"But you are not," she said accusingly. "Deep down in your inner consciousness you don't believe a little bit in Mirapolis. You are only playing the game with the rest of us, Mr. Brouillard. Sometimes I am puzzled to know why."
Brouillard's smile was rather grim.
"Your father would probably tell you that I have a stake in the game—as everybody else has."
"Not Mr. Grislow?" she said, laying her finger inerrantly upon the single exception.
"No, not Grizzy; I forgot him."
"Doesn't he want to make money?" she asked, with exactly the proper shade of disinterest.
"No; yes, I guess he does, too. But he is—er—well, I suppose you might call him a man of one idea."
"Meaning that he is too uncompromisingly honest to be one of us? I think you are right."
Gorman, Mr. Cortwright's ablest trumpeter in the real-estate booming, was holding the plaza crowd spellbound with his enthusiastic periods, rising upon his toes and lifting his hands in angel gestures to high heaven in confirmation of his prophetic outlining of the Mirapolitan future.
In the middle distance, and backgrounding the buildings on the opposite side of the plaza, rose the false work of the great dam—a standing forest of sawed timbers, whose afternoon shadows were already pointing like a many-fingered fate toward the city of the plain. But, though the face of the speaker was toward the shadowing forest, his words ignored it. "The snow-capped Timanyonis," "the mighty Chigringo," and "the golden-veined slopes of Jack's Mountain" all came in for eulogistic mention; but the massive wall of concrete, with its bristling parapet of timbers, had no part in the orator's flamboyant descriptive.