ing off the Mississippi River does not encourage idle gossip. For a while the other men wondered why this heir to millions should go splashing around in mud a little deeper than they, who had their bread to earn. But Grimshaw did splash around, most effectively, and had built a thumping good levee.
Against every difficulty and obstacle there stood his embankment. He could look through the window and see it, cleaving the forest like the swath of some gigantic reaper. Grimshaw's work was done. All his energy had gone into the task. With listless hand he now stirred the neglected personal correspondence which lay before him. A metropolitan newspaper fell open, and he jerked himself upright as a girl's familiar face smiled at him from the photogravure section.
“Jessica!” he exclaimed. “What's her picture doing in the papers? Oh, yes. Bridesmaid at Alicia's wedding.”
A queer sense of aloofness took possession of the expatriated New Yorker as he scanned the pictured bridesmaids who surrounded a portrait of the groom, His Grace the Duke of Druidsholm. All of that seemed so far, so very very far away. Vaguely he remembered. Every recent letter from Jess had sizzled with half-read details of this international function at which Mr. Furlong B. Grimshaw, Jr., was scheduled to exhibit himself as a groomsman. Groomsman at a duke's wedding! He could remember the time when that might seem the proper end and aim of human ambition. But now his thoughts were in the dirt, of the earth earthy. He dreamed of nothing but levees, and beating the Mississippi River. So he sat smiling and shaking his head when the foreman's excited voice called out:
“Cap'n Grimshaw! Oh, cap! Oh, cap!”
“What is it, Mr. Barlow?” Furlong sprang up to answer an oldish-looking man who thrust in his bristled beard at the doorway.
“Front levee's caving! At the p'int!”
Together they went bounding up the steep embankment and ran toward the front. Furlong outstripping the even longer-legged Barlow. At the very apex of the A, where ravenous currents dug and tore, they found that one great section of dirt had already sloughed off, while a larger slice hung like a precarious avalanche, ready to slide into the river.
“This levee's gone, cap!” Old Barlow spoke abruptly. “Better cut her before the overflow gets any higher.”
Of course their outer skirmish line could be held for a few days longer, but when it eventually gave way the floods might have risen ten or fifteen feet, and the resulting crevasse become a resistless torrent. As Barlow suggested, it were wiser to let the water in more slowly. Furlong's every muscle tightened at the inevitable test, for Mesaseba would now rage against the fresh dirt of his untried levee.
“Very good, Mr. Barlow,” he decided. “We'll cut this outer lime right here. I'll go and call out the men. Mr. Barlow, we are going to have a hard fight.”
“I know it, sir.”
The official steamer of the Mississippi River Commission plowed southward through the turbid waters, bearing a committee of senators and congressmen to inspect the levee system. On its forward deck Miss Jessica Faison glanced up languidly from her magazine, quite unimpressed by the terrible grandeur of Father Mesaseba at flood height, or by the fact that a presidential possibility was bending over her chair.
“Frankly, senator,” she admitted, “I'm bored stiff.”
Yet Jessica looked so provokingly pretty, and her father, old Joshua K. Faison, was so influential in party councils, that Senator Rutherford showed no annoyance.
“Suppose we play bridge,” he suggested.
“I'm fed up on bridge.” The girl shrugged her ennuied shoulders. “I don't want to do anything except to catch Furlong before he has time to get mulish, and rush him back to New York.”
“Only a few more hours, Jessica; a few more hours. It's all arranged.” The senator's butter-smooth voice tried to pacify her. “We reach Boggy Bayou at noon. I have already had Colonel Clancy telephone Furlong to meet our boat. We will take him on board, and the three of us will catch a fast train out of New Orleans on Saturday night.”
“Saturday night? No, siree! Furlong must reach New York in full time for the wedding.” From between the pages of her magazine, Miss Faison produced an A. &
