The City of Numbered Days

"Is it a good reason?"

"It is a very excellent reason, indeed."

"Does the order cover more than the work on the dam?"

"Yes; it extends to the canal diggers in the Buckskin."

"Good. Then I'll ask only one more question, and if you answer it at all I know you'll tell me the truth: are you, individually, buying or selling on the Real Estate Exchange? Take your time, Brouillard, but, for God's sake, don't turn me down."

Brouillard did take time, plenty of it. Over and over the point of the paper-knife traced the creased circles and ellipses, and the ash on the slowly burning cigar grew longer. Harlan was a student of men, but his present excitement was against him. Otherwise he could not have stared so long and so intently at Brouillard's face without reading therein the record of the soul struggle his final question had evoked. And if he had read, he would have interpreted differently the quick flinging down of the paper-cutter, and the sudden hardening of the jaw muscles when Brouillard spoke.

"I'm buying, Harlan; when I sell it is only to buy again."

The newspaper man rose and held out his hand.

"You're a man and a brother, Brouillard, and I'm your friend for life. With only a fraction of your chance at inside information, I've stayed on the up-hill side, straight through, myself. And I'll tell you why. I've banked on you. I've said to myself that it was safe for me to wade around in the edges if you could plunge out in the sure-enough swimming-hole. I'm going to stay until you give me the high sign to crawl out on the bank. Is that asking too much?"

"No. If the time ever comes when I have anything to say, I'll say it to you. But don't lose sight of the 'if,' and don't lean too hard on me. I'm a mighty uncertain quantity these days, Harlan, and that's the truest thing I've told you since you butted in. Good-night."

Mirapolis awoke to a full sense of its opportunities on the morning following the departure of its distinguished guests. Though the Spot-Light was unable to say anything conclusively definite, Harlan had made the most of what he had; and, trickling in from a dozen independent sources, as it seemed, came jubilant confirmation of the Spot-Light's optimistic editorials.

In such a crisis all men are liars. Now that the visiting delegation was gone, there were scores of witnesses willing to testify that the Honorable Tom, Dick, or Harry had dropped the life-giving word; and though each fictionist knew that his own story was a fabrication, it was only human to believe that of the man with whom he exchanged the whispered confidence.

To the lies and the exaggerations was presently added a most convincing truth. By ten o'clock it was the talk of the lobbies, the club, and the exchanges that the Reclamation Service was already abandoning the work on the great dam. One half of the workmen were to be discharged at once, and doubtless the other half would follow as soon as the orders could come from Washington.

Appealed to by a mob of anxious inquirers, Brouillard did not deny the fact of the discharges, and thereupon the city went mad in a furor of speculative excitement in comparison with which the orgy of the gold discoverers paled into insignificance. "Curb" exchanges sprang into being in the Metropole lobby, in the court of the Niquoia Building, and at a dozen street corners on the Avenue. Word went to the placers, and by noon the miners had left their sluice-boxes and were pouring into town to buy options at prices that would have staggered the wildest plunger otherwhere, or at any other time.

Brouillard closed his desk at one o'clock and went to fight his way through the street pandemonium to Bongras's. At a table in the rear room he found David Massingale, his long, white beard tucked into the closely buttoned miner's coat to be out of the way of the flying knife and fork, while he gave a lifelike imitation of a man begrudging every second of time wasted in stopping the hunger gap.

Brouillard took the opposite chair and was grimly amused at the length of time that elapsed before Massingale realized his presence.

"Pity a man has to stop to eat on a day like this, isn't it, Mr. Massingale?" he laughed; and then: "I wouldn't hurry. There's another day coming; or if there isn't, we'll all be in the same boat. How is Steve?"

Massingale nodded. "The boy's comin' along all right now; he allows to be out in another week 'r two." Then the inevitable question: "They're sayin' on the street that you're lettin' out half o' your men – that so?"

Brouillard laughed again.

"I've heard it so often that I've come to believe it myself," he admitted, adding: "Yes, it's true." After which he asked a question of his own: "Have you been doing something in real estate this morning, Mr. Massingale?"

"All I could," mumbled the old man between mouthfuls. "But I cayn't do much. If it ain't one thing, it's another. 'Bout as soon as I got that tangle with the Red Butte smelter straightened out, the railroad hit me."

"How was that?" queried Brouillard, with quickening interest coming alive at a bound.

"Same old song, no cars; try and get 'em to-morruh, and to-morruh it'll be next day, and next day it'll be the day after. Looks like they don't want to haul any freight out o' here."

"I see," said Brouillard, and truly he saw much more than David Massingale did. Then: "No shipments means no money for you, and more delay; and delay happens to be the one thing you can't stand. When do those notes of yours fall due?"

"Huh?" said Massingale. He was a close-mouthed man, by breeding and by habit, and he was quite sure he had never mentioned the "Little Susan" entanglement to the young engineer.

Brouillard became more explicit. "The notes covering your indebtedness to the bank for the money you've been putting into development work and improvements – I asked when they would become due."

The old man's heavy white eyebrows bent themselves in a perplexed frown.

"Amy hadn't ort to talk so much," he objected. "Business is business."

Brouillard's smile was a tacit denial of the implication.

"You forget that there were several other parties to the transaction and that any man's business is every man's in this crazy town," he suggested. "But you haven't answered my question about the due date. I didn't ask it out of idle curiosity, I assure you."

Massingale was troubled, and his fine old face showed it plainly.

"I ain't much of a man to holler when I've set the woods afire myself," he answered slowly. "But I don't know why I shouldn't yip a little to you if I feel like it. To-day is the last day on them notes, and I'd about made up my mind that I was goin' up the spout on a sure thing for the fourth time since I hit the mount'ins, when this here new excitement broke out."

"Go on," said Brouillard.

"I saw a chance – about a one-to-a-hundred shot. I'd been to see Hardwick at the bank, and he gave me the ultimaytum good and cold; if I couldn't lift the paper, the bank'd have to go back on my indorser, John Wes. I had a little over five thousand left out o' the borray, and I took it and broke for the Real Estate Exchange. Been there for three solid hours, turnin' my little stake over like a flapjack on a hot griddle; but it ain't any use, I cayn't turn it fast enough, 'r often enough, betwixt now and three o'clock."

One of Bongras's rear-room luxuries was a portable telephone for every group of tables. Brouillard made a sign to the waiter, and the desk set was brought to him. If David Massingale recognized the number asked for, he paid no attention; and, since a man may spend his life digging holes in the ground and still retain the instincts of a gentleman – if he happens to have been born with them – he was equally oblivious to the disjointed half of the telephone conversation he might have listened to.

"Hello! Is that Boyer – Niquoia National?.. This is Brouillard. Can you give me my present figure?.. Not more than that?.. Oh, yes; you say the Hillman check is in; I had overlooked it. All right, thank you."

When the waiter had removed the desk set, the engineer leaned toward his table companion:

"Mr. Massingale, I'm going to ask you to tell me frankly what kind of a deal it was you made with Cortwright and the bank people."

"It was the biggest tom-fool razzle that any livin' live man out of a lunatic 'sylum ever went into," confessed the prisoner of fate. "I was to stock the 'Susan' for half a million – oh, she's worth it, every dollar of it; you might say the ore's in sight for it right now" – this in deference to Brouillard's brow-lifting of surprise. "They was to put in a hundred thousand cash, and I was to put in the mine and the ore on the dump, just as she stood."

The engineer nodded and Massingale went on.

"I was to have two thirds of the stock and they was to have one third. The hundred thousand for development we'd get at the bank, on my notes, because I was president and the biggest stockholder, with John Wes. as indorser. Then, to protect the bank accordin' to law, they said, we'd put the whole bunch o' stock – mine and their'n – into escrow in the hands of Judge Williams. When the notes was paid, the judge'd hand the stock back to us."

"Just a moment," interrupted Brouillard. "Did you sign those notes personally, or as president of the new company?"

"That's where they laid for me," said the old man shamefacedly. "We made the money turn before we was a company – while we was waitin' for the charter."

"Of course," commented Brouillard. "And they rushed you into it on the plea of saving time. But you say the stock was to be released when the notes were paid – what was to happen if they were not paid?"

"Right there is where John Wes.'s ten-dollar-a-bottle sody-pop stuff we was soppin' up must 'a' foolished me plumb silly; I don't just rightly recollect what the judge was to do with the stock if I fell down. I know it was talked all 'round Robin Hood's barn, up one side and down the other, and they made it look like I couldn't slip up if I tried to. And they made the borray at the bank look fair enough, too."

"Well, why wasn't it fair?" Brouillard wanted to know.

"Why, sufferin' Moses! don't you see? It hadn't ort to 've been needed. They was to put in a hundred thousand, and they wasn't doin' it. It figgered out this-a-way in the talk: they said, what's the use o' takin' the money out o' one pocket and puttin' it into the other? Let the bank carry the development loan and let the mine pay it. Then we could even up when it come to the dividends."

"So it amounts to this: you have given them a clean third of the 'Susan' for the mere privilege of borrowing one hundred thousand dollars on your own paper. And if you don't pay, you lose the remaining two thirds as well."

"That's about the way it stacks up to a sober man. Looks like I needed a janitor to look after my upper story, don't it? And I reckon mebby I do."

"One thing more," pressed the relentless querist. "Did you really handle the hundred-thousand-dollar development fund yourself, Mr. Massingale?"