His first impulse was to take the letter over to Pen. Then he smiled wryly. He must not take all his troubles to her or she would get no relief from the burdening that Sara put upon her. So he brooded over the letter until supper time when he went with Henderson down to the lower mess. Jim ate with the lower mess frequently. It was almost the only way he had now of keeping in touch personally with his workmen. After supper and a pipe in the steward's room Jim climbed the long road to the dam. The road hung high above the dam site. The mountains and the bulk of the Elephant were black in the shadowy regions beyond the arc lights. Black and purple and silver below lay the mighty section of concrete, with black specks of workmen moving back and forth on it, pygmies aiding in the birth of a Colossus. The night sky was dim and remote here. Despite the roar of the cableways, the whistles of foremen, the rushing to and fro of workmen, the flicker of electric lights, one could not lose the sense of the project's isolation. One knew that the desert was pressing in on every side. One knew that old Jezebel, having crossed endless wastes, having fed on loneliness, whispered threats of trouble to the narrow flume that for a moment throttled her. One knew that the Elephant never for a moment lost his sardonic sense of the impermanence of human effort. When Jim reached his house, he found old Suma-theek camped on the doorstep. "What is it, Suma-theek?" asked Jim. "Old Suma-theek, he want make talk with you," replied the Indian. Jim nodded. "I'd like to talk with you, Suma-theek. Wait till I get enough tobacco for us both and we'll go up on the Elephant's back, eh?" Suma-theek grunted. The two reached the Elephant's top without conversation and sat for perhaps half an hour, smoking and mute. This was quite an ordinary procedure with them. Finally Suma-theek said, "Why you make 'em this dam?" "So that corn and cattle and horses will increase in the valley," replied Jim. The Indian grunted. "Much talk! Why _you_ make 'em?" "It's my job; the kind of work I like." "What use?" insisted Suma-theek. "People down in valley they much swear at you. Big Sheriff at Washington, he much swear at you. You much lonely. Much sad. Why you stay? What use? Much old Suma-theek wonder at that. Why old Iron Skull work on this dam? Why you, so young, so strong, no have wife, no have child, marry dam instead? You tell old Suma-theek why." Jim had learned on the Makon that while war and hunting might have been an Indian's business in life, his avocation was philosophizing. He had learned that many a pauperized and decrepit old Indian, warming his back in the sun, despised of the whites, held locked in his marvelous mind treasures of philosophy, of comment on life and living, Indian and white, that the world can ill afford to lose, yet never will know.