The City of Numbered Days

of P

apitalist'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

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 equipm

ulous 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 migh

f 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 nati

mall power dam in the upper canyon had been begun that the young chief of construction, busy with a th

e 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

ief's angry comment when he had given Grislow the letter to read. "Without knowing any more of the details than tha

s went up in doub

an?" he queried mildly. "I d

e had not taken the trouble to define, even to himself, he had carefully refrained from telling the hydrographer anything about the early mor

pping table. "It was his motor party that was camping at the Buckskin f

told me you merely went down a

night. But the

r's smile was a

id that one of the motor

nted the implic

en his eyes. "The young woman was the daughter. There was a cub of a son, and he fired a stick of dynamite in

uite as naturally, you went down to see. I'm n

dn'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 chan

he is going to ma

etter from Washington. "That scheme is going to change the whole face of

t will relieve us of a lot of side-issue industries-c

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.

nail. "Curious that this particular fly should drop into yo

d ragefully. "Are you never going to

that night that the seven-year characteristic was change; and you're a changed man, V

, d

'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

to prove that his sense of

ace. 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 s

ow no

It will be 'Place-where-they-go-down' if th

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 tha

"You've been having a séance with Steve

ou?" Brouillard dem

the other room when Massingale was here, and the door was open. He said

brittle admission.

ve up a paper packet folded like a medicine powder. The paper contai

. "Gold-placer gold!" he exclaimed, and Brouillard nodded an

Massingale opposition to the building of the dam. There was nothing in it. The opposition was purel

daughter fairly well by this time and, in common with every other man on the

oreman, tells me that Steve was on the war-path; he told Harding when he left, last

he hydrographer's definitive comment; and Brouillard went bac

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

g that ever happened for our job here. If it did nothing else, it would make us inde

im-that I could neither accept stock in his mine nor say anything to influence the railroad people; that my posit

ow's smile

shington and Griffith and the rest of us and maki

leave to say things like that about Amy Massingale. She is too good and sweet and clean

saying that I'm one of the fools.

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

ow no

bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, and you have

"Comparatively rich, you say?-and you w

that the bar wasn't any such bonanza as that first result would indicate. I proved that, too, by washing

arger aspect of the fact launch

we-we're planning to drown it u

d's laugh

or 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 pos

w, with all the variations! Every white man in the camp would chuc

shrewd enough, when he is sober. He had me dead to rights, and he knew it. 'You don't want an

he small collection of grain gold and nuggets. In the midst of the eager examination he looked up suddenly to

an.' 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

great and growing respect for Mr. Stephen Massingale. This field is too small for him; altogether too s

mmon consent after we left the bar in the Quadjenà? 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 t

was pretty d

nkly in favor of it. Irrigation in the Buckskin means population; and population will bring the railroad, sooner or later. In t

the end of his penh

ed at length. "We can't stand for any more chaos th

e office window before he said: "What wou

ker put up his hands a

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'