Jim grunted. Labor-getting continued to be a constant problem for all the valuable nucleus formed by the Park. Experts and the offscourings of the earth drifted to the great government camp and Jim and all his assistants exercised a constant and rigid sifting process. He did not talk much to his new help. His eyes were keen to catch the first glimpse of the river. The men caught his strain and none of them spoke again. Cottontails quivered out of sight as the automobile rushed on. An occasional coyote, silhouetted against the sky, disappeared as if by magic. Swooping buzzards hung motionless to see, then swept on into the heavens. Jim was taking right-angled curves at twenty-five miles an hour. The hoboes clung to the machine wild-eyed and speechless. Up and up, round a twisted peak and then, far below, the river. "She's up! The old Jezebel!" said Jim. The machine slid down the mountainside to the government bridge. The brown water was just beginning to wash over the floor. Across the bridge, Jim stopped the machine before a long gray adobe building. It topped a wide street of tents. Jim scrawled a line on an old envelope and gave it to one of the hoboes. "Take that to the steward. Eat all you can hold and report wherever the steward sends you." Then he went on. Regardless of turn or precipice the road rose in a steady grade from the lower camp where the workmen lived, a half mile to the dam site. Jim whirled to the foot of the cable way towers and jumped out of the machine. The dam site lay in a valley, a quarter of a mile wide, between two mountains. Above the dam lay the Elephant. A great cofferdam built near the Elephant's base diverted the river into a concrete flume that ran along the foot of one of the mountains. The river bed, bared by the diverting of the stream, was filled with machinery. An excavation sixty feet below the river bottom and two hundred feet wide was almost completed. Indeed, on the side next the flume there already rose above the river bed a mighty square of concrete, a third the width of the river. Jim had begun the actual erection of the dam. The two mountains were topped by huge towers, supporting cables that swung above the dam site. The cables carried anything from a man to a locomotive, from the "grab buckets" that bit two tons of sand at a mouthful from the excavation, to a skid bearing a motion picture outfit. Work was going on as usual when Jim arrived. The cable ways sang and shrieked. The concrete mixer roared. Donkey engines puffed and dinkees squealed. Jim dashed into a telephone booth and called up the office. "This is Mr. Manning. Where is Williams?"