The City of Numbered Days

In the face of such discouragements Mr. Cortwright was constrained to pocket his dignity as mayor, as the potentate of the exchanges, and as the unquestionable master of the surly young industry captain who refused to come when he was called, and to go in person. Choosing the evening hour when he had been assured that he was likely to find Brouillard alone and at work, he crossed the boundaries of the sacred reservation and made his way to the door of the log-built mapping room.

"I came around to see what is eating you these days," was the pudgy tyrant's greeting for the young man sitting under the shaded desk lamp. "Why don't you drop in once in a while and give me the run of things?"

"I gave your clerk the reason," said Brouillard laconically. "I'm too busy."

"The devil you are!" snapped the great man, finding the only arm chair in the room and dropping heavily into it. "Since when?"

"Since the first time you sent for me – and before."

Mr. Cortwright recovered his working geniality only with a palpable effort.

"See here, Brouillard, you know you never make any money by being short with me. Let's drop it and get down to business. What I wanted to say is that you are overdoing it; you are putting on too much steam. You've brought the boom, all right, but at the pace you're setting it won't last long enough. Are you catching on?"

"I'm listening," was the non-committal reply.

"Well, enough's enough, and too much of a good thing scalds the hog before you're ready to dress it and cut it up. It's all right for you to run men in here by the train load and scatter 'em out over your scaffolding – the more the merrier, and it's good for the town – but you needn't sweat the last shovelful of hurry out of them the way you're doing. It won't do to get your job finished too soon."

"Before Congress convenes, you mean?" suggested Brouillard.

"That's just what I mean. String it out. Make it last."

Brouillard sat back in his pivot chair and began to play with the paper-knife.

"And if I don't choose to 'string it out' – if I even confess that I am straining every nerve to do this thing that you don't want me to do – what then, Mr. Cortwright?"

The quiet retort jolted the stocky man in the arm chair as if it had been a blow. But he recovered quickly.

"I've been looking for that," he said with a nervous twinkling of the little gray eyes. "You've no business being out of business, Brouillard. If you'd quit puddling sand and cement and little rocks together and strike your gait right in ten years you'd be the richest man this side of the mountains. I'll be open-handed with you: this time you've got us where we can't wiggle. We've got to have more time. How much is it going to cost us?"

Brouillard shook his head slowly.

"Odd as it may seem to you, I'm out of your market this time, Mr. Cortwright – quite out of it."

"Oh, no, you're not. You've got property to sell – a good bit of it. We can turn it for you at a figure that will – "

"No; you are mistaken," was the quick reply. "I have no property in Mirapolis. I am merely a squatter on government land, like every one else in the Niquoia valley."

"For Heaven's sake!" the promoter burst out. "What's got into you? Don't you go around trying to stand that corpse on its feet; it's a dead one, I tell you! The Coronida titles are all right!"

"There are no Coronida titles. You have known it all along, and I know it – now. I have it straight from the bureau of land statistics, in a letter from a man who knows. The nearest boundary of the old Spanish grant is Latigo Peak, ten miles south of Chigringo. The department knows this and is prepared to prove it. And in the very beginning you and your associates were warned that you could not acquire homestead or other rights in the Niquoia."

"Let it go!" snapped the gray-eyed king of the pack. "We've got to get out alive and we're going to get out alive. What's your price?"

"I have answered that question once, but I'll make it a little plainer if you wish. It is beyond your reach; if you should turn your money-coining soul into cash you couldn't pay it this time, Mr. Cortwright."

"That's guff – boy-talk – play-ranting! You want something – is it that damned Massingale business again? I don't own the railroad, but if you think I do, I'll sign anything you want to write to the traffic people. Let Massingale sell his ore and get the money for it. He'll go gamble it as he did yours."

Brouillard looked up under the shaded electric globe and his handsome face wrinkled in a sour smile.

"You are ready to let go, are you?" he said. "You are too late. Mr. Ford returned from Europe a week ago, and I have a wire saying that to-night's through freight from Brewster is chiefly made up of empty ore-cars for the 'Little Susan.'"

The sandy-gray eyes blinked at this, but Mr. Cortwright was of those who die hard.

"What I said still holds good. Massingale or his son, or both of them, will gamble the money. And if they don't, we've got 'em tied up in a hard knot on the stock proposition."

"I was coming to that," said Brouillard quietly. "For a long time you have been telling me what I should do and I have done it. Now I'll take my turn. You must notify your associates that the 'Little Susan' deal is off. There will be a called meeting of the directors here in this room to-morrow evening at eight o'clock, and – "

"Who calls it?" interrupted the tyrant.

"The president."

"President nothing!" was the snorted comment. "An old, drunken gambler who hasn't got sense enough to go in when it rains! Say, Brouillard, I'll cut that pie so there'll be enough to go around the table. Just leave Massingale out of it and make up your mind that you're going to sit in with us. We've bought the mine and paid for it. I've got the stock put away where it's safe. Massingale can't touch a share of it, or vote it, either."

Brouillard shook his head.

"You are stubbornly hard to convince, Mr. Cortwright, but I'll try one more time. You will come here to-morrow evening, with your confederates in the deal, prepared to take the money you have actually spent in betterments and prepared to release the stock. If you fail to do so you will get nothing. Is that explicit enough?"

"You're crazy!" shouted the promoter. "You talk as if there wasn't any law in this country!"

"There isn't – for such men as you; you and your kind put yourselves above the law. But that is neither here nor there. You don't want to go into court with this conspiracy which you have cooked up to beat David Massingale out of his property. It's the last thing on earth you want to do. So you'd better do the other thing – while you can."

Mr. Cortwright sat back in his chair, and once more Brouillard saw in the sandy-gray eyes the look which had been in the son's eyes when the derelict fought for freedom to finish killing Stephen Massingale.

"It's a pretty dangerous thing to try to hold a man up unless you've got the drop on him, Brouillard," he said significantly. "I've got you covered from my pocket; I've had you covered that way ever since you began to buck and rear on me a couple of months ago. One little wire word to Washington fixes you for good and all. If I say the word, you'll stay on your job just as long as it will take another man to get here to supersede you."

Brouillard laughed.

"The pocket drop is never very safe, Mr. Cortwright. You are likely to lose too much time feeling for the proper range. Then, too, you can never be sure that you won't miss. Also, your assumption that I'm taking an unarmed man's chance is wrong. I can kill you before you can pull the trigger of the pocket gun you speak of – kill you so dead that you won't need anything but a coroner's jury and a coffin. How long would it take you to get action in the Washington matter, do you think?"

"I've told you; you'd have just about a week longer to live, at the furthest."

"I can better that," was the cool reply. "I have asked you to do a certain thing to-morrow night. If you don't do it, the Spot-Light will print, on the following morning, that letter I spoke of – the letter from my friend in the bureau of land statistics. When that letter is printed everybody in Mirapolis will know that you and your accomplices are plain swindlers, amenable to the criminal law, and from that moment there will never be another real-estate transfer in the Niquoia valley."

The promoter rose slowly out of his chair and stood leaning heavily with his fat hands, palms downward, on the flat-topped desk. His cheeks were puffed out and the bitten mustaches bristled like the whiskers of a gray old leader of the timber-wolves.

"Brouillard," he grated huskily, "does this mean that you're breaking with us, once for all?"

"It means more than that; it means that I have reached a point at which I am ashamed to admit that there was ever anything to break."

"Then listen: you've helped this thing along as much as, or more than, anybody else in this town; and there are men right here in Mirapolis – plenty of 'em – who will kill you like a rat in a hole if you go back on them as you are threatening to. Don't you know that?"

The younger man was balancing the paper-cutter across his finger.

"That is the least of my worries," he answered, speaking slowly. "I am all sorts of a moral coward, I suppose; I've proved that often enough in the past few months, God knows. But I'm not the other kind, Mr. Cortwright."

"Then I'll take a hand!" snarled the tyrant at bay. "I'll spend a million dollars, if I have to, blacklisting you from one end of this country to the other! I'll fix it so you'll never build anything bigger than a hog-pen again as long as you live! I'll publish your record wherever there is a newspaper to print it!" He pounded on the desk with his fist – "I'll do it – money can do it! More than that, you'll never get a smell of that Chigringo mine – you nor Dave Massingale!"

Brouillard tossed the paper-knife into a half-opened drawer and squared himself at the blotting-pad.

"That is your challenge, is it?" he said curtly. "So be it. Start your machinery. You will doubtless get me, not because you have money, but because for a time I was weak enough and wicked enough to climb down and stand on your level. But if you don't hurry, Mr. Cortwright, I'll get you first. Are you going? One thing more – and it's a kindness; get your son out of town before this Massingale matter comes up for adjustment. It will be safer."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Pretty nearly all, except to tell you that your time is growing short, and you and those who are in with you had better begin to set your houses in order. If you'll come over here at eight o'clock to-morrow night prepared to do the square thing by David Massingale, I'll withhold the publication of that letter which will stamp you and your associates as criminals before the law; but that is the only concession I shall make."

"You've got to make at least one more!" stormed the outgoing magnate. "You don't have to set any dates or anything of that kind for your damned drowning act!"

"In justice to a good many people who are measurably innocent, I shall have to do that very thing," returned the engineer firmly. "The notice will appear in to-morrow's Spot-Light."

It was the final straw in the stocky promoter's crushing wrath burden. His fat face turned purple, and for a second or two he clawed the air, gasping for breath. Brouillard sat back in his chair, waiting for the volcanic upheaval. But it did not come. When he had regained a measure of self-control, Mr. Cortwright turned slowly and went out without a word, stumbling over the threshold and slamming the door heavily as he disappeared.

For a time after the promoter's wordless departure Brouillard sat at his desk writing steadily. When the last of the memorandum sheets was filled he found his hat and street coat and left the office. Ten minutes later he had penetrated to the dusty den on the second floor of the Spot-Light office where Harlan was grinding copy for his paper. Brouillard took a chair at the desk end and laid the sheets of pencilled government paper under the editor's eyes.

Harlan's lean, fine-lined face was a study in changing emotions as he read. But at the end there was an aggrieved look in his eyes, mirroring the poignant regret of a newsman who has found a priceless story which he dares not use.

"It's ripping," he sighed, "the biggest piece of fireworks a poor devil of a newspaper man ever had a chance to touch off. But, of course, I can't print it."

"Why 'of course'?"

"For the same reason that a sane man doesn't peek down the muzzle of a loaded gun when he is monkeying with the trigger. I want to live a little while longer."

Brouillard looked relieved.

"I thought, perhaps, it was on account of your investments," he said.

"Not at the present writing," amended Harlan with a grin. "I got a case of cold feet when we had that little let-up a while back, and when the market opened I cleaned up and sent the sure-enough little round dollars home to Ohio."

"And still you won't print this?"

"I'd like to; you don't know how much I'd like to. But they'd hang me and sack the shop. I shouldn't blame 'em. If what you have said here ever gets into cold type, it's good-by Mirapolis. Why, Brouillard, the whole United States would rise up and tell us to get off the map. You've made us look like thirty cents trying to block the wheels of a million dollars – and that is about the real size of it, I guess."

"Then it is your opinion that if this were printed it would do the business?"

"There isn't the slightest doubt about it."

"Thank you, Harlan, that is what I wanted to find out – if I had made it strong enough. It'll be printed. I'll put it on the wires to the Associated Press. I was merely giving you the first hack at it."

"Gee – gosh! hold on a minute!" exclaimed the newsman, jumping up and snapping his fingers. "If I weren't such a dod-gasted coward! Let me run in a few 'It is alleged's', and I'll chance it."

"No; it goes as it lies. There are no allegations. It is merely a string of cold facts, as you very well know. Print it if you like, and I'll see to it that they don't hang you or loot the office. I have two hundred of the safest men on my force under arms to-night, and we'll take care of you. I'm in this thing for blood, Harlan, and when I get through, this little obstruction in the way of progress that Cortwright and his crowd planned, and that you and I and a lot of other fools and knaves helped to build, will be cooling itself under two hundred feet of water."

"Good Lord!" said the editor, still unable to compass the barbaric suddenness of it. Then he ran his eye over the scratch sheets again. "Does this formal notice that the waste-gates will be closed three weeks from to-morrow go as it stands?" he inquired.

"It does. I have the department's authority. You know as well as I do that unless a fixed day is set there will be no move made. We are all trespassers here, and we've been warned off. That's all there is to it. And if we can't get our little belongings up into the hills in three weeks it's our loss; we had no business bringing them here."

The editor looked up with the light of a new discovery in his eyes. "You say 'we' and 'our.' That reminds me; Garner told me no longer ago than this afternoon that you are on record for something like a hundred thousand dollars' worth of choice Mirapolis front feet. How about that?"

Brouillard's smile was quite heart-whole.

"I've kept my salary in a separate pocket, Harlan. Besides that – well, I came here with nothing and I shall go away with nothing. The rest of it was all stage money."

"Say – by hen!" ejaculated the owner of the Spot-Light. Then, smiting the desk: "You ought to let me print that. I'd run it in red head-lines across the top of the front page. But, of course, you won't… Well, here goes for the fireworks and a chance of a soaped rope." And he pushed the bell button for the copy boy.

Late as it was when he left the Spot-Light office, Brouillard waited on the corner for a Quadjenàï car, and, catching one, he was presently whisked out to the ornate villa in the eastern suburb. There was a light in the hall and another in a room to the rear, and it was Amy who answered his touch of the bell-push.

"No, I can't stay," he said, when she asked him in. "But I had to come, if it was only for a minute. The deed is done. I've had my next-to-the-last round-up with Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright, and to-morrow's Spot-Light will fire the sunset gun for Mirapolis. Is your father here?"

"No. He and Stevie are up at the mine. I am looking for them on every car."

"When they come, tell your father it's time to hike. Are you all packed?"

She nodded. "Everything is ready."

"All right. Three of my teams will be here by midnight, at the latest. The drivers and helpers will be good men and you can trust them. Don't let anything interfere with your getting safely up to the mountain to-night. There'll be warm times in Gomorrah from this on and I want a free hand – which I shouldn't have with you here."

"Oh, I'm glad, glad! – and I'm just as scared as I can be!" she gasped with true feminine inconsistency. "They will single you out first; what if I am sending you to your death, Victor! Oh, please don't go and break my heart the other way across by getting killed!"

He drew a deep breath and laughed.

"You don't know how good it sounds to hear you say that – and say it in that way. I sha'n't be reckless. But I'm going to bring J. Wesley and his crowd to book – they've got to go, and they've got to turn the 'Little Susan' loose."

"They will never do that," she said sadly.

"I'll make them; you wait and see."

She looked up with the violet eyes kindling.

"I told you once that you could do anything you wanted to – if you only wanted to hard enough. I believed it then; I believe it now."

"No," he denied with a smile that was half sorrowful, "I can't make two hills without a valley between them. I've chased down the back track like a little man, – for love's sake, Amy, – and I've burned all the bridges behind me as I ran; namely, the sham deeds to the pieces of reservoir bottom I'd been buying. But when it is all over I shall be just where I was when we began – exactly one hundred thousand dollars short of being able to say: 'Come, girl, let's go and get married.'"

"But father owes you a hundred thousand dollars," she said quickly.

"Not in a hundred thousand years, O most inconsistent of women! Didn't we agree that that money was poisoned? It was the purchase price of an immortal soul, and I wouldn't touch it with a pair of tongs. That is why your father couldn't use it; it belonged to the devil and the devil wanted it back."

"Father won't take that view of it," she protested.

"Then you'll have to help me to bully him, that's all. But I must go and relieve Grizzy, who is doing guard duty at the mixers… Tell your father – no, that isn't what I meant to say, it's this – " and his arms went suddenly across the hundred-thousand-dollar chasm.

A little deeper in the night, when he was tramping back through the sleeping town and up to the mixers on the high bench of Jack's Mountain, Brouillard knew well enough that he was walking over a thin-crusted crater of volcanic possibilities. But to a man in the seventh heaven of love acknowledged without shame, and equally without shame returned, – nay, with the first passionate kiss of the love still tingling on his lips, – volcanic possibilities, or even the volcanoes themselves, figure lightly, indeed.

XX

The Terror

In the Yellowstone National Park there is an apparently bottomless pit which can be instantly transformed into a spouting, roaring Vesuvius of boiling water by the simple expedient of dropping a bar of soap into it.

The Spot-Light went to press at three o'clock. By the earliest graying of dawn, and long before the sun had shown itself above the eastern Timanyonis, Brouillard's bar of soap was melting and the Mirapolitan under-depths were beginning to heave. Like wild-fire, the news spread from lip to lip and street to street, and by sunrise the geyser was retching and vomiting, belching débris of cries and maledictions, and pouring excited and riotous crowds into Chigringo Avenue.

Most naturally, the Spot-Light office was the first point of attack, and Harlan suffered loss, though it was inconsiderable. At the battering down of the doors the angry mob found itself confronting the young Reclamation Service chief and four members of his staff, all armed. Brouillard spoke briefly and to the point.

"I am the man who wrote that article you've been reading, and Mr. Harlan printed it as a matter of news. If you have anything to say to me you know where to find me. Now, move on and let Mr. Harlan's property alone or somebody will get hurt."

Nobody stayed to press the argument at the moment. An early-morning mob is proverbially incoherent and incohesive; and, besides, loaded Winchesters in the hands of five determined men are apt to have an eloquence which is more or less convincing.

But with the opening of business the geyser spouted again. The exchanges were mobbed by eager sellers, each frenzied struggler hoping against hope that he might find some one simple enough to buy. At ten o'clock the bank closed – "Temporarily," the placard notice said. But there were plenty to believe that it would never open again.

By noon the trading panic had exhausted itself a little, though the lobby and café of the Metropole were crowded, and anxious groups quickly formed around any nucleus of rumor or gossip in the streets.

Between one and two o'clock, while Brouillard, Leshington, and Anson were hastily eating a luncheon sent over to the mapping room from Bongras's, Harlan drifted in.

"Spill your news," commanded Leshington gruffly. "What's doing, and who's doing it?"

"Nobody, and nothing much," said Harlan, answering the two queries as one. "The town is falling apart like a bunch of sand and the get-away has set in. Two full trains went east this forenoon, and two more are scheduled for this afternoon if the railroad people can get the cars here."

"'Good-by, little girl, good-by,'" hummed Grislow, entering in time to hear the report of the flight.

But Leshington was shaking his big head moodily. "Laugh about it if you can, but it's no joke," he growled. "When the froth is blown away and the bubbles quit rising, there are going to be some mighty bitter settlings left in the bottom of the stein."

"You're right, Leshington," said Harlan, gravely. "What we're seeing now is only the shocked surprise of it – as when a man says 'Ouch!' before he realizes that the dog which has bitten him has a well-developed case of rabies. We'll come to the hydrophobic stage later on."

By nightfall of this first day the editor's ominous prophecy seemed about to reach its fulfilment. The Avenue was crowded again and the din and clamor was the roar of a mob infuriated. Brouillard and Leshington had just returned from posting a company of the workmen guard at the mixers and crushers, when Grislow, who had been scouting on the Avenue, came in.

"Harmless enough, yet," he reported. "It's only some more of the get-away that Harlan was describing. Just the same, it's something awful. People are fairly climbing over one another on the road up the hill to the station – with no possible hope of getting a train before some time to-morrow. Teamsters are charging twenty-five dollars a load for moving stuff that won't find cars for a week, and they're scarce at the price."

Leshington, who was not normally a profane man, opened his mouth and said things.

"If the Cortwright crowd had one man in it with a single idea beyond saving his own miserable stake!" he stormed. "What are the spellbinders doing, Grizzy?"

The hydrographer grinned. "Cortwright and a chosen few left this afternoon, hotfoot, for Washington, to get the government to interfere. That's the story they'd like to have the people believe. But the fact is, they ran away from Judge Lynch."

"Yes; I think I see 'em coming back – not!" snorted the first assistant. Then to Brouillard: "That puts it up to us from this out. Is there anything we can do?"

Brouillard shook his head. "I don't want to stop the retreat. I've heard from President Ford. The entire Western Division will hustle the business of emptying the town, and the quicker it is done the sooner it will be over."