ber 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 in