Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/155



HEN Father Mesaseba behaves himself and lies contentedly in bed, he rarely sees a. These long and tortuous dikes keep their most respectful distance on either side, yet guard his every twisting and escort his overflows to the Gulf of Mexico. Ages ago—Mesaseba is long, but his memory is longer—ages ago he roamed unfettered from Cairo to the Gulf, until men began erecting their puny ridges. Again and again had he torn them down, but next year found the levees rebuilt, stronger and higher. Not until the spring of 1922 did Mesaseba summon all his power to sweep away these irritating barriers. Up every branch of his many-forked streams went the mobilizing call. “Rise! Rise!” he commanded Sinnemahoning Creek in Pennsylvania. “We'll be ready,” answered Rocky Mountain rivulets, and ice-locked waters of Alberta. Barely in time to resist their simultaneous assault young Furlong B. Grimshaw, Jr., had just completed his embankment across the marshy lands at Boggy Bayou.

At Boggy Bayou there are two lines of defense. The old levee angles outward in front of the new, like the apex of a huge sprawling A, the point of which was so persistently attacked by river currents that engineers decided to abandon it for a stronger bulwark along the cross line of the A. Grimshaw's construction camp crouched behind this cross line—a precise little row of canvas houses with gabled roofs, toy habitations such as children cut from cardboard and set up in a street of make-believe.

The long Southern dusk had scarcely begun to deepen, yet Grimshaw's quarters already showed their light. Beside it, with brown bare arm lying across his desk, the engineer sat in an attitude of utter relaxation. He had finished his big job. The last few tons of dirt had been thrown in. The last gap was closed and leveled up. He was done.

Two years before, when this immaculate city lad had first shown up to work on the levees, it was whispered that he claimed to be a son of the Furlong B. Grimshaw, called “Long Grim” on Wall Street. “Yes,” the upstanding youngster had replied. “That's my father.” Then he said nothing more about it. Neither did anybody else. Fight-