under lip in a way ominously familiar to his antagonists in the wheat
pit. Then he glanced at his watch and changed the subject abruptly.
"We'll have to be straggling back to the chug-wagon. Much obliged to
you, Mr. Brouillard. Will you come down and see us off?"
Brouillard said "yes," for Miss Cortwright's sake, and took the
field-glass she was returning to put it back upon the sheaf of
blue-prints. She saw what he did with it and made instant
acknowledgments.
"It was good of you to neglect your work for us," she said, smiling
level-eyed at him when he straightened up.
He was frank enough to tell the truth--or part of it.
"It was the dynamite that called me off. Doesn't your brother know that
it is illegal to shoot a trout stream?"
She waited until her father was out of ear-shot on the gorge trail
before she answered:
"He ought to know that it is caddish and unsportsmanlike. I didn't know
what he and Rickert were doing or I should have stopped them."
"In that event we shouldn't have met, and you would have missed your
chance of seeing the Niqoyastcadje and the site of the city that isn't
to be--the city of numbered days," he jested, adding, less lightly: "You
wouldn't have missed very much."
"No?" she countered with a bright return of the alluring smile which he
had first seen through the filmy gauze of the automobile veil. "Do you
want me to say that I should have missed a great deal? You may consider
it said if you wish."
He made no reply to the bit of persiflage, and a little later felt the
inward warmth of an upflash of resentment directed not at his companion
but at himself for having been momentarily tempted to take the
persiflage seriously. The temptation was another of the consequences of
the four years of isolation which had cut him off from the world of
women no less completely than from the world of money-getting. But it
was rather humiliating, none the less.
"What have I done to make you forget how to talk?" she wished to know,
five minutes further on, when his silence was promising to outlast the
canyon passage.
"You? Nothing at all," he hastened to say. Then he took the first step
in the fatal road of attempting to account for himself. "But I have
forgotten, just the same. It has been years since I have had a chance to
talk to a woman. Do you wonder that I have lost the knack?"
"How dreadful!" she laughed. And afterward, with a return to the
half-serious mood which had threatened to reopen the door so lately
slammed in the face of temptation: "Perhaps we shall come back to
Niqo--Niqoy--I simply _can't_ say it without sneezing--and then you
might relearn some of the things you have forgotten. Wouldn't that be
delightful?"
This time he chose to ignore utterly the voice of the inward monitor,
which was assuring him coldly that young women of Miss Cortwright's
world plane were constrained by the accepted rules of their kind to play
the game in season and out of season, and his half-laughing reply was at
once a defiance and a counter-challenge.
"I dare you to come!" he said brazenly. "Haven't you heard how the men
of the desert camps kill each other for the chance to pick up a lady's
handkerchief?"
They were at the final descent in the trail, with the Buckskin
blanknesses showing hotly beyond the curtaining of pines, and there was
space only for a flash of the beautiful eyes and a beckoning word.
"In that case, I hope you know how to shoot straight, Mr. Brouillard,"
she said quizzically; and then they passed at a step from romance to the
crude realities.
The realities were basing themselves upon the advent of two new-comers,
riding down the Chigringo trail to the ford which had been the scene of
the fish slaughtering; a sunburnt young man in goatskin "shaps," flannel
shirt and a flapping Stetson, and a girl whose face reminded Brouillard
of one of the Madonnas, whose name and painter he strove vainly to
recall. Ten seconds farther along the horses of the pair were sniffing
suspiciously at the automobile, and the young man under the flapping hat
was telling Van Bruce Cortwright what he thought of cartridge fishermen
in general, and of this present cartridge fisherman in particular.
"Which the same, being translated into Buckskin English, hollers like
this," he concluded. "Don't you tote any more fish ca'tridges into this
here rese'vation; not no more, whatsoever. Who says so? Well, if anybody
should ask, you might say it was Tig Smith, foreman o' the Tri'-Circ'
outfit. No, I ain't no game warden, but what I say goes as she lays.
_Savez?_"
The chauffeur was adjusting something under the upturned bonnet of the
touring-car and thus hiding his grin. Mr. Cortwright, who had maintained
his lead on the descent to the desert level, was trying to come between
his sullen-faced son and the irate cattleman, money in hand. Brouillard
walked his companion down to the car and helped her to a seat in the
tonneau. She repaid him with a nod and a smile, and when he saw that the
crudities were not troubling her he stepped aside and unconsciously fell
to comparing the two--the girl on horseback and his walking mate of the
canyon passage.
They had little enough in common, apart from their descent from Eve, he
decided--and the decision itself was subconscious. The millionaire's
daughter was a warm blonde, beautiful, queenly, a finished product of
civilization and high-priced culture; a woman of the world, standing but
a single remove from the generation of quick money-getting and yet able
to make the money take its proper place as a means to an end.
And the girl on horseback? Brouillard had to look twice before he could
attempt to classify her, and even then she baffled him. A rather slight
figure, suggestive of the flexible strength of a silken cord; a face
winsome rather than beautiful; coils and masses of copper-brown hair
escaping under the jaunty cow-boy hat; eyes ... it was her eyes that
made Brouillard look the third time: they were blue, with a hint of
violet in them; he made sure of this when she turned her head and met
his gaze fearlessly and with a certain calm serenity that made him feel
suddenly uncomfortable and half embarrassed. Nevertheless, he would not
look aside; and he caught himself wondering if her cow-boy lover--he had
already jumped to the sentimental conclusion--had ever been able to look
into those steadfast eyes and trifle with the truth.
So far the young chief of construction had travelled on the road
reflective while the fish-slaughtering matter was getting itself
threshed out at the river's edge. When it was finally settled--not by
the tender of money that Mr. Cortwright had made--the man Smith and his
pretty riding mate galloped through the ford and disappeared among the
barren hills, and the chauffeur was at liberty to start the motor.
"_Au revoir_, Mr. Brouillard," said the princess, as the big car righted
itself for the southward flight into the desert. Then, when the wheels
began to churn in the loose sand of the halting place, she leaned out to
give him a woman's leave-taking. "If I were you I shouldn't fall in love
with the calm-eyed goddess who rides like a man. Mr. Tri'-Circ' Smith
might object, you know; and you haven't yet told me whether or not you
can shoot straight."
There was something almost heart-warming in the bit of parting badinage;
something to make the young engineer feel figuratively for the knife
with which he had resolutely cut around himself to the dividing of all
hindrances, sentimental or other, on a certain wretched day years before
when he had shouldered his life back-load.
[Illustration: Brouillard had to look twice before he could attempt to
classify her, and even then she baffled him.]
But the warmth might have given place to a disconcerting chill if he
could have heard Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's remark to his seat
companion, made when the canyon portal of the Niquoia and the man
climbing the path beside it were hazy mirage distortions in the backward
distances.
"He isn't going to be the dead easy mark I hoped to find in the son of
the old bankrupt hair-splitter, Genie, girl. But he'll come down and
hook himself all right if the bait is well covered with his particular
brand of sugar. Don't you forget it."
III
Sands of Pactolus
If Victor Brouillard had been disposed to speculate curiously upon the
possibilities suggested by Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright on the occasion of
the capitalist's brief visit to the Niquoia, or had been tempted to
dwell sentimentally upon the idyllic crossing of orbits--Miss
Genevieve's and his own--on the desert's rim, there was little leisure
for either indulgence during the strenuous early summer weeks which
followed the Cortwright invasion.
Popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not precisely true
that all government undertakings are dilatory industrial imitations,
designed, primarily, to promote the even-handed cutting of some
appropriation pie, and, secondarily, to provide easy sinecures for
placemen and political heelers. Holding no brief for the government, one
may still say without fear of contradiction that _laissez-faire_ has
seldom been justly charged against the Reclamation Service. Fairly
confronting his problem, Brouillard did not find himself hampered by
departmental inertia. While he was rapidly organizing his force for the
constructive attack, the equipment and preliminary material for the
building of the great dam were piling up by the train load on the
side-tracks at Quesado; and at once the man- and beast-killing task of
rushing the excavating outfit of machinery, teams, scrapers,
rock-drilling installations, steam-shovels, and the like, over the War
Arrow trail was begun.
During the weeks which followed, the same trail, and a little later that
from the Navajo Reservation on the south, were strung with ant-like
processions of laborers pouring into the shut-in valley at the foot of
Mount Chigringo. Almost as if by magic a populous camp of tents, shelter
shacks, and Indian tepees sprang up in the level bed-bottom of the
future lake; camp-fires gave place to mess kitchens; the commissary
became a busy department store stocked with everything that thrifty or
thriftless labor might wish to purchase; and daily the great foundation
scorings in the buttressing shoulders of Jack's Mountain and Chigringo
grew deeper and wider under the churning of the air-drills, the
crashings of the dynamite, and the rattle and chug of the
steam-shovels.
Magically, too, the life of the isolated working camp sprang into being.
From the beginning its speech was a curious polyglot; the hissings and
bubblings of the melting-pot out of which a new citizenry is poured.
Poles and Slovaks, men from the slopes of the Carpathians, the terraces
of the Apennines, and the passes of the Balkans; Scandinavians from the
pineries of the north, and a colony of railroad-grading Greeks, fresh
from the building of a great transcontinental line; all these and more
were spilled into the melting-pot, and a new Babel resulted. Only the
Indians held aloof. Careful from the first for these wards of the
nation, Brouillard had made laws of Draconian severity. The Navajos were
isolated upon a small reservation of their own on the Jack's Mountain
side of the Niquoia, a full half mile from the many-tongued camp in the
open valley; and for the man caught "boot-legging" among the Indians
there were penalties swift and merciless.
It was after the huge task of foundation digging was well under way and
the work of constructing the small power dam in the upper canyon had
been begun that the young chief of construction, busy with a thousand
details, had his first forcible reminder of the continued existence of
Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright.
It came in the form of a communication from Washington, forwarded by
special post-rider service from Quesado, and it called a halt upon the
up-river power project. In accordance with its settled policy, the
Reclamation Service would refrain, in the Niquoia as elsewhere, from
entering into competition with private citizens; would do nothing to
discourage the investment of private capital. A company had been formed
to take over the power production and to establish a plant for the
manufacture of cement, and Brouillard was instructed to govern himself
accordingly. For his information, the department letter-writer went on
to say, it was to be understood that the company was duly organized
under the provisions of an act of Congress; that it had bound itself to
furnish power and material at prices satisfactory to the Service; and
that the relations between it and the government field-staff on the
ground were to be entirely friendly.
"It's a graft--a pull-down with a profit in it for some bunch of money
leeches a little higher up!" was the young chief's angry comment when he
had given Grislow the letter to read. "Without knowing any more of the
details than that letter gives, I'd be willing to bet a month's pay
that this is the fine Italian hand of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright!"
Grislow's eyebrows went up in doubtful interrogation.
"Ought I to know the gentleman?" he queried mildly. "I don't seem to
recall the name."
Brouillard got up from his desk to go and stand at one of the little
square windows of the log-built office quarters. For some reason which
he had not taken the trouble to define, even to himself, he had
carefully refrained from telling the hydrographer anything about the
early morning meeting with the automobilists at the edge of the desert
basin; of that and of the subsequent visit of two of them to the site of
the dam.
"No; you don't know him," he said, turning back to the worker at the
mapping table. "It was his motor party that was camping at the Buckskin
ford the night we broke in here--the night when we saw the
search-light."
"And you met him? I thought you told me you merely went down and took a
look--didn't butt in?"
"I didn't--that night. But the next morning----"
The hydrographer's smile was a jocose grimace.
"I recollect now; you said that one of the motorists was a young woman."
Brouillard resented the implication irritably.
"Don't be an ass, Murray," he snapped; and then he went on, with the
frown of impatience still wrinkling between his eyes. "The young woman
was the daughter. There was a cub of a son, and he fired a stick of
dynamite in the river to kill a mess of trout. I heard the explosion and
thought it might be the gasolene tank of the car."
"Naturally," said Grislow guilelessly. "And, quite as naturally, you
went down to see. I'm not sure that I shouldn't have done it myself."
"Of course you would," was the touchy retort. "When I got there and
found out what had happened, I meant to make a second drop-out; but
Cortwright and his daughter were coming up the trail, and he hailed me.
After that I couldn't do less than the decent thing. They wanted to see
the valley, and I showed them the way in. Cortwright is the
multimillionaire pork packer of Chicago, and he went up into the air
like a lunatic over the money-making chances there were going to be in
this job. I didn't pay much attention to his chortlings at the time. It
didn't seem remotely credible that anybody with real money to invest
would plant it in the bottom of the Niquoia reservoir."
"But now you think he is going to make his bluff good?"
"That looks very much like it," said Brouillard sourly, pointing to the
letter from Washington. "That scheme is going to change the whole face
of Nature for us up here, Grislow. It will spell trouble right from the
jump."
"Oh, I don't know," was the deprecatory rejoinder. "It will relieve us
of a lot of side-issue industries--cut 'em out and bury 'em, so far as
we are concerned."
"That part of it is all right, of course; but it won't end there; not by
a hundred miles. We've started in here to be a law to ourselves--as
we've got to be to handle this mixed multitude of brigands and ditch
diggers. But when this new company gets on the ground it will be
different. There will be pull-hauling and scrapping and liquor selling,
and we can't go in and straighten things out with a club as we do now.
Jobson says in that letter that the relations have got to be friendly!
I'll bet anything you like that I'll have to go and read the riot act to
those people before they've been twenty-four hours on their job!"
Grislow was trying the point of his mapping-pen on his thumb nail.
"Curious that this particular fly should drop into your pot of ointment
on your birthday, wasn't it?" he remarked.
"O suffering Jehu!" gritted Brouillard ragefully. "Are you never going
to forget that senseless bit of twaddle?"
"You're not giving me a chance to forget it," said the map-maker
soberly. "You told me that night that the seven-year characteristic was
change; and you're a changed man, Victor, if ever there was one.
Moreover, it began that very night--or the next morning."
"Oh, damn!"
"Certainly, if you wish it. But that is only another proof of what I am
saying. It's getting on your nerves now. Do you know what the men have
named you? They call you 'Hell's-Fire.' That has come to be your word
when you light into them for something they've done or haven't done. No
longer ago than this morning you were swearing at Griffith, as if you'd
forgotten that the boy is only a year out of college and can't be
supposed to know as much as Leshington or Anson. Where is your sense of
humor?"
Brouillard laughed, if only to prove that his sense of humor was still
unimpaired.
"They are a fearful lot of dubs, Grizzy," he said, meaning the laborers;
"the worst we've ever drawn, and that is saying a good deal. Three
drunken brawls last night, and a man killed in Haley's Place. And I
can't keep liquor out of the camp to save my soul--not if I should sit
up nights to invent new regulations. The Navajos are the best of the
bunch and we've managed to keep the fire from spreading over on their
side of the Niquoia, thus far. But if the whiskey ever gets hold in the
tepees, we'll have orders to shoot Chief Nicagee's people back to their
reservation in a holy minute."
Grislow nodded.
"Niqoyastcadje--'Place-where-they-came-up.' It will be
'Place-where-they-go-down' if the tin-horns and boot-leggers get an
inning."
"We'll all go to the devil on a toboggan-slide and there is the order
for it," declared the chief morosely, again indicating the letter from
Washington. "That means more human scum--a new town--an element that we
can neither chase out nor control. Cortwright and his associates,
whoever they are, won't care a rotten hang. They'll be here to sweat
money out of the job; to sweat it in any and every way that offers, and
to do it quick. All of which is bad enough, you'd say, Murray; but it
isn't the worst of it. I've just run up against another thing that is
threatening to raise merry hell in this valley."
"I know," said the hydrographer slowly. "You've been having a _seance_
with Steve Massingale. Leshington told me about it."
"What did he tell you?" Brouillard demanded half-angrily.
"Oh, nothing much; nothing to make you hot at him. He happened to be in
the other room when Massingale was here, and the door was open. He said
he gathered the notion that the young sorehead was trying to bully you."
"He was," was the brittle admission. "See here, Grizzy."
The thing to be seen was a small buckskin bag which, when opened, gave
up a paper packet folded like a medicine powder. The paper contained a
spoonful of dust and pellets of metal of a dull yellow lustre.
The hydrographer drew a long breath and fingered the nuggets.
"Gold--placer gold!" he exclaimed, and Brouillard nodded and went on to
tell how he had come by the bag and its contents.
"Massingale had an axe to grind, of course. You may remember that
Harding talked loosely about the Massingale opposition to the building
of the dam. There was nothing in it. The opposition was purely personal
and it was directed against Harding himself, with Amy Massingale for the
exciting cause."
"That girl?--the elemental brute!" Grislow broke in warmly. He knew the
miner's daughter fairly well by this time and, in common with every
other man on the staff, not excepting the staff's chief, would have
fought for her in any cause.
Brouillard nodded. "I don't know what Harding did, but Smith, the
Triangle-Circle foreman, tells me that Steve was on the war-path; he
told Harding when he left, last summer, that if he ever came back to the
Niquoia, he'd come to stay--and stay dead."
"I never did like Harding's sex attitude any too well," was the
hydrographer's definitive comment; and Brouillard went back to the
matter of the morning's _seance_ and its golden outcome.
"That is only a little side issue. Steve Massingale came to me this
morning with a proposal that was about as cold-blooded as a slap in the
face. Naturally, for good business reasons of their own, the Massingales
want to see the railroad built over War Arrow Pass and into the Niquoia.
In some way Steve has found out that I stand in pretty well with
President Ford and the Pacific Southwestern people. His first break was
to offer to incorporate the 'Little Susan' and to give me a block of the
stock if I'd pull Ford's leg on the Extension proposition."
"Well?" queried Grislow. "The railroad over War Arrow Pass would be the
biggest thing that ever happened for our job here. If it did nothing
else, it would make us independent of these boomers that are coming in
to sell us material at their own prices."
"Exactly. But my hands are tied; and, besides, Massingale's offer was a
rank bribe. You can imagine what I told him--that I could neither accept
stock in his mine nor say anything to influence the railroad people;
that my position as chief engineer for the government cut me out both
ways. Then he began to bully and pulled the club on me."
Again Grislow's smile was jocose.
"You haven't been tumbling into the ditch with Leshington and Griffith
and the rest of us and making love to the little sister, have you?" he
jested.
"Don't be a fool if you can help it," was the curt rejoinder. "And don't
give yourself leave to say things like that about Amy Massingale. She
is too good and sweet and clean-hearted to be dragged into this mix-up,
even by implication. Do you get that, Murray?"
"Oh, yes; it's only another way of saying that I'm one of the fools. Go
on with the Stephen end of it."
"Well, when I turned him down, young Massingale began to bluster and to
say that I'd have to boost the railroad deal, whether I wanted to or
not. I told him he couldn't prove it, and he said he would show me, if
I'd take half an hour's walk up the valley with him. I humored him, more
to get quit of him than for any other reason, and on the way past the
camp he borrowed a frying-pan at one of the cook shacks. You know that
long, narrow sand-bar in the river just below the mouth of the upper
canyon?"
Grislow nodded.
"That is where we went for the proof. Massingale dipped up a panful of
the bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, and
you have the results there in that paper. That bar is comparatively rich
placer dirt."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated the map-maker. "Comparatively rich, you
say?--and you washed this spoonful out of a single pan?"
"Keep your head," said Brouillard coolly. "Massingale explained that I
had happened to make a ten-strike; that the bar wasn't any such bonanza
as that first result would indicate. I proved that, too, by washing some
more of it without getting any more than a few 'colors.' But the fact
remains: it's placer ground."
It was at this point that the larger aspect of the fact launched itself
upon the hydrographer.
"A gold strike!" he gasped. "And we--we're planning to drown it under
two hundred feet of a lake!"
Brouillard's laugh was harsh.