The City of Numbered Days, Page 3

  III

  Sands of Pactolus

  If Victor Brouillard had been disposed to speculate curiously upon thepossibilities suggested by Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright on the occasion ofthe capitalist's brief visit to the Niquoia, or had been tempted todwell sentimentally upon the idyllic crossing of orbits--MissGenevieve's and his own--on the desert's rim, there was little leisurefor either indulgence during the strenuous early summer weeks whichfollowed the Cortwright invasion.

  Popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not precisely truethat all government undertakings are dilatory industrial imitations,designed, primarily, to promote the even-handed cutting of someappropriation pie, and, secondarily, to provide easy sinecures forplacemen and political heelers. Holding no brief for the government, onemay still say without fear of contradiction that _laissez-faire_ hasseldom been justly charged against the Reclamation Service. Fairlyconfronting his problem, Brouillard did not find himself hampered bydepartmental inertia. While he was rapidly organizing his force for theconstructive attack, the equipment and preliminary material for thebuilding of the great dam were piling up by the train load on theside-tracks at Quesado; and at once the man- and beast-killing task ofrushing the excavating outfit of machinery, teams, scrapers,rock-drilling installations, steam-shovels, and the like, over the WarArrow trail was begun.

  During the weeks which followed, the same trail, and a little later thatfrom the Navajo Reservation on the south, were strung with ant-likeprocessions of laborers pouring into the shut-in valley at the foot ofMount Chigringo. Almost as if by magic a populous camp of tents, sheltershacks, and Indian tepees sprang up in the level bed-bottom of thefuture lake; camp-fires gave place to mess kitchens; the commissarybecame a busy department store stocked with everything that thrifty orthriftless labor might wish to purchase; and daily the great foundationscorings in the buttressing shoulders of Jack's Mountain and Chigringogrew deeper and wider under the churning of the air-drills, thecrashings of the dynamite, and the rattle and chug of thesteam-shovels.

  Magically, too, the life of the isolated working camp sprang into being.From the beginning its speech was a curious polyglot; the hissings andbubblings of the melting-pot out of which a new citizenry is poured.Poles and Slovaks, men from the slopes of the Carpathians, the terracesof the Apennines, and the passes of the Balkans; Scandinavians from thepineries of the north, and a colony of railroad-grading Greeks, freshfrom the building of a great transcontinental line; all these and morewere spilled into the melting-pot, and a new Babel resulted. Only theIndians held aloof. Careful from the first for these wards of thenation, Brouillard had made laws of Draconian severity. The Navajos wereisolated upon a small reservation of their own on the Jack's Mountainside of the Niquoia, a full half mile from the many-tongued camp in theopen valley; and for the man caught "boot-legging" among the Indiansthere were penalties swift and merciless.

  It was after the huge task of foundation digging was well under way andthe work of constructing the small power dam in the upper canyon hadbeen begun that the young chief of construction, busy with a thousanddetails, had his first forcible reminder of the continued existence ofMr. J. Wesley Cortwright.

  It came in the form of a communication from Washington, forwarded byspecial post-rider service from Quesado, and it called a halt upon theup-river power project. In accordance with its settled policy, theReclamation Service would refrain, in the Niquoia as elsewhere, fromentering into competition with private citizens; would do nothing todiscourage the investment of private capital. A company had been formedto take over the power production and to establish a plant for themanufacture of cement, and Brouillard was instructed to govern himselfaccordingly. For his information, the department letter-writer went onto say, it was to be understood that the company was duly organizedunder the provisions of an act of Congress; that it had bound itself tofurnish power and material at prices satisfactory to the Service; andthat the relations between it and the government field-staff on theground were to be entirely friendly.

  "It's a graft--a pull-down with a profit in it for some bunch of moneyleeches a little higher up!" was the young chief's angry comment when hehad given Grislow the letter to read. "Without knowing any more of thedetails than that letter gives, I'd be willing to bet a month's paythat this is the fine Italian hand of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright!"

  Grislow's eyebrows went up in doubtful interrogation.

  "Ought I to know the gentleman?" he queried mildly. "I don't seem torecall the name."

  Brouillard got up from his desk to go and stand at one of the littlesquare windows of the log-built office quarters. For some reason whichhe had not taken the trouble to define, even to himself, he hadcarefully refrained from telling the hydrographer anything about theearly morning meeting with the automobilists at the edge of the desertbasin; of that and of the subsequent visit of two of them to the site ofthe dam.

  "No; you don't know him," he said, turning back to the worker at themapping table. "It was his motor party that was camping at the Buckskinford the night we broke in here--the night when we saw thesearch-light."

  "And you met him? I thought you told me you merely went down and took alook--didn't butt in?"

  "I didn't--that night. But the next morning----"

  The hydrographer's smile was a jocose grimace.

  "I recollect now; you said that one of the motorists was a young woman."

  Brouillard resented the implication irritably.

  "Don't be an ass, Murray," he snapped; and then he went on, with thefrown of impatience still wrinkling between his eyes. "The young womanwas the daughter. There was a cub of a son, and he fired a stick ofdynamite in the river to kill a mess of trout. I heard the explosion andthought it might be the gasolene tank of the car."

  "Naturally," said Grislow guilelessly. "And, quite as naturally, youwent down to see. I'm not sure that I shouldn't have done it myself."

  "Of course you would," was the touchy retort. "When I got there andfound out what had happened, I meant to make a second drop-out; butCortwright and his daughter were coming up the trail, and he hailed me.After that I couldn't do less than the decent thing. They wanted to seethe valley, and I showed them the way in. Cortwright is themultimillionaire pork packer of Chicago, and he went up into the airlike a lunatic over the money-making chances there were going to be inthis job. I didn't pay much attention to his chortlings at the time. Itdidn't seem remotely credible that anybody with real money to investwould plant it in the bottom of the Niquoia reservoir."

  "But now you think he is going to make his bluff good?"

  "That looks very much like it," said Brouillard sourly, pointing to theletter from Washington. "That scheme is going to change the whole faceof Nature for us up here, Grislow. It will spell trouble right from thejump."

  "Oh, I don't know," was the deprecatory rejoinder. "It will relieve usof a lot of side-issue industries--cut 'em out and bury 'em, so far aswe are concerned."

  "That part of it is all right, of course; but it won't end there; not bya hundred miles. We've started in here to be a law to ourselves--aswe've got to be to handle this mixed multitude of brigands and ditchdiggers. But when this new company gets on the ground it will bedifferent. There will be pull-hauling and scrapping and liquor selling,and we can't go in and straighten things out with a club as we do now.Jobson says in that letter that the relations have got to be friendly!I'll bet anything you like that I'll have to go and read the riot act tothose people before they've been twenty-four hours on their job!"

  Grislow was trying the point of his mapping-pen on his thumb nail."Curious that this particular fly should drop into your pot of ointmenton your birthday, wasn't it?" he remarked.

  "O suffering Jehu!" gritted Brouillard ragefully. "Are you never goingto forget that senseless bit of twaddle?"

  "You're not giving me a chance to forget it," said the map-makersoberly. "You told me that night that the seven-year characteristic waschange; and you're a changed man, Victor, if ever there w
as one.Moreover, it began that very night--or the next morning."

  "Oh, damn!"

  "Certainly, if you wish it. But that is only another proof of what I amsaying. It's getting on your nerves now. Do you know what the men havenamed you? They call you 'Hell's-Fire.' That has come to be your wordwhen you light into them for something they've done or haven't done. Nolonger ago than this morning you were swearing at Griffith, as if you'dforgotten that the boy is only a year out of college and can't besupposed to know as much as Leshington or Anson. Where is your sense ofhumor?"

  Brouillard laughed, if only to prove that his sense of humor was stillunimpaired.

  "They are a fearful lot of dubs, Grizzy," he said, meaning the laborers;"the worst we've ever drawn, and that is saying a good deal. Threedrunken brawls last night, and a man killed in Haley's Place. And Ican't keep liquor out of the camp to save my soul--not if I should situp nights to invent new regulations. The Navajos are the best of thebunch and we've managed to keep the fire from spreading over on theirside of the Niquoia, thus far. But if the whiskey ever gets hold in thetepees, we'll have orders to shoot Chief Nicagee's people back to theirreservation in a holy minute."

  Grislow nodded.

  "Niqoyastcadje--'Place-where-they-came-up.' It will be'Place-where-they-go-down' if the tin-horns and boot-leggers get aninning."

  "We'll all go to the devil on a toboggan-slide and there is the orderfor it," declared the chief morosely, again indicating the letter fromWashington. "That means more human scum--a new town--an element that wecan neither chase out nor control. Cortwright and his associates,whoever they are, won't care a rotten hang. They'll be here to sweatmoney out of the job; to sweat it in any and every way that offers, andto do it quick. All of which is bad enough, you'd say, Murray; but itisn't the worst of it. I've just run up against another thing that isthreatening to raise merry hell in this valley."

  "I know," said the hydrographer slowly. "You've been having a _seance_with Steve Massingale. Leshington told me about it."

  "What did he tell you?" Brouillard demanded half-angrily.

  "Oh, nothing much; nothing to make you hot at him. He happened to be inthe other room when Massingale was here, and the door was open. He saidhe gathered the notion that the young sorehead was trying to bully you."

  "He was," was the brittle admission. "See here, Grizzy."

  The thing to be seen was a small buckskin bag which, when opened, gaveup a paper packet folded like a medicine powder. The paper contained aspoonful of dust and pellets of metal of a dull yellow lustre.

  The hydrographer drew a long breath and fingered the nuggets."Gold--placer gold!" he exclaimed, and Brouillard nodded and went on totell how he had come by the bag and its contents.

  "Massingale had an axe to grind, of course. You may remember thatHarding talked loosely about the Massingale opposition to the buildingof the dam. There was nothing in it. The opposition was purely personaland it was directed against Harding himself, with Amy Massingale for theexciting cause."

  "That girl?--the elemental brute!" Grislow broke in warmly. He knew theminer's daughter fairly well by this time and, in common with everyother man on the staff, not excepting the staff's chief, would havefought for her in any cause.

  Brouillard nodded. "I don't know what Harding did, but Smith, theTriangle-Circle foreman, tells me that Steve was on the war-path; hetold Harding when he left, last summer, that if he ever came back to theNiquoia, he'd come to stay--and stay dead."

  "I never did like Harding's sex attitude any too well," was thehydrographer's definitive comment; and Brouillard went back to thematter of the morning's _seance_ and its golden outcome.

  "That is only a little side issue. Steve Massingale came to me thismorning with a proposal that was about as cold-blooded as a slap in theface. Naturally, for good business reasons of their own, the Massingaleswant to see the railroad built over War Arrow Pass and into the Niquoia.In some way Steve has found out that I stand in pretty well withPresident Ford and the Pacific Southwestern people. His first break wasto offer to incorporate the 'Little Susan' and to give me a block of thestock if I'd pull Ford's leg on the Extension proposition."

  "Well?" queried Grislow. "The railroad over War Arrow Pass would be thebiggest thing that ever happened for our job here. If it did nothingelse, it would make us independent of these boomers that are coming into sell us material at their own prices."

  "Exactly. But my hands are tied; and, besides, Massingale's offer was arank bribe. You can imagine what I told him--that I could neither acceptstock in his mine nor say anything to influence the railroad people;that my position as chief engineer for the government cut me out bothways. Then he began to bully and pulled the club on me."

  Again Grislow's smile was jocose.

  "You haven't been tumbling into the ditch with Leshington and Griffithand the rest of us and making love to the little sister, have you?" hejested.

  "Don't be a fool if you can help it," was the curt rejoinder. "And don'tgive yourself leave to say things like that about Amy Massingale. Sheis too good and sweet and clean-hearted to be dragged into this mix-up,even by implication. Do you get that, Murray?"

  "Oh, yes; it's only another way of saying that I'm one of the fools. Goon with the Stephen end of it."

  "Well, when I turned him down, young Massingale began to bluster and tosay that I'd have to boost the railroad deal, whether I wanted to ornot. I told him he couldn't prove it, and he said he would show me, ifI'd take half an hour's walk up the valley with him. I humored him, moreto get quit of him than for any other reason, and on the way past thecamp he borrowed a frying-pan at one of the cook shacks. You know thatlong, narrow sand-bar in the river just below the mouth of the uppercanyon?"

  Grislow nodded.

  "That is where we went for the proof. Massingale dipped up a panful ofthe bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, andyou have the results there in that paper. That bar is comparatively richplacer dirt."

  "Good Lord!" ejaculated the map-maker. "Comparatively rich, yousay?--and you washed this spoonful out of a single pan?"

  "Keep your head," said Brouillard coolly. "Massingale explained that Ihad happened to make a ten-strike; that the bar wasn't any such bonanzaas that first result would indicate. I proved that, too, by washing somemore of it without getting any more than a few 'colors.' But the factremains: it's placer ground."

  It was at this point that the larger aspect of the fact launched itselfupon the hydrographer.

  "A gold strike!" he gasped. "And we--we're planning to drown it undertwo hundred feet of a lake!"

  Brouillard's laugh was harsh.

  "Don't let the fever get hold of you, Grislow. Don't forget that we arehere to carry out the plans of the Reclamation Service--which are morefar-reaching and of a good bit greater consequence than a dozenplacer-mines. Not that it didn't make me grab for hand-holds for aminute or two, mind you. I wasn't quite as cold about it as I'm askingyou to be, and I guess Massingale had calculated pretty carefully on thedramatic effect of his little shock. Anyway, he drove the peg down goodand hard. If I would jump in and pull every possible string to hurry therailroad over the range, and keep on pulling them, the secret of theplacer bar would remain a secret. Otherwise he, Stephen Massingale,would give it away, publish it, advertise it to the world. You knowwhat that would mean for us, Murray."

  "My Lord! I should say so! We'd have Boomtown-on-the-pike right now,with all the variations! Every white man in the camp would chuck his jobin the hollow half of a minute and go to gravel washing!"

  "That's it precisely," Brouillard acquiesced gloomily. "Massingale is ayoung tough, but he is shrewd enough, when he is sober. He had me deadto rights, and he knew it. 'You don't want any gold camp starting uphere in the bottom of your reservoir,' he said; and I had to admit it."

  Grislow had found a magnifying-glass in the drawer of the mapping table,and he was holding it in focus over the small collection of grain goldand nuggets. In the midst of the eager
examination he looked up suddenlyto say: "Hold on a minute. Why is Steve proposing to give this thingaway? Why isn't he working the bar himself?"

  "He explained that phase of it, after a fashion--said that placer-miningwas always more or less of a gamble and that they had a sure thing of itin the 'Little Susan.' Of course, if the thing had to be given away, heand his father would avail themselves of their rights as discoverers andtake their chance with the crowd for the sake of the ready money theymight get out of it. Otherwise they'd be content to let it alone andstick to their legitimate business, which is quartz-mining."

  "And to do that successfully they've got to have the railroad. Say,Victor, I'm beginning to acquire a great and growing respect for Mr.Stephen Massingale. This field is too small for him; altogether toosmall. He ought to get a job with some of the malefactors of greatwealth. How did you settle it finally?"

  "Massingale was too shrewd to try to push me over the edge while thereseemed to be a fairly good chance that I would walk over of my ownaccord. He told me to take a week or two and think about it. We droppedthe matter by common consent after we left the bar in the Quadjenaibend, and on the way down the valley Massingale pitched in a bit ofinformation out of what seemed to be sheer good-will. It seems that heand his father have done a lot of test drilling up and down the side ofChigringo at one time and another, and he told me that there is a bed ofmicaceous shale under our south anchorage, cautioning me not to let theexcavation stop until we had gone through it."

  "Well! That was pretty decent of him."

  "Yes; and it shows that Harding was lying when he said that theMassingales were opposing the reclamation project. They are frankly infavor of it. Irrigation in the Buckskin means population; and populationwill bring the railroad, sooner or later. In the matter of hurrying thetrack-laying, Massingale is only adopting modern business methods. Hehas a club and he is using it."

  Grislow was biting the end of his penholder thoughtfully.

  "What are you going to do about it, Victor?" he asked at length. "Wecan't stand for any more chaos than the gods have already doped out forus, can we?"

  Brouillard took another long minute at the office window before he said:"What would you do if you were in my place, Murray?"

  But at this the map-maker put up his hands as if to ward off a blow.

  "No, you don't!" he laughed. "I can at least refuse to be that kind of afool. Go and hunt you a professional conscience keeper; I went out ofthat business for keeps in my sophomore year. But I'll venture a smallprophecy: We'll have the railroad--and you'll pull for it. And then,whether Massingale tells or doesn't tell, the golden secret will leakout. And after that, the deluge."