The City of Numbered Days. Lynde Francis
of the seven-year flag-stations. What happened when you were twenty-one – or were you too busy just then chasing the elusive engineering degree to take notice?"
Brouillard was staring out over the loom of the dozen camp-fires – out and across the valley at the massive bulk of Mount Chigringo rising like a huge barrier dark to the sky-line save for a single pin-prick of yellow light fixing the position of a solitary miner's cabin half-way between the valley level and the summit. When he spoke again the hydrographer had been given time to shave another pipe charge of tobacco from his pocket plug and to fill and light the brier.
"When I was twenty-one my father died, and" – he stopped short and then went on in a tone which was more than half apologetic – "I don't mind telling you, Grislow; you're not the kind to pass it on where it would hurt. At twenty-one I was left with a back load that I am carrying to this good day; that I shall probably go on carrying through life."
Grislow walked around the fire, kicked two or three of the charred log ends into the blaze, and growled when the resulting smoke rose up to choke and blind him.
"Forget it, Victor," he said in blunt retraction. "I thought it was merely a little splashing match and I didn't mean to back you out into deep water. I know something about the load business myself; I'm trying to put a couple of kid brothers through college, right now."
"Are you?" said Brouillard half-absently; and then, as one who would not be selfishly indifferent: "That is fine. I wish I were going to have something as substantial as that to show for my wood sawing."
"Won't you?"
"Not in a thousand years, Murray."
"In less than a hundredth part of that time you'll be at the top of the Reclamation-Service pay-roll – won't that help out?"
"No; not appreciably."
Grislow gave it up at that and went back to the original contention.
"We're dodging the main issue," he said. "What is the active principle of your 'sevens' – or haven't you figured it out?"
"Change," was the prompt rejoinder; "always something different – radically different."
"And what started you off into the memory woods, particularly, to-night?"
"A small recurrence of the coincidences. It began with that hopelessly unreliable little clock that Anson persists in carrying around with him wherever he goes. While you were up on the hill cutting your spruce tips Anson pulled out and said he was going to unpack his camp kit. He went over to his tent and lighted up, and a few minutes afterward I heard the clock strike – seven. I looked at my watch and saw that it lacked a few minutes of eight, and the inference was that Anson had set the clock wrong, as he commonly does. Just as I was comfortably forgetting the significant reminder the clock went off again, striking slowly, as if the mechanism were nearly run down."
"Another seven?" queried Grislow, growing interested in spite of a keen desire to lapse into ridicule again.
"No; it struck four. I didn't imagine it, Murray; I counted: one – two – three – four."
"Well?" was the bantering comment. "You couldn't conjure an omen out of that, could you? You say there was a light in the tent – I suppose Anson was there tinkering with his little tin god of a timepiece. It's a habit of his."
"That was the natural inference; but I was curious enough to go and look. When I lifted the flap the tent was empty. The clock was ticking away on Anson's soap-box dressing-case, with a lighted candle beside it, and for a crazy half second I had a shock, Murray – the minute-hand was pointing to four and the hour-hand to seven!"
"Still I don't see the miraculous significance," said the hydrographer.
"Don't you? It was only another of the coincidences, of course. While I stood staring at the clock Anson came in with Griffith's tool kit. 'I've got to tinker her again,' he said. 'She's got so she keeps Pacific time with one hand and Eastern with the other.' Then I understood that he had been tinkering it and had merely gone over to Griffith's tent for the tools."
"Well," said Grislow again, "what of it? The clock struck seven, you say; but it also struck four."
Brouillard's smile tilted his curling mustaches to the sardonic angle.
"The combination was what called the turn, Grizzy. To-day happens to be my twenty-eighth birthday – the end of the fourth cycle of seven."
"By George!" ejaculated the hydrographer in mock perturbation, sitting up so suddenly that he dropped his pipe into the ashes of the fire. "In that case, according to what seems to be the well-established custom, something is due to fall in right now!"
"I have been looking for it all day," returned Brouillard calmly, "which is considerably more ridiculous than anything else I have owned to, you will say. Let it go at that. We'll talk about something real if you'd rather – that auxiliary reservoir supply from the Apache Basin, for example. Were the field-notes in when you left Washington?" And from the abrupt break, the technicalities came to their own again; were still holding the centre of the stage after the groups around the mess fires had melted away into the bunk shelters and tents, and the fires themselves had died down into chastened pools of incandescence edged each with its beach line of silvered ashes.
It was Murray Grislow who finally rang the curtain call on the prolonged shop-talk.
"Say, man! do you know that it is after ten o'clock?" he demanded, holding the face of his watch down to the glow of the dying embers. "You may sit here all night, if you like, but it's me for the blankets and a few lines of 'tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy' – Now, what in the name of a guilty conscience is that?"
As it chanced, they were both facing toward the lower end of the valley when the quotation-breaking apparition flashed into view. In the deepest of the shadows at the mouth of the gorge, where the torrenting Niquoia straightened itself momentarily before entering upon its plunging race through the mountain barrier, a beam of white light flickered unsteadily for a fraction of a second. Then it became a luminous pencil to trace a zigzag line up the winding course of the river, across to the foot-hill spur where the camp of the Reclamation-Service vanguard was pitched, and so on around to the base of Chigringo. For certain other seconds it remained quiescent, glowing balefully like the eye of some fabled monster searching for its prey. Then it was gone.
Grislow's comment took the form of a half-startled exclamation.
"By Jove! wouldn't that give you a fit of the creepies? – this far from civilization and a dynamo?"
"It wasn't an electric," returned Brouillard thoughtfully, apparently taking Grislow's suggestion literally. "It was an acetylene."
"Supposing it was – what's the difference? Aren't we just as far from a carbide shop as we are from the dynamo? What are you calling it?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," was the half-absent reply. Brouillard was still staring fixedly at the distant gulf of blackness where the mysterious light had appeared and disappeared.
"Then I'll make it and go to bed," said the hydrographer, rising and stretching his arms over his head. "If it had come a couple of hours ago we should have called it the 'spot-light,' turned on to mark the end of your fourth act and the beginning, auspicious or otherwise, of the fifth. Maybe it is, anyway; maybe the property-man was asleep or drunk and forgot to turn it on at the spectacular instant. How will that do?"
Brouillard had got upon his feet and was buttoning his many-pocketed shooting-coat.
"It will do to put you into the Balaam saddle-beast class, Grizzy," he said, almost morosely. Then he added: "I'm going to take a little hike down yonder for investigative purposes. Want to come along?"
But the mapper of watersheds was yawning sleepily. "Not on your tintype," he refused. "I'm going to 'cork it orf in me 'ammick.' Wake me up when you come back and tell me what the fifth act is going to do to you. The more I think of it the more I'm convinced that it was the spot-light, a little overdue, after all." And he turned away chuckling.
It was only a short mile from the camp on the inward slopes of the eastern foot-hills to the mouth of the outlet gorge, across which Brouillard could already