Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 124, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 May 1916 — The City of Numbered Days [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The City of Numbered Days

By FRANCIS LYNDE

SYNOPSIS. Brouillard, chief engineer of the Niquofa Irrigation dam. goes out from camp to investigate a strange light and tinds an automobile party camped at the canyon portal. He meets J. Wesley Cortwright and his daughter. Genevieve, of the auto Party and explains the reclamation work to them; Cortwright sees in the Project a big chance to make money. Brouitiara ia impervious to hints from the financier, who tells Genevieve that the engineer “Will come down and hook himself if the bait is well covered."

CHAPTER IV—Continued. During the weeks which followed, the same trail, and a little later that from the Navajo reservation on the south, were strung with antlike processions of laborers pouring Into the shut-in valley at the foot of Mount Chigringo. Almost as If by magic a populous camp of tents, shelter shacks and Indian tepees sprang up in the level bed-bottom of the future lake: campfires gave place to mess kitchens; the commissary became a busy department store stocked with everything that thrifty or thriftless labor might wish to purchase; and daily the great foundation scorings in the buttressing shoulders of Jack’s mountain and Chigringo grew deeper and wider under the churning of the air-drills, the crashings of the dynamite and the rattle and chug of the steam shovels. If was after the huge task of foundation digging was well under way and the work of constructing the small power dam in the upper canyon had been begun that the young chief of construction, busy with a thousand details, had his first forcible reminder of the continued existence of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright.

It came in the form of a communication from Washington, forwarded by special post-rider service from Quesado, and it called a halt upon the upriver power project. In accordance with its settled policy, the reclamation service would refrain, in the Niquoia as elsewhere, from entering into competition with private citizens; would do nothing to discourage the investment of private capital. A company had been formed to take over the power production and to establish a plant for the manufacture of cement, and Brouillard was instructed to govern himself accordingly. For his information, the department letter writer went on to say, it was to be understood that the company was duly organized under the provisions of an act of congress; that it had bound itself to furnish power and material fit prices satisfactory to the service; and that the relations between it and the government field-staff on the ground were to be entirely friendly. “It’s a graft—a pull-down with a profit in it for some bunch of money leeches a little higher up!” was the young chief’s angry comment when he had given Grlslow the letter to read. “Without knowing any more of the details than that letter gives, I’d be willing to bet a month’s pay that this Is the fine Italian hand of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright!" XSrislow’s eyebrows went up in doubtful interrogation. "Ought I to know the gentleman?” he queried mildly. “I don't seem to recall the name.” "No, you don’t know him. It was his motor party that was camping at the Buckskin ford the night we broke in here —the night when we saw the searchlight.” ' And you met him? I thought you told me you merely went down and took a 100k —didn't butt in?" "I didn’t—that night. But the next morning they wanted to see the valley, and I showed them the way in. Cortwright is the multimillionaire pork packer of Chicago, and he went up into the air like a lunatic over the moneymaking chances there were to be in this job. I didn’t pay much attention to his chortlings at the time. It didn’t seem remotely credible that anybody with real money to invest would plant it in the bottom of the Niquoia reservoir." "Bat now you think he is going to make his bluff good?” "'lllOl looks very much like it," said Brouillard sourly, pointing to the letter from Washington. "That scheme ta going to change the whole face of nature for us up here, Grislow. It will spell trouble right from the jump." i “Oh, I don’t know,” was the deprecatory rejoinder. "It will relieve us of -a lot of side-issue industries —cut 'em out and bury ’em, so far as we are concerned." “That part of it is all right, of ebursej but it won’t end there; not by a hundred miles Jobson says in that latter that the relations have got to be friendly! I’ll bet anything you like that 111 have to go and read the riot Mt to those 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 ointment on your birthday, wasn’t it?"* he remarked. “O suffering Jehu!” gritted Brouillard ragefully. “Are you never going to forget that senseless bit of twaddle?” “You’re not giving me a chance to forget it,” said the mapmaker soberly. “You told me that night that the seven-year characteristic was change; and you’re a changed man, Victor, if ever there was one. Moreover, it began that very night—or the next morning.” Brouillard laughed. “All pf which is bad enough, you’d say, Murray; but It isn’t the worst of it I’ve just run up against another thing that Is threatening 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 said he 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, gave up a paper packet folded like a medicine powder. The paper contained a spoonful of dust and pellets of metal of a dull yellow luster. The hydrographer drew a long breath and fingered the nuggets. “Gold —placer gold!” he exclaimed, and Brouillard nodded and went on to tell how he had come by the bag and Its contents.

“Massingale had an ax to grind, of course. You may remember that Harding talked loosely about the Massingale opposition to the building of the dam. There was nothing in it. .The opposition was purely personal, and it was directed against Harding himself, with Amy Masslngale for the exciting cause.” “That girl?—the elemental brute!” Grislow broke in warmly. He knew the miner’s daughter fairly well by

thia time, and, in common with every man on the staff, not excepting the staff’s chief, would have fought for her in any cause. Brouillard nodded. “I don’t know what Harding did, but Smith, the Tri-angle-Circle foreman, tells me that Steve was on the warpath; he told Harding when he left, last summer, that if he ever came back to Niquoia, he’d come to stay—and stay dead.” '“I never did like Harding any too was the hydrographer’s definitive comment, and Brouillard went back to the matter of the morning’s seance'and its golden outcome. “That is only a little side issue. Steve Massingale came to me this morning with a proposal that was about as cold-blooded as a slap in the face. Naturally, for good business reasons of their own, the Massingales want to see the railroad built over War Arrow pass into the Niquoia. In some way SteVe has found out that I stand pretty well with President Ford and the Pacific Southwestern people. His first break was to offer to incorporate the 'Little Susan' and to give me a block of the stock if I’d pull Ford’s leg on the extension prop osition.” “Well?” queried Grislow. “Exactly. You can imagine what 1 told him. Then he began to bully and pulled the club on me." _ Again Grlslow’s smile was jocose. '<Well, when I turned him down, young Massingale began to bluster and to say that I’d have to boost the railroad deal, whether I wanted to or not. I told him he couldn’t prove it, and he saldhe would Show me, if I'd take half an hour's walk tip the valley

with him. You know that long, narrow sandbar in the river just below the mouth of the upper canyon?” Grislow nodded. “That IS where we went for the proof. Massingale dipped up a panful of the bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, and you have the results there in that paper. That bar is comparatively rich placer dirt.” “Good Lord!” ejaculated the mapmaker. “Comparatively rich, you say 7 —and you washed this spoonful out of a single pan?” “Keep your head,” said Brouillard coolly. “Massingale explained that I had happened to make a ten-strike; that the bar wasn’t any such bonanza as that first result would Indicate. I proved that, too, by washing some more of it without getting any more than a few ’colors.’ But the fact remains: It’s placer ground.” It was at this point that the larger aspect of the fact launched itself upon the hydrographer. “A gold strike!” he gasped. "And we—we’re planning to drown It under two 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 are here to carry out the plans of the reclamation service—which are more farreaching and of a good bit greater consequence than a dozen placer mines. Masslngale drove the peg down good and hard. If I would jump in and pull every possible string to hurry the railroad over the range, and keep on pulling them, the secret of the placer bar would remain a secret. Otherwise he, Stephen Masslngale, would give It away, publish It, advertise it to the world. You know what 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 job in the hollow half of a minute and go to gravel washing!" “That’s it precisely," Brouillard acquiesced gloomily. “Masslngale is a young tough, but he is shrbwd enough, when he is sober. He had me dead to rights, and he knew it. ’You don’t want any gold camp starting up here 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 gold and nuggets. In the midst of the eager examination he looked up suddenly to say: “Hold on a minute. Why is Steve proposing to give this thing away? Why isn’t he working the bar himself?” “He explained that phase of it, after a fashion—said that placer mining was always more or less of a gamble, and that they had a sure thing of it in the ‘Little Susan.’ Of course, if the thing had to be given away he and his father would avail themselves of their rights as discoverers and take their chance with the crowd for the sake of the ready money they might get out of it. Otherwise they’d be content to let it alone and stick to their legitimate business, which is quartz mining.” “And to do that successfully they’ve got to have the railroad. How did you settle it finally?" “He told me to take a week or two and think about it." Grislow was biting the end of his penholder thoughtfully. “What are you going to do about it, Victor?” he asked at length. "We can’t stand for any more chaos than the gods have already doped out for us, 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 mapmaker put up his hands as if to ward off a blow. “No, you don’t!” he laughed. "I refuse to be that kind of a fooL But I’ll venture a small prophecy: The golden secret will leak out. And after that, the deluge.”

CHAPTER V A Fire of Little Sticks

Two days after the arrival of the letter from Washington announcing the approaching invasion of private capital, Brouillard, returning from a horseback trip to the Buckskin, where Anson and Griffith were setting grade stakes for the canal diggers, found a visitor awaiting him in the camp headquarters office. One glance at the thick-oodled, heavy-faced man chewing, an extinct cigaf while he made himself comfortable in the only approach to a lounging chair that the office afforded was sufficient to awaken an alert antagonism. The big man introduced himself without taking the trouble to get out. of his chair. ■ _ “My name is Hosford, and I represent the Niquoia Improvement company as its Tnsnegar and resident ep*

ginser,” said the lounger, •hifttn* the dead cigar from one corner of his hard-bitted mouth to the other. “You're Brillard, the government man, I take it?” “Brouillard, if you please,” was the crisp correction. And then with a careful effacement of the final saving trace of hospitality in tone or manner: “What can we do for you, Mr. Hosford?” “A good many things, first and last I’m two or three days ahead of my outfit, and you can put me up somewhere until I get a camp of my own. You’ve got some sort of an engineers' mess, I take it?" “We have,” said Brouillard briefly. “You’ll make yourself at home with us, of course,” he added, and he tried to say it without making it sound too much like a challenge. “All right; so much for that part of it,” said the self-invited guest. “Now for the buslhess end of the deal —why don’t you sit down?” Brouillard planted himself behind his desk and began to fill his blackened office pipe, coldly refusing Hosford’s tender of a cigar. “You were speaking of the business matter,” he suggested bluntly. . “Yes. I’d like to go over your plans for the power dam In the upper canyon. If they look good to me I’ll adoptthem.” “I am very far from wishing to quarrel with anybody,” said Brouillard, but his tone belied the words. “At the same time, if you think we are going to do your engineering work, or any part of it, for you, you are pretty severely mistaken. Our job is fully big enough to keep us busy.” “You’re off,” said the big man coolly. "Somebody has bungled in giving you the dope. You want to keep your job, don’t you?” V y “That is neither here nori 'there. What we are discussing at present is the department’s attitude toward your enterprise. I shall be exceeding my instructions if I make that attitude friendly to the detriment of my own work.” The new resident manager sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar reflectively, staring up at the log beaming of the office celling. “You’re just like all the other government men I’ve ever had to do business with, Brouillard; pig-headed, obstinate* blind as bats to their own interests. I didn’t especially want to begin by knocking you into line, but I guess it’ll have to be done. I guess the best way to get you is to send a little wire to Washington. How does that strike you?” , “I haven’t the slightest interest in what you may do or fail to do," said Brouillard. "But you have made the plans for this power plant, haven’t you?” “Yes; and they are the property of the department. If you want them I’ll turn them over to you upon a proper order from headquarters.” “That’s a little more like it. Where did you say I’d find your wire office?” Brouillard gave the information, and as Hosford went out Grislow came in and took his place at the mapping table. “Glad you got back in time to save my life," he remarked pointedly, with a shy glance at his chief. “He’s been plowing furrows up and down my little potato patch all day.” “Humph! Digging for information, I suppose?” grunte/i Brouillard. “Just that; and he’s been getting it, too. Not out of me, particularly, bit out of everybody. Also, he was willing to impart a little. We’re in for the time of our lives, Victor.” "I know it,” was the crabbed rejoinder. “You don’t know the tenth part of it," asserted the hydrographer slowly. “It’s a modest name, ‘The Niquoia Improvement company,’ but it is going to be like charity—covering a multitude of sins. Do you know what that plank-faced organizer has got up his sleeve? He Is going to build us a neat, up-to-date little city right here in the middle of our midst. If I hadn't made him believe that I was only a draftsman, he would have had me out with a transit, running the lines for the streets.” “A city?—in this rqpervoir bottom? I guess not He was only stringing you to kill time, Grizzy." “Don’t you fool yourself!" exclaimed the mapmaker. “He’s got the plans in his grip. We’re going to be on a little reservation set apart for us by the grace of God and the kindness of those promoters. The remainder of the valley is laid off into cute little squares and streets, with everything named and numbered, ready to be listed in the brokers’ offices. You may not be aware of it, but this palatial office building of ours fronts on Chigringo avenue.” “Stuff!" said Brouillard. “What has all this bubble blowing got to do with the building of a temporary dam and the setting up of a couple of cement kilns?” Grislow laid his pen aside and whirled around on his working stooL “Don’t you make any easy-going mistake, Victor,” he said earnestly. “The cement and power proposition is only a side issue. These new people are going to take over the sawmills, open up quarries, build a stub railroad to the Hophra mines, grade a practicable stage road over the range to Quesado, and put on a fast-mule freight line to serve until the railroad builds in. Wouldn’t that set your teeth on edge?” j - 1 How will Brouillard get rid of Hosford, who seems bent on making trouble? Or will he get rtd of him at all? HggHMMßSMMasaMlsnaßMMMsaMMoaiMaMmiMaMsgMaaF (TO BB CONTINUUM

Do you believe there is as much grafting going on among our government officials, including congressmen, as muckraking critics have frequently charged? Who’s to blame in this story?

“You're Brillard, the Government Man, I Take It?”