Clothed and fed, Jim told his story, a little brokenly. The group of men who listened were used to hardy deeds. They had seen Nature demand her toll of death again and again in the wilderness. And yet as they sat looking at the young fellow with his gray eyes shocked and grief-stricken and perceived his boyish idolatry of Charlie Tuck, something like moisture shone in their eyes. They shook hands with Jim when he had finished, silently for the most part, though the rancher said:
"You're the only man ever came through there alive. They had to bury Tuck right off. They'd ought to build a monument for him. Where is his folks?"
"He had none," said Jim. "I want to put up his headstone for him, and I know just what lines are going to be put on the stone."
"They ought to be blamed good," said Dick.
"What are they?" asked the ranchman.
Jim sat for a moment looking down into the fearful depths where Charlie and he had lived a lifetime. Then he said:
"'Lift ye the stone or cleave the wood, to make a path more fair or flat,
Lo, it is black already, with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from Earth to Heaven, not as an altar to any creed,
But simple Service, simply given, to his own kind, in their common need.'"
And so Charlie Tuck crossed the Great Divide.
Jim stopped two days with the rancher and then went back to the Green Mountain dam. The story of the trip through the crevice had preceded him. The men of the Service were inured to the idea of the sacrifice of blood for the dams. There was little said, some silent handshakes given, and they ceased to haze Jim. He had become one of them.
The plans for the preliminary surveys of the Makon Project were begun at once. Jim remained at Green Mountain during the winter, serving his apprenticeship to the concrete works and the superintendent as Mr. Freet had planned. But in the spring he had his wish and was sent to lay out the road on the Makon project.