Chapter IV: Part 4

"I've noticed that they haven't been blasting for two or three days. But that may mean nothing more than a delayed shipment of dynamite," was his rejoinder.

"It looks bad--devilish bad." The promoter was planted heavily in his pivot-chair, and the sandy-gray eyes dwindled to pin-points. "Three days ago the blasting stopped, and Garner--you know him, the little Kansas City shark across the street--got busy with the wire. The next thing we knew he was unloading, quietly and without making any fuss about it, but at prices that would have set us afire if he'd had enough stuff in his pack to amount to anything."

Brouillard tried to remember that he was the Reclamation Service construction chief, that the pricking of the Mirapolitan bubble early or late concerned him not at all,--tried it and failed.

"I am afraid you are right," he said thoughtfully. "We've had a good many applications from men hunting work in the past two days, more than would be accounted for by the usual drift from the railroad camps."

"You saw President Ford after I did; what did he say when he was over here?"

"He said very little to me," replied Brouillard guardedly. "From that little I gathered that the members of his executive committee were not unanimously in favor of building the Extension."

"Well, we are up against it, that's all. Read that," and the promoter handed a telegram across the desk.

The wire was from Chicago, was signed "Ackerman," and was still damp from the receiving operator's copying-press. It read:

"Work on P. S-W.'s Buckskin Extension has been suspended for the present. Reason assigned, shrinkage in securities and uncertainty of business outlook in Niquoia."

Brouillard's first emotion was that of the engineer and the economist. "What a bunch of blanked fools!" he broke out. "They've spent a clean million as it stands, and they are figuring to leave it tied up and idle!"

Mr. Cortwright's frown figured as a fleshly mask of irritability.

"I'm not losing any sleep over the P. S-W. treasury. It's our own basket of eggs here that I'm worrying about. Let it once get out that the railroad people don't believe in the future of Mirapolis and we're done."

Brouillard's retort was the expression of an upflash of sanity.

"Mirapolis has no future; it has only an exceedingly precarious present."

For a moment the sandy-gray eyes became inscrutable. Then the mask of irritation slid aside, revealing the face which Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright ordinarily presented to his world--the face of imperturbable good nature.

"You're right, Brouillard; Mirapolis is only a good joke, after all. Sometimes I get bamfoozled into the idea that it isn't--that it's the real thing. That's bad for the nerves. But about this railroad fizzle; I don't relish the notion of having our little joke sprung on us before we're ready to laugh, do you? What do you think?"

Brouillard shook himself as one who casts a burden.

"It is not my turn to think, Mr. Cortwright."

"Oh, yes, it is; very pointedly. You're one of us, to a certain extent; and if you were not you would still be interested. A smash just now would hamper the Reclamation Service like the mischief; the entire works shut down; no cement, no lumber, no power; everything tied up in the courts until the last creditor quits taking appeals. Oh, no, Brouillard; you don't want to see the end of the world come before it's due."

It was the consulting engineer of the power company rather than the Reclamation Service chief who rose and went to the window to look down upon the morning briskness of Chigringo Avenue. And it was the man who saw one hundred thousand dollars, the price of freedom, slipping away from him who turned after a minute or two of the absent street gazing and said: "What do you want me to do, Mr. Cortwright? I did put my shoulder to the wheel when Ford was here. I told him if I were in his place I'd take the long chance and build the Extension."

"Did you?--and before you had a stake in the game? That was a white man's boost, right! Have another cigar. They're 'Poodles's Pride,' and they're not half bad when you get used to the near-Havana filler. Think you could manage to get Ford on the wire and encourage him a little more?"

"It isn't Ford; it is the New York bankers. You can read that between the lines in your man Ackerman's telegram."

The stocky gentleman in the pivot-chair thrust out his jaw and tilted his freshly lighted cigar to the aggressive angle.

"Say, Brouillard, we've got to throw a fresh piece of bait into the cage, something that will make the railroad crowd sit up and take notice. By George, if those gold hunters up on Jack's Mountain would only stumble across something big enough to advertise----"

Brouillard started as if the wishful musing had been a blow. Like a hot wave from a furnace mouth it swept over him--the sudden realization that the means, the one all-powerful, earth-moving lever the promoter was so anxiously seeking, lay in his hands.

"The Buckskin people, yes," he said, making talk as the rifleman digs a pit to hold his own on the firing-line. "If they should happen to uncover a gold reef just now it would simplify matters immensely for Mirapolis, wouldn't it? The railroad would come on, then, without a shadow of doubt. All the bankers in New York couldn't hold it back."

Now came Mr. Cortwright's turn to get up and walk the floor, and he took it, tramping solidly back and forth in the clear space behind the table-topped desk. It was not until he had extended the meditative stump-and-go to one of the windows that he stopped short and came out of the inventive trance with a jerk.

"Come here," he called curtly, with a quick finger crook for the engineer, and when Brouillard joined him: "Can you size up that little caucus over yonder?"

The "caucus" was a knot of excited men blocking the sidewalk in front of Garner's real-estate office on the opposite side of the street. The purpose of the excited ones was not difficult to divine. They were all trying to crowd into the Kansas City man's place of business at once.

"It looks like a run on a bank," said Brouillard.

"It is," was the crisp reply. "Garner has beaten everybody else to the home plate, but he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He's been talking, and every man in that mob is a potential panic breeder. That thing has got to be nipped in the bud, right now!"

"Yes," Brouillard agreed. He was still wrestling with his own besetment--the prompting which involved a deliberate plunge where up to the present crisis he had been merely wading in the shallows. A little thing stung him alive to the imperative call of the moment--the sight of Amy Massingale walking down the street with Tig Smith, the Triangle-Circle foreman. It was of the death of her hopes that he was thinking when he said coolly: "You have sized it up precisely, Mr. Cortwright; that is a panic in the making, and the bubble won't stand for very much pricking. Give me a free hand with your check-book for a few minutes and I'll try to stop it."

It spoke volumes for the millionaire promoter's quick discernment and decision that he asked no questions. "Do it," he snapped. "I'll cover you for whatever it takes. Don't wait; that crowd is getting bigger every minute."

Brouillard ran down-stairs and across the street. It was no part of his intention to stop and speak to Amy Massingale and the ranchman, but he did it, and even walked a little way with them before he turned back to elbow his way through the sidewalk throng and into Garner's dingy little office.

"You are selling Mirapolis holdings short to-day, Garner?" he asked when he had pushed through the crowd to the speculator's desk. And when Garner laughed and said there were no takers he placed his order promptly. "You may bid in for me, at yesterday's prices, anything within the city limits--not options, you understand, but the real thing. Bring your papers over to my office after banking hours and we'll close for whatever you've been able to pick up."

He said it quietly, but there could be no privacy at such a time and in such a place.

"What's that, Mr. Brouillard?" demanded one in the counter jam. "You're giving Garner a blank card to buy for your account? Say, that's plenty good enough for me. Garner, cancel my order to sell, will you? When the chief engineer of the government water-works believes in Mirapolis futures and bets his money on 'em, I'm not selling."

The excitement was already dying down and the crowd was melting away from Garner's sidewalk when Brouillard rejoined Mr. Cortwright in the second-floor room across the street.

"Well, it's done," he announced shortly, adding: "It's only a stop-gap. To make the bluff good, you've got to have the railroad."

"That's the talk," said the promoter, relighting the cigar which the few minutes of crucial suspense had extinguished. And then, without warning: "You're carrying something up your sleeve, Brouillard. What is it?"

"It is the one thing you need, Mr. Cortwright. If I could get my own consent to use it I could bring the railroad here in spite of those New Yorkers who seem to have an attack of cold feet."

Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's hesitation was so brief as to be almost imperceptible. "I suppose that is your way of saying that your share in the table stakes isn't big enough. All right; the game can't stop in the middle of a bet. How much is it going to cost us to stay in?"

"The cost isn't precisely in the kind of figures that you understand best, Mr. Cortwright. And as to my share in the profits ... well, we needn't mince matters; you may remember that you were at some considerable pains to ascertain my price before you made the original bid--and the bid was accepted. You've just been given a proof that I'm trying to earn my money. No other man in Mirapolis could have served your turn over there at Garner's as I did a few minutes ago. You know that."

"Good Lord, man, I'm not kicking! But we are all in the same boat. If the railroad work doesn't start up again within the next few days we are all due to go to pot. If you've got the odd ace up your sleeve and don't play it, you stand to lose out with the rest of us."

The door was open into the anteroom where the stenographers' desks were, and Brouillard was staring gloomily into the farther vacancies.

"I wonder if you know how little I care?" he said half musingly. Then, with sudden vehemence: "It is altogether a question of motive with me, Mr. Cortwright; of a motive which you couldn't understand in a thousand years. If that motive prevails, you get your railroad and a little longer lease of life. If it doesn't, Mirapolis will go to the devil some few weeks or months ahead of its schedule--and I'll take my punishment with the remainder of the fools--and the knaves."

He was on his feet and moving toward the door of exit when the promoter got his breath.

"Here, hold on, Brouillard--for Heaven's sake, don't go off and leave it up in the air that way!" he protested.

But the corridor door had opened and closed and Brouillard was gone.

Two hours later Mirapolis the frenetic had a new thrill, a shock so electrifying that the rumor of the railroad's halting decision sank into insignificance and was forgotten. The suddenly evoked excitement focussed in a crowd besieging the window of the principal jewelry shop--focussed more definitely upon a square of white paper in the window in the centre of which was displayed a little heap of virgin gold in small nuggets and coarse grains.

While the crowds in the street were still struggling and fighting to get near enough to read the labelling placard, the _Daily Spot-Light_ came out with an extra which was all head-lines, the telegraph-wires to the East were buzzing, and the town had gone mad. The gold specimen--so said the placard and the news extra--had been washed from one of the bars in the Niquoia.

By three o'clock the madness had culminated in the complete stoppage of all work among the town builders and on the great dam as well, and gold-crazed mobs were frantically digging and panning on every bar in the river from the valley outlet to the power dam five miles away.

IX

Bedlam

It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon of the day in which Mirapolis went placer mad when word came to the Reclamation-Service headquarters that the power was cut off and that there were no longer men enough at the mixers and on the forms to keep the work going if the power should come on again.

Handley, the new fourth assistant, brought the news, dropping heavily into a chair and shoving his hat to the back of his head to mop his seamed and sun-browned face.

"Why the devil didn't you fellows turn out?" he demanded savagely of Leshington, Anson, and Grislow, who were lounging in the office and very pointedly waiting for the lightning to strike. "Gassman and I have done everything but commit cold-blooded murder to hold the men on the job. Where's the boss?"

Nobody knew, and Grislow, at least, was visibly disturbed at the question. It was Anson who seemed to have the latest information about Brouillard.

"He came in about eleven o'clock, rummaged for a minute or two in that drawer you've got your foot on, Grizzy, and then went out again. Anybody seen him since?"

There was a silence to answer the query, and the hydrographer righted his chair abruptly and closed the opened drawer he had been utilizing for a foot-rest. He had a long memory for trifles, and at the mention of the drawer a disquieting picture had flashed itself upon the mental screen. There were two figures in the picture, Brouillard and himself, and Brouillard was tossing the little buckskin sack of gold nuggets into the drawer, where it had lain undisturbed ever since--until now.

Moreover, Grislow's news of Brouillard, if he had seen fit to publish it, was later than Anson's. At one o'clock, or thereabout, the chief had come into the mapping room for a glance at the letters on his desk. One of the letters--a note in a square envelope--he had thrust into his pocket before going out.

"It looks as if the chief had gone with the crowd," said Leshington when the silence had grown almost portentous, "though that wouldn't be like him. Has anybody found out yet who touched off the gold-mounted sky-rocket?"

Grislow came out of his brown study with a start. "Levy won't tell who gave him those nuggets to put in his window. I tried him. All he will say is that the man who left the sample is perfectly reliable and that he dictated the exact wording of the placard that did the business."

"I saw Harlan, of the _Spot-Light_, half an hour ago," cut in Anson. "He's plumb raving crazy, like everybody else, but there is something faintly resembling method in his madness. He figures it that we government people are out of a job permanently; that with the discovery of these placers--or, rather, with the practically certain rediscovery of them by the mob--Mirapolis will jump to the front rank as a gold camp, and the Reclamation Service will have to call a halt on the Buckskin project."

Leshington's long, plain-song face grew wooden. "You say 'practically certain.' The question is: Will they be rediscovered? Bet any of you a box of Poodles's Flor de near Havanas that it's some new kind of a flip-flap invented by J. Wesley and his boomers. What do you say?"

"Good Lord!" growled Handley. "They didn't need any new stunts. They had the world by the ear, as it was."

"That's all right," returned Leshington; "maybe they didn't. I heard a thing or two over at Bongras's last night that set me guessing. There was a piece of gossip coming up the pike about the railroad pulling out of the game, or, rather, that it had already pulled out."

Once more silence fell upon the group in the mapping room, and this time it was Grislow who broke it.

"I suppose Harlan is getting ready to exploit the new sensation right?" he suggested, and Anson nodded.

"You can trust Harlan for that. He's got the valley wire subsidized, and he is waiting for the first man to come in with the news of the sure thing and the location of it. When he gets the facts he'll touch off the fireworks, and the world will be invited to take a running jump for the new Tonopah." Then, with sudden anxiety: "I wish to goodness Brouillard would turn up and get busy on his job. It's something hideous to be stranded this way in the thick of a storm!"

"It's time somebody was getting busy," snarled Handley. "There are a hundred tons of fresh concrete lying in the forms, just as they were dumped--with no puddlers--to say nothing of half as much more freezing to solid rock right now in the mixers and on the telphers."

Grislow got up and reached for his coat and hat.

"I'm going out to hunt for the boss," he said, "and you fellows had better do the same. If this is one of Cortwright's flip-flaps, and Brouillard happened to be in the way, I wouldn't put it beyond J. Wesley to work some kind of a disappearing racket on the human obstacle."

The suggestion was carried out immediately by the three to whom it was made, but for a reason of his own the hydrographer contrived to be the last to leave the mapping room. When he found himself alone he returned hastily to the desk and pulled out the drawer of portents, rummaging in it until he was fully convinced that the little buckskin bag of nuggets was gone. Then, instead of following the others, he took a field-glass from its case on the wall and went to the south window to focus it upon the Massingale cabin, standing out clear-cut and distinct in the afternoon sunlight on its high, shelf-like bench.

The powerful glass brought out two figures on the cabin porch, a woman and a man. The woman was standing and the man was sitting on the step. Grislow lowered the glass and slid the telescoping sun tubes home with a snap.

"Good God!" he mused, "it's unbelievable! He deliberately turns this thing loose on us down here and then takes an afternoon off to go and make love to a girl! He's crazy; it's the seven-year devil he talks about. And nobody can help him; nobody--unless Amy can. Lord, Lord!"

X

Epochal

At the other extremity of the trajectory of Grislow's telltale field-glass Brouillard was sunning himself luxuriously on the porch step at the Massingale house and making up for lost time--counting all time lost when it spelled absence from the woman he loved. But Miss Massingale was in a charmingly frivolous frame of mind.

"That is the fourth different excuse you have invented for cutting me out of your visiting list, not counting the repetitions," she gibed, when he had finally fallen back upon the time demands of his work to account for his late neglect of her. "If I wanted to be hateful I might insist that you haven't given the true reason yet."

"Perhaps I will give it before I go," he parried. "But just now I'd much rather talk about something else. Tell me about yourself. What have you been doing all these days when I haven't been able to keep tab on you?"

"Flirting--flirting desperately with Tig, with Lord Falkland, with Mr. Anson, and Mr. Grislow, and that nice boy of yours, Herbert Griffith, and with--no, _not_ with Mr. Leshington; he scares me--makes a face like a wooden image and says: 'Little girl, you need a mother--or a husband; I haven't made up my mind which.' When he _does_ make up his mind I'm going to shriek and run away."

"Who is Lord Falkland?" demanded Brouillard, ignoring the rank and file.

"O-o-h! Haven't you met him? He is Tig's boss. He isn't a real lord; he is only a 'younger son.' But we call him Lord Falkland because he has no sense of humor and is always trying to explain. 'Beg pawdon, my _deah_ Miss Massingale, but I'm _not_ Lord Falkland, don't y' know. The--er--title goes with the--er--entail. I'm only the Honorable Pawcy Grammont Penbawthy Trevawnnion.'" Her mimicry of the Englishman was delicious, and Brouillard laughed like a man without a care in the world.

"Where does the Honorable All-the-rest keep himself?" he wished to know.

"He stays out at the ranch in the Buckskin with Tig and the range-riders most of the time, I think. It's his ranch, you know, and he is immensely proud of it. He never tires of telling me about the cattle on a thousand hills, or the thousand cattle on one hill, I forget which it is."

"And you flirt with this--this alphabetical monstrosity!" he protested reproachfully.

"Honestly, Victor, I don't; that was only an amiable little figure of speech. You simply _can't_ flirt with a somebody who is almost as brilliant as a lump of Cornish tin ore and, oh, ever so many times as dense."

"Exit Lord Falkland, who isn't Lord Falkland," said Brouillard. "Now tell me about the 'Little Susan'; is the Blue-grass farm looming up comfortably on the eastern edge of things?"

In a twinkling her frivolous mood vanished.

"Oh, we are prosperous, desperately prosperous. We have power drills, and electric ore-cars, and a crib, and a chute, and a hoist, and an aerial tramway down to the place where the railroad yard is going to be--all the improvements you can see and a lot more that you can't see. And our pay-roll--it fairly frightens me when I make it up on the Saturdays."

"I see," he nodded. "All going out and nothing coming in. But the money is all here, safely stacked up in the ore bins. You'll get it all out when the railroad comes."

"That is another thing--a thing I haven't dared tell father and Stevie. When I was in Mirapolis this morning I heard that the railroad wasn't coming, after all; or, rather, Tig had heard it and he told me. We were digging for facts when you met us on Chigringo Avenue--trying to find out if the rumor were true."

"Did you find out?" he asked.

"Not positively. That is why I left the note at your office begging you to come up if you could spare the time. I felt sure you would know."

"It means a great deal to you, doesn't it?" he said evasively.

"It means everything--a thousand times more now than it did before."

His quick glance up into the suddenly sobered eyes of the girl standing on the step above him was a voiceless query and she answered it.

"We had no working capital, as I think you must have known. Once a month father or Stevie would make up a few pack-saddle loads of the richest ore and freight them over the mountains to Red Butte. That was how we got along. But when you sent me word by Tig that the railroad company had decided to build the Extension, there was--there was--a chance----"

"Yes," he encouraged.

"A chance that the day of little things was past and the day of big things was come. Mr. Cortwright and some of his associates had been trying to buy an interest in the 'Little Susan.' Father let them in on some sort of a stock arrangement that I don't understand and then made himself personally responsible for a dreadful lot of borrowed money."

"Borrowed of Mr. Cortwright?" queried Brouillard.

"No; of the bank. Neither Stevie nor I knew about it until after it was done, and even then father wouldn't explain. He has been like a man out of his mind since Mr. Cortwright got hold of him--everything is rose-colored; we are going to be immensely rich the minute the railroad builds its track to the mine dump. The ore is growing richer every day--which is true--and the railroad will let us into the smelters with train loads of it. He is crazy to build more cribs and put on night shifts of miners. But you see how it all depends upon the railroad."

"Not so much upon the railroad now as upon some other things," said Brouillard enigmatically. "You say your father has borrowed of the bank--is Mr. Cortwright mixed up in the loan in any way?"

"Yes; he arranged it in some way for father--I don't know just how. All I know is that father is responsible, and that if the railroad doesn't come he will lose everything."

Brouillard gave a low whistle. "I don't wonder that the quitting rumor made you nervous."

"It was, and is, positively terrifying. Father has taken one of the new houses in town and we are to move down next week in spite of all I can do or say. That means more expense and more temptations. I can't tell you how I hate and dread Mirapolis. It isn't like any other place I have ever known; it is cynical, vicious, wicked!"

"It is," he agreed soberly. "It couldn't well be otherwise. You tell a dozen men they've got a certain definite time to live, and the chances are that two or three of them will begin to prepare to get ready to be sorry for their sins. The other nine or ten will speed up and burn the candle right down into the socket. We shall see worse things in Mirapolis before we see better. But I think I can lift one of your burdens. What you heard in town this morning is a fact: the railroad people have stopped work on the Buckskin Extension. Don't faint--they are going to begin again right away."

"Oh!" she gasped. "Are you sure? How _can_ you be sure?"

"I've given the order," he said gravely. "An order they can't disregard. Let's go back a bit and I'll explain. Do you remember my telling you that your brother had tried to bribe me to use my influence with Mr. Ford?"

"As if I should ever be able to forget it!" she protested.

"Well, that wasn't all that he did--he threatened me--took me to one of the bars in the Niquoia, and let me prove for myself that it was tolerably rich placer ground. The threat was a curious one. If I'd say the right thing to President Ford, well and good; if not, your brother would disarrange things for the government by giving away the secret of the gold placers. It was ingenious, and effective. To turn the valley into a placer camp would be to disorganize our working force, temporarily at least, and in the end it might even stop or definitely postpone the building of the dam."

She was listening eagerly, but there was a nameless fear in the steadfast eyes--a shadow which he either missed or disregarded.

"Naturally, I saw, or thought I saw, a good reason why he should hesitate to carry out his threat," Brouillard went on. "The placer find, with whatever profit might be got out of it, was his only so long as he kept the secret. But he covered that point at once; he said that the 'Little Susan'--with the railroad--was worth more to him and to your father than a chance at the placer-diggings. The ore dump with its known values was a sure thing, while the sluice mining was always a gamble."

"And you--you believed all this?" she asked faintly.

"I was compelled to believe it. He let me pan out the proof for myself; a heaping spoonful of nuggets and grain gold in a few panfuls of the sand. It pretty nearly turned my head, Amy; would have turned it, I'm afraid, if Steve hadn't explained that the bar, as a whole, wouldn't run as rich as the sample."

"It is dreadful--dreadful!" she murmured. "You believed him, and for that reason you used your influence with Mr. Ford?"

"No."

"But you did advise Mr. Ford to build the Extension?"

"Yes."

"Believing that it was for the best interests of the railroad to come here?"

"No; doubting it very much, indeed."

"Then why did you do it? I _must_ know; it is my right to know."

He got up and took her in his arms, and she suffered him.

"A few days ago, little girl, I couldn't have told you. But now I can. I am a free man--or I can be whenever I choose to say the word. You ask me why I pulled for the railroad; I did it for love's sake."

She was pushing him away, and the great horror in her eyes was unmistakable now.

"Oh!" she panted, "is love a thing to be cheapened like that--to be sinned for?"

"Why, Amy, girl! What do you mean? I don't understand----"

"That is it, Victor; _you don't understand_. You deliberately sacrificed your convictions; you have admitted it. And you did it in the sacred name of love! And your freedom--how have you made a hundred thousand dollars in these few weeks? Oh, Victor, is it clean money?"

He was abashed, confounded; and at the bottom of the tangle of conflicting emotions there was a dull glow of resentment.

"The 'sacrifice,' as you call it, was made for you," he said, ignoring her question about the money. "I merely told Mr. Ford what I should do if the decision lay wholly with me. That is what he asked for--my personal opinion. And he got it."

"Yes; but when you gave it ... did you say: 'Mr. Ford, there is a girl up at the "Little Susan" mine on Chigringo Mountain who needs your railroad to help her out of her troubles. Because I love the girl'----"

"Of course I didn't say any such suicidal thing as that! But it is too late to raise the question of culpability in the matter of giving Ford what he asked for. I did it, as I say--for love of you, Amy; and now I have done a much more serious thing--for the same good reason."

"Tell me," she said, with a quick catching of her breath.

"Your brother put a weapon in my hands, and I have used it. There was one sure way to make the railroad people get busy again. They couldn't sit still if all the world were trying to get to a new gold camp, to which they already have a line graded and nearly ready for the steel."

"And you have----?"

He nodded.

"I had Levy put the spoonful of nuggets in his window, with a placard stating that it was taken out of a bar in the Niquoia. When I left the office to come up here the whole town was blocking the street in front of Levy's."

She had retreated to take her former position, leaning against the porch post, with her hands behind her, and she had grown suddenly calm.

"You did this deliberately, Victor, weighing all the consequences? Mirapolis is already a city of frenzied knaves and dupes; did you realize that you were taking the chance of turning it into a wicked pandemonium? Oh, I can't believe you did!"

"Don't look at me that way, Amy," he pleaded. Then he went on, with curious little pauses between the words: "Perhaps I didn't think--didn't care; you wanted something--and I wanted to give it to you. That was all--as God hears me, it was all. There was another thing that might have weighed, but I didn't let it weigh; I stood to lose the money that will set me free--I could have lost it without wincing--I told Cortwright so. You believe that, Amy? It will break my heart if you don't believe it."

She shook her head sadly.

"You have thrown down another of the ideals, and this time it was mine. You don't understand, and I can't make you understand--that is the keen misery of it. If this ruthless thing you tried to do had succeeded, I should be the most wretched woman in the world."

"If it had succeeded? It has succeeded. Didn't I say just now that the town was crazy with excitement when I left to come up here?"

The girl was shaking her head again.

"God sometimes saves us in spite of ourselves," she said gravely. "The excitement will die out. There are no placers in the Niquoia. The bars have been prospected again and again."

"They have been?----"

Brouillard turned on his heel and choked back the sudden malediction that rose to his lips. She had called Mirapolis a city of knaves and dupes; surely, he himself was the simplest of the dupes.

"I see--after so long a time," he went on. "Your brother merely 'salted' a few shovelfuls of sand for my especial benefit. Great Heavens, but I was an easy mark!"

"Don't!" she cried, and the tears in her voice cut him to the heart--"don't make it harder for me than it has to be. I have told you only what I've heard my father say, time and again: that there is no gold in the Niquoia River. And you mustn't ask me to despise my brother. He fights his way to his ends without caring much for the consequences to others; but tell me--haven't you been doing the same thing?"

"I have," he confessed stubbornly. "My love isn't measured by a fear of consequences--to myself or others."

"That is the hopeless part of it," she returned drearily.

"Yet you condone in your brother what you condemn in me," he complained.

"My brother is my brother; and you are--Let me tell you something, Victor: God helping me, I shall be no man's evil genius, and yours least of all. You broke down the barriers a few minutes ago and you know what is in my heart. But I can take it out of my heart if the man who put it there is not true to himself."

Brouillard was silent for a little space, and when he spoke again it was as one awaking from a troubled dream.

"I know what you would do and say; you would take me by the hand and tell me to come up higher.... There was a time, Amy, when you wouldn't have had to say it twice--a time when the best there was in me would have leaped to climb to any height you pointed to. The time is past, and I can't recall it, try as I may; there is a change; it goes back to that day when I first saw you--down at the lower ford in the desert's edge. I loved you then, though I wouldn't admit it even to myself. But that wasn't the change; it was something different. Do you believe in Freiborg's theory of the multiple personality? I saw his book in your hammock one day when I was up here."

"No," she said quite definitely. "I am I, and I am always I. For the purposes of the comedy we call life, we play many parts, perhaps; but back of the part-playing there is always the same soul person, I think--and believe."

"I know; that is common sense and sanity. And yet Freiborg's speculations are most plausible. He merely carries the idea of the dual personality--the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde notion--a step farther along. You may remember how he compares the human being to a ship changing commanders at every port. One captain makes her a merchantman; another makes her a tramp; a third turns her into a slaver or a pirate; under a fourth she becomes a derelict."

"That is a terribly dangerous theory, if you take it seriously," was her comment.

"I don't want to take it seriously. But facts are stubborn things. I am not the same man I was a few years or even a few months ago. I have lost something; I have not the same promptings; things that I used to loathe no longer shock me. New and unsuspected pitfalls open for me every day. For example, I am not naturally hot-headed--or rather, I should say, I am quick-tempered but have always been able to control myself. Yet in the past few months I have learned what it means to fly into a rage that fairly makes me see red. And there is no cause. Nothing different has broken into my life save the best of all things--a great love. And you tell me that the love is unworthy."

"No, I didn't say that; I only meant that you had misconceived it. Love is the truest, finest thing we know. It can never be the tool of evil, much less the hand that guides the tool. Given a free field, it always makes for the wider horizons, the higher planes of thought and action; it may even breathe new life into the benumbed conscience. I don't say that it can't be dragged down and trampled in the dust and the mire; it can be, and then there is nothing more pitiful in a world of misconceptions."

Again a silence came and sat between them; and, as before, it was the man who broke it.

"You lead me to a conclusion that I refuse to accept, Amy; that I am dominated by some influence which is stronger than love."

"You are," she said simply.

"What is it?"

"Environment."

"That is the most humiliating thing you have said to-day. Is a man a mere bit of driftwood, to be tossed about in the froth of any wave that happens to come along, as Freiborg says he is?"

"Not always; perhaps not often. And never, I think, in the best part of him--the soul ego. Yet there is a mighty power in the wave, in the mere drift. However much others may be deluded, I am sure you can see Mirapolis in its true light. It is frankly, baldly, the money-making scheme of a few unscrupulous men. It has no future--it can have none. And because it is what it is, the very air you breathe down there is poisoned. The taint is in the blood. Mr. Cortwright and his fellow bandits call it the 'Miracle City,' but the poor wretches on lower Chigringo Avenue laugh and call it Gomorrah."

"Just at the present moment it is a city of fools--and I, the king of the fools, have made it so," said Brouillard gloomily. From his seat on the porch step he was frowning down upon the outspread scene in the valley, where the triangular shadow of Jack's Mountain was creeping slowly across to the foot of Chigringo. Something in the measured eye-sweep brought him to his feet with a hasty exclamation:

"Good Lord! the machinery has stopped! They've knocked off work on the dam!"

"Why not?" she said. "Did you imagine that your workmen were any less human than other people?"

"No, of course not; that is, I--but I haven't any time to go into that now. Is your telephone line up here in operation?"

"No, not yet."

"Then I must burn the wind getting down there. By Jove! if those unspeakable idiots have gone off and left the concrete to freeze wherever it happens to be----"

"One moment," she pleaded, while he was reaching for his hat. "This new madness will have spent itself by nightfall--it must. And yet I have the queerest shivery feeling, as if something dreadful were going to happen. Can't you contrive to get word to me, some way--after it is all over? I wish you could."

"I'll do it," he promised. "I'll come up after supper."

"No, don't do that. You will be needed at the dam. There will be trouble, with a town full of disappointed gold-hunters, and liquor to be had. Wait a minute." She ran into the house and came out with two little paper-covered cylinders with fuses projecting. "Take these, they are Bengal lights--some of the fireworks that Tig bought in Red Butte for the Fourth. Light the blue one when you are ready to send me my message of cheer. I shall be watching for it."

"And the other?" he asked.

"It is a red light, the signal of war and tumults and danger. If you light it, I shall know----"

He nodded, dropped the paper cylinders into his pocket, and a moment later was racing down the trail to take his place at the helm of the abandoned ship of the industries.

There was need for a commander; for a cool head to bring order out of chaos, and for the rare faculty which is able to accomplish Herculean tasks with whatever means lie at hand. Brouillard descended upon his disheartened subordinates like a whirlwind of invincible energy, electrifying everybody into instant action. Gassman was told off to bring the Indians, who alone were loyally indifferent to the gold craze, down from the crushers. Anson was despatched to impress the waiters and bell-boys from the Metropole; Leshington was sent to the shops and the bank to turn out the clerks; Grislow and Handley were ordered to take charge of the makeshift concrete handlers as fast as they materialized, squadding them and driving the work of wreck clearing for every man and minute they could command, with Gassman and Bender to act as foremen.

For himself, Brouillard reserved the most hazardous of the recruiting expedients. The lower Avenue had already become a double rank of dives, saloons, and gambling dens; here, if anywhere in the craze-depopulated town, men might be found, and for once in their lives they should be shown how other men earned money.

"Shove it for every minute of daylight there is left," he ordered, snapping out his commands to his staff while he was filling the magazine of his Winchester. "Puddle what material there is in the forms, dump the telpher buckets where they stand, and clean out the mixers; that's the size of the job, and it's got to be done. Jump to it, Grizzy, you and Handley, and we'll try to fill your gangs the best way we can. Leshington, don't you take any refusal from the shopkeepers and the bank people; if they kick, you tell them that not another dollar of government money will be spent in this town--we'll run a free commissary first. Anson, you make Bongras turn out every man in his feeding place; he'll do it. Griffith, you chase Mr. Cortwright, and don't quit till you find him. Tell him from me that we've got to have every man he can give us, at whatever cost."

"You'll be up on the stagings yourself, won't you?" asked Grislow, struggling into his working-coat.

"After a bit. I'm going down to the lower Avenue to turn out the crooks and diamond wearers. It's time they were learning how to earn an honest dollar."

"You'll get yourself killed up," grumbled Leshington. "Work is the one thing you won't get out of that crowd."

"Watch me," rasped the chief, and he was gone as soon as he had said it.

Strange things and strenuous happened in the lower end of the Niquoia valley during the few hours of daylight that remained. First, climbing nervously to the puddlers' staging on the great dam, and led by near-Napoleon Poodles himself, came the Metropole quota of waiters, scullions, cooks, and porters, willing but skilless. After them, and herded by Leshington, came a dapper crew of office men and clerks to snatch up the puddling spades and to soil their clothes and blister their hands in emptying the concrete buckets. Mr. Cortwright's contribution came as a dropping fire; a handful of tree-cutters from the sawmills, a few men picked up here and there in the deserted town, an automobile load of power-company employees shot down from the generating plant at racing speed.

Last, but by no means least in numbers, came the human derelicts from the lower Avenue; men in frock-coats; men in cow-boy jeans taking it as a huge joke; men with foreign faces and lowering brows and with strange oaths in their mouths; and behind the motley throng and marshalling it to a quickstep, Brouillard and Tig Smith.

It was hot work and heavy for the strangely assorted crew, and Brouillard drove it to the limit, bribing, cajoling, or threatening, patrolling the long line of staging to encourage the awkward puddlers, or side-stepping swiftly to the mixers to bring back a detachment of skulkers at the rifle's muzzle. And by nightfall the thing was done, with the loss reduced to a minimum and the makeshift laborers dropping out in squads and groups, some laughing, some swearing, and all too weary and toil-worn to be dangerous. "Give us a job if we come back to-morrow, Mr. Brouillard?" called out the king of the gamblers in passing; and the cry was taken up by others in grim jest.

"Thus endeth the first lesson," said Grislow, when the engineering corps was reassembling at the headquarters preparatory to a descent upon the supper-table. But Brouillard was dumb and haggard, and when he had hung rifle and cartridge-belt on their pegs behind his desk, he went out, leaving unbroken the silence which had greeted his entrance.

"The boss is taking it pretty hard," said young Griffith to no one in particular, and it was Leshington who took him up savagely and invited him to hold his tongue.

"The least said is the soonest mended--at a funeral," was the form the first assistant's rebuke took. "You take my advice and don't mess or meddle with the chief until he's had time to work this thing out of his system."

Brouillard was working it out in his own way, tramping the streets, hanging on the outskirts of arguing groups of newsmongers, or listening to the bonanza talk of the loungers in the Metropole lobby. Soon after dark the gold-seekers began to drop in, by twos and threes and in squads, all with the same story of disappointment. By nine o'clock the town was full of them, and since the liquor was flowing freely across many bars, the mutterings of disappointment soon swelled to a thunder roar of drunken rage, with the unknown exhibitor of the specimen nuggets for its object. From threats of vengeance upon the man who had hoaxed an entire town to a frenzied search for the man was but a step, and when Brouillard finally left the Metropole and crossed over to his office quarters, the mob was hunting riotously for the jeweller Levy and promising to hang him--when found--to the nearest wire pole if he should not confess the name and standing of his gold-bug.

The shouts of the mob were ringing in Brouillard's ears when he strode dejectedly into the deserted map room, and the cries were rising with a new note and in fresher frenzies a little later when Grislow came in. The hydrographer's blue eyes were hard and his voice had a tang of bitterness in it when he said: "Well, you've done it. Three men have just come in with a double handful of nuggets, and Mirapolis makes its bow to the world at large as the newest and richest of the gold camps."

Brouillard had been humped over his desk, and he sprang up with a cry like that of a wounded animal.

"It can't be; Grizzy, I tell you it can't be! Steve Massingale planted that gold that I washed out--played me for a fool to get me to work for the railroad. I didn't know it until--until----"

"Until Amy Massingale told you about it this afternoon," cut in the map-maker shrewdly. "That's all right. The bar Steve took you to was barren enough; they tell me that every cubic foot of it has been washed over in dish pans and skillets in the past few hours. But you know the big bend opposite the Quadjenai Hills; the river has built that bend out of its own washings, and the bulletin over at the _Spot-Light_ office says that the entire peninsula is one huge bank of gold-bearing gravel."

At the word Brouillard staggered as from the impact of a bullet. Then he crossed the room slowly, groping his way toward the peg where the coat he had worn in the afternoon was hanging. Grislow saw him take something out of the pocket of the coat, and the next moment the door opened and closed and the hydrographer was left alone.

Having been planned before there was a city to be considered, the government buildings enclosed three sides of a small open square, facing toward the great dam. In the middle of this open space Brouillard stopped, kicked up a little mound of earth, and stood the two paper cylinders on it, side by side.

The tempered glow from the city electrics made a soft twilight in the little plaza; he could see the wrapper colors of the two signal-fires quite well. A sharp attack of indecision had prompted him to place both of them on the tiny mound. With the match in his hand, he was still undecided. Amy Massingale's words came back to him as he hesitated: "Light the blue one when you are ready to send me my message of cheer...." On the lips of another woman the words might have taken a materialistic meaning; the miraculous gold discovery would bring the railroad, and the railroad would rescue the Massingale mine and restore the Massingale fortunes.

He looked up at the dark bulk of Chigringo, unrelieved even by the tiny fleck of lamplight which he had so often called his guiding star. "Take me out of your mind and heart and say which you will have, little girl," he whispered, sending the words out into the void of night. But only the din and clamor of a city gone wild with enthusiasm came to answer him. Somewhere on the Avenue a band was playing; men were shouting themselves hoarse in excitement, and above the shouting came the staccato crackling of pistols and guns fired in air.

He struck the match and stooped over the blue cylinder. "This is your message of cheer, whether you take it that way or not," he went on, whispering again to the silent void. But when the fuse of the blue light was fairly fizzing, he suddenly pinched it out and held the match to the other.

* * * * *

Up on the high bench of the great mountain Amy Massingale was pacing to and fro on the puncheon-floored porch of the home cabin. Her father had gone to bed, and somewhere down among the electric lights starring the valley her brother was mingling with the excited mobs whose shoutings and gun-firings floated up, distance-softened, on the still, thin air of the summer night.

Though there was no pause in the monotonous pacing back and forth, the girl's gaze never wandered far from a dark area in the western edge of the town--the semicircle cut into the dotting lights and marking the site of the government reservation. It was when a tiny stream of sparks shot up in the centre of the dark area that she stopped and held her breath. Then, when a blinding flare followed to prick out the headquarters, the commissary, and the mess house, she sank in a despairing little heap on the floor, with her face hidden in her hands and the quick sobs shaking her like an ague chill. It was Brouillard's signal, but it was not the signal of peace; it was the blood-red token of revolution and strife and turmoil.

XI

The Feast of Hurrahs

Mirapolis the marvellous was a hustling, roaring, wide-open mining-camp of twenty thousand souls by the time the railroad, straining every nerve and crowding three shifts into the twenty-four-hour day, pushed its rails along the foot-hill bench of Chigringo, tossed up its temporary station buildings, and signalled its opening for business by running a mammoth excursion from the cities of the immediate East.

Busy as it was, the city took time to celebrate fittingly the event which linked it to the outer world. By proclamation Mayor Cortwright declared a holiday. There were lavish displays of bunting, an impromptu trades parade, speeches from the plaza band-stand, free lunches and free liquor--a day of boisterous, hilarious triumphings, with, incidentally, much buying and selling and many transfers of the precious "front foot" or choice "corner."

Yielding to pressure, which was no less imperative from below than from above, Brouillard had consented to suspend work on the great dam during the day of triumphs, and the Reclamation-Service force, smaller now than at any time since the beginning of the undertaking, went to swell the crowds in Chigringo Avenue.