"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.