"About $500,000, I think."
"What was it, say the year before the Reclamation Service went in there?"
"Perhaps $100,000."
"We are to believe, then, that some people have found the Service useful?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Secretary, there are a whole lot of contented farmers up there who are too busy with their bumper crops to come to Washington, even if they wanted to."
The real estate man sat down and the Secretary called on the Chairman of the Congressional investigating committee to make a brief summary of his charges.
The Chairman said, succinctly: "I charge the Service with graft, gross extravagance and inefficiency. I call on you to remove the Director and four of his engineers, including Arthur Freet and James Manning, who are present."
"Of what specific things do you accuse Mr. Manning?" asked the Secretary, with a glance at Jim's impassive face.
"His Project is full of mistakes, some of them small, that, nevertheless, aggregate big and show the trend of the Service. Up on the Makon he made a road at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars that only the Service used. He's put a thousand dollars into telephone booths where two hundred would have been ample. Some of the canal concrete work has had to be dynamited out and done over and over again. The farmer pays for all this. Manning refuses to take any advice from the farmers on the Project, men who were irrigating before he was born. His every idea seems hostile to the farmer, whose land the farmer himself is paying him to irrigate. Manning was trained by Freet, Mr. Secretary."
The Secretary tapped his desk softly for several moments, as if turning over in his mind the opposing evidence brought out during the several days of the Hearing. Jim had not been called on but Arthur Freet and two other Project engineers had spent an entire day on the stand, quizzed unmercifully by everyone in the room. They had disclaimed every accusation. The Director of the Service, a quiet man of marvelous executive ability, had made a bitter return attack on the Congressional Committee, the farmers, the real estate men and the lawyers, accusing them of being the conscious or unconscious tools of the Water Power Trust, whose object was to destroy the Service.