Brouillard laughed.
"I'll make a hedging bet and break even with you, Mr. Massingale," he said. "That check is drawn to my order, and I have indorsed it. Let me have it again and I'll get the cash for you. In that way only the two of us need know anything about the transaction; and if I promise to keep the secret from Miss Amy, you must promise to keep it from Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright. Will you saw it off with me that way?—until you've made the turn on the ore sales?"
David Massingale shook hands on it with more gratitude, colored this time with a hearty imprecation. "Dad burn you, Victor Brouillard, you're a man—ever' single mill-run of you!" he burst out. But Brouillard shook his head gravely.
"No, Mr. Massingale, I'm the little yellow dog you mentioned a while back," he asserted, and then he went to get the money.
The check cashed and the transfer of the money made, Brouillard did not wait to see Massingale astonish the Niquoia National cashier. Nor did he remark the curious change that came into the old man's face at the pocketing of the thick sheaf of bank-notes. But he added a word of comment and another of advice before leaving the bank.
"The day fits us like a glove," was the comment. "With all the money that is changing hands in the street, Hardwick won't wonder at your sudden raise or at my check." Then he put in the word of warning: "I suppose you'll be dabbling a little in Mirapolis options after you get this note business out of the way? It's all right—I'd probably do it myself if I didn't have to leave town. But just one word in your ear, Mr. Massingale: buy andsell—don't hold. That's all. Good-by, and good luck to you."
Left alone in the small retiring room of the bank where the business had been transacted, David Massingale took the sheaf of bank-notes from his pocket with trembling hands, fondling it as a miser might. The bills were in large denominations, and they were new and stiff. He thumbed the end of the thick packet as one runs the leaves of a book, and the flying succession of big figures seemed to dazzle him. There was an outer door to the customers' room giving upon the side street; it was the one through which Brouillard had passed. Twice the old man made as if he would turn toward the door of egress, and the light in his gray-blue eyes was the rekindling flame of a passion long denied. But in the end he thrust the tempting sheaf back into the inner pocket and went resolutely to the cashier's counter window.
Expecting to have to do with Hardwick, the brusque and business-like cashier, Massingale was jarred a little aside from his own predetermined attitude by finding Schermerhorn, the president, sitting at the cashier's desk. But from the banker's first word the change seemed to be altogether for the better.
"How are you, Mr. Massingale? Glad to see you. How is the boy getting along? First rate, I hope?"
Massingale was looking from side to side, like a gray old hawk disappointed in its swoop. It would have been some satisfaction to buffet the exacting Hardwick with the fistful of money. But with Schermerhorn the note lifting would figure as a mere bit of routine.
"I've come to take up them notes o' mine with John Wes.'s name on 'em," Massingale began, pulling out the thick sheaf of redemption money.
"Oh, yes; let me see; are they due to-day?" said the president, running over the note portfolio.
Massingale nodded.
"H'm, yes, here they are. Brought the cash, did you? The 'Little Susan' has begun to pan out, has it? I didn't know you had commenced shipping ore yet."
"We haven't." David Massingale made the admission and regretted it in one and the same breath.
"You've borrowed to meet these notes?" queried the president, looking up quickly. "That won't do, Mr. Massingale; that won't do at all. We can't afford to lose an old customer that way. What's the matter with our money? Doesn't it look good to you any more?"
Massingale stammered out something about Cashier Hardwick's peremptory demand of a few hours earlier, but he was not permitted to finish.
"Of course, that is all right from Hardwick's point of view. He was merely looking out for the maturing paper. How much more time will you need to enable you to get returns from your shipments? Sixty days? All right, you needn't make out new notes; I'll indorse the extension on the back of these, and I'll undertake to get Cortwright's approval myself. No; not a word, Mr. Massingale. As long as you're borrowing, you must be loyal and borrow of us. Good afternoon. Come again when we can help you out."
David Massingale turned away, dazed and confused beyond the power of speech. When the mists of astoundment cleared he found himself in the street with the thick wad of bank-notes still in his pocket. Suddenly, out of the limbo into which two years of laborious discipline and self-denial had pushed it stalked the demon of the ruling passion, mighty, overpowering, unconquerable. The familiar street sights danced before Massingale's eyes, and there was a drumming in his ears like the fall of many waters. But above the clamor rose the insistent voice of the tempter, and the voice was at once a command and an entreaty, a gnawing hunger and a parching thirst.
"By Gash! I'd like to try that old system o' mine jest one more time!" he muttered. "All it takes is money enough to foller it up andstay. And I'vegotthe money. Besides, didn't Brouillard say I was to get an extension if I could?"
He grabbed at his coat to be sure that the packet was still there, took two steps toward the bank, stopped, turned as if in the grasp of an invisible but irresistible captor, and moved away, like a man walking in his sleep, toward the lower Avenue.
It was the doorway of Haley's Place, the Monte Carlo of the Niquoia, that finally halted him. Here the struggle was so fierce that the bartender, who knew him, named it sickness and led the stricken one to a card-table in the public bar-room and fetched him a drink. A single swallow of whiskey turned the scale. Massingale rose, tossed a coin to the bar, and passed quickly to the rear, where a pair of baize doors opened silently and engulfed him.
It was at early candle-lighting in the evening of the day of renewed and unbridled speculation in Mirapolis "front feet" that Brouillard, riding the piebald range pony on which he had been making an inspection round of the nearer Buckskin ditchers' camps, topped the hill in the new, high-pitched road over the Chigringo shoulder and looked down upon the valley electrics.
The immediate return to Mirapolis was no part of the plan he had struck out when he had closed his office in the Niquoia Building at one o'clock and had gone over to Bongras's to fall into the chance encounter with David Massingale. He had intended making a complete round of all the ditch camps, a ride which would have taken at least three days, and after parting from Massingale at the bank he had left town at once, taking the new road which began on the bench of the railroad yard. But almost immediately a singular thing had happened. Before he had gone a mile a strange reluctance had begun to beset him.
At first it was merely a haunting feeling of loss, as if he had left something behind, forgetting when he should have remembered; a thing of sufficient importance to make him turn and ride back if he could only recall what it was. Farther along the feeling became a vague premonition of impending disaster, growing with every added mile of the Buckskin gallopings until, at Overton's Camp, a few miles short of the Triangle-Circle Ranch headquarters, he had yielded and had set out for the return.
If the curious premonition had been a drag on the outward journey it became a spur to quicken the eastward faring. Even the piebald pony seemed to share the urgency, needing only a loose rein and an encouraging word. Across the yellow sands of the desert, through the lower ford of the Niquoia, and up the outlet gorge the willing little horse tossed the miles to the rear, and at the hill-topping moment, when the electric lights spread themselves in the valley foreground like stars set to illuminate the chess-board squares of the Wonder City, a record gallop had been made from Overton's.
Brouillard let the pony set its own pace on the down-hill lap to the finish, and it was fast enough to have jolted fresh road weariness into a less seasoned rider than the young engineer. Most curiously, the premonition with its nagging urgency seemed to vanish completely as soon as the city's streets were under hoof. Brouillard left the horse at the reservation stables, freshened himself at his rooms in the Niquoia Building, and went to the Metropole to eat his dinner, all without any recurrence of the singular symptoms. Further, when he found himself at a table with Murray Grislow as hisvis-à-vis, and had invented a plausible excuse for his sudden return, he was able to enjoy his dinner with a healthy wayfarer's appetite and to talk over the events of the exciting day with the hydrographer with few or none of the abstracted mental digressions.
Afterward, however, the symptoms returned, manifesting themselves this time in the form of a vague and undefined restlessness. The buzzing throngs in the Metropole café and lobby annoyed him, and even Grislow's quiet sarcasm as applied to the day's bubble-blowing failed to clear the air. At the club there was the same atmosphere of unrest; an exacerbating overcharge of the suppressed activities impatiently waiting for another day of excitement and opportunity. Corner lots and the astounding prices they had commanded filled the air in the lounge, the billiard room, and the buffet, and after a few minutes Brouillard turned his back on the hubbub and sought the quiet of the darkened building on the opposite side of the street.
He was alone in his office on the sixth floor and was trying, half absently, to submerge himself in a sea of desk-work when the disturbing over-thought suddenly climaxed in an occurrence bordering on the supernatural. As distinctly as if she were present and at his elbow, he heard, or seemed to hear, Amy Massingale say: "Victor, you said you would come if I needed you: I need you now." Without a moment's hesitation he got up and made ready to go out. Skeptical to the derisive degree of other men's superstitions, it did not occur to him to doubt the reality of the mysterious summons, or to question in any way his own broad admission of the supernatural in the prompt obedience.
The Massingale town house was one of a row of stuccoed villas fronting on the main residence street, which beyond the city limits became the highroad to the Quadjenàï bend and the upper valley. Brouillard took a cab at the Metropole, dismissed it at the villa gate, and walked briskly up the path to the house, which was dark save for one lighted room on the second floor—the room in which Stephen Massingale was recovering from the effects of Van Bruce Cortwright's pistol-shot.
Amy Massingale was on the porch—waiting for him, as he fully believed until her greeting sufficiently proved her surprise at seeing him.
"You, Victor?" she said, coming quickly to meet him. "Murray Grislow said you had gone down to the Buckskin camps and wouldn't be back for two or three days!"
"Grizzy told the truth—as it stood a few hours ago," he admitted. "But I changed my mind and came back. How is Steve this evening?"
"He is quite comfortable, more comfortable than he has been at all since the wound began to heal. I have been reading him to sleep, and when the night nurse came I ran down to get a breath of fresh air in the open."
"No, you didn't come down for that reason," Brouillard amended gravely. "You came to meet me."
"Did I?" she asked. "What makes you think that?"
"I don't think; Iknow. You called me, and I heard you and came at once."
"How absurd!" she protested. "I knew, or thought I knew, that you were miles away, over in the Buckskin; and how could I call you?"
Brouillard pulled out his watch and scanned its face by the light of the roadway electric.
"It is exactly twenty minutes since I left my office. What were you doing twenty minutes ago?"
"As if I could tell! I don't believe I have looked at a clock or a watch all evening. After Stevie had his supper I read to him—one of the creepy Kipling stories that he is so fond of. You would say that 'Bimi' would be just about the last thing in the world to put anybody to sleep, wouldn't you? But Stevie dropped off, and I think I must have lost myself for a minute or two, because the next thing I knew the nurse was in the room."
"I know what happened," said Brouillard, speaking as soberly as if he were stating a mathematical certainty. "You left that room up-stairs and came to me. I didn't see you, but I heard you as plainly as I can hear you now. You spoke to me and called me by name."
"What did I say? Can you remember the words?"
"Indeed I can. The room was perfectly still, and I was working at my desk. Suddenly, and without any warning, I heard your voice saying: 'Victor, you said you would come if I needed you: I need you now.'"
She shook her head, laughing lightly.
"You have been overwrought about something, or maybe you are just plain tired. I didn't say or even think anything like that; or if I did, it must have been the other I, or one of the others, that Herr Freiborg writes about—and I don't believe in. This I that you are talking to doesn't remember anything about it."
"You are standing me off," he declared. "You are in trouble of some sort, and you are trying to hide it from me."
"No, not exactly trouble; only a little worry."
"All right, call it worry if you like and share it with me. What is it?"
"I think you know without being told—or you will know when I say that to-day was the day when the big debt to the bank became due. I am afraid we have finally lost the 'Little Susan.' That is one of the worries and the other I've been trying to call silly. I don't know what has become of father—as if he weren't old enough to go and come without telling me every move he makes!"
"Your father isn't at home?" gasped Brouillard.
"No; he hasn't been here since nine o'clock this morning. Murray Grislow saw him going into the Metropole about one o'clock, but nobody that I have been able to reach by 'phone seems to have seen him after that."
"I can bring the record down to two o'clock," was the quick reply. "He ate with me at Bongras's, and afterward I walked with him as far as the bank. And I can cure part of the first worry—all of it, in fact; he had the money to take up the Cortwright notes, and when I left him he was on his way to Hardwick's window to do it."
"He had the money?Where did he get it?"
Brouillard put his back against a porch post, a change of position which kept the light of the street electric from shining squarely upon his face.
"It has been another of the get-rich-quick days in Mirapolis," he said evasively. "Somebody told me that the corner opposite Poodles's was bought and sold three times within a single hour and that each time the price was doubled."
"And you are trying to tell me that father made a hundred thousand dollars just in those few hours by buying and selling Mirapolis lots? You don't know him, Victor. He is totally lacking the trading gift. He has often said that he couldn't stand on a street corner and sell twenty-dollar gold pieces at nineteen dollars apiece—nobody would buy of him."
"Nevertheless, I am telling you that he had the money to take up those notes," Brouillard insisted. "I saw it in his hands."
She left him abruptly and began to pace back and forth on the porch, with her hands behind her, an imitative trait unconsciously copying her father in his moments of stress. When she stopped she stood fairly in the beam of the street light. The violet eyes were misty, and in the low voice there was a note of deeper trouble.
"You say you saw the money in father's hands; tell me, Victor, did you see him pay it into the bank?"
"Why, no; not the final detail. But, as I say, when I left him he was on his way to Hardwick's window."
Again she turned away, but this time it was to dart into the house. A minute later she had rejoined him, and the minute had sufficed for the donning of a coat and the pinning on of the quaint cow-boy riding-hat.
"I must go and find him," she said with quiet resolution. "Will you go with me, Victor? Perhaps that is why I—the subconscious I—called you a little while ago. Let's not wait for the Quadjenàï car. I'd rather walk, and we'll save time."
They set out together, walking rapidly townward, and there was no word to go with the brisk footing. Brouillard respected his companion's silence. That the thing unspeakable, or at least unspoken, was something more than a woman's undefined fears was obvious; but until she should see fit to tell him what it was, he would not question her.
From the moment of outsetting the young woman's purpose seemed clearly defined. By the shortest way she indicated the course to the Avenue, and at the Metropole corner she turned unhesitatingly to the northward—toward the region of degradation.
As was to be expected after the day of frantic speculation and quick money changing, the lower Avenue was ablaze with light, the sidewalks were passes of peril, and the saloons and dives were reaping a rich harvest. Luckily, Brouillard was well known, and his position as chief of the great army of government workmen purchased something like immunity for himself and his companion. But more than once he was on the point of begging the young woman to turn back for her own sake.
The quest ended unerringly at the door of Haley's Place, and when David Massingale's daughter made as if she would go in, Brouillard protested quickly.
"No, Amy," he said firmly. "You mustn't go in there. Let me take you around to the Metropole, and then I'll come back alone."
"I have been in worse places," she returned in low tones. And then, with her voice breaking tremulously: "Be my good friend just a little longer, Victor!"
He took her arm and walked her into the garishly lighted bar-room, bracing himself militantly for what might happen. But nothing happened. Dissipation of the Western variety seldom sinks below the level of a certain rude gallantry, quick to recognize the good and pure in womankind. Instantly a hush fell upon the place. The quartets at the card-tables held their hands, and a group of men drinking at the bar put down their glasses. One, a Tri'-Circ' cow-boy with his back turned, let slip an oath, and in a single swift motion his nearest comrade garroted him with a hairy arm, strangling him to silence.
As if guided by the same unerring instinct which had made her choose Haley's out of a dozen similar hells, Amy Massingale led Brouillard swiftly to the green baize doors at the rear of the bar-room. At her touch the swinging doors gave inward, and her goal was reached.
Three faro games, each with its inlaid table, its impassive dealer, its armed "lookout," and its ring of silent players, lay beyond the baize doors. At the nearest of the tables there was a stir, and the dealer stopped running the cards. Somebody said, "Let him get out," and then an old man, bearded, white-haired, wild-eyed, and haggard almost beyond recognition, pushed his chair away from the table and stumbled to his feet, his hands clutching the air like those of a swimmer sinking for the last time.
With a low cry the girl darted across the intervening space to clasp the staggering old man in her arms and draw him away. Brouillard stood aside as they came slowly toward the doors which he was holding open for them. He saw the distorted face-mask of a soul in torment and heard the mumbling repetition of the despairing words, "It's all gone, little girl; it's all gone!" and then he removed himself quickly beyond the range of the staring, unseeing eyes.
For in the lightning flash of revealment he realized that once again the good he would have done had turned to hideous evil in the doing, and that this time the sword thrust of the blind-passion impulse had gone straight to the heart of love itself.
Contrary to the most sanguine expectations of the speculators—contrary, perhaps, even to those of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright—the upward surge in Mirapolis values, following the visit of the "distinguished citizens," proved to be more than a tidal wave: it was a series of them.
The time was fully ripe for the breaking down of the final barriers of prudence and common-place sanity. Day after day the "curb" markets were reopened, with prices mounting skyward; and when the news of how fortunes could be made in a day in the Miracle City of the Niquoia got abroad in the press despatches there was a fresh influx of mad money hunters from the East, and the merry game of buying and selling that which, inferentially at least, had no legal existence, went on with ever-increasing activity and an utterly reckless disregard of values considered as a basis for future returns on the investment.
Now, if never before, the croaker was wrathfully shouted down and silenced. No one admitted, or seemed to admit, the possible impermanence of the city. So far from it, the boast was made openly that Mirapolis had fairly out-stripped the Reclamation Service in the race for supremacy, and that among the first acts passed by Congress on its reassembling would be one definitely annulling the Buckskin Desert project, or, at any rate, so much of it as might be threatening the existence of the great gold camp in the Niquoia Valley.
To the observer, anxious or casual, there appeared to be reasonable grounds for the optimistic assertion. It was an indubitable fact that Brouillard's force had been cut down, first to one half, and later to barely enough men to keep the crushers and mixers moving and to add fresh layers of concrete to the huge wall of sufficient quantities to prevent the material—in technical phrase—from "dying."
True, in the new furor of buying and selling and booming it was not remarked that the discharged government employees uniformly disappeared from the city and the valley as soon as they were stricken from the time rolls. True, also, was the fact that Brouillard said nothing for publication, and little otherwise, regarding the successive reductions in his working force. But in such periods of insanity it is only the favorable indications which are marked and emphasized. The work on the great dam was languishing visibly, as every one could see. The Navajos had been sent home to their reservation, the tepees were gone, and two thirds of the camp shacks were empty.
Past these material facts, plainly to be seen and weighed and measured by any who would take the time to consider them, there was a strictly human argument which was even more significant. It was known to everybody in the frenzied marketplace that Brouillard himself was, according to his means, one of the most reckless of the plungers, buying, borrowing, and buying again as if the future held no threat of a possibledébâcle. It was an object-lesson for the timid. Those who did not themselves know certainly argued that there must be a few who did know, and among these few the chief of the Reclamation Service must be in the very foremost rank.
"You just keep your eye on Brouillard and steer your own boat accordingly," was the way Editor Harlan put it to one of the timid ones. "He knows it all, backward and forward, and from the middle both ways; you can bet your final dollar on that. And you mustn't expect him to talk. In his position he can't talk; one of the things he is drawing his salary for is to keep his mouth shut. Besides, what a man may say doesn't necessarily count for much. It is what he does."
Thus Harlan, speaking, as it were, in his capacity of a public dispenser of the facts. But for himself he was admitting a growing curiosity about the disappearing workmen, and this curiosity broke ground one evening when he chanced to meet Brouillard at the club.
"Somebody was telling me that you let out another batch of your Buckskin ditch diggers to-day, Brouillard," he began. And then, without any bush beating, the critical question was fired point-blank: "What becomes of all these fellows you are dropping? They don't stay in town or go to the mines—not one of them."
"Don't they?" said Brouillard with discouraging brevity.
"You know mighty well they don't. And they don't even drift out like other people; they go in bunches."
"Anything else remarkable up your sleeve?" was the careless query.
"Yes; Conlan, the railroad ticket agent, started to tell me yesterday that they were going out on government transportation—that they didn't buy tickets like ordinary folks; started to tell me, I say, because he immediately took it back and fell all over himself trying to renege."
"You are a born gossip, Harlan, but I suppose you can't help it. Did no one ever tell you that a part of the government contract with these laborers includes transportation back to civilization when they are discharged?"
"No, not by a jugful!" retorted the newspaper man. "And you're not telling me so now. For some purpose of your own you are asking me to believe it without being told. I refuse. This is the closed season, and the fish are not biting."
Brouillard laughed easily.
"You are trying mighty hard to make a mountain out of a mole-hill. You say the men clear out when they are discharged—isn't that about what you'd do if you were out of a job?"
"Not with such unfailing unanimity if there were several hundred of me. Mirapolis isn't such an infernally good place to go away from—not yet."
Brouillard's smile matched the easy-going laugh which had been its forerunner.
"You are a most persistent gadfly, Harlan. If I tell you one small, trifling, and safely uninflammable fact, can I trust you not to turn it into a house afire in the columns of theSpot-Light?"
"You know well enough you can!" was the eager protest. "When have I ever bleated when I should have kept still?"
"Well, then, the fact is this: the men leaving the Niquoia are not discharged from the service. They are merely transferred to the Escalante project, which the department is trying to push through to completion before the northern winter sets in and freezes the concrete in the mixers."
"Ah!" said Harlan with a quick indrawing of his breath. "That brings on more talk—about a thousand miles of it, doesn't it?"
"For example?" suggested the engineer.
"To put it baldly, is the government really quitting on the Niquoia project, or is it merely transferring its force from a job that can wait to one that can't wait?"
Brouillard smiled again. "You see," he said; "it is second nature for you pencil-pushers to try to make two facts grow where only one grew before. Honestly, now, Harlan, what do you think about it yourself? You don't need any kindergartner of a construction man to help you solve a little problem like that, do you?"
"I'm doing a little sum in simple equations," was the thoughtful answer—"putting this bit of information which you have just given me against what I have been believing to be a pretty straight tip from Washington."
"What is your tip?"
"It's this: that Congress does really propose to interfere in behalf of Mirapolis."
"How can any one predict that when Congress is not in session?"
"The tip asserts that the string-pulling is all done. It will be a quiet bit of special legislation smuggled through, I suppose, like the bills for private relief. All it will need will be the recommendation and backing of a handful of Western members and senators. Nobody else is very vitally interested, outside of your own department, and there are always plenty of clubs at hand for killing off department opposition—threats of cutting down the appropriations and so on. Properly engineered, the Mirapolis bill will go through like a greased pig under a gate. You know it will."
"You say nobody else is vitally interested—that's a mistake big enough to be called a crime," said Brouillard with emphasis. "The reclamation of the Buckskin Desert is a matter of moment to the entire nation. Its failure would be a public disaster."
Harlan laughed derisively.
"You are talking through your hat now—the salaried government engineer's hat. Let your topographers go out and find some other stream to dam up. Let them hunt up some other desert to reclaim. The supply of arid lands isn't exhausted yet by a good bit."
Brouillard appeared to be silenced even if he were not fully convinced. After a time, however, he dropped in another query.
"How straight is your tip, Harlan?"
"So straight that I'd print it in to-morrow'sSpot-Lightif I wasn't afraid of queering the deal by being too previous. The necessary backing has been secured, and the bill is already prepared. If you don't believe it, ask your own big bosses in Washington."
"You are certain that your information didn't originate right here in Mirapolis—in Mr. Cortwright's office, to locate it more exactly?"
"It didn't; it came from a purely personal source and direct from Washington."
"And the source couldn't possibly have become contaminated by the Cortwright germs?"
Harlan's smile was the face-wrinkling of seasoned wisdom.
"You are pushing me too hard," he protested. "I know that there are wheels within wheels. You'd say it would be a foxy move to have the local newspaper in Mirapolis get such a tip from a strictly unprejudiced source. I'll have to admit that myself."
Brouillard looked at his watch and reached for his hat.
"It's all right, Harlan," he said at the leave-taking. "Believe as much as you like, but take my advice in just one small matter. Don't buy Mirapolis dirt to hold; buy it to sell—and sell the minute you see your profit. I told you I'd give you a pointer if I didn't forget; you've got it."
For the better part of a fortnight the tidal waves of prosperity, as evinced by increasing speculative values, kept on rolling in, each one apparently a little higher than its immediate predecessor. Then the flood began to subside, though so slowly that at first it was only by a careful comparison of the daily transfers that the recession could be measured.
Causes and consequences extraneous to the city itself contributed to the almost imperceptible reactionary tendency. For one, the Buckskin Mining and Milling Company reluctantly abandoned its pastime of ploughing barren furrows on Jack's Mountain, and a little later went into liquidation, as the phrase ran, though the Eastern bondholders probably called it bankruptcy. About the same time the great cement plant, deprived of the government market by the slackening of the work on the dam, reduced its output to less than one fourth of its full capacity. Most portentous of all, perhaps, was the rumor that the placers at Quadjenàï were beginning to show signs of exhaustion. It was even whispered about that the two huge gold dredges recently installed were not paying the expenses of operating them.
Quite naturally, the pulse of the Wonder City beat sensitive to all these depressive rumors and incidents, responding slowly at first but a little later in accelerated throbbings which could no longer be ignored by the most optimistic bidder at the "curb" exchanges.
Still there was no panic. As the activities in local sales fell off and the Mirapolitans themselves were no longer crowding the curbs or standing in line at the real estate offices for their turn at the listings, the prudent ones, with Mr. Cortwright and his chosen associates far in advance of the field, were placing Mirapolis holdings temptingly on view in distant markets; placing them and selling them with a blazonry of advertising worthy of the envy of those who have called themselves the suburb builders of Greater New York.
It was after this invasion of the distant market was fully in train that Cortwright once more sent for Brouillard, receiving the engineer this time in the newest offices of the power company, on the many-times-bought-and-sold corner opposite Bongras's.
"Hello, Brouillard!" said the magnate jocosely, indicating a chair and the never-absent open box of cigars in the same gesture. "You're getting to be as much of a stranger as a man might wish his worst enemy to be. Gene says you are neglecting her shamefully, but she seems to be making a pretty good Jack-at-a-pinch of the English lord."
"You sent for me?" Brouillard broke in tersely. More and more he was coming to acknowledge a dull rage when he heard the call of his master.
"Yes. What about the dam? Is your work going to start up again? Or is it going off for good?"
Brouillard bit his lip to keep back the exclamation of astoundment that the blunt inquiry threatened to evoke. To assume that Mr. Cortwright did not know all there was to be known was to credit the incredible.
"I told you a good while ago that I was only the government's hired man," he replied. "You doubtless have much better information than any I can give you."
"You can tell me what your orders are—that's what I want to know."
The young chief of construction frowned first, then he laughed.
"What has given you the impression that you own me, Mr. Cortwright? I have often wondered."
"Well, I might say that I have made you what you are, and——"
"That's true; the truest thing you ever said," snapped Brouillard.
"And, I was going to add, I can unmake you just as easily. But I don't want to be savage with you. All I'm asking is a little information first, and a little judicious help afterward. What are your orders from the department?"
Brouillard got up and stood over the stocky man in the office chair, with the black eyes blazing.
"Mr. Cortwright, I said a moment ago that you have made me what I am, and you have. I am infinitely a worse man than you are, because I know better and you don't. It is no excuse for me that I have had a motive which I haven't explained to you, because, as I once told you, you couldn't understand it in a thousand years. The evil has been done and the consequences, to you, to me, and to every one in this cursed valley are certain. Facing them as I am obliged to face them, I am telling you—but what's the use? You can't make a tool of me any longer—that's all. You must cook your meat over your own fire. I'm out of it."
"I can smash you," said the man in the chair, quite without heat.
"No, you can't even do that," was the equally cool retort. "No man's fate is in another man's hands. If you choose to set in motion the machinery which will grind me to a small-sized villain of the county-jail variety, it is I myself who will furnish every foot-pound of the power that is applied."
He was moving toward the door, but Cortwright stopped him.
"One more word before you go, Brouillard. It is to be war between us from this on?"
"I don't say that: It would be awkward for Miss Genevieve. Let it be armed neutrality if you like. Don't interfere with me and I won't interfere with you."
"Ah!" said the millionaire. "Now you have brought it around to the point I was trying to reach. You don't want to have anything more to do with me, but you are not quite ready to cash in and pull out of the game. How much money have you got?"
The cool impudence of the question brought a dull flush to the younger man's face, but he would give the enemy no advantage in the matter of superior self-control.
"That is scarcely a fair question—even between armed neutrals," he objected. "Why do you want to know?"
"I'm asking because you have just proposed the non-interference policy, and I'd like to know how fairly you mean to live up to it. A little while back you interfered in a small business matter of mine very pointedly. What became of the one hundred thousand dollars you gave old David Massingale?"
"How do you know I gave him a hundred thousand dollars?"
"That's dead easy," laughed the man in the pivot chair, once more the genial buccaneer. "You drew a check for that amount and cashed it, and a few minutes later Massingale, whose account had been drawn down to nothing, bobs up at Schermerhorn's window with exactly the same amount in loose cash. What did he do with it—gamble it?"
"That is his own affair," Brouillard countered briefly.
"Well, the future—next month's future—is my affair. If you've got money enough to interfere again—don't. You'll lose it, the same as you did before. And perhaps I sha'n't take the second interference as good-naturedly as I did the first."
"Is that all you have to say?" Brouillard asked impatiently.
"Not quite. I don't believe you were altogether in earnest a minute ago when you expressed your desire to call it all off. You don't want the Mirapolis well to go dry right now, not one bit more than I do."
"I have been trying pretty hard to make you understand that it is a matter of utter indifference to me."
"But you haven't succeeded very well; it isn't at all a matter of indifference to you," the magnate insisted persuasively. "As things are shaping themselves up at the present speaking, you stand to lose, not only the hundred thousand you squandered on old David, but all you've made besides. I keep in touch—it's my business to keep in touch. You've been buying bargains and you are holding them—for the simple reason that with the present slowing-down tendency in the saddle you can't sell and make any money."
"Well?"
"I've got a proposition to make that ought to look good to you. What we need just now in this town is a little more activity—something doing. You can relieve the situation if you feel like it."
"How?"
"If I tell you, you mustn't go and use it against me. That would be a low-down welcher's trick. But you won't. See here, your bureau at Washington is pretty well scared up over the prospect here. It is known in the capital that when Congress convenes there is going to be a dead-open-and-shut fight to kill this Buckskin reclamation project. Very well; the way for you fellows to win out is to hurry—finish your dam and finish it quick, before Congress or anybody else can get action."
For a single instant Brouillard was puzzled. Then he began to understand.
"Go on," he said.
"What I was going to suggest is this: you prod your people at Washington with a hot wire; tell 'em now's the time to strike and strike hard. They'll see the point, and if you ask for an increase of a thousand men you'll get it. Make it two thousand, just for the dramatic effect. We'll work right along with you and make things hum again. We'll start up the cement plant, and I don't know but what we might give the Buckskin M. & M. folks a small hypodermic that would keep 'em alive while we are taking a few snapshot pictures of Mirapolis on the jump again."
"Let me get it straight," said Brouillard, putting his back against the door. "You fully believe you've got us down; that eventually, and before the water is turned on, Congress will pass a bill killing the Niquoia project. But in the meantime, to make things lively, you'd like to have the Reclamation Service go ahead and spend another million or so in wages that can be turned loose in Mirapolis. Is that it?"
"You've surrounded it very neatly," laughed the promoter. "Once, some little time ago, I might have felt the necessity of convincing your scruples, but you've cut away all that foolishness. It's a little tough on our good old Uncle Samuel, I'll admit, but it'll be only a pin-prick or so in comparison to the money that is thrown away every time Congress passes an appropriation bill. And, putting it upon the dead practical basis, Brouillard, it's your one and only salvation—personally, I mean. You'vegotto unload or go broke, and you can't unload on a falling market. You think about it and then get quick action with the wire. There is no time to lose."
Brouillard was looking past Cortwright and out through the plate-glass window which commanded a view of the great dam and its network of forms and stagings.
"It is a gambler's bet and a rather desperate one," he said slowly. "You stand to win all or to lose all in making it, Mr. Cortwright. The town is balancing on the knife-edge of a panic at this moment. Would it go up, or down, with a sudden resumption of work on the dam?"
"The careless thinker would say that it would yell 'Fire!' and go up into the air so far that it could never climb down," was the prompt reply. "But we'll have the medicine dropper handy. In the first place, everybody can afford to stay and boost while Uncle Sam is spending his million or so right here in the middle of things. Nobody will want to pull out and leave that cow unmilked. In the second place, we've got a mighty good antidote to use in any sure-enough case of hydrophobia your quick dam building may start."
"You could let it leak out that, in spite of all the hurrah and rush on the dam, Congress is really going to interfere before we are ready to turn the water on," said Brouillard musingly and as if it were only his thought slipping into unconscious speech.
"Precisely. We could make that prop hold if you were actually putting the top course on your wall and making preparations to drop the stop-gate in your spillway."
"I see," was the rejoinder, and it was made in the same half-absent monotone. "But while we are still on the knife-blade edge ... a little push.... Mr. Cortwright, if there were one solitary righteous man left in Mirapolis——"
"There isn't," chuckled the promoter, turning back to his desk while the engineer was groping for the door-knob—"at least, nobody with that particular brand of righteousness backed by the needful inside information. You go ahead and do your part and we'll do the rest."
Brouillard, walking out of Mr. Cortwright's new offices with his thoughts afar, wondered if it were by pure coincidence that he found Castner apparently waiting for him on the sidewalk.
"Once more you are just the man I have been wanting to see," the young missionary began, promptly making use of the chance meeting. "May I break in with a bit of bad news?"
"There is no such thing as good news in this God-forsaken valley, Castner. What's your grief?"
"There is trouble threatening for the Cortwrights. Stephen Massingale is out and about again, and I was told this morning that he was filling himself up with bad whiskey and looking for the man who shot him."
Brouillard nodded unsympathetically.
"You will find that there is always likely to be a second chapter in a book of that sort—if the first one isn't conclusive."
"But there mustn't be this time," Castner insisted warmly. "We must stop it; it is our business to stop it."
"Your business, maybe; it falls right in your line, doesn't it?"
"No more in mine than in yours," was the quick retort.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" said the engineer pointlessly, catching step with the long-legged stride of the athletic young shepherd of souls.
"Not if you claim kinship with Cain, who was the originator of that very badly outworn query," came the answer shot-like. Then: "What has come over you lately, Brouillard? You are a friend of the Massingales; I've had good proof of that. Why don't you care?"
"Great Heavens, Castner, I do care! But if you had a cut finger you wouldn't go to a man in hell to get it tied up, would you?"
"You mean that I have brought my cut finger to you?"
"Yes, I meant that, and the rest of it, too. I'm no fit company for a decent man to-day, Castner. You'd better edge off and leave me alone."
Castner did not take the blunt intimation. For the little distance intervening between the power company's new offices and the Niquoia Building he tramped beside the young engineer in silence. But at the entrance to the Niquoia he would have gone his way if Brouillard had not said abruptly:
"I gave you fair warning; I'm not looking for a chance to play the Good Samaritan to anybody—not even to Stephen Massingale, much less Van Bruce Cortwright. The reason is because I have a pretty decent back-load of my own to carry. Come up to my rooms if you can spare a few minutes. I want to talk to a man who hasn't parted with his soul for a money equivalent—if there is such a man left in this bottomless pit of a town."
Castner accepted the implied challenge soberly, and together they ascended to Brouillard's offices. Once behind the closed door, Brouillard struck out viciously.
"You fellows claim to hold the keys of the conscience shop; suppose you open up and dole out a little of the precious commodity to me, Castner. Is it ever justifiable to do evil that good may come?"
"No." There was no hesitation in the denial.
Brouillard's laugh was harshly derisive.
"I thought you'd say that. No qualifications asked for, no judicial weighing of the pros and cons—the evil of the evil, or the goodness of the good—just a plain, bigoted 'No.'"
Castner ran a hand through his thick shock of dark hair and looked away from the scoffer.
"Extenuating circumstances—is that what you mean? There are no such things in the court of conscience—the enlightened conscience. Right is right and wrong is wrong. There is no middle ground of accommodation between the two. You know that as well as I do, Brouillard."
"Well, then, how about the choice between two evils? You'll admit that there are times——"
Castner was shaking his head. "That is a lying proverb. No man is ever compelled to make that choice. He only thinks he is."
"That is all you know about it!" was the bitter retort. "What can you, or any man who sets himself apart as you do, know about the troubles and besetments of ordinary people? You sit on the bank of the river and see the water go by; what do you know about the agonies of the fellow who is fighting for breath and life out in the middle of the stream?"
"That is a fallacy, too," was the calm reply. "I am a man as other men, Brouillard. My coat makes no difference, as you have allowed at other times when we have been thrown together. Moreover, nobody sits on the bank in these days. What are your two evils?"
Brouillard tilted back in his chair and pointedly ignored the direct question.
"Theories," he said half contemptuously. "And they never fit. See here, Castner; suppose it was clearly your duty, as a man and a Christian and to subserve some good end, to plant a thousand pounds of dynamite in the basement of this building and fire it. Would you do it?"
"The case isn't supposable."
"There you are!" Brouillard broke out impatiently. "I told you you were sitting on the bank. The case is not only supposable; it exists as an actual fact. And the building the man ought to blow to high heaven contains not only a number of measurably innocent people but one in particular for whose life and happiness the man would barter his immortal soul—if he has one."
The young missionary left his chair and began to walk back and forth on his side of the office desk.
"You want counsel and you are not willing to buy it with the coin of confidence," he said at length, adding: "It is just as well, perhaps. I doubt very much if I am the person to give it to you."
"Why do you doubt it? Isn't it a part of your job?"
"Not always. I am not your conscience keeper, Brouillard. Don't misunderstand me. I may have lived a year or so longer than you have, but you have lived more—a great deal more. That fact might be set aside, but there is another: in the life of every man there is some one person who knows, who understands, whose word for that man is the one only fitting word of inspiration. That is what I mean when I say that I am not your conscience keeper. Do I make it clear?"
"Granting your premises—yes. Go on."
"I will. We'll paste that leaf down and turn another. Though I can't counsel you, I can still be your faithful accuser. You have committed a great sin, Brouillard, and you are still committing it. If you haven't been the leader in the mad scramble for riches here in this abandoned city, you have been only a step behind the leaders. And you were the one man who should have been like Cæsar's wife, the one whose example counted for most."
Brouillard got up and thrust out his hand across the desk.
"You are a man, Castner—and that is better than being a priest," he asserted soberly. "I'll take back all the spiteful things I've been saying. I'm down under the hoofs of the horses, and it's only human nature to want to pull somebody else down. You are one of the few men in Mirapolis whose presence has been a blessing instead of a curse—who hasn't had a purely selfish greed to satisfy."
Again Castner shook his head. "There hasn't been much that I could do. Brouillard, it is simply dreadful—the hard, reckless, half-demoniac spirit of this place! There is nothing to appeal to; there is no room or time for anything but the mad money chase or the still madder dissipation in which the poor wretches seek to forget. I can only try here and there to drag some poor soul out of the fire at the last moment, and it makes me sick—sick at heart!"
"You mustn't look at it that way," said Brouillard, suddenly turning comforter. "You have been doing good work and a lot of it—more than any three ordinary men could stand up under. I haven't got beyond seeing and appreciating, Castner; truly I have not. And I'll say this: if I had only half your courage... but it's no use, I'm in too deep. I can't see any farther ahead than a man born blind. There is one end for which I have been striving from the very first, and it is still unattained. I'm past help now. I have reached a point at which I'd pull the whole world down in ruins to see that end accomplished."
The young missionary took another turn up and down the room and then came back to the desk for his hat. At the leave-taking he said the only helpful word he could think of.
"Go to your confessor, Brouillard—your real confessor—and go all the more readily if that one happens to be a good woman—whom you love and trust. They often see more clearly than we do—the good women. Try it; and let me help where a man can help."
For a long hour after Castner went away Brouillard sat at his desk, fighting as those fight who see the cause lost, and who know they only make the ruin more complete by struggling on.
Cortwright's guess had found its mark. He was loaded to break with "front feet" and options and "corners." In the latest speculative period he had bought and mortgaged and bought again, plunging recklessly with the sole object of wringing another hundred thousand out of the drying sponge against the time when David Massingale should need it.
There seemed to be no other hope. It had become plainly evident after a little time that Cortwright's extorted promise to lift the smelting embargo from the "Little Susan" ore had been kept only in the letter; that he had removed one obstacle only to interpose another. The new obstacle was in the transportation field. Protests and beseechings, letters to traffic officials, and telegrams to railroad headquarters were of no avail. In spite of all that had been done, there was never an ore-car to come over the range at War Arrow, and the side-track to the mine was as yet uncompleted. Brouillard had seen little of Massingale, but that little had shown him that the old miner was in despair.
It was this hopeless situation which had made Brouillard bend his back to a second lifting of the "Little Susan's" enormous burden. At first the undertaking seemed easily possible. But with the drying of the speculative sponge it became increasingly difficult. More and more he had been compelled to buy and hold, until now the bare attempt to unload would have started the panic which was only waiting for some hedging seller to fire the train.
Sitting in the silence of the sixth-floor office he saw that Cortwright had shown him the one way out. Beyond doubt, the resumption in full force of the work on the dam would galvanize new life into Mirapolis, temporarily, at least. After that, a cautious selling campaign, conducted under cover through the brokers, might save the day for David Massingale. But the cost—the heaping dishonor, the disloyalty of putting his service into the breach and wrecking and ruining to gain the one personal end....
The sweat stood out in great drops on his forehead when he finally drew a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand and began to write a message. Painstakingly he composed it, referring often to the notes in his field-book, and printing the words neatly in his accurate, clearly defined handwriting.
When it was finished he translated it laboriously into the department code. But after the copy was made and signed he did not ring at once for a messenger. Instead, he put the two, the original and the cipher, under a paper-weight and sat glooming at them, as if they had been his own death-warrant—was still so sitting when a light tap at the door was followed by a soft swishing of silken skirts, a faint odor of crushed violets, and Genevieve Cortwright stood beside him.
While one might count ten the silence of the upper room remained unbroken, and neither the man nor the woman spoke. It was not the first time by many that Genevieve Cortwright had come to stand beside the engineer's desk, holding him with smiling eyes and a charming audacity while she laid her commands upon him for the afternoon's motoring or the evening's bridge party or what other social diversion she might have in view.
But now there was a difference. Brouillard felt it instinctively—and in the momentary silence saw it in a certain hard brilliance of the beautiful eyes, in the curving of the ripe lips, half scornful, half pathetic, though the pathos may have been only a touch of self-pity born of the knowledge that the world of the luxury-lapped has so little to offer once the cold finger of satiety has been laid upon the throbbing pulse of fruition.
"You have been quarrelling with father again," she said, with an abruptness that was altogether foreign to her habitual attitude toward him. "I have come to try to make peace. Won't you ask me to sit down?"
He recalled himself with a start from his abstracted study of the faultless contour of cheek and chin and rounded throat and placed a chair for her, apologizing for the momentary aberration and slipping easily from apology into explanation.
"It was good of you to try to bring the wine and oil," he said. "But it was scarcely a quarrel; the king doesn't quarrel with his subjects."
"Now you are making impossible all the things I came to say," she protested, with a note of earnestness in her voice that he had rarely heard. "Tell me what it was about."
"I am afraid it wouldn't interest you in the least," he returned evasively.
"I suppose you are punishing me now for the 'giddy butterfly' pose which you once said was mine. Isn't there a possibility, just the least little shadow of a possibility, that I don't deserve to be punished?"
He had sat down facing her and his thought was quite alien to the words when he tried again.
"You wouldn't understand. It was merely a disagreement in a matter of—a matter of business."
"Perhaps I can understand more than you give me credit for," she countered, with an upflash of the captivating eyes. "Perhaps I can be hurt where you have been thinking that the armor of frivolity, or ignorance, or indifference is the thickest."
"No, you wouldn't be hurt," he denied, in sober finality.
"How can you tell? Can you read minds and hearts as you do your maps and drawings? Must I be set down as hopelessly and irreclaimably frivolous just because I have chosen to laugh when possibly another woman might have cried?"
"Oh, no," he denied again. Then he tried to meet her fairly on the new ground. "You mustn't accuse yourself. You are of your own world and you can't very well help being of it. Besides, it is a pleasant world."
"But an exceedingly shallow one, you would say. But why not, Mr. Brouillard? What do we get out of life more than the day's dole of—well, of whatever we care most for? I suppose one ought to be properly shocked at the big electric sign Monsieur Bongras has put up over the entrance to his café; 'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' He meant it as a cynical gibe at the expense of Mirapolis, of course; but do you know it appeals to me—it makes me think."
"I'm listening," said Brouillard. "Convert me if you can."
"Oh, I don't know how to say it, or perhaps even how to think it. But when I see Monsieur Bongras's cynical little fling I wonder if it isn't the real philosophy, after all. Why should we be always looking forward and striving and trying foolishly to climb to some high plane where the air is sure to be so rare that we couldn't possibly breathe it?"
Brouillard's smile was a mere eye-lifting of grave reminiscence when he said: "Some of us have quit looking forward—quit trying to climb—and that without even the poor hope of reaping the reward that Poodles's quotation offers."
Miss Cortwright left her chair and began to make an aimless circuit of the room, passing the blue-prints on the walls in slow review, and coming finally to the window looking out over the city and across to the gray, timber-crowned wall of the mighty structure spanning the gap between the Niquoia's two sentinel mountains.
"You haven't told me yet what your disagreement with father was about," she reminded him at length; and before he could speak: "You needn't, because I know. You have been getting in his way—financially, and he has been getting in your way—ethically. You are both in the wrong."
"Yes?" said Brouillard, neither agreeing nor denying.
"Yes. Father thinks too much of making money—a great deal too much; and you——"
"Well?" he prompted, when the pause threatened to become a break. "I am waiting to hear my indictment."
"You puzzle me," she acknowledged frankly. "At first I thought you were going to be a thirsty money hunter like all the others. And—and I couldn't quite understand why you should be. Now I know, or partly know. You had an object that was different from that of the others. You wanted to buy some one thing—not everything, as most people do. But there is something missing, and that is what puzzles me. I don't know what it is that you want to buy."
"There have been two things," he broke in. "One of them you know, because I spoke of it to you long ago. The other——"
"The other is connected in some way with the Massingales; so much I have been able to gather from what father said."
"Since you know part, you may know all," he went on. "David Massingale owes your father—technically, at least—one hundred thousand dollars, which he can't pay; which your father isn't going to let him pay, if he can help it. And if Massingale doesn't pay he will lose his mine."
"You interested yourself? Would you mind telling me just why?" she asked.
"That is one of the things you couldn't understand."
She turned a calmly smiling face toward him.
"Oh, you are mistaken, greatly mistaken. I can understand it very well, indeed. You are in love with David Massingale's daughter."
Once more he neither denied nor affirmed, and she had turned to face the window again when she went on in the same unmoved tone:
"It was fine. I can appreciate such devotion even if I can't fully sympathize with it. Everybody should be in love like that—once. Every woman demands that kind of love—once. But afterward, you know—if one should be content to take the good the gods provide...." When she began again at the end of the eloquent little pause there was a new note in her voice, a note soothingly suggestive of swaying poppies in sunlit fields, of ease and peace and the ideal heights receding, of rose-strewn paths pleasant to the feet of the weary wayfarer. "Why shouldn't we take to-day, the only day we can be sure of having, and use and enjoy it while it is ours? Money?—there is money enough in the world, God knows; enough and to spare for anything that is worth the buying. I have money, if that is all—money of my own. And, if I should ask him, father would give me the 'Little Susan' outright, to do with it as I pleased."
Brouillard was leaning back in his chair studying her faultless profile as she talked, and the full meaning of what she was saying did not come to him at once. But when it did he sprang up and went to stand beside her. And all the honesty and manhood the evil days had spared went into what he said to her.
"I was a coward a moment ago, Miss Genevieve, when you spoke of the 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.