Between sunrise and nightfall, on a day when the cloud of depression had
grown black with panic threatenings, the apathy which had lately
characterized the work on the great dam disappeared as if by magic. The
city found its bill-boards posted with loud calls for labor; the idle
mixers were put in commission; the quarries and crushers began to
thunder again; and the stagings once more shook and trembled under the
feet of a busy army of puddlers.
While the revival was as yet only in the embryonic period, fresh labor
began to come in gangs and in car loads and presently by special
trains. Swarming colonies of Greeks, Italians, and Bulgarians were
dumped upon the city through the gate of the railroad station, and once
more Chigringo Avenue at night became a cheerful Midway answering to the
speech of all nations.
Change, revivification, reanimation instantly became the new order of
the day; and again Mirapolis flung itself joyously into the fray,
reaping where it had not sown and sowing only where the quickest crop
could be gathered. For now the dullest of the reapers saw that the
government work was really the Mirapolitan breath of life. Neither the
quickening of the city's industries nor the restarting of the gold
dredges in the Quadjenai canals, the reopening of the Real Estate
Exchange nor the Buckskin Company's sudden resumption of the profitless
prospecting on Jack's Mountain served to obscure the principal
fact--that without the money the Reclamation Service was disbursing the
new prosperity structure would collapse like a house of cards.
This new and never-mentioned conviction wrought an eager change in men
and in methods. Credit vanished and spot cash was tacitly acknowledged
to be the only way to do business in a live community. Fortunes changed
hands swiftly, as before, but now there was little bargaining and, with
hot haste for the foreword, little time for it. To the Western motto of
"Go to it and get the money" was added: "And don't come back without
it." It was said with a laugh, but behind the laugh there was a menace.
Among the individual transformations wrought by the new conditions, the
young chief of the Reclamation Service afforded the most striking
example. From the morning when he had summarily cancelled the lease for
the offices in the Niquoia Building and had returned his headquarters to
the old log buildings on the government reservation and thence had
issued his first series of orders for the resumption of full-force work
on the dam and canals, those who had known him best discovered that they
had not known him at all. Even to Grislow and the men of his staff he
was curt, crisply mandatory, almost brutal. For one and all there was
rarely anything beyond the shot-like sentence: "Drive it, men; drive it;
that's what you're here for--_drive it_!"
The time he took to eat his hurried meals at Bongras's could be measured
in minutes, and what hours he gave to sleep no man knew, since he was
the last to leave the headquarters at night and the first on the work
in the morning. Twice, after the renewed activities on the great wall
had become a well-ordered race against time, and the concrete was
pouring into the high forms in steady streams from the ranked batteries
of mixers, Mr. Cortwright had sent for Brouillard, and on each occasion
the messenger had gone back with the brief word: "Too busy during
working hours." And when a third messenger came to inquire what Mr.
Brouillard's working hours were, the equally blunt answer returned was:
"All the time."
In the face of such discouragements Mr. Cortwright was constrained to
pocket his dignity as mayor, as the potentate of the exchanges, and as
the unquestionable master of the surly young industry captain who
refused to come when he was called, and to go in person. Choosing the
evening hour when he had been assured that he was likely to find
Brouillard alone and at work, he crossed the boundaries of the sacred
reservation and made his way to the door of the log-built mapping room.
"I came around to see what is eating you these days," was the pudgy
tyrant's greeting for the young man sitting under the shaded desk lamp.
"Why don't you drop in once in a while and give me the run of things?"
"I gave your clerk the reason," said Brouillard laconically. "I'm too
busy."
"The devil you are!" snapped the great man, finding the only arm chair
in the room and dropping heavily into it. "Since when?"
"Since the first time you sent for me--and before."
Mr. Cortwright recovered his working geniality only with a palpable
effort.
"See here, Brouillard, you know you never make any money by being short
with me. Let's drop it and get down to business. What I wanted to say is
that you are overdoing it; you are putting on too much steam. You've
brought the boom, all right, but at the pace you're setting it won't
last long enough. Are you catching on?"
"I'm listening," was the non-committal reply.
"Well, enough's enough, and too much of a good thing scalds the hog
before you're ready to dress it and cut it up. It's all right for you to
run men in here by the train load and scatter 'em out over your
scaffolding--the more the merrier, and it's good for the town--but you
needn't sweat the last shovelful of hurry out of them the way you're
doing. It won't do to get your job finished too soon."
"Before Congress convenes, you mean?" suggested Brouillard.
"That's just what I mean. String it out. Make it last."
Brouillard sat back in his pivot chair and began to play with the
paper-knife.
"And if I don't choose to 'string it out'--if I even confess that I am
straining every nerve to do this thing that you don't want me to
do--what then, Mr. Cortwright?"
The quiet retort jolted the stocky man in the arm chair as if it had
been a blow. But he recovered quickly.
"I've been looking for that," he said with a nervous twinkling of the
little gray eyes. "You've no business being out of business, Brouillard.
If you'd quit puddling sand and cement and little rocks together and
strike your gait right in ten years you'd be the richest man this side
of the mountains. I'll be open-handed with you: this time you've got us
where we can't wiggle. We've _got_ to have more time. How much is it
going to cost us?"
Brouillard shook his head slowly.
"Odd as it may seem to you, I'm out of your market this time, Mr.
Cortwright--quite out of it."
"Oh, no, you're not. You've got property to sell--a good bit of it. We
can turn it for you at a figure that will----"
"No; you are mistaken," was the quick reply. "I have no property in
Mirapolis. I am merely a squatter on government land, like every one
else in the Niquoia valley."
"For Heaven's sake!" the promoter burst out. "What's got into you? Don't
you go around trying to stand that corpse on its feet; it's a dead one,
I tell you! The Coronida titles are all right!"
"There are no Coronida titles. You have known it all along, and I know
it--now. I have it straight from the bureau of land statistics, in a
letter from a man who knows. The nearest boundary of the old Spanish
grant is Latigo Peak, ten miles south of Chigringo. The department knows
this and is prepared to prove it. And in the very beginning you and your
associates were warned that you could not acquire homestead or other
rights in the Niquoia."
"Let it go!" snapped the gray-eyed king of the pack. "We've got to get
out alive and we're going to get out alive. What's your price?"
"I have answered that question once, but I'll make it a little plainer
if you wish. It is beyond your reach; if you should turn your
money-coining soul into cash you couldn't pay it this time, Mr.
Cortwright."
"That's guff--boy-talk--play-ranting! You want something--is it that
damned Massingale business again? I don't own the railroad, but if you
think I do, I'll sign anything you want to write to the traffic people.
Let Massingale sell his ore and get the money for it. He'll go gamble it
as he did yours."
Brouillard looked up under the shaded electric globe and his handsome
face wrinkled in a sour smile.
"You are ready to let go, are you?" he said. "You are too late. Mr. Ford
returned from Europe a week ago, and I have a wire saying that
to-night's through freight from Brewster is chiefly made up of empty
ore-cars for the 'Little Susan.'"
The sandy-gray eyes blinked at this, but Mr. Cortwright was of those who
die hard.
"What I said still holds good. Massingale or his son, or both of them,
will gamble the money. And if they don't, we've got 'em tied up in a
hard knot on the stock proposition."
"I was coming to that," said Brouillard quietly. "For a long time you
have been telling me what I should do and I have done it. Now I'll take
my turn. You must notify your associates that the 'Little Susan' deal is
off. There will be a called meeting of the directors here in this room
to-morrow evening at eight o'clock, and----"
"Who calls it?" interrupted the tyrant.
"The president."
"President nothing!" was the snorted comment. "An old, drunken gambler
who hasn't got sense enough to go in when it rains! Say, Brouillard,
I'll cut that pie so there'll be enough to go around the table. Just
leave Massingale out of it and make up your mind that you're going to
sit in with us. We've bought the mine and paid for it. I've got the
stock put away where it's safe. Massingale can't touch a share of it, or
vote it, either."
Brouillard shook his head.
"You are stubbornly hard to convince, Mr. Cortwright, but I'll try one
more time. You will come here to-morrow evening, with your confederates
in the deal, prepared to take the money you have actually spent in
betterments and prepared to release the stock. If you fail to do so you
will get nothing. Is that explicit enough?"
"You're crazy!" shouted the promoter. "You talk as if there wasn't any
law in this country!"
"There isn't--for such men as you; you and your kind put yourselves
above the law. But that is neither here nor there. You don't want to go
into court with this conspiracy which you have cooked up to beat David
Massingale out of his property. It's the last thing on earth you want to
do. So you'd better do the other thing--while you can."
Mr. Cortwright sat back in his chair, and once more Brouillard saw in
the sandy-gray eyes the look which had been in the son's eyes when the
derelict fought for freedom to finish killing Stephen Massingale.
"It's a pretty dangerous thing to try to hold a man up unless you've got
the drop on him, Brouillard," he said significantly. "I've got you
covered from my pocket; I've had you covered that way ever since you
began to buck and rear on me a couple of months ago. One little wire
word to Washington fixes you for good and all. If I say the word, you'll
stay on your job just as long as it will take another man to get here to
supersede you."
Brouillard laughed.
"The pocket drop is never very safe, Mr. Cortwright. You are likely to
lose too much time feeling for the proper range. Then, too, you can
never be sure that you won't miss. Also, your assumption that I'm taking
an unarmed man's chance is wrong. I can kill you before you can pull the
trigger of the pocket gun you speak of--kill you so dead that you won't
need anything but a coroner's jury and a coffin. How long would it take
you to get action in the Washington matter, do you think?"
"I've told you; you'd have just about a week longer to live, at the
furthest."
"I can better that," was the cool reply. "I have asked you to do a
certain thing to-morrow night. If you don't do it, the _Spot-Light_ will
print, on the following morning, that letter I spoke of--the letter from
my friend in the bureau of land statistics. When that letter is printed
everybody in Mirapolis will know that you and your accomplices are plain
swindlers, amenable to the criminal law, and from that moment there will
never be another real-estate transfer in the Niquoia valley."
The promoter rose slowly out of his chair and stood leaning heavily with
his fat hands, palms downward, on the flat-topped desk. His cheeks were
puffed out and the bitten mustaches bristled like the whiskers of a gray
old leader of the timber-wolves.
"Brouillard," he grated huskily, "does this mean that you're breaking
with us, once for all?"
"It means more than that; it means that I have reached a point at which
I am ashamed to admit that there was ever anything to break."
"Then listen: you've helped this thing along as much as, or more than,
anybody else in this town; and there are men right here in
Mirapolis--plenty of 'em--who will kill you like a rat in a hole if you
go back on them as you are threatening to. Don't you know that?"
The younger man was balancing the paper-cutter across his finger.
"That is the least of my worries," he answered, speaking slowly. "I am
all sorts of a moral coward, I suppose; I've proved that often enough in
the past few months, God knows. But I'm not the other kind, Mr.
Cortwright."
"Then I'll take a hand!" snarled the tyrant at bay. "I'll spend a
million dollars, if I have to, blacklisting you from one end of this
country to the other! I'll fix it so you'll never build anything bigger
than a hog-pen again as long as you live! I'll publish your record
wherever there is a newspaper to print it!" He pounded on the desk with
his fist--"I'll do it--money can do it! More than that, you'll never
get a smell of that Chigringo mine--you nor Dave Massingale!"
Brouillard tossed the paper-knife into a half-opened drawer and squared
himself at the blotting-pad.
"That is your challenge, is it?" he said curtly. "So be it. Start your
machinery. You will doubtless get me, not because you have money, but
because for a time I was weak enough and wicked enough to climb down and
stand on your level. But if you don't hurry, Mr. Cortwright, I'll get
you first. Are you going? One thing more--and it's a kindness; get your
son out of town before this Massingale matter comes up for adjustment.
It will be safer."
"Is that all you have to say?"
"Pretty nearly all, except to tell you that your time is growing short,
and you and those who are in with you had better begin to set your
houses in order. If you'll come over here at eight o'clock to-morrow
night prepared to do the square thing by David Massingale, I'll withhold
the publication of that letter which will stamp you and your associates
as criminals before the law; but that is the only concession I shall
make."
"You've got to make at least one more!" stormed the outgoing magnate.
"You don't have to set any dates or anything of that kind for your
damned drowning act!"
"In justice to a good many people who are measurably innocent, I shall
have to do that very thing," returned the engineer firmly. "The notice
will appear in to-morrow's _Spot-Light_."
It was the final straw in the stocky promoter's crushing wrath burden.
His fat face turned purple, and for a second or two he clawed the air,
gasping for breath. Brouillard sat back in his chair, waiting for the
volcanic upheaval. But it did not come. When he had regained a measure
of self-control, Mr. Cortwright turned slowly and went out without a
word, stumbling over the threshold and slamming the door heavily as he
disappeared.
For a time after the promoter's wordless departure Brouillard sat at his
desk writing steadily. When the last of the memorandum sheets was filled
he found his hat and street coat and left the office. Ten minutes later
he had penetrated to the dusty den on the second floor of the
_Spot-Light_ office where Harlan was grinding copy for his paper.
Brouillard took a chair at the desk end and laid the sheets of pencilled
government paper under the editor's eyes.
Harlan's lean, fine-lined face was a study in changing emotions as he
read. But at the end there was an aggrieved look in his eyes, mirroring
the poignant regret of a newsman who has found a priceless story which
he dares not use.
"It's ripping," he sighed, "the biggest piece of fireworks a poor devil
of a newspaper man ever had a chance to touch off. But, of course, I
can't print it."
"Why 'of course'?"
"For the same reason that a sane man doesn't peek down the muzzle of a
loaded gun when he is monkeying with the trigger. I want to live a
little while longer."
Brouillard looked relieved.
"I thought, perhaps, it was on account of your investments," he said.
"Not at the present writing," amended Harlan with a grin. "I got a case
of cold feet when we had that little let-up a while back, and when the
market opened I cleaned up and sent the sure-enough little round dollars
home to Ohio."
"And still you won't print this?"
"I'd like to; you don't know how much I'd like to. But they'd hang me
and sack the shop. I shouldn't blame 'em. If what you have said here
ever gets into cold type, it's good-by Mirapolis. Why, Brouillard, the
whole United States would rise up and tell us to get off the map.
You've made us look like thirty cents trying to block the wheels of a
million dollars--and that is about the real size of it, I guess."
"Then it is your opinion that if this were printed it would do the
business?"
"There isn't the slightest doubt about it."
"Thank you, Harlan, that is what I wanted to find out--if I had made it
strong enough. It'll be printed. I'll put it on the wires to the
Associated Press. I was merely giving you the first hack at it."
"Gee--gosh! hold on a minute!" exclaimed the newsman, jumping up and
snapping his fingers. "If I weren't such a dod-gasted coward! Let me run
in a few 'It is alleged's', and I'll chance it."
"No; it goes as it lies. There are no allegations. It is merely a string
of cold facts, as you very well know. Print it if you like, and I'll see
to it that they don't hang you or loot the office. I have two hundred of
the safest men on my force under arms to-night, and we'll take care of
you. I'm in this thing for blood, Harlan, and when I get through, this
little obstruction in the way of progress that Cortwright and his crowd
planned, and that you and I and a lot of other fools and knaves helped
to build, will be cooling itself under two hundred feet of water."
"Good Lord!" said the editor, still unable to compass the barbaric
suddenness of it. Then he ran his eye over the scratch sheets again.
"Does this formal notice that the waste-gates will be closed three weeks
from to-morrow go as it stands?" he inquired.
"It does. I have the department's authority. You know as well as I do
that unless a fixed day is set there will be no move made. We are all
trespassers here, and we've been warned off. That's all there is to it.
And if we can't get our little belongings up into the hills in three
weeks it's our loss; we had no business bringing them here."
The editor looked up with the light of a new discovery in his eyes. "You
say 'we' and 'our.' That reminds me; Garner told me no longer ago than
this afternoon that you are on record for something like a hundred
thousand dollars' worth of choice Mirapolis front feet. How about that?"
Brouillard's smile was quite heart-whole.
"I've kept my salary in a separate pocket, Harlan. Besides that--well, I
came here with nothing and I shall go away with nothing. The rest of it
was all stage money."
"Say--by hen!" ejaculated the owner of the _Spot-Light_. Then, smiting
the desk: "You ought to let me print that. I'd run it in red head-lines
across the top of the front page. But, of course, you won't.... Well,
here goes for the fireworks and a chance of a soaped rope." And he
pushed the bell button for the copy boy.
Late as it was when he left the _Spot-Light_ office, Brouillard waited
on the corner for a Quadjenai car, and, catching one, he was presently
whisked out to the ornate villa in the eastern suburb. There was a light
in the hall and another in a room to the rear, and it was Amy who
answered his touch of the bell-push.
"No, I can't stay," he said, when she asked him in. "But I had to come,
if it was only for a minute. The deed is done. I've had my
next-to-the-last round-up with Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright, and to-morrow's
_Spot-Light_ will fire the sunset gun for Mirapolis. Is your father
here?"
"No. He and Stevie are up at the mine. I am looking for them on every
car."
"When they come, tell your father it's time to hike. Are you all
packed?"
She nodded. "Everything is ready."
"All right. Three of my teams will be here by midnight, at the latest.
The drivers and helpers will be good men and you can trust them. Don't
let anything interfere with your getting safely up to the mountain
to-night. There'll be warm times in Gomorrah from this on and I want a
free hand--which I shouldn't have with you here."
"Oh, I'm glad, glad!--and I'm just as scared as I can be!" she gasped
with true feminine inconsistency. "They will single you out first; what
if I am sending you to your death, Victor! Oh, please don't go and break
my heart the other way across by getting killed!"
He drew a deep breath and laughed.
"You don't know how good it sounds to hear you say that--and say it in
that way. I sha'n't be reckless. But I'm going to bring J. Wesley and
his crowd to book--they've got to go, and they've got to turn the
'Little Susan' loose."
"They will never do that," she said sadly.
"I'll make them; you wait and see."
She looked up with the violet eyes kindling.
"I told you once that you could do anything you wanted to--if you only
wanted to hard enough. I believed it then; I believe it now."
"No," he denied with a smile that was half sorrowful, "I can't make two
hills without a valley between them. I've chased down the back track
like a little man,--for love's sake, Amy,--and I've burned all the
bridges behind me as I ran; namely, the sham deeds to the pieces of
reservoir bottom I'd been buying. But when it is all over I shall be
just where I was when we began--exactly one hundred thousand dollars
short of being able to say: 'Come, girl, let's go and get married.'"
"But father owes you a hundred thousand dollars," she said quickly.
"Not in a hundred thousand years, O most inconsistent of women! Didn't
we agree that that money was poisoned? It was the purchase price of an
immortal soul, and I wouldn't touch it with a pair of tongs. That is why
your father couldn't use it; it belonged to the devil and the devil
wanted it back."
"Father won't take that view of it," she protested.
"Then you'll have to help me to bully him, that's all. But I must go and
relieve Grizzy, who is doing guard duty at the mixers.... Tell your
father--no, that isn't what I meant to say, it's this--" and his arms
went suddenly across the hundred-thousand-dollar chasm.
* * * * *
A little deeper in the night, when he was tramping back through the
sleeping town and up to the mixers on the high bench of Jack's
Mountain, Brouillard knew well enough that he was walking over a
thin-crusted crater of volcanic possibilities. But to a man in the
seventh heaven of love acknowledged without shame, and equally without
shame returned,--nay, with the first passionate kiss of the love still
tingling on his lips,--volcanic possibilities, or even the volcanoes
themselves, figure lightly, indeed.
XX
The Terror
In the Yellowstone National Park there is an apparently bottomless pit
which can be instantly transformed into a spouting, roaring Vesuvius of
boiling water by the simple expedient of dropping a bar of soap into it.
The _Spot-Light_ went to press at three o'clock. By the earliest graying
of dawn, and long before the sun had shown itself above the eastern
Timanyonis, Brouillard's bar of soap was melting and the Mirapolitan
under-depths were beginning to heave. Like wild-fire, the news spread
from lip to lip and street to street, and by sunrise the geyser was
retching and vomiting, belching debris of cries and maledictions, and
pouring excited and riotous crowds into Chigringo Avenue.
Most naturally, the _Spot-Light_ office was the first point of attack,
and Harlan suffered loss, though it was inconsiderable. At the battering
down of the doors the angry mob found itself confronting the young
Reclamation Service chief and four members of his staff, all armed.
Brouillard spoke briefly and to the point.
"I am the man who wrote that article you've been reading, and Mr. Harlan
printed it as a matter of news. If you have anything to say to me you
know where to find me. Now, move on and let Mr. Harlan's property alone
or somebody will get hurt."