But the warmth might have given place to a disconcerting chill if he could have heard Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's remark to his seat companion, made when the canyon portal of the Niquoia and the man climbing the path beside it were hazy mirage distortions in the backward distances.
"He isn't going to be the dead easy mark I hoped to find in the son of the old bankrupt hair-splitter, Genie, girl. But he'll come down and hook himself all right if the bait is well covered with his particular brand of sugar. Don't you forget it."
If Victor Brouillard had been disposed to speculate curiously upon the possibilities suggested by Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright on the occasion of the capitalist's brief visit to the Niquoia, or had been tempted to dwell sentimentally upon the idyllic crossing of orbits—Miss Genevieve's and his own—on the desert's rim, there was little leisure for either indulgence during the strenuous early summer weeks which followed the Cortwright invasion.
Popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not precisely true that all government undertakings are dilatory industrial imitations, designed, primarily, to promote the even-handed cutting of some appropriation pie, and, secondarily, to provide easy sinecures for placemen and political heelers. Holding no brief for the government, one may still say without fear of contradiction that laissez-faire has seldom been justly charged against the Reclamation Service. Fairly confronting his problem, Brouillard did not find himself hampered by departmental inertia. While he was rapidly organizing his force for the constructive attack, the equipment and preliminary material for the building of the great dam were piling up by the train load on the side-tracks at Quesado; and at once the man- and beast-killing task of rushing the excavating outfit of machinery, teams, scrapers, rock-drilling installations, steam-shovels, and the like, over the War Arrow trail was begun.
During the weeks which followed, the same trail, and a little later that from the Navajo Reservation on the south, were strung with ant-like processions of laborers pouring into the shut-in valley at the foot of Mount Chigringo. Almost as if by magic a populous camp of tents, shelter shacks, and Indian tepees sprang up in the level bed-bottom of the future lake; camp-fires gave place to mess kitchens; the commissary became a busy department store stocked with everything that thrifty or thriftless labor might wish to purchase; and daily the great foundation scorings in the buttressing shoulders of Jack's Mountain and Chigringo grew deeper and wider under the churning of the air-drills, the crashings of the dynamite, and the rattle and chug of the steam-shovels.
Magically, too, the life of the isolated working camp sprang into being. From the beginning its speech was a curious polyglot; the hissings and bubblings of the melting-pot out of which a new citizenry is poured. Poles and Slovaks, men from the slopes of the Carpathians, the terraces of the Apennines, and the passes of the Balkans; Scandinavians from the pineries of the north, and a colony of railroad-grading Greeks, fresh from the building of a great transcontinental line; all these and more were spilled into the melting-pot, and a new Babel resulted. Only the Indians held aloof. Careful from the first for these wards of the nation, Brouillard had made laws of Draconian severity. The Navajos were isolated upon a small reservation of their own on the Jack's Mountain side of the Niquoia, a full half mile from the many-tongued camp in the open valley; and for the man caught "boot-legging" among the Indians there were penalties swift and merciless.
It was after the huge task of foundation digging was well under way and the work of constructing the small power dam in the upper canyon had been begun that the young chief of construction, busy with a thousand details, had his first forcible reminder of the continued existence of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright.
It came in the form of a communication from Washington, forwarded by special post-rider service from Quesado, and it called a halt upon the up-river power project. In accordance with its settled policy, the Reclamation Service would refrain, in the Niquoia as elsewhere, from entering into competition with private citizens; would do nothing to discourage the investment of private capital. A company had been formed to take over the power production and to establish a plant for the manufacture of cement, and Brouillard was instructed to govern himself accordingly. For his information, the department letter-writer went on to say, it was to be understood that the company was duly organized under the provisions of an act of Congress; that it had bound itself to furnish power and material at prices satisfactory to the Service; and that the relations between it and the government field-staff on the ground were to be entirely friendly.
"It's a graft—a pull-down with a profit in it for some bunch of money leeches a little higher up!" was the young chief's angry comment when he had given Grislow the letter to read. "Without knowing any more of the details than that letter gives, I'd be willing to bet a month's pay that this is the fine Italian hand of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright!"
Grislow's eyebrows went up in doubtful interrogation.
"Ought I to know the gentleman?" he queried mildly. "I don't seem to recall the name."
Brouillard got up from his desk to go and stand at one of the little square windows of the log-built office quarters. For some reason which he had not taken the trouble to define, even to himself, he had carefully refrained from telling the hydrographer anything about the early morning meeting with the automobilists at the edge of the desert basin; of that and of the subsequent visit of two of them to the site of the dam.
"No; you don't know him," he said, turning back to the worker at the mapping table. "It was his motor party that was camping at the Buckskin ford the night we broke in here—the night when we saw the search-light."
"And you met him? I thought you told me you merely went down and took a look—didn't butt in?"
"I didn't—that night. But the next morning——"
The hydrographer's smile was a jocose grimace.
"I recollect now; you said that one of the motorists was a young woman."
Brouillard resented the implication irritably.
"Don't be an ass, Murray," he snapped; and then he went on, with the frown of impatience still wrinkling between his eyes. "The young woman was the daughter. There was a cub of a son, and he fired a stick of dynamite in the river to kill a mess of trout. I heard the explosion and thought it might be the gasolene tank of the car."
"Naturally," said Grislow guilelessly. "And, quite as naturally, you went down to see. I'm not sure that I shouldn't have done it myself."
"Of course you would," was the touchy retort. "When I got there and found out what had happened, I meant to make a second drop-out; but Cortwright and his daughter were coming up the trail, and he hailed me. After that I couldn't do less than the decent thing. They wanted to see the valley, and I showed them the way in. Cortwright is the multimillionaire pork packer of Chicago, and he went up into the air like a lunatic over the money-making chances there were going to be in this job. I didn't pay much attention to his chortlings at the time. It didn't seem remotely credible that anybody with real money to invest would plant it in the bottom of the Niquoia reservoir."
"But now you think he is going to make his bluff good?"
"That looks very much like it," said Brouillard sourly, pointing to the letter from Washington. "That scheme is going to change the whole face of Nature for us up here, Grislow. It will spell trouble right from the jump."
"Oh, I don't know," was the deprecatory rejoinder. "It will relieve us of a lot of side-issue industries—cut 'em out and bury 'em, so far as we are concerned."
"That part of it is all right, of course; but it won't end there; not by a hundred miles. We've started in here to be a law to ourselves—as we've got to be to handle this mixed multitude of brigands and ditch diggers. But when this new company gets on the ground it will be different. There will be pull-hauling and scrapping and liquor selling, and we can't go in and straighten things out with a club as we do now. Jobson says in that letter that the relations have got to be friendly! I'll bet anything you like that I'll have to go and read the riot act to those people before they've been twenty-four hours on their job!"
Grislow was trying the point of his mapping-pen on his thumb nail. "Curious that this particular fly should drop into your pot of ointment on your birthday, wasn't it?" he remarked.
"O suffering Jehu!" gritted Brouillard ragefully. "Are you never going to forget that senseless bit of twaddle?"
"You're not giving me a chance to forget it," said the map-maker soberly. "You told me that night that the seven-year characteristic was change; and you're a changed man, Victor, if ever there was one. Moreover, it began that very night—or the next morning."
"Oh, damn!"
"Certainly, if you wish it. But that is only another proof of what I am saying. It's getting on your nerves now. Do you know what the men have named you? They call you 'Hell's-Fire.' That has come to be your word when you light into them for something they've done or haven't done. No longer ago than this morning you were swearing at Griffith, as if you'd forgotten that the boy is only a year out of college and can't be supposed to know as much as Leshington or Anson. Where is your sense of humor?"
Brouillard laughed, if only to prove that his sense of humor was still unimpaired.
"They are a fearful lot of dubs, Grizzy," he said, meaning the laborers; "the worst we've ever drawn, and that is saying a good deal. Three drunken brawls last night, and a man killed in Haley's Place. And I can't keep liquor out of the camp to save my soul—not if I should sit up nights to invent new regulations. The Navajos are the best of the bunch and we've managed to keep the fire from spreading over on their side of the Niquoia, thus far. But if the whiskey ever gets hold in the tepees, we'll have orders to shoot Chief Nicagee's people back to their reservation in a holy minute."
Grislow nodded.
"Niqoyastcàdje—'Place-where-they-came-up.' It will be 'Place-where-they-go-down' if the tin-horns and boot-leggers get an inning."
"We'll all go to the devil on a toboggan-slide and there is the order for it," declared the chief morosely, again indicating the letter from Washington. "That means more human scum—a new town—an element that we can neither chase out nor control. Cortwright and his associates, whoever they are, won't care a rotten hang. They'll be here to sweat money out of the job; to sweat it in any and every way that offers, and to do it quick. All of which is bad enough, you'd say, Murray; but it isn't the worst of it. I've just run up against another thing that is threatening to raise merry hell in this valley."
"I know," said the hydrographer slowly. "You've been having a séance with Steve Massingale. Leshington told me about it."
"What did he tell you?" Brouillard demanded half-angrily.
"Oh, nothing much; nothing to make you hot at him. He happened to be in the other room when Massingale was here, and the door was open. He said he gathered the notion that the young sorehead was trying to bully you."
"He was," was the brittle admission. "See here, Grizzy."
The thing to be seen was a small buckskin bag which, when opened, gave up a paper packet folded like a medicine powder. The paper contained a spoonful of dust and pellets of metal of a dull yellow lustre.
The hydrographer drew a long breath and fingered the nuggets. "Gold—placer gold!" he exclaimed, and Brouillard nodded and went on to tell how he had come by the bag and its contents.
"Massingale had an axe to grind, of course. You may remember that Harding talked loosely about the Massingale opposition to the building of the dam. There was nothing in it. The opposition was purely personal and it was directed against Harding himself, with Amy Massingale for the exciting cause."
"That girl?—the elemental brute!" Grislow broke in warmly. He knew the miner's daughter fairly well by this time and, in common with every other man on the staff, not excepting the staff's chief, would have fought for her in any cause.
Brouillard nodded. "I don't know what Harding did, but Smith, the Triangle-Circle foreman, tells me that Steve was on the war-path; he told Harding when he left, last summer, that if he ever came back to the Niquoia, he'd come to stay—and stay dead."
"I never did like Harding's sex attitude any too well," was the hydrographer's definitive comment; and Brouillard went back to the matter of the morning's séance and its golden outcome.
"That is only a little side issue. Steve Massingale came to me this morning with a proposal that was about as cold-blooded as a slap in the face. Naturally, for good business reasons of their own, the Massingales want to see the railroad built over War Arrow Pass and into the Niquoia. In some way Steve has found out that I stand in pretty well with President Ford and the Pacific Southwestern people. His first break was to offer to incorporate the 'Little Susan' and to give me a block of the stock if I'd pull Ford's leg on the Extension proposition."
"Well?" queried Grislow. "The railroad over War Arrow Pass would be the biggest thing that ever happened for our job here. If it did nothing else, it would make us independent of these boomers that are coming in to sell us material at their own prices."
"Exactly. But my hands are tied; and, besides, Massingale's offer was a rank bribe. You can imagine what I told him—that I could neither accept stock in his mine nor say anything to influence the railroad people; that my position as chief engineer for the government cut me out both ways. Then he began to bully and pulled the club on me."
Again Grislow's smile was jocose.
"You haven't been tumbling into the ditch with Leshington and Griffith and the rest of us and making love to the little sister, have you?" he jested.
"Don't be a fool if you can help it," was the curt rejoinder. "And don't give yourself leave to say things like that about Amy Massingale. She is too good and sweet and clean-hearted to be dragged into this mix-up, even by implication. Do you get that, Murray?"
"Oh, yes; it's only another way of saying that I'm one of the fools. Go on with the Stephen end of it."
"Well, when I turned him down, young Massingale began to bluster and to say that I'd have to boost the railroad deal, whether I wanted to or not. I told him he couldn't prove it, and he said he would show me, if I'd take half an hour's walk up the valley with him. I humored him, more to get quit of him than for any other reason, and on the way past the camp he borrowed a frying-pan at one of the cook shacks. You know that long, narrow sand-bar in the river just below the mouth of the upper canyon?"
Grislow nodded.
"That is where we went for the proof. Massingale dipped up a panful of the bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, and you have the results there in that paper. That bar is comparatively rich placer dirt."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated the map-maker. "Comparatively rich, you say?—and you washed this spoonful out of a single pan?"
"Keep your head," said Brouillard coolly. "Massingale explained that I had happened to make a ten-strike; that the bar wasn't any such bonanza as that first result would indicate. I proved that, too, by washing some more of it without getting any more than a few 'colors.' But the fact remains: it's placer ground."
It was at this point that the larger aspect of the fact launched itself upon the hydrographer.
"A gold strike!" he gasped. "And we—we're planning to drown it under two hundred feet of a lake!"
Brouillard's laugh was harsh.
"Don't let the fever get hold of you, Grislow. Don't forget that we are here to carry out the plans of the Reclamation Service—which are more far-reaching and of a good bit greater consequence than a dozen placer-mines. Not that it didn't make me grab for hand-holds for a minute or two, mind you. I wasn't quite as cold about it as I'm asking you to be, and I guess Massingale had calculated pretty carefully on the dramatic effect of his little shock. Anyway, he drove the peg down good and hard. If I would jump in and pull every possible string to hurry the railroad over the range, and keep on pulling them, the secret of the placer bar would remain a secret. Otherwise he, Stephen Massingale, would give it away, publish it, advertise it to the world. You know what that would mean for us, Murray."
"My Lord! I should say so! We'd have Boomtown-on-the-pike right now, with all the variations! Every white man in the camp would chuck his job in the hollow half of a minute and go to gravel washing!"
"That's it precisely," Brouillard acquiesced gloomily. "Massingale is a young tough, but he is shrewd enough, when he is sober. He had me dead to rights, and he knew it. 'You don't want any gold camp starting up here in the bottom of your reservoir,' he said; and I had to admit it."
Grislow had found a magnifying-glass in the drawer of the mapping table, and he was holding it in focus over the small collection of grain gold and nuggets. In the midst of the eager examination he looked up suddenly to say: "Hold on a minute. Why is Steve proposing to give this thing away? Why isn't he working the bar himself?"
"He explained that phase of it, after a fashion—said that placer-mining was always more or less of a gamble and that they had a sure thing of it in the 'Little Susan.' Of course, if the thing had to be given away, he and his father would avail themselves of their rights as discoverers and take their chance with the crowd for the sake of the ready money they might get out of it. Otherwise they'd be content to let it alone and stick to their legitimate business, which is quartz-mining."
"And to do that successfully they've got to have the railroad. Say, Victor, I'm beginning to acquire a great and growing respect for Mr. Stephen Massingale. This field is too small for him; altogether too small. He ought to get a job with some of the malefactors of great wealth. How did you settle it finally?"
"Massingale was too shrewd to try to push me over the edge while there seemed to be a fairly good chance that I would walk over of my own accord. He told me to take a week or two and think about it. We dropped the matter by common consent after we left the bar in the Quadjenàï bend, and on the way down the valley Massingale pitched in a bit of information out of what seemed to be sheer good-will. It seems that he and his father have done a lot of test drilling up and down the side of Chigringo at one time and another, and he told me that there is a bed of micaceous shale under our south anchorage, cautioning me not to let the excavation stop until we had gone through it."
"Well! That was pretty decent of him."
"Yes; and it shows that Harding was lying when he said that the Massingales were opposing the reclamation project. They are frankly in favor of it. Irrigation in the Buckskin means population; and population will bring the railroad, sooner or later. In the matter of hurrying the track-laying, Massingale is only adopting modern business methods. He has a club and he is using it."
Grislow was biting the end of his penholder thoughtfully.
"What are you going to do about it, Victor?" he asked at length. "We can't stand for any more chaos than the gods have already doped out for us, can we?"
Brouillard took another long minute at the office window before he said: "What would you do if you were in my place, Murray?"
But at this the map-maker put up his hands as if to ward off a blow.
"No, you don't!" he laughed. "I can at least refuse to be that kind of a fool. Go and hunt you a professional conscience keeper; I went out of that business for keeps in my sophomore year. But I'll venture a small prophecy: We'll have the railroad—and you'll pull for it. And then, whether Massingale tells or doesn't tell, the golden secret will leak out. And after that, the deluge."
Two days after the arrival of the letter from Washington announcing the approaching invasion of private capital, Brouillard, returning from a horseback trip into the Buckskin, where Anson and Griffith were setting grade stakes for the canal diggers, found a visitor awaiting him in the camp headquarters office.
One glance at the thick-bodied, heavy-faced man chewing an extinct cigar while he made himself comfortable in the only approach to a lounging chair that the office afforded was sufficient to awaken an alert antagonism. Quick to found friendships or enmities upon the intuitive first impression, Brouillard's acknowledgment was curt and business-brusque when the big man introduced himself without taking the trouble to get out of his chair.
"My name is Hosford and I represent the Niquoia Improvement Company as its manager and resident engineer," said the lounger, shifting the dead cigar from one corner of his hard-bitted mouth to the other. "You're Brillard, the government man, I take it?"
"Brouillard, if you please," was the crisp correction. And then with a careful effacement of the final saving trace of hospitality in tone or manner: "What can we do for you, Mr. Hosford?"
"A good many things, first and last. I'm two or three days ahead of my outfit, and you can put me up somewhere until I get a camp of my own. You've got some sort of an engineers' mess, I take it?"
"We have," said Brouillard briefly. With Anson and Griffith absent on the field-work, there were two vacancies in the staff mess. Moreover, the law of the desert prescribes that not even an enemy shall be refused bread and bed. "You'll make yourself at home with us, of course," he added, and he tried to say it without making it sound too much like a challenge.
"All right; so much for that part of it," said the self-invited guest. "Now for the business end of the deal—why don't you sit down?"
Brouillard planted himself behind his desk and began to fill his blackened office pipe, coldly refusing Hosford's tender of a cigar.
"You were speaking of the business matter," he suggested bluntly.
"Yes. I'd like to go over your plans for the power dam in the upper canyon. If they look good to me I'll adopt them."
Brouillard paused to light his pipe before he replied.
"Perhaps we'd better clear away the underbrush before we begin on the standing timber, Mr. Hosford," he said, when the tobacco was glowing militantly in the pipe bowl. "Have you been given to understand that this office is in any sense a tail to your Improvement Company's kite?"
"I haven't been 'given to understand' anything," was the gruff rejoinder. "Our company has acquired certain rights in this valley, and I'm taking it for granted that you've had the situation doped out to you. It won't be worth your while to quarrel with us, Mr. Brouillard."
"I am very far from wishing to quarrel with anybody," said Brouillard, but his tone belied the words. "At the same time, if you think that we are going to do your engineering work, or any part of it, for you, you are pretty severely mistaken. Our own job is fully big enough to keep us busy."
"You're off," said the big man coolly. "Somebody has bungled in giving you the dope. You want to keep your job, don't you?"
"That is neither here nor there. What we are discussing at present is the department's attitude toward your enterprise. I shall be exceeding my instructions if I make that attitude friendly to the detriment of my own work."
The new resident manager sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar reflectively, staring up at the log beaming of the office ceiling. When he began again he did not seem to think it worth while to shift his gaze from the abstractions.
"You're just like all the other government men I've ever had to do business with, Brouillard; pig-headed, obstinate, blind as bats to their own interests. I didn't especially want to begin by knocking you into line, but I guess it'll have to be done. In the first place, let me tell you that there are all kinds of big money behind this little sky-rocket of ours here in the Niquoia: ten millions, twenty millions, thirty millions, if they're needed."
Brouillard shook his head. "I can't count beyond a hundred, Mr. Hosford."
"All right; then I'll get you on the other side. Suppose I should tell you that practically all of your bosses are in with us; what then?"
"Your stockholders' listings concern me even less than your capitalization. We are miles apart yet."
Again the representative of Niquoia Improvement took time to shift the extinct cigar.
"I guess the best way to get you is to send a little wire to Washington," he said reflectively. "How does that strike you?"
"I haven't the slightest interest in what you may do or fail to do," said Brouillard. "At the same time, as I have already said, I don't wish to quarrel with you or with your company."
"Ah! that touched you, didn't it?"
"Not in the sense you are imagining; no. Send your wire if you like. You may have the use of the government telegraph. The office is in the second shack north of this."
"Still you say you don't want to scrap?"
"Certainly not. As you have intimated, we shall have to do business together as buyer and seller. I merely wished to make it plain that the Reclamation Service doesn't put its engineering department at the disposal of the Niquoia Improvement Company."
"But you have made the plans for this power plant, haven't you?"
"Yes; and they are the property of the department. If you want them, I'll turn them over to you upon a proper order from headquarters."
"That's a little more like it. Where did you say I'd find your wire office?"
Brouillard gave the information a second time, and as Hosford went out, Grislow came in and took his place at the mapping table.
"Glad you got back in time to save my life," he remarked pointedly, with a sly glance at his chief. "He's been ploughing furrows up and down my little potato patch all day."
"Humph! Digging for information, I suppose?" grunted Brouillard.
"Just that; and he's been getting it, too. Not out of me, particularly, but out of everybody. Also, he was willing to impart a little. We're in for the time of our lives, Victor."
"I know it," was the crabbed rejoinder.
"You don't know the tenth part of it," asserted the hydrographer slowly. "It's a modest name, 'The Niquoia Improvement Company,' but it is going to be like charity—covering a multitude of sins. Do you know what that plank-faced organizer has got up his sleeve? He is going to build us a neat, up-to-date little city right here in the middle of our midst. If I hadn't made him believe that I was only a draughtsman, he would have had me out with a transit, running the lines for the streets."
"A city?—in this reservoir bottom? I guess not. He was only stringing you to kill time, Grizzy."
"Don't you fool yourself!" exclaimed the map-maker. "He's got the plans in his grip. We're going to be on a little reservation set apart for us by the grace of God and the kindness of these promoters. The remainder of the valley is laid off into cute little squares and streets, with everything named and numbered, ready to be listed in the brokers' offices. You may not be aware of it, but this palatial office building of ours fronts on Chigringo Avenue."
"Stuff!" said Brouillard. "What has all this bubble blowing got to do with the building of a temporary power dam and the setting up of a couple of cement kilns?"
Grislow laid his pen aside and whirled around on his working-stool.
"Don't you make any easy-going mistake, Victor," he said earnestly. "The cement and power proposition is only a side issue. These new people are going to take over the sawmills, open up quarries, build a stub railroad to the Hophra mines, grade a practicable stage road over the range to Quesado, and put on a fast-mule freight line to serve until the railroad builds in. Wouldn't that set your teeth on edge?"
"I can't believe it, Murray. It's a leaf out of the book of Bedlam! Take a fair shot at it and see where the bullet lands: this entire crazy fake is built upon one solitary, lonesome fact—the fact that we're here, with a job on our hands big enough to create an active, present-moment market for labor and material. There is absolutely nothing else behind the bubble blowing; if we were not here the Niquoia Improvement Company would never have been heard of!"
Grislow laughed. "Your arguing that twice two makes four doesn't change the iridescent hue of the bubble," he volunteered. "If big money has seen a chance to skin somebody, the mere fact that the end of the world is due to come along down the pike some day isn't going to cut any obstructing figure. We'll all be buying and selling corner lots in Hosford's new city before we're a month older. Don't you believe it?"
"I'll believe it when I see it," was Brouillard's reply; and with this the matter rested for the moment.
It was later in the day, an hour or so after the serving of the hearty supper in the engineers' mess tent, that Brouillard was given to see another and still less tolerable side of his temporary guest. Hosford had come into the office to plant himself solidly in the makeshift easy-chair for the smoking of a big, black, after-supper cigar.
"I've been looking over your rules and regulations, Brouillard," he began, after an interval of silence which Brouillard had been careful not to break. "You're making a capital mistake in trying to transplant the old Connecticut blue laws out here. Your working-men ought to have the right to spend their money in any way that suits 'em."
Brouillard was pointedly occupying himself at his desk, but he looked up long enough to say: "Whiskey, you mean?"
"That and other things. They tell me that you don't allow any open gambling, or any women here outside of the families of the workmen."
"We don't," was the short rejoinder.
"That won't hold water after we get things fairly in motion."
"It will have to hold water, so far as we are concerned, if I have to build a stockade around the camp," snapped Brouillard.
Hosford's heavy face wrinkled itself in a mirthless smile. "You're nutty," he remarked. "When I find a man bearing down hard on all the little vices, it always makes me wonder what's the name of the corking big one he is trying to cover up."
Since there was obviously no peaceful reply to be made to this, Brouillard bent lower over his work and said nothing. At every fresh step in the forced acquaintance the new-comer was painstakingly developing new antagonisms. Sooner or later, Brouillard knew, it would come to an open rupture, but he was hoping that the actual hostilities could be postponed until after Hosford had worn out his temporary welcome as a guest in the engineers' mess.
For a time the big man in the easy-chair smoked on in silence. Then he began again:
"Say, Brouillard, I saw one little girl to-day that didn't belong to your workmen's-family outfit, and she's a peach; came riding down the trail with her brother from that mine up on the south mountain—Massingale's, isn't it? By Jove! she fairly made my mouth water!"
Inasmuch as no man can read field-notes when the page has suddenly become a red blur, Brouillard looked up.
"You are my guest, in a way, Mr. Hosford; for that reason I can't very well tell you what I think of you." So much he was able to say quietly. Then the control mechanism burned out in a flash of fiery rage and he cursed the guest fluently and comprehensively, winding up with a crude and savage threat of dissection and dismemberment if he should ever venture so much as to name Miss Massingale again in the threatener's hearing.
Hosford sat up slowly, and his big face turned darkly red.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he broke out. "So you're that kind of a fire-eater, are you? Lord, Lord! I didn't suppose anything like that ever happened outside of the ten-cent shockers. Wake up, man; this is the twentieth century we're living in. Don't look at me that way!"
But the wave of insane wrath was already subsiding, and Brouillard, half ashamed of the momentary lapse into savagery, was once more scowling down at the pages of his note-book. Further along, when the succeeding silence had been undisturbed for five full minutes, he began to realize that the hot Brouillard temper, which he had heretofore been able to keep within prudent bounds, had latterly been growing more and more rebellious. He could no longer be sure of what he would say or do under sudden provocation. True, he argued, the provocation in the present instance had been sufficiently maddening; but there had been other upflashings of the murderous inner fire with less to excuse them.
Hosford finished his cigar, and when he tossed the butt out through the opened window, Brouillard hoped he was going. But the promoter-manager made no move other than to take a fresh cigar from his pocket case and light it. Brouillard worked on silently, ignoring the big figure in the easy-chair by the window, and striving to regain his lost equilibrium. To have shown Hosford the weakness of the control barriers was bad enough, but to have pointed out the exact spot at which they were most easily assailable was worse. He thought it would be singular if Hosford should not remember how and where to strike when the real conflict should begin, and he was properly humiliated by the reflection that he had rashly given the enemy an advantage.
He was calling Hosford "the enemy" now and making no ameliorating reservations. That the plans of the boomers would speedily breed chaos, and bring the blight of disorder and lawlessness upon the Niquoia project and everything connected with it, he made no manner of doubt. How was he to hold a camp of several hundred men in decent subjection if the temptations and allurements of a boomers' city were to be brought in and set down within arm's reach of the work on the dam? It seemed blankly incredible that the department heads in Washington should sanction such an invasion if they knew the full meaning of it.
The "if" gave him an idea. What if the boomers were taking an unauthorized ell for their authorized inch? He had taken a telegraph pad from the desk stationery rack and was composing his message of inquiry when the door opened and Quinlan, the operator, came in with a communication fresh from the Washington wire. The message was an indirect reply to Hosford's telegraphed appeal to the higher powers. Brouillard read it, stuck it upon the file, and took a roll of blue-prints from the bottom drawer of his desk.
"Here are the drawings for your power installation, Mr. Hosford," he said, handing the roll to the man in the chair. And a little later he went out to smoke a pipe in the open air, leaving the message of inquiry unwritten.
For some few minutes after the gray-bearded, absent-eyed old man who had been working at the mine forge had disappeared in the depths of the tunnel upon finishing his job of drill pointing, the two on the cabin porch made no attempt to resume the talk which had been broken by the blacksmithing. But when the rumbling thunder of the ore-car which the elder Massingale was pushing ahead of him into the mine had died away in the subterranean distances Brouillard began again.
"I do get your point of view—sometimes," he said. "Or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that I have had it now and then in times past. Civilization, or what stands for it, does have a way of shrinking into littleness, not to say cheapness, when one can get the proper perspective. And your life up here on Chigringo has given you the needful detached point of view."
The trouble shadows in the eyes of the young woman who was sitting in the fish-net hammock gave place to a smile of gentle derision.
"Do you call that civilization?" she demanded, indicating the straggling new town spreading itself, map-like, in the valley below.
"I suppose it is—one form of it. At least it is civilization in the making. Everything has to have some sort of a beginning."
Miss Massingale acquiesced in a little uptilt of her perfectly rounded chin.
"Just the same, you don't pretend to say that you are enjoying it," she said in manifest deprecation.
"Oh, I don't know. My work is down there, and a camp is a necessary factor in it. You'd say that the more civilized the surroundings become, the less need there would be for me to sit up nights to keep the lid on. That would be the reasonable conclusion, wouldn't it?"
"If you were really trying to make the fact fit the theory—which you are not—it would be a sheer, self-centred eye-shutting to all the greater things that may be involved," she continued. "Don't you ever get beyond that?"
"I did at first. When I learned a few weeks ago that the boomers had taken hold of us in earnest and that we were due to acquire a real town with all the trimmings, I was righteously hot. Apart from the added trouble a wide-open town would be likely to give us in maintaining order in the camp, it seemed so crudely unnecessary to start a pigeon-plucking match at this distance from Wall Street."
"But now," she queried—"now, I suppose, you have become reconciled?"
"I am growing more philosophical, let us say. There are just about so many pigeons to be plucked, anyway; they'd moult if they weren't plucked. And it may as well be done here as on the Stock Exchange, when you come to think of it."
"I like you least when you talk that way," said the young woman in the hammock, with open-eyed frankness. "Do you do it as other men do?—just to hear how it sounds?"
Brouillard, sitting on the top step of the porch, leaned his head against the porch post and laughed.
"You know too much—a lot too much for a person of your tender years," he asserted. "Which names one more of the charming collection of contradictions which your father or mother or somebody had the temerity to label 'Amy,' sweetest and most seraphic of diminutives."
"If you don't like my name—" she began, and then she went off at another tangent. "Please tell me why I am a 'collection of contradictions.' Tig never says anything like that to me."
"'Tig,'" said Brouillard, "'Tig' Smith. Speaking of names, I've often wondered how on earth our breezy friend of the Tri'-Circ' ever got such a handle as that."
"It's his own name—or a part of it. His father was a country preacher back in Tennessee, and I imagine he had the Smith feeling that the surname wasn't very distinctive. So he named the poor boy Tiglath-Pileser. Just the same, it is not to laugh," she went on in friendly loyalty. "Tig can't help his name, and, anyway, he's the vastest possible improvement on those old Assyrian gentlemen who were the first to wear it."
Brouillard's gaze went past the shapely little figure in the string hammock to lose itself in the far Timanyoni distances.
"You are a bundle of surprises," he said, letting the musing thought slip into speech. "What can you possibly know about the Assyrians?"
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."
"I didn't know it. You never tell me anything about yourself."
Again the mood shutter clicked and her smile was the calm mask of discerning wisdom.
"Persons with well-developed egos don't care to listen to folk-stories," she rejoined, evading the tentative invitation openly. "But tell me, what would you do with your pot of rainbow gold—if you should find it?"
Brouillard rose and straightened himself with his arms over his head like an athlete testing his muscles for the record-breaking event.
"What would I do? A number of things. But first of all, I think, I'd buy the privilege of telling some woman that I love her."
This time her laugh was frankly disparaging. "As if you could!" she said, with a lip curl that set his blood afire—"as if any woman worth while would care two pins for your wretched pot of gold!"
"Oh, I didn't mean it quite that way," he hastened to explain. "I said: 'Buy the privilege.' If you knew the conditions you would understand me when I say that the money must come first."
She was silent for so long a time that he looked at his watch and thought of going. But at the deciding instant she held him with a low-spoken question.
"Does it date back to the handicap? You needn't tell me if you don't want to."
"It does. And there is no reason why I shouldn't tell you the simple fact. When my father died he left me a debt—a debt of honor; and it must be paid. Until it is paid—but I am sure you understand."
"Quite fully," she responded quickly, and now there was no trace of levity in the sweetly serious tone. "Is it much?—so much that you can't——"
He nodded and sat down again on the porch step. "Yes, it is big enough to go in a class by itself—in round numbers, a hundred thousand dollars."
"Horrors!" she gasped. "And you are carrying that millstone? Must you carry it?"
"If you knew the circumstances you would be the first to say that I must carry it, and go on carrying it to the end of the chapter."
"But—but you'll never be free!"
"Not on a government salary," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, it takes more than half of the salary to pay the premiums on—pshaw! I'm boring you shamelessly for the sake of proving up on my definition of the eternal ego. You ought not to have encouraged me. It's quite hopeless—the handicap business—unless some good angel should come along with a miracle or two. Let's drop it."
She was looking beyond him and her voice was quick with womanly sympathy when she said: "If you could drop it—but you can't. And it changes everything for you, distorts everything, colors your entire life. It's heart-breaking!"
This was dangerous ground for him and he knew it. Sympathy applied to a rankling wound may figure either as the healing oil or the maddening wine. It was the one thing he had hitherto avoided, resolutely, half-fearfully, as a good general going into battle marches around a kennel of sleeping dogs. But now the under-depths were stirring to a new awakening. In the ardor of young manhood he had taken up the vicarious burden dutifully, and at that time his renunciation of the things that other men strove for seemed the lightest of the many fetterings. But now love for a woman was threatening to make the renunciation too grievous to be borne.
"How did you know?" he queried curiously. "It does change things; it has changed them fiercely in the past few weeks. We smile at the old fable of a man selling his soul for a ready-money consideration, but there are times when I'd sell anything I've got, save one, for a chance at the freedom that other men have—and don't value."
"What is the one thing you wouldn't sell?" she questioned, and Brouillard chose to discover a gently quickened interest in the clear-seeing eyes.
"My love for the—for some woman. I'm saving that, you know. It is the only capital I'll have when the big debt is paid."
"Do you want me to be frivolous or serious?" she asked, looking down at him with the grimacing little smile that always reminded him of a caress. "A little while ago you said 'some woman,' and now you say it again, making it cautiously impersonal. That is nice of you—not to particularize; but I have been wondering whether she is or isn't worth the effort—and the reservation you make. Because it is all in that, you know. You can do and be what you want to do and be if you only want to hard enough."
He looked up quickly.
"Do you really believe that? What about a man's natural limitations?"
"Poof!" she said, blowing the word away as if it were a bit of thistle-down. "It is only the woman's limitations that count, not the man's. The only question is this: Is the one only and incomparable she worth the effort? Would you give a hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of being able to say to her: 'Come, dear, let's go and get married'?"
He was looking down, chiefly because he dared not look up, when he answered soberly: "She is worth it many times over; her price is above rubies. Money, much or little, wouldn't be in it."
"That is better—much better. Now we may go on to the ways and means; they are all in the man, not in the things, 'not none whatsoever,' as Tig would say. Let me show you what I mean. Three times within my recollection my father has been worth considerably more than you owe, and three time she has—well, it's gone. And now he is going to make good again when the railroad comes."
Brouillard got up, thrust his hands into the pockets of his working-coat, and faced about as if he had suddenly remembered that he was wasting the government's time.
"I must be going back down the hill," he said. And then, without warning: "What if I should tell you that the railroad is not coming to the Niquoia, Amy?"
To his utter amazement the blue eyes filled suddenly. But the owner of the eyes was winking the tears away and laughing before he could put the amazement into words.
"You shouldn't hit out like that when one isn't looking; it's wicked," she protested. "Besides, the railroad is coming; it's got to come."
"It is still undecided," he told her mechanically. "Mr. Ford is coming over with the engineers to have a conference on the ground with—with the Cortwright people. I am expecting him any day."
"The Cortwright people want the road, don't they?" she asked.
"Yes, indeed; they are turning heaven and earth over to get it."
"And the government?"
"The department is holding entirely aloof, as it should. Every one in the Reclamation Service knows that no good can possibly come of any effort to force the region ahead of its normal and natural development. And, besides, none of us here in the valley want to help blow the Cortwright bubble any bigger than it has to be."
"Then you will advise against the building of the Extension?"
Instead of answering her question he asked one of his own.
"What does it mean to you—to you, personally, and apart from the money your father might make out of it, Amy?"
She hesitated a moment and then met the shrewd scrutiny of his gaze with open candor.
"The money is only a means to an end—as yours will be. You know very well what I meant when I told you that three times we have been obliged to come back to the mountains to—to try again. I dreaded the coming of your camp; I dread a thousand times more the other changes that are coming—the temptations that a mushroom city will offer. This time father has promised me that when he can make his stake he will go back to Kentucky and settle down; and he will keep his promise. More than that, Stevie has promised me that he will go, too, if he can have a stock-farm and raise fine horses—his one healthy ambition. Now you know it all."
He reached up from the lower step where he was standing and took her hand.
"Yes; and I know more than that: I know that you are a mighty brave little girl and that your load is heavier than mine—worlds heavier. But you're going to win out; if not to-day or to-morrow, why, then, the day after. It's written in the book."
She returned his hand-grip of encouragement impulsively and smiled down upon him through quick-springing tears.
"You'll win out, too, Victor, because it's in you to do it. I'm sure of it—I know it. There is only one thing that scares me."
"Name it," he said. "I'm taking everything that comes to-day—from you."
"You are a strong man; you have a reserve of strength that is greater than most men's full gift; you can cut and slash your way to the thing you really want, and nothing can stop you. But—you'll forgive me for being plain, won't you?—there is a little, just the least little, bit of desperation in the present point of view, and——"
"Say it," he commanded when she hesitated.
"I hardly know how to say it. It's just a little shudder—inside, you know—as you might have when you see a railroad train rushing down the mountain and think what would happen if one single, inconsequent wheel should climb the rail. There were ideals in the beginning; you admitted it, didn't you? And they are not as distinct now as they used to be. You didn't say that, but I know.... Stand them up again, Victor; don't let them fall down in the dust or in the—in the mud. It's got to be clean money, you know; the money that is going to give you the chance to say: 'Come, girl, let's go and get married.' You won't forget that, will you?"
He relinquished the hand of encouragement because he dared not hold it any longer, and turned away to stare absently at the timbered tunnel mouth whence a faint clinking of hammer upon steel issued with monotonous regularity.
"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."