The day of the election was a long one for Jim. He packed his trunk and his personal papers and Mrs. Flynn began to wrap the legs of the chairs in newspapers. Her tears threatened to reduce each wrapping to pulp before she completed it. In the afternoon, Jim started for a last tour of the dam. He covered the work slowly, looking his last at the details over which he had toiled and dreamed so long. He walked slowly up from the lower town. The men who passed him glanced away as if they would not intrude on his trouble.
The work on the dam was going forward as though life and death depended on the amount accomplished by this particular shift. Jim was inexpressibly touched by this display of the men's good will, but he could think of no way to show his feeling.
Just at sunset he climbed the Elephant's back. But he was not to have this last call alone. Old Suma-theek was sitting on the edge of the crater, his fine face turned hawklike toward the distance. Jim nodded to his friend, then sat down in his favorite spot where, far across the canyon, he could see the flag, rippling before the office.
After a time, the old Indian came over to sit beside him. He followed Jim's gaze and said softly:
"That flag it heap pretty but wherever Injun see it he see sorrow and death for Injun."
Jim answered slowly: "Perhaps we're being paid for what we've done to you, Suma-theek. The white tribe that made the flag is going, just as we have made you go. The flag will always look the same, but the dream it was made to tell will go."
"Who sabez the way of the Great Spirit? He make you go. He make Injun go. He make nigger and Chinamans stay. Perhaps they right, you and Injun wrong. Who sabez?"
"I'd like to have finished my dam," Jim muttered. "Somehow we are inadequate. I woke up too late." And suddenly a deeper significance came to him of Pen's verse—
"Too late for love, too late for joy;
Too late! Too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate——"
"When you old like Suma-theek," said the Indian, "you sabez then nothing matter except man make his tribe live. Have children or die! That the Great Spirit's law for tribes."