Jim drank his tea, staring the while at the envelope that lay on the tray. Then he opened the envelope and read:
"Dear Still: Don't say that I must go away. I want to stay and help you. I promised Iron Skull that I would. I don't want to add one breath to your pain—nor to my own!—and yet I feel as if we ought to forget ourselves and think only of the dam. No one knows you as I do, dear Jim. Iron Skull felt, and so do I, that somehow, sometime I can help you to be the big man you were meant to be. I have grown to feel that it was for that purpose I have lived through the last eight years. If it will not hurt you too much, please, Jim, let me stay.
Penelope."
Jim answered the note immediately.
"Dearest Pen: Give me a day or so to get braced and we will go on as before. Stand by me, Pen. I need you, dear.
Jim."
But it was nearly two weeks before Jim talked with Pen again. For a number of days he devoted himself day and night to the preparations for starting the second section of the dam in the completed excavation. Then formal notice came that the Congressional committee would arrive at the dam nearly a week before it had been expected and Jim was overwhelmed in preparations for its reception. The first three days of the investigation were to be devoted to inspecting the dam. Jim brought the committee to the dam from the station himself.
There were five men on the committee, two New Englanders and three far westerners. They were the same five men who a year before had investigated Arthur Freet's projects and they were baffled and suspicious. And Jim's silence irritated them far more than Arthur Freet's loquacity. The members from the West and from Massachusetts were, in spite of this, open-minded, eager for information and interested in the actual work of the dam building. The member from Vermont pursued Jim with the bitterness of a fanatic.
"A Puritan hang-over is what ails him," Jim remarked to Henderson. "He would burn a woman for a witch for having three moles on her back, as easy as—as he'd fire me!"