The City of Numbered Days

by Francis Lynde

  V

  Symptomatic

  For some few minutes after the gray-bearded, absent-eyed old man who hadbeen working at the mine forge had disappeared in the depths of thetunnel upon finishing his job of drill pointing, the two on the cabinporch made no attempt to resume the talk which had been broken by theblacksmithing. But when the rumbling thunder of the ore-car which theelder Massingale was pushing ahead of him into the mine had died away inthe subterranean distances Brouillard began again.

  "I do get your point of view--sometimes," he said. "Or perhaps it wouldbe nearer the truth to say that I have had it now and then in timespast. Civilization, or what stands for it, does have a way of shrinkinginto littleness, not to say cheapness, when one can get the properperspective. And your life up here on Chigringo has given you theneedful detached point of view."

  The trouble shadows in the eyes of the young woman who was sitting inthe fish-net hammock gave place to a smile of gentle derision.

  "Do you call _that_ civilization?" she demanded, indicating thestraggling new town spreading itself, map-like, in the valley below.

  "I suppose it is--one form of it. At least it is civilization in themaking. Everything has to have some sort of a beginning."

  Miss Massingale acquiesced in a little uptilt of her perfectly roundedchin.

  "Just the same, you don't pretend to say that you are enjoying it," shesaid in manifest deprecation.

  "Oh, I don't know. My work is down there, and a camp is a necessaryfactor in it. You'd say that the more civilized the surroundings become,the less need there would be for me to sit up nights to keep the lid on.That would be the reasonable conclusion, wouldn't it?"

  "If you were really trying to make the fact fit the theory--which youare not--it would be a sheer, self-centred eye-shutting to all thegreater things that may be involved," she continued. "Don't you ever getbeyond that?"

  "I did at first. When I learned a few weeks ago that the boomers hadtaken hold of us in earnest and that we were due to acquire a real townwith all the trimmings, I was righteously hot. Apart from the addedtrouble a wide-open town would be likely to give us in maintaining orderin the camp, it seemed so crudely unnecessary to start a pigeon-pluckingmatch at this distance from Wall Street."

  "But now," she queried--"now, I suppose, you have become reconciled?"

  "I am growing more philosophical, let us say. There are just about somany pigeons to be plucked, anyway; they'd moult if they weren'tplucked. And it may as well be done here as on the Stock Exchange, whenyou come to think of it."

  "I like you least when you talk that way," said the young woman in thehammock, with open-eyed frankness. "Do you do it as other men do?--justto hear how it sounds?"

  Brouillard, sitting on the top step of the porch, leaned his headagainst the porch post and laughed.

  "You know too much--a lot too much for a person of your tender years,"he asserted. "Which names one more of the charming collection ofcontradictions which your father or mother or somebody had the temerityto label 'Amy,' sweetest and most seraphic of diminutives."

  "If you don't like my name--" she began, and then she went off atanother tangent. "Please tell me why I am a 'collection ofcontradictions.' Tig never says anything like that to me."

  "'Tig,'" said Brouillard, "'Tig' Smith. Speaking of names, I've oftenwondered how on earth our breezy friend of the Tri'-Circ' ever got sucha handle as that."

  "It's his own name--or a part of it. His father was a country preacherback in Tennessee, and I imagine he had the Smith feeling thatthe surname wasn't very distinctive. So he named the poor boyTiglath-Pileser. Just the same, it is not to laugh," she went on infriendly loyalty. "Tig can't help his name, and, anyway, he's thevastest possible improvement on those old Assyrian gentlemen who werethe first to wear it."

  Brouillard's gaze went past the shapely little figure in the stringhammock to lose itself in the far Timanyoni distances.

  "You are a bundle of surprises," he said, letting the musing thoughtslip into speech. "What can you possibly know about the Assyrians?"

  She made a funny little grimace at him. "It was 'contradictions' amoment ago and now it is 'surprises.' Which reminds me, you haven't toldme why I am a 'collection.'"

  "I think you know well enough," he retorted. "The first time I sawyou--down at the Nick-wire ford with Tig, you remember--I tried torecall which Madonna it is that has your mouth and eyes."

  "Well, did you succeed in placing the lady?"

  "No. Somehow, I haven't cared to since I've come to know you. You'redifferent--always different, and then--oh, well, comparisons are suchhopelessly inadequate things, anyway," he finished lamely.

  "You are not getting on very well with the 'contradictions,'" shedemurred.

  "Oh, I can catalogue them if you push me to it. One minute you are theMadonna lady that I can't recall, calm, reposeful, truthful, and allthat, you know--so truthful that those childlike eyes of yours wouldmake a stuttering imbecile of the man who should come to you with a liein his mouth."

  "And the next minute?" she prompted.

  "The next minute you are a witch, laughing at the man's littleweaknesses, putting your finger on them as accurately as if you couldread his soul, holding them up to your ridicule and--what's muchworse--to his own. At such times your insight, or whatever you choose tocall it, is enough to give a man a fit of 'seeing things.'"

  Her laugh was like a school-girl's, light-hearted, ringing, deliciouslyunrestrained.

  "What a picture!" she commented. And then: "I can draw a better one ofyou, Monsieur Victor de Brouillard."

  "Do it," he dared.

  "It'll hurt your vanity."

  "I haven't any."

  "Oh, but you have! Don't you know that it is only the very vainestpeople who say that?"

  "Never mind; go on and draw your picture."

  "Even if it should give you another attack of the 'seeing things'?"

  "Yes; I'll chance even that."

  "Very well, then: once upon a time--it was a good while ago, I'mafraid--you were a very upright young man, and your uprightness made youjust a little bit austere--for yourself, if not for others. At that timeyou were busy whittling out heroic little ideals and making idols ofthem; and I am quite sure you were spelling duty with a capital 'D' andthat you would have been properly horrified if a sister of yours hadpermitted an unchaperoned acquaintance like--well, like ours."

  "Go on," he said, neither affirming nor denying.

  "Also, at that time you thought that a man's work in the world was thebiggest thing that ever existed, the largest possible order that couldbe given, and the work and everything about it had to be transparentlyhonest and openly aboveboard. You would cheerfully have died for aprinciple in those days, and you would have allowed the enemy to cut youup into cunning little inch cubes before you would have admitted thatany pigeon was ever made to be plucked."

  He was smiling mirthlessly, with the black mustaches taking the sardonicupcurve.

  "Then what happened?"

  "One of two things, or maybe both of them. You were pushed out into thelife race with some sort of a handicap. I don't know what it was--or is.Is that true?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I'll hazard the other guess. You discovered that there were womenin the world and that there was something in you, or about you, that wassufficiently attractive to make them sit up and be nice to you. For somereason--perhaps it was the handicap--you thought you'd be safer in theunwomaned wilderness and so you came out here to the 'wild and woolly.'But even here you're not safe. There is a passable trail over War ArrowPass and at a pinch an automobile can cross the Buckskin."

  When she stopped he nodded gravely. "It is all true enough. You haven'tadded anything more than a graceful little touch here and there. Who hasbeen telling you all these things about me?"

  She clapped her hands in delighted self-applause.

  "You don't deny them?"

  "I wouldn't be so impolite."

  In the turning of a l
eaf her mood changed and the wide-open, fearlesseyes were challenging him soberly.

  "You _can't_ deny them."

  He tried to break away from the level-eyed, accusing gaze--tried andfound it impossible.

  "I asked you who has been gossiping about me; not Grizzy?"

  "No, not Murray Grislow; it was the man you think you know best in allthe world--who is also the one you probably know the least--yourself."

  "Good Heavens! am I really such a transparent egoist as all that?"

  "All men are egoists," she answered calmly. "In some the ego is soundand clear-eyed and strong; in others it is weak--in the same way thatpassion is weak; it will sacrifice all it has or hopes to have in somesudden fury of self-assertion."

  She sat up and put her hands to her hair, and he was free to look away,down upon the great ditch where the endless chain of concrete bucketslinked itself to the overhead carrier like a string of mechanicalinsects, each with its pinch of material to add to the deep andwide-spread foundations of the dam. Across the river a group of hiddensawmills sent their raucous song like the high-pitched shrilling ofdistant locusts to tremble upon the still air of the afternoon. In themiddle distance the camp-town city, growing now by leaps and bounds,spread its roughly indicated streets over the valley level, the yellowshingled roofs of the new structures figuring as patches of vivid paintunder the slanting rays of the sun. Far away to the right the dark-greenliftings of the Quadjenai Hills cut across from mountain to river; atthe foot of the ridge the tall chimney-stacks of the new cement plantwere rising, and from the quarries beyond the plant the dull thunder ofthe blasts drifted up to the Chigringo heights like a sign from themysterious underworld of Navajo legend.

  This was not Brouillard's first visit to the cabin on the Massingaleclaim by many. In the earliest stages of the valley activities Smith,the Buckskin cattleman, had been Amy Massingale's escort to thereclamation camp--"just a couple o' lookers," in Smith's phrase--and theunconventional altitudes had done the rest. From that day forward theyoung woman had hospitably opened her door to Brouillard and hisassistants, and any member of the corps, from Leshington the morose, whocommonly came to sit in solemn silence on the porch step, to Griffith,who had lost his youthful heart to Miss Massingale on his first visit,was welcome.

  Of the five original members of the staff and the three later additionsto it, in the persons of the paymaster, the cost-keeper, and youngAltwein, who had come in as Grislow's field assistant, Brouillard wasthe one who climbed oftenest up the mountain-side trail from the camp--atrail which was becoming by this time quite well defined. He knew hewent oftener than any of the others, and yet he felt that he knew AmyMassingale less intimately and was far and away more hopelesslyentangled than--well, than Grislow, for example, whose visits to themine cabin came next in the scale of frequency and whose ready wit andgentle cynicism were his passports in any company.

  For himself, Brouillard had not been pointedly analytical as yet. Fromthe moment when Amy and Smith had reined up at the door of his officeshack and he had welcomed them both, it had seemed the most naturalthing in the world to fall under the spell of enchantment. He knew nextto nothing of the young woman's life story; he had not cared to know. Ithad not occurred to him to wonder how the daughter of a man who drilledand shot the holes in his own mine should have the gifts andbelongings--when she chose to display them--of a woman of a much widerworld. It was enough for him that she was piquantly attractive in anycharacter and that he found her marvellously stimulating and uplifting.On the days when the devil of moroseness and irritability possessed andmaddened him he could climb to the cabin on high Chigringo and findsanity. It was a keen joy to be with her, and up to the present this hadsufficed.

  "Egoism is merely another name for the expression of a vital need," hesaid, after the divagating pause, defining the word more for his ownsatisfaction than in self-defense.

  "You may put it in that way if you please," she returned gravely. "Whatis your need?"

  He stated it concisely. "Money--a lot of it."

  "How singular!" she laughed. "I need money, too--a lot of it."

  "You?"

  "Yes, I."

  "What would you do with it? Buy corner lots in Niqoyastcadjeburg?"

  "No, indeed; I'd buy a farm in the Blue-grass--two of them, maybe."

  "What an ambition for a girl! Have you ever been in the Blue-grasscountry?"

  She got out of the hammock and came to lean, with her hands behind her,against the opposite porch post. "That was meant to humiliate me, and Isha'n't forget it. You know well enough that I have never been east ofthe Mississippi."

  "I didn't know it. You never tell me anything about yourself."

  Again the mood shutter clicked and her smile was the calm mask ofdiscerning wisdom.

  "Persons with well-developed egos don't care to listen to folk-stories,"she rejoined, evading the tentative invitation openly. "But tell me,what would you do with your pot of rainbow gold--if you should find it?"

  Brouillard rose and straightened himself with his arms over his headlike an athlete testing his muscles for the record-breaking event.

  "What would I do? A number of things. But first of all, I think, I'd buythe privilege of telling some woman that I love her."

  This time her laugh was frankly disparaging. "As if you could!" shesaid, with a lip curl that set his blood afire--"as if any woman worthwhile would care two pins for your wretched pot of gold!"

  "Oh, I didn't mean it quite that way," he hastened to explain. "I said:'Buy the privilege.' If you knew the conditions you would understand mewhen I say that the money must come first."

  She was silent for so long a time that he looked at his watch andthought of going. But at the deciding instant she held him with alow-spoken question.

  "Does it date back to the handicap? You needn't tell me if you don'twant to."

  "It does. And there is no reason why I shouldn't tell you the simplefact. When my father died he left me a debt--a debt of honor; and itmust be paid. Until it is paid--but I am sure you understand."

  "Quite fully," she responded quickly, and now there was no trace oflevity in the sweetly serious tone. "Is it much?--so much that youcan't----"

  He nodded and sat down again on the porch step. "Yes, it is big enoughto go in a class by itself--in round numbers, a hundred thousanddollars."

  "Horrors!" she gasped. "And you are carrying that millstone? Must youcarry it?"

  "If you knew the circumstances you would be the first to say that I mustcarry it, and go on carrying it to the end of the chapter."

  "But--but you'll _never_ be free!"

  "Not on a government salary," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, ittakes more than half of the salary to pay the premiums on--pshaw! I'mboring you shamelessly for the sake of proving up on my definition ofthe eternal ego. You ought not to have encouraged me. It's quitehopeless--the handicap business--unless some good angel should comealong with a miracle or two. Let's drop it."

  She was looking beyond him and her voice was quick with womanly sympathywhen she said: "If you could drop it--but you can't. And it changeseverything for you, distorts everything, colors your entire life. It'sheart-breaking!"

  This was dangerous ground for him and he knew it. Sympathy applied to arankling wound may figure either as the healing oil or the maddeningwine. It was the one thing he had hitherto avoided, resolutely,half-fearfully, as a good general going into battle marches around akennel of sleeping dogs. But now the under-depths were stirring to a newawakening. In the ardor of young manhood he had taken up the vicariousburden dutifully, and at that time his renunciation of the things thatother men strove for seemed the lightest of the many fetterings. But nowlove for a woman was threatening to make the renunciation too grievousto be borne.

  "How did you know?" he queried curiously. "It does change things; it haschanged them fiercely in the past few weeks. We smile at the old fableof a man selling his soul for a ready-money consideration, but there aretimes when I'd sell anythin
g I've got, save one, for a chance at thefreedom that other men have--and don't value."

  "What is the one thing you wouldn't sell?" she questioned, andBrouillard chose to discover a gently quickened interest in theclear-seeing eyes.

  "My love for the--for some woman. I'm saving that, you know. It is theonly capital I'll have when the big debt is paid."

  "Do you want me to be frivolous or serious?" she asked, looking down athim with the grimacing little smile that always reminded him of acaress. "A little while ago you said 'some woman,' and now you say itagain, making it cautiously impersonal. That is nice of you--not toparticularize; but I have been wondering whether she is or isn't worththe effort--and the reservation you make. Because it is all in that, youknow. You can do and be what you want to do and be if you only want tohard enough."

  He looked up quickly.

  "Do you really believe that? What about a man's natural limitations?"

  "Poof!" she said, blowing the word away as if it were a bit ofthistle-down. "It is only the woman's limitations that count, not theman's. The only question is this: Is the one only and incomparable sheworth the effort? Would you give a hundred thousand dollars for theprivilege of being able to say to her: 'Come, dear, let's go and getmarried'?"

  He was looking down, chiefly because he dared not look up, when heanswered soberly: "She is worth it many times over; her price is aboverubies. Money, much or little, wouldn't be in it."

  "That is better--much better. Now we may go on to the ways and means;they are all in the man, not in the things, 'not none whatsoever,' asTig would say. Let me show you what I mean. Three times within myrecollection my father has been worth considerably more than you owe,and three time she has--well, it's gone. And now he is going to makegood again when the railroad comes."

  Brouillard got up, thrust his hands into the pockets of hisworking-coat, and faced about as if he had suddenly remembered that hewas wasting the government's time.

  "I must be going back down the hill," he said. And then, withoutwarning: "What if I should tell you that the railroad is not coming tothe Niquoia, Amy?"

  To his utter amazement the blue eyes filled suddenly. But the owner ofthe eyes was winking the tears away and laughing before he could put theamazement into words.

  "You shouldn't hit out like that when one isn't looking; it's wicked,"she protested. "Besides, the railroad _is_ coming; it's got to come."

  "It is still undecided," he told her mechanically. "Mr. Ford is comingover with the engineers to have a conference on the ground with--withthe Cortwright people. I am expecting him any day."

  "The Cortwright people want the road, don't they?" she asked.

  "Yes, indeed; they are turning heaven and earth over to get it."

  "And the government?"

  "The department is holding entirely aloof, as it should. Every one inthe Reclamation Service knows that no good can possibly come of anyeffort to force the region ahead of its normal and natural development.And, besides, none of us here in the valley want to help blow theCortwright bubble any bigger than it has to be."

  "Then you will advise against the building of the Extension?"

  Instead of answering her question he asked one of his own.

  "What does it mean to you--to you, personally, and apart from the moneyyour father might make out of it, Amy?"

  She hesitated a moment and then met the shrewd scrutiny of his gaze withopen candor.

  "The money is only a means to an end--as yours will be. You know verywell what I meant when I told you that three times we have been obligedto come back to the mountains to--to try again. I dreaded the coming ofyour camp; I dread a thousand times more the other changes that arecoming--the temptations that a mushroom city will offer. This timefather has promised me that when he can make his stake he will go backto Kentucky and settle down; and he will keep his promise. More thanthat, Stevie has promised me that he will go, too, if he can have astock-farm and raise fine horses--his one healthy ambition. Now you knowit all."

  He reached up from the lower step where he was standing and took herhand.

  "Yes; and I know more than that: I know that you are a mighty bravelittle girl and that your load is heavier than mine--worlds heavier. Butyou're going to win out; if not to-day or to-morrow, why, then, the dayafter. It's written in the book."

  She returned his hand-grip of encouragement impulsively and smiled downupon him through quick-springing tears.

  "You'll win out, too, Victor, because it's in you to do it. I'm sure ofit--I _know_ it. There is only one thing that scares me."

  "Name it," he said. "I'm taking everything that comes to-day--from you."

  "You are a strong man; you have a reserve of strength that is greaterthan most men's full gift; you can cut and slash your way to the thingyou really want, and nothing can stop you. But--you'll forgive me forbeing plain, won't you?--there is a little, just the least little, bitof desperation in the present point of view, and----"

  "Say it," he commanded when she hesitated.

  "I hardly know how to say it. It's just a little shudder--inside, youknow--as you might have when you see a railroad train rushing down themountain and think what would happen if one single, inconsequent wheelshould climb the rail. There were ideals in the beginning; you admittedit, didn't you? And they are not as distinct now as they used to be. Youdidn't say that, but I know.... Stand them up again, Victor; don't letthem fall down in the dust or in the--in the mud. It's got to be cleanmoney, you know; the money that is going to give you the chance to say:'Come, girl, let's go and get married.' You won't forget that, willyou?"

  He relinquished the hand of encouragement because he dared not hold itany longer, and turned away to stare absently at the timbered tunnelmouth whence a faint clinking of hammer upon steel issued withmonotonous regularity.

  "I wish you hadn't said that, Amy--about the ideals."

  "Why shouldn't I say it? I _had_ to say it."

  "I can't afford to play with too many fine distinctions. I have acceptedthe one great handicap. I may owe it to myself--and to some others--notto take on any more."

  "I don't know what you mean now," she said simply.

  "Perhaps it is just as well that you don't. Let's talk about somethingelse; about the railroad. I told you that President Ford is coming overto have a wrestle with the Cortwright people, but I didn't tell you thathe has already had his talk with Mr. Cortwright in person--in Chicago.He hasn't decided; he won't decide until he has looked the ground overand had a chance to confer with me."

  She bridged all the gaps with swift intuition. "He means to give you thecasting vote? He will build the Extension if you advise it?"

  "It is something like that, I fancy; yes."

  "And you think--you feel----"

  "It is a matter of absolute indifference to me, officially. But in anyevent, Ford would ask for nothing more than a friendly opinion."

  "Then it will lie in your hand to make us rich or to keep us poor," shelaughed. "Be a good god-in-the-car, please, and your petitioners willever pray." Then, with an instant return to seriousness: "But youmustn't think of that--of course, you won't--with so many other andgreater things to consider."

  "On the contrary, I shall think very pointedly of that; pointedly andregretfully--because your brother has made it practically impossible forme to help."

  "My brother?" with a little gasp.

  "Yes. He offered to buy my vote with a block of 'Little Susan' stock.That wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't talked about it--told otherpeople what he was going to do. But he did that, as well."

  He felt rather than saw that she had turned quickly to face the porchpost, that she was hiding her face in the crooking of an arm. It meltedhim at once.

  "Don't cry; I was a brute to say such a thing as that to you," he began,but she stopped him.

  "No," she denied bravely. "The truth may hurt--it _does_ hurt awfully;but it can't be brutal. And you are right. Stevie _has_ made itimpossible."

  An awkward lit
tle silence supervened and once more Brouillard draggedhis watch from its pocket.

  "I'm like the awkward country boy," he said with quizzical humor. "Ireally must go and I don't know how to break away." Then he went backto the closed topic. "I guess the other thing was brutal, too--what Isaid about your brother's having made it impossible. Other things beingequal----"

  Again she stopped him.

  "When Mr. Ford comes, you must forget what Stevie said and what I havesaid. Good-by."

  * * * * *

  An hour later, when the afternoon shadow of Jack's Mountain was lyingall across the shut-in valley and pointing like the angle of a hugegnomon to the Quadjenai Hills, Brouillard was closeted in his log-builtoffice quarters with a big, fair-faced man, whose rough tweeds andunbrushed, soft hat proclaimed him fresh from the dust-dry reaches ofthe Quesado trail.

  "It is your own opinion that I want, Victor," the fair-faced man wassaying, "not the government engineer's. Can we make the road pay if webring it here? That is a question which you can answer better than anyother living man. You are here on the ground and you've been here fromthe first."

  "You've had it out with Cortwright?" Brouillard asked. And then: "Whereis he now? in Chicago?"

  "No. He is on his way to the Niquoia, coming over in his car from ElGato. Says he made it that way once before and is willing to bet that itis easier than climbing War Arrow. But never mind J. Wesley. You are theman I came to see."

  "I can give you the facts," was the quiet rejoinder. "While theCortwright boom lasts there will be plenty of incoming business--andsome outgoing. When the bubble bursts--as it will have to when the damis completed, if it doesn't before--you'll quit until the Buckskin fillsup with settlers who can give you crops to move. That is the situationin a nutshell, all but one little item. There is a mine up onChigringo--Massingale's--with a good few thousand tons of pay ore on thedump. Where there is one mine there may be more, later on; and I don'tsuppose that even such crazy boomers as the Cortwright crowd will careto put in a gold reduction plant. So you would have the ore to haul tothe Red Butte smelters."

  A smile wrinkled at the corners of the big man's eyes.

  "You are dodging the issue, Victor, and you know it," he objected. "WhatI want is your personal notion. If you were the executive committee ofthe Pacific Southwestern, would you, or would you not, build theExtension? That's the point I'm trying to make."

  Brouillard got up and went to the window. The gnomon shadow of Jack'sMountain had spread over the entire valley, and its southern limb hadcrept up Chigringo until its sharply defined line was resting upon theMassingale cabin. When he turned back to the man at the desk he wasfrowning thoughtfully, and his eyes were the eyes of one who sees onlythe clearly etched lines of a picture which obscures all outward andvisual objects ... the picture he saw was of a sweet-faced young woman,laughing through her tears and saying: "Besides, the railroad _is_coming; it's _got_ to come."

  "If you put it that way," he said to the man who was waiting, "if youinsist on pulling my private opinion out by the roots, you may have it._I'd_ build the Extension."