nelope. 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 sav