.
He was tanned to bronze, of course. He had sun wrinkles at the cornersof his eyes. His mouth was thinner and the corners not so deep. The oldscowl between his eyes had traced two permanent lines there. The mass ofbrown hair still swept his dreamer's forehead. His jaws had become thejaws of a man of action.
Jim sat down, folded his arms and crossed his knees, fixing his gaze onthe patch of blue sky above the building opposite the open window. Forfive days he sat so, without answering a charge that was brought againsthim.
For five days the Secretary sat with entire patience urging every man tospeak his mind fully and freely. And if bitterness toward the Servicebetokened free speaking, the complainants held back nothing.
A heavy set man, tanned and cheaply dressed, said: "Mr.
Secretary, I wasborn in Hungary. I am a tinner by trade. I lived in Sioux City. I have awife and six children. I got consumption and a real estate man fixed itup 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 allmy living expenses. I buy forty acres.
"Mr. Secretary, I get no crops for five years. I hauled every drop ofwater we use seven miles from a spring for five years. Some days we gotnothing to eat. Me and my oldest boy, we work for Mellin when we canand 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 canal do come they run it through Mellin's place. Mymoney 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 MakonProject?" asked the Secretary.
"Yes, sir," replied the man, "many, but also, many like me."
"Then is your complaint against the real estate sharks or thegovernment?" persisted the Secretary.
"Against both!" cried the man. "Why did that Freet give Mellin and theother big fellow first choice in everything? Why must I pay for what Ican't get?"
There were several farmers from different projects who had stories thatmatched the ex-tinner's. When they had finished, the Secretary called ona real estate man who had come with a protest about the running of thecanals 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 inthere?"
"Perhaps $100,000."
"We are to believe, then, that some people have found the Serviceuseful?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Secretary, there are a whole lot of contented farmers upthere who are too busy with their bumper crops to come to Washington,even if they wanted to."
The real estate man sat down and the Secretary called on the Chairman ofthe Congressional investigating committee to make a brief summary of hischarges.
The Chairman said, succinctly: "I charge the Service with graft, grossextravagance and inefficiency. I call on you to remove the Director andfour of his engineers, including Arthur Freet and James Manning, who arepresent."
"Of what specific things do you accuse Mr. Manning?" asked theSecretary, with a glance at Jim's impassive face.
"His Project is full of mistakes, some of them small, that,nevertheless, aggregate big and show the trend of the Service. Up on theMakon he made a road at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars that onlythe Service used. He's put a thousand dollars into telephone boothswhere two hundred would have been ample. Some of the canal concrete workhas had to be dynamited out and done over and over again. The farmerpays for all this. Manning refuses to take any advice from the farmerson the Project, men who were irrigating before he was born. His everyidea seems hostile to the farmer, whose land the farmer himself ispaying him to irrigate. Manning was trained by Freet, Mr. Secretary."
The Secretary tapped his desk softly for several moments, as if turningover in his mind the opposing evidence brought out during the severaldays of the Hearing. Jim had not been called on but Arthur Freet and twoother Project engineers had spent an entire day on the stand, quizzedunmercifully by everyone in the room. They had disclaimed everyaccusation. The Director of the Service, a quiet man of marvelousexecutive ability, had made a bitter return attack on the CongressionalCommittee, the farmers, the real estate men and the lawyers, accusingthem of being the conscious or unconscious tools of the Water PowerTrust, whose object was to destroy the Service.
An elderly Senator had risen and had addressed the Hearing. "I was oneof the fathers of the Reclamation Act. One of the fundamental ideas ofthe Act was that it was not governmental charity but that every farmerwhose arid acres were watered would be willing to pay for it. I see butone thing in all these protests against the Service and that is theattempt to repudiate the debt incurred by the farmers to the Service.And the attempt to repudiate is most bitter with the very men whopleaded most loudly with the Government to irrigate their land and whovoluntarily pledged themselves to pay back during an easy period ofyears the cost of the Projects. If it is a fact that this tainted ideaof Repudiation is creeping among the land owners on the Projects, I warnyou all that I shall use all my influence to have the Reclamation Actrepealed."
As the old Senator had finished half the men in the room had risen totheir 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. Hestood there struggling for words that would not come. For five days hehad sat thinking of the three Projects that he knew. He recalled CharlieTuck and the two other engineers who had laid down their lives for thedams. He pictured again the drowned and mangled workmen at the cost ofwhose lives the Makon tunnel had been driven. A slow, bitter anger hadrisen in him against Freet. It seemed to Jim a fearful thing that onecrooked man could taint such faithfulness and sacrifice as he had known,could blind intelligent men to the marvel of engineering work thatmarked 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 haveanything to say to the specific charges against me. The Director hascovered the ground better than I can. I have the feeling that if theactual work we have done out west, the actual acreage we have brought toprofitable bearing won't speak to you people who have seen it, nothingelse will. The flood season is coming on, Mr. Secretary. I would suggestthat 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 ofgovernment is to build good roads. Actually, the heavy freightage thatmust pass over these roads makes it essential that they be first class.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 beenexpensive ones in lives and money. Many of our engineering problems areentirely new and we have to solve them without precedent. The punishmentfor a bad guess in engineering is always sure and hard. One can make abad 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 thepatch 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 bedishonest, no punishment can be too severe for him." Jim paused and thenwent on, half under his breath as if he had forgotten his audience. "Thestrength of the pack is the wolf. It's disloyalty in the pack that'shelping 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 lookedguilty, Jim did.
There was at this point a sudden scraping of a chair, the clatter of anoverturned cuspidor and a stout, elderly man at the rear of the roomjumped 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 mehand. And I know Jim Manning as I know me own soul. You've let everyonehave free speech here. Manning didn't know till this minute that I wasin town. My name is Michael Dennis, your honor."
The Secretary smiled ever so slightly as he glanced from Jim's face tothat of the speaker. Jim's jaw was dropped. He was shaking his headfuriously at Uncle Denny while the latter nodded as furiously at Jim.
"Mr. Manning seems unwilling to speak for himse
lf. Since you know him sowell, 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 tothe 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 andStill Jim he is here before this crowd of mixed jackals and jackasses.He never could waste his energy in speech, as I'm doing now. I've oftenthought he had some fine inner sense that taught him even as a childthat if it's hard to speak truth, its next to impossible to hear it. Sohe just keeps still.
"You've heard him accused of graft, Mr. Secretary, and of inefficiencyand of any other black phrase that came handy to these people. Yourhonor, it's impossible! It's not in his breed of mind! If you could haveseen him as I have! A child of fifteen working in the pit of askyscraper and crying himself to sleep nights for memory of his fatherhe'd seen killed at like work, yet refusing money from me till I marriedhis mother and made him take it. If you had seen him out on yourProjects, cutting himself off from civilization in the flower of hisyouth and giving his young life blood to his dams! I know he's receivedoffers of five times his salary from a corporation and stayed by hisdam. I've seen him hang by a frayed cable with the flood round his armpits, arguing, heartening the rough-necks for twenty-four hours at astretch, the last man to give in, for his dam! I've seen him takechances that meant life or death for him and a hundred workmen and tenthousand dollars worth of material and win for his dam, for a pile ofstones that was to bring money to the very men here who are howling himdown. For his dam, that's wife and child to him, and they accuse him ofprostituting it! Bah! You fools! Don't you know no money-getter worksthat way? He's a trail builder, Mr. Secretary. He's the breed that opensthe way for idiots like these and they follow in and trample himunderfoot on the very trail he has made for them!"
Uncle Denny stopped. There was a moment's hush in the room. Jim watchedthe patch of blue with unseeing eyes. As Uncle Denny started back to hisseat there rose an angry buzz, but the Secretary raised his hand.
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Turn about is fair play. Remember that you havecalled the Reclamation Engineers some very foul names. Mr. Manning, Icannot see why you should not return to the flood at your dam and youother engineers to your respective posts, there to await word from yourDirector as to the results of this Hearing. You yourselves must realizeafter hearing all sides that I can take action only after carefuldeliberation. 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'thave 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 feelabout you as I do about Ireland! I'm aching for some blundering fool tosay 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. Ican't wait an hour on the flood. How are mother and Pen?"
"Fine! Your mother and I are the most comfortable couple on earth. Wetook it for granted you'd come up to New York. You got me letter aboutSara 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 hishands. "Soul of me soul! They are out there by now. It all happened veryunexpectedly and I did me best to head him off. I must admit Pen was nohelp to me there."
"But what----" exclaimed Jim.
Uncle Denny interrupted. "I don't know, meself. You gave Sara's name toFreet some time ago, two years ago, when he wanted to do some realestate business in New York. Well, ever since Sara has had the westernland speculation bug, and lately nothing would do but he must get out toyour Project. They are waiting there now for you if Sara killed no oneen route. There is so much peace in the old brownstone front now, StillJim, that your mother and I fear we will have to keep a coyote in theparlor 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 heartmisgives 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 hisIrish eyes were tear-dimmed. He said no more until they were in Jim'sroom 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 willbe Saradokis' wife."
"Oh, I know! Only in name! But--I may as well tell you that I think shewas unwise in going to you."
Jim walked over to the window, then slowly back again. His clear grayeyes searched the kindly blue ones. "Uncle Denny, why do you supposethis thing happened to Pen?"
The Irishman's voice was a little husky as he answered: "To make a grandwoman of her. She's developed qualities that nothing else on earth couldhave developed in her. It's because of her having grown to be what sheis that I didn't want her to go to you. I--Oh, Still Jim, me boy! Meboy!"
For just a moment Jim's lips quivered, then he said, "We shall see whatthe desert does for us," and he closed his suitcase with a snap.