"Yes; I'll chance even that."
"Very well, then: once upon a time--it was a good while ago, I'm
afraid--you were a very upright young man, and your uprightness made you
just a little bit austere--for yourself, if not for others. At that time
you were busy whittling out heroic little ideals and making idols of
them; and I am quite sure you were spelling duty with a capital 'D' and
that you would have been properly horrified if a sister of yours had
permitted an unchaperoned acquaintance like--well, like ours."
"Go on," he said, neither affirming nor denying.
"Also, at that time you thought that a man's work in the world was the
biggest thing that ever existed, the largest possible order that could
be given, and the work and everything about it had to be transparently
honest and openly aboveboard. You would cheerfully have died for a
principle in those days, and you would have allowed the enemy to cut you
up into cunning little inch cubes before you would have admitted that
any pigeon was ever made to be plucked."
He was smiling mirthlessly, with the black mustaches taking the sardonic
upcurve.
"Then what happened?"
"One of two things, or maybe both of them. You were pushed out into the
life race with some sort of a handicap. I don't know what it was--or is.
Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll hazard the other guess. You discovered that there were women
in the world and that there was something in you, or about you, that was
sufficiently attractive to make them sit up and be nice to you. For some
reason--perhaps it was the handicap--you thought you'd be safer in the
unwomaned wilderness and so you came out here to the 'wild and woolly.'
But even here you're not safe. There is a passable trail over War Arrow
Pass and at a pinch an automobile can cross the Buckskin."
When she stopped he nodded gravely. "It is all true enough. You haven't
added anything more than a graceful little touch here and there. Who has
been telling you all these things about me?"
She clapped her hands in delighted self-applause.
"You don't deny them?"
"I wouldn't be so impolite."
In the turning of a leaf her mood changed and the wide-open, fearless
eyes were challenging him soberly.
"You _can't_ deny them."
He tried to break away from the level-eyed, accusing gaze--tried and
found it impossible.
"I asked you who has been gossiping about me; not Grizzy?"
"No, not Murray Grislow; it was the man you think you know best in all
the world--who is also the one you probably know the least--yourself."
"Good Heavens! am I really such a transparent egoist as all that?"
"All men are egoists," she answered calmly. "In some the ego is sound
and clear-eyed and strong; in others it is weak--in the same way that
passion is weak; it will sacrifice all it has or hopes to have in some
sudden fury of self-assertion."
She sat up and put her hands to her hair, and he was free to look away,
down upon the great ditch where the endless chain of concrete buckets
linked itself to the overhead carrier like a string of mechanical
insects, each with its pinch of material to add to the deep and
wide-spread foundations of the dam. Across the river a group of hidden
sawmills sent their raucous song like the high-pitched shrilling of
distant locusts to tremble upon the still air of the afternoon. In the
middle distance the camp-town city, growing now by leaps and bounds,
spread its roughly indicated streets over the valley level, the yellow
shingled roofs of the new structures figuring as patches of vivid paint
under the slanting rays of the sun. Far away to the right the dark-green
liftings of the Quadjenai Hills cut across from mountain to river; at
the foot of the ridge the tall chimney-stacks of the new cement plant
were rising, and from the quarries beyond the plant the dull thunder of
the blasts drifted up to the Chigringo heights like a sign from the
mysterious underworld of Navajo legend.
This was not Brouillard's first visit to the cabin on the Massingale
claim by many. In the earliest stages of the valley activities Smith,
the Buckskin cattleman, had been Amy Massingale's escort to the
reclamation camp--"just a couple o' lookers," in Smith's phrase--and the
unconventional altitudes had done the rest. From that day forward the
young woman had hospitably opened her door to Brouillard and his
assistants, and any member of the corps, from Leshington the morose, who
commonly came to sit in solemn silence on the porch step, to Griffith,
who had lost his youthful heart to Miss Massingale on his first visit,
was welcome.
Of the five original members of the staff and the three later additions
to it, in the persons of the paymaster, the cost-keeper, and young
Altwein, who had come in as Grislow's field assistant, Brouillard was
the one who climbed oftenest up the mountain-side trail from the camp--a
trail which was becoming by this time quite well defined. He knew he
went oftener than any of the others, and yet he felt that he knew Amy
Massingale less intimately and was far and away more hopelessly
entangled than--well, than Grislow, for example, whose visits to the
mine cabin came next in the scale of frequency and whose ready wit and
gentle cynicism were his passports in any company.
For himself, Brouillard had not been pointedly analytical as yet. From
the moment when Amy and Smith had reined up at the door of his office
shack and he had welcomed them both, it had seemed the most natural
thing in the world to fall under the spell of enchantment. He knew next
to nothing of the young woman's life story; he had not cared to know. It
had not occurred to him to wonder how the daughter of a man who drilled
and shot the holes in his own mine should have the gifts and
belongings--when she chose to display them--of a woman of a much wider
world. It was enough for him that she was piquantly attractive in any
character and that he found her marvellously stimulating and uplifting.
On the days when the devil of moroseness and irritability possessed and
maddened him he could climb to the cabin on high Chigringo and find
sanity. It was a keen joy to be with her, and up to the present this had
sufficed.
"Egoism is merely another name for the expression of a vital need," he
said, after the divagating pause, defining the word more for his own
satisfaction than in self-defense.
"You may put it in that way if you please," she returned gravely. "What
is your need?"
He stated it concisely. "Money--a lot of it."
"How singular!" she laughed. "I need money, too--a lot of it."
"You?"
"Yes, I."
"What would you do with it? Buy corner lots in Niqoyastcadjeburg?"
"No, indeed; I'd buy a farm in the Blue-grass--two of them, maybe."
"What an ambition for a girl! Have you ever been in the Blue-grass
country?"
She got out of the hammock and came to lean, with her hands behind her,
against the opposite porch post. "That was meant to humiliate me, and I
sha'n't forget it. You know well enough that I have never been east of
the Mississippi."
"I didn't know it. You never tell me anything about yourself."
Again the mood shutter clicked and her smile was the calm mask of
discerning wisdom.
"Persons with well-developed egos don't care to listen to folk-stories,"
she rejoined, evading the tentative invitation openly. "But tell me,
what would you do with your pot of rainbow gold--if you should find it?"
Brouillard rose and straightened himself with his arms over his head
like an athlete testing his muscles for the record-breaking event.
"What would I do? A number of things. But first of all, I think, I'd buy
the privilege of telling some woman that I love her."
This time her laugh was frankly disparaging. "As if you could!" she
said, with a lip curl that set his blood afire--"as if any woman worth
while would care two pins for your wretched pot of gold!"
"Oh, I didn't mean it quite that way," he hastened to explain. "I said:
'Buy the privilege.' If you knew the conditions you would understand me
when I say that the money must come first."
She was silent for so long a time that he looked at his watch and
thought of going. But at the deciding instant she held him with a
low-spoken question.
"Does it date back to the handicap? You needn't tell me if you don't
want to."
"It does. And there is no reason why I shouldn't tell you the simple
fact. When my father died he left me a debt--a debt of honor; and it
must be paid. Until it is paid--but I am sure you understand."
"Quite fully," she responded quickly, and now there was no trace of
levity in the sweetly serious tone. "Is it much?--so much that you
can't----"
He nodded and sat down again on the porch step. "Yes, it is big enough
to go in a class by itself--in round numbers, a hundred thousand
dollars."
"Horrors!" she gasped. "And you are carrying that millstone? Must you
carry it?"
"If you knew the circumstances you would be the first to say that I must
carry it, and go on carrying it to the end of the chapter."
"But--but you'll _never_ be free!"
"Not on a government salary," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, it
takes more than half of the salary to pay the premiums on--pshaw! I'm
boring you shamelessly for the sake of proving up on my definition of
the eternal ego. You ought not to have encouraged me. It's quite
hopeless--the handicap business--unless some good angel should come
along with a miracle or two. Let's drop it."
She was looking beyond him and her voice was quick with womanly sympathy
when she said: "If you could drop it--but you can't. And it changes
everything for you, distorts everything, colors your entire life. It's
heart-breaking!"
This was dangerous ground for him and he knew it. Sympathy applied to a
rankling wound may figure either as the healing oil or the maddening
wine. It was the one thing he had hitherto avoided, resolutely,
half-fearfully, as a good general going into battle marches around a
kennel of sleeping dogs. But now the under-depths were stirring to a new
awakening. In the ardor of young manhood he had taken up the vicarious
burden dutifully, and at that time his renunciation of the things that
other men strove for seemed the lightest of the many fetterings. But now
love for a woman was threatening to make the renunciation too grievous
to be borne.
"How did you know?" he queried curiously. "It does change things; it has
changed them fiercely in the past few weeks. We smile at the old fable
of a man selling his soul for a ready-money consideration, but there are
times when I'd sell anything I've got, save one, for a chance at the
freedom that other men have--and don't value."
"What is the one thing you wouldn't sell?" she questioned, and
Brouillard chose to discover a gently quickened interest in the
clear-seeing eyes.
"My love for the--for some woman. I'm saving that, you know. It is the
only capital I'll have when the big debt is paid."
"Do you want me to be frivolous or serious?" she asked, looking down at
him with the grimacing little smile that always reminded him of a
caress. "A little while ago you said 'some woman,' and now you say it
again, making it cautiously impersonal. That is nice of you--not to
particularize; but I have been wondering whether she is or isn't worth
the effort--and the reservation you make. Because it is all in that, you
know. You can do and be what you want to do and be if you only want to
hard enough."
He looked up quickly.
"Do you really believe that? What about a man's natural limitations?"
"Poof!" she said, blowing the word away as if it were a bit of
thistle-down. "It is only the woman's limitations that count, not the
man's. The only question is this: Is the one only and incomparable she
worth the effort? Would you give a hundred thousand dollars for the
privilege of being able to say to her: 'Come, dear, let's go and get
married'?"
He was looking down, chiefly because he dared not look up, when he
answered soberly: "She is worth it many times over; her price is above
rubies. Money, much or little, wouldn't be in it."
"That is better--much better. Now we may go on to the ways and means;
they are all in the man, not in the things, 'not none whatsoever,' as
Tig would say. Let me show you what I mean. Three times within my
recollection my father has been worth considerably more than you owe,
and three time she has--well, it's gone. And now he is going to make
good again when the railroad comes."
Brouillard got up, thrust his hands into the pockets of his
working-coat, and faced about as if he had suddenly remembered that he
was wasting the government's time.
"I must be going back down the hill," he said. And then, without
warning: "What if I should tell you that the railroad is not coming to
the Niquoia, Amy?"
To his utter amazement the blue eyes filled suddenly. But the owner of
the eyes was winking the tears away and laughing before he could put the
amazement into words.
"You shouldn't hit out like that when one isn't looking; it's wicked,"
she protested. "Besides, the railroad _is_ coming; it's got to come."
"It is still undecided," he told her mechanically. "Mr. Ford is coming
over with the engineers to have a conference on the ground with--with
the Cortwright people. I am expecting him any day."
"The Cortwright people want the road, don't they?" she asked.
"Yes, indeed; they are turning heaven and earth over to get it."
"And the government?"
"The department is holding entirely aloof, as it should. Every one in
the Reclamation Service knows that no good can possibly come of any
effort to force the region ahead of its normal and natural development.
And, besides, none of us here in the valley want to help blow the
Cortwright bubble any bigger than it has to be."
"Then you will advise against the building of the Extension?"
Instead of answering her question he asked one of his own.
"What does it mean to you--to you, personally, and apart from the money
your father might make out of it, Amy?"
She hesitated a moment and then met the shrewd scrutiny of his gaze with
open candor.
"The money is only a means to an end--as yours will be. You know very
well what I meant when I told you that three times we have been obliged
to come back to the mountains to--to try again. I dreaded the coming of
your camp; I dread a thousand times more the other changes that are
coming--the temptations that a mushroom city will offer. This time
father has promised me that when he can make his stake he will go back
to Kentucky and settle down; and he will keep his promise. More than
that, Stevie has promised me that he will go, too, if he can have a
stock-farm and raise fine horses--his one healthy ambition. Now you know
it all."
He reached up from the lower step where he was standing and took her
hand.
"Yes; and I know more than that: I know that you are a mighty brave
little girl and that your load is heavier than mine--worlds heavier. But
you're going to win out; if not to-day or to-morrow, why, then, the day
after. It's written in the book."
She returned his hand-grip of encouragement impulsively and smiled down
upon him through quick-springing tears.
"You'll win out, too, Victor, because it's in you to do it. I'm sure of
it--I _know_ it. There is only one thing that scares me."
"Name it," he said. "I'm taking everything that comes to-day--from you."
"You are a strong man; you have a reserve of strength that is greater
than most men's full gift; you can cut and slash your way to the thing
you really want, and nothing can stop you. But--you'll forgive me for
being plain, won't you?--there is a little, just the least little, bit
of desperation in the present point of view, and----"
"Say it," he commanded when she hesitated.
"I hardly know how to say it. It's just a little shudder--inside, you
know--as you might have when you see a railroad train rushing down the
mountain and think what would happen if one single, inconsequent wheel
should climb the rail. There were ideals in the beginning; you admitted
it, didn't you? And they are not as distinct now as they used to be. You
didn't say that, but I know.... Stand them up again, Victor; don't let
them fall down in the dust or in the--in the mud. It's got to be clean
money, you know; the money that is going to give you the chance to say:
'Come, girl, let's go and get married.' You won't forget that, will
you?"
He relinquished the hand of encouragement because he dared not hold it
any longer, and turned away to stare absently at the timbered tunnel
mouth whence a faint clinking of hammer upon steel issued with
monotonous regularity.
"I wish you hadn't said that, Amy--about the ideals."
"Why shouldn't I say it? I _had_ to say it."
"I can't afford to play with too many fine distinctions. I have accepted
the one great handicap. I may owe it to myself--and to some others--not
to take on any more."
"I don't know what you mean now," she said simply.
"Perhaps it is just as well that you don't. Let's talk about something
else; about the railroad. I told you that President Ford is coming over
to have a wrestle with the Cortwright people, but I didn't tell you that
he has already had his talk with Mr. Cortwright in person--in Chicago.
He hasn't decided; he won't decide until he has looked the ground over
and had a chance to confer with me."
She bridged all the gaps with swift intuition. "He means to give you the
casting vote? He will build the Extension if you advise it?"
"It is something like that, I fancy; yes."
"And you think--you feel----"
"It is a matter of absolute indifference to me, officially. But in any
event, Ford would ask for nothing more than a friendly opinion."
"Then it will lie in your hand to make us rich or to keep us poor," she
laughed. "Be a good god-in-the-car, please, and your petitioners will
ever pray." Then, with an instant return to seriousness: "But you
mustn't think of that--of course, you won't--with so many other and
greater things to consider."
"On the contrary, I shall think very pointedly of that; pointedly and
regretfully--because your brother has made it practically impossible for
me to help."
"My brother?" with a little gasp.
"Yes. He offered to buy my vote with a block of 'Little Susan' stock.
That wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't talked about it--told other
people what he was going to do. But he did that, as well."
He felt rather than saw that she had turned quickly to face the porch
post, that she was hiding her face in the crooking of an arm. It melted
him at once.
"Don't cry; I was a brute to say such a thing as that to you," he began,
but she stopped him.
"No," she denied bravely. "The truth may hurt--it _does_ hurt awfully;
but it can't be brutal. And you are right. Stevie _has_ made it
impossible."
An awkward little silence supervened and once more Brouillard dragged
his watch from its pocket.
"I'm like the awkward country boy," he said with quizzical humor. "I
really must go and I don't know how to break away." Then he went back
to the closed topic. "I guess the other thing was brutal, too--what I
said about your brother's having made it impossible. Other things being
equal----"
Again she stopped him.
"When Mr. Ford comes, you must forget what Stevie said and what I have
said. Good-by."
* * * * *
An hour later, when the afternoon shadow of Jack's Mountain was lying
all across the shut-in valley and pointing like the angle of a huge
gnomon to the Quadjenai Hills, Brouillard was closeted in his log-built
office quarters with a big, fair-faced man, whose rough tweeds and
unbrushed, soft hat proclaimed him fresh from the dust-dry reaches of
the Quesado trail.
"It is your own opinion that I want, Victor," the fair-faced man was
saying, "not the government engineer's. Can we make the road pay if we
bring it here? That is a question which you can answer better than any
other living man. You are here on the ground and you've been here from
the first."
"You've had it out with Cortwright?" Brouillard asked. And then: "Where
is he now? in Chicago?"
"No. He is on his way to the Niquoia, coming over in his car from El
Gato. Says he made it that way once before and is willing to bet that it
is easier than climbing War Arrow. But never mind J. Wesley. You are the
man I came to see."
"I can give you the facts," was the quiet rejoinder. "While the
Cortwright boom lasts there will be plenty of incoming business--and
some outgoing. When the bubble bursts--as it will have to when the dam
is completed, if it doesn't before--you'll quit until the Buckskin fills
up with settlers who can give you crops to move. That is the situation
in a nutshell, all but one little item. There is a mine up on
Chigringo--Massingale's--with a good few thousand tons of pay ore on the
dump. Where there is one mine there may be more, later on; and I don't
suppose that even such crazy boomers as the Cortwright crowd will care
to put in a gold reduction plant. So you would have the ore to haul to
the Red Butte smelters."
A smile wrinkled at the corners of the big man's eyes.
"You are dodging the issue, Victor, and you know it," he objected. "What
I want is your personal notion. If you were the executive committee of
the Pacific Southwestern, would you, or would you not, build the
Extension? That's the point I'm trying to make."
Brouillard got up and went to the window. The gnomon shadow of Jack's
Mountain had spread over the entire valley, and its southern limb had
crept up Chigringo until its sharply defined line was resting upon the
Massingale cabin. When he turned back to the man at the desk he was
frowning thoughtfully, and his eyes were the eyes of one who sees only
the clearly etched lines of a picture which obscures all outward and
visual objects ... the picture he saw was of a sweet-faced young woman,
laughing through her tears and saying: "Besides, the railroad _is_
coming; it's _got_ to come."
"If you put it that way," he said to the man who was waiting, "if you
insist on pulling my private opinion out by the roots, you may have it.
_I'd_ build the Extension."
VI
Mirapolis
During the strenuous weeks when Camp Niquoia's straggling street was
acquiring plank sidewalks and getting itself transformed into Chigringo
Avenue, with a double row of false-fronted "emporiums" to supplant the
shack shelters, Monsieur Poudrecaulx Bongras, late of the San Francisco
tenderloin, opened the camp's first counter-grill.
Finding monsieur's name impossible in both halves of it, the camp
grinned and rechristened him "Poodles." Later, discovering his dual gift
of past mastership in potato frying and coffee making, the camp gave him
vogue. Out of the vogue sprang in swift succession a cafe with
side-tables, a restaurant with private dining-rooms, and presently a
commodious hotel, where the food was excellent, the appointments
luxurious, and where Jack--clothed and in his right mind and with money
in his hand--was as good as his master.
It was in one of Bongras's private dining-rooms that Mr. J. Wesley
Cortwright was entertaining Brouillard, with Miss Genevieve to make a
harmonizing third at the circular table up to the removal of the cloth
and the serving of the cigars and a second cold bottle.
The little dinner had been a gustatory triumph; Miss Genevieve had added
the charm of lightness at moments when her father threatened to let the
money clink become painfully audible; and the cigars were gold-banded.
Nevertheless, when Miss Cortwright had gone up-stairs, and the waiter
would have refilled his glass, Brouillard shook his head.
If the millionaire saw the refusal he was too wise to remark it.
Altogether, Brouillard was finding his first impressions of Mr.
Cortwright readjusting themselves with somewhat confusing rapidity. It
was not that there was any change in the man. Charactering the genial
host like a bachelor of hospitality, he was still the frank, outspoken
money-maker, hot upon the trail of the nimble dollar. Yet there was a
change of some kind. Brouillard had marked it on the day, a fortnight
earlier, when (after assuring himself morosely that he would not) he had
gone down to the lower canyon portal to see the Cortwright touring-car
finish its second race across the desert from El Gato.