It must be wide enough to safeguard life. It must be as steep as the mules could manage in order to save distance and cost. It must be strong enough to carry enormous weights. Its curves must accommodate teams of twenty mules, hauling the great length of beam and pipe needed in the work below. And it must be a road that would endure with little expense of up-keep as long as the dam below would endure.
It was not a complicated engineering feat. But it was Jim's first responsible job. It was his first experience in handling men and a camp. Moses, showing the children of Israel the way across the desert, could have felt no more pride or responsibility than did Jim breaking the trail to the Makon.
The crevice road was blasted from the granite. It was widened to hang like a shelf over sickening depths or built up with concrete to withstand the wash from some menacing gorge, or tilted to cling desperately to a blank wall that offered not even claw hold for the eagles. And always it must drop with a grade that took no account of return freightage.
"We'll wear the machinery out and leave it at the bottom," Freet had said. "Even a 25 per cent. grade will do when necessary. Hustle it along, Manning. I'll be ready to leave the Green Mountain by the time you are ready for me at the Makon."
And Jim hustled. But labor was hard to get. The country was inaccessible and extraordinarily lonely. There was no place for women or children until the camp in the canyon should be built, so it was a crowd of wandering "rough-necks" who built the road. A few were friends of Iron Skull, who followed him from job to job. The rest were tramp workmen, men who had toiled all over the world. They were not hoboes. They were journeyman laborers. They were world workers who had lent willing and calloused hands to a thousand great labors in a thousand places.
They came and went like shifting sands. Jim never knew whether he would wake to find ten or a hundred men in the camp. He tried for a long time to solve the problem. Iron Skull considered it unsolvable. He had a low opinion of the rough-neck. At last he disappeared for a couple of weeks and returned with twenty-five Indians. They were Apaches and Mohaves under the leadership of a fine austere old Indian whom Iron Skull introduced to Jim as "Suma-theek."
"His name means 'I don't know,'" explained Williams. "It's the extent of his conversation with the average white who considers an Injun sort of a cross between a cigar sign and a nigger. Him and I did scout service together for ten years in Geronimo's time. He's my 'blood' brother, which means we've saved each other's lives. He knows more than any two whites. Color don't make no difference in wisdom, Boss Still, and I guess the Big Boss up above must have some quiet laughs at the airs the whites give themselves."
This was Jim's introduction to another friendship, though it was slow in growth. But before the Makon was finished Jim, in the long evening pipes he smoked under the stars with Suma-theek, learned the truth of Iron Skull's statements as to the Indian's wisdom.
The evening of the day the Indians arrived, a short, heavy man came to Jim's tent. He was a foreman and a good one. Jim liked his voice, which had a peculiar, tender quality, astonishing in so rough a man.