genial buccaneer. "You drew a check for that amount and cashed it, and a
few minutes later Massingale, whose account had been drawn down to
nothing, bobs up at Schermerhorn's window with exactly the same amount
in loose cash. What did he do with it--gamble it?"
"That is his own affair," Brouillard countered briefly.
"Well, the future--next month's future--is my affair. If you've got
money enough to interfere again--don't. You'll lose it, the same as you
did before. And perhaps I sha'n't take the second interference as
good-naturedly as I did the first."
"Is that all you have to say?" Brouillard asked impatiently.
"Not quite. I don't believe you were altogether in earnest a minute ago
when you expressed your desire to call it all off. You don't want the
Mirapolis well to go dry right now, not one bit more than I do."
"I have been trying pretty hard to make you understand that it is a
matter of utter indifference to me."
"But you haven't succeeded very well; it isn't at all a matter of
indifference to you," the magnate insisted persuasively. "As things are
shaping themselves up at the present speaking, you stand to lose, not
only the hundred thousand you squandered on old David, but all you've
made besides. I keep in touch--it's my business to keep in touch.
You've been buying bargains and you are holding them--for the simple
reason that with the present slowing-down tendency in the saddle you
can't sell and make any money."
"Well?"
"I've got a proposition to make that ought to look good to you. What we
need just now in this town is a little more activity--something doing.
You can relieve the situation if you feel like it."
"How?"
"If I tell you, you mustn't go and use it against me. That would be a
low-down welcher's trick. But you won't. See here, your bureau at
Washington is pretty well scared up over the prospect here. It is known
in the capital that when Congress convenes there is going to be a
dead-open-and-shut fight to kill this Buckskin reclamation project. Very
well; the way for you fellows to win out is to hurry--finish your dam
and finish it quick, before Congress or anybody else can get action."
For a single instant Brouillard was puzzled. Then he began to
understand.
"Go on," he said.
"What I was going to suggest is this: you prod your people at Washington
with a hot wire; tell 'em now's the time to strike and strike hard.
They'll see the point, and if you ask for an increase of a thousand men
you'll get it. Make it two thousand, just for the dramatic effect. We'll
work right along with you and make things hum again. We'll start up the
cement plant, and I don't know but what we might give the Buckskin M. &
M. folks a small hypodermic that would keep 'em alive while we are
taking a few snapshot pictures of Mirapolis on the jump again."
"Let me get it straight," said Brouillard, putting his back against the
door. "You fully believe you've got us down; that eventually, and before
the water is turned on, Congress will pass a bill killing the Niquoia
project. But in the meantime, to make things lively, you'd like to have
the Reclamation Service go ahead and spend another million or so in
wages that can be turned loose in Mirapolis. Is that it?"
"You've surrounded it very neatly," laughed the promoter. "Once, some
little time ago, I might have felt the necessity of convincing your
scruples, but you've cut away all that foolishness. It's a little tough
on our good old Uncle Samuel, I'll admit, but it'll be only a pin-prick
or so in comparison to the money that is thrown away every time Congress
passes an appropriation bill. And, putting it upon the dead practical
basis, Brouillard, it's your one and only salvation--personally, I mean.
You've _got_ to unload or go broke, and you can't unload on a falling
market. You think about it and then get quick action with the wire.
There is no time to lose."
Brouillard was looking past Cortwright and out through the plate-glass
window which commanded a view of the great dam and its network of forms
and stagings.
"It is a gambler's bet and a rather desperate one," he said slowly. "You
stand to win all or to lose all in making it, Mr. Cortwright. The town
is balancing on the knife-edge of a panic at this moment. Would it go
up, or down, with a sudden resumption of work on the dam?"
"The careless thinker would say that it would yell 'Fire!' and go up
into the air so far that it could never climb down," was the prompt
reply. "But we'll have the medicine dropper handy. In the first place,
everybody can afford to stay and boost while Uncle Sam is spending his
million or so right here in the middle of things. Nobody will want to
pull out and leave that cow unmilked. In the second place, we've got a
mighty good antidote to use in any sure-enough case of hydrophobia your
quick dam building may start."
"You could let it leak out that, in spite of all the hurrah and rush on
the dam, Congress is really going to interfere before we are ready to
turn the water on," said Brouillard musingly and as if it were only his
thought slipping into unconscious speech.
"Precisely. We could make that prop hold if you were actually putting
the top course on your wall and making preparations to drop the
stop-gate in your spillway."
"I see," was the rejoinder, and it was made in the same half-absent
monotone. "But while we are still on the knife-blade edge ... a little
push.... Mr. Cortwright, if there were one solitary righteous man left
in Mirapolis----"
"There isn't," chuckled the promoter, turning back to his desk while the
engineer was groping for the door-knob--"at least, nobody with that
particular brand of righteousness backed by the needful inside
information. You go ahead and do your part and we'll do the rest."
XVI
The Man on the Bank
Brouillard, walking out of Mr. Cortwright's new offices with his
thoughts afar, wondered if it were by pure coincidence that he found
Castner apparently waiting for him on the sidewalk.
"Once more you are just the man I have been wanting to see," the young
missionary began, promptly making use of the chance meeting. "May I
break in with a bit of bad news?"
"There is no such thing as good news in this God-forsaken valley,
Castner. What's your grief?"
"There is trouble threatening for the Cortwrights. Stephen Massingale is
out and about again, and I was told this morning that he was filling
himself up with bad whiskey and looking for the man who shot him."
Brouillard nodded unsympathetically.
"You will find that there is always likely to be a second chapter in a
book of that sort--if the first one isn't conclusive."
"But there mustn't be this time," Castner insisted warmly. "We must stop
it; it is our business to stop it."
"Your business, maybe; it falls right in your line, doesn't it?"
"No more in mine than in yours," was the quick retort.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" said the engineer pointlessly, catching step
with the long-legged stride of the athletic young shepherd of souls.
"Not if you claim kinship with Cain, who was the originator of that very
badly outworn query," came the answer shot-like. Then: "What has come
over you lately, Brouillard? You are a friend of the Massingales; I've
had good proof of that. Why don't you care?"
"Great Heavens, Castner, I do care! But if you had a cut finger you
wouldn't go to a man in hell to get it tied up, would you?"
"You mean that I have brought my cut finger to you?"
"Yes, I meant that, and the rest of it, too. I'm no fit company for a
decent man to-day, Castner. You'd better edge off and leave me alone."
Castner did not take the blunt intimation. For the little distance
intervening between the power company's new offices and the Niquoia
Building he tramped beside the young engineer in silence. But at the
entrance to the Niquoia he would have gone his way if Brouillard had not
said abruptly:
"I gave you fair warning; I'm not looking for a chance to play the Good
Samaritan to anybody--not even to Stephen Massingale, much less Van
Bruce Cortwright. The reason is because I have a pretty decent back-load
of my own to carry. Come up to my rooms if you can spare a few minutes.
I want to talk to a man who hasn't parted with his soul for a money
equivalent--if there is such a man left in this bottomless pit of a
town."
Castner accepted the implied challenge soberly, and together they
ascended to Brouillard's offices. Once behind the closed door,
Brouillard struck out viciously.
"You fellows claim to hold the keys of the conscience shop; suppose you
open up and dole out a little of the precious commodity to me, Castner.
Is it ever justifiable to do evil that good may come?"
"No." There was no hesitation in the denial.
Brouillard's laugh was harshly derisive.
"I thought you'd say that. No qualifications asked for, no judicial
weighing of the pros and cons--the evil of the evil, or the goodness of
the good--just a plain, bigoted 'No.'"
Castner ran a hand through his thick shock of dark hair and looked away
from the scoffer.
"Extenuating circumstances--is that what you mean? There are no such
things in the court of conscience--the enlightened conscience. Right is
right and wrong is wrong. There is no middle ground of accommodation
between the two. You know that as well as I do, Brouillard."
"Well, then, how about the choice between two evils? You'll admit that
there are times----"
Castner was shaking his head. "That is a lying proverb. No man is ever
compelled to make that choice. He only thinks he is."
"That is all you know about it!" was the bitter retort. "What can you,
or any man who sets himself apart as you do, know about the troubles and
besetments of ordinary people? You sit on the bank of the river and see
the water go by; what do you know about the agonies of the fellow who is
fighting for breath and life out in the middle of the stream?"
"That is a fallacy, too," was the calm reply. "I am a man as other men,
Brouillard. My coat makes no difference, as you have allowed at other
times when we have been thrown together. Moreover, nobody sits on the
bank in these days. What are your two evils?"
Brouillard tilted back in his chair and pointedly ignored the direct
question.
"Theories," he said half contemptuously. "And they never fit. See here,
Castner; suppose it was clearly your duty, as a man and a Christian and
to subserve some good end, to plant a thousand pounds of dynamite in the
basement of this building and fire it. Would you do it?"
"The case isn't supposable."
"There you are!" Brouillard broke out impatiently. "I told you you were
sitting on the bank. The case is not only supposable; it exists as an
actual fact. And the building the man ought to blow to high heaven
contains not only a number of measurably innocent people but one in
particular for whose life and happiness the man would barter his
immortal soul--if he has one."
The young missionary left his chair and began to walk back and forth on
his side of the office desk.
"You want counsel and you are not willing to buy it with the coin of
confidence," he said at length, adding: "It is just as well, perhaps. I
doubt very much if I am the person to give it to you."
"Why do you doubt it? Isn't it a part of your job?"
"Not always. I am not your conscience keeper, Brouillard. Don't
misunderstand me. I may have lived a year or so longer than you have,
but you have lived more--a great deal more. That fact might be set
aside, but there is another: in the life of every man there is some one
person who knows, who understands, whose word for that man is the one
only fitting word of inspiration. That is what I mean when I say that I
am not your conscience keeper. Do I make it clear?"
"Granting your premises--yes. Go on."
"I will. We'll paste that leaf down and turn another. Though I can't
counsel you, I can still be your faithful accuser. You have committed a
great sin, Brouillard, and you are still committing it. If you haven't
been the leader in the mad scramble for riches here in this abandoned
city, you have been only a step behind the leaders. And you were the one
man who should have been like Caesar's wife, the one whose example
counted for most."
Brouillard got up and thrust out his hand across the desk.
"You are a man, Castner--and that is better than being a priest," he
asserted soberly. "I'll take back all the spiteful things I've been
saying. I'm down under the hoofs of the horses, and it's only human
nature to want to pull somebody else down. You are one of the few men in
Mirapolis whose presence has been a blessing instead of a curse--who
hasn't had a purely selfish greed to satisfy."
Again Castner shook his head. "There hasn't been much that I could do.
Brouillard, it is simply dreadful--the hard, reckless, half-demoniac
spirit of this place! There is nothing to appeal to; there is no room or
time for anything but the mad money chase or the still madder
dissipation in which the poor wretches seek to forget. I can only try
here and there to drag some poor soul out of the fire at the last
moment, and it makes me sick--sick at heart!"
"You mustn't look at it that way," said Brouillard, suddenly turning
comforter. "You have been doing good work and a lot of it--more than any
three ordinary men could stand up under. I haven't got beyond seeing and
appreciating, Castner; truly I have not. And I'll say this: if I had
only half your courage... but it's no use, I'm in too deep. I can't see
any farther ahead than a man born blind. There is one end for which I
have been striving from the very first, and it is still unattained. I'm
past help now. I have reached a point at which I'd pull the whole world
down in ruins to see that end accomplished."
The young missionary took another turn up and down the room and then
came back to the desk for his hat. At the leave-taking he said the only
helpful word he could think of.
"Go to your confessor, Brouillard--your real confessor--and go all the
more readily if that one happens to be a good woman--whom you love and
trust. They often see more clearly than we do--the good women. Try it;
and let me help where a man can help."
For a long hour after Castner went away Brouillard sat at his desk,
fighting as those fight who see the cause lost, and who know they only
make the ruin more complete by struggling on.
Cortwright's guess had found its mark. He was loaded to break with
"front feet" and options and "corners." In the latest speculative period
he had bought and mortgaged and bought again, plunging recklessly with
the sole object of wringing another hundred thousand out of the drying
sponge against the time when David Massingale should need it.
There seemed to be no other hope. It had become plainly evident after a
little time that Cortwright's extorted promise to lift the smelting
embargo from the "Little Susan" ore had been kept only in the letter;
that he had removed one obstacle only to interpose another. The new
obstacle was in the transportation field. Protests and beseechings,
letters to traffic officials, and telegrams to railroad headquarters
were of no avail. In spite of all that had been done, there was never an
ore-car to come over the range at War Arrow, and the side-track to the
mine was as yet uncompleted. Brouillard had seen little of Massingale,
but that little had shown him that the old miner was in despair.
It was this hopeless situation which had made Brouillard bend his back
to a second lifting of the "Little Susan's" enormous burden. At first
the undertaking seemed easily possible. But with the drying of the
speculative sponge it became increasingly difficult. More and more he
had been compelled to buy and hold, until now the bare attempt to unload
would have started the panic which was only waiting for some hedging
seller to fire the train.
Sitting in the silence of the sixth-floor office he saw that Cortwright
had shown him the one way out. Beyond doubt, the resumption in full
force of the work on the dam would galvanize new life into Mirapolis,
temporarily, at least. After that, a cautious selling campaign,
conducted under cover through the brokers, might save the day for David
Massingale. But the cost--the heaping dishonor, the disloyalty of
putting his service into the breach and wrecking and ruining to gain the
one personal end....
The sweat stood out in great drops on his forehead when he finally drew
a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand and began to write a message.
Painstakingly he composed it, referring often to the notes in his
field-book, and printing the words neatly in his accurate, clearly
defined handwriting.
When it was finished he translated it laboriously into the department
code. But after the copy was made and signed he did not ring at once for
a messenger. Instead, he put the two, the original and the cipher, under
a paper-weight and sat glooming at them, as if they had been his own
death-warrant--was still so sitting when a light tap at the door was
followed by a soft swishing of silken skirts, a faint odor of crushed
violets, and Genevieve Cortwright stood beside him.
XVII
The Circean Cup
While one might count ten the silence of the upper room remained
unbroken, and neither the man nor the woman spoke. It was not the first
time by many that Genevieve Cortwright had come to stand beside the
engineer's desk, holding him with smiling eyes and a charming audacity
while she laid her commands upon him for the afternoon's motoring or the
evening's bridge party or what other social diversion she might have in
view.
But now there was a difference. Brouillard felt it instinctively--and in
the momentary silence saw it in a certain hard brilliance of the
beautiful eyes, in the curving of the ripe lips, half scornful, half
pathetic, though the pathos may have been only a touch of self-pity born
of the knowledge that the world of the luxury-lapped has so little to
offer once the cold finger of satiety has been laid upon the throbbing
pulse of fruition.
"You have been quarrelling with father again," she said, with an
abruptness that was altogether foreign to her habitual attitude toward
him. "I have come to try to make peace. Won't you ask me to sit down?"
He recalled himself with a start from his abstracted study of the
faultless contour of cheek and chin and rounded throat and placed a
chair for her, apologizing for the momentary aberration and slipping
easily from apology into explanation.
"It was good of you to try to bring the wine and oil," he said. "But it
was scarcely a quarrel; the king doesn't quarrel with his subjects."
"Now you are making impossible all the things I came to say," she
protested, with a note of earnestness in her voice that he had rarely
heard. "Tell me what it was about."
"I am afraid it wouldn't interest you in the least," he returned
evasively.
"I suppose you are punishing me now for the 'giddy butterfly' pose which
you once said was mine. Isn't there a possibility, just the least little
shadow of a possibility, that I don't deserve to be punished?"
He had sat down facing her and his thought was quite alien to the words
when he tried again.
"You wouldn't understand. It was merely a disagreement in a matter
of--a matter of business."
"Perhaps I can understand more than you give me credit for," she
countered, with an upflash of the captivating eyes. "Perhaps I can be
hurt where you have been thinking that the armor of frivolity, or
ignorance, or indifference is the thickest."
"No, you wouldn't be hurt," he denied, in sober finality.
"How can you tell? Can you read minds and hearts as you do your maps and
drawings? Must I be set down as hopelessly and irreclaimably frivolous
just because I have chosen to laugh when possibly another woman might
have cried?"
"Oh, no," he denied again. Then he tried to meet her fairly on the new
ground. "You mustn't accuse yourself. You are of your own world and you
can't very well help being of it. Besides, it is a pleasant world."
"But an exceedingly shallow one, you would say. But why not, Mr.
Brouillard? What do we get out of life more than the day's dole
of--well, of whatever we care most for? I suppose one ought to be
properly shocked at the big electric sign Monsieur Bongras has put up
over the entrance to his cafe; 'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow we die.' He meant it as a cynical gibe at the expense of
Mirapolis, of course; but do you know it appeals to me--it makes me
think."
"I'm listening," said Brouillard. "Convert me if you can."
"Oh, I don't know how to say it, or perhaps even how to think it. But
when I see Monsieur Bongras's cynical little fling I wonder if it isn't
the real philosophy, after all. Why should we be always looking forward
and striving and trying foolishly to climb to some high plane where the
air is sure to be so rare that we couldn't possibly breathe it?"
Brouillard's smile was a mere eye-lifting of grave reminiscence when he
said: "Some of us have quit looking forward--quit trying to climb--and
that without even the poor hope of reaping the reward that Poodles's
quotation offers."
Miss Cortwright left her chair and began to make an aimless circuit of
the room, passing the blue-prints on the walls in slow review, and
coming finally to the window looking out over the city and across to the
gray, timber-crowned wall of the mighty structure spanning the gap
between the Niquoia's two sentinel mountains.
"You haven't told me yet what your disagreement with father was about,"
she reminded him at length; and before he could speak: "You needn't,
because I know. You have been getting in his way--financially, and he
has been getting in your way--ethically. You are both in the wrong."
"Yes?" said Brouillard, neither agreeing nor denying.
"Yes. Father thinks too much of making money--a great deal too much; and
you----"
"Well?" he prompted, when the pause threatened to become a break. "I am
waiting to hear my indictment."
"You puzzle me," she acknowledged frankly. "At first I thought you were
going to be a thirsty money hunter like all the others. And--and I
couldn't quite understand why you should be. Now I know, or partly know.
You had an object that was different from that of the others. You wanted
to buy some one thing--not everything, as most people do. But there is
something missing, and that is what puzzles me. I don't know what it is
that you want to buy."
"There have been two things," he broke in. "One of them you know,
because I spoke of it to you long ago. The other----"
"The other is connected in some way with the Massingales; so much I
have been able to gather from what father said."
"Since you know part, you may know all," he went on. "David Massingale
owes your father--technically, at least--one hundred thousand dollars,
which he can't pay; which your father isn't going to let him pay, if he
can help it. And if Massingale doesn't pay he will lose his mine."
"You interested yourself? Would you mind telling me just why?" she
asked.
"That is one of the things you couldn't understand."
She turned a calmly smiling face toward him.
"Oh, you are mistaken, greatly mistaken. I can understand it very well,
indeed. You are in love with David Massingale's daughter."
Once more he neither denied nor affirmed, and she had turned to face the
window again when she went on in the same unmoved tone:
"It was fine. I can appreciate such devotion even if I can't fully
sympathize with it. Everybody should be in love like that--once. Every
woman demands that kind of love--once. But afterward, you know--if one
should be content to take the good the gods provide...." When she began
again at the end of the eloquent little pause there was a new note in
her voice, a note soothingly suggestive of swaying poppies in sunlit
fields, of ease and peace and the ideal heights receding, of rose-strewn
paths pleasant to the feet of the weary wayfarer. "Why shouldn't we take
to-day, the only day we can be sure of having, and use and enjoy it
while it is ours? Money?--there is money enough in the world, God knows;
enough and to spare for anything that is worth the buying. I have money,
if that is all--money of my own. And, if I should ask him, father would
give me the 'Little Susan' outright, to do with it as I pleased."
Brouillard was leaning back in his chair studying her faultless profile
as she talked, and the full meaning of what she was saying did not come
to him at once. But when it did he sprang up and went to stand beside
her. And all the honesty and manhood the evil days had spared went into
what he said to her.