Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 146, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1916 — The City of Numbered Days [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The City of Numbered Days

By FRANCIS LYNDE

The .power of a good woman over the man who loves her — what a great force It Is! Brouillard, head over heels In diehonest speculation, wants to go to Amy and tell her everything. He needs her sorely, but he fears she will throw him over if she learns what he has been doing and how deeply he Is involved.

CHAPTER XlX—Continued. . —l3 "You want counsel and you are not willing to buy it with the coin of confidence,” he said at length, adding: "It is just as well, perhaps. I doubt very much if I am the person to give it to you." "Why do you doubt it? Isn’t It a part of your job?” “Not always. I am not your conscience keeper, Brouillard. Don’t misunderstand me. I may have lived a year longer than you have, but you have lived more —a great deal more. That fact might be set aside, but there is another: In the life of every man there is some one person who knows, who understands, whose word for that man is the one only fitting word of inspiration. That IS what I mean when I say that I am not your conscience keeper. Do I make it clear?” "Granting your premises—yes. Go on." “I will. We’ll paste that leaf down and turn another. Though I can’t counsel you, I can still be your faithful accuser. You have committed a great sin, Brouillard; and you are still committing IL If you haven’t been the leader in the mad scramble for riches here in this abandoned city, you have been only a step behind the leaders. And you were the one man who should have been like Caesar’s wife, the one whose example counted for most." Brouillard got up and thrust out his hand across the desk. “You are a man, Castner —and that is better than being a priest," he asserted soberly. “I’ll take back all the spiteful things I’ve been saying. I’m down under the hoofs of the horses, and it’s only human nature to want to pull somebody else down. You are one of the few men in Mirapolis whose presence has been a blessing instead of a curse —who hasn’t had a purely selfish greed to satisfy.” Again Castner shook his head. "There hasn’t been much that I could do. Brouillard, it is simply dreadful—the hard, reckless, half-demoniac spirit of this place! There is nothing to appeal to; there is no room or time for anything but the mad money chase or the still madder dissipation in which the poor wretches seek to forget I can only try here and there to drag some poor soul out of the fire at the last moment, and it makes me sick —; sick at heart!" “You musn’t look at it that way,” said Brouillard, suddenly turning comforter. “You have been doing good work and a lot of it —more than any three ordinary men could stand up under. I haven’t got beyond seeing and appreciating, Castner; truly I have noL And ill say this: “If I had only half your courage . . . but it’s no use, I’m in too deep. I can’t see any farther ahead than a man born blind. There is one end for which I have been striving, from the very first, and it is still unattained. I’m past help now. I have reached a point at which I’d pull the whole world down in ruins to see that end accomplished.” The young missionary took another turn up and down the room and then'” came back to the desk for his haL At the leave-taking he said the only helpful word he could think of. "Go to your confessor^Brouillard — your real confessor —and go all the more readily if that one happens to be a good woman —whom you love and trust They often see more clearly than we dp—the good women. Try it; and let me help where a man can help." For a long hour after Castner went away Brouillard sat at his desk, fight ing as those fight who see the cause lost, and who know they only make the ruin more complete by struggling on. Cortwright’s guess had found its mark. He was loaded to break with “front feet” and options and “corners.” In the least speculative period he had bought and mortgaged and bought again, plunging recklessly with the sole object of wringing another hundred thousand out of drying sponge against the time when David Massingale should need it At first the undertaking seemed easily possible. But with the drying of the speculative sponge it became Increasingly dlfldcult. More and more he had been compelled' to buy and hold, until now the bare attempt to unload would have started the panic which was only waiting for some hedging seller to fire the train. The sweat stood out in great drops on his forehead when he finally drew a pad of .telegraph blanks under his hand, and began to write a message. Painstakingly he composed it, refer-

ring often to the notes in his fieldbook, and printing the words neatly in bls accurate, clearly-defined handwriting. When it was finished he translated it laboriously into the department code. But after the copy was made and signed he did not ring at once for a messenger. Instead, he put the two, the original and the cipher, under a paper weight and sat glooming at them searching blindly for some alternative to the final act of treachery which would be consummated in the sending of the wire. Since, by reason of Cortwright’s tamperings with the smelter people and the railroad, the "Little Susan” had become a locked treasure vault the engineer, acting upon his own initiative, had tried the law. As soon as he had ascertained that David Massingale had been given Sixty days longer to live, solely because the buccaneers chose to take his mine rather than his money, Brouillard had submitted the facts in the case to a trusted lawyer friend in the East. This hope had pulled in two like a frayed cord. Massingale must pay the bank or lose all. Until he had obtained possession of the promissory notes there would be no crevice in which to drive any legal wedge. And even then, unless some pressure could be brought to bear upon the grafters to make them disgorge, there was no chance of Massingale’s recovering more than his allotted two-thirds of the stock; in other words, he would still stand committed to the agreement by which he had bound himself to make the grafters a present, in fee simple, of one-third of his mine. Brouillard had written one more letter to the lawyer. In it he had asked how David Massingale could be unassallably reinstated in his rights as the sole owner of the “Little Susan." The answer had come promptly and it was explicit. “Only by the repayment of such sums as had been actually expended in the reorganization and on the betterments—for the modernizing machinery and improvements —and the voluntary surrender, by the other parties to the agreement, of the stock in dispute,” the lawyer had written; and Brouillard had smiled "at the thought of Cortwrlght voluntarily surrendering anything which was once well within the grasp of his pudgy hands. Failing to start the legal wedge, Brouillard had dipped—also without consulting Massingale—into the matter of land titles. The "Little Susan” was legally patented under the land laws, and Massingale’s title, if the mine were located upon government land, was without a flaw. But on a former reclamation project Brouillard had been brought in contact with some of the curious title litigation growing out of the old Spanish grants; and in at least one instance he had seen a government patent invalidated thereby. As a man in reasonably close touch with his superiors in Washington, the chief ?ff construction knew that there was a Spanish grant Involvement which had at one time threatened to at least delay the Niquoia project. How it had been settled finally he did not know; but after the legal failure he had written to a man —a college classmate of his own—in the bureau of land statistics, asking for data which would enable him to locate exactly the Ni-quoia-touching boundaries of the great Coronida grant. To this letter no reply had as yet been received. Brouillard had cause to know with what slowness a simple matter of information can ooze out of a department bureau. The letter—which, after all, might contain nothing helpful—lingered on the way, and the crisis, the turning point beyond which there could be no redemption in a revival of the speculative craze, had arrived. Brouillard took up the draft of the Washington telegram and read it over. He was cooler now, and he saw that it was only as it came from the hand of a traitor, who could and would deliberately wreck the train of events it might set in motion, that it became a betrayal. Writing as the commanding

officer in the field, he had restated the facts —facts doubtless well known in the department—the probability that congress would intervene and the hold the opposition was gaining by the suspension of the work on the dam. If the work could be pushed energetically and at once, there was a possibility that the opposition would become discouraged and voluntarily withdraw. Would the department place the men and the means Instantly at his disposal? "If I were tife honest man I am supposed to be, that is precisely the message I ought to send,” he mused reflectively. “It is only as the crooked devil in possession of me-will drive me to nullify the effort and make it of no effect that’it becomes a crime; that and the fact that I can never be sure that the Cortwright gang ha-sn’t the inside track and will not win out in spite of all efforts. ’ That is the touchstone of the whole business. I am afraid Cortwright has the inside track. If I could only get a libtie clear-sighted daylight on the damnable tangle!"

CHAPTER XX Love’s Crucible

Obeying a sudden impulse, Brouillard thrust the two copies of the telegram under the paper-weight again, sprang up, put on his hat, and left the building. A few minutes later he was on the porch of the stuccoed villa in the Quadjenal road and was saying gravely to the young woman who had been reading in the hammock: “You are staying too closely at home. Get your coat and hat and walk with me up to the ’Little Susan.’ It will do you good.” The afternoon was waning and the sun, dipping to the horizon, hung like a huge golden ball over the yellow immensities of the distant Buckskin as they topped the final ascent in the steep trail and went to sit on the steps of the deserted home cabin at the mine. For a time neither spoke, and the stillness of the air contributed something to the high-mountain silence, which was almost oppressive. Work had been stopped in the mine at the end of the previous week. Massingale declaring, morosely, that until he knew

whose ore he was digging he would dig no more. Presumably there was a watchman, but if so he was invisible to the two on the cabin step, and the high viewpoint was theirs alone. “How did you know that I have been wanting to come up here once more before everything is changed?” said the girl at length, patting the roughly-hewn log step as if it were a sentient thing to fee'l the caress. "I didn’t know it,” Brouillard denied. “I only knew that I wanted to get out of Gomorrah for a little while, to come up here with you and get the reek of the pit out of my nostrils.” “I know,” she rejoined, with the quick comprehension which never failed him. “It is good to be out of it. to be up here where we can look down upon it and see it in its true perspective —as a mere little impertinent blot on the landscape. It’s only that, after all, Victor. See how the great dam — your work—overshadows it.” "That is one of the things I hoped I might be able to see if I came here with yotiC*’ he returned slowly. “But I can’t get your point of view, Amy. I shall never be able to get it again." “You did have it once,” she asserted. "Or rather, you had a better one of your own. Has Gomorrah changed it?” “No, not Gomorrah. I could shut the waste-gates and drown the place tomorrow for all that Mirapolis, or anything in it, means to me. But something has changed the point of view for me past mending, since that first day when we sat here together and looked down upon the beginning of the reclamation construction camp—before Gomorrah was ever thought of.” “I know,” she said again. “But that dreadful city is responsible. It has robbed us all, Victor; but you more than any, I’m afraid.” “No,” he objected. "Mirapolis has been only a means to an end. The thing that has changed my point of view—my entire life —is love, as I have told you once before.” “ p “Oh, no," she protested .gently, rising to take her old place, with her back to the porch post and her hands behind her. And then, still more gently: “That is] almost like sacrilege, Victor, for love |s sacred." “I can't help |t. Love has made a great scoundrel of me, Amy; a criminal, if man’s laws were as closely meshed as God’s." "I can’t believe that,” she dissented loyally. “It is true. I have betrayed my trust. Cortwright will make good in all of his despicable schemes. Congress will intervene and the Niquoia project will be abandoned." "Tell me," she begged briefly; and,

since he was staring fixedly at the scored slopes of Jack’s mountain, he did not see that she caught her lip between her teeth to stop its trembling. "As you know, I had a debt to pay before I could say: ’Come, little girl, let’s go and get married.’ So I became a stockholder in Cortwright’s power company, knowing perfectly well when I consented that the hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock he gave me was a bribe —the price of my silence and noninterference with his greedy schemes.” “But you didn’t mean to keep it; you know 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." 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 IL" 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. 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.” “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 es completion and the city will be saved by legislative enactmenL 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 ajn 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 lam 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. 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 Timanyonls. “How little you know the real love!” she said slowly. 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. • * * * * . • • 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.' . ’ ,

Will Amy be able to awaken In Brouillard’s breast enough manhood to defy Cortwright—and fight him to a finish, even though the fight appears hopeless?

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

To remote the water of the Pacific ocean would require the filling ot a tank a mile wide, a mile deep and • mile long every day tor 440 years.

"See How the Great Dam—Your Work —Overshadows It."