II
J. Wesley Croesus
Measured even by the rather exacting standards of the mining and cattlecountry, Brouillard was not what the West calls "jumpy." Four years offield-work, government or other, count for something; and the man whohas proved powder-shy in any stage of his grapple with the Land of ShortNotice is customarily a dead man.
In spite of his training, however, the young chief of construction,making an early morning exploration of the site for the new dam at themouth of the outlet gorge while the rank and file of the pioneer forcewere building the permanent camp half-way between the foot-hills and theriver, winced handsomely when the shock of a distance-muffled explosiontrembled upon the crisp morning air, coming, as it seemed, from somepoint near the lower end of the canyon.
The dull rumble of the explosion and the little start for which it wasaccountable were disconcerting in more ways than one. As an industrycaptain busy with the preliminaries of what promised to be one of thegreatest of the modern salvages of the waste places, Brouillard had beenassuring himself that his work was large enough to fill all hishorizons. But the detonating crash reminded him forcibly that thepresence of the touring party was asserting itself as a disturbingelement and that the incident of its discovery the night before had beendividing time pretty equally with his verification of the locatingengineer's blue-print mappings and field-notes.
This was the first thought, and it was pointedly irritating. But therebound flung him quickly over into the field of the common humanities.The explosion was too heavy to figure as a gun-shot; and, besides, itwas the closed season for game. Therefore, it must have been an accidentof some sort--possibly the blowing up of the automobile. Brouillard hadonce seen the gasolene tank of a motor-car take fire and go up like apyrotechnic set piece in a sham battle.
Between this and a hurried weighting of the sheaf of blue-prints withhis field-glass preparatory to a first-aid dash down the outlet gorge,there was no appreciable interval. But the humane impulse doubled backupon itself tumultuously when he came to his outlook halting place ofthe night before.
There had been no accident. The big touring-car, yellow with the dust ofthe Buckskin, stood intact on the sand flat where it had been backed andturned and headed toward the desert. Wading in the shallows of the riverwith a linen dust robe for a seine, the two younger men of the partywere gathering the choicest of the dead mountain trout with which theeddy was thickly dotted. Coming toward him on the upward trail andclimbing laboriously to gain the easier path among the pines, were thetwo remaining members of the party--an elderly, pudgy, stockily builtman with a gray face, stiff gray mustaches and sandy-gray eyes to match,and the young woman, booted, gauntleted, veiled, and bulked intoshapelessness by her touring coat, and yet triumphing exuberantly overall of these handicaps in an ebullient excess of captivating beauty andattractiveness.
Being a fisherman of mark and a true sportsman, Brouillard had a suddenrush of blood to the anger cells when he realized that the alarm whichhad brought him two hard-breathing miles out of his way had been thedischarge of a stick of dynamite thrown into the Niquoia for thefish-killing purpose. In his code the dynamiting of a stream figured asa high crime. But the two on the trail had come up, and his protest wasforestalled by the elderly man with the gray face and the sandy-grayeyes, whose explosive "Ha!" was as much a measure of his breathlessnessas of his surprise.
"I was just telling Van Bruce that his thundering fish cartridge wouldraise the neighbors," the trail climber went on with a stout man'schuckle. And then: "You're one of the Reclamation engineers? Great workthe government is undertaking here--fine opportunity to demonstrate thelifting power of aggregated capital backed by science and energy and awhole heap of initiative. It's a high honor to be connected with it, andthat's a fact. You _are_ connected with it, aren't you?"
Brouillard's nod was for the man, but his words were for the young womanwhose beauty refused to be quenched by the touring handicaps. "Yes, I amin charge of it," he said.
"Ha!" said the stout man, and this time the exclamation was purelyapprobative. "Chief engineer, eh? That's fine, _fine_! You're young, andyou've climbed pretty fast. But that's the way with you young mennowadays; you begin where we older fellows leave off. I'm glad we metyou. My name is Cortwright--J. Wesley Cortwright, of Chicago. And yoursis----?"
Brouillard named himself in one word. Strangers usually found himbluntly unresponsive to anything like effusiveness, but he was findingit curiously difficult to resist the good-natured heartiness whichseemed to exude from the talkative gentleman, overlaying him like thehoneydew on the leaves in a droughty forest.
If Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's surprise on hearing the Brouillard surnamewas not genuine it was at least an excellent imitation.
"Well, well, well--you don't say! Not of the Brouillards of Knox County,Indiana?--but, of course, you must be. There is only the one family thatI ever heard of, and it is mighty good, old _voyageur_ stock, too,dating 'way back to the Revolutionary War, and further. I've bought hogsof the farmer Brouillards hundreds of times when I was in the packingbusiness, and I want to tell you that no finer animals ever came intothe Chicago market."
"Yes?" said Brouillard, driving the word in edgewise. "I am sorry to saythat I don't know many of the farmers. Our branch of the family settlednear Vincennes, and my father was on the bench, when he wasn't inpolitics."
"What? Not Judge Antoine! Why, my dear young man! Do you know that Ionce had the pleasure of introducing your good father to my bankers inChicago? It was years ago, at a time when he was interested in floatinga bond issue for some growing industry down on the Wabash. And to thinkthat away out here in this howling wilderness, a thousand miles fromnowhere, as you might say, I should meet his son!"
Brouillard laughed and fell headlong into the pit of triteness.
"The world isn't so very big when you come to surround it properly, Mr.Cortwright," he asserted.
"That's a fact; and we're doing our level best nowadays to make and keepit little," buzzed the portly man cheerfully, with a wave of one pudgyarm toward the automobile. "It's about a hundred and twenty miles fromthis to El Gato, on the Grand Canyon, isn't it, Mr. Brouillard? Well, wedid it in five hours yesterday afternoon, and we could have cut an hourout of that if Rickert hadn't mistaken the way across the Buckskin. Notthat it made any special difference. We expected to spend one night outand came prepared."
Brouillard admitted that the touring feat kept even pace with thequickening spirit of the age; but he did not add that the motive for thefeat was not quite so apparent as it might be. This mystery, however,was immediately brushed aside by Mr. Cortwright, speaking in hischaracter of universal ouster of mysteries.
"You are wondering what fool notion chased us away out here in thedesert when we had a comfortable hotel to stop at," he rattled on. "I'lltell you, Mr. Brouillard--in confidence. It was curiosity--raw, countrycuriosity. The papers and magazines have been full of this Buckskinreclamation scheme, and we wanted to see the place where all thewonderful miracles were going to get themselves wrought out. Have yougot time to 'put us next'?"
Brouillard, as the son of the man who had been introduced to the Chicagomoney gods in his hour of need, could scarcely do less than to take thetime. The project, he explained, contemplated the building of a high damacross the upper end of the Niquoia Canyon and the converting of theinland valley above into a great storage reservoir. From this reservoira series of distributing canals would lead the water out upon the aridlands of the Buckskin and the miracle would be a fact accomplished.
"Sure, sure!" said the cheerful querist, feeling in the pockets of theautomobile coat for a cigar. At the match-striking instant he remembereda thing neglected. "By George! you'll have to excuse me, Mr.Brouillard; I'm always forgetting the little social dewdabs. Let mepresent you to my daughter Genevieve. Gene, shake hands with the son ofmy good old friend Judge Antoine Brouillard, of Vincennes."
It was rather awkwardly done, and somehow Brouillard could not hel
pfancying that Mr. Cortwright could have done it better; that the roughlyinformal introduction was only one of the component parts of a studiedbrusquerie which Mr. Cortwright could put on and off at will, like awell-worn working coat. But when the unquenchable beauty stripped hergauntlet and gave him her hand, with a dazzling smile and a word ofacknowledgment which was not borrowed from her father's effusivevocabulary, he straightway fell into another pit of triteness and hissaving first impressions of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's character beganto fade.
"I'm immensely interested," was Miss Cortwright's comment on theoutlining of the reclamation project. "Do you mean to say that realfarms with green things growing on them can be made out of thatfrightful desert we drove over yesterday afternoon?"
Brouillard smiled and plunged fatuously. "Oh, yes; the farms arealready there. Nature made them, you know; she merely forgot to arrangefor their watering." He was going on to tell about the exhaustiveexperiments the Department of Agriculture experts had been making uponthe Buckskin soils when the gentleman whose name had once figured uponcountless thousands of lard packages cut in.
"Do you know what I'm thinking about, Mr. Brouillard? I'm saying it oversoft and slow to myself that no young man in this world ever had such amagnificent fighting chance as you have right here," he averred, thesandy-gray eyes growing suddenly alert and shrewd. "If you don't comeout of this with money enough to buy in all those bonds your father wasplacing that time in Chicago--but of course you will."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean, Mr. Cortwright,"said Brouillard, with some inner monitor warning him that it would bebetter not to understand.
The portly gentleman became suddenly facetious.
"Hear him, Gene," he chuckled, sharing the joke with his daughter; "hesays he doesn't understand!" Then to Brouillard: "Say, young man; youdon't mean to tell me that your father's son needs a guardian, do you?You know exactly where these canals are going to run and all the choicespots they are going to irrigate; what's to prevent your getting inahead of the rush and taking up a dozen or so of those primequarter-sections--homesteads, town sites, and the like? Lack of money?Why, bless your soul, there are plenty of us who would fall all overourselves running to back a proposition like that--any God's quantity ofus who would fairly throw the working capital at you! For that matter, Idon't know but I'd undertake to finance you alone."
Brouillard's first impulse sprang full-grown out of honest anger. Thatany man who had known his father should make such a proposal to thatfather's son was a bald insult to the father's memory. But the calmersecond thought turned wrath into amused tolerance. The costlytouring-car, the idle, time-killing jaunt in the desert, the dynamitingof the river for the sake of taking a few fish--all these were theindices of a point of view limited strictly by a successful market forhog products. Why should he go out of his way to quarrel with it on highmoral grounds?
"You forget that I am first of all the government's hired man, Mr.Cortwright," he demurred. "My job of dam building will be fully bigenough and strenuous enough to keep me busy. Aside from that, I fancythe department heads would take it rather hard if we fellows in thefield went plum picking."
"Let them!" retorted the potential backer of profitable side issues."What's the odds if you go to it and bring back the money? I tell you,Mr. Brouillard, money--bunched money--is what talks. A good, healthybank balance makes so much noise that you can't hear the knockers. Ifthe Washington crowd had your chance--but never mind, that's yourbusiness and none of mine, and you'll take it as it's meant, as agood-natured hint to your father's son. How far is it up to where youare going to build your dam?"
Brouillard gave the distance, and Mr. Cortwright measured the visibletrail grades with a deprecatory eye.
"Do you think my daughter could walk it?" he asked.
Miss Genevieve answered for herself: "Of course I can walk it; can't I,Mr. Brouillard?"
"I'll be glad to show you the way if you care to try," Brouillardoffered; and the tentative invitation was promptly accepted.
The transfer of view-points from the lower end of the canyon to theupper was effected without incident, save at its beginning, when thefather would have called down to the young man who had waded ashore andwas drying himself before the camp-fire. "Van Bruce won't care to go,"the daughter hastened to say; and Brouillard, whose gift it was to beable to pick out and identify the human derelict at long range,understood perfectly well the reason for the young woman's hastyinterruption. One result of the successfully marketed lard packages wasvery plainly evident in the dissipated face and hangdog attitude of themarketer's son.
Conversation flagged, even to the discouragement of a voluble moneyking, on the climb from the Buckskin level to that of the reservoirvalley. The trail was narrow, and Brouillard unconsciously set a pacewhich was almost inhospitable for a stockily built man whose tendencywas toward increasing waist measures. But when they reached thepine-tree of the anchored blue-prints at the upper portal, Mr.Cortwright recovered his breath sufficiently to gasp his appreciation ofthe prospect and its possibilities.
"Why, good goodness, Mr. Brouillard, it's practically all done for you!"he wheezed, taking in the level, mountain-enclosed valley with anappraisive eye-sweep. "Van Bruce and the chauffeur came up here lastnight, with one of the car lamps for a lantern, but of course theycouldn't bring back any idea of the place. What will you do?--build yourdam right here and take out your canal through the canyon? Is that theplan?"
Brouillard nodded and went a little further into details, showing howthe inward-arching barrier would be anchored into the two opposingmountain buttresses.
"And the structure itself--how high is it to be?"
"Two hundred feet above the spillway apron foot."
The lard millionaire twisted his short, fat neck and guessed thedistance up the precipitous slopes of Chigringo and Jack's Mountain.
"That will be a whale of a chunk of masonry," he said. Then, withbusiness-like directness: "What will you build it of?--concrete?"
"Yes; concrete and steel."
"Then you are going to need Portland cement--a whole world of it. Wherewill you get it? And how will you get it here?"
Brouillard smiled inwardly at the pork packer's suddenly awakenedinterest in the technical ways and means. His four years in the deserthad taken him out of touch with a money-making world, and thismomentary contact with one of its successful devotees was illuminating.He had a growing conviction that the sordid atmosphere which appeared tobe as the breath of life to Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright would presentlybegin to make things taste coppery, but the inextinguishable charm ofthe veiled princess was a compensation. It was partly for the sake ofseeing her with the veil abolished that he recovered the paper-weightingfield-glass and gave it to her, showing her how to focus it upon theupper reaches of the valley.
"We are in luck on the cement proposition," he told the eagermoney-maker. "We shall probably manufacture our own supply right here onthe ground. There is plenty of limestone and an excellent shale in thosehills just beyond our camp; and for burning fuel there is a fairly goodvein of bituminous coal underlying that farther range at the head of thevalley."
"H'm," said the millionaire; "a cement plant, eh? There's money in thatanywhere on the face of the globe, just now. And over here, where thereis no transportation--Gad! if you only had somebody to sell cement to,you could ask your own price. The materials have all been tested, Isuppose?"
"Oh, yes; we've had experts in here for more than a year. The materialis all right."
"And your labor?"
"On the dam, you mean? One advantage of concrete work is that it doesnot require any great proportion of skilled labor, the crushing, mixing,and placing all being done by machinery. We shall work all the Indianswe can get from the Navajo Reservation, forty-odd miles south of here;for the remainder we shall import men from the States, bringing them inover the Timanyoni High Line--the trail from Quesado on the Red ButteWestern. At least, that is what we shall do for the present.
Later on,the railroad will probably build an extension up the Barking Dog andover War Arrow Pass."
Mr. Cortwright's calculating eye roved once more over the attractiveprospect.
"Fuel for your power plant?--wood I take it?" he surmised; and then:"Oh, I forgot; you say you have coal."
"Yes; there is coal, of a sort; good enough for the cement kilns. But wesha'n't burn it for power. Neither shall we burn the timber, which canbe put to much better use in building and in false- and form-work. Thereare no finer lumber forests this side of the Sierras. For power weshall utilize the river. There is another small canyon at the head ofthe valley where a temporary dam can be built which will deliver powerenough to run anything--an entire manufacturing city, if we had one."
Mr. Cortwright made a clucking noise with his tongue and blew his cheeksout like a swimmer gasping for breath.
"Julius Caesar!" he exploded. "You stand there and tell me calmly thatthe government has all these resources coopered up here in abarrel?--that nobody is going to get a chance to make any money out ofthem? It's a crime, Mr. Brouillard; that's just what it is--a crime!"
"No; I didn't say that. The resources just happen to be here and weshall turn them to good account. But if there were any feasibletransportation facilities I doubt if we should make use of these nativeraw materials. It is the policy of the department to go into the marketlike any other buyer where it can. But here there are no sellers, or,rather, no way in which the sellers can reach us."
"No sellers and no chance for a man to get the thin edge of a wedge inanywhere," lamented the money-maker despairingly. Then his eye lightedupon the graybeard dump of a solitary mine high up on the face of MountChigringo. "What's that up there?" he demanded.
"It is a mine," said Brouillard, showing Miss Cortwright how to adjustthe field-glass for the shorter distance. "Two men named Massingale,father and son, are working it, I'm told." And then again to MissGenevieve: "That is their cabin--on the trail a little to the right ofthe tunnel opening."
"I see it quite plainly," she returned. "Two people are just leaving itto ride down the path--a man and a woman, I think, though the woman--ifit is a woman--is riding on a man's saddle."
Brouillard's eyebrows went up in a little arch of surprise. Harding, thetopographical engineer who had made all the preliminary surveys and hadspent the better part of the former summer in the Niquoia, had reportedon the Massingales, father and son, and his report had conveyed a hintof possible antagonism on the part of the mine owners to the governmentproject. But there had been no mention of a woman.
"The Massingale mine, eh?" broke in the appraiser of values crisply."They showed us some ore specimens from that property while we werestopping over in Red Butte. It's rich--good and plenty rich--if theyhave the quantity. And somebody told me they had the quantity, too; onlyit was too far from the railroad--couldn't jack-freight it profitablyover the Timanyonis."
"In which case it is one of many," Brouillard said, taking refuge in thegeneralities.
But Mr. Cortwright was not to be so easily diverted from the pointedparticulars--the particulars having to do with the pursuit of the markettrail.
"I'm beginning to get my feet on bottom, Brouillard," he said, droppingthe courtesy prefix and shoving his fat hands deep into the pockets ofthe dust-coat. "There's a business proposition here, and it looks mightygood to me. That was a mere nursery notion I gave you a whileback--about picking up homesteads and town sites in the Buckskin. Thebig thing is right here. I tell you, I can smell money in this valley ofyours--scads of it."
Brouillard laughed. "It is only the fragrance of futureReclamation-Service appropriations," he suggested. "There will be a goodbit of money spent here before the Buckskin Desert gets its maidenwetting."
"I don't mean that at all," was the impatient rejoinder. "Let me showyou: you are going to have a population of some sort, if it's only thepopulation that your big job will bring here. That's the basis. Thenyou're going to need material by the train load, not the raw stuff,which you say is right here on the ground, but the manufacturedarticle--cement, lumber, and steel. You can ship this material in overthe range at prices that will be pretty nearly prohibitory, or, as yousuggest, it can be manufactured right here on the spot."
"The cement and the lumber can be produced here, but not the steel,"Brouillard corrected.
"That's where you're off," snapped the millionaire. "There are fine orebeds in the Hophras and a pretty good quality of coking coal. Ten ortwelve miles of a narrow-gauge railroad would dump the pig metal intothe upper end of your valley, and there you are. With a small reductionplant you could tell the big steel people to go hang."
Brouillard admitted the postulate without prejudice to a keen andgrowing wonder. How did it happen that this Chicago money king had takenthe trouble to inform himself so accurately in regard to the naturalresources of the Niquoia region? Had he not expressly declared that theobject of the desert automobile trip was mere tourist curiosity? Givena little time, the engineer would have cornered the inquiry, making ityield some sort of a reasonable answer; but Mr. Cortwright was gallopingon again.
"There you are, then, with the three prime requisites in raw material:cement stock, timber, and pig metal. Fuel you've got, you say, and if itisn't good enough, your dummy railroad can supply you from the Hophramines. Best of all, you've got power to burn--and that's the key to anymanufacturing proposition. Well and good. Now, you know, and I know,that the government doesn't care to go into the manufacturing businesswhen it can help it. Isn't that so?"
"Unquestionably. But this is a case of can't-help-it," Brouillardargued. "You couldn't begin to interest private capital in any of theseindustries you speak of."
"Why not?" was the curt demand.
"Because of their impermanence--their dependence upon a market whichwill quit definitely when the dam is completed. What you are suggestingpredicates a good, busy little city in this valley, behind thedam--since there is no other feasible place for it--and it would bestrictly a city of numbered days. When the dam is completed and thespillway gates are closed, the Niqoyastcadje and everything in it willgo down under two hundred feet of water."
"The--what?" queried Miss Cortwright, lowering the glass with which shehad been following the progress of the two riders down the Buckskintrail from the high-pitched mine on Chigringo.
"The Niqoyastcadje--'Place-where-they-came-up,'" said Brouillard,elucidating for her. "That is the Navajo name for this valley. TheIndians have a legend that this is the spot where their tribal ancestorscame up from the underworld. Our map makers shortened it to 'Niquoia'and the cow-men of the Buckskin foot-hills have cut that to'Nick-wire.'"
This bit of explanatory place lore was entirely lost upon Mr. J. WesleyCortwright. He was chewing the ends of his short mustaches and scowlingthoughtfully out upon the possible site of the future industrial city ofthe plain.
"Say, Brouillard," he cut in, "you get me the right to build that powerdam, and give me the contracts for what material you'd rather buy thanmake, and I'll be switched if I don't take a shot at this drowningproposition myself. I tell you, it looks pretty good to me. What do yousay?"
"I'll say what I said a few minutes ago," laughed the young chief ofconstruction--"that I'm only a hired man. You'll have to go a good fewrounds higher up on the authority ladder to close a deal like that. I'mnot sure it wouldn't require an act of Congress."
"Well, by George, we might get even that if we have to," was theoptimistic assertion. "You think about it."
"I guess it isn't my think," said Brouillard, still inclined to take theretired pork packer's suggestion as the mere ravings of a money-madpromoter. "As the government engineer in charge of this work, I couldn'tafford to be identified even as a friendly intermediary in any suchscheme as the one you are proposing."
"Of course, I suppose not," agreed the would-be promoter, sucking hisunder lip in a way ominously familiar to his antagonists in the wheatpit. Then he glanced at his watch and changed the subject abruptly.
"We'll have to be straggling back to the chug-wagon. Much obliged toyou, Mr. Brouillard. Will you come down and see us off?"
Brouillard said "yes," for Miss Cortwright's sake, and took thefield-glass she was returning to put it back upon the sheaf ofblue-prints. She saw what he did with it and made instantacknowledgments.
"It was good of you to neglect your work for us," she said, smilinglevel-eyed at him when he straightened up.
He was frank enough to tell the truth--or part of it.
"It was the dynamite that called me off. Doesn't your brother know thatit is illegal to shoot a trout stream?"
She waited until her father was out of ear-shot on the gorge trailbefore she answered:
"He ought to know that it is caddish and unsportsmanlike. I didn't knowwhat he and Rickert were doing or I should have stopped them."
"In that event we shouldn't have met, and you would have missed yourchance of seeing the Niqoyastcadje and the site of the city that isn'tto be--the city of numbered days," he jested, adding, less lightly: "Youwouldn't have missed very much."
"No?" she countered with a bright return of the alluring smile which hehad first seen through the filmy gauze of the automobile veil. "Do youwant me to say that I should have missed a great deal? You may considerit said if you wish."
He made no reply to the bit of persiflage, and a little later felt theinward warmth of an upflash of resentment directed not at his companionbut at himself for having been momentarily tempted to take thepersiflage seriously. The temptation was another of the consequences ofthe four years of isolation which had cut him off from the world ofwomen no less completely than from the world of money-getting. But itwas rather humiliating, none the less.
"What have I done to make you forget how to talk?" she wished to know,five minutes further on, when his silence was promising to outlast thecanyon passage.
"You? Nothing at all," he hastened to say. Then he took the first stepin the fatal road of attempting to account for himself. "But I haveforgotten, just the same. It has been years since I have had a chance totalk to a woman. Do you wonder that I have lost the knack?"
"How dreadful!" she laughed. And afterward, with a return to thehalf-serious mood which had threatened to reopen the door so latelyslammed in the face of temptation: "Perhaps we shall come back toNiqo--Niqoy--I simply _can't_ say it without sneezing--and then youmight relearn some of the things you have forgotten. Wouldn't that bedelightful?"
This time he chose to ignore utterly the voice of the inward monitor,which was assuring him coldly that young women of Miss Cortwright'sworld plane were constrained by the accepted rules of their kind to playthe game in season and out of season, and his half-laughing reply was atonce a defiance and a counter-challenge.
"I dare you to come!" he said brazenly. "Haven't you heard how the menof the desert camps kill each other for the chance to pick up a lady'shandkerchief?"
They were at the final descent in the trail, with the Buckskinblanknesses showing hotly beyond the curtaining of pines, and there wasspace only for a flash of the beautiful eyes and a beckoning word.
"In that case, I hope you know how to shoot straight, Mr. Brouillard,"she said quizzically; and then they passed at a step from romance to thecrude realities.
The realities were basing themselves upon the advent of two new-comers,riding down the Chigringo trail to the ford which had been the scene ofthe fish slaughtering; a sunburnt young man in goatskin "shaps," flannelshirt and a flapping Stetson, and a girl whose face reminded Brouillardof one of the Madonnas, whose name and painter he strove vainly torecall. Ten seconds farther along the horses of the pair were sniffingsuspiciously at the automobile, and the young man under the flapping hatwas telling Van Bruce Cortwright what he thought of cartridge fishermenin general, and of this present cartridge fisherman in particular.
"Which the same, being translated into Buckskin English, hollers likethis," he concluded. "Don't you tote any more fish ca'tridges into thishere rese'vation; not no more, whatsoever. Who says so? Well, if anybodyshould ask, you might say it was Tig Smith, foreman o' the Tri'-Circ'outfit. No, I ain't no game warden, but what I say goes as she lays._Savez?_"
The chauffeur was adjusting something under the upturned bonnet of thetouring-car and thus hiding his grin. Mr. Cortwright, who had maintainedhis lead on the descent to the desert level, was trying to come betweenhis sullen-faced son and the irate cattleman, money in hand. Brouillardwalked his companion down to the car and helped her to a seat in thetonneau. She repaid him with a nod and a smile, and when he saw that thecrudities were not troubling her he stepped aside and unconsciously fellto comparing the two--the girl on horseback and his walking mate of thecanyon passage.
They had little enough in common, apart from their descent from Eve, hedecided--and the decision itself was subconscious. The millionaire'sdaughter was a warm blonde, beautiful, queenly, a finished product ofcivilization and high-priced culture; a woman of the world, standing buta single remove from the generation of quick money-getting and yet ableto make the money take its proper place as a means to an end.
And the girl on horseback? Brouillard had to look twice before he couldattempt to classify her, and even then she baffled him. A rather slightfigure, suggestive of the flexible strength of a silken cord; a facewinsome rather than beautiful; coils and masses of copper-brown hairescaping under the jaunty cow-boy hat; eyes ... it was her eyes thatmade Brouillard look the third time: they were blue, with a hint ofviolet in them; he made sure of this when she turned her head and methis gaze fearlessly and with a certain calm serenity that made him feelsuddenly uncomfortable and half embarrassed. Nevertheless, he would notlook aside; and he caught himself wondering if her cow-boy lover--he hadalready jumped to the sentimental conclusion--had ever been able to lookinto those steadfast eyes and trifle with the truth.
So far the young chief of construction had travelled on the roadreflective while the fish-slaughtering matter was getting itselfthreshed out at the river's edge. When it was finally settled--not bythe tender of money that Mr. Cortwright had made--the man Smith and hispretty riding mate galloped through the ford and disappeared among thebarren hills, and the chauffeur was at liberty to start the motor.
"_Au revoir_, Mr. Brouillard," said the princess, as the big car righteditself for the southward flight into the desert. Then, when the wheelsbegan to churn in the loose sand of the halting place, she leaned out togive him a woman's leave-taking. "If I were you I shouldn't fall in lovewith the calm-eyed goddess who rides like a man. Mr. Tri'-Circ' Smithmight object, you know; and you haven't yet told me whether or not youcan shoot straight."
There was something almost heart-warming in the bit of parting badinage;something to make the young engineer feel figuratively for the knifewith which he had resolutely cut around himself to the dividing of allhindrances, sentimental or other, on a certain wretched day years beforewhen he had shouldered his life back-load.
Brouillard had to look twice before he could attempt toclassify her, and even then she baffled him.]
But the warmth might have given place to a disconcerting chill if hecould have heard Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright's remark to his seatcompanion, made when the canyon portal of the Niquoia and the manclimbing the path beside it were hazy mirage distortions in the backwarddistances.
"He isn't going to be the dead easy mark I hoped to find in the son ofthe old bankrupt hair-splitter, Genie, girl. But he'll come down andhook himself all right if the bait is well covered with his particularbrand of sugar. Don't you forget it."
The City of Numbered Days Page 2
