ry, the cheapest portion of its equipment is its inexhaustible
human labor supply. It was Big Jim who was sufficiently intelligent to
keep demanding a new derrick. It was Big Jim who was adept in managing
the decrepit machinery and so it was he who was sent to the danger
spots, he having the keenest wits and the best knowledge of the danger
spots.

Little Jim, sitting with his long legs dangling over the derrick pit,
watched his father and 'Masso tease the derrick into swinging the great
blocks to the flat car for the rush order.

The thing happened very quickly, so quickly that Little Jim could not
jump to his feet and start madly down into the pit before it was all
over. The great derrick broke clean from its moorings and dropped across
the flat car, throwing Big Jim and 'Masso and the swinging block
together in a ghastly heap.

It took some time to rig the other derrick to bear on the situation.
Little Jim dropped to the ground and managed to grip his father's hand,
protruding from under the debris. But the boy could not speak. He only
sobbed dryly and clung desperately to the inert hand.

At last Big Jim and 'Masso were laid side by side upon the brown grass
at the quarry edge. 'Masso's chest was broken. The priest got to him
before the doctor. Had 'Masso known enough, before he choked, he might
have said:

"It doesn't matter. I have done a real man's part. I have worked to the
limit of my strength and I shall survive for America through my
fertility. What I have done to America, no one knows."

But 'Masso was no thinker. Before he slipped away, he only said some
futile word to the priest who knelt beside him. 'Masso never had gotten
very far from the thought of his Maker.

Big Jim, lying on the border of the fields where his fathers had dreamed
and hoped and worked, looked hazily at Little Jim, and tried to say
something, but couldn't. Once more the sense of having his back to the
wall, the pack suffocating him, closed in on him, blinded him, and
merged with him into the darkness into which none of us has seen.

Had Big Jim been able to clarify the chaos of thoughts in his mind and
had he had a longer time for dying, he might have done the thing far
more dramatically. He merely rasped out his life, a bloody, voiceless,
broken thing on the golden August fields, with his chaos of thoughts
unspoken.

He might, had things been otherwise, have seen the long, sad glory of
humanity's migrations; might have caug