The City of Numbered Days

"Go on," said Brouillard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engineer nodded and Massingale went on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, no; not exactly. Ten thousand dollars of what they called a 'contingent fund' was put in my name; but the treasurer handled most of it – nachurly, we bein' a stock company."

"Who is your treasurer?"

"Feller with just one share o' stock – Parker Jackson."

"Humph! Cortwright's private secretary. And he has spent ninety thousand dollars on the 'Little Susan' in sixty days? Not much! What has your pay-roll been?"

"'Bout five hundred a week."

"That is to say between three and four thousand dollars for the two months – call it five thousand. Now, let's see – " Brouillard took out his pencil and began to make figures on the back of the menu card. He knew the equipment of the "Little Susan," and his specialty was the making of estimates. Hence he was able to say, after a minute or two of figuring:

"Thirty thousand dollars will amply cover your new equipment: power drills, electric transfers, and the cheap telpherage plant. Have you ever seen any vouchers for the money spent?"

"No. Had I ort to?"

"Well, rather – as president of the company."

Massingale tucked the long white beard still farther into the buttoned coat. "I been tellin' you I need a mule-driver to knock a little sense into me," he offered.

"It's a bad business any way you attack it," said Brouillard after a reflective pause. "What you have really got for yourself out of the deal is the ten-thousand-dollar deposit to your personal account, and nothing more; and they'll probably try to make you a debtor for that. Taking that amount and a fair estimate of the company's expenditures to date – say thirty-five thousand in round numbers, which is fairly chargeable to the company's assets as a whole – they still owe you about fifty-five thousand of the original hundred thousand they were to put in. If there were time – but you say this is the last day?"

"The last half o' the last day," Massingale amended.

"I was going to say, if there were time, this thing wouldn't stand the light of day for a minute, Mr. Massingale. They wouldn't go within a hundred miles of a court of law with it. Can't you get an extension on the notes? – but of course you can't; that is just the one thing Cortwright doesn't want you to have – more time."

"No; you bet he don't."

"That being the case, there is no help for it; you'll have to take your medicine and pay the notes. Do that, take an iron-clad receipt from the bank – I'll write it out for you – and get the stock released. After that, we'll give them a whirl for the thirty-three and a third per cent they have practically stolen from you."

The old man's face, remindful now of his daughter's, was a picture of dismayed incertitude.

"I reckon you're forgettin' that I hain't got money enough to lift one edge o' them notes," he said gently.

Brouillard had found a piece of blank paper in his pocket and was rapidly writing the "iron-clad" receipt.

"No, I hadn't forgotten. I have something over a hundred thousand dollars lying idle in the bank. You'll take it and pay the notes."

It was a bolt out of a clear sky for the old man tottering on the brink of his fourth pit of disaster, and he evinced his emotion – and the tense strain of keyed-up nerves – by dropping his lifted coffee-cup with a crash into his plate. The little accident was helpful in its way, – it made a diversion, – and by the time the wreck was repaired speech was possible.

"Are you – are you plumb sure you can spare it?" asked the debtor huskily. And then: "I cayn't seem to sort o' surround it – all in a bunch, that way. I knowed J. Wesley had me down; knowed it in less 'n a week after he sprung his trap. He wanted the 'Little Sue,' wanted it worse 'n a little yaller dog ever wanted his supper. Do you know why? I can tell you. After you get your dam done, and every dollar of the make-believe money this cussed town's built on has gone to the bottom o' the Dead Sea, the 'Susan' will still be joggin' along, forty dollars to the ton. It's the only piece o' real money in this whole blamed free-for-all, and J. Wes. knows it."

Brouillard looked at his watch. "When you're through we'll go around to the bank and fix it up. There's no hurry. I've got to ride down to the Buckskin camps, but I don't care to start much before two."

Massingale nodded, but his appetite was gone, and speech with it, the one grateful outburst having apparently drained the well. But after they had made their way through the excited sidewalk exchanges to the bank, and Brouillard had written his check, the old man suddenly found his voice again.

"You say you're goin' down to the Buckskin right away? How 'm I goin' to secure you for this?"

"We can talk about that later on, after I come back. The thing to do now is to get those notes cancelled and that stock released before bank-closing time."

Still David Massingale, with the miraculously sent bit of rescue paper in his hand, hesitated.

"There's one other thing – and I've got to spit it out before it's everlastedly too late. See here, Victor Brouillard – Amy likes you – thinks a heap of you; a plumb blind man could see that. But say, that little girl o' mine has just natchurly got to have a free hand when it comes to pairin' up, and she won't never have if she finds out about this. You ain't allowin' to use it on her, Victor?"

Brouillard laughed.

"I'll make a hedging bet and break even with you, Mr. Massingale," he said. "That check is drawn to my order, and I have indorsed it. Let me have it again and I'll get the cash for you. In that way only the two of us need know anything about the transaction; and if I promise to keep the secret from Miss Amy, you must promise to keep it from Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright. Will you saw it off with me that way? – until you've made the turn on the ore sales?"

David Massingale shook hands on it with more gratitude, colored this time with a hearty imprecation. "Dad burn you, Victor Brouillard, you're a man – ever' single mill-run of you!" he burst out. But Brouillard shook his head gravely.

"No, Mr. Massingale, I'm the little yellow dog you mentioned a while back," he asserted, and then he went to get the money.

The check cashed and the transfer of the money made, Brouillard did not wait to see Massingale astonish the Niquoia National cashier. Nor did he remark the curious change that came into the old man's face at the pocketing of the thick sheaf of bank-notes. But he added a word of comment and another of advice before leaving the bank.

"The day fits us like a glove," was the comment. "With all the money that is changing hands in the street, Hardwick won't wonder at your sudden raise or at my check." Then he put in the word of warning: "I suppose you'll be dabbling a little in Mirapolis options after you get this note business out of the way? It's all right – I'd probably do it myself if I didn't have to leave town. But just one word in your ear, Mr. Massingale: buy and sell – don't hold. That's all. Good-by, and good luck to you."

Left alone in the small retiring room of the bank where the business had been transacted, David Massingale took the sheaf of bank-notes from his pocket with trembling hands, fondling it as a miser might. The bills were in large denominations, and they were new and stiff. He thumbed the end of the thick packet as one runs the leaves of a book, and the flying succession of big figures seemed to dazzle him. There was an outer door to the customers' room giving upon the side street; it was the one through which Brouillard had passed. Twice the old man made as if he would turn toward the door of egress, and the light in his gray-blue eyes was the rekindling flame of a passion long denied. But in the end he thrust the tempting sheaf back into the inner pocket and went resolutely to the cashier's counter window.

Expecting to have to do with Hardwick, the brusque and business-like cashier, Massingale was jarred a little aside from his own predetermined attitude by finding Schermerhorn, the president, sitting at the cashier's desk. But from the banker's first word the change seemed to be altogether for the better.

"How are you, Mr. Massingale? Glad to see you. How is the boy getting along? First rate, I hope?"

Massingale was looking from side to side, like a gray old hawk disappointed in its swoop. It would have been some satisfaction to buffet the exacting Hardwick with the fistful of money. But with Schermerhorn the note lifting would figure as a mere bit of routine.

"I've come to take up them notes o' mine with John Wes.'s name on 'em," Massingale began, pulling out the thick sheaf of redemption money.

"Oh, yes; let me see; are they due to-day?" said the president, running over the note portfolio.

Massingale nodded.

"H'm, yes, here they are. Brought the cash, did you? The 'Little Susan' has begun to pan out, has it? I didn't know you had commenced shipping ore yet."

"We haven't." David Massingale made the admission and regretted it in one and the same breath.

"You've borrowed to meet these notes?" queried the president, looking up quickly. "That won't do, Mr. Massingale; that won't do at all. We can't afford to lose an old customer that way. What's the matter with our money? Doesn't it look good to you any more?"

Massingale stammered out something about Cashier Hardwick's peremptory demand of a few hours earlier, but he was not permitted to finish.

"Of course, that is all right from Hardwick's point of view. He was merely looking out for the maturing paper. How much more time will you need to enable you to get returns from your shipments? Sixty days? All right, you needn't make out new notes; I'll indorse the extension on the back of these, and I'll undertake to get Cortwright's approval myself. No; not a word, Mr. Massingale. As long as you're borrowing, you must be loyal and borrow of us. Good afternoon. Come again when we can help you out."

David Massingale turned away, dazed and confused beyond the power of speech. When the mists of astoundment cleared he found himself in the street with the thick wad of bank-notes still in his pocket. Suddenly, out of the limbo into which two years of laborious discipline and self-denial had pushed it stalked the demon of the ruling passion, mighty, overpowering, unconquerable. The familiar street sights danced before Massingale's eyes, and there was a drumming in his ears like the fall of many waters. But above the clamor rose the insistent voice of the tempter, and the voice was at once a command and an entreaty, a gnawing hunger and a parching thirst.

"By Gash! I'd like to try that old system o' mine jest one more time!" he muttered. "All it takes is money enough to foller it up and stay. And I've got the money. Besides, didn't Brouillard say I was to get an extension if I could?"

He grabbed at his coat to be sure that the packet was still there, took two steps toward the bank, stopped, turned as if in the grasp of an invisible but irresistible captor, and moved away, like a man walking in his sleep, toward the lower Avenue.

It was the doorway of Haley's Place, the Monte Carlo of the Niquoia, that finally halted him. Here the struggle was so fierce that the bartender, who knew him, named it sickness and led the stricken one to a card-table in the public bar-room and fetched him a drink. A single swallow of whiskey turned the scale. Massingale rose, tossed a coin to the bar, and passed quickly to the rear, where a pair of baize doors opened silently and engulfed him.

XIV

The Abyss

It was at early candle-lighting in the evening of the day of renewed and unbridled speculation in Mirapolis "front feet" that Brouillard, riding the piebald range pony on which he had been making an inspection round of the nearer Buckskin ditchers' camps, topped the hill in the new, high-pitched road over the Chigringo shoulder and looked down upon the valley electrics.

The immediate return to Mirapolis was no part of the plan he had struck out when he had closed his office in the Niquoia Building at one o'clock and had gone over to Bongras's to fall into the chance encounter with David Massingale. He had intended making a complete round of all the ditch camps, a ride which would have taken at least three days, and after parting from Massingale at the bank he had left town at once, taking the new road which began on the bench of the railroad yard. But almost immediately a singular thing had happened. Before he had gone a mile a strange reluctance had begun to beset him.

At first it was merely a haunting feeling of loss, as if he had left something behind, forgetting when he should have remembered; a thing of sufficient importance to make him turn and ride back if he could only recall what it was. Farther along the feeling became a vague premonition of impending disaster, growing with every added mile of the Buckskin gallopings until, at Overton's Camp, a few miles short of the Triangle-Circle Ranch headquarters, he had yielded and had set out for the return.

If the curious premonition had been a drag on the outward journey it became a spur to quicken the eastward faring. Even the piebald pony seemed to share the urgency, needing only a loose rein and an encouraging word. Across the yellow sands of the desert, through the lower ford of the Niquoia, and up the outlet gorge the willing little horse tossed the miles to the rear, and at the hill-topping moment, when the electric lights spread themselves in the valley foreground like stars set to illuminate the chess-board squares of the Wonder City, a record gallop had been made from Overton's.

Brouillard let the pony set its own pace on the down-hill lap to the finish, and it was fast enough to have jolted fresh road weariness into a less seasoned rider than the young engineer. Most curiously, the premonition with its nagging urgency seemed to vanish completely as soon as the city's streets were under hoof. Brouillard left the horse at the reservation stables, freshened himself at his rooms in the Niquoia Building, and went to the Metropole to eat his dinner, all without any recurrence of the singular symptoms. Further, when he found himself at a table with Murray Grislow as his vis-à-vis, and had invented a plausible excuse for his sudden return, he was able to enjoy his dinner with a healthy wayfarer's appetite and to talk over the events of the exciting day with the hydrographer with few or none of the abstracted mental digressions.

Afterward, however, the symptoms returned, manifesting themselves this time in the form of a vague and undefined restlessness. The buzzing throngs in the Metropole café and lobby annoyed him, and even Grislow's quiet sarcasm as applied to the day's bubble-blowing failed to clear the air. At the club there was the same atmosphere of unrest; an exacerbating overcharge of the suppressed activities impatiently waiting for another day of excitement and opportunity. Corner lots and the astounding prices they had commanded filled the air in the lounge, the billiard room, and the buffet, and after a few minutes Brouillard turned his back on the hubbub and sought the quiet of the darkened building on the opposite side of the street.

He was alone in his office on the sixth floor and was trying, half absently, to submerge himself in a sea of desk-work when the disturbing over-thought suddenly climaxed in an occurrence bordering on the supernatural. As distinctly as if she were present and at his elbow, he heard, or seemed to hear, Amy Massingale say: "Victor, you said you would come if I needed you: I need you now." Without a moment's hesitation he got up and made ready to go out. Skeptical to the derisive degree of other men's superstitions, it did not occur to him to doubt the reality of the mysterious summons, or to question in any way his own broad admission of the supernatural in the prompt obedience.

The Massingale town house was one of a row of stuccoed villas fronting on the main residence street, which beyond the city limits became the highroad to the Quadjenàï bend and the upper valley. Brouillard took a cab at the Metropole, dismissed it at the villa gate, and walked briskly up the path to the house, which was dark save for one lighted room on the second floor – the room in which Stephen Massingale was recovering from the effects of Van Bruce Cortwright's pistol-shot.

Amy Massingale was on the porch – waiting for him, as he fully believed until her greeting sufficiently proved her surprise at seeing him.

"You, Victor?" she said, coming quickly to meet him. "Murray Grislow said you had gone down to the Buckskin camps and wouldn't be back for two or three days!"

"Grizzy told the truth – as it stood a few hours ago," he admitted. "But I changed my mind and came back. How is Steve this evening?"

"He is quite comfortable, more comfortable than he has been at all since the wound began to heal. I have been reading him to sleep, and when the night nurse came I ran down to get a breath of fresh air in the open."

"No, you didn't come down for that reason," Brouillard amended gravely. "You came to meet me."

"Did I?" she asked. "What makes you think that?"

"I don't think; I know. You called me, and I heard you and came at once."

"How absurd!" she protested. "I knew, or thought I knew, that you were miles away, over in the Buckskin; and how could I call you?"

Brouillard pulled out his watch and scanned its face by the light of the roadway electric.

"It is exactly twenty minutes since I left my office. What were you doing twenty minutes ago?"

"As if I could tell! I don't believe I have looked at a clock or a watch all evening. After Stevie had his supper I read to him – one of the creepy Kipling stories that he is so fond of. You would say that 'Bimi' would be just about the last thing in the world to put anybody to sleep, wouldn't you? But Stevie dropped off, and I think I must have lost myself for a minute or two, because the next thing I knew the nurse was in the room."

"I know what happened," said Brouillard, speaking as soberly as if he were stating a mathematical certainty. "You left that room up-stairs and came to me. I didn't see you, but I heard you as plainly as I can hear you now. You spoke to me and called me by name."

"What did I say? Can you remember the words?"

"Indeed I can. The room was perfectly still, and I was working at my desk. Suddenly, and without any warning, I heard your voice saying: 'Victor, you said you would come if I needed you: I need you now.'"

She shook her head, laughing lightly.

"You have been overwrought about something, or maybe you are just plain tired. I didn't say or even think anything like that; or if I did, it must have been the other I, or one of the others, that Herr Freiborg writes about – and I don't believe in. This I that you are talking to doesn't remember anything about it."

"You are standing me off," he declared. "You are in trouble of some sort, and you are trying to hide it from me."

"No, not exactly trouble; only a little worry."

"All right, call it worry if you like and share it with me. What is it?"

"I think you know without being told – or you will know when I say that to-day was the day when the big debt to the bank became due. I am afraid we have finally lost the 'Little Susan.' That is one of the worries and the other I've been trying to call silly. I don't know what has become of father – as if he weren't old enough to go and come without telling me every move he makes!"

"Your father isn't at home?" gasped Brouillard.

"No; he hasn't been here since nine o'clock this morning. Murray Grislow saw him going into the Metropole about one o'clock, but nobody that I have been able to reach by 'phone seems to have seen him after that."

"I can bring the record down to two o'clock," was the quick reply. "He ate with me at Bongras's, and afterward I walked with him as far as the bank. And I can cure part of the first worry – all of it, in fact; he had the money to take up the Cortwright notes, and when I left him he was on his way to Hardwick's window to do it."

"He had the money? Where did he get it?"