county. She stopped Mr. Manning a while ago and asked what he meant
by running one of the canals the way it was. Then, just because he's
always nice to a woman, Mr. Manning stands and lets her explain his
business to him for half an hour. When she got through he thanked her
and said it was always wise to trust a woman's intuition. She thought
she'd taught him a real valuable lesson and she said he was the only man
she ever saw that knew good advice when he got it. Well, when I went
round to her the other day and told her what Mr. Manning was up against,
she flew round like a wet hen. I've heard she threatened to foreclose on
anyone that voted for Fleckenstein."

Uncle Denny chuckled. "And the boy thinks he has no friends!"

The fight into which Jim had thrown himself was an intangible one. He
knew that he could not save his job for himself, but he believed that if
he could defeat Fleckenstein, he would have made the farmers assume a
responsibility for the Project that would never be lost.

Uncle Denny did not tell Jim that he knew that every day lessened Jim's
term of office on the dam. He asked no embarrassing questions. One day,
as they stood looking at the dam slowly emerging from the river bed to
lie in the utter beauty of strength at the Elephant's feet, Jim said:

"I wonder if another man will love the dam as I have. There is not a
stone in it that I don't know and care for."

But Uncle Denny only nodded and said in reply, "A man must love the
thing he creates whether it's a dam or a child." But his heart ached
within him.

The Department of Agriculture had responded immediately and half a dozen
experts already were at work on the Project. The older farmers resented
any suggestions that were made regarding their methods, but little by
little the newcomers were turning to the experts, and Jim believed that
even in a year scientific farming would be a settled fact on the
Project.

Every moment that Jim could spare from hastening the work on the dam he
spent in the valley with the farmers. He did not harangue. He had come
to realize that deep within us all dwells a hunger of the soul on which,
when roused, the world wings forward. So he induced these men to talk to
him and listened, wondering at the deeps he touched. He did not realize
that often they were ashamed to show him narrowness or selfishness when
through his wistful silence they glimpsed his unsatisfied visioning.
Nothing in life is so contagious as