Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 May 1916 — THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS BY FRANCIS LYNDE [ARTICLE]

THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS BY FRANCIS LYNDE

BY FRANCIS LYNDE

It seems to be the scheme of life In all ages and climes that just when a man thinks he Is able to stand on his moral feet, temptation comes and tries to trip him up. Do you know the power of money to corrupt honesty? And do you know the power of a good woman to strangle corruption? In this story you will find these problems working themselves out.

/JO CHAPTER 1 <-4\ It was not characteristic of Brouillard—the Brouillard Grislow knew best—that he should suffer the purely technical talk of dams and reservoirs, bed-rock anchorages, and the latest word in concrete structural processes to languish and should drift into personal reminiscences over their first evening campfire in the Niouoia. "As you were saying?” Grislow prompted, stretching himself luxuriously upon the fragrant banking of treshly clipped spruce tips, with his ifeet to the blaze and his hands locked under his head. He felt that Brouilflard was merely responding to the (subtle influences of time, place and rencompassments and took no shame lor being an analytical rather than a (sympathetic listener. The hundred-odd taen of the pioneer party, relaxing after the day-long march over the (mountains, were smoking, yarning, or playing cards around the dozen or more campfires. The evening, with a half-grown moon silvering the Inverted bowl of a firmament which seemed to shut down, lidlike, upon the mountain trim of the high-walled valley, was wltchlngly enchanting. - "Iwas saying that the present-day ■world slant is sanely skeptical—as it

should be,” Brouillard went on at the end of the thoughtful pause. “Just the same, every man has his little atavistic streak, if youcan hit upon it. For example, away back in the porringer period, in which we are all like the pin-feathered dickybirds, open-mouth-ed for anything anybody may drop into us someone fed me with the number eeven.’’ “Succulent morsel! ” chuckled Grislow. “Did it agree with you?” Brouillard sat back from the Are and clasped his hands over his bent knees. He was of a type rare enough to be noteworthy—a well-knit' figure of a man, rather under the normal stature, but bulging athletically in the 7 loose-fitting khaki of the engineer; dark of skin, and owning a face which might have served as a model for a Vierge study of a fighting franc-tlreur. “I don’t remember how early in_the game the thing began,” he resumed, ignoring Grislow’s joking Interruption, “but away back in the dimmest dawnings the number seven began to have a curious significanee for me. Back in the pin-feather time somebody handed me a fact about the waste and replacement that goes on in the human organism, bringing around a complete oellular change about once in every seven years. Are you"asleep?” “Not yet; go on,” said the hydrographer. ‘Up to my seventh birthday I was a sickly child, puny suddenly about half alive. It came —the change, I mean —when I was seven years old. That was the year of our removal to Vincennes from the country village time I haven't known what it means to be sick, or even ailing." “Bully old change!” applauded Gris-, £ low. “Is that all?” “No. What the second period spent «n my body it took out of my mind. I

grew stouter and stronger every and became more and more the stupidest blockhead that ever thumbed a schoolbook. I was fourteen to a day when I squeezed through the final grammar grade; think of it —fourteen years old and still with the woman teachers! I found out afterward that I got my dubiously given passport to the high school chiefly because my father was one of the best-known and best-loved men in the old home town. Perhaps it wasn’t the magic seven that built me all over new that summer; perhaps it was only the change in schools and teachers. But from that year on all the hard things were too easy. It was as if somebody or something had suddenly opened a closed door in my brain and let the daylight into all the dark corners at once.” Grislow sat up and finished for him. “Yes; and since that time you have staved your way through the university, and butted into the reclamation service, and played skittles with every other man’s chanoes of promotion until you have come out at the top of the heap in the construction division, all of which you’re much too modest to brag about. But, say; we’ve skipped one of the seven-year flag stations. What happened when you were twenty-one—or were you too busy just then chasing the elusive engineering degree to take notice?” Brouillard was staring out over the loom of the dozen campfires—out and across the valley at the massive bulk of Mount Chigringo rising like a huge barrier dark to the skyline save for a single pinprick of yellow light fixing the position of a solitary miner’s cabin half way between the valley level and the summit. When he spoke again the hydrographer had been given time to shave another pipe charge of tobacco from his pocket plug and to fill and light the brier. “When I was twenty-one my father died, and" —he stopped short and then went on in a tone which was more than half apologetic—“l don’t mind telling, Grislow; you’re not the kind to pass it on where it would hurt. At twenty-one I was left with a back load that I am carrying to this good day; that I will probably go on carrying through life." » ♦ Grislow walked around the fire, kicked two or three of the charred log ends into the blaze, and growled when the resulting smoke rose up to choke and blind him. “Forget it, Victor,” he said. “In less than a hundredth part of that time you’ll be at the top of the reclamation service pay roll —won’t that help out?" “No; not appreciably.” Grislow gave it up at that and went back to the original contention. “We’re dodging the main issue," he said. “What is the active principle of your ‘sevens’—or haven’t you figured It out?" “Change,” was the prompt rejoinder; “always something different — radicallydifferent.” ' "And what started you off into the memory woods, particularly tonight?" “Coincidences. It began with that hopelessly unreliable little clock that Anson persists in carrying around with him wherever he goes. While you were up on the hill cutting your spruce tips Anson went over to his tent and lighted up, and a few minutes afterward I heard the clock strike —seven. Just as I was comfortably forgetting the significant reminder the clock went off again, striking slowly, as if the mechanism were nearly run down.” “Another seven?" queried Grislow. "No; it struck four.” "Well?” was the bantering comment, “I suppose Anson was tinkering with his little tin god of a timepiece. It’s a habit of his.” “I was curious enough to go and look. When I lifted the flap the tent was empty. The clock was ticking away on Anson’s soap-box dressing

case, with a lighted candle beside it, and for a crazy half-second I had a shock, Murray—the minute hand was pointing to four and the hour hand to seven!” “Still I don't see the miraculous significance," said the hydrographer. “Don’t you? It was only another of the coincidences, of course. While I stood staring at the clock Anson came in with Griffith's tool kit. ‘l’ve got to tinker her again,* he said. ‘She’s got so she keeps Pacific time with one hand and eastern with the other.’ Then I understood that he had been tinkering with it and had merely gone over to Griffith’s tent for the tools.” - “Well,” said Grislow again, “what of it? The clock struck seven, you say; but it also struck four.” Brouillard’s smile tilted his curling mustaches to the sardonic angle. “The combination was what called the turn, Grfzzy. Today happens to be my twenty-eighth birthday—the end of the fourth cycle of seven.” "By George!”.ejaculated the hydrographer in mock perturbation, sitting up so suddenly that he dropped his pipe into the ashes of the fire. “In that case, according to what seems to be the well-established custom, something is due to fall in right now!”, "I have been looking for it all day,” returned Brouillard calmly. - It -was Murray Grislow who finally rang the curtain call on the prolonged talk. “Say, man! do you know that it is after ten o’clock?” he demanded, holding the face of his watch down to the glow of the dying embers. “You may sit here all night, if you like, but it’s me for the blankets. Now, what in the name of a guilty conscience is that?" As it chanced, they were both facing toward the lower end of the valley when the apparition flashed into view. In the deepest of the shadows at the mouth of the gorge, where the torrenting Niquoia straightened itself momentarily before entering upon its plunging race through the mountain barrier a beam of white light flickered unsteadily for a fraction of a second. Then it became a luminous pencil to trace a zigzag line up the winding course of the river, across to the foothill spur where the camp of the reclamation service vanguard was pitched, and so on around to the base* of the Chigringo. For certain other seconds it remained quiescent, glowing balefully like the eye of some fabled monster searching for its prey. Then it was gone. Grlslow’s comment took the form of a half-startled exclamation. "By Jove! wouldn’t that give you a fit of the creeples?—this far from civilization and a dynamo? What are you calling it?” “Your guess is as good as mine,” was the half-absent reply. Brouillard had got upon his feet and was buttoning his many-pocketed shooting coat. “I’m going to take a little hike down yonder for investigation purposes. Want to come along?” But the mapper of watersheds was yawning sleepily. “Not on your tintype,” he refused. "I’m going to ‘cork it ors in me ’ammlck.’ ” It was only a short mile from the camp on the inward slopes of the eastern foothills to the mouth of the outlet gorge, across which Brouillard could already see, in mental prevision, the great gray wall of the projected Niquoia dam—his future work —curving majestically from the broken shoulder of Chigringo to the opposing steeps of Jack’s mountain. The half-grown moon, tilting now toward the skyline of the western barrier, was leaving the canyon portal in deepest gldom. Picking his way judiciously because the trail was new to him, Brouillard came in due time to the descending path among the spruces and scrub pines leading to the western outlook

upon the desert swales and sandhills. At the canyon portal, where the forest thinned away and left him standing at the head of the final descending plunge in the trail, he found himself looking, down upon the explanation of the curious apparition. None the less, what he saw was in itself rather inexplicable. In the first desert looping of the river a campfire of pinyon knots was blazing cheerfully, and beside it, with a picnic hamper for a table, sat a supper party of three — two men and a woman—in enveloping dust-coats, and a third man in chauffeur leather serving the sitters. Back of the group, and with its detachable searchlight missing, stood a huge touring car to account for the picnic hamper, the dust-coats, the man in leather, and, doubtless, for the apparitlonal eye which had appeared and disappeared at the mouth of the upper gorge. Also it accounted, in*a purely physical sense, for the presence of the ijicnickers, though the whim which had led them to cross the desolate Buckskin desert for the dubious pleasure of making an all-night bivouac on its eastern edge was not so readily apparent The young engineer saw no reason why he should intrude upon the group at the cheerful campflre. On the contrary, he began speedily to find good and sufficient reasons why he should not. That the real restraining motive was a sudden attack of desert shyness he would not have admitted. But the fact remained. Four years in the reclamation service had made the goodlooking young chief of construction a man-queller of quality. But each year of isolation had done semething toward weakening the social ties. A loosened pebble turned the scale. When a bit of the coarse-grained sandr stone of the trail rolled under Brouillard’s foot and went clattering down to plunge into the stream the man in the chauffeur leather reached for the searchlight lantern and directed its beam upon the canyon portal. But by that time Brouillard had sought the shelter of the scrub pines and was retracing his steps up the shoulder of the mountain.

tffl* CHAPTER II \ J. Wesley Croesus J - Brouillard was not what the West calls "jumpy." Four years of fieldwork, government or other, count for something; and the man who has proved powder-shy in any stage of his grapple with the Land of Short Notice is customarily a dead man. In spite of his training, however, the young chief of construction, making an early morning exploration of the site for the new dam, winced handsomely when the shock of a distance-muffled explosion trembled upon the crisp morning air, coming, as it seemed, from some point near the lower end of the canyon. The detonating crash reminded him forcibly that the presence of the touring party was asserting itself. The explosion was too heavy to figure as a gunshot. Therefore it must have been an accident of some sort —possibly the blowing up of the automobile. Between this and a hurried weighting of the sheaf of blueprints with his fieldglass preparatory to a first-aid dash down the outlet gorge, there was no appreciable Interval. But when he came to his outlook halting place of the night before, he saw that there had been no accident. The big touring car, yellow with the dust of the Buckskin, stood intact on the sand flat where it had been backed and turned and headed toward the desert. Wading in the shallows of the river with a linen dust robe for a seine, the two younger men of the party were gathering the choicest of the dead mountain trout with which the eddy was thickly dotted. Coming toward him on the upward trail, and climbing laboriously to gain the easier path among the pines, were the two remaining members of the party—an elderly, pudgy, stockily built man with a gray face, stiff gray mustaches and sandy-gray eyes to match, and the-young woman, booted, gauntleted, veiled, and bulked into shapelessness by her touring coat Brouillard had a sudden rush of blood to the anger cells when he realized that the alarm which had brought him two hard-breathing miles out of his way had been the discharge of a stick of dynamite thrown into the Nlquoia for the fish-killing purpose. In his code the dynamiting of a stream figured as a high crime. But the two on the*trail had come up, and his protest was forestalled by the elderly man with the gray face and the sandy-gray eyes, whose explosive “Ha!" was as much a measure of his breathlessness as of his surprise. What do you think will be capital’s first move to pet concessions for city building near the Nlquoia dam project 7 ■ (TO BE CONTINUEDJ