The City of Numbered Days

She made a funny little grimace at him. "It was 'contradictions' a moment ago and now it is 'surprises.' Which reminds me, you haven't told me why I am a 'collection.'"

"I think you know well enough," he retorted. "The first time I saw you – down at the Nick-wire ford with Tig, you remember – I tried to recall which Madonna it is that has your mouth and eyes."

"Well, did you succeed in placing the lady?"

"No. Somehow, I haven't cared to since I've come to know you. You're different – always different, and then – oh, well, comparisons are such hopelessly inadequate things, anyway," he finished lamely.

"You are not getting on very well with the 'contradictions,'" she demurred.

"Oh, I can catalogue them if you push me to it. One minute you are the Madonna lady that I can't recall, calm, reposeful, truthful, and all that, you know – so truthful that those childlike eyes of yours would make a stuttering imbecile of the man who should come to you with a lie in his mouth."

"And the next minute?" she prompted.

"The next minute you are a witch, laughing at the man's little weaknesses, putting your finger on them as accurately as if you could read his soul, holding them up to your ridicule and – what's much worse – to his own. At such times your insight, or whatever you choose to call it, is enough to give a man a fit of 'seeing things.'"

Her laugh was like a school-girl's, light-hearted, ringing, deliciously unrestrained.

"What a picture!" she commented. And then: "I can draw a better one of you, Monsieur Victor de Brouillard."

"Do it," he dared.

"It'll hurt your vanity."

"I haven't any."

"Oh, but you have! Don't you know that it is only the very vainest people who say that?"

"Never mind; go on and draw your picture."

"Even if it should give you another attack of the 'seeing things'?"

"Yes; I'll chance even that."

"Very well, then: once upon a time – it was a good while ago, I'm afraid – you were a very upright young man, and your uprightness made you just a little bit austere – for yourself, if not for others. At that time you were busy whittling out heroic little ideals and making idols of them; and I am quite sure you were spelling duty with a capital 'D' and that you would have been properly horrified if a sister of yours had permitted an unchaperoned acquaintance like – well, like ours."

"Go on," he said, neither affirming nor denying.

"Also, at that time you thought that a man's work in the world was the biggest thing that ever existed, the largest possible order that could be given, and the work and everything about it had to be transparently honest and openly aboveboard. You would cheerfully have died for a principle in those days, and you would have allowed the enemy to cut you up into cunning little inch cubes before you would have admitted that any pigeon was ever made to be plucked."

He was smiling mirthlessly, with the black mustaches taking the sardonic upcurve.

"Then what happened?"

"One of two things, or maybe both of them. You were pushed out into the life race with some sort of a handicap. I don't know what it was – or is. Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll hazard the other guess. You discovered that there were women in the world and that there was something in you, or about you, that was sufficiently attractive to make them sit up and be nice to you. For some reason – perhaps it was the handicap – you thought you'd be safer in the unwomaned wilderness and so you came out here to the 'wild and woolly.' But even here you're not safe. There is a passable trail over War Arrow Pass and at a pinch an automobile can cross the Buckskin."

When she stopped he nodded gravely. "It is all true enough. You haven't added anything more than a graceful little touch here and there. Who has been telling you all these things about me?"

She clapped her hands in delighted self-applause.

"You don't deny them?"

"I wouldn't be so impolite."

In the turning of a leaf her mood changed and the wide-open, fearless eyes were challenging him soberly.

"You can't deny them."

He tried to break away from the level-eyed, accusing gaze – tried and found it impossible.

"I asked you who has been gossiping about me; not Grizzy?"

"No, not Murray Grislow; it was the man you think you know best in all the world – who is also the one you probably know the least – yourself."

"Good Heavens! am I really such a transparent egoist as all that?"

"All men are egoists," she answered calmly. "In some the ego is sound and clear-eyed and strong; in others it is weak – in the same way that passion is weak; it will sacrifice all it has or hopes to have in some sudden fury of self-assertion."

She sat up and put her hands to her hair, and he was free to look away, down upon the great ditch where the endless chain of concrete buckets linked itself to the overhead carrier like a string of mechanical insects, each with its pinch of material to add to the deep and wide-spread foundations of the dam. Across the river a group of hidden sawmills sent their raucous song like the high-pitched shrilling of distant locusts to tremble upon the still air of the afternoon. In the middle distance the camp-town city, growing now by leaps and bounds, spread its roughly indicated streets over the valley level, the yellow shingled roofs of the new structures figuring as patches of vivid paint under the slanting rays of the sun. Far away to the right the dark-green liftings of the Quadjenàï Hills cut across from mountain to river; at the foot of the ridge the tall chimney-stacks of the new cement plant were rising, and from the quarries beyond the plant the dull thunder of the blasts drifted up to the Chigringo heights like a sign from the mysterious underworld of Navajo legend.

This was not Brouillard's first visit to the cabin on the Massingale claim by many. In the earliest stages of the valley activities Smith, the Buckskin cattleman, had been Amy Massingale's escort to the reclamation camp – "just a couple o' lookers," in Smith's phrase – and the unconventional altitudes had done the rest. From that day forward the young woman had hospitably opened her door to Brouillard and his assistants, and any member of the corps, from Leshington the morose, who commonly came to sit in solemn silence on the porch step, to Griffith, who had lost his youthful heart to Miss Massingale on his first visit, was welcome.

Of the five original members of the staff and the three later additions to it, in the persons of the paymaster, the cost-keeper, and young Altwein, who had come in as Grislow's field assistant, Brouillard was the one who climbed oftenest up the mountain-side trail from the camp – a trail which was becoming by this time quite well defined. He knew he went oftener than any of the others, and yet he felt that he knew Amy Massingale less intimately and was far and away more hopelessly entangled than – well, than Grislow, for example, whose visits to the mine cabin came next in the scale of frequency and whose ready wit and gentle cynicism were his passports in any company.

For himself, Brouillard had not been pointedly analytical as yet. From the moment when Amy and Smith had reined up at the door of his office shack and he had welcomed them both, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to fall under the spell of enchantment. He knew next to nothing of the young woman's life story; he had not cared to know. It had not occurred to him to wonder how the daughter of a man who drilled and shot the holes in his own mine should have the gifts and belongings – when she chose to display them – of a woman of a much wider world. It was enough for him that she was piquantly attractive in any character and that he found her marvellously stimulating and uplifting. On the days when the devil of moroseness and irritability possessed and maddened him he could climb to the cabin on high Chigringo and find sanity. It was a keen joy to be with her, and up to the present this had sufficed.

"Egoism is merely another name for the expression of a vital need," he said, after the divagating pause, defining the word more for his own satisfaction than in self-defense.

"You may put it in that way if you please," she returned gravely. "What is your need?"

He stated it concisely. "Money – a lot of it."

"How singular!" she laughed. "I need money, too – a lot of it."

"You?"

"Yes, I."

"What would you do with it? Buy corner lots in Niqoyastcàdjeburg?"

"No, indeed; I'd buy a farm in the Blue-grass – two of them, maybe."

"What an ambition for a girl! Have you ever been in the Blue-grass country?"

She got out of the hammock and came to lean, with her hands behind her, against the opposite porch post. "That was meant to humiliate me, and I sha'n't forget it. You know well enough that I have never been east of the Mississippi."