Henderson snorted: "I wish he was fat. I'd take him to ride in Bill Evans' machine. But, gee! he's so thin he'd stick in the seat like a sliver!"
Henderson had devoted himself to the entertainment of the visitors. He had organized a picnic to a far canyon where the "officers" and their wives offered the committee a wonderful camp supper, by a camp fire that lighted the desert for miles. He had induced the Mexicans in the lower camp to give one of their religious plays for the second night's entertainment. The moving picture hall was turned into a theater and the play, in queer Spanish, a strange mixture of miracle-play and buffoonery, delighted the hombres and astounded the whites. But the consummation of Henderson's art as an entertainment provider was to be the Mask Ball. This was to take place after the hearing at Cabillo was finished.
Jim gave all his time to the committee. He turned the office and its force over to them; gave them the freedom of the account books and the safe. Let them rummage the warehouse and its system. Explained his engineering mistakes to them. Went over and over the details of the flood, of the weathering abutments, of the concrete that did not come up to specifications, of the new system of concrete mixture that he and his cement engineer were evolving and which Jim believed in so ardently that he was using it on the dam. But in regard to Freet or to any graft in the Service he was persistently silent.
The Hearing was like and yet unlike the May hearing. It lacked the dignity of the first occasion and the Vermont member who presided was not the calm, inscrutable judge that the Secretary had been. The hall in Cabillo was packed with farmers and their wives and sweethearts and with Del Norte citizens.
The main effort of the speakers at the Hearing was to prove the inordinate extravagance and incompetence of Jim and his associates. For three days Jim answered questions quietly and as briefly as possible. But he was not able to compass the cool indifference that had kept him staring out the window of the Interior Department. There was growing within him an overwhelming desire to protest. He saw that, however fair the other members of the committee were inclined to be, their certainty of Freet's dishonesty, coupled with the fact that he was a pupil of Freet's, would be used by the restless vindictiveness of the Vermont member without doubt, to bring about his dismissal.
He felt an increasing desire to make a last stand against the wall of the nation's indifference, to make the people of the Project and the people of the world understand his viewpoint. But words failed him until the last day of the Hearing.
On this last day, Sara and Pen attended the hearing, as guests of Fleckenstein, who had sent his great touring car for them. Jim nodded to them across the room but made no attempt to speak to them. It was nearing five o'clock when Fleckenstein closed his testimony.
"The Reclamation Service," he said, "is like every other department of the government. It is a refuge for the incompetent whose one skill is in grafting. The cost of this dam has jumped over the estimates by hundreds of thousands. Forty dollars an acre is what the farmers of this project must pay the government instead of the estimated thirty. I do not lay the whole blame on Mr. Manning, even though he is Freet's pupil. Part of it is due to the criminal ignorance and weakness of Mr. Manning's predecessor. We farmers——"
"Stop!" thundered Jim. He jumped to his feet. Fleckenstein gasped. Jim threw back his hair. His gray eyes were black. His thin brown face was flushed. Under his khaki riding suit his long steel muscles were tense.
"My predecessor was Frederick Watts. I grew to know him well. He was a master mind in his profession, but he was gentle and sensitive and, like many men who have lived long in the open, silent. About the time that he started to build this dam the money interests in this country decided that the nation was getting too much water power control. They decided that the best way to stop the nation's growth in this direction was to discredit the Service. Frederick Watts was one of their first targets. By means too subtle for me to understand, they set machinery going in this vicinity by which every step that Watts took was made a kick against him.