here to carry out the plans of the Reclamation Service--which are more
far-reaching and of a good bit greater consequence than a dozen
placer-mines. Not that it didn't make me grab for hand-holds for a
minute or two, mind you. I wasn't quite as cold about it as I'm asking
you to be, and I guess Massingale had calculated pretty carefully on the
dramatic effect of his little shock. Anyway, he drove the peg down good
and hard. If I would jump in and pull every possible string to hurry the
railroad over the range, and keep on pulling them, the secret of the
placer bar would remain a secret. Otherwise he, Stephen Massingale,
would give it away, publish it, advertise it to the world. You know
what that would mean for us, Murray."
"My Lord! I should say so! We'd have Boomtown-on-the-pike right now,
with all the variations! Every white man in the camp would chuck his job
in the hollow half of a minute and go to gravel washing!"
"That's it precisely," Brouillard acquiesced gloomily. "Massingale is a
young tough, but he is shrewd enough, when he is sober. He had me dead
to rights, and he knew it. 'You don't want any gold camp starting up
here in the bottom of your reservoir,' he said; and I had to admit it."
Grislow had found a magnifying-glass in the drawer of the mapping table,
and he was holding it in focus over the small collection of grain gold
and nuggets. In the midst of the eager examination he looked up suddenly
to say: "Hold on a minute. Why is Steve proposing to give this thing
away? Why isn't he working the bar himself?"
"He explained that phase of it, after a fashion--said that placer-mining
was always more or less of a gamble and that they had a sure thing of it
in the 'Little Susan.' Of course, if the thing had to be given away, he
and his father would avail themselves of their rights as discoverers and
take their chance with the crowd for the sake of the ready money they
might get out of it. Otherwise they'd be content to let it alone and
stick to their legitimate business, which is quartz-mining."
"And to do that successfully they've got to have the railroad. Say,
Victor, I'm beginning to acquire a great and growing respect for Mr.
Stephen Massingale. This field is too small for him; altogether too
small. He ought to get a job with some of the malefactors of great
wealth. How did you settle it finally?"
"Massingale was too shrewd to try to push me over the edge while there
seemed to be a fairly good chance that I would walk over of my own
accord. He told me to take a week or two and think about it. We dropped
the matter by common consent after we left the bar in the Quadjenai
bend, and on the way down the valley Massingale pitched in a bit of
information out of what seemed to be sheer good-will. It seems that he
and his father have done a lot of test drilling up and down the side of
Chigringo at one time and another, and he told me that there is a bed of
micaceous shale under our south anchorage, cautioning me not to let the
excavation stop until we had gone through it."
"Well! That was pretty decent of him."
"Yes; and it shows that Harding was lying when he said that the
Massingales were opposing the reclamation project. They are frankly in
favor of it. Irrigation in the Buckskin means population; and population
will bring the railroad, sooner or later. In the matter of hurrying the
track-laying, Massingale is only adopting modern business methods. He
has a club and he is using it."
Grislow was biting the end of his penholder thoughtfully.
"What are you going to do about it, Victor?" he asked at length. "We
can't stand for any more chaos than the gods have already doped out for
us, can we?"
Brouillard took another long minute at the office window before he said:
"What would you do if you were in my place, Murray?"
But at this the map-maker put up his hands as if to ward off a blow.
"No, you don't!" he laughed. "I can at least refuse to be that kind of a
fool. Go and hunt you a professional conscience keeper; I went out of
that business for keeps in my sophomore year. But I'll venture a small
prophecy: We'll have the railroad--and you'll pull for it. And then,
whether Massingale tells or doesn't tell, the golden secret will leak
out. And after that, the deluge."
IV
A Fire of Little Sticks
Two days after the arrival of the letter from Washington announcing the
approaching invasion of private capital, Brouillard, returning from a
horseback trip into the Buckskin, where Anson and Griffith were setting
grade stakes for the canal diggers, found a visitor awaiting him in the
camp headquarters office.
One glance at the thick-bodied, heavy-faced man chewing an extinct cigar
while he made himself comfortable in the only approach to a lounging
chair that the office afforded was sufficient to awaken an alert
antagonism. Quick to found friendships or enmities upon the intuitive
first impression, Brouillard's acknowledgment was curt and
business-brusque when the big man introduced himself without taking the
trouble to get out of his chair.
"My name is Hosford and I represent the Niquoia Improvement Company as
its manager and resident engineer," said the lounger, shifting the dead
cigar from one corner of his hard-bitted mouth to the other. "You're
Brillard, the government man, I take it?"
"Brouillard, if you please," was the crisp correction. And then with a
careful effacement of the final saving trace of hospitality in tone or
manner: "What can we do for you, Mr. Hosford?"
"A good many things, first and last. I'm two or three days ahead of my
outfit, and you can put me up somewhere until I get a camp of my own.
You've got some sort of an engineers' mess, I take it?"
"We have," said Brouillard briefly. With Anson and Griffith absent on
the field-work, there were two vacancies in the staff mess. Moreover,
the law of the desert prescribes that not even an enemy shall be refused
bread and bed. "You'll make yourself at home with us, of course," he
added, and he tried to say it without making it sound too much like a
challenge.
"All right; so much for that part of it," said the self-invited guest.
"Now for the business end of the deal--why don't you sit down?"
Brouillard planted himself behind his desk and began to fill his
blackened office pipe, coldly refusing Hosford's tender of a cigar.
"You were speaking of the business matter," he suggested bluntly.
"Yes. I'd like to go over your plans for the power dam in the upper
canyon. If they look good to me I'll adopt them."
Brouillard paused to light his pipe before he replied.
"Perhaps we'd better clear away the underbrush before we begin on the
standing timber, Mr. Hosford," he said, when the tobacco was glowing
militantly in the pipe bowl. "Have you been given to understand that
this office is in any sense a tail to your Improvement Company's kite?"
"I haven't been 'given to understand' anything," was the gruff
rejoinder. "Our company has acquired certain rights in this valley, and
I'm taking it for granted that you've had the situation doped out to
you. It won't be worth your while to quarrel with us, Mr. Brouillard."
"I am very far from wishing to quarrel with anybody," said Brouillard,
but his tone belied the words. "At the same time, if you think that we
are going to do your engineering work, or any part of it, for you, you
are pretty severely mistaken. Our own job is fully big enough to keep us
busy."
"You're off," said the big man coolly. "Somebody has bungled in giving
you the dope. You want to keep your job, don't you?"
"That is neither here nor there. What we are discussing at present is
the department's attitude toward your enterprise. I shall be exceeding
my instructions if I make that attitude friendly to the detriment of my
own work."
The new resident manager sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar
reflectively, staring up at the log beaming of the office ceiling. When
he began again he did not seem to think it worth while to shift his gaze
from the abstractions.
"You're just like all the other government men I've ever had to do
business with, Brouillard; pig-headed, obstinate, blind as bats to their
own interests. I didn't especially want to begin by knocking you into
line, but I guess it'll have to be done. In the first place, let me tell
you that there are all kinds of big money behind this little sky-rocket
of ours here in the Niquoia: ten millions, twenty millions, thirty
millions, if they're needed."
Brouillard shook his head. "I can't count beyond a hundred, Mr.
Hosford."
"All right; then I'll get you on the other side. Suppose I should tell
you that practically all of your bosses are in with us; what then?"
"Your stockholders' listings concern me even less than your
capitalization. We are miles apart yet."
Again the representative of Niquoia Improvement took time to shift the
extinct cigar.
"I guess the best way to get you is to send a little wire to
Washington," he said reflectively. "How does that strike you?"
"I haven't the slightest interest in what you may do or fail to do,"
said Brouillard. "At the same time, as I have already said, I don't wish
to quarrel with you or with your company."
"Ah! that touched you, didn't it?"
"Not in the sense you are imagining; no. Send your wire if you like. You
may have the use of the government telegraph. The office is in the
second shack north of this."
"Still you say you don't want to scrap?"
"Certainly not. As you have intimated, we shall have to do business
together as buyer and seller. I merely wished to make it plain that the
Reclamation Service doesn't put its engineering department at the
disposal of the Niquoia Improvement Company."
"But you have made the plans for this power plant, haven't you?"
"Yes; and they are the property of the department. If you want them,
I'll turn them over to you upon a proper order from headquarters."
"That's a little more like it. Where did you say I'd find your wire
office?"
Brouillard gave the information a second time, and as Hosford went out,
Grislow came in and took his place at the mapping table.
"Glad you got back in time to save my life," he remarked pointedly, with
a sly glance at his chief. "He's been ploughing furrows up and down my
little potato patch all day."
"Humph! Digging for information, I suppose?" grunted Brouillard.
"Just that; and he's been getting it, too. Not out of me, particularly,
but out of everybody. Also, he was willing to impart a little. We're in
for the time of our lives, Victor."
"I know it," was the crabbed rejoinder.
"You don't know the tenth part of it," asserted the hydrographer slowly.
"It's a modest name, 'The Niquoia Improvement Company,' but it is going
to be like charity--covering a multitude of sins. Do you know what that
plank-faced organizer has got up his sleeve? He is going to build us a
neat, up-to-date little city right here in the middle of our midst. If I
hadn't made him believe that I was only a draughtsman, he would have
had me out with a transit, running the lines for the streets."
"A city?--in this reservoir bottom? I guess not. He was only stringing
you to kill time, Grizzy."
"Don't you fool yourself!" exclaimed the map-maker. "He's got the plans
in his grip. We're going to be on a little reservation set apart for us
by the grace of God and the kindness of these promoters. The remainder
of the valley is laid off into cute little squares and streets, with
everything named and numbered, ready to be listed in the brokers'
offices. You may not be aware of it, but this palatial office building
of ours fronts on Chigringo Avenue."
"Stuff!" said Brouillard. "What has all this bubble blowing got to do
with the building of a temporary power dam and the setting up of a
couple of cement kilns?"
Grislow laid his pen aside and whirled around on his working-stool.
"Don't you make any easy-going mistake, Victor," he said earnestly. "The
cement and power proposition is only a side issue. These new people are
going to take over the sawmills, open up quarries, build a stub railroad
to the Hophra mines, grade a practicable stage road over the range to
Quesado, and put on a fast-mule freight line to serve until the railroad
builds in. Wouldn't that set your teeth on edge?"
"I can't believe it, Murray. It's a leaf out of the book of Bedlam! Take
a fair shot at it and see where the bullet lands: this entire crazy fake
is built upon one solitary, lonesome fact--the fact that we're here,
with a job on our hands big enough to create an active, present-moment
market for labor and material. There is absolutely nothing else behind
the bubble blowing; if we were not here the Niquoia Improvement Company
would never have been heard of!"
Grislow laughed. "Your arguing that twice two makes four doesn't change
the iridescent hue of the bubble," he volunteered. "If big money has
seen a chance to skin somebody, the mere fact that the end of the world
is due to come along down the pike some day isn't going to cut any
obstructing figure. We'll all be buying and selling corner lots in
Hosford's new city before we're a month older. Don't you believe it?"
"I'll believe it when I see it," was Brouillard's reply; and with this
the matter rested for the moment.
It was later in the day, an hour or so after the serving of the hearty
supper in the engineers' mess tent, that Brouillard was given to see
another and still less tolerable side of his temporary guest. Hosford
had come into the office to plant himself solidly in the makeshift
easy-chair for the smoking of a big, black, after-supper cigar.
"I've been looking over your rules and regulations, Brouillard," he
began, after an interval of silence which Brouillard had been careful
not to break. "You're making a capital mistake in trying to transplant
the old Connecticut blue laws out here. Your working-men ought to have
the right to spend their money in any way that suits 'em."
Brouillard was pointedly occupying himself at his desk, but he looked up
long enough to say: "Whiskey, you mean?"
"That and other things. They tell me that you don't allow any open
gambling, or any women here outside of the families of the workmen."
"We don't," was the short rejoinder.
"That won't hold water after we get things fairly in motion."
"It will have to hold water, so far as we are concerned, if I have to
build a stockade around the camp," snapped Brouillard.
Hosford's heavy face wrinkled itself in a mirthless smile. "You're
nutty," he remarked. "When I find a man bearing down hard on all the
little vices, it always makes me wonder what's the name of the corking
big one he is trying to cover up."
Since there was obviously no peaceful reply to be made to this,
Brouillard bent lower over his work and said nothing. At every fresh
step in the forced acquaintance the new-comer was painstakingly
developing new antagonisms. Sooner or later, Brouillard knew, it would
come to an open rupture, but he was hoping that the actual hostilities
could be postponed until after Hosford had worn out his temporary
welcome as a guest in the engineers' mess.
For a time the big man in the easy-chair smoked on in silence. Then he
began again:
"Say, Brouillard, I saw one little girl to-day that didn't belong
to your workmen's-family outfit, and she's a peach; came riding
down the trail with her brother from that mine up on the south
mountain--Massingale's, isn't it? By Jove! she fairly made my mouth
water!"
Inasmuch as no man can read field-notes when the page has suddenly
become a red blur, Brouillard looked up.
"You are my guest, in a way, Mr. Hosford; for that reason I can't very
well tell you what I think of you." So much he was able to say quietly.
Then the control mechanism burned out in a flash of fiery rage and he
cursed the guest fluently and comprehensively, winding up with a crude
and savage threat of dissection and dismemberment if he should ever
venture so much as to name Miss Massingale again in the threatener's
hearing.
Hosford sat up slowly, and his big face turned darkly red.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he broke out. "So you're _that_ kind of a
fire-eater, are you? Lord, Lord! I didn't suppose anything like that
ever happened outside of the ten-cent shockers. Wake up, man; this is
the twentieth century we're living in. Don't look at me that way!"
But the wave of insane wrath was already subsiding, and Brouillard, half
ashamed of the momentary lapse into savagery, was once more scowling
down at the pages of his note-book. Further along, when the succeeding
silence had been undisturbed for five full minutes, he began to realize
that the hot Brouillard temper, which he had heretofore been able to
keep within prudent bounds, had latterly been growing more and more
rebellious. He could no longer be sure of what he would say or do under
sudden provocation. True, he argued, the provocation in the present
instance had been sufficiently maddening; but there had been other
upflashings of the murderous inner fire with less to excuse them.
Hosford finished his cigar, and when he tossed the butt out through the
opened window, Brouillard hoped he was going. But the promoter-manager
made no move other than to take a fresh cigar from his pocket case and
light it. Brouillard worked on silently, ignoring the big figure in the
easy-chair by the window, and striving to regain his lost equilibrium.
To have shown Hosford the weakness of the control barriers was bad
enough, but to have pointed out the exact spot at which they were most
easily assailable was worse. He thought it would be singular if Hosford
should not remember how and where to strike when the real conflict
should begin, and he was properly humiliated by the reflection that he
had rashly given the enemy an advantage.
He was calling Hosford "the enemy" now and making no ameliorating
reservations. That the plans of the boomers would speedily breed chaos,
and bring the blight of disorder and lawlessness upon the Niquoia
project and everything connected with it, he made no manner of doubt.
How was he to hold a camp of several hundred men in decent subjection
if the temptations and allurements of a boomers' city were to be brought
in and set down within arm's reach of the work on the dam? It seemed
blankly incredible that the department heads in Washington should
sanction such an invasion if they knew the full meaning of it.
The "if" gave him an idea. What if the boomers were taking an
unauthorized ell for their authorized inch? He had taken a telegraph pad
from the desk stationery rack and was composing his message of inquiry
when the door opened and Quinlan, the operator, came in with a
communication fresh from the Washington wire. The message was an
indirect reply to Hosford's telegraphed appeal to the higher powers.
Brouillard read it, stuck it upon the file, and took a roll of
blue-prints from the bottom drawer of his desk.
"Here are the drawings for your power installation, Mr. Hosford," he
said, handing the roll to the man in the chair. And a little later he
went out to smoke a pipe in the open air, leaving the message of inquiry
unwritten.
V
Symptomatic
For some few minutes after the gray-bearded, absent-eyed old man who had
been working at the mine forge had disappeared in the depths of the
tunnel upon finishing his job of drill pointing, the two on the cabin
porch made no attempt to resume the talk which had been broken by the
blacksmithing. But when the rumbling thunder of the ore-car which the
elder Massingale was pushing ahead of him into the mine had died away in
the subterranean distances Brouillard began again.
"I do get your point of view--sometimes," he said. "Or perhaps it would
be nearer the truth to say that I have had it now and then in times
past. Civilization, or what stands for it, does have a way of shrinking
into littleness, not to say cheapness, when one can get the proper
perspective. And your life up here on Chigringo has given you the
needful detached point of view."
The trouble shadows in the eyes of the young woman who was sitting in
the fish-net hammock gave place to a smile of gentle derision.
"Do you call _that_ civilization?" she demanded, indicating the
straggling new town spreading itself, map-like, in the valley below.
"I suppose it is--one form of it. At least it is civilization in the
making. Everything has to have some sort of a beginning."
Miss Massingale acquiesced in a little uptilt of her perfectly rounded
chin.
"Just the same, you don't pretend to say that you are enjoying it," she
said in manifest deprecation.
"Oh, I don't know. My work is down there, and a camp is a necessary
factor in it. You'd say that the more civilized the surroundings become,
the less need there would be for me to sit up nights to keep the lid on.
That would be the reasonable conclusion, wouldn't it?"
"If you were really trying to make the fact fit the theory--which you
are not--it would be a sheer, self-centred eye-shutting to all the
greater things that may be involved," she continued. "Don't you ever get
beyond that?"
"I did at first. When I learned a few weeks ago that the boomers had
taken hold of us in earnest and that we were due to acquire a real town
with all the trimmings, I was righteously hot. Apart from the added
trouble a wide-open town would be likely to give us in maintaining order
in the camp, it seemed so crudely unnecessary to start a pigeon-plucking
match at this distance from Wall Street."
"But now," she queried--"now, I suppose, you have become reconciled?"
"I am growing more philosophical, let us say. There are just about so
many pigeons to be plucked, anyway; they'd moult if they weren't
plucked. And it may as well be done here as on the Stock Exchange, when
you come to think of it."
"I like you least when you talk that way," said the young woman in the
hammock, with open-eyed frankness. "Do you do it as other men do?--just
to hear how it sounds?"
Brouillard, sitting on the top step of the porch, leaned his head
against the porch post and laughed.
"You know too much--a lot too much for a person of your tender years,"
he asserted. "Which names one more of the charming collection of
contradictions which your father or mother or somebody had the temerity
to label 'Amy,' sweetest and most seraphic of diminutives."
"If you don't like my name--" she began, and then she went off at
another tangent. "Please tell me why I am a 'collection of
contradictions.' Tig never says anything like that to me."
"'Tig,'" said Brouillard, "'Tig' Smith. Speaking of names, I've often
wondered how on earth our breezy friend of the Tri'-Circ' ever got such
a handle as that."
"It's his own name--or a part of it. His father was a country preacher
back in Tennessee, and I imagine he had the Smith feeling that
the surname wasn't very distinctive. So he named the poor boy
Tiglath-Pileser. Just the same, it is not to laugh," she went on in
friendly loyalty. "Tig can't help his name, and, anyway, he's the
vastest possible improvement on those old Assyrian gentlemen who were
the first to wear it."
Brouillard's gaze went past the shapely little figure in the string
hammock to lose itself in the far Timanyoni distances.
"You are a bundle of surprises," he said, letting the musing thought
slip into speech. "What can you possibly know about the Assyrians?"
She made a funny little grimace at him. "It was 'contradictions' a
moment ago and now it is 'surprises.' Which reminds me, you haven't told
me why I am a 'collection.'"
"I think you know well enough," he retorted. "The first time I saw
you--down at the Nick-wire ford with Tig, you remember--I tried to
recall which Madonna it is that has your mouth and eyes."
"Well, did you succeed in placing the lady?"
"No. Somehow, I haven't cared to since I've come to know you. You're
different--always different, and then--oh, well, comparisons are such
hopelessly inadequate things, anyway," he finished lamely.
"You are not getting on very well with the 'contradictions,'" she
demurred.
"Oh, I can catalogue them if you push me to it. One minute you are the
Madonna lady that I can't recall, calm, reposeful, truthful, and all
that, you know--so truthful that those childlike eyes of yours would
make a stuttering imbecile of the man who should come to you with a lie
in his mouth."
"And the next minute?" she prompted.
"The next minute you are a witch, laughing at the man's little
weaknesses, putting your finger on them as accurately as if you could
read his soul, holding them up to your ridicule and--what's much
worse--to his own. At such times your insight, or whatever you choose to
call it, is enough to give a man a fit of 'seeing things.'"
Her laugh was like a school-girl's, light-hearted, ringing, deliciously
unrestrained.
"What a picture!" she commented. And then: "I can draw a better one of
you, Monsieur Victor de Brouillard."
"Do it," he dared.
"It'll hurt your vanity."
"I haven't any."
"Oh, but you have! Don't you know that it is only the very vainest
people who say that?"
"Never mind; go on and draw your picture."