solid granite a
road down which mule teams could haul all the machinery for the making
of the dam and the tunnel and all the necessities for building the
workingmen's camp in the canyon bottom.

It must be wide enough to safeguard life. It must be as steep as the
mules could manage in order to save distance and cost. It must be strong
enough to carry enormous weights. Its curves must accommodate teams of
twenty mules, hauling the great length of beam and pipe needed in the
work below. And it must be a road that would endure with little expense
of up-keep as long as the dam below would endure.

It was not a complicated engineering feat. But it was Jim's first
responsible job. It was his first experience in handling men and a camp.
Moses, showing the children of Israel the way across the desert, could
have felt no more pride or responsibility than did Jim breaking the
trail to the Makon.

The crevice road was blasted from the granite. It was widened to hang
like a shelf over sickening depths or built up with concrete to
withstand the wash from some menacing gorge, or tilted to cling
desperately to a blank wall that offered not even claw hold for the
eagles. And always it must drop with a grade that took no account of
return freightage.

"We'll wear the machinery out and leave it at the bottom," Freet had
said. "Even a 25 per cent. grade will do when necessary. Hustle it
along, Manning. I'll be ready to leave the Green Mountain by the time
you are ready for me at the Makon."

And Jim hustled. But labor was hard to get. The country was inaccessible
and extraordinarily lonely. There was no place for women or children
until the camp in the canyon should be built, so it was a crowd of
wandering "rough-necks" who built the road. A few were friends of Iron
Skull, who followed him from job to job. The rest were tramp workmen,
men who had toiled all over the world. They were not hoboes. They were
journeyman laborers. They were world workers who had lent willing and
calloused hands to a thousand great labors in a thousand places.

They came and went like shifting sands. Jim never knew whether he would
wake to find ten or a hundred men in the camp. He tried for a long time
to solve the problem. Iron Skull considered it unsolvable. He had a low
opinion of the rough-neck. At last he disappeared for a couple of weeks
and returned with twenty-five Indians. They were Apaches and Mohaves
under the leadership of a fine austere old I