"Yes," replied Pen.
"Well then, it's time I took notice of things on this project and you can help me by watching things up there. I won't take time to say any more right now. Oscar will be storming in here in a minute."
When they reached the dam that afternoon, Oscar and Fleckenstein called on Sara. Pen found that they would talk nothing but land values while she was in the tent, so she wandered out in search of Jim.
She found him at the dam site. He was talking to a heavy-set, red-faced man in khaki. He was considerably older than Jim, who introduced the stranger as Mr. Jack Henderson.
"Henderson will take Iron Skull's place," explained Jim. "You must remember how I wrote home of him and how he helped me save my reputation as a road-builder on the Makon. He's been down on the diversion dam."
Penelope held out her hand. "I shall never cease regretting that I didn't get to see the Makon," she said.
Henderson's gray eyes lost their keenness for a moment. "It was hard for me to come up knowing I was to take Iron Skull's job." Pen listened in surprise to his low, gentle voice. "You know, Boss Still Jim, if he'd had a better chance for a education he'd have made his mark. He was just naturally big. He could see all over and around a thing and what it had to do with things a hundred years back and a hundred years on. That's what I call being big. A good many fellows that lives a long time in the desert gets a little of that, but Iron Skull had it more than anyone I know. I wish he'd had a better chance. I can fill his job, Boss, as far as the day's work goes, but I can't give you the big look of things he could."
Henderson was standing with his hat off, and now he rumpled his gray hair and shook his head. Pen liked him at once.
Jim nodded. "I miss him. I always shall miss him. I often thought that if my father had come out to this country, he'd have grown to be like Iron Skull. And they are both gone."
"That's the way life acts," said Henderson. "It's always the man that ought to stay that goes. And there's never any explanation of how you're going to fill the gap. He's jerked out of your life and you will go lame the rest of your life for all you know. These here story books that try to show death has got a lot of logic about it are liars. There ain't any reason or sense about death. It just goes around, hit or miss, like a lizard snapping flies."