The City of Numbered Days

"But you didn't mean to keep it; you knew you couldn't keep it!" she broke in; and now he did not need to look to know that her lips were trembling piteously.

"I did keep it. And when the time was fully ripe I sold it back to Cortwright, or, rather, I suppose, sold it through him to some one of his wretched gulls. I meant to pay my father's debt with the money. I had the letter written and ready to mail. Then the tempter whispered that there was no hurry, that I might at least keep the money long enough to make it earn something for myself. Also, it struck me that this same devil was laughing at the spectacle of a man so completely lost to a decent sense of the fitness of things as to be planning to pay an honor debt with graft money. And so I kept it for a while."

She dropped quickly on the step beside him and a sympathetic hand crept into his.

"You kept it until the unhappy day when you gave it to my father, and he – and he threw it away." She was crying softly, but his attempt to comfort her was almost mechanical.

"Don't cry about the money. It had the devil's thumb-prints on it, and he merely claimed his own and got it." Then he went on as one determined to leave nothing untold. "Cortwright had bought me, and I served him as only a man in my position could serve him. I became a promoter, a 'booster,' with the others. There have been times when a word from me would have pricked the bubble. I haven't said the word; I am not saying it now. If I should say it I'd lose at a single stroke all that I have been fighting for. And I am not a good loser, Amy."

For once the keen, apprehending perception failed.

"I don't understand," she said, speaking as if she were groping in thick darkness. "I mean I don't understand the motive that could – "

He turned to her in dumb astonishment.

"I thought I had been making it plain as I went along. There has been but the one motive – a mad passion to give, give, never counting the cost. Love, as it has come to me, seems to have neither conscience nor any scruples. Nothing is too precious to be dragged to the sacrifice. You wanted something – you needed it – therefore it must be purchased for you. And the curious part of the besetment is that I have known all along that I was killing your love for me. If it wasn't quite dead before, it will die now – now that I have told you how I am flinging the last vestiges of uprightness and honor to the winds."

"But how?" she queried. "You haven't told me."

"You said a few minutes ago that Mirapolis is dying. That is true; and it is dying a little too soon to suit the purposes of the Cortwright gang. It must be revived, and I am to revive it by persuading the department to rush the work on the dam. You would say that this would only hasten the death of the city. But the plot provides for all the contingencies. Mirapolis needs the money that would be spent here in the rushing of the government work. That was the real life-blood of the boom at first, and it could be made to serve again. Am I making it plain?"

She nodded in speechless disheartenment, and he went on:

"With the dam completed before Congress could intervene, Mirapolis would, of course, be quite dead and ready for its funeral. But if the Cortwright people industriously insist that the spending of another million or two of government money is only another plum for the city and its merchants and industries, that, notwithstanding the renewed activities, the work will still stop short of completion and the city will be saved by legislative enactment, the innocent sheep may be made to bleed again and the wolves will escape."

She shuddered and drew a little apart from him on the log step.

"But your part in this horrible plot, Victor?" she asked.

"It is as simple as it is despicable. In the first place, I am to set the situation before the department in such a light as to make it clearly a matter of public policy to take advantage of the present Mirapolitan crisis by pushing the work vigorously to a conclusion. After thus turning on the spigot of plenty, I am expected to crowd the pay-rolls and at the same time to hold back on the actual progress of the work. That is all – except that I am to keep my mouth shut."

"But you can't, you can't!" she cried. Then, in a passionate outburst: "If you should do such a thing as that, it wouldn't kill my love – I can't say that any more; but it would kill me – I shouldn't want to live!"

He looked around at her curiously, as if he were holding her at arm's length.

"Shall I do what you would have me do, Amy? Or shall I do what is best for you?" The opposing queries were as impersonal as the arm's-length gaze. "Perhaps I might be able to patch up the ideals and stand them on their feet again – and you would pay the penalty all your life in poverty and privation, in hopes wrecked and ruined, and I with my hands tied. That is one horn of the dilemma, and the other is … let me tell you, Amy, it is worse than your worst fears. They will strip your father of the last thing he has on earth and bring him out in debt to them. There is one chance, and only one, so far as I can see. Let me go on as I have begun and I can pull him out."

The tears had burned out of the steadfast eyes which were resting, with the shining soul looking out through them, upon the crimsoning snow peaks of the distant Timanyonis.

"How little you know the real love!" she said slowly. "It neither weighs nor measures, nor needs to; it writes its own law in the heart, and that law can make no compromise with evil. It has but one requirement – the best good of the beloved. If the way to that end lies through sacrifice – if it asks for the life itself – so let it be. If you knew this, Victor, you would know that I would gladly lose all – the mine, my father's chance of his reward for the years of toil, even my brother's better chance for reformation – and count myself happy in having found a love that was too great to do evil that good might come."

He got up stiffly and helped her to her feet and together they stood looking down upon the city of the plain, lying now under the curved, sunset shadow cast by the mighty, inbending sweep of the great dam.

"I don't know," he said after a time. "Once, as I told you a few weeks ago, the best there was in me would have leaped up to climb the heights with you. But I've gone far since the going began. I am not sure that I could find my way back if I should try. Let's go down. I mustn't keep you out on the mountain after dark. I haven't happened to meet her, but I suppose there is a Mrs. Grundy, even in Gomorrah."

She acquiesced in silence and they made the descent of the steep trail and walked across in the growing dusk from the foot of Chigringo to the stuccoed villa in the suburb, misers of speech, since there were no deeper depths to which the spoken word could plunge. But at the villa steps Brouillard took the girl in his arms and kissed her.

"Put me out of your mind and heart if you can," he said tenderly, repeating the words which he had once sent across the distances to her in another moment of despair, and before she could answer he was gone.

Monsieur Poudrecaulx Bongras, rotund, smiling, and roached and waxed to a broad burlesque of Second-Empire fierceness, looked in vain among his dinner guests that evening for the chief of the Reclamation Service, and Brouillard's absence held a small disappointment for the Frenchman. Rumor, the rumor which was never quiet and which could never be traced conclusively to its source, was again busy with exciting hints of a new era of prosperity about to dawn, and Bongras had hoped to drop his own little plummet of inquiry into the Reclamation Service chief.

The chance did not materialize. The lights in a certain upper office in the Niquoia Building were still turned on long after M. Poudrecaulx had given up the hope of the deep-sea sounding for that night. Some time after the lobby crowd had melted, and before the lower avenue had begun to order small-hour suppers of Bongras, the two high windows in the Niquoia Building went dark and a few minutes later the man who had spent half the night tramping the floor or sitting with his head in his hands at the desk in the upper room came out of the street archway and walked briskly to the telegraph office across the plaza.

"How is the line to-night, Sanford – pretty clear?" he asked of the night manager, killing time while the sleepy night receiving clerk was making his third attempt to count the words in the closely written, two-page government cipher.

"Nothing doing; a little A. P. stuff drizzling in now and then," said the manager; adding: "But that's like the poor – always with us."

"All right; there is no particular rush about this matter of mine, just so it is sure to be in the secretary's hands at the opening of business in the morning. But be careful that it goes straight – you'd better have it checked back before it is put on the through wire from Denver."

"Sure, Mr. Brouillard. What you say in this little old shack goes as it lays. We'll look out and not bull your message. Good-night."

XIX

The Sunset Gun

Notwithstanding the preliminary rumors which Bongras and many others had sought so anxiously to verify, the Mirapolitan awakening to a realization that once more the tide had turned to bring new billows of prosperity tumbling into the valley of the Niquoia came with a sudden and triumphant shock.

The first of the quickening waves fell upon the government reservation. Between sunrise and nightfall, on a day when the cloud of depression had grown black with panic threatenings, the apathy which had lately characterized the work on the great dam disappeared as if by magic. The city found its bill-boards posted with loud calls for labor; the idle mixers were put in commission; the quarries and crushers began to thunder again; and the stagings once more shook and trembled under the feet of a busy army of puddlers.

While the revival was as yet only in the embryonic period, fresh labor began to come in gangs and in car loads and presently by special trains. Swarming colonies of Greeks, Italians, and Bulgarians were dumped upon the city through the gate of the railroad station, and once more Chigringo Avenue at night became a cheerful Midway answering to the speech of all nations.

Change, revivification, reanimation instantly became the new order of the day; and again Mirapolis flung itself joyously into the fray, reaping where it had not sown and sowing only where the quickest crop could be gathered. For now the dullest of the reapers saw that the government work was really the Mirapolitan breath of life. Neither the quickening of the city's industries nor the restarting of the gold dredges in the Quadjenàï canals, the reopening of the Real Estate Exchange nor the Buckskin Company's sudden resumption of the profitless prospecting on Jack's Mountain served to obscure the principal fact – that without the money the Reclamation Service was disbursing the new prosperity structure would collapse like a house of cards.

This new and never-mentioned conviction wrought an eager change in men and in methods. Credit vanished and spot cash was tacitly acknowledged to be the only way to do business in a live community. Fortunes changed hands swiftly, as before, but now there was little bargaining and, with hot haste for the foreword, little time for it. To the Western motto of "Go to it and get the money" was added: "And don't come back without it." It was said with a laugh, but behind the laugh there was a menace.

Among the individual transformations wrought by the new conditions, the young chief of the Reclamation Service afforded the most striking example. From the morning when he had summarily cancelled the lease for the offices in the Niquoia Building and had returned his headquarters to the old log buildings on the government reservation and thence had issued his first series of orders for the resumption of full-force work on the dam and canals, those who had known him best discovered that they had not known him at all. Even to Grislow and the men of his staff he was curt, crisply mandatory, almost brutal. For one and all there was rarely anything beyond the shot-like sentence: "Drive it, men; drive it; that's what you're here for —drive it!"

The time he took to eat his hurried meals at Bongras's could be measured in minutes, and what hours he gave to sleep no man knew, since he was the last to leave the headquarters at night and the first on the work in the morning. Twice, after the renewed activities on the great wall had become a well-ordered race against time, and the concrete was pouring into the high forms in steady streams from the ranked batteries of mixers, Mr. Cortwright had sent for Brouillard, and on each occasion the messenger had gone back with the brief word: "Too busy during working hours." And when a third messenger came to inquire what Mr. Brouillard's working hours were, the equally blunt answer returned was: "All the time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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