“Hog-wild!” exclaimed Hardin when he saw the levee for the first time. “Gone hog-wild.” To him, the growing ridge of fine earth, like a soft heap of pulverized chocolate, was an absurd proof of misdirected energy. He walked down with Silent after dark to the gorge the river had cut on its last wild debauch, and stood on the newly upturned mound of earth. There was no water running now in the flood channel; it was a deep dry scar.
“It would be a good idea if it were necessary. It can do no harm.”
“Do no harm, and the gate hung up! He makes me sick. We’ve had all the floods coming to us this twenty years. He’s locking the barn after the horse is gone.”
The calm beauty of that desert night was wasted on the man whose life, he told himself, had been dishonored. He did not smell the pungent breath, the damp moist sweetness of the newly turned earth; did not see the star-pricked canopy spreading out toward illimitable horizons. The moon trailed its cold pale light across the sky, but Hardin could not see. His view was a world of his making, a country peopled by his energy, the people who had turned him down. The eyes that were looking at the levee were no longer seeing another man’s folly; they were visualizing his head-gate, the gate that meant safety to the valley, the gate he was not allowed to complete. He was living over again, step by step, the chain of events that led to this exasperating deadlock; himself, incapacitated, helpless, seeing the thing which should be done, powerless to do it. The men who might win, petty enough to let the wish to put him in the wrong override the big opportunity to save the valley! He wondered again why he had not the sense to get out.
“And kick the whole bucket over,” he grumbled. “I would, too, if I had the sense I was born with. Get out, and begin over again somewhere. Not stay for more kicks. They’d find they’d be wanting me back again. I will get out. I’ll not stay a month longer.”
“Rickard’s gone hog-wild,” he told his family the next morning. “Building a levee between the towns! The man’s off his head.”
“There really isn’t any danger?” Gerty’s anxiety made the deep blue eyes look black.
Innes looked up for Tom’s answer. His face was ugly with passion.
“Danger! It’s a bluff, a big show of activity here, because he’s buffaloed; he doesn’t know how to tackle the job out there.”
It had begun to look that way to more than one. It was talked over at Coulter’s store; in the outer office of the D. R. Company where the engineers foregathered; among the chair-tilters who idled in front of the Desert Hotel. “The man does not know how to tackle his job!” A levee, and the gate held up! What protection to the towns would be that toy levee if the river should return on one of its spectacular sprees? A levee, and the intake itself not guarded? He was whispered of as an incompetent; one of Marshall’s clerks. He was given a short time to blow himself out. A bookman, a theorist.