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THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
by
FRANCIS LYNDE
Illustrated by Arthur E. Becher
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York 1914
Copyright, 1914, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Published August, 1914
TO MY WIFE
[Illustration: "What would I do? A number of things." _Page 91_]
CONTENTS
I. THE HEPTADERM 1
II. J. WESLEY CROESUS 19
III. SANDS OF PACTOLUS 48
IV. A FIRE OF LITTLE STICKS 66
V. SYMPTOMATIC 79
VI. MIRAPOLIS 104
VII. THE SPEEDWAY 119
VIII. TABLE STAKES 130
IX. BEDLAM 145
X. EPOCHAL 151
XI. THE FEAST OF HURRAHS 178
XII. QUICKSANDS 196
XIII. FLOOD TIDE 208
XIV. THE ABYSS 232
XV. THE SETTING OF THE EBB 244
XVI. THE MAN ON THE BANK 263
XVII. THE CIRCEAN CUP 273
XVIII. LOVE'S CRUCIBLE 284
XIX. THE SUNSET GUN 301
XX. THE TERROR 322
ILLUSTRATIONS
"What would I do? A number of things" _Frontispiece_
Brouillard had to look twice before he could attempt
to classify her, and even then she baffled him 46
"It's all gone, little girl; it's all gone!" 242
Brouillard got between 342
The City of Numbered Days
I
The Heptaderm
It was not characteristic of Brouillard--the Brouillard Grislow knew
best--that he should suffer the purely technical talk of dams and
reservoirs, bed-rock anchorages, and the latest word in concrete
structural processes to languish and should drift into personal
reminiscences over their first evening camp-fire in the Niquoia.
Because the personalities were gratefully varying the monotonies, and
also because he had a jocose respect for the unusual, Grislow was
careful not to discourage the drift. There had been a benumbing surfeit
of the technical talk dating from the day and hour when the orders had
come from Washington giving Brouillard his step up and directing him to
advance with his squad of Reclamation-Service pioneers upon the new work
in the western Timanyonis. But, apart from this, the reminiscences had
an experimental value. Grislow's one unamiable leaning manifested
itself in a zest for cleverly turning the hidden facets of the human
polygon up to the light; and if the facets chose to turn themselves of
their own accord, as in Brouillard's case, why, so much the better.
"As you were saying?" he prompted, stretching himself luxuriously upon
the fragrant banking of freshly clipped spruce tips, with his feet to
the blaze and his hands locked under his head. He felt that Brouillard
was merely responding to the subtle influences of time, place, and
encompassments and took no shame for being an analytical rather than a
sympathetic listener. The hundred-odd men of the pioneer party, relaxing
after the day-long march over the mountains, were smoking, yarning, or
playing cards around the dozen or more camp-fires. The evening, with a
half-grown moon silvering the inverted bowl of a firmament which seemed
to shut down, lid-like, upon the mountain rim of the high-walled valley,
was witchingly enchanting; and, to add the final touch, there was
comradely isolation, Anson, Griffith, and Leshington, the three other
members of the engineering staff, having gone to burn candles in the
headquarters tent over blue-prints and field-notes.
"I was saying that the present-day world slant is sanely skeptical--as
it should be," Brouillard went on at the end of the thoughtful pause.
"Being modern and reasonably sophisticated, we can smile at the signs
and omens of the ages that had to get along without laboratories and
testing plants. Just the same, every man has his little atavistic
streak, if you can hit upon it. For example, you may throw flip-flaps
and call it rank superstition if you like, but I have never
been able to get rid of the notion that birthdays are like the
equinoxes--turning-points in the small, self-centred system which we
call life."
"Poodle-dogs!" snorted the one whose attitude was both jocose and
analytical, stuffing more of the spruce branches under his head to keep
the pipe ashes from falling into his eyes.
"I know; being my peculiar weakness instead of your own, it's tommy-rot
to you," Brouillard rejoined good-naturedly. "As I said a few minutes
ago, I am only burbling to hear the sound of my own voice. But the
bottoming fact remains. You give a screw twist to a child's mind, and if
the mind of the man doesn't exhibit the same helical curve----"
"Suppose you climb down out of the high-browed altitudes and give it a
plain, every-day name?" grumbled the staff authority on watersheds.
"It's casting pearls before swine, but you're a pretty good sort of
swine, Grizzy. If you'll promise to keep your feet out of the trough,
I'll tell you. Away back in the porringer period, in which we are all
like the pin-feathered dicky-birds, open-mouthed for anything anybody
may drop into us, some one fed me with the number seven."
"Succulent morsel!" chuckled Grislow. "Did it agree with you?"
Brouillard sat back from the fire and clasped his hands over his bent
knees. He was of a type rare enough to be noteworthy in a race which has
drawn so heavily upon the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic stocks for its build
and coloring: a well-knit figure of a man, rather under than over the
normal stature, but bulging athletically in the loose-fitting khaki of
the engineer; dark of skin, even where the sun had not burned its rich
mahogany into the olive, and owning a face which, with the upcurled
mustaches, the brooding black eyes, and the pure Gallic outline of brow
and jaw, might have served as a model for a Vierge study of a fighting
_franc-tireur_.
"I don't remember how early in the game the thing began," he resumed,
ignoring Grislow's joking interruption, "but away back in the dimmest
dawnings the number seven began to have a curious significance for me.
From my earliest recollections things have been constantly associating
themselves with seven or some multiple of it. You don't believe it, of
course; but it is true."
"Which means that you have been sitting up and taking notice when the
coincidences hit, and have forgotten the millions of times when they
didn't," scoffed the listener.
"Probably," was the ready admission. "We all do that. But there is one
set of 'coincidences,' as you call them, that can't be so easily turned
down. Back in the pin-feather time that I mentioned somebody handed me a
fact--the discovery of the physiologists about the waste and replacement
that goes on in the human organism, bringing around a complete cellular
change about once in every seven years. Are you asleep?"
"Not yet; go on," said the hydrographer.
"It was a long time ago, and I was only a little tad; but I surrounded
the idea and took it in literally, in the sense of a sudden and sort of
magical change coming at the end of each seven-year period and bound to
occur at those particular fixed times. The notion stuck to me like a
cockle-bur, and sometimes I wonder if it isn't still sticking."
"Bugs!" ranted Grislow, in good-natured ridicule, and Brouillard
laughed.
"That is what I say to myself, Murray, every time the fatal period rolls
around. And yet----"
"There isn't any 'and yet,'" cut in the scoffer derisively. "This is
merely your night for being batty. 'Fatal period'--suffering humanity!"
"No, hold on: let me tell you, Murray--I'd like to get it out of my
system if I can. Up to my seventh birthday I was a sickly child, puny
and only about half alive. I recollect, as if it were only yesterday,
how the neighbor women used to come in and condole with my mother,
ignoring me, of course, as if I hadn't any ears. I can remember old Aunt
Hetty Parsons saying, time and again: 'No, Mis' Brouillard; you'll never
raise that boy the longest day you live!'"
"I'm waiting for the 'and yet,'" put in Grislow, sitting up to relight
his pipe with a blazing splinter from the fire.
"It came--the change, I mean--when I was seven years old. That was the
year of our removal to Vincennes from the country village where I was
born. Since that time I haven't known what it means to be sick or even
ailing."
"Bully old change!" applauded Grislow. "Is that all?"
"No. What the second period spent on my body it took out of my mind. I
grew stouter and stronger every year and became more and more the
stupidest blockhead that ever thumbed a school-book. I simply couldn't
learn, Murray. My mother made excuses for me, as mothers will, but my
father was in despair. He was an educated man, and I can imagine that my
unconquerable doltishness went near to breaking his heart."
"You are safely over that stage of it now, at all events," said the
hydrographer in exaggerated sarcasm. "Any man who can stare into the
fire and think out fetching little imaginations like these you are
handing me----"
"Sometimes I wish they were only imaginings, Grizzy. But let me finish.
I was fourteen to a day when I squeezed through the final grammar grade;
think of it--fourteen years old and still with the women teachers! I
found out afterward that I got my dubiously given passport to the high
school chiefly because my father was one of the best-known and
best-loved men in the old home town. Perhaps it wasn't the magic seven
that built me all over new that summer; perhaps it was only the change
in schools and teachers. But from that year on, all the hard things
were too easy. It was as if somebody or something had suddenly opened a
closed door in my brain and let the daylight into all the dark corners
at once."
Grislow sat up and finished for him.
"Yes; and since that time you have staved your way through the
university, and butted into the Reclamation Service, and played skittles
with every other man's chances of promotion until you have come out at
the top of the heap in the Construction Division, all of which you're
much too modest to brag about. But, say; we've skipped one of the
seven-year flag-stations. What happened when you were twenty-one--or
were you too busy just then chasing the elusive engineering degree to
take notice?"
Brouillard was staring out over the loom of the dozen camp-fires--out
and across the valley at the massive bulk of Mount Chigringo rising like
a huge barrier dark to the sky-line save for a single pin-prick of
yellow light fixing the position of a solitary miner's cabin half-way
between the valley level and the summit. When he spoke again the
hydrographer had been given time to shave another pipe charge of tobacco
from his pocket plug and to fill and light the brier.
"When I was twenty-one my father died, and"--he stopped short and then
went on in a tone which was more than half apologetic--"I don't mind
telling you, Grislow; you're not the kind to pass it on where it would
hurt. At twenty-one I was left with a back load that I am carrying to
this good day; that I shall probably go on carrying through life."
Grislow walked around the fire, kicked two or three of the charred log
ends into the blaze, and growled when the resulting smoke rose up to
choke and blind him.
"Forget it, Victor," he said in blunt retraction. "I thought it was
merely a little splashing match and I didn't mean to back you out into
deep water. I know something about the load business myself; I'm trying
to put a couple of kid brothers through college, right now."
"Are you?" said Brouillard half-absently; and then, as one who would not
be selfishly indifferent: "That is fine. I wish I were going to have
something as substantial as that to show for my wood sawing."
"Won't you?"
"Not in a thousand years, Murray."
"In less than a hundredth part of that time you'll be at the top of the
Reclamation-Service pay-roll--won't that help out?"
"No; not appreciably."
Grislow gave it up at that and went back to the original contention.
"We're dodging the main issue," he said. "What is the active principle
of your 'sevens'--or haven't you figured it out?"
"Change," was the prompt rejoinder; "always something
different--radically different."
"And what started you off into the memory woods, particularly,
to-night?"
"A small recurrence of the coincidences. It began with that hopelessly
unreliable little clock that Anson persists in carrying around with him
wherever he goes. While you were up on the hill cutting your spruce tips
Anson pulled out and said he was going to unpack his camp kit. He went
over to his tent and lighted up, and a few minutes afterward I heard the
clock strike--seven. I looked at my watch and saw that it lacked a few
minutes of eight, and the inference was that Anson had set the clock
wrong, as he commonly does. Just as I was comfortably forgetting the
significant reminder the clock went off again, striking slowly, as if
the mechanism were nearly run down."
"Another seven?" queried Grislow, growing interested in spite of a keen
desire to lapse into ridicule again.
"No; it struck four. I didn't imagine it, Murray; I counted:
one--two--three--four."
"Well?" was the bantering comment. "You couldn't conjure an omen out of
that, could you? You say there was a light in the tent--I suppose Anson
was there tinkering with his little tin god of a timepiece. It's a habit
of his."
"That was the natural inference; but I was curious enough to go and
look. When I lifted the flap the tent was empty. The clock was ticking
away on Anson's soap-box dressing-case, with a lighted candle beside it,
and for a crazy half second I had a shock, Murray--the minute-hand was
pointing to four and the hour-hand to seven!"
"Still I don't see the miraculous significance," said the hydrographer.
"Don't you? It was only another of the coincidences, of course. While I
stood staring at the clock Anson came in with Griffith's tool kit. 'I've
got to tinker her again,' he said. 'She's got so she keeps Pacific time
with one hand and Eastern with the other.' Then I understood that he had
been tinkering it and had merely gone over to Griffith's tent for the
tools."
"Well," said Grislow again, "what of it? The clock struck seven, you
say; but it also struck four."
Brouillard's smile tilted his curling mustaches to the sardonic angle.
"The combination was what called the turn, Grizzy. To-day happens to be
my twenty-eighth birthday--the end of the fourth cycle of seven."
"By George!" ejaculated the hydrographer in mock perturbation, sitting
up so suddenly that he dropped his pipe into the ashes of the fire. "In
that case, according to what seems to be the well-established custom,
something is due to fall in right now!"
"I have been looking for it all day," returned Brouillard calmly, "which
is considerably more ridiculous than anything else I have owned to, you
will say. Let it go at that. We'll talk about something real if you'd
rather--that auxiliary reservoir supply from the Apache Basin, for
example. Were the field-notes in when you left Washington?" And from the
abrupt break, the technicalities came to their own again; were still
holding the centre of the stage after the groups around the mess fires
had melted away into the bunk shelters and tents, and the fires
themselves had died down into chastened pools of incandescence edged
each with its beach line of silvered ashes.
It was Murray Grislow who finally rang the curtain call on the prolonged
shop-talk.
"Say, man! do you know that it is after ten o'clock?" he demanded,
holding the face of his watch down to the glow of the dying embers. "You
may sit here all night, if you like, but it's me for the blankets and a
few lines of 'tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy'--Now, what in the
name of a guilty conscience is _that_?"
As it chanced, they were both facing toward the lower end of the valley
when the quotation-breaking apparition flashed into view. In the deepest
of the shadows at the mouth of the gorge, where the torrenting Niquoia
straightened itself momentarily before entering upon its plunging race
through the mountain barrier, a beam of white light flickered unsteadily
for a fraction of a second. Then it became a luminous pencil to trace a
zigzag line up the winding course of the river, across to the foot-hill
spur where the camp of the Reclamation-Service vanguard was pitched, and
so on around to the base of Chigringo. For certain other seconds it
remained quiescent, glowing balefully like the eye of some fabled
monster searching for its prey. Then it was gone.
Grislow's comment took the form of a half-startled exclamation.
"By Jove! wouldn't that give you a fit of the creepies?--this far from
civilization and a dynamo?"
"It wasn't an electric," returned Brouillard thoughtfully, apparently
taking Grislow's suggestion literally. "It was an acetylene."
"Supposing it was--what's the difference? Aren't we just as far from a
carbide shop as we are from the dynamo? What are you calling it?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," was the half-absent reply. Brouillard
was still staring fixedly at the distant gulf of blackness where the
mysterious light had appeared and disappeared.
"Then I'll make it and go to bed," said the hydrographer, rising and
stretching his arms over his head. "If it had come a couple of hours ago
we should have called it the 'spot-light,' turned on to mark the end of
your fourth act and the beginning, auspicious or otherwise, of the
fifth. Maybe it is, anyway; maybe the property-man was asleep or drunk
and forgot to turn it on at the spectacular instant. How will that do?"
Brouillard had got upon his feet and was buttoning his many-pocketed
shooting-coat.
"It will do to put you into the Balaam saddle-beast class, Grizzy," he
said, almost morosely. Then he added: "I'm going to take a little hike
down yonder for investigative purposes. Want to come along?"
But the mapper of watersheds was yawning sleepily. "Not on your
tintype," he refused. "I'm going to 'cork it orf in me 'ammick.' Wake me
up when you come back and tell me what the fifth act is going to do to
you. The more I think of it the more I'm convinced that it _was_ the
spot-light, a little overdue, after all." And he turned away chuckling.
It was only a short mile from the camp on the inward slopes of the
eastern foot-hills to the mouth of the outlet gorge, across which
Brouillard could already see, in mental prevision, the great gray wall
of the projected Niquoia dam--his future work--curving majestically from
the broken shoulder of Chigringo to the opposing steeps of Jack's
Mountain. The half-grown moon, tilting now toward the sky-line of the
western barrier, was leaving the canyon portal in deepest gloom. As
Brouillard swung along he kept a watchful eye upon the gorge shadows,
half expecting a return of the mysterious apparition. But when he
finally reached the canyon portal and began to seek for the trail which
roughly paralleled the left bank of the stream the mystery was still
unexplained.
From its upper portal in the valley's throat to the point where the
river debouches among the low sand-hills of the Buckskin Desert the
canyon of the Niquoia measures little more than a mile as the bird
flies, though its crookings through the barrier mountains fairly double
the distance. Beginning as a broken ravine at the valley outlet, the
gorge narrows in its lower third to a cliff-walled raceway for the
torrent, and the trail, leaving the bank of the stream, climbs the
forested slope of a boundary spur to descend abruptly to the water's
edge again at the desert gateway, where the Niquoia, leaping joyously
from the last of its many hamperings, becomes a placid river of the
plain.
Picking his way judiciously because the trail was new to him, Brouillard
came in due time to the descending path among the spruces and
scrub-pines leading to the western outlook upon the desert swales and
sand-hills. At the canyon portal, where the forest thinned away and left
him standing at the head of the final descending plunge in the trail, he
found himself looking down upon the explanation of the curious
apparition.
None the less, what he saw was in itself rather inexplicable. In the
first desert looping of the river a camp-fire of pinyon knots was blazing
cheerfully, and beside it, with a picnic hamper for a table, sat a
supper party of three--two men and a woman--in enveloping dust-coats,
and a third man in chauffeur leather serving the sitters. Back of the
group, and with its detachable search-light missing, stood a huge
touring-car to account for the picnic hamper, the dust-coats, the man in
leather, and, doubtless, for the apparitional eye which had appeared and
disappeared at the mouth of the upper gorge. Also it accounted, in a
purely physical sense, for the presence of the picnickers, though the
whim which had led them to cross the desolate Buckskin Desert for the
dubious pleasure of making an all-night bivouac on its eastern edge was
not so readily apparent.
Being himself a Bedouin of the desert, Brouillard's first impulse was
hospitable. But when he remarked the ample proportions of the great
touring-car and remembered the newness and rawness of his temporary camp
he quickly decided that the young woman member of the party would
probably fare better where she was.
This being the case, the young engineer saw no reason why he should
intrude upon the group at the cheerful camp-fire. On the contrary, he
began speedily to find good and sufficient reasons why he should not.
That the real restraining motive was a sudden attack of desert shyness
he would not have admitted. But the fact remained. Good red blood with
its quickenings of courage and self-reliance, and a manful ability to do
and dare, are the desert's gifts; but the penalty the desert exacts in
return for them is evenly proportioned. Four years in the Reclamation
Service had made the good-looking young chief of construction a
man-queller of quality. But each year of isolation had done something
toward weakening the social ties.
A loosened pebble turned the scale. When a bit of the coarse-grained
sandstone of the trail rolled under Brouillard's foot and went
clattering down to plunge into the stream the man in chauffeur leather
reached for the search-light lantern and directed its beam upon the
canyon portal. But by that time Brouillard had sought the shelter of the
scrub-pines and was retracing his steps up the shoulder of the
mountain.
II
J. Wesley Croesus
Measured even by the rather exacting standards of the mining and cattle
country, Brouillard was not what the West calls "jumpy." Four years of
field-work, government or other, count for something; and the man who
has proved powder-shy in any stage of his grapple with the Land of Short
Notice is customarily a dead man.
In spite of his training, however, the young chief of construction,
making an early morning exploration of the site for the new dam at the
mouth of the outlet gorge while the rank and file of the pioneer force
were building the permanent camp half-way between the foot-hills and the
river, winced handsomely when the shock of a distance-muffled explosion
trembled upon the crisp morning air, coming, as it seemed, from some
point near the lower end of the canyon.
The dull rumble of the explosion and the little start for which it was
accountable were disconcerting in more ways than one. As an industry
captain busy with the preliminaries of what promised to be one of the
greatest of the modern salvages of the waste places, Brouillard had been
assuring himself that his work was large enough to fill all his
horizons. But the detonating crash reminded him forcibly that the
presence of the touring party was asserting itself as a disturbing
element and that the incident of its discovery the night before had been
dividing time pretty equally with his verification of the locating
engineer's blue-print mappings and field-notes.
This was the first thought, and it was pointedly irritating. But the
rebound flung him quickly over into the field of the common humanities.
The explosion was too heavy to figure as a gun-shot; and, besides, it
was the closed season for game. Therefore, it must have been an accident
of some sort--possibly the blowing up of the automobile. Brouillard had
once seen the gasolene tank of a motor-car take fire and go up like a
pyrotechnic set piece in a sham battle.
Between this and a hurried weighting of the sheaf of blue-prints with
his field-glass preparatory to a first-aid dash down the outlet gorge,
there was no appreciable interval. But the humane impulse doubled back
upon itself tumultuously when he came to his outlook halting place of
the night before.
There had been no accident. The big touring-car, yellow with the dust of
the Buckskin, stood intact on the sand flat where it had been backed and
turned and headed toward the desert. Wading in the shallows of the river
with a linen dust robe for a seine, the two younger men of the party
were gathering the choicest of the dead mountain trout with which the
eddy was thickly dotted. Coming toward him on the upward trail and
climbing laboriously to gain the easier path among the pines, were the
two remaining members of the party--an elderly, pudgy, stockily built
man with a gray face, stiff gray mustaches and sandy-gray eyes to match,
and the young woman, booted, gauntleted, veiled, and bulked into
shapelessness by her touring coat, and yet triumphing exuberantly over
all of these handicaps in an ebullient excess of captivating beauty and
attractiveness.
Being a fisherman of mark and a true sportsman, Brouillard had a sudden
rush of blood to the anger cells when he realized that the alarm which
had brought him two hard-breathing miles out of his way had been the
discharge of a stick of dynamite thrown into the Niquoia for the
fish-killing purpose. In his code the dynamiting of a stream figured as
a high crime. But the two on the trail had come up, and his protest was
forestalled by the elderly man with the gray face and the sandy-gray
eyes, whose explosive "Ha!" was as much a measure of his breathlessness
as of his surprise.
"I was just telling Van Bruce that his thundering fish cartridge would
raise the neighbors," the trail climber went on with a stout man's
chuckle. And then: "You're one of the Reclamation engineers? Great work
the government is undertaking here--fine opportunity to demonstrate the
lifting power of aggregated capital backed by science and energy and a
whole heap of initiative. It's a high honor to be connected with it, and
that's a fact. You _are_ connected with it, aren't you?"
Brouillard's nod was for the man, but his words were for the young woman
whose beauty refused to be quenched by the touring handicaps. "Yes, I am
in charge of it," he said.
"Ha!" said the stout man, and this time the exclamation was purely
approbative. "Chief engineer, eh? That's fine, _fine_! You're young, and
you've climbed pretty fast. But that's the way with you young men
nowadays; you begin where we older fellows leave off. I'm glad we met
you. My name is Cortwright--J. Wesley Cortwright, of Chicago. And yours
is----?"
Brouillard named himself in one word. Strangers usually found him
bluntly unresponsive to anything like effusiveness, but he was finding
it curiously difficult to resist the good-natured heartiness which
seemed to exude from the talkative gentleman, overlaying him like the
honeydew on the leaves in a droughty forest.
If Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's surprise on hearing the Brouillard surname
was not genuine it was at least an excellent imitation.
"Well, well, well--you don't say! Not of the Brouillards of Knox County,
Indiana?--but, of course, you must be. There is only the one family that
I ever heard of, and it is mighty good, old _voyageur_ stock, too,
dating 'way back to the Revolutionary War, and further. I've bought hogs
of the farmer Brouillards hundreds of times when I was in the packing
business, and I want to tell you that no finer animals ever came into
the Chicago market."
"Yes?" said Brouillard, driving the word in edgewise. "I am sorry to say
that I don't know many of the farmers. Our branch of the family settled
near Vincennes, and my father was on the bench, when he wasn't in
politics."
"What? Not Judge Antoine! Why, my dear young man! Do you know that I
once had the pleasure of introducing your good father to my bankers in
Chicago? It was years ago, at a time when he was interested in floating
a bond issue for some growing industry down on the Wabash. And to think
that away out here in this howling wilderness, a thousand miles from
nowhere, as you might say, I should meet his son!"
Brouillard laughed and fell headlong into the pit of triteness.
"The world isn't so very big when you come to surround it properly, Mr.
Cortwright," he asserted.
"That's a fact; and we're doing our level best nowadays to make and keep
it little," buzzed the portly man cheerfully, with a wave of one pudgy
arm toward the automobile. "It's about a hundred and twenty miles from
this to El Gato, on the Grand Canyon, isn't it, Mr. Brouillard? Well, we
did it in five hours yesterday afternoon, and we could have cut an hour
out of that if Rickert hadn't mistaken the way across the Buckskin. Not
that it made any special difference. We expected to spend one night out
and came prepared."
Brouillard admitted that the touring feat kept even pace with the
quickening spirit of the age; but he did not add that the motive for the
feat was not quite so apparent as it might be. This mystery, however,
was immediately brushed aside by Mr. Cortwright, speaking in his
character of universal ouster of mysteries.
"You are wondering what fool notion chased us away out here in the
desert when we had a comfortable hotel to stop at," he rattled on. "I'll
tell you, Mr. Brouillard--in confidence. It was curiosity--raw, country
curiosity. The papers and magazines have been full of this Buckskin
reclamation scheme, and we wanted to see the place where all the
wonderful miracles were going to get themselves wrought out. Have you
got time to 'put us next'?"
Brouillard, as the son of the man who had been introduced to the Chicago
money gods in his hour of need, could scarcely do less than to take the
time. The project, he explained, contemplated the building of a high dam
across the upper end of the Niquoia Canyon and the converting of the
inland valley above into a great storage reservoir. From this reservoir
a series of distributing canals would lead the water out upon the arid
lands of the Buckskin and the miracle would be a fact accomplished.
"Sure, sure!" said the cheerful querist, feeling in the pockets of the
automobile coat for a cigar. At the match-striking instant he remembered
a thing neglected. "By George! you'll have to excuse me, Mr.
Brouillard; I'm always forgetting the little social dewdabs. Let me
present you to my daughter Genevieve. Gene, shake hands with the son of
my good old friend Judge Antoine Brouillard, of Vincennes."
It was rather awkwardly done, and somehow Brouillard could not help
fancying that Mr. Cortwright could have done it better; that the roughly
informal introduction was only one of the component parts of a studied
brusquerie which Mr. Cortwright could put on and off at will, like a
well-worn working coat. But when the unquenchable beauty stripped her
gauntlet and gave him her hand, with a dazzling smile and a word of
acknowledgment which was not borrowed from her father's effusive
vocabulary, he straightway fell into another pit of triteness and his
saving first impressions of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's character began
to fade.
"I'm immensely interested," was Miss Cortwright's comment on the
outlining of the reclamation project. "Do you mean to say that real
farms with green things growing on them can be made out of that
frightful desert we drove over yesterday afternoon?"
Brouillard smiled and plunged fatuously. "Oh, yes; the farms are
already there. Nature made them, you know; she merely forgot to arrange
for their watering." He was going on to tell about the exhaustive
experiments the Department of Agriculture experts had been making upon
the Buckskin soils when the gentleman whose name had once figured upon
countless thousands of lard packages cut in.
"Do you know what I'm thinking about, Mr. Brouillard? I'm saying it over
soft and slow to myself that no young man in this world ever had such a
magnificent fighting chance as you have right here," he averred, the
sandy-gray eyes growing suddenly alert and shrewd. "If you don't come
out of this with money enough to buy in all those bonds your father was
placing that time in Chicago--but of course you will."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean, Mr. Cortwright,"
said Brouillard, with some inner monitor warning him that it would be
better not to understand.
The portly gentleman became suddenly facetious.
"Hear him, Gene," he chuckled, sharing the joke with his daughter; "he
says he doesn't understand!" Then to Brouillard: "Say, young man; you
don't mean to tell me that your father's son needs a guardian, do you?
You know exactly where these canals are going to run and all the choice
spots they are going to irrigate; what's to prevent your getting in
ahead of the rush and taking up a dozen or so of those prime
quarter-sections--homesteads, town sites, and the like? Lack of money?
Why, bless your soul, there are plenty of us who would fall all over
ourselves running to back a proposition like that--any God's quantity of
us who would fairly throw the working capital at you! For that matter, I
don't know but I'd undertake to finance you alone."
Brouillard's first impulse sprang full-grown out of honest anger. That
any man who had known his father should make such a proposal to that
father's son was a bald insult to the father's memory. But the calmer
second thought turned wrath into amused tolerance. The costly
touring-car, the idle, time-killing jaunt in the desert, the dynamiting
of the river for the sake of taking a few fish--all these were the
indices of a point of view limited strictly by a successful market for
hog products. Why should he go out of his way to quarrel with it on high
moral grounds?
"You forget that I am first of all the government's hired man, Mr.
Cortwright," he demurred. "My job of dam building will be fully big
enough and strenuous enough to keep me busy. Aside from that, I fancy
the department heads would take it rather hard if we fellows in the
field went plum picking."
"Let them!" retorted the potential backer of profitable side issues.
"What's the odds if you go to it and bring back the money? I tell you,
Mr. Brouillard, money--bunched money--is what talks. A good, healthy
bank balance makes so much noise that you can't hear the knockers. If
the Washington crowd had your chance--but never mind, that's your
business and none of mine, and you'll take it as it's meant, as a
good-natured hint to your father's son. How far is it up to where you
are going to build your dam?"
Brouillard gave the distance, and Mr. Cortwright measured the visible
trail grades with a deprecatory eye.
"Do you think my daughter could walk it?" he asked.
Miss Genevieve answered for herself: "Of course I can walk it; can't I,
Mr. Brouillard?"
"I'll be glad to show you the way if you care to try," Brouillard
offered; and the tentative invitation was promptly accepted.
The transfer of view-points from the lower end of the canyon to the
upper was effected without incident, save at its beginning, when the
father would have called down to the young man who had waded ashore and
was drying himself before the camp-fire. "Van Bruce won't care to go,"
the daughter hastened to say; and Brouillard, whose gift it was to be
able to pick out and identify the human derelict at long range,
understood perfectly well the reason for the young woman's hasty
interruption. One result of the successfully marketed lard packages was
very plainly evident in the dissipated face and hangdog attitude of the
marketer's son.
Conversation flagged, even to the discouragement of a voluble money
king, on the climb from the Buckskin level to that of the reservoir
valley. The trail was narrow, and Brouillard unconsciously set a pace
which was almost inhospitable for a stockily built man whose tendency
was toward increasing waist measures. But when they reached the
pine-tree of the anchored blue-prints at the upper portal, Mr.
Cortwright recovered his breath sufficiently to gasp his appreciation of
the prospect and its possibilities.
"Why, good goodness, Mr. Brouillard, it's practically all done for you!"
he wheezed, taking in the level, mountain-enclosed valley with an
appraisive eye-sweep. "Van Bruce and the chauffeur came up here last
night, with one of the car lamps for a lantern, but of course they
couldn't bring back any idea of the place. What will you do?--build your
dam right here and take out your canal through the canyon? Is that the
plan?"
Brouillard nodded and went a little further into details, showing how
the inward-arching barrier would be anchored into the two opposing
mountain buttresses.
"And the structure itself--how high is it to be?"
"Two hundred feet above the spillway apron foot."
The lard millionaire twisted his short, fat neck and guessed the
distance up the precipitous slopes of Chigringo and Jack's Mountain.
"That will be a whale of a chunk of masonry," he said. Then, with
business-like directness: "What will you build it of?--concrete?"
"Yes; concrete and steel."
"Then you are going to need Portland cement--a whole world of it. Where
will you get it? And how will you get it here?"
Brouillard smiled inwardly at the pork packer's suddenly awakened
interest in the technical ways and means. His four years in the desert
had taken him out of touch with a money-making world, and this
momentary contact with one of its successful devotees was illuminating.
He had a growing conviction that the sordid atmosphere which appeared to
be as the breath of life to Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright would presently
begin to make things taste coppery, but the inextinguishable charm of
the veiled princess was a compensation. It was partly for the sake of
seeing her with the veil abolished that he recovered the paper-weighting
field-glass and gave it to her, showing her how to focus it upon the
upper reaches of the valley.
"We are in luck on the cement proposition," he told the eager
money-maker. "We shall probably manufacture our own supply right here on
the ground. There is plenty of limestone and an excellent shale in those
hills just beyond our camp; and for burning fuel there is a fairly good
vein of bituminous coal underlying that farther range at the head of the
valley."
"H'm," said the millionaire; "a cement plant, eh? There's money in that
anywhere on the face of the globe, just now. And over here, where there
is no transportation--Gad! if you only had somebody to sell cement to,
you could ask your own price. The materials have all been tested, I
suppose?"
"Oh, yes; we've had experts in here for more than a year. The material
is all right."
"And your labor?"
"On the dam, you mean? One advantage of concrete work is that it does
not require any great proportion of skilled labor, the crushing, mixing,
and placing all being done by machinery. We shall work all the Indians
we can get from the Navajo Reservation, forty-odd miles south of here;
for the remainder we shall import men from the States, bringing them in
over the Timanyoni High Line--the trail from Quesado on the Red Butte
Western. At least, that is what we shall do for the present. Later on,
the railroad will probably build an extension up the Barking Dog and
over War Arrow Pass."
Mr. Cortwright's calculating eye roved once more over the attractive
prospect.
"Fuel for your power plant?--wood I take it?" he surmised; and then:
"Oh, I forgot; you say you have coal."
"Yes; there is coal, of a sort; good enough for the cement kilns. But we
sha'n't burn it for power. Neither shall we burn the timber, which can
be put to much better use in building and in false- and form-work. There
are no finer lumber forests this side of the Sierras. For power we
shall utilize the river. There is another small canyon at the head of
the valley where a temporary dam can be built which will deliver power
enough to run anything--an entire manufacturing city, if we had one."
Mr. Cortwright made a clucking noise with his tongue and blew his cheeks
out like a swimmer gasping for breath.
"Julius Caesar!" he exploded. "You stand there and tell me calmly that
the government has all these resources coopered up here in a
barrel?--that nobody is going to get a chance to make any money out of
them? It's a crime, Mr. Brouillard; that's just what it is--a crime!"
"No; I didn't say that. The resources just happen to be here and we
shall turn them to good account. But if there were any feasible
transportation facilities I doubt if we should make use of these native
raw materials. It is the policy of the department to go into the market
like any other buyer where it can. But here there are no sellers, or,
rather, no way in which the sellers can reach us."
"No sellers and no chance for a man to get the thin edge of a wedge in
anywhere," lamented the money-maker despairingly. Then his eye lighted
upon the graybeard dump of a solitary mine high up on the face of Mount
Chigringo. "What's that up there?" he demanded.
"It is a mine," said Brouillard, showing Miss Cortwright how to adjust
the field-glass for the shorter distance. "Two men named Massingale,
father and son, are working it, I'm told." And then again to Miss
Genevieve: "That is their cabin--on the trail a little to the right of
the tunnel opening."
"I see it quite plainly," she returned. "Two people are just leaving it
to ride down the path--a man and a woman, I think, though the woman--if
it is a woman--is riding on a man's saddle."
Brouillard's eyebrows went up in a little arch of surprise. Harding, the
topographical engineer who had made all the preliminary surveys and had
spent the better part of the former summer in the Niquoia, had reported
on the Massingales, father and son, and his report had conveyed a hint
of possible antagonism on the part of the mine owners to the government
project. But there had been no mention of a woman.
"The Massingale mine, eh?" broke in the appraiser of values crisply.
"They showed us some ore specimens from that property while we were
stopping over in Red Butte. It's rich--good and plenty rich--if they
have the quantity. And somebody told me they had the quantity, too; only
it was too far from the railroad--couldn't jack-freight it profitably
over the Timanyonis."
"In which case it is one of many," Brouillard said, taking refuge in the
generalities.
But Mr. Cortwright was not to be so easily diverted from the pointed
particulars--the particulars having to do with the pursuit of the market
trail.
"I'm beginning to get my feet on bottom, Brouillard," he said, dropping
the courtesy prefix and shoving his fat hands deep into the pockets of
the dust-coat. "There's a business proposition here, and it looks mighty
good to me. That was a mere nursery notion I gave you a while
back--about picking up homesteads and town sites in the Buckskin. The
big thing is right here. I tell you, I can smell money in this valley of
yours--scads of it."
Brouillard laughed. "It is only the fragrance of future
Reclamation-Service appropriations," he suggested. "There will be a good
bit of money spent here before the Buckskin Desert gets its maiden
wetting."
"I don't mean that at all," was the impatient rejoinder. "Let me show
you: you are going to have a population of some sort, if it's only the
population that your big job will bring here. That's the basis. Then
you're going to need material by the train load, not the raw stuff,
which you say is right here on the ground, but the manufactured
article--cement, lumber, and steel. You can ship this material in over
the range at prices that will be pretty nearly prohibitory, or, as you
suggest, it can be manufactured right here on the spot."
"The cement and the lumber can be produced here, but not the steel,"
Brouillard corrected.
"That's where you're off," snapped the millionaire. "There are fine ore
beds in the Hophras and a pretty good quality of coking coal. Ten or
twelve miles of a narrow-gauge railroad would dump the pig metal into
the upper end of your valley, and there you are. With a small reduction
plant you could tell the big steel people to go hang."
Brouillard admitted the postulate without prejudice to a keen and
growing wonder. How did it happen that this Chicago money king had taken
the trouble to inform himself so accurately in regard to the natural
resources of the Niquoia region? Had he not expressly declared that the
object of the desert automobile trip was mere tourist curiosity? Given
a little time, the engineer would have cornered the inquiry, making it
yield some sort of a reasonable answer; but Mr. Cortwright was galloping
on again.
"There you are, then, with the three prime requisites in raw material:
cement stock, timber, and pig metal. Fuel you've got, you say, and if it
isn't good enough, your dummy railroad can supply you from the Hophra
mines. Best of all, you've got power to burn--and that's the key to any
manufacturing proposition. Well and good. Now, you know, and I know,
that the government doesn't care to go into the manufacturing business
when it can help it. Isn't that so?"
"Unquestionably. But this is a case of can't-help-it," Brouillard
argued. "You couldn't begin to interest private capital in any of these
industries you speak of."
"Why not?" was the curt demand.
"Because of their impermanence--their dependence upon a market which
will quit definitely when the dam is completed. What you are suggesting
predicates a good, busy little city in this valley, behind the
dam--since there is no other feasible place for it--and it would be
strictly a city of numbered days. When the dam is completed and the
spillway gates are closed, the Niqoyastcadje and everything in it will
go down under two hundred feet of water."
"The--what?" queried Miss Cortwright, lowering the glass with which she
had been following the progress of the two riders down the Buckskin
trail from the high-pitched mine on Chigringo.
"The Niqoyastcadje--'Place-where-they-came-up,'" said Brouillard,
elucidating for her. "That is the Navajo name for this valley. The
Indians have a legend that this is the spot where their tribal ancestors
came up from the underworld. Our map makers shortened it to 'Niquoia'
and the cow-men of the Buckskin foot-hills have cut that to
'Nick-wire.'"
This bit of explanatory place lore was entirely lost upon Mr. J. Wesley
Cortwright. He was chewing the ends of his short mustaches and scowling
thoughtfully out upon the possible site of the future industrial city of
the plain.
"Say, Brouillard," he cut in, "you get me the right to build that power
dam, and give me the contracts for what material you'd rather buy than
make, and I'll be switched if I don't take a shot at this drowning
proposition myself. I tell you, it looks pretty good to me. What do you
say?"
"I'll say what I said a few minutes ago," laughed the young chief of
construction--"that I'm only a hired man. You'll have to go a good few
rounds higher up on the authority ladder to close a deal like that. I'm
not sure it wouldn't require an act of Congress."
"Well, by George, we might get even that if we have to," was the
optimistic assertion. "You think about it."
"I guess it isn't my think," said Brouillard, still inclined to take the
retired pork packer's suggestion as the mere ravings of a money-mad
promoter. "As the government engineer in charge of this work, I couldn't
afford to be identified even as a friendly intermediary in any such
scheme as the one you are proposing."