XV
The Setting of the Ebb
Contrary to the most sanguine expectations of the speculators—contrary, perhaps, even to those of Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright—the upward surge in Mirapolis values, following the visit of the "distinguished citizens," proved to be more than a tidal wave: it was a series of them.
The time was fully ripe for the breaking down of the final barriers of prudence and common-place sanity. Day after day the "curb" markets were reopened, with prices mounting skyward; and when the news of how fortunes could be made in a day in the Miracle City of the Niquoia got abroad in the press despatches there was a fresh influx of mad money hunters from the East, and the merry game of buying and selling that which, inferentially at least, had no legal existence, went on with ever-increasing activity and an utterly reckless disregard of values considered as a basis for future returns on the investment.
Now, if never before, the croaker was wrathfully shouted down and silenced. No one admitted, or seemed to admit, the possible impermanence of the city. So far from it, the boast was made openly that Mirapolis had fairly out-stripped the Reclamation Service in the race for supremacy, and that among the first acts passed by Congress on its reassembling would be one definitely annulling the Buckskin Desert project, or, at any rate, so much of it as might be threatening the existence of the great gold camp in the Niquoia Valley.
To the observer, anxious or casual, there appeared to be reasonable grounds for the optimistic assertion. It was an indubitable fact that Brouillard's force had been cut down, first to one half, and later to barely enough men to keep the crushers and mixers moving and to add fresh layers of concrete to the huge wall of sufficient quantities to prevent the material—in technical phrase—from "dying."
True, in the new furor of buying and selling and booming it was not remarked that the discharged government employees uniformly disappeared from the city and the valley as soon as they were stricken from the time rolls. True, also, was the fact that Brouillard said nothing for publication, and little otherwise, regarding the successive reductions in his working force. But in such periods of insanity it is only the favorable indications which are marked and emphasized. The work on the great dam was languishing visibly, as every one could see. The Navajos had been sent home to their reservation, the tepees were gone, and two thirds of the camp shacks were empty.
Past these material facts, plainly to be seen and weighed and measured by any who would take the time to consider them, there was a strictly human argument which was even more significant. It was known to everybody in the frenzied marketplace that Brouillard himself was, according to his means, one of the most reckless of the plungers, buying, borrowing, and buying again as if the future held no threat of a possible débâcle. It was an object-lesson for the timid. Those who did not themselves know certainly argued that there must be a few who did know, and among these few the chief of the Reclamation Service must be in the very foremost rank.
"You just keep your eye on Brouillard and steer your own boat accordingly," was the way Editor Harlan put it to one of the timid ones. "He knows it all, backward and forward, and from the middle both ways; you can bet your final dollar on that. And you mustn't expect him to talk. In his position he can't talk; one of the things he is drawing his salary for is to keep his mouth shut. Besides, what a man may say doesn't necessarily count for much. It is what he does."