made, but for a reason of his own the hydrographer contrived to be the
last to leave the mapping room. When he found himself alone he returned
hastily to the desk and pulled out the drawer of portents, rummaging in
it until he was fully convinced that the little buckskin bag of nuggets
was gone. Then, instead of following the others, he took a field-glass
from its case on the wall and went to the south window to focus it upon
the Massingale cabin, standing out clear-cut and distinct in the
afternoon sunlight on its high, shelf-like bench.
The powerful glass brought out two figures on the cabin porch, a woman
and a man. The woman was standing and the man was sitting on the step.
Grislow lowered the glass and slid the telescoping sun tubes home with a
snap.
"Good God!" he mused, "it's unbelievable! He deliberately turns this
thing loose on us down here and then takes an afternoon off to go and
make love to a girl! He's crazy; it's the seven-year devil he talks
about. And nobody can help him; nobody--unless Amy can. Lord, Lord!"
X
Epochal
At the other extremity of the trajectory of Grislow's telltale
field-glass Brouillard was sunning himself luxuriously on the porch step
at the Massingale house and making up for lost time--counting all time
lost when it spelled absence from the woman he loved. But Miss
Massingale was in a charmingly frivolous frame of mind.
"That is the fourth different excuse you have invented for cutting me
out of your visiting list, not counting the repetitions," she gibed,
when he had finally fallen back upon the time demands of his work to
account for his late neglect of her. "If I wanted to be hateful I might
insist that you haven't given the true reason yet."
"Perhaps I will give it before I go," he parried. "But just now I'd much
rather talk about something else. Tell me about yourself. What have you
been doing all these days when I haven't been able to keep tab on you?"
"Flirting--flirting desperately with Tig, with Lord Falkland, with Mr.
Anson, and Mr. Grislow, and that nice boy of yours, Herbert Griffith,
and with--no, _not_ with Mr. Leshington; he scares me--makes a face like
a wooden image and says: 'Little girl, you need a mother--or a husband;
I haven't made up my mind which.' When he _does_ make up his mind I'm
going to shriek and run away."
"Who is Lord Falkland?" demanded Brouillard, ignoring the rank and file.
"O-o-h! Haven't you met him? He is Tig's boss. He isn't a real lord; he
is only a 'younger son.' But we call him Lord Falkland because he has no
sense of humor and is always trying to explain. 'Beg pawdon, my _deah_
Miss Massingale, but I'm _not_ Lord Falkland, don't y' know.
The--er--title goes with the--er--entail. I'm only the Honorable Pawcy
Grammont Penbawthy Trevawnnion.'" Her mimicry of the Englishman was
delicious, and Brouillard laughed like a man without a care in the
world.
"Where does the Honorable All-the-rest keep himself?" he wished to know.
"He stays out at the ranch in the Buckskin with Tig and the range-riders
most of the time, I think. It's his ranch, you know, and he is
immensely proud of it. He never tires of telling me about the cattle on
a thousand hills, or the thousand cattle on one hill, I forget which it
is."
"And you flirt with this--this alphabetical monstrosity!" he protested
reproachfully.
"Honestly, Victor, I don't; that was only an amiable little figure of
speech. You simply _can't_ flirt with a somebody who is almost as
brilliant as a lump of Cornish tin ore and, oh, ever so many times as
dense."
"Exit Lord Falkland, who isn't Lord Falkland," said Brouillard. "Now
tell me about the 'Little Susan'; is the Blue-grass farm looming up
comfortably on the eastern edge of things?"
In a twinkling her frivolous mood vanished.
"Oh, we are prosperous, desperately prosperous. We have power drills,
and electric ore-cars, and a crib, and a chute, and a hoist, and an
aerial tramway down to the place where the railroad yard is going to
be--all the improvements you can see and a lot more that you can't see.
And our pay-roll--it fairly frightens me when I make it up on the
Saturdays."
"I see," he nodded. "All going out and nothing coming in. But the money
is all here, safely stacked up in the ore bins. You'll get it all out
when the railroad comes."
"That is another thing--a thing I haven't dared tell father and Stevie.
When I was in Mirapolis this morning I heard that the railroad wasn't
coming, after all; or, rather, Tig had heard it and he told me. We were
digging for facts when you met us on Chigringo Avenue--trying to find
out if the rumor were true."
"Did you find out?" he asked.
"Not positively. That is why I left the note at your office begging you
to come up if you could spare the time. I felt sure you would know."
"It means a great deal to you, doesn't it?" he said evasively.
"It means everything--a thousand times more now than it did before."
His quick glance up into the suddenly sobered eyes of the girl standing
on the step above him was a voiceless query and she answered it.
"We had no working capital, as I think you must have known. Once a month
father or Stevie would make up a few pack-saddle loads of the richest
ore and freight them over the mountains to Red Butte. That was how we
got along. But when you sent me word by Tig that the railroad company
had decided to build the Extension, there was--there was--a chance----"
"Yes," he encouraged.
"A chance that the day of little things was past and the day of big
things was come. Mr. Cortwright and some of his associates had been
trying to buy an interest in the 'Little Susan.' Father let them in on
some sort of a stock arrangement that I don't understand and then made
himself personally responsible for a dreadful lot of borrowed money."
"Borrowed of Mr. Cortwright?" queried Brouillard.
"No; of the bank. Neither Stevie nor I knew about it until after it was
done, and even then father wouldn't explain. He has been like a man out
of his mind since Mr. Cortwright got hold of him--everything is
rose-colored; we are going to be immensely rich the minute the railroad
builds its track to the mine dump. The ore is growing richer every
day--which is true--and the railroad will let us into the smelters with
train loads of it. He is crazy to build more cribs and put on night
shifts of miners. But you see how it all depends upon the railroad."
"Not so much upon the railroad now as upon some other things," said
Brouillard enigmatically. "You say your father has borrowed of the
bank--is Mr. Cortwright mixed up in the loan in any way?"
"Yes; he arranged it in some way for father--I don't know just how. All
I know is that father is responsible, and that if the railroad doesn't
come he will lose everything."
Brouillard gave a low whistle. "I don't wonder that the quitting rumor
made you nervous."
"It was, and is, positively terrifying. Father has taken one of the new
houses in town and we are to move down next week in spite of all I can
do or say. That means more expense and more temptations. I can't tell
you how I hate and dread Mirapolis. It isn't like any other place I have
ever known; it is cynical, vicious, wicked!"
"It is," he agreed soberly. "It couldn't well be otherwise. You tell a
dozen men they've got a certain definite time to live, and the chances
are that two or three of them will begin to prepare to get ready to be
sorry for their sins. The other nine or ten will speed up and burn the
candle right down into the socket. We shall see worse things in
Mirapolis before we see better. But I think I can lift one of your
burdens. What you heard in town this morning is a fact: the railroad
people have stopped work on the Buckskin Extension. Don't faint--they
are going to begin again right away."
"Oh!" she gasped. "Are you sure? How _can_ you be sure?"
"I've given the order," he said gravely. "An order they can't disregard.
Let's go back a bit and I'll explain. Do you remember my telling you
that your brother had tried to bribe me to use my influence with Mr.
Ford?"
"As if I should ever be able to forget it!" she protested.
"Well, that wasn't all that he did--he threatened me--took me to one of
the bars in the Niquoia, and let me prove for myself that it was
tolerably rich placer ground. The threat was a curious one. If I'd say
the right thing to President Ford, well and good; if not, your brother
would disarrange things for the government by giving away the secret of
the gold placers. It was ingenious, and effective. To turn the valley
into a placer camp would be to disorganize our working force,
temporarily at least, and in the end it might even stop or definitely
postpone the building of the dam."
She was listening eagerly, but there was a nameless fear in the
steadfast eyes--a shadow which he either missed or disregarded.
"Naturally, I saw, or thought I saw, a good reason why he should
hesitate to carry out his threat," Brouillard went on. "The placer find,
with whatever profit might be got out of it, was his only so long as he
kept the secret. But he covered that point at once; he said that the
'Little Susan'--with the railroad--was worth more to him and to your
father than a chance at the placer-diggings. The ore dump with its known
values was a sure thing, while the sluice mining was always a gamble."
"And you--you believed all this?" she asked faintly.
"I was compelled to believe it. He let me pan out the proof for myself;
a heaping spoonful of nuggets and grain gold in a few panfuls of the
sand. It pretty nearly turned my head, Amy; would have turned it, I'm
afraid, if Steve hadn't explained that the bar, as a whole, wouldn't run
as rich as the sample."
"It is dreadful--dreadful!" she murmured. "You believed him, and for
that reason you used your influence with Mr. Ford?"
"No."
"But you did advise Mr. Ford to build the Extension?"
"Yes."
"Believing that it was for the best interests of the railroad to come
here?"
"No; doubting it very much, indeed."
"Then why did you do it? I _must_ know; it is my right to know."
He got up and took her in his arms, and she suffered him.
"A few days ago, little girl, I couldn't have told you. But now I can. I
am a free man--or I can be whenever I choose to say the word. You ask me
why I pulled for the railroad; I did it for love's sake."
She was pushing him away, and the great horror in her eyes was
unmistakable now.
"Oh!" she panted, "is love a thing to be cheapened like that--to be
sinned for?"
"Why, Amy, girl! What do you mean? I don't understand----"
"That is it, Victor; _you don't understand_. You deliberately sacrificed
your convictions; you have admitted it. And you did it in the sacred
name of love! And your freedom--how have you made a hundred thousand
dollars in these few weeks? Oh, Victor, is it clean money?"
He was abashed, confounded; and at the bottom of the tangle of
conflicting emotions there was a dull glow of resentment.
"The 'sacrifice,' as you call it, was made for you," he said, ignoring
her question about the money. "I merely told Mr. Ford what I should do
if the decision lay wholly with me. That is what he asked for--my
personal opinion. And he got it."
"Yes; but when you gave it ... did you say: 'Mr. Ford, there is a girl
up at the "Little Susan" mine on Chigringo Mountain who needs your
railroad to help her out of her troubles. Because I love the girl'----"
"Of course I didn't say any such suicidal thing as that! But it is too
late to raise the question of culpability in the matter of giving Ford
what he asked for. I did it, as I say--for love of you, Amy; and now I
have done a much more serious thing--for the same good reason."
"Tell me," she said, with a quick catching of her breath.
"Your brother put a weapon in my hands, and I have used it. There was
one sure way to make the railroad people get busy again. They couldn't
sit still if all the world were trying to get to a new gold camp, to
which they already have a line graded and nearly ready for the steel."
"And you have----?"
He nodded.
"I had Levy put the spoonful of nuggets in his window, with a placard
stating that it was taken out of a bar in the Niquoia. When I left the
office to come up here the whole town was blocking the street in front
of Levy's."
She had retreated to take her former position, leaning against the
porch post, with her hands behind her, and she had grown suddenly calm.
"You did this deliberately, Victor, weighing all the consequences?
Mirapolis is already a city of frenzied knaves and dupes; did you
realize that you were taking the chance of turning it into a wicked
pandemonium? Oh, I can't believe you did!"
"Don't look at me that way, Amy," he pleaded. Then he went on, with
curious little pauses between the words: "Perhaps I didn't think--didn't
care; you wanted something--and I wanted to give it to you. That was
all--as God hears me, it was all. There was another thing that might
have weighed, but I didn't let it weigh; I stood to lose the money that
will set me free--I could have lost it without wincing--I told
Cortwright so. You believe that, Amy? It will break my heart if you
don't believe it."
She shook her head sadly.
"You have thrown down another of the ideals, and this time it was mine.
You don't understand, and I can't make you understand--that is the keen
misery of it. If this ruthless thing you tried to do had succeeded, I
should be the most wretched woman in the world."
"If it had succeeded? It has succeeded. Didn't I say just now that the
town was crazy with excitement when I left to come up here?"
The girl was shaking her head again.
"God sometimes saves us in spite of ourselves," she said gravely. "The
excitement will die out. There are no placers in the Niquoia. The bars
have been prospected again and again."
"They have been?----"
Brouillard turned on his heel and choked back the sudden malediction
that rose to his lips. She had called Mirapolis a city of knaves and
dupes; surely, he himself was the simplest of the dupes.
"I see--after so long a time," he went on. "Your brother merely 'salted'
a few shovelfuls of sand for my especial benefit. Great Heavens, but I
was an easy mark!"
"Don't!" she cried, and the tears in her voice cut him to the
heart--"don't make it harder for me than it has to be. I have told you
only what I've heard my father say, time and again: that there is no
gold in the Niquoia River. And you mustn't ask me to despise my brother.
He fights his way to his ends without caring much for the consequences
to others; but tell me--haven't you been doing the same thing?"
"I have," he confessed stubbornly. "My love isn't measured by a fear of
consequences--to myself or others."
"That is the hopeless part of it," she returned drearily.
"Yet you condone in your brother what you condemn in me," he complained.
"My brother is my brother; and you are--Let me tell you something,
Victor: God helping me, I shall be no man's evil genius, and yours least
of all. You broke down the barriers a few minutes ago and you know what
is in my heart. But I can take it out of my heart if the man who put it
there is not true to himself."
Brouillard was silent for a little space, and when he spoke again it was
as one awaking from a troubled dream.
"I know what you would do and say; you would take me by the hand and
tell me to come up higher.... There was a time, Amy, when you wouldn't
have had to say it twice--a time when the best there was in me would
have leaped to climb to any height you pointed to. The time is past, and
I can't recall it, try as I may; there is a change; it goes back to that
day when I first saw you--down at the lower ford in the desert's edge. I
loved you then, though I wouldn't admit it even to myself. But that
wasn't the change; it was something different. Do you believe in
Freiborg's theory of the multiple personality? I saw his book in your
hammock one day when I was up here."
"No," she said quite definitely. "I am I, and I am always I. For the
purposes of the comedy we call life, we play many parts, perhaps; but
back of the part-playing there is always the same soul person, I
think--and believe."
"I know; that is common sense and sanity. And yet Freiborg's
speculations are most plausible. He merely carries the idea of the dual
personality--the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde notion--a step farther
along. You may remember how he compares the human being to a ship
changing commanders at every port. One captain makes her a merchantman;
another makes her a tramp; a third turns her into a slaver or a pirate;
under a fourth she becomes a derelict."
"That is a terribly dangerous theory, if you take it seriously," was her
comment.
"I don't want to take it seriously. But facts are stubborn things. I am
not the same man I was a few years or even a few months ago. I have lost
something; I have not the same promptings; things that I used to loathe
no longer shock me. New and unsuspected pitfalls open for me every day.
For example, I am not naturally hot-headed--or rather, I should say, I
am quick-tempered but have always been able to control myself. Yet in
the past few months I have learned what it means to fly into a rage that
fairly makes me see red. And there is no cause. Nothing different has
broken into my life save the best of all things--a great love. And you
tell me that the love is unworthy."
"No, I didn't say that; I only meant that you had misconceived it. Love
is the truest, finest thing we know. It can never be the tool of evil,
much less the hand that guides the tool. Given a free field, it always
makes for the wider horizons, the higher planes of thought and action;
it may even breathe new life into the benumbed conscience. I don't say
that it can't be dragged down and trampled in the dust and the mire; it
can be, and then there is nothing more pitiful in a world of
misconceptions."
Again a silence came and sat between them; and, as before, it was the
man who broke it.
"You lead me to a conclusion that I refuse to accept, Amy; that I am
dominated by some influence which is stronger than love."
"You are," she said simply.
"What is it?"
"Environment."
"That is the most humiliating thing you have said to-day. Is a man a
mere bit of driftwood, to be tossed about in the froth of any wave that
happens to come along, as Freiborg says he is?"
"Not always; perhaps not often. And never, I think, in the best part of
him--the soul ego. Yet there is a mighty power in the wave, in the mere
drift. However much others may be deluded, I am sure you can see
Mirapolis in its true light. It is frankly, baldly, the money-making
scheme of a few unscrupulous men. It has no future--it can have none.
And because it is what it is, the very air you breathe down there is
poisoned. The taint is in the blood. Mr. Cortwright and his fellow
bandits call it the 'Miracle City,' but the poor wretches on lower
Chigringo Avenue laugh and call it Gomorrah."
"Just at the present moment it is a city of fools--and I, the king of
the fools, have made it so," said Brouillard gloomily. From his seat on
the porch step he was frowning down upon the outspread scene in the
valley, where the triangular shadow of Jack's Mountain was creeping
slowly across to the foot of Chigringo. Something in the measured
eye-sweep brought him to his feet with a hasty exclamation:
"Good Lord! the machinery has stopped! They've knocked off work on the
dam!"
"Why not?" she said. "Did you imagine that your workmen were any less
human than other people?"
"No, of course not; that is, I--but I haven't any time to go into that
now. Is your telephone line up here in operation?"
"No, not yet."
"Then I must burn the wind getting down there. By Jove! if those
unspeakable idiots have gone off and left the concrete to freeze
wherever it happens to be----"
"One moment," she pleaded, while he was reaching for his hat. "This new
madness will have spent itself by nightfall--it must. And yet I have the
queerest shivery feeling, as if something dreadful were going to happen.
Can't you contrive to get word to me, some way--after it is all over? I
wish you could."
"I'll do it," he promised. "I'll come up after supper."
"No, don't do that. You will be needed at the dam. There will be
trouble, with a town full of disappointed gold-hunters, and liquor to be
had. Wait a minute." She ran into the house and came out with two little
paper-covered cylinders with fuses projecting. "Take these, they are
Bengal lights--some of the fireworks that Tig bought in Red Butte for
the Fourth. Light the blue one when you are ready to send me my message
of cheer. I shall be watching for it."
"And the other?" he asked.
"It is a red light, the signal of war and tumults and danger. If you
light it, I shall know----"
He nodded, dropped the paper cylinders into his pocket, and a moment
later was racing down the trail to take his place at the helm of the
abandoned ship of the industries.
There was need for a commander; for a cool head to bring order out of
chaos, and for the rare faculty which is able to accomplish Herculean
tasks with whatever means lie at hand. Brouillard descended upon his
disheartened subordinates like a whirlwind of invincible energy,
electrifying everybody into instant action. Gassman was told off to
bring the Indians, who alone were loyally indifferent to the gold craze,
down from the crushers. Anson was despatched to impress the waiters and
bell-boys from the Metropole; Leshington was sent to the shops and the
bank to turn out the clerks; Grislow and Handley were ordered to take
charge of the makeshift concrete handlers as fast as they materialized,
squadding them and driving the work of wreck clearing for every man and
minute they could command, with Gassman and Bender to act as foremen.
For himself, Brouillard reserved the most hazardous of the recruiting
expedients. The lower Avenue had already become a double rank of dives,
saloons, and gambling dens; here, if anywhere in the craze-depopulated
town, men might be found, and for once in their lives they should be
shown how other men earned money.
"Shove it for every minute of daylight there is left," he ordered,
snapping out his commands to his staff while he was filling the magazine
of his Winchester. "Puddle what material there is in the forms, dump the
telpher buckets where they stand, and clean out the mixers; that's the
size of the job, and it's got to be done. Jump to it, Grizzy, you and
Handley, and we'll try to fill your gangs the best way we can.
Leshington, don't you take any refusal from the shopkeepers and the bank
people; if they kick, you tell them that not another dollar of
government money will be spent in this town--we'll run a free commissary
first. Anson, you make Bongras turn out every man in his feeding place;
he'll do it. Griffith, you chase Mr. Cortwright, and don't quit till you
find him. Tell him from me that we've got to have every man he can give
us, at whatever cost."
"You'll be up on the stagings yourself, won't you?" asked Grislow,
struggling into his working-coat.
"After a bit. I'm going down to the lower Avenue to turn out the crooks
and diamond wearers. It's time they were learning how to earn an honest
dollar."
"You'll get yourself killed up," grumbled Leshington. "Work is the one
thing you won't get out of that crowd."
"Watch me," rasped the chief, and he was gone as soon as he had said it.
Strange things and strenuous happened in the lower end of the Niquoia
valley during the few hours of daylight that remained. First, climbing
nervously to the puddlers' staging on the great dam, and led by
near-Napoleon Poodles himself, came the Metropole quota of waiters,
scullions, cooks, and porters, willing but skilless. After them, and
herded by Leshington, came a dapper crew of office men and clerks to
snatch up the puddling spades and to soil their clothes and blister
their hands in emptying the concrete buckets. Mr. Cortwright's
contribution came as a dropping fire; a handful of tree-cutters from
the sawmills, a few men picked up here and there in the deserted town,
an automobile load of power-company employees shot down from the
generating plant at racing speed.
Last, but by no means least in numbers, came the human derelicts from
the lower Avenue; men in frock-coats; men in cow-boy jeans taking it as
a huge joke; men with foreign faces and lowering brows and with strange
oaths in their mouths; and behind the motley throng and marshalling it
to a quickstep, Brouillard and Tig Smith.