The Vision of Elijah Berl

Uncle Sid asked a few questions, then they began to climb the steep mountains. They passed loaded pack-mules going up and empty trains coming down the trail. In places the trail was a narrow shelf along the face of a nearly perpendicular cliff. Below them ran the river in its narrow gorge, above them gleamed a slender strip of sky cut into ragged edges by towering cliffs. Just as the trail climbed to the edge of the cañon it seemed to end against a smooth wall of granite. A sharp turn to the left, and Uncle Sid could not repress an exclamation of awed delight at the scene before him. The trail led out upon a broad terrace. Two hundred feet below, a treeless valley wound out and in among rounded tree-clad domes of granite. Here and there, on either side, stately spires of naked rock thrust up into the sky, the bare brown of their sides striped with bands of dazzling white.

The dam was to be situated between two granite bluffs at the head of the cañon. The masonry gatehouses were already the height of the proposed dam. The gates themselves were closed and the valley was a great lake. The sight was great, awe-inspiring yet peaceful.

"What do you think of it?"

"Who thought of this?" Uncle Sid glanced at Ralph with shrewd eyes.

"It thought itself." Ralph answered evasively. "We are really only doing here what nature herself did and then undid. You can see that this valley was once a great natural lake. The Sangre de Cristo cut through the cañon and drained the lake. Now we are putting in a dam and restoring it."

Uncle Sid did not take his eyes from Ralph's impassive face.

"Young man, there's a lot o' dust around here, but you can't blow it into my eyes, not that way. You can't do it by keepin' still either, any more than 'Lige Berl can by talkin' about it."

Ralph laughed quietly.

"Oh, well, that doesn't matter. We're going to get what we're after and that's the main thing. Let's go down to camp."

They rode down the winding trail that led from the upper terrace. The remainder of the afternoon was spent in an inspection of the work. After supper, their pipes lighted, they sat looking out over the valley.

"Engineering is a great business," Uncle Sid observed meditatively.

"Yes," Ralph assented, "so is anything, if you push it."

"I guess not." Uncle Sid chuckled. "I ran away to sea when I was twelve years old. My education was got dancin' at a rope's end when the captain's mess didn't sit well on his stomach." Uncle Sid paused, again chuckled. "A rope's end makes a boy mighty observin.'"

"You didn't learn navigation that way, did you?"

"No-o." Uncle Sid pulled meditatively at his pipe. "A rope's end is also mighty stimulatin' to the imagination. It struck me that I had got all I needed. At the same time, I saw old sailors with bald heads an' gray whiskers, still a dancin'. The only difference I could see between them an' the captain was that the captain could squint at the sun through a spyglass with a half moon hitched to it, an' tell the man at the wheel to hold the ship's head nor'-nor'east."

"Then what?"

"Then? Oh, I just got me a nautical almanac and learned to squint too. The first thing I knew I was mate, then first officer an' by squintin' long enough I squinted myself on the quarter deck."

Ralph waited a moment, then spoke laughingly.

"I guess my rope's end wasn't so very different from yours, only I had mine in college."

"You didn't run away to college, did you?"

"No, I didn't; but I had a gad flying around my heels, just the same. After I got out of college, I was engaged as assistant to a famous hydraulic engineer. He sent me into the mountains to make a preliminary survey. There weren't many men as big as I was when I strapped a level and a transit to my mule's back and started off. I was going to show that old bomb-shell that he'd got a man worth having, and I wasn't going to stop with him either." Ralph paused to give way to a reminiscent chuckle.

"Well! I wish you could have seen those mountains as I saw them. Talk about taking the starch out of a man! Why, Captain, you could have wadded me up and drawn me through a finger ring like one of those Arabian Nights shawls. There were mountains and mountains, and gulches and gulches, precipices and cañons, and rushing, yelping torrents that I was to lead over them, or through them or around them, and the old man hadn't given me a suggestion that I could hang a guess on. The more I thought, the more scared I got. I put up a stiff front, or tried to before my men, but all the time I imagined them laughing at me, or cursing me for making them wade that strip of ice water, or break their shins dragging a chain over the slippery rocks. I was thankful when the sun went down, but that didn't last long. Even in my sleep I saw those mountains jiggering and grinning. They moved into places that I had picked out for my line, and away from them when I had abandoned it. I stood it for a week, then I poured out my woes in a long letter to my chief and sent it out by a special messenger."

Ralph again paused. The old man waited for a moment.

"Well?" he asked.

"In a week my answer came. Just five sentences. 'You are going at your work the wrong way. You are asking it questions. By and by your work will ask you questions. Then you're getting on. Keep at it.'"

"And the line?" persisted Uncle Sid.

"Oh, the line? I made the profile and sent it in. My old man came up and looked it over. He was in a hurry as usual. 'You have laid out the line; now go ahead and build it', then he was off."

"You built it?"

"Yes, after a fashion. It helped to wash the gold out of the Yuba river sand till the anti-debris laws headed it off. Then I came down here."

"How did you happen to hit in with Elijah Berl?"

"He was the only man in Southern California who was doing anything that was worth while."

"Yes, it is worth while." Uncle Sid brought down his open hand upon his knee with a resounding slap. Then he laid his hand on Ralph's with emphasizing beats, looking earnestly into his face. "Don't you let go, either, or it won't be worth shucks."

Ralph returned the Captain's earnest look.

"I'll hang on," he answered briefly.

"That's right. You stick to it. You an' Helen Lonsdale are goin' to make this thing go, if it's a goin'."

"I think I appreciate what Helen is doing as well as what Elijah has done; she's the life of the whole business."

Uncle Sid appeared to take up Ralph's words. Then he changed his mind, speaking reminiscently.

"I've known 'Lige Berl ever since he was so high an' before." Uncle Sid measured Elijah's former height with his hand. "He's a queer mixture. He was always a mixture of ideas an' prayer meetin's an' the flesh pots of Egypt. You can't no more help commendin' his prayer-meetin' moods than you can help cussin' his lickin' the flesh pots. He ain't changed a bit out here. He'll just look at you with his eyes wide open an' you'll feel like a man that's just got religion an' you won't suspect that he's picked your pocket till you put your hand in to pay your grocer's bill."

Ralph smiled grimly.

"There's not much profit in talking about this. But – well, you know 'Lige all right."

"Wait a minute, I ain't through." Uncle Sid's eyes were fixed on Ralph like a steel needle pointing to a magnet. "Money's the root of evil, but there's a power of good in the roots if they're used right. I've got quite a bunch of the roots handy. You're goin' to need them, an' young man, they're at your call when you say so, an' if I ain't mistaken, it won't be long either."

"Thank you." Ralph answered briefly. "I'll remember."

The Captain did not drop his eyes, but they softened.

"You've known Helen Lonsdale for a long time, haven't you?"

"Ever since she was a little girl."

"An' you're a friend of hers?"

"Yes." Ralph did not say how much more than a friend she was coming to be to him.

Uncle Sid felt the repellent air of Ralph's changed mood more than his rather curt reply, but he held doggedly to his point.

"Smallpox is a mighty mean disease an' you don't always know that you're a catchin' it till it breaks out."

Ralph rose to his feet. Uncle Sid was breaking ground that he had thought about, but which he had not yet brought himself to touch.