Again Castner shook his head. "There hasn't been much that I could do. Brouillard, it is simply dreadful—the hard, reckless, half-demoniac spirit of this place! There is nothing to appeal to; there is no room or time for anything but the mad money chase or the still madder dissipation in which the poor wretches seek to forget. I can only try here and there to drag some poor soul out of the fire at the last moment, and it makes me sick—sick at heart!"
"You mustn't look at it that way," said Brouillard, suddenly turning comforter. "You have been doing good work and a lot of it—more than any three ordinary men could stand up under. I haven't got beyond seeing and appreciating, Castner; truly I have not. And I'll say this: if I had only half your courage... but it's no use, I'm in too deep. I can't see any farther ahead than a man born blind. There is one end for which I have been striving from the very first, and it is still unattained. I'm past help now. I have reached a point at which I'd pull the whole world down in ruins to see that end accomplished."
The young missionary took another turn up and down the room and then came back to the desk for his hat. At the leave-taking he said the only helpful word he could think of.
"Go to your confessor, Brouillard—your real confessor—and go all the more readily if that one happens to be a good woman—whom you love and trust. They often see more clearly than we do—the good women. Try it; and let me help where a man can help."
For a long hour after Castner went away Brouillard sat at his desk, fighting as those fight who see the cause lost, and who know they only make the ruin more complete by struggling on.
Cortwright's guess had found its mark. He was loaded to break with "front feet" and options and "corners." In the latest speculative period he had bought and mortgaged and bought again, plunging recklessly with the sole object of wringing another hundred thousand out of the drying sponge against the time when David Massingale should need it.
There seemed to be no other hope. It had become plainly evident after a little time that Cortwright's extorted promise to lift the smelting embargo from the "Little Susan" ore had been kept only in the letter; that he had removed one obstacle only to interpose another. The new obstacle was in the transportation field. Protests and beseechings, letters to traffic officials, and telegrams to railroad headquarters were of no avail. In spite of all that had been done, there was never an ore-car to come over the range at War Arrow, and the side-track to the mine was as yet uncompleted. Brouillard had seen little of Massingale, but that little had shown him that the old miner was in despair.
It was this hopeless situation which had made Brouillard bend his back to a second lifting of the "Little Susan's" enormous burden. At first the undertaking seemed easily possible. But with the drying of the speculative sponge it became increasingly difficult. More and more he had been compelled to buy and hold, until now the bare attempt to unload would have started the panic which was only waiting for some hedging seller to fire the train.
Sitting in the silence of the sixth-floor office he saw that Cortwright had shown him the one way out. Beyond doubt, the resumption in full force of the work on the dam would galvanize new life into Mirapolis, temporarily, at least. After that, a cautious selling campaign, conducted under cover through the brokers, might save the day for David Massingale. But the cost—the heaping dishonor, the disloyalty of putting his service into the breach and wrecking and ruining to gain the one personal end....
The sweat stood out in great drops on his forehead when he finally drew a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand and began to write a message. Painstakingly he composed it, referring often to the notes in his field-book, and printing the words neatly in his accurate, clearly defined handwriting.