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 for repudiation will be on!"
Jim groaned again. Then abruptly he jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and looked at the little picture of Pen on the wall.