nks merged as if in a final
struggle for supremacy.

The boy saw a country of mighty distances, of indescribable cruelty and
hostility, a country of unthinkable heights and impassable depths. And,
standing so, struggling to resist the sense of the region's terrifying
bigness, he saw that all the valleys and canyons and mountain slopes
seemed to focus toward one point. It was as if they had concentrated at
one spot against a common enemy.

This point, he saw, was a huge black canyon that carried the waters from
all the hundred hills around. It was the point where the war of waters
must be keenest, where the stand of the wilderness was most savage and
where lay the one touch of man in all that area of contending mountains.

A vast wall of masonry had been built to block the outlet of the ranges.
A curving wall of gray stone, so huge, so naked of conscious adornment
that the hills might well have disbelieved it to be an enemy and have
accepted it as part and parcel of their own silent grandeur.

Jim lifted his hat slowly and moistened his lips. This, then, was the
labor to which he had so patronizingly offered his puny hands.

After a while, details obtruded themselves. Jim saw black dots of men
moving about the top of the dam. He heard the clatter of concrete
mixers, the raucous grind of the crusher, the scream of donkey engines
and the shouts of foremen. Back to the right, among the trees, was a
long military line of tents. Above the noise of construction the boy
caught the silent brooding of the forest and, poured round all, the
liquid glory of the sunset. Suddenly he saw the whole great picture as
his own work, and it was a picture as elusive, as tantalizing, as a
boy's first dreams of pirate adventure. Jim had come to his first great
dam.

When he had shaken himself together and had swallowed the lump in his
throat, he asked a passing workman for Mr. Freet, the Project Engineer.
He was directed to a tent with a sheet iron roof. Jim stopped bashfully
in the door. A tall man was standing before a map. Jim had a good look
at him before he turned around.

Mr. Freet wore corduroy riding breeches and leather puttees, a blue
flannel shirt and soft tie. He was thin and tall and had a shock of
bright red hair. When he turned, Jim saw that his face was bronzed and
deeply lined. His eyes were black and small and piercing.

"Mr. Freet," said Jim, "my name is Manning."

The project engineer came forward with a pleasant s