The City of Numbered Days

"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 accepted the one great handicap. I may owe it to myself – and to some others – not to 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 something else; about the railroad. I told you that President Ford is coming over to have a wrestle with the Cortwright people, but I didn't tell you that he 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 over and had a chance to confer with me."

She bridged all the gaps with swift intuition. "He means to give you the casting 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 any event, 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," she laughed. "Be a good god-in-the-car, please, and your petitioners will ever pray." Then, with an instant return to seriousness: "But you mustn't think of that – of course, you won't – with so many other and greater things to consider."

"On the contrary, I shall think very pointedly of that; pointedly and regretfully – because your brother has made it practically impossible for me 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 other people 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 porch post, that she was hiding her face in the crooking of an arm. It melted him 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 it impossible."

An awkward little silence supervened and once more Brouillard dragged his watch from its pocket.

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

Again she stopped him.

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

An hour later, when the afternoon shadow of Jack's Mountain was lying all across the shut-in valley and pointing like the angle of a huge gnomon to the Quadjenàï Hills, Brouillard was closeted in his log-built office quarters with a big, fair-faced man, whose rough tweeds and unbrushed, soft hat proclaimed him fresh from the dust-dry reaches of the Quesado trail.

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

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

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

"I can give you the facts," was the quiet rejoinder. "While the Cortwright boom lasts there will be plenty of incoming business – and some outgoing. When the bubble bursts – as it will have to when the dam is completed, if it doesn't before – you'll quit until the Buckskin fills up with settlers who can give you crops to move. That is the situation in a nutshell, all but one little item. There is a mine up on Chigringo – Massingale's – with a good few thousand tons of pay ore on the dump. Where there is one mine there may be more, later on; and I don't suppose that even such crazy boomers as the Cortwright crowd will care to put in a gold reduction plant. So you would have the ore to haul to the 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. "What I want is your personal notion. If you were the executive committee of the Pacific Southwestern, would you, or would you not, build the Extension? That's the point I'm trying to make."

Brouillard got up and went to the window. The gnomon shadow of Jack's Mountain had spread over the entire valley, and its southern limb had crept up Chigringo until its sharply defined line was resting upon the Massingale cabin. When he turned back to the man at the desk he was frowning thoughtfully, and his eyes were the eyes of one who sees only the clearly etched lines of a picture which obscures all outward and visual 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 you insist on pulling my private opinion out by the roots, you may have it. I'd build the Extension."

VI

Mirapolis

During the strenuous weeks when Camp Niquoia's straggling street was acquiring plank sidewalks and getting itself transformed into Chigringo Avenue, with a double row of false-fronted "emporiums" to supplant the shack shelters, Monsieur Poudrecaulx Bongras, late of the San Francisco tenderloin, opened the camp's first counter-grill.

Finding monsieur's name impossible in both halves of it, the camp grinned and rechristened him "Poodles." Later, discovering his dual gift of past mastership in potato frying and coffee making, the camp gave him vogue. Out of the vogue sprang in swift succession a café with side-tables, a restaurant with private dining-rooms, and presently a commodious hotel, where the food was excellent, the appointments luxurious, and where Jack – clothed and in his right mind and with money in his hand – was as good as his master.

It was in one of Bongras's private dining-rooms that Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright was entertaining Brouillard, with Miss Genevieve to make a harmonizing third at the circular table up to the removal of the cloth and the serving of the cigars and a second cold bottle.

The little dinner had been a gustatory triumph; Miss Genevieve had added the charm of lightness at moments when her father threatened to let the money clink become painfully audible; and the cigars were gold-banded. Nevertheless, when Miss Cortwright had gone up-stairs, and the waiter would have refilled his glass, Brouillard shook his head.

If the millionaire saw the refusal he was too wise to remark it. Altogether, Brouillard was finding his first impressions of Mr. Cortwright readjusting themselves with somewhat confusing rapidity. It was not that there was any change in the man. Charactering the genial host like a bachelor of hospitality, he was still the frank, outspoken money-maker, hot upon the trail of the nimble dollar. Yet there was a change of some kind. Brouillard had marked it on the day, a fortnight earlier, when (after assuring himself morosely that he would not) he had gone down to the lower canyon portal to see the Cortwright touring-car finish its second race across the desert from El Gato.

"Of course, I was quite prepared to have you stand off and throw stones at our little cob house of a venture, Brouillard," the host allowed at the lighting of the gold-banded cigars. "You're the government engineer and the builder of the big dam; it's only natural that your horizons should be filled with government-report pictures and half-tones of what's going to be when you get your dam done. But you can't build your dam in one day, or in two, and the interval is ours. I tell you, we're going to make Mirapolis a buzz-hummer while the daylight lasts. Don't you forget that."

"'Mirapolis'?" queried Brouillard. "Is that the new name?"

Cortwright laughed and nodded. "It's Gene's name – 'Miracle City.' Fits like the glove on a pretty girl's arm, doesn't it?"

"It does. But the miracle is that there should be any money daring enough to invest itself in the Niquoia."

"There you go again, with your ingrained engineering ideas that to be profitable a scheme must necessarily have rock-bottom foundations and a time-defying superstructure," chuckled the host. "Why, bless your workaday heart, Brouillard, nothing is permanent in this shuffling, growing, progressive world of ours – absolutely nothing. Some of the biggest and costliest buildings in New York and Chicago are built on ground leases. Our ground lease will merely be a little shorter in the factor of time."

"So much shorter that the parallel won't hold," argued Brouillard.

"The parallel does hold; that is precisely the point. Every ground-lease investment is a gamble. The investor simply bets that he can make the turn within the time limit."

"Yes; but a long term of years – "

"There you are," cut in the financier. "Now you've got it down to the hard-pan basis: long time, small profits and a slow return; short time, big profits and a quick return. You've eaten here before; what do you pay Bongras for a reasonably good dinner?"

Brouillard laughed. "Oh, Poodles. He cinches us, all right; four or five times as much as it's worth – or would cost anywhere else."

"That's it. He knows he has to make good on all these little luxuries he gives you – cash in every day, as you might say, and come out whole before you stop the creek and drown him. Let me tell you something, Brouillard; San Francisco brags about being the cheapest city in the country; they'll tell you over there that you can buy more for your money than you can anywhere else on earth. Well, Mirapolis is going to take the trophy at the other end of the speedway. When we get in motion we're going to have Alaska faded to a frazzle on prices – and you'll see everybody paying them joyfully."

"And in the end somebody, or the final series of somebodies, will be left to hold the bag," finished Brouillard.

"That's a future. What is it the Good Book says? 'Let us eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' That's philosophy, and it's good business, too. Not that I'm admitting your pessimistic conclusions for a single minute; don't mistake me on that point. There needn't be any bag holders, Brouillard. Let me put it in a nutshell: we're building a cement plant, and we shall sell you the output – at a good, round price, I promise you, but still at a lower figure than you're paying for the imported article now, or than you will pay even after the railroad gets in. When our government orders are filled we can afford to wreck the plant for what it will bring as junk. We'll be out of it whole, with a nice little profit."

"That is only one instance," objected the guest.