month ago this city-building fake looked as crazy to you as it still
does to those of us who haven't been invited to sit down and take a hand
in Mr. Cortwright's little game. You hooted at it, preached a little
about the gross immorality of it, swore a good bit about the effect it
was going to have on our working force. It was a crazy object-lesson in
modern greed, and all that."
"Well?"
"Now you seem to have gone over to the other side. You hobnob with
Cortwright and do office work for him. You know his fake is a fake; and
yet I overheard you boosting it the other night in Poodles's dining-room
to a tableful of money maniacs as if Cortwright were giving you a
rake-off."
Brouillard stiffened himself with a jerk as he paced beside his accuser,
but he kept his temper.
"You're an old friend, Grizzy, and a mighty good one--as I have had
occasion to prove. It is your privilege to ease your mind. Is that all?"
"No. You are letting Genevieve Cortwright make a fool of you. If you
were only half sane you'd see that she is a confirmed trophy hunter.
Why, she even gets down to young Griffith--and uses him to dig out
information about you. She----"
"Hold on, Murray; there's a limit, and you'll bear with me if I say that
you are working up to it now." Brouillard's jaw was set and the lines
between his eyes were deepening. "I don't know what you are driving at,
but you'd better call it off. I can take care of myself."
"If I thought you could--if I only thought you could," said Grislow
musingly. "But the indications all lean the other way. It would be all
right if you wanted to marry her and she wanted you to; but you
don't--and she doesn't. And, besides, there's Amy; you owe her
something, don't you?--or don't you? You needn't grit your teeth that
way. You are only getting a part of what is coming to you. 'Faithful are
the wounds of a friend,' you know."
"Yes. And when the Psalmist had admitted that, he immediately asked the
Lord not to let their precious balms break his head. You're all right,
Grizzy, but I'll pull through." Then, with a determined wrenching aside
of the subject: "Are you going up on Chigringo this afternoon?"
"I thought I would--yes. What shall I tell Miss Massingale when she asks
about you?"
"You will probably tell her the first idiotic thing that comes into the
back part of your head. And if you tell her anything pifflous about me
I'll lay for you some dark night with a pick handle."
Grislow laughed reminiscently. "She won't ask," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because the last time she did it I told her your scalp was dangling at
Miss Genevieve's belt."
They had reached the door of the log-built quarters and Brouillard spun
the jester around with a shoulder grip that was only half playful.
"If I believed you said any such thing as that I'd murder you!" he
exploded. "Perhaps you'll go and tell her that--you red-headed
blastoderm!"
"Sure," said the blastoderm, and they went apart, each to his dunnage
kit.
VIII
Table Stakes
There were a dozen business blocks under construction in Mirapolis, with
a proportional number of dwellings and suburban villas at various stages
in the race toward completion, when it began to dawn upon the collective
consciousness of a daily increasing citizenry that something was
missing. Garner, the real-estate plunger from Kansas City, first gave
the missing quantity its name. The distant thunder of the blasts
heralding the approach of the railroad had ceased between two days.
There was no panic; there was only the psychoplasmic moment for one.
Thus far there had been no waning of the fever of enthusiasm, no
slackening of the furious pace in the race for growth, and, in a way, no
lack of business. With money plentiful and credit unimpaired, with an
army of workmen to spend its weekly wage, and a still larger army of
government employees to pour a monthly flood into the strictly limited
pool of circulation, traffic throve, and in token thereof the saloons
and dance-halls never closed.
Up to the period of the silenced dynamite thunderings new industries
were projected daily, and investors, tolled in over the high mountain
trails or across the Buckskin in dust-encrusted automobiles by methods
best known to a gray-mustached adept in the art of promotion, thronged
the lobby of the Hotel Metropole and bought and sold Mirapolis "corners"
or "insides" on a steadily ascending scale of prices.
Not yet had the time arrived for selling before sunset that which had
been bought since sunrise. On the contrary, a strange mania for holding
on, for permanency, seemed to have become epidemic. Many of the
working-men were securing homes on the instalment plan. A good few of
the villas could boast parquetry floors and tiled bath-rooms. One
coterie of Chicagoans refused an advance of fifty per cent on a quarter
square of business earth and the next day decided to build a six-storied
office-building, with a ground-floor corner for the Niquoia National
Bank, commodious suites for the city offices of the power company, the
cement company, the lumber syndicate, and the water company, and an
entire floor to be set apart for the government engineers and
accountants. And it was quite in harmony with the spirit of the moment
that the building should be planned with modern conveniences and that
the chosen building material should be nothing less permanent than
monolithic concrete.
In harmony with the same spirit was the enterprise which cut great
gashes across the shoulder of Jack's Mountain in the search for precious
metal. Here the newly incorporated Buckskin Gold Mining and Milling
Company had discarded the old and slow method of prospecting with pick
and shovel, and power-driven machines ploughed deep furrows to bed-rock
across and back until the face of the mountain was zigzagged and scarred
like a veteran of many battles.
In keeping, again, was the energy with which Mr. Cortwright and his
municipal colleagues laid water-mains, strung electric wires, drove the
paving contractors, and pushed the trolley-line to the stage at which it
lacked only the rails and the cars awaiting shipment by the railroad.
Under other conditions it is conceivable that an impatient committee of
construction would have had the rails freighted in across the desert,
would have had the cars taken to pieces and shipped by mule-train
express from Quesado. But with the railroad grade already in sight on
the bare shoulders of the Hophra Hills and the thunder-blasts playing
the presto march of promise the committee could afford to wait.
This was the situation on the day when Garner, sharp-eared listener at
the keyhole of Opportunity, missing the dynamite rumblings, sent a
cipher wire of inquiry to the East, got a "rush" reply, and began warily
to unload his Mirapolitan holdings. Being a man of business, he ducked
to cover first and talked afterward; but by the time his hint had grown
to rumor size Mr. Cortwright had sent for Brouillard.
"Pull up a chair and have a cigar," said the great man when Brouillard
had penetrated to the nerve-centre of the Mirapolitan activities in the
Metropole suite and the two stenographers had been curtly dismissed.
"Have you heard the talk of the street? There is a rumor that the
railroad grading has been stopped."
Brouillard, busy with the work of setting the third series of forms on
his great wall, had heard nothing.
"I've noticed that they haven't been blasting for two or three days. But
that may mean nothing more than a delayed shipment of dynamite," was his
rejoinder.
"It looks bad--devilish bad." The promoter was planted heavily in his
pivot-chair, and the sandy-gray eyes dwindled to pin-points. "Three days
ago the blasting stopped, and Garner--you know him, the little Kansas
City shark across the street--got busy with the wire. The next thing we
knew he was unloading, quietly and without making any fuss about it, but
at prices that would have set us afire if he'd had enough stuff in his
pack to amount to anything."
Brouillard tried to remember that he was the Reclamation Service
construction chief, that the pricking of the Mirapolitan bubble early or
late concerned him not at all,--tried it and failed.
"I am afraid you are right," he said thoughtfully. "We've had a good
many applications from men hunting work in the past two days, more than
would be accounted for by the usual drift from the railroad camps."
"You saw President Ford after I did; what did he say when he was over
here?"
"He said very little to me," replied Brouillard guardedly. "From that
little I gathered that the members of his executive committee were not
unanimously in favor of building the Extension."
"Well, we are up against it, that's all. Read that," and the promoter
handed a telegram across the desk.
The wire was from Chicago, was signed "Ackerman," and was still damp
from the receiving operator's copying-press. It read:
"Work on P. S-W.'s Buckskin Extension has been suspended for the
present. Reason assigned, shrinkage in securities and uncertainty of
business outlook in Niquoia."
Brouillard's first emotion was that of the engineer and the economist.
"What a bunch of blanked fools!" he broke out. "They've spent a clean
million as it stands, and they are figuring to leave it tied up and
idle!"
Mr. Cortwright's frown figured as a fleshly mask of irritability.
"I'm not losing any sleep over the P. S-W. treasury. It's our own basket
of eggs here that I'm worrying about. Let it once get out that the
railroad people don't believe in the future of Mirapolis and we're
done."
Brouillard's retort was the expression of an upflash of sanity.
"Mirapolis has no future; it has only an exceedingly precarious
present."
For a moment the sandy-gray eyes became inscrutable. Then the mask of
irritation slid aside, revealing the face which Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright
ordinarily presented to his world--the face of imperturbable good
nature.
"You're right, Brouillard; Mirapolis is only a good joke, after all.
Sometimes I get bamfoozled into the idea that it isn't--that it's the
real thing. That's bad for the nerves. But about this railroad fizzle; I
don't relish the notion of having our little joke sprung on us before
we're ready to laugh, do you? What do you think?"
Brouillard shook himself as one who casts a burden.
"It is not my turn to think, Mr. Cortwright."
"Oh, yes, it is; very pointedly. You're one of us, to a certain extent;
and if you were not you would still be interested. A smash just now
would hamper the Reclamation Service like the mischief; the entire works
shut down; no cement, no lumber, no power; everything tied up in the
courts until the last creditor quits taking appeals. Oh, no, Brouillard;
you don't want to see the end of the world come before it's due."
It was the consulting engineer of the power company rather than the
Reclamation Service chief who rose and went to the window to look down
upon the morning briskness of Chigringo Avenue. And it was the man who
saw one hundred thousand dollars, the price of freedom, slipping away
from him who turned after a minute or two of the absent street gazing
and said: "What do you want me to do, Mr. Cortwright? I did put my
shoulder to the wheel when Ford was here. I told him if I were in his
place I'd take the long chance and build the Extension."
"Did you?--and before you had a stake in the game? That was a white
man's boost, right! Have another cigar. They're 'Poodles's Pride,' and
they're not half bad when you get used to the near-Havana filler. Think
you could manage to get Ford on the wire and encourage him a little
more?"
"It isn't Ford; it is the New York bankers. You can read that between
the lines in your man Ackerman's telegram."
The stocky gentleman in the pivot-chair thrust out his jaw and tilted
his freshly lighted cigar to the aggressive angle.
"Say, Brouillard, we've got to throw a fresh piece of bait into the
cage, something that will make the railroad crowd sit up and take
notice. By George, if those gold hunters up on Jack's Mountain would
only stumble across something big enough to advertise----"
Brouillard started as if the wishful musing had been a blow. Like a hot
wave from a furnace mouth it swept over him--the sudden realization that
the means, the one all-powerful, earth-moving lever the promoter was so
anxiously seeking, lay in his hands.
"The Buckskin people, yes," he said, making talk as the rifleman digs a
pit to hold his own on the firing-line. "If they should happen to
uncover a gold reef just now it would simplify matters immensely for
Mirapolis, wouldn't it? The railroad would come on, then, without a
shadow of doubt. All the bankers in New York couldn't hold it back."
Now came Mr. Cortwright's turn to get up and walk the floor, and he took
it, tramping solidly back and forth in the clear space behind the
table-topped desk. It was not until he had extended the meditative
stump-and-go to one of the windows that he stopped short and came out of
the inventive trance with a jerk.
"Come here," he called curtly, with a quick finger crook for the
engineer, and when Brouillard joined him: "Can you size up that little
caucus over yonder?"
The "caucus" was a knot of excited men blocking the sidewalk in front of
Garner's real-estate office on the opposite side of the street. The
purpose of the excited ones was not difficult to divine. They were all
trying to crowd into the Kansas City man's place of business at once.
"It looks like a run on a bank," said Brouillard.
"It is," was the crisp reply. "Garner has beaten everybody else to the
home plate, but he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He's been talking, and
every man in that mob is a potential panic breeder. That thing has got
to be nipped in the bud, right now!"
"Yes," Brouillard agreed. He was still wrestling with his own
besetment--the prompting which involved a deliberate plunge where up to
the present crisis he had been merely wading in the shallows. A little
thing stung him alive to the imperative call of the moment--the sight of
Amy Massingale walking down the street with Tig Smith, the
Triangle-Circle foreman. It was of the death of her hopes that he was
thinking when he said coolly: "You have sized it up precisely, Mr.
Cortwright; that is a panic in the making, and the bubble won't stand
for very much pricking. Give me a free hand with your check-book for a
few minutes and I'll try to stop it."
It spoke volumes for the millionaire promoter's quick discernment and
decision that he asked no questions. "Do it," he snapped. "I'll cover
you for whatever it takes. Don't wait; that crowd is getting bigger
every minute."
Brouillard ran down-stairs and across the street. It was no part of his
intention to stop and speak to Amy Massingale and the ranchman, but he
did it, and even walked a little way with them before he turned back to
elbow his way through the sidewalk throng and into Garner's dingy little
office.
"You are selling Mirapolis holdings short to-day, Garner?" he asked when
he had pushed through the crowd to the speculator's desk. And when
Garner laughed and said there were no takers he placed his order
promptly. "You may bid in for me, at yesterday's prices, anything within
the city limits--not options, you understand, but the real thing. Bring
your papers over to my office after banking hours and we'll close for
whatever you've been able to pick up."
He said it quietly, but there could be no privacy at such a time and in
such a place.
"What's that, Mr. Brouillard?" demanded one in the counter jam. "You're
giving Garner a blank card to buy for your account? Say, that's plenty
good enough for me. Garner, cancel my order to sell, will you? When the
chief engineer of the government water-works believes in Mirapolis
futures and bets his money on 'em, I'm not selling."
The excitement was already dying down and the crowd was melting away
from Garner's sidewalk when Brouillard rejoined Mr. Cortwright in the
second-floor room across the street.
"Well, it's done," he announced shortly, adding: "It's only a stop-gap.
To make the bluff good, you've got to have the railroad."
"That's the talk," said the promoter, relighting the cigar which the few
minutes of crucial suspense had extinguished. And then, without warning:
"You're carrying something up your sleeve, Brouillard. What is it?"
"It is the one thing you need, Mr. Cortwright. If I could get my own
consent to use it I could bring the railroad here in spite of those New
Yorkers who seem to have an attack of cold feet."
Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's hesitation was so brief as to be almost
imperceptible. "I suppose that is your way of saying that your share in
the table stakes isn't big enough. All right; the game can't stop in the
middle of a bet. How much is it going to cost us to stay in?"
"The cost isn't precisely in the kind of figures that you understand
best, Mr. Cortwright. And as to my share in the profits ... well, we
needn't mince matters; you may remember that you were at some
considerable pains to ascertain my price before you made the original
bid--and the bid was accepted. You've just been given a proof that I'm
trying to earn my money. No other man in Mirapolis could have served
your turn over there at Garner's as I did a few minutes ago. You know
that."
"Good Lord, man, I'm not kicking! But we are all in the same boat. If
the railroad work doesn't start up again within the next few days we are
all due to go to pot. If you've got the odd ace up your sleeve and don't
play it, you stand to lose out with the rest of us."
The door was open into the anteroom where the stenographers' desks were,
and Brouillard was staring gloomily into the farther vacancies.
"I wonder if you know how little I care?" he said half musingly. Then,
with sudden vehemence: "It is altogether a question of motive with me,
Mr. Cortwright; of a motive which you couldn't understand in a thousand
years. If that motive prevails, you get your railroad and a little
longer lease of life. If it doesn't, Mirapolis will go to the devil some
few weeks or months ahead of its schedule--and I'll take my punishment
with the remainder of the fools--and the knaves."
He was on his feet and moving toward the door of exit when the promoter
got his breath.
"Here, hold on, Brouillard--for Heaven's sake, don't go off and leave it
up in the air that way!" he protested.
But the corridor door had opened and closed and Brouillard was gone.
Two hours later Mirapolis the frenetic had a new thrill, a shock so
electrifying that the rumor of the railroad's halting decision sank into
insignificance and was forgotten. The suddenly evoked excitement
focussed in a crowd besieging the window of the principal jewelry
shop--focussed more definitely upon a square of white paper in the
window in the centre of which was displayed a little heap of virgin gold
in small nuggets and coarse grains.
While the crowds in the street were still struggling and fighting to get
near enough to read the labelling placard, the _Daily Spot-Light_ came
out with an extra which was all head-lines, the telegraph-wires to the
East were buzzing, and the town had gone mad. The gold specimen--so said
the placard and the news extra--had been washed from one of the bars in
the Niquoia.
By three o'clock the madness had culminated in the complete stoppage of
all work among the town builders and on the great dam as well, and
gold-crazed mobs were frantically digging and panning on every bar in
the river from the valley outlet to the power dam five miles away.
IX
Bedlam
It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon of the
day in which Mirapolis went placer mad when word came to the
Reclamation-Service headquarters that the power was cut off and that
there were no longer men enough at the mixers and on the forms to keep
the work going if the power should come on again.
Handley, the new fourth assistant, brought the news, dropping heavily
into a chair and shoving his hat to the back of his head to mop his
seamed and sun-browned face.
"Why the devil didn't you fellows turn out?" he demanded savagely of
Leshington, Anson, and Grislow, who were lounging in the office and very
pointedly waiting for the lightning to strike. "Gassman and I have done
everything but commit cold-blooded murder to hold the men on the job.
Where's the boss?"
Nobody knew, and Grislow, at least, was visibly disturbed at the
question. It was Anson who seemed to have the latest information about
Brouillard.
"He came in about eleven o'clock, rummaged for a minute or two in that
drawer you've got your foot on, Grizzy, and then went out again. Anybody
seen him since?"
There was a silence to answer the query, and the hydrographer righted
his chair abruptly and closed the opened drawer he had been utilizing
for a foot-rest. He had a long memory for trifles, and at the mention of
the drawer a disquieting picture had flashed itself upon the mental
screen. There were two figures in the picture, Brouillard and himself,
and Brouillard was tossing the little buckskin sack of gold nuggets into
the drawer, where it had lain undisturbed ever since--until now.
Moreover, Grislow's news of Brouillard, if he had seen fit to publish
it, was later than Anson's. At one o'clock, or thereabout, the chief had
come into the mapping room for a glance at the letters on his desk. One
of the letters--a note in a square envelope--he had thrust into his
pocket before going out.
"It looks as if the chief had gone with the crowd," said Leshington when
the silence had grown almost portentous, "though that wouldn't be like
him. Has anybody found out yet who touched off the gold-mounted
sky-rocket?"
Grislow came out of his brown study with a start. "Levy won't tell who
gave him those nuggets to put in his window. I tried him. All he will
say is that the man who left the sample is perfectly reliable and that
he dictated the exact wording of the placard that did the business."
"I saw Harlan, of the _Spot-Light_, half an hour ago," cut in Anson.
"He's plumb raving crazy, like everybody else, but there is something
faintly resembling method in his madness. He figures it that we
government people are out of a job permanently; that with the discovery
of these placers--or, rather, with the practically certain rediscovery
of them by the mob--Mirapolis will jump to the front rank as a gold
camp, and the Reclamation Service will have to call a halt on the
Buckskin project."
Leshington's long, plain-song face grew wooden. "You say 'practically
certain.' The question is: Will they be rediscovered? Bet any of you a
box of Poodles's Flor de near Havanas that it's some new kind of a
flip-flap invented by J. Wesley and his boomers. What do you say?"
"Good Lord!" growled Handley. "They didn't need any new stunts. They
had the world by the ear, as it was."
"That's all right," returned Leshington; "maybe they didn't. I heard a
thing or two over at Bongras's last night that set me guessing. There
was a piece of gossip coming up the pike about the railroad pulling out
of the game, or, rather, that it had already pulled out."
Once more silence fell upon the group in the mapping room, and this time
it was Grislow who broke it.
"I suppose Harlan is getting ready to exploit the new sensation right?"
he suggested, and Anson nodded.
"You can trust Harlan for that. He's got the valley wire subsidized, and
he is waiting for the first man to come in with the news of the sure
thing and the location of it. When he gets the facts he'll touch off the
fireworks, and the world will be invited to take a running jump for the
new Tonopah." Then, with sudden anxiety: "I wish to goodness Brouillard
would turn up and get busy on his job. It's something hideous to be
stranded this way in the thick of a storm!"
"It's time somebody was getting busy," snarled Handley. "There are a
hundred tons of fresh concrete lying in the forms, just as they were
dumped--with no puddlers--to say nothing of half as much more freezing
to solid rock right now in the mixers and on the telphers."
Grislow got up and reached for his coat and hat.
"I'm going out to hunt for the boss," he said, "and you fellows had
better do the same. If this is one of Cortwright's flip-flaps, and
Brouillard happened to be in the way, I wouldn't put it beyond J. Wesley
to work some kind of a disappearing racket on the human obstacle."