ok Freet to the
train. They talked construction work all the way and parted amiably.
Then Jim returned to his belated office work.

The last letter that he opened was from the Director of the Service. It
explained to Jim that while the Director had complete faith in Jim's
engineering ability and integrity, Jim's unpopularity not only with the
public but with the investigating committee made his resignation seem
expedient for the good of the Service. It was with extreme regret and
with full appreciation of what Jim had done for the Service that the
Director asked for Jim's resignation, three months from date.

Jim folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he stared out of
the door at the Elephant. The great beast was silent in the after-glow.
A to-hee cheeped sleepily in a nearby cholla:

"O yahee! O yahai!
Sweet as arrow weed in spring!"

Then Jim went slowly up the trail to his house, and, refusing his
supper, went into his room and closed the door.

CHAPTER XXII

JIM PLANS A LAST FIGHT

"The coyotes are going leaving behind them bleaching bones.
The Indians are going leaving a few arrow heads and water
vessels. What will the whites leave?"

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

Jim was angry. All night he lay staring into the dark with his wrath
accumulating until it finally focused itself, not on the Director or on
Sara or on the farmers, but on himself! He reviewed the years
mercilessly. He saw how he had refused again and again to shoulder the
responsibilities that belonged to him--belonged, because of his fitness
to carry them. Charlie Tuck and Iron Skull both had done what they could
to make him see, but wrapped in his futile dreams he had refused to
look, and, he told himself, long before he had left Exham, his father
had tried to set him on the right path but he always had put off the
quest on which his father had sent him, always thrust it over into
tomorrow when today was waiting for his start.

The very peak of his anger was reached when it suddenly came home to Jim
that he had failed his father, had proved renegade to old Exham.

Three months! A cool dismissal after over eight years of his heart's
blood had been given to the Service! Jim groaned, then sat erect.

"Serves you right, you dreaming fool! Nobody to blame but yourself!
Three months! And in that time the farmers will elect Fleckenstein to
Congress and the open fight