"They ought to be blamed good," said Dick.
Jim sat for a moment looking down into the fearful depths where Charlie and he had lived a lifetime. Then he said:
"'Lift ye the stone or cleave the wood, to make a path more fair or flat, Lo, it is black already, with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that! Not as a ladder from Earth to Heaven, not as an altar to any creed, But simple Service, simply given, to his own kind, in their common need.'"
And so Charlie Tuck crossed the Great Divide.
Jim stopped two days with the rancher and then went back to the Green Mountain dam. The story of the trip through the crevice had preceded him. The men of the Service were inured to the idea of the sacrifice of blood for the dams. There was little said, some silent handshakes given, and they ceased to haze Jim. He had become one of them.
The plans for the preliminary surveys of the Makon Project were begun at once. Jim remained at Green Mountain during the winter, serving his apprenticeship to the concrete works and the superintendent as Mr. Freet had planned. But in the spring he had his wish and was sent to lay out the road on the Makon project.
All this time letters came regularly from the brownstone front, but they were from Jim's mother and his Uncle Denny for the most part, and they were very silent about Penelope. 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.