r itself easy for
Jim to understand.

"MY DEAR MR. MANNING:

"There are several facts connected with your work that I
would like to call to your attention. The Reclamation
Service is an experiment, a magnificent one. It is not a
test of engineering efficiency, except indirectly. Engineers
as a class are efficient. It is an experiment to discover
whether or not the American people is capable of
understanding and handling such an idea as the Service idea.
It is a problem of human adjustment. Is an engineer capable
of handling so gigantic a human as well as technical
problem? I shall be interested in getting your ideas along
this line.

"---- Secretary of the Interior."

Jim laid the letter down. He recalled the Secretary's fine, inscrutable
face and that something back of its mask that he had liked and
understood. He felt sure that the letter had been impelled by that
far-seeing quality that he knew belonged to the Secretary but for which
he had no lucid word. And yet the letter roused in Jim the old sense of
resentment. What did the Secretary want him to do; turn peanut
politician and fight the water power trust? Did no one realize that the
erecting of the dam was heavy enough responsibility for any one man?

His first impulse was to take the letter over to Pen. Then he smiled
wryly. He must not take all his troubles to her or she would get no
relief from the burdening that Sara put upon her. So he brooded over the
letter until supper time when he went with Henderson down to the lower
mess. Jim ate with the lower mess frequently. It was almost the only way
he had now of keeping in touch personally with his workmen.

After supper and a pipe in the steward's room Jim climbed the long road
to the dam. The road hung high above the dam site. The mountains and the
bulk of the Elephant were black in the shadowy regions beyond the arc
lights. Black and purple and silver below lay the mighty section of
concrete, with black specks of workmen moving back and forth on it,
pygmies aiding in the birth of a Colossus. The night sky was dim and
remote here. Despite the roar of the cableways, the whistles of foremen,
the rushing to and fro of workmen, the flicker of electric lights, one
could not lose the sense of the project's isolation. One knew that the
desert was pressing in on every side. One knew that old Jezebel, having
crossed endless wastes, h