The work in the foundation was going on but not on the steel structure. No one heeded Jim. He reached the 18th floor, where there was a narrow temporary flooring. Jim sat down on a coil of rope. The boy was badly shaken.
No one, unless for the first time tonight, Mr. Dennis, realized how hard a nerve shock Jim had had in seeing his father killed. He had kept from his mother the horror of the nights that followed the tragedy. She did not know that periodically, even now, he dreamed the August fields and the dying men and the bloody derrick over again. She did not know what utter courage it had taken to join the derrick gang, not for fear for his own safety, but because of the dread association in his own mind.
At first, the sense of height made Jim quiver. To master this he fixed his mind on the details of structure underneath. Line on line the delicate tracery of steel waiting for its concrete sheathing was silhouetted below him. The night wind rushed past and he braced himself automatically, noting at the same time how the vibration of the steel cobweb was like a marvelous faint tune. The wonder of conception and workmanship caught the boy's imagination.
"That's what I'll do," he said aloud. "I'll build steel buildings like this. In college, that's what I'll study, reinforced concrete building. I've got to find a profession that'll give me a bigger chance than poor Dad had, so I can marry young and have lots and gob-lots of kids."
The wind increased and Jim slid off the coil of rope and lay flat on his back, looking up at the sky. It was full of stars and scudding clouds. Jim missed the sky in New York. He lay staring, sailing with the clouds while his boyish heart glowed with the stars.
"I'm not in New York," he thought. "I'm—I'm out in the desert country. There isn't any noise. There aren't any people. I'm an engineer and I'm building a bridge across a canyon where no one but the birds have ever crossed before. I'm making a place for people to come after me. I'm discovering new land for them and fixing it so they can come."
For half an hour Jim lay and dreamed. He often had wondered what he was going to be as a man. He had planned to be many things, from a milkman to an Indian fighter. But since his father's death and indeed for some time before, his mind had taken a bent suggested by Mr. Manning's melancholy. What was the matter with Exham and the Mannings? Why had his father failed? What could he do to make up for the failure? These thoughts had colored the boy's dreams. No one can measure the importance to a child of taking his air castles away from him. Tragedy scars a child permanently. Grown people often forget a heavy loss.
But tonight, inspired by the wonder of the building and the heavens, Jim's mind slipped its leashings and took its racial bent. Suddenly he was a maker of trails, a builder in the wilderness. He completed the bridge and then sat up with an articulate, "Gee whiz! I know what I'm going to be!"
It seemed a matter of tremendous importance to the boy. He sat with clenched fists and burning cheeks, sensing for the first time one of the highest types of joy that comes to human beings, that of finding one's predilection in the work by which one earns one's daily bread. The sense of clean-cut aim to his life was like balm and tonic to the boy's nerves. Something deeper than a New York or a New England influence was speaking in Jim now. For the first time, his Anglo-Saxon race, his race of empire builders, was finding its voice in him.