An elderly Senator had risen and had addressed the Hearing. "I was one of the fathers of the Reclamation Act. One of the fundamental ideas of the Act was that it was not governmental charity but that every farmer whose arid acres were watered would be willing to pay for it. I see but one thing in all these protests against the Service and that is the attempt to repudiate the debt incurred by the farmers to the Service. And the attempt to repudiate is most bitter with the very men who pleaded most loudly with the Government to irrigate their land and who voluntarily pledged themselves to pay back during an easy period of years the cost of the Projects. If it is a fact that this tainted idea of Repudiation is creeping among the land owners on the Projects, I warn you all that I shall use all my influence to have the Reclamation Act repealed."
As the old Senator had finished half the men in the room had risen to their feet, angrily denying any thought of repudiation.
Now, after tapping his desk thoughtfully, the Secretary looked at Jim.
"Mr. Manning, please take the stand."
Jim unfolded his long legs and strode up beside the Secretary's desk. He stood there struggling for words that would not come. For five days he had sat thinking of the three Projects that he knew. He recalled Charlie Tuck and the two other engineers who had laid down their lives for the dams. He pictured again the drowned and mangled workmen at the cost of whose lives the Makon tunnel had been driven. A slow, bitter anger had risen in him against Freet. It seemed to Jim a fearful thing that one crooked man could taint such faithfulness and sacrifice as he had known, could blind intelligent men to the marvel of engineering work that marked the progress of the Reclamation Service through the arid country. But when Jim's words came, they were futile.
"I don't know," he said in his father's casual drawl, "that I have anything to say to the specific charges against me. The Director has covered the ground better than I can. I have the feeling that if the actual work we have done out west, the actual acreage we have brought to profitable bearing won't speak to you people who have seen it, nothing else will. The flood season is coming on, Mr. Secretary. I would suggest that you send either me or my successor out to my dam."
The Secretary's face was quite as inscrutable as Jim's. "Mr. Manning, why do you put so much money into roads?"
Jim's eyes fired a little. "I believe that one of the functions of government is to build good roads. Actually, the heavy freightage that must pass over these roads makes it essential that they be first class. A cheap road would be expensive in time and breakage."
"How about the accusations of mismanagement?"
"I have made mistakes," replied Jim, "and some of them have been expensive ones in lives and money. Many of our engineering problems are entirely new and we have to solve them without precedent. The punishment for a bad guess in engineering is always sure and hard. One can make a bad political guess and escape."