motive which had prompted me to help David Massingale. But you knew and
you said the words for me. When you love as I do you will understand
that there is an ecstasy in the very madness of it that is more precious
than all the joys of a gold-mounted paradise without it. I must go on as
I have begun."
"You will marry her?" she asked softly.
"There has never been any hope of that, I think; not from the very
beginning. While I remained an honest man there was the insurmountable
obstacle I once told you of--the honor debt my father left me. And when
I became a thief and a grafter for love's sake I put myself out of the
running, definitely and hopelessly."
"Has she told you so?"
"Not in so many words; there was no need. There can be no fellowship
between light and darkness."
Miss Cortwright's beautiful eyes mirrored well-bred incredulity, and
there was the faintest possible suggestion of lenient scorn in her
smile.
"What a pedestal you have built for her!" she said. "Has it never
occurred to you that she may be just a woman--like other women? Tell me,
Mr. Brouillard, have you asked her to marry you?"
"You know very well that I haven't."
"Then, if you value your peace of mind, don't. She would probably say
'yes' and you would be miserable forever after. Ideals are exceedingly
fragile things, you know. They are made to be looked up to, not
handled."
"Possibly they are," he said, as one who would rather concede than
dispute. The reaction was setting in, bringing a discomforting
conviction that he had opened the door of an inner sanctuary to
unsympathetic eyes.
Followed a little pause, which was threatening to become awkward when
Miss Cortwright broke it and went back to the beginning of things.
"I came to tender my good offices in the--the disagreement, as you call
it, between you and father. Can't you be complaisant for once, in a way,
Mr. Brouillard?"
Brouillard's laugh came because it was summoned, but there was no mirth
in it.
"I have never been anything else but complaisant in the little set-tos
with your father, Miss Genevieve. He has always carried too many guns
for me. You may tell him that I am acting upon his suggestion, if you
please--that the telegram to Washington is written. He will understand."
"And about this Massingale affair--you will not interfere again?"
Brouillard's jaw muscles began to set in the fighting lines.
"Does he make that a command?" he asked.
"Oh, I fancy not; at least, I didn't hear him say anything like that. I
am merely speaking as your friend. You will not be allowed to do as you
wish to do. I know my father better than you do, Mr. Brouillard."
"What he has done, and what he proposes to do, in Massingale's affair,
is little short of highway robbery, Miss Genevieve."
"From your point of view, you mean. He will call it 'business' and cite
you a thousand precedents in every-day life. But let it go. I've talked
so much about business that I'm tired. Let me see, what was the other
thing I came up here for?--oh, yes, I remember now. We are making up a
party to motor down to the Tri'-Circ' Ranch for a cow-boy supper with
Lord Falkland. There is a place in our car for you, and I know Sophie
Schermerhorn would be delighted if you should call her up and tell her
you are going."
She had turned toward the door and he went to open it for her.
"I am afraid I shall have to offer my regrets to you, and to Miss
Schermerhorn as well, if she needs them," he said, with the proper
outward show of disappointment.
"Is it business?" she laughed.
"Yes, it is business."
"Good-by, then. I'm sorry you have to work so hard. If Miss Massingale
were only rich--but I forgot, the ideals would still be in the way. No,
don't come to the elevator. I can at least do that much for myself, if I
am a 'giddy butterfly.'"
After she had gone Brouillard went back to the window and stood with his
hands behind him looking out at the great dam with its stagings and
runways almost deserted. But when the westering sun was beginning to
emphasize the staging timbers whose shadow fingers would presently be
reaching out toward the city he went around to his chair and sat down to
take the Washington telegram from beneath its paper-weight. Nothing
vital, nothing in any manner changeful of the hard conditions, had
happened since he had signed his name to the cipher at the end of the
former struggle. Notwithstanding, the struggle was instantly renewed,
and once more he found himself battling hopelessly with the undertow in
the tide-way of indecision.
XVIII
Love's Crucible
For half an hour after the motor-cars of the Falkland supper party had
rolled away from the side entrance of the Hotel Metropole, Brouillard
sat at his desk in the empty office with the momentous telegram before
him, searching blindly for some alternative to the final act of
treachery which would be consummated in the sending of the wire.
Since, by reason of Cortwright's tamperings with the smelter people and
the railroad, the "Little Susan" had become a locked treasure vault, the
engineer, acting upon his own initiative, had tried the law. As soon as
he had ascertained that David Massingale had been given sixty days
longer to live, solely because the buccaneers chose to take his mine
rather than his money, Brouillard had submitted the facts in the case to
a trusted lawyer friend in the East.
This hope had pulled in two like a frayed cord. Massingale must pay the
bank or lose all. Until he had obtained possession of the promissory
notes there would be no crevice in which to drive any legal wedge. And
even then, unless some pressure could be brought to bear upon the
grafters to make them disgorge, there was no chance of Massingale's
recovering more than his allotted two thirds of the stock; in other
words, he would still stand committed to the agreement by which he had
bound himself to make the grafters a present, in fee simple, of one
third of his mine.
Brouillard had written one more letter to the lawyer. In it he had asked
how David Massingale could be unassailably reinstated in his rights as
the sole owner of the "Little Susan." The answer had come promptly and
it was explicit. "Only by the repayment of such sums as had been
actually expended in the reorganization and on the betterments--for the
modernizing machinery and improvements--and the voluntary surrender, by
the other parties to the agreement, of the stock in dispute," the lawyer
had written; and Brouillard had smiled at the thought of Cortwright
voluntarily surrendering anything which was once well within the grasp
of his pudgy hands.
Failing to start the legal wedge, Brouillard had dipped--also without
consulting Massingale--into the matter of land titles. The "Little
Susan" was legally patented under the land laws, and Massingale's title,
if the mine were located upon government land, was without a flaw. But
on a former reclamation project Brouillard had been brought in contact
with some of the curious title litigation growing out of the old Spanish
grants; and in at least one instance he had seen a government patent
invalidated thereby.
As a man in reasonably close touch with his superiors in Washington, the
chief of construction knew that there was a Spanish-grant involvement
which had at one time threatened to at least delay the Niquoia project.
How it had been settled finally he did not know; but after the legal
failure he had written to a man--a college classmate of his own--in the
bureau of land statistics, asking for data which would enable him to
locate exactly the Niquoia-touching boundaries of the great Coronida
Grant. To this letter no reply had as yet been received. Brouillard had
cause to know with what slowness a simple matter of information can ooze
out of a department bureau. The letter--which, after all, might contain
nothing helpful--lingered on the way, and the crisis, the turning-point
beyond which there could be no redemption in a revival of the
speculative craze, had arrived.
Brouillard took up the draught of the Washington telegram and read it
over. He was cooler now, and he saw that it was only as it came from the
hand of a traitor, who could and would deliberately wreck the train of
events it might set in motion, that it became a betrayal. Writing as the
commanding officer in the field, he had restated the facts--facts
doubtless well known in the department--the probability that Congress
would intervene and the hold the opposition was gaining by the
suspension of the work on the dam. If the work could be pushed
energetically and at once, there was a possibility that the opposition
would become discouraged and voluntarily withdraw. Would the department
place the men and the means instantly at his disposal?
"If I were the honest man I am supposed to be, that is precisely the
message I ought to send," he mused reflectively. "It is only as the
crooked devil in possession of me will drive me to nullify the effort
and make it of no effect that it becomes a crime; that and the fact that
I can never be sure that the Cortwright gang hasn't the inside track and
will not win out in spite of all efforts. That is the touchstone of the
whole degrading business. I'm afraid Cortwright has the inside track. If
I could only get a little clear-sighted daylight on the damnable
tangle!"
Obeying a sudden impulse, he thrust the two copies of the telegram under
the paper-weight again, sprang up, put on his hat, and left the
building. A few minutes later he was on the porch of the stuccoed villa
in the Quadjenai road and was saying gravely to the young woman who had
been reading in the hammock: "You are staying too closely at home. Get
your coat and hat and walk with me up to the 'Little Susan.' It will do
you good."
The afternoon was waning and the sun, dipping to the horizon, hung like
a huge golden ball over the yellow immensities of the distant Buckskin
as they topped the final ascent in the steep trail and went to sit on
the steps of the deserted home cabin at the mine.
For a time neither spoke, and the stillness of the air contributed
something to the high-mountain silence, which was almost oppressive.
Work had been stopped in the mine at the end of the previous week,
Massingale declaring, morosely, that until he knew whose ore he was
digging he would dig no more. Presumably there was a watchman, but if so
he was invisible to the two on the cabin step, and the high view-point
was theirs alone.
"How did you know that I have been wanting to come up here once more
before everything is changed?" said the girl at length, patting the
roughly hewn log step as if it were a sentient thing to feel the caress.
"I didn't know it," Brouillard denied. "I only knew that I wanted to get
out of Gomorrah for a little while, to come up here with you and get the
reek of the pit out of my nostrils."
"I know," she rejoined, with the quick comprehension which never failed
him. "It is good to be out of it, to be up here where we can look down
upon it and see it in its true perspective--as a mere little impertinent
blot on the landscape. It's only that, after all, Victor. See how the
great dam--your work--overshadows it."
"That is one of the things I hoped I might be able to see if I came here
with you," he returned slowly. "But I can't get your point of view, Amy.
I shall never be able to get it again."
"You did have it once," she asserted. "Or rather, you had a better one
of your own. Has Gomorrah changed it?"
"No, not Gomorrah. I could shut the waste-gates and drown the place
to-morrow for all that Mirapolis, or anything in it, means to me. But
something has changed the point of view for me past mending, since that
first day when we sat here together and looked down upon the beginnings
of the Reclamation construction camp--before Gomorrah was ever thought
of."
"I know," she said again. "But that dreadful city is responsible. It has
robbed us all, Victor; but you more than any, I'm afraid."
"No," he objected. "Mirapolis has been only a means to an end. The thing
that has changed my point of view--my entire life--is love, as I have
told you once before."
"Oh, no," she protested gently, rising to take her old place, with her
back to the porch post and her hands behind her. And then, still more
gently: "That is almost like sacrilege, Victor, for love is sacred."
"I can't help it. Love has made a great scoundrel of me, Amy; a
criminal, if man's laws were as closely meshed as God's."
"I can't believe that," she dissented loyally.
"It is true. I have betrayed my trust. Cortwright will make good in all
of his despicable schemes. Congress will intervene and the Niquoia
project will be abandoned."
"No," she insisted. "Take a good, deep breath of this pure, clean,
high-mountain air and think again. Mirapolis is dying, even now, though
nobody dares admit it. But it is. Tig Smith hears everything, and he
told father last night that the rumor about the Quadjenai placers is
true. They are worked out, and already the men have begun to move up the
river in search of new ground. Tig said that in another week there
wouldn't be a dozen sluice-boxes working."
"I have known about the Quadjenai failure for the past two weeks,"
Brouillard put in. "For at least that length of time the two steam
dredges have been handling absolutely barren gravel, and the men in
charge of them have had orders to go on dredging and say nothing.
Mirapolis is no longer a gold camp; but, nevertheless, it will boom
again--long enough to let Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright and his fellow
buccaneers loot it and get away."
"How can you know that?" she asked curiously.
"I know it because I am going to bring it to pass."
"You?"
"Yes, I. It is the final act in the play. And my part in this act is the
Judas part--as it has been in the others."
She was looking down at him with wide-open eyes.
"If any one else had said that of you ... but I can't believe it! I
know you, Victor; I think I must have known you in the other world--the
one before this--and there we climbed the heights, in the clear
sunlight, together."
"There was one thing you didn't learn about me--in that other world you
speak of," he said, falling in with her allegory. "You didn't discover
that I could become a wretched cheat and a traitor for love of you.
Perhaps it wasn't necessary--there."
"Tell me," she begged briefly; and, since he was staring fixedly at the
scored slopes of Jack's Mountain, he did not see that she caught her lip
between her teeth to stop its trembling.
"Part of it you know: how I did what I could to bring the railroad, and
how your brother's teaspoonful of nuggets was made to work a devil's
miracle to hurry things along when the railroad work was stopped. But
that wasn't the worst. As you know, I had a debt to pay before I could
say: 'Come, little girl, let's go and get married.' So I became a
stockholder in Cortwright's power company, knowing perfectly well when I
consented that the hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock he gave me
was a bribe--the price of my silence and non-interference with his
greedy schemes."
"But you didn't mean to keep it; you knew you _couldn't_ keep it!" she
broke in; and now he did not need to look to know that her lips were
trembling piteously.
"I did keep it. And when the time was fully ripe I sold it back to
Cortwright, or, rather, I suppose, sold it through him to some one of
his wretched gulls. I meant to pay my father's debt with the money. I
had the letter written and ready to mail. Then the tempter whispered
that there was no hurry, that I might at least keep the money long
enough to make it earn something for myself. Also, it struck me that
this same devil was laughing at the spectacle of a man so completely
lost to a decent sense of the fitness of things as to be planning to pay
an honor debt with graft money. And so I kept it for a while."
She dropped quickly on the step beside him and a sympathetic hand crept
into his.
"You kept it until the unhappy day when you gave it to my father, and
he--and he threw it away." She was crying softly, but his attempt to
comfort her was almost mechanical.
"Don't cry about the money. It had the devil's thumb-prints on it, and
he merely claimed his own and got it." Then he went on as one
determined to leave nothing untold. "Cortwright had bought me, and I
served him as only a man in my position could serve him. I became a
promoter, a 'booster,' with the others. There have been times when a
word from me would have pricked the bubble. I haven't said the word; I
am not saying it now. If I should say it I'd lose at a single stroke all
that I have been fighting for. And I am not a good loser, Amy."
For once the keen, apprehending perception failed.
"I don't understand," she said, speaking as if she were groping in thick
darkness. "I mean I don't understand the motive that could----"
He turned to her in dumb astonishment.
"I thought I had been making it plain as I went along. There has been
but the one motive--a mad passion to give, give, never counting the
cost. Love, as it has come to me, seems to have neither conscience nor
any scruples. Nothing is too precious to be dragged to the sacrifice.
You wanted something--you needed it--therefore it must be purchased for
you. And the curious part of the besetment is that I have known all
along that I was killing your love for me. If it wasn't quite dead
before, it will die now--now that I have told you how I am flinging the
last vestiges of uprightness and honor to the winds."
"But how?" she queried. "You haven't told me."
"You said a few minutes ago that Mirapolis is dying. That is true; and
it is dying a little too soon to suit the purposes of the Cortwright
gang. It must be revived, and I am to revive it by persuading the
department to rush the work on the dam. You would say that this would
only hasten the death of the city. But the plot provides for all the
contingencies. Mirapolis needs the money that would be spent here in the
rushing of the government work. That was the real life-blood of the boom
at first, and it could be made to serve again. Am I making it plain?"
She nodded in speechless disheartenment, and he went on:
"With the dam completed before Congress could intervene, Mirapolis
would, of course, be quite dead and ready for its funeral. But if the
Cortwright people industriously insist that the spending of another
million or two of government money is only another plum for the city and
its merchants and industries, that, notwithstanding the renewed
activities, the work will still stop short of completion and the city
will be saved by legislative enactment, the innocent sheep may be made
to bleed again and the wolves will escape."
She shuddered and drew a little apart from him on the log step.
"But your part in this horrible plot, Victor?" she asked.
"It is as simple as it is despicable. In the first place, I am to set
the situation before the department in such a light as to make it
clearly a matter of public policy to take advantage of the present
Mirapolitan crisis by pushing the work vigorously to a conclusion. After
thus turning on the spigot of plenty, I am expected to crowd the
pay-rolls and at the same time to hold back on the actual progress of
the work. That is all--except that I am to keep my mouth shut."
"But you can't, you _can't_!" she cried. Then, in a passionate outburst:
"If you should do such a thing as that, it wouldn't kill my love--I
can't say that any more; but it would kill me--I shouldn't want to
live!"
He looked around at her curiously, as if he were holding her at arm's
length.
"Shall I do what you would have me do, Amy? Or shall I do what is best
for you?" The opposing queries were as impersonal as the arm's-length
gaze. "Perhaps I might be able to patch up the ideals and stand them on
their feet again--and you would pay the penalty all your life in poverty
and privation, in hopes wrecked and ruined, and I with my hands tied.
That is one horn of the dilemma, and the other is ... let me tell you,
Amy, it is worse than your worst fears. They will strip your father of
the last thing he has on earth and bring him out in debt to them. There
is one chance, and only one, so far as I can see. Let me go on as I have
begun and I can pull him out."
The tears had burned out of the steadfast eyes which were resting, with
the shining soul looking out through them, upon the crimsoning snow
peaks of the distant Timanyonis.
"How little you know the real love!" she said slowly. "It neither weighs
nor measures, nor needs to; it writes its own law in the heart, and that
law can make no compromise with evil. It has but one requirement--the
best good of the beloved. If the way to that end lies through
sacrifice--if it asks for the life itself--so let it be. If you knew
this, Victor, you would know that I would gladly lose all--the mine, my
father's chance of his reward for the years of toil, even my brother's
better chance for reformation--and count myself happy in having found a
love that was too great to do evil that good might come."
He got up stiffly and helped her to her feet and together they stood
looking down upon the city of the plain, lying now under the curved,
sunset shadow cast by the mighty, inbending sweep of the great dam.
"I don't know," he said after a time. "Once, as I told you a few weeks
ago, the best there was in me would have leaped up to climb the heights
with you. But I've gone far since the going began. I am not sure that I
could find my way back if I should try. Let's go down. I mustn't keep
you out on the mountain after dark. I haven't happened to meet her, but
I suppose there is a Mrs. Grundy, even in Gomorrah."
She acquiesced in silence and they made the descent of the steep trail
and walked across in the growing dusk from the foot of Chigringo to the
stuccoed villa in the suburb, misers of speech, since there were no
deeper depths to which the spoken word could plunge. But at the villa
steps Brouillard took the girl in his arms and kissed her.
"Put me out of your mind and heart if you can," he said tenderly,
repeating the words which he had once sent across the distances to her
in another moment of despair, and before she could answer he was gone.
* * * * *
Monsieur Poudrecaulx Bongras, rotund, smiling, and roached and waxed to
a broad burlesque of Second-Empire fierceness, looked in vain among his
dinner guests that evening for the chief of the Reclamation Service, and
Brouillard's absence held a small disappointment for the Frenchman.
Rumor, the rumor which was never quiet and which could never be traced
conclusively to its source, was again busy with exciting hints of a new
era of prosperity about to dawn, and Bongras had hoped to drop his own
little plummet of inquiry into the Reclamation Service chief.
The chance did not materialize. The lights in a certain upper office in
the Niquoia Building were still turned on long after M. Poudrecaulx had
given up the hope of the deep-sea sounding for that night. Some time
after the lobby crowd had melted, and before the lower avenue had begun
to order small-hour suppers of Bongras, the two high windows in the
Niquoia Building went dark and a few minutes later the man who had spent
half the night tramping the floor or sitting with his head in his hands
at the desk in the upper room came out of the street archway and walked
briskly to the telegraph office across the plaza.
"How is the line to-night, Sanford--pretty clear?" he asked of the night
manager, killing time while the sleepy night receiving clerk was making
his third attempt to count the words in the closely written, two-page
government cipher.
"Nothing doing; a little A. P. stuff drizzling in now and then," said
the manager; adding: "But that's like the poor--always with us."
"All right; there is no particular rush about this matter of mine, just
so it is sure to be in the secretary's hands at the opening of business
in the morning. But be careful that it goes straight--you'd better have
it checked back before it is put on the through wire from Denver."
"Sure, Mr. Brouillard. What you say in this little old shack goes as it
lays. We'll look out and not bull your message. Good-night."
XIX
The Sunset Gun
Notwithstanding the preliminary rumors which Bongras and many others had
sought so anxiously to verify, the Mirapolitan awakening to a
realization that once more the tide had turned to bring new billows of
prosperity tumbling into the valley of the Niquoia came with a sudden
and triumphant shock.