through the street pandemonium to Bongras's. At a table in the rear room
he found David Massingale, his long, white beard tucked into the closely
buttoned miner's coat to be out of the way of the flying knife and fork,
while he gave a lifelike imitation of a man begrudging every second of
time wasted in stopping the hunger gap.
Brouillard took the opposite chair and was grimly amused at the length
of time that elapsed before Massingale realized his presence.
"Pity a man has to stop to eat on a day like this, isn't it, Mr.
Massingale?" he laughed; and then: "I wouldn't hurry. There's another
day coming; or if there isn't, we'll all be in the same boat. How is
Steve?"
Massingale nodded. "The boy's comin' along all right now; he allows to
be out in another week 'r two." Then the inevitable question: "They're
sayin' on the street that you're lettin' out half o' your men--that so?"
Brouillard laughed again.
"I've heard it so often that I've come to believe it myself," he
admitted, adding: "Yes, it's true." After which he asked a question of
his own: "Have you been doing something in real estate this morning, Mr.
Massingale?"
"All I could," mumbled the old man between mouthfuls. "But I cayn't do
much. If it ain't one thing, it's another. 'Bout as soon as I got that
tangle with the Red Butte smelter straightened out, the railroad hit
me."
"How was that?" queried Brouillard, with quickening interest coming
alive at a bound.
"Same old song, no cars; try and get 'em to-morruh, and to-morruh it'll
be next day, and next day it'll be the day after. Looks like they don't
_want_ to haul any freight _out_ o' here."
"I see," said Brouillard, and truly he saw much more than David
Massingale did. Then: "No shipments means no money for you, and more
delay; and delay happens to be the one thing you can't stand. When do
those notes of yours fall due?"
"Huh?" said Massingale. He was a close-mouthed man, by breeding and by
habit, and he was quite sure he had never mentioned the "Little Susan"
entanglement to the young engineer.
Brouillard became more explicit. "The notes covering your indebtedness
to the bank for the money you've been putting into development work and
improvements--I asked when they would become due."
The old man's heavy white eyebrows bent themselves in a perplexed frown.
"Amy hadn't ort to talk so much," he objected. "Business is business."
Brouillard's smile was a tacit denial of the implication.
"You forget that there were several other parties to the transaction and
that any man's business is every man's in this crazy town," he
suggested. "But you haven't answered my question about the due date. I
didn't ask it out of idle curiosity, I assure you."
Massingale was troubled, and his fine old face showed it plainly.
"I ain't much of a man to holler when I've set the woods afire myself,"
he answered slowly. "But I don't know why I shouldn't yip a little to
you if I feel like it. To-day is the last day on them notes, and I'd
about made up my mind that I was goin' up the spout on a sure thing for
the fourth time since I hit the mount'ins, when this here new excitement
broke out."
"Go on," said Brouillard.
"I saw a chance--about a one-to-a-hundred shot. I'd been to see Hardwick
at the bank, and he gave me the ultimaytum good and cold; if I couldn't
lift the paper, the bank'd have to go back on my indorser, John Wes. I
had a little over five thousand left out o' the borray, and I took it
and broke for the Real Estate Exchange. Been there for three solid
hours, turnin' my little stake over like a flapjack on a hot griddle;
but it ain't any use, I cayn't turn it fast enough, 'r often enough,
betwixt now and three o'clock."
One of Bongras's rear-room luxuries was a portable telephone for every
group of tables. Brouillard made a sign to the waiter, and the desk set
was brought to him. If David Massingale recognized the number asked for,
he paid no attention; and, since a man may spend his life digging holes
in the ground and still retain the instincts of a gentleman--if he
happens to have been born with them--he was equally oblivious to the
disjointed half of the telephone conversation he might have listened to.
"Hello! Is that Boyer--Niquoia National?... This is Brouillard. Can you
give me my present figure?... Not more than that?... Oh, yes; you say
the Hillman check is in; I had overlooked it. All right, thank you."
When the waiter had removed the desk set, the engineer leaned toward his
table companion:
"Mr. Massingale, I'm going to ask you to tell me frankly what kind of a
deal it was you made with Cortwright and the bank people."
"It was the biggest tom-fool razzle that any livin' live man out of a
lunatic 'sylum ever went into," confessed the prisoner of fate. "I was
to stock the 'Susan' for half a million--oh, she's worth it, every
dollar of it; you might say the ore's in sight for it right now"--this
in deference to Brouillard's brow-lifting of surprise. "They was to put
in a hundred thousand cash, and I was to put in the mine and the ore on
the dump, just as she stood."
The engineer nodded and Massingale went on.
"I was to have two thirds of the stock and they was to have one third.
The hundred thousand for development we'd get at the bank, on my notes,
because I was president and the biggest stockholder, with John Wes. as
indorser. Then, to protect the bank accordin' to law, they said, we'd
put the whole bunch o' stock--mine and their'n--into escrow in the hands
of Judge Williams. When the notes was paid, the judge'd hand the stock
back to us."
"Just a moment," interrupted Brouillard. "Did you sign those notes
personally, or as president of the new company?"
"That's where they laid for me," said the old man shamefacedly. "We made
the money turn before we _was_ a company--while we was waitin' for the
charter."
"Of course," commented Brouillard. "And they rushed you into it on the
plea of saving time. But you say the stock was to be released when the
notes were paid--what was to happen if they were not paid?"
"Right there is where John Wes.'s ten-dollar-a-bottle sody-pop stuff we
was soppin' up must 'a' foolished me plumb silly; I don't just rightly
recollect _what_ the judge was to do with the stock if I fell down. I
know it was talked all 'round Robin Hood's barn, up one side and down
the other, and they made it look like I couldn't slip up if I tried to.
And they made the borray at the bank look fair enough, too."
"Well, why wasn't it fair?" Brouillard wanted to know.
"Why, sufferin' Moses! don't you see? It hadn't ort to 've been needed.
_They_ was to put in a hundred thousand, and they wasn't doin' it. It
figgered out this-a-way in the talk: they said, what's the use o' takin'
the money out o' one pocket and puttin' it into the other? Let the bank
carry the development loan and let the mine pay it. Then we could even
up when it come to the dividends."
"So it amounts to this: you have given them a clean third of the 'Susan'
for the mere privilege of borrowing one hundred thousand dollars on your
own paper. And if you don't pay, you lose the remaining two thirds as
well."
"That's about the way it stacks up to a sober man. Looks like I needed a
janitor to look after my upper story, don't it? And I reckon mebby I
do."
"One thing more," pressed the relentless querist. "Did you really handle
the hundred-thousand-dollar development fund yourself, Mr. Massingale?"
"Well, no; not exactly. Ten thousand dollars of what they called a
'contingent fund' was put in my name; but the treasurer handled most of
it--nachurly, we bein' a stock company."
"Who is your treasurer?"
"Feller with just one share o' stock--Parker Jackson."
"Humph! Cortwright's private secretary. And he has spent ninety thousand
dollars on the 'Little Susan' in sixty days? Not much! What has your
pay-roll been?"
"'Bout five hundred a week."
"That is to say between three and four thousand dollars for the two
months--call it five thousand. Now, let's see--" Brouillard took out his
pencil and began to make figures on the back of the _menu_ card. He knew
the equipment of the "Little Susan," and his specialty was the making of
estimates. Hence he was able to say, after a minute or two of figuring:
"Thirty thousand dollars will amply cover your new equipment: power
drills, electric transfers, and the cheap telpherage plant. Have you
ever seen any vouchers for the money spent?"
"No. Had I ort to?"
"Well, rather--as president of the company."
Massingale tucked the long white beard still farther into the buttoned
coat. "I been tellin' you I need a mule-driver to knock a little sense
into me," he offered.
"It's a bad business any way you attack it," said Brouillard after a
reflective pause. "What you have really got for yourself out of the deal
is the ten-thousand-dollar deposit to your personal account, and nothing
more; and they'll probably try to make you a debtor for that. Taking
that amount and a fair estimate of the company's expenditures to
date--say thirty-five thousand in round numbers, which is fairly
chargeable to the company's assets as a whole--they still owe you about
fifty-five thousand of the original hundred thousand they were to put
in. If there were time--but you say this is the last day?"
"The last half o' the last day," Massingale amended.
"I was going to say, if there were time, this thing wouldn't stand the
light of day for a minute, Mr. Massingale. They wouldn't go within a
hundred miles of a court of law with it. Can't you get an extension on
the notes?--but of course you can't; that is just the one thing
Cortwright doesn't want you to have--more time."
"No; you bet he don't."
"That being the case, there is no help for it; you'll have to take your
medicine and pay the notes. Do that, take an iron-clad receipt from the
bank--I'll write it out for you--and get the stock released. After that,
we'll give them a whirl for the thirty-three and a third per cent they
have practically stolen from you."
The old man's face, remindful now of his daughter's, was a picture of
dismayed incertitude.
"I reckon you're forgettin' that I hain't got money enough to lift one
edge o' them notes," he said gently.
Brouillard had found a piece of blank paper in his pocket and was
rapidly writing the "iron-clad" receipt.
"No, I hadn't forgotten. I have something over a hundred thousand
dollars lying idle in the bank. You'll take it and pay the notes."
It was a bolt out of a clear sky for the old man tottering on the brink
of his fourth pit of disaster, and he evinced his emotion--and the tense
strain of keyed-up nerves--by dropping his lifted coffee-cup with a
crash into his plate. The little accident was helpful in its way,--it
made a diversion,--and by the time the wreck was repaired speech was
possible.
"Are you--are you _plumb_ sure you can spare it?" asked the debtor
huskily. And then: "I cayn't seem to sort o' surround it--all in a
bunch, that way. I knowed J. Wesley had me down; knowed it in less 'n a
week after he sprung his trap. He wanted the 'Little Sue,' wanted it
worse 'n a little yaller dog ever wanted his supper. Do you know why? I
can tell you. After you get your dam done, and every dollar of the
make-believe money this cussed town's built on has gone to the bottom o'
the Dead Sea, the 'Susan' will still be joggin' along, forty dollars to
the ton. It's the only piece o' real money in this whole blamed
free-for-all, and J. Wes. knows it."
Brouillard looked at his watch. "When you're through we'll go around to
the bank and fix it up. There's no hurry. I've got to ride down to the
Buckskin camps, but I don't care to start much before two."
Massingale nodded, but his appetite was gone, and speech with it, the
one grateful outburst having apparently drained the well. But after they
had made their way through the excited sidewalk exchanges to the bank,
and Brouillard had written his check, the old man suddenly found his
voice again.
"You say you're goin' down to the Buckskin right away? How 'm I goin' to
secure you for this?"
"We can talk about that later on, after I come back. The thing to do
now is to get those notes cancelled and that stock released before
bank-closing time."
Still David Massingale, with the miraculously sent bit of rescue paper
in his hand, hesitated.
"There's one other thing--and I've got to spit it out before it's
everlastedly too late. See here, Victor Brouillard--Amy likes
you--thinks a heap of you; a plumb blind man could see that. But say,
that little girl o' mine has just natchurly _got_ to have a free hand
when it comes to pairin' up, and she won't never have if she finds out
about this. You ain't allowin' to use it on her, Victor?"
Brouillard laughed.
"I'll make a hedging bet and break even with you, Mr. Massingale," he
said. "That check is drawn to my order, and I have indorsed it. Let me
have it again and I'll get the cash for you. In that way only the two of
us need know anything about the transaction; and if I promise to keep
the secret from Miss Amy, you must promise to keep it from Mr. J. Wesley
Cortwright. Will you saw it off with me that way?--until you've made the
turn on the ore sales?"
David Massingale shook hands on it with more gratitude, colored this
time with a hearty imprecation. "Dad burn you, Victor Brouillard,
you're a man--ever' single mill-run of you!" he burst out. But
Brouillard shook his head gravely.
"No, Mr. Massingale, I'm the little yellow dog you mentioned a while
back," he asserted, and then he went to get the money.
The check cashed and the transfer of the money made, Brouillard did not
wait to see Massingale astonish the Niquoia National cashier. Nor did he
remark the curious change that came into the old man's face at the
pocketing of the thick sheaf of bank-notes. But he added a word of
comment and another of advice before leaving the bank.
"The day fits us like a glove," was the comment. "With all the money
that is changing hands in the street, Hardwick won't wonder at your
sudden raise or at my check." Then he put in the word of warning: "I
suppose you'll be dabbling a little in Mirapolis options after you get
this note business out of the way? It's all right--I'd probably do it
myself if I didn't have to leave town. But just one word in your ear,
Mr. Massingale: buy and _sell--don't hold_. That's all. Good-by, and
good luck to you."
Left alone in the small retiring room of the bank where the business had
been transacted, David Massingale took the sheaf of bank-notes from his
pocket with trembling hands, fondling it as a miser might. The bills
were in large denominations, and they were new and stiff. He thumbed the
end of the thick packet as one runs the leaves of a book, and the flying
succession of big figures seemed to dazzle him. There was an outer door
to the customers' room giving upon the side street; it was the one
through which Brouillard had passed. Twice the old man made as if he
would turn toward the door of egress, and the light in his gray-blue
eyes was the rekindling flame of a passion long denied. But in the end
he thrust the tempting sheaf back into the inner pocket and went
resolutely to the cashier's counter window.
Expecting to have to do with Hardwick, the brusque and business-like
cashier, Massingale was jarred a little aside from his own predetermined
attitude by finding Schermerhorn, the president, sitting at the
cashier's desk. But from the banker's first word the change seemed to be
altogether for the better.
"How are you, Mr. Massingale? Glad to see you. How is the boy getting
along? First rate, I hope?"
Massingale was looking from side to side, like a gray old hawk
disappointed in its swoop. It would have been some satisfaction to
buffet the exacting Hardwick with the fistful of money. But with
Schermerhorn the note lifting would figure as a mere bit of routine.
"I've come to take up them notes o' mine with John Wes.'s name on 'em,"
Massingale began, pulling out the thick sheaf of redemption money.
"Oh, yes; let me see; are they due to-day?" said the president, running
over the note portfolio.
Massingale nodded.
"H'm, yes, here they are. Brought the cash, did you? The 'Little Susan'
has begun to pan out, has it? I didn't know you had commenced shipping
ore yet."
"We haven't." David Massingale made the admission and regretted it in
one and the same breath.
"You've borrowed to meet these notes?" queried the president, looking up
quickly. "That won't do, Mr. Massingale; that won't do at all. We can't
afford to lose an old customer that way. What's the matter with our
money? Doesn't it look good to you any more?"
Massingale stammered out something about Cashier Hardwick's peremptory
demand of a few hours earlier, but he was not permitted to finish.
"Of course, that is all right from Hardwick's point of view. He was
merely looking out for the maturing paper. How much more time will you
need to enable you to get returns from your shipments? Sixty days? All
right, you needn't make out new notes; I'll indorse the extension on the
back of these, and I'll undertake to get Cortwright's approval myself.
No; not a word, Mr. Massingale. As long as you're borrowing, you must be
loyal and borrow of us. Good afternoon. Come again when we can help you
out."
David Massingale turned away, dazed and confused beyond the power of
speech. When the mists of astoundment cleared he found himself in the
street with the thick wad of bank-notes still in his pocket. Suddenly,
out of the limbo into which two years of laborious discipline and
self-denial had pushed it stalked the demon of the ruling passion,
mighty, overpowering, unconquerable. The familiar street sights danced
before Massingale's eyes, and there was a drumming in his ears like the
fall of many waters. But above the clamor rose the insistent voice of
the tempter, and the voice was at once a command and an entreaty, a
gnawing hunger and a parching thirst.
"By Gash! I'd like to try that old system o' mine jest one more time!"
he muttered. "All it takes is money enough to foller it up and _stay_.
And I've _got_ the money. Besides, didn't Brouillard say I was to get an
extension if I could?"
He grabbed at his coat to be sure that the packet was still there, took
two steps toward the bank, stopped, turned as if in the grasp of an
invisible but irresistible captor, and moved away, like a man walking in
his sleep, toward the lower Avenue.
It was the doorway of Haley's Place, the Monte Carlo of the Niquoia,
that finally halted him. Here the struggle was so fierce that the
bartender, who knew him, named it sickness and led the stricken one to a
card-table in the public bar-room and fetched him a drink. A single
swallow of whiskey turned the scale. Massingale rose, tossed a coin to
the bar, and passed quickly to the rear, where a pair of baize doors
opened silently and engulfed him.
XIV
The Abyss
It was at early candle-lighting in the evening of the day of renewed and
unbridled speculation in Mirapolis "front feet" that Brouillard, riding
the piebald range pony on which he had been making an inspection round
of the nearer Buckskin ditchers' camps, topped the hill in the new,
high-pitched road over the Chigringo shoulder and looked down upon the
valley electrics.
The immediate return to Mirapolis was no part of the plan he had struck
out when he had closed his office in the Niquoia Building at one o'clock
and had gone over to Bongras's to fall into the chance encounter with
David Massingale. He had intended making a complete round of all the
ditch camps, a ride which would have taken at least three days, and
after parting from Massingale at the bank he had left town at once,
taking the new road which began on the bench of the railroad yard. But
almost immediately a singular thing had happened. Before he had gone a
mile a strange reluctance had begun to beset him.
At first it was merely a haunting feeling of loss, as if he had left
something behind, forgetting when he should have remembered; a thing of
sufficient importance to make him turn and ride back if he could only
recall what it was. Farther along the feeling became a vague premonition
of impending disaster, growing with every added mile of the Buckskin
gallopings until, at Overton's Camp, a few miles short of the
Triangle-Circle Ranch headquarters, he had yielded and had set out for
the return.
If the curious premonition had been a drag on the outward journey it
became a spur to quicken the eastward faring. Even the piebald pony
seemed to share the urgency, needing only a loose rein and an
encouraging word. Across the yellow sands of the desert, through the
lower ford of the Niquoia, and up the outlet gorge the willing little
horse tossed the miles to the rear, and at the hill-topping moment, when
the electric lights spread themselves in the valley foreground like
stars set to illuminate the chess-board squares of the Wonder City, a
record gallop had been made from Overton's.
Brouillard let the pony set its own pace on the down-hill lap to the
finish, and it was fast enough to have jolted fresh road weariness into
a less seasoned rider than the young engineer. Most curiously, the
premonition with its nagging urgency seemed to vanish completely as soon
as the city's streets were under hoof. Brouillard left the horse at the
reservation stables, freshened himself at his rooms in the Niquoia
Building, and went to the Metropole to eat his dinner, all without any
recurrence of the singular symptoms. Further, when he found himself at a
table with Murray Grislow as his _vis-a-vis_, and had invented a
plausible excuse for his sudden return, he was able to enjoy his dinner
with a healthy wayfarer's appetite and to talk over the events of the
exciting day with the hydrographer with few or none of the abstracted
mental digressions.
Afterward, however, the symptoms returned, manifesting themselves this
time in the form of a vague and undefined restlessness. The buzzing
throngs in the Metropole cafe and lobby annoyed him, and even Grislow's
quiet sarcasm as applied to the day's bubble-blowing failed to clear the
air. At the club there was the same atmosphere of unrest; an
exacerbating overcharge of the suppressed activities impatiently waiting
for another day of excitement and opportunity. Corner lots and the
astounding prices they had commanded filled the air in the lounge, the
billiard room, and the buffet, and after a few minutes Brouillard
turned his back on the hubbub and sought the quiet of the darkened
building on the opposite side of the street.
He was alone in his office on the sixth floor and was trying, half
absently, to submerge himself in a sea of desk-work when the disturbing
over-thought suddenly climaxed in an occurrence bordering on the
supernatural. As distinctly as if she were present and at his elbow, he
heard, or seemed to hear, Amy Massingale say: "Victor, you said you
would come if I needed you: I need you now." Without a moment's
hesitation he got up and made ready to go out. Skeptical to the derisive
degree of other men's superstitions, it did not occur to him to doubt
the reality of the mysterious summons, or to question in any way his own
broad admission of the supernatural in the prompt obedience.
The Massingale town house was one of a row of stuccoed villas fronting
on the main residence street, which beyond the city limits became the
highroad to the Quadjenai bend and the upper valley. Brouillard took a
cab at the Metropole, dismissed it at the villa gate, and walked briskly
up the path to the house, which was dark save for one lighted room on
the second floor--the room in which Stephen Massingale was recovering
from the effects of Van Bruce Cortwright's pistol-shot.
Amy Massingale was on the porch--waiting for him, as he fully believed
until her greeting sufficiently proved her surprise at seeing him.
"You, Victor?" she said, coming quickly to meet him. "Murray Grislow
said you had gone down to the Buckskin camps and wouldn't be back for
two or three days!"
"Grizzy told the truth--as it stood a few hours ago," he admitted. "But
I changed my mind and came back. How is Steve this evening?"
"He is quite comfortable, more comfortable than he has been at all since
the wound began to heal. I have been reading him to sleep, and when the
night nurse came I ran down to get a breath of fresh air in the open."
"No, you didn't come down for that reason," Brouillard amended gravely.
"You came to meet me."