It was hot work and heavy for the strangely assorted crew, and Brouillard drove it to the limit, bribing, cajoling, or threatening, patrolling the long line of staging to encourage the awkward puddlers, or side-stepping swiftly to the mixers to bring back a detachment of skulkers at the rifle's muzzle. And by nightfall the thing was done, with the loss reduced to a minimum and the makeshift laborers dropping out in squads and groups, some laughing, some swearing, and all too weary and toil-worn to be dangerous. "Give us a job if we come back to-morrow, Mr. Brouillard?" called out the king of the gamblers in passing; and the cry was taken up by others in grim jest.
"Thus endeth the first lesson," said Grislow, when the engineering corps was reassembling at the headquarters preparatory to a descent upon the supper-table. But Brouillard was dumb and haggard, and when he had hung rifle and cartridge-belt on their pegs behind his desk, he went out, leaving unbroken the silence which had greeted his entrance.
"The boss is taking it pretty hard," said young Griffith to no one in particular, and it was Leshington who took him up savagely and invited him to hold his tongue.
"The least said is the soonest mended—at a funeral," was the form the first assistant's rebuke took. "You take my advice and don't mess or meddle with the chief until he's had time to work this thing out of his system."
Brouillard was working it out in his own way, tramping the streets, hanging on the outskirts of arguing groups of newsmongers, or listening to the bonanza talk of the loungers in the Metropole lobby. Soon after dark the gold-seekers began to drop in, by twos and threes and in squads, all with the same story of disappointment. By nine o'clock the town was full of them, and since the liquor was flowing freely across many bars, the mutterings of disappointment soon swelled to a thunder roar of drunken rage, with the unknown exhibitor of the specimen nuggets for its object. From threats of vengeance upon the man who had hoaxed an entire town to a frenzied search for the man was but a step, and when Brouillard finally left the Metropole and crossed over to his office quarters, the mob was hunting riotously for the jeweller Levy and promising to hang him—when found—to the nearest wire pole if he should not confess the name and standing of his gold-bug.
The shouts of the mob were ringing in Brouillard's ears when he strode dejectedly into the deserted map room, and the cries were rising with a new note and in fresher frenzies a little later when Grislow came in. The hydrographer's blue eyes were hard and his voice had a tang of bitterness in it when he said: "Well, you've done it. Three men have just come in with a double handful of nuggets, and Mirapolis makes its bow to the world at large as the newest and richest of the gold camps."
Brouillard had been humped over his desk, and he sprang up with a cry like that of a wounded animal.
"It can't be; Grizzy, I tell you it can't be! Steve Massingale planted that gold that I washed out—played me for a fool to get me to work for the railroad. I didn't know it until—until——"
"Until Amy Massingale told you about it this afternoon," cut in the map-maker shrewdly. "That's all right. The bar Steve took you to was barren enough; they tell me that every cubic foot of it has been washed over in dish pans and skillets in the past few hours. But you know the big bend opposite the Quadjenàï Hills; the river has built that bend out of its own washings, and the bulletin over at the Spot-Light office says that the entire peninsula is one huge bank of gold-bearing gravel."
At the word Brouillard staggered as from the impact of a bullet. Then he crossed the room slowly, groping his way toward the peg where the coat he had worn in the afternoon was hanging. Grislow saw him take something out of the pocket of the coat, and the next moment the door opened and closed and the hydrographer was left alone.