u'd never need
it. Billy, start a fire and cook the coffee and bacon. You've had an
awful experience, Mr. Manning, I guess. You don't look the tenderfoot
kid that went into the canyon!"

"We found the dam site," said Jim hoarsely.

"Don't try to talk till you get some grub," said the man called Billy.

Clothed and fed, Jim told his story, a little brokenly. The group of men
who listened were used to hardy deeds. They had seen Nature demand her
toll of death again and again in the wilderness. And yet as they sat
looking at the young fellow with his gray eyes shocked and
grief-stricken and perceived his boyish idolatry of Charlie Tuck,
something like moisture shone in their eyes. They shook hands with Jim
when he had finished, silently for the most part, though the rancher
said:

"You're the only man ever came through there alive. They had to bury
Tuck right off. They'd ought to build a monument for him. Where is his
folks?"

"He had none," said Jim. "I want to put up his headstone for him, and I
know just what lines are going to be put on the stone."

"They ought to be blamed good," said Dick.

"What are they?" asked the ranchman.

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 Pe