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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The King of Arcadia, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The King of Arcadia
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2010 [EBook #33306]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KING OF ARCADIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE KING OF ARCADIA
+
+                               BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+           Author of "A Romance in Transit," "The Quickening," etc.
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+NEW YORK
+1909
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published February, 1909
+
+     To my daughter Dorothea,
+         AMANUENSIS OF THE
+  LOVING HEART AND WILLING HANDS
+          IN ITS WRITING,
+             THIS BOOK
+    IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a
+single step ahead."]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I THE CRYPTOGRAM
+
+II THE TRIPPERS
+
+III THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR
+
+IV ARCADY
+
+V "FIRE IN THE ROCK!"
+
+VI ELBOW CANYON
+
+VII THE POLO PLAYERS
+
+VIII CASTLE 'CADIA
+
+IX THE BRINK OF HAZARD
+
+X HOSKINS'S GHOST
+
+XI GUN PLAY
+
+XII THE RUSTLERS
+
+XIII THE LAW AND THE LADY
+
+XIV THE MAXIM
+
+XV _HOSPES ET HOSTIS_
+
+XVI THE RETURN OF THE OMEN
+
+XVII THE DERRICK FUMBLES
+
+XVIII THE INDICTMENT
+
+XIX IN THE LABORATORY
+
+XX THE GEOLOGIST
+
+XXI MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG
+
+XXII A CRY IN THE NIGHT
+
+XXIII DEEP UNTO DEEP
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a single step
+ahead."
+
+"Señor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
+like-a-that!"
+
+The muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathing hard, like
+a spent runner.
+
+"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play."
+
+
+
+
+THE KING OF ARCADIA
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE CRYPTOGRAM
+
+
+The strenuous rush of the day of suddenly changed plans was over, and
+with Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology, to bid him God-speed,
+Ballard had got as far as the track platform gates of the Boston &
+Albany Station when Lassley's telegram, like a detaining hand stretched
+forth out of the invisible, brought him to a stand.
+
+He read it, with a little frown of perplexity sobering his strong,
+enthusiastic face.
+
+     "_S.S. Carania_,
+      NEW YORK.
+
+     "_To_ BRECKENRIDGE BALLARD,
+      _Boston_.
+
+     "You love life and crave success. Arcadia Irrigation has killed
+     its originator and two chiefs of construction. It will kill
+     you. Let it alone.
+
+     "LASSLEY."
+
+He signed the book, tipped the boy for his successful chase, and passed
+the telegram on to Gardiner.
+
+"If you were called in as an expert, what would you make of that?" he
+asked.
+
+The assistant professor adjusted his eye-glasses, read the message, and
+returned it without suggestive comment.
+
+"My field being altogether prosaic, I should make nothing of it. There
+are no assassinations in geology. What does it mean?"
+
+Ballard shook his head.
+
+"I haven't the remotest idea. I wired Lassley this morning telling him
+that I had thrown up the Cuban sugar mills construction to accept the
+chief engineer's billet on Arcadia Irrigation. I didn't suppose he had
+ever heard of Arcadia before my naming of it to him."
+
+"I thought the Lassleys were in Europe," said Gardiner.
+
+"They are sailing to-day in the _Carania_, from New York. My wire was to
+wish them a safe voyage, and to give my prospective address. That
+explains the date-line of this telegram."
+
+"But it does not explain the warning. Is it true that the Colorado
+irrigation scheme has blotted out three of its field officers?"
+
+"Oh, an imaginative person might put it that way, I suppose," said
+Ballard, his tone asserting that none but an imaginative person would be
+so foolish. "Braithwaite, of the Geodetic Survey, was the originator of
+the plan for constructing a storage reservoir in the upper Boiling Water
+basin, and for transforming Arcadia Park into an irrigated agricultural
+district. He interested Mr. Pelham and a few other Denver capitalists,
+and they sent him out as chief engineer to stand the project on its
+feet. Shortly after he had laid the foundations for the reservoir dam,
+he fell into the Boiling Water and was drowned."
+
+Gardiner's humour was as dry as his professional specialty. "One," he
+said, checking off the unfortunate Braithwaite on his fingers.
+
+"Then Billy Sanderson took it--you remember Billy, in my year? He made
+the preliminary survey for an inlet railroad over the mountains, and put
+a few more stones on Braithwaite's dam. As they say out on the Western
+edge of things, Sanderson died with his boots on; got into trouble with
+somebody about a camp-following woman and was shot."
+
+"Two," checked the assistant in geology. "Who was the third?"
+
+"An elderly, dyspeptic Scotchman named Macpherson. He took up the work
+where Sanderson dropped it; built the railroad over the mountain and
+through Arcadia Park to the headquarters at the dam, and lived to see
+the dam itself something more than half completed."
+
+"And what happened to Mr. Macpherson?" queried Gardiner.
+
+"He was killed a few weeks ago. The derrick fell on him. The accident
+provoked a warm discussion in the technical periodicals. A wire guy
+cable parted--'rusted off,' the newspaper report said--and there was a
+howl from the wire-rope makers, who protested that a rope made of
+galvanised wire couldn't possibly 'rust off.'"
+
+"Nevertheless, Mr. Macpherson was successfully killed," remarked the
+professor dryly. "That would seem to be the persisting fact in the
+discussion. Does none of these things move you?"
+
+"Certainly not," returned the younger man. "I shall neither fall into
+the river, nor stand under a derrick whose guy lines are unsafe."
+
+Gardiner's smile was a mere eye wrinkle of good-natured cynicism. "You
+carefully omit poor Sanderson's fate. One swims out of a torrent--if he
+can--and an active young fellow might possibly be able to dodge a
+falling derrick. But who can escape the toils of the woman 'whose hands
+are as bands, and whose feet----'"
+
+"Oh, piff!" said the Kentuckian; and then he laughed aloud. "There is,
+indeed, one woman in the world, my dear _Herr_ Professor, for whose sake
+I would joyfully stand up and be shot at; but she isn't in Colorado, by
+a good many hundred miles."
+
+"No? Nevertheless, Breckenridge, my son, there lies your best chance of
+making the fourth in the list of sacrifices. You are a Kentuckian; an
+ardent and chivalric Southerner. If the Fates really wish to interpose
+in contravention of the Arcadian scheme, they will once more bait the
+deadfall with the eternal feminine--always presuming, of course, that
+there are any Fates, and that they have ordinary intelligence."
+
+Ballard shook his head as if he took the prophecy seriously.
+
+"I am in no danger on that score. Bromley--he was Sanderson's assistant,
+and afterward Macpherson's, you know--wrote me that the Scotchman's
+first general order was an edict banishing every woman from the
+construction camps."
+
+"Now, if he had only banished the derricks at the same time," commented
+Gardiner reflectively. Then he added: "You may be sure the Fates will
+find you an enchantress, Breckenridge; the oracles have spoken. What
+would the most peerless Arcadia be without its shepherdess? But we are
+jesting when Lassley appears to be very much in earnest. Could there be
+anything more than coincidence in these fatalities?"
+
+"How could there be?" demanded Ballard. "Two sheer accidents and one
+commonplace tragedy, which last was the fault--or the misfortune--of
+poor Billy's temperament, it appears; though he was a sober enough
+fellow when he was here learning his trade. Let me prophesy awhile: I
+shall live and I shall finish building the Arcadian dam. Now let us
+side-track Lassley and his cryptogram and go back to what I was trying
+to impress on your mind when he butted in; which is that you are not to
+forget your promise to come out and loaf with me in August. You shall
+have all the luxuries a construction camp affords, and you can geologise
+to your heart's content in virgin soil."
+
+"That sounds whettingly enticing," said the potential guest. "And,
+besides, I am immensely interested in dams; and in wire cables that give
+way at inopportune moments. If I were you, Breckenridge, I should make
+it a point to lay that broken guy cable aside. It might make interesting
+matter for an article in the _Engineer_; say, 'On the Effect of the
+Atmosphere in High Altitudes upon Galvanised Wire.'"
+
+Ballard paid the tributary laugh. "I believe you'd have your joke if you
+were dying. However, I'll keep the broken cable for you, and the pool
+where Braithwaite was drowned, and Sanderson's inamorata--only I suppose
+Macpherson obliterated her at the earliest possible.... Say, by Jove!
+that's my train he's calling. Good-by, and don't forget your promise."
+
+After which, but for a base-runner's dash down the platform, Ballard
+would have lost the reward of the strenuous day of changed plans at the
+final moment.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE TRIPPERS
+
+
+It was on the Monday afternoon that Breckenridge Ballard made the
+base-runner's dash through the station gates in the Boston terminal, and
+stood in the rearmost vestibule of his outgoing train to watch for the
+passing of a certain familiar suburb where, at the home of the
+hospitable Lassleys, he had first met Miss Craigmiles.
+
+On the Wednesday evening following, he was gathering his belongings in
+the sleeper of a belated Chicago train preparatory to another dash
+across platforms--this time in the echoing station at Council Bluffs--to
+catch the waiting "Overland Flyer" for the run to Denver.
+
+President Pelham's telegram, which had found him in Boston on the eve of
+closing a contract with the sugar magnates to go and build refineries in
+Cuba, was quite brief, but it bespoke haste:
+
+     "We need a fighting man who can build railroads and dams and
+     dig ditches in Arcadia. Salary satisfactory to you. Wire quick
+     if you can come."
+
+This was the wording of it; and at the evening hour of train-changing in
+Council Bluffs, Ballard was sixteen hundred miles on his way, racing
+definitely to a conference with the president of Arcadia Irrigation in
+Denver, with the warning telegram from Lassley no more than a vague
+disturbing under-thought.
+
+What would lie beyond the conference he knew only in the large. As an
+industrial captain in touch with the moving world of great projects, he
+was familiar with the plan for the reclamation of the Arcadian desert. A
+dam was in process of construction, the waters of a mountain torrent
+were to be impounded, a system of irrigating canals opened, and a
+connecting link of railway built. Much of the work, he understood, was
+already done; and he was to take charge as chief of construction and
+carry it to its conclusion.
+
+So much President Pelham's summons made clear. But what was the mystery
+hinted at in Lassley's telegram? And did it have any connection with
+that phrase in President Pelham's wire: "We need a fighting man"?
+
+These queries, not yet satisfactorily answered, were presenting
+themselves afresh when Ballard followed the porter to the section
+reserved for him in the Denver sleeper. The car was well filled; and
+when he could break away from the speculative entanglement long enough
+to look about him, he saw that the women passengers were numerous enough
+to make it more than probable that he would be asked, later on, to give
+up his lower berth to one of them.
+
+Being masculinely selfish, and a seasoned traveller withal, he was
+steeling himself to say "No" to this request what time the train was
+rumbling over the great bridge spanning the Missouri. The bridge passage
+was leisurely, and there was time for a determined strengthening of the
+selfish defenses.
+
+But at the Omaha station there was a fresh influx of passengers for the
+Denver car, and to Ballard's dismay they appeared at the first hasty
+glance to be all women.
+
+"O good Lord!" he ejaculated; and finding his pipe retreated
+precipitately in the direction of the smoking-compartment, vaguely
+hoping to dodge the inevitable.
+
+At the turn around the corner of the linen locker he glanced back. Two
+or three figures in the group of late comers might have asked for
+recognition if he had looked fairly at them; but he had eyes for only
+one: a modish young woman in a veiled hat and a shapeless gray box
+travelling-coat, who was evidently trying to explain something to the
+Pullman conductor.
+
+"Jove!" he exclaimed; "if I weren't absolutely certain that Elsa
+Craigmiles is half-way across the Atlantic with the Lassleys--but she
+is; and if she were not, she wouldn't be here, doing the 'personally
+conducted' for that mob." And he went on to smoke.
+
+It was a very short time afterward that an apologetic Pullman conductor
+found him, and the inevitable came to pass.
+
+"This is Mr. Ballard, I believe?"
+
+A nod, and an uphanding of tickets.
+
+"Thank you. I don't like to discommode you, Mr. Ballard; but--er--you
+have an entire section, and----"
+
+"I know," said Ballard crisply. "The lady got on the wrong train, or she
+bought the wrong kind of ticket, or she took chances on finding the
+good-natured fellow who would give up his berth and go hang himself on a
+clothes-hook in the vestibule. I have been there before, but I have not
+yet learned how to say 'No.' Fix it up any way you please, only don't
+give me an upper over a flat-wheeled truck, if you can help it."
+
+An hour later the dining-car dinner was announced; and Ballard, who had
+been poring over a set of the Arcadian maps and profiles and a thick
+packet of documents mailed to intercept him at Chicago, brought up the
+rear of the outgoing group from the Denver car.
+
+In the vestibule of the diner he found the steward wrestling suavely
+with a late contingent of hungry ones, and explaining that the tables
+were all temporarily full. Ballard had broad shoulders and the Kentucky
+stature to match them. Looking over the heads of the others, he marked,
+at the farther end of the car, a table for two, with one vacant place.
+
+"I beg your pardon--there is only one of me," he cut in; and the steward
+let him pass. When he had dodged the laden waiters and was taking the
+vacant seat he found himself confronting the young woman in the veiled
+hat and the gray box-coat, identified her, and discovered in a
+petrifying shock of astoundment that she was not Miss Elsa Craigmiles's
+fancied double, but Miss Craigmiles herself.
+
+"Why, Mr. Ballard--of all people!" she cried, with a brow-lifting of
+genuine or well-assumed surprise. And then in mock consternation: "Don't
+tell me that _you_ are the good-natured gentleman I drove out of his
+section in the sleeping-car."
+
+"I sha'n't; because I don't know how many more there are of me," said
+Ballard. Then, astonishment demanding its due: "Did I only dream that
+you were going to Europe with the Herbert Lassleys, or----"
+
+She made a charming little face at him.
+
+"Do you never change your plans suddenly, Mr. Ballard? Never mind; you
+needn't confess: I know you do. Well, so do I. At the last moment I
+begged off, and Mrs. Lassley fairly scolded. She even went so far as to
+accuse me of not knowing my own mind for two minutes at a time."
+
+Ballard's smile was almost grim.
+
+"You have given me that impression now and then; when I wanted to be
+serious and you did not. Did you come aboard with that party at Omaha?"
+
+"Did I not? It's my--that is, it's cousin Janet Van Bryck's party; and
+we are going to do Colorado this summer. Think of that as an exchange
+for England and a yachting voyage to Tromsoe!"
+
+This time Ballard's smile was affectionately cynical.
+
+"I didn't suppose you ever forgot yourself so far as to admit that there
+was any America west of the Alleghany Mountains."
+
+Miss Elsa's laugh was one of her most effective weapons. Ballard was
+made to feel that he had laid himself open at some vulnerable point,
+without knowing how or why.
+
+"Dear me!" she protested. "How long does it take you to really get
+acquainted with people?" Then with reproachful demureness: "The man has
+been waiting for five full minutes to take your dinner order."
+
+One of Ballard's gifts was pertinacity; and after he had told the waiter
+what to bring, he returned to her question.
+
+"It is taking me long enough to get acquainted with you," he ventured.
+"It will be two years next Tuesday since we first met at the Herbert
+Lassleys', and you have been delightfully good to me, and even chummy
+with me--when you felt like it. Yet do you know you have never once gone
+back of your college days in speaking of yourself? I don't know to this
+blessed moment whether you ever had any girlhood; and that being the
+case----"
+
+"Oh, spare me!" she begged, in well-counterfeited dismay. "One would
+think----"
+
+"One would not think anything of you that he ought not to think," he
+broke in gravely; adding: "We are a long way past the Alleghanies now,
+and I am glad you are aware of an America somewhat broader than it is
+long. Do I know any of your sight-seers, besides Mrs. Van Bryck?"
+
+"I don't know; I'll list them for you," she offered. "There are Major
+Blacklock, United States Engineers, retired, who always says, 'H'm--ha!'
+before he contradicts you; the major's nieces, Madge and Margery
+Cantrell--the idea of splitting one name for two girls in the same
+family!--and the major's son, Jerry, most hopeful when he is pitted
+against other young savages on the football field. All strangers, so
+far?"
+
+Ballard nodded, and she went on.
+
+"Then there are Mrs. Van Bryck and Dosia--I am sure you have met them;
+and Hetty Bigelow, their cousin, twice removed, whom you have never met,
+if Cousin Janet could help it; and Hetty's brother, Lucius, who is
+something or other in the Forestry Service. Let me see; how many is
+that?"
+
+"Eight," said Ballard, "counting the negligible Miss Bigelow and her
+tree-nursing brother."
+
+"Good. I merely wanted to make sure you were paying attention. Last, but
+by no means least, there is Mr. Wingfield--_the_ Mr. Wingfield, who
+writes plays."
+
+Without ever having been suffered to declare himself Miss Elsa's lover,
+Ballard resented the saving of the playwright for the climax; also, he
+resented the respectful awe, real or assumed, with which his name was
+paraded.
+
+"Let me remember," he said, with the frown reflective. "I believe it was
+Jack Forsyth the last time you confided in me. Is it Mr. Wingfield now?"
+
+"Would you listen!" she laughed; but he made quite sure there was a
+blush to go with the laugh. "Do you expect me to tell you about it here
+and now?--with Mr. Wingfield sitting just three seats back of me, on the
+right?"
+
+Ballard scowled, looked as directed, and took the measure of his latest
+rival.
+
+Wingfield was at a table for four, with Mrs. Van Bryck, her daughter,
+and a shock-headed young man, whom Ballard took to be the
+football-playing Blacklock. In defiance of the clean-shaven custom of
+the moment, or, perhaps, because he was willing to individualise
+himself, the playwright wore a beard closely trimmed and pointed in the
+French manner; this, the quick-grasping eyes, and a certain vulpine
+showing of white teeth when he laughed, made Ballard liken him to an
+unnamed singer he had once heard in the part of _Mephistopheles_.
+
+The overlooking glance necessarily included Wingfield's table
+companions: Mrs. Van Bryck's high-bred contours lost in adipose; Dosia's
+cool and placid prettiness--the passionless charms of unrelieved
+milk-whiteness of skin and masses of flaxen hair and baby-blue eyes; the
+Blacklock boy's square shoulders, heavy jaw, and rather fine eyes--which
+he kept resolutely in his plate for the better part of the time.
+
+At the next table Ballard saw a young man with the brown of an out-door
+occupation richly colouring face and hands; an old one with the
+contradictory "H'm--ha!" written out large in every gesture; and two
+young women who looked as if they might be the sharers of the single
+Christian name. Miss Bigelow, the remaining member of the party, had
+apparently been lost in the dinner seating. At all events, Ballard did
+not identify her.
+
+"Well?" said Miss Craigmiles, seeming to intimate that he had looked
+long enough.
+
+"I shall know Mr. Wingfield, if I ever see him again," remarked Ballard.
+"Whose guest is he? Or are you all Mrs. Van Bryck's guests?"
+
+"What an idea!" she scoffed. "Cousin Janet is going into the absolutely
+unknown. She doesn't reach even to the Alleghanies; her America stops
+short at Philadelphia. She is the chaperon; but our host isn't with us.
+We are to meet him in the wilds of Colorado."
+
+"Anybody I know?" queried Ballard.
+
+"No. And--oh, yes, I forgot; Professor Gardiner is to join us later. I
+knew there must be one more somewhere. But he was an afterthought.
+I--Cousin Janet, I mean--got his acceptance by wire at Omaha."
+
+"Gardiner is not going to join you," said Ballard, with the cool
+effrontery of a proved friend. "He is going to join me."
+
+"Where? In Cuba?"
+
+"Oh, no; I am not going to Cuba. I am going to live the simple life;
+building dams and digging ditches in Arcadia."
+
+He was well used to her swiftly changing moods. What Miss Elsa's
+critics, who were chiefly of her own sex, spoke of disapprovingly as her
+flightiness, was to Ballard one of her characterizing charms. Yet he was
+quite unprepared for her grave and frankly reproachful question:
+
+"Why aren't you going to Cuba? Didn't Mr. Lassley telegraph you not to
+go to Arcadia?"
+
+"He did, indeed. But what do you know about it?--if I may venture to
+ask?"
+
+For the first time in their two years' acquaintance he saw her visibly
+embarrassed. And her explanation scarcely explained.
+
+"I--I was with the Lassleys in New York, you know; I went to the steamer
+to see them off. Mr. Lassley showed me his telegram to you after he had
+written it."
+
+They had come to the little coffees, and the other members of Miss
+Craigmiles's party had risen and gone rearward to the sleeping-car.
+Ballard, more mystified than he had been at the Boston moment when
+Lassley's wire had found him, was still too considerate to make his
+companion a reluctant source of further information. Moreover, Mr.
+Lester Wingfield was weighing upon him more insistently than the
+mysteries. In times past Miss Craigmiles had made him the target for
+certain little arrows of confidence: he gave her an opportunity to do it
+again.
+
+"Tell me about Mr. Wingfield," he suggested. "Is he truly Jack Forsyth's
+successor?"
+
+"How can you question it?" she retorted gayly. "Some time--not here or
+now--I will tell you all about it."
+
+"'Some time,'" he repeated. "Is it always going to be 'some time'? You
+have been calling me your friend for a good while, but there has always
+been a closed door beyond which you have never let me penetrate. And it
+is not my fault, as you intimated a few minutes ago. Why is it? Is it
+because I'm only one of many? Or is it your attitude toward all men?"
+
+She was knotting her veil and her eyes were downcast when she answered
+him.
+
+"A closed door? There is, indeed, my dear friend: two hands, one dead
+and one still living, closed it for us. It may be opened some time"--the
+phrase persisted, and she could not get away from it--"and then you will
+be sorry. Let us go back to the sleeping-car. I want you to meet the
+others." Then with a quick return to mockery: "Only I suppose you will
+not care to meet Mr. Wingfield?"
+
+He tried to match her mood; he was always trying to keep up with her
+kaleidoscopic changes of front.
+
+"Try me, and see," he laughed. "I guess I can stand it, if he can."
+
+And a few minutes later he had been presented to the other members of
+the sight-seeing party; had taken Mrs. Van Bryck's warm fat hand of
+welcome and Dosia's cool one, and was successfully getting himself
+contradicted at every other breath by the florid-faced old campaigner,
+who, having been a major of engineers, was contentiously critical of
+young civilians who had taken their B.S. degree otherwhere than at West
+Point.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR
+
+
+It was shortly after midnight when the "Overland Flyer" made its
+unscheduled stop behind a freight train which was blocking the track at
+the blind siding at Coyote. Always a light sleeper, Ballard was aroused
+by the jar and grind of the sudden brake-clipping; and after lying awake
+and listening for some time, he got up and dressed and went forward to
+see what had happened.
+
+The accident was a box-car derailment, caused by a broken truck, and the
+men of both train crews were at work trying to get the disabled car back
+upon the steel and the track-blocking train out of the "Flyer's" way.
+Inasmuch as such problems were acutely in his line, Ballard thought of
+offering to help; but since there seemed to be no special need, he sat
+down on the edge of the ditch-cutting to look on.
+
+The night was picture fine; starlit, and with the silent wideness of the
+great upland plain to give it immensity. The wind, which for the first
+hundred miles of the westward flight had whistled shrilly in the car
+ventilators, was now lulled to a whispering zephyr, pungent with the
+subtle soil essence of the grass-land spring.
+
+Ballard found a cigar and smoked it absently. His eyes followed the
+toilings of the train crews prying and heaving under the derailed car,
+with the yellow torch flares to pick them out; but his thoughts were far
+afield, with his dinner-table companion to beckon them.
+
+"Companion" was the word which fitted her better than any other. Ballard
+had found few men, and still fewer women, completely companionable. Some
+one has said that comradeship is the true test of affinity; and the
+Kentuckian remembered with a keen appreciation of the truth of this
+saying a summer fortnight spent at the Herbert Lassleys' cottage on the
+North Shore, with Miss Craigmiles as one of his fellow-guests.
+
+Margaret Lassley had been kind to him on that occasion, holding the
+reins of chaperonage lightly. There had been sunny afternoons on the
+breezy headlands, and blood-quickening mornings in Captain Tinkham's
+schooner-rigged whale-boat, when the white horses were racing across the
+outer reef and the water was too rough to tempt the other members of the
+house-party.
+
+He had monopolised Elsa Craigmiles crudely during those two weeks,
+glorying in her beauty, in her bright mind, in her triumphant physical
+fitness. He remembered how sturdily their comradeship had grown during
+the uninterrupted fortnight. He had told her all there was to tell about
+himself, and in return she had alternately mocked him and pretended to
+confide in him; the confidences touching such sentimental passages as
+the devotion of the Toms, the Dicks, and the Harrys of her college
+years.
+
+Since he had sometimes wished to be sentimental on his own account,
+Ballard had been a little impatient under these frivolous appeals for
+sympathy. But there is a certain tonic for growing love even in such
+bucketings of cold water as the loved one may administer in telling the
+tale of the predecessor. It is a cold heart, masculine, that will not
+find warmth in anything short of the ice of indifference; and whatever
+her faults, Miss Elsa was never indifferent. Ballard recalled how he had
+groaned under the jesting confidences. Also, he remembered that he had
+never dared to repel them, choosing rather to clasp the thorns than to
+relinquish the rose.
+
+From the sentimental journey past to the present stage of the same was
+but a step; but the present situation was rather perplexingly befogged.
+Why had Elsa Craigmiles changed her mind so suddenly about spending the
+summer in Europe? What could have induced her to substitute a summer in
+Colorado, travelling under Mrs. Van Bryck's wing?
+
+The answer to the queryings summed itself up, for the Kentuckian, in a
+name--the name of a man and a playwright. He held Mr. Lester Wingfield
+responsible for the changed plans, and was irritably resentful. In the
+after-dinner visit with the sight-seeing party in the Pullman there had
+been straws to indicate the compass-point of the wind. Elsa deferred to
+Wingfield, as the other women did; only in her case Ballard was sure it
+meant more. And the playwright, between his posings as a literary
+oracle, assumed a quiet air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles that
+was maddening.
+
+Ballard recalled this, sitting upon the edge of the ditch-cutting in the
+heart of the fragrant night, and figuratively punched Mr. Wingfield's
+head. Fate had been unkind to him, throwing him thus under the wheels of
+the opportune when the missing of a single train by either the
+sight-seers or himself would have spared him.
+
+Taking that view of the matter, there was grim comfort in the thought
+that the mangling could not be greatly prolonged. The two orbits
+coinciding for the moment would shortly go apart again; doubtless upon
+the morning's arrival in Denver. It was well. Heretofore he had been
+asked to sympathise only in a subjective sense. With another lover
+corporeally present and answering to his name, the torture would become
+objective--and blankly unendurable.
+
+Notwithstanding, he found himself looking forward with keen desire to
+one more meeting with the beloved tormentor--to a table exchange of
+thoughts and speech at the dining-car breakfast which he masterfully
+resolved not all the playmakers in a mumming world should forestall or
+interrupt.
+
+This determination was shaping itself in the Kentuckian's brain when,
+after many futile backings and slack-takings, the ditched car was
+finally induced to climb the frogs and to drop successfully upon the
+rails. When the obstructing freight began to move, Ballard flung away
+the stump of his cigar and climbed the steps of the first open vestibule
+on the "Flyer," making his way to the rear between the sleeping
+emigrants in the day-coaches.
+
+Being by this time hopelessly wakeful, he filled his pipe and sought the
+smoking-compartment of the sleeping-car. It was a measure of his
+abstraction that he did not remark the unfamiliarity of the place; all
+other reminders failing, he should have realised that the fat negro
+porter working his way perspiringly with brush and polish paste through
+a long line of shoes was not the man to whom he had given his suit-cases
+in the Council Bluffs terminal.
+
+But thinking pointedly of Elsa Craigmiles, and of the joy of sharing
+another meal with her in spite of the Lester Wingfields, he saw nothing,
+noted nothing; and the reverie, now frankly traversing the field of
+sentiment, ran on unbroken until he became vaguely aware that the train
+had stopped and started again, and that during the pause there had been
+sundry clankings and jerkings betokening the cutting off of a car.
+
+A hasty question fired at the fat porter cleared the atmosphere of
+doubt.
+
+"What station was that we just passed?"
+
+"Short Line Junction, sah; whah we leaves the Denver cyar--yes, sah."
+
+"What? Isn't this the Denver car?"
+
+"No, indeed, sah. Dish yer cyar goes on th'oo to Ogden; yes, sah."
+
+Ballard leaned back again and chuckled in ironic self-derision. He was
+not without a saving sense of humour. What with midnight prowlings and
+sentimental reveries he had managed to sever himself most abruptly and
+effectually from his car, from his hand-baggage, from the prefigured
+breakfast, with Miss Elsa for his _vis-à-vis_; and, what was of vastly
+greater importance, from the chance of a day-long business conference
+with President Pelham!
+
+"Gardiner, old man, you are a true prophet; it isn't in me to think girl
+and to play the great game at one and the same moment," he said,
+flinging a word to the assistant professor of geology across the
+distance abysses; and the fat porter said: "Sah?"
+
+"I was just asking what time I shall reach Denver, going in by way of
+the main line and Cheyenne," said Ballard, with cheerful mendacity.
+
+"Erbout six o'clock in the evenin', sah; yes, sah. Huccome you to get
+lef', Cap'n Boss?"
+
+"I didn't get left; it was the Denver sleeper that got left," laughed
+the Kentuckian. After which he refilled his pipe, wrote a telegram to
+Mr. Pelham, and one to the Pullman conductor about his hand-baggage, and
+resigned himself to the inevitable, hoping that the chapter of accidents
+had done its utmost.
+
+Unhappily, it had not, as the day forthcoming amply proved. Reaching
+Cheyenne at late breakfast-time, Ballard found that the Denver train
+over the connecting line waited for the "Overland" from the West; also,
+that on this day of all days, the "Overland" was an hour behind her
+schedule. Hence there was haste-making extraordinary at the end of the
+Boston-Denver flight. When the delayed Cheyenne train clattered in over
+the switches, it was an hour past dark. President Pelham was waiting
+with his automobile to whisk the new chief off to a hurried dinner-table
+conference at the Brown Palace; and what few explanations and
+instructions Ballard got were sandwiched between the _consommé au
+gratin_ and the dessert.
+
+Two items of information were grateful. The Fitzpatrick Brothers,
+favourably known to Ballard, were the contractors on the work; and
+Loudon Bromley, who had been his friend and loyal understudy in the
+technical school, was still the assistant engineer, doing his best to
+push the construction in the absence of a superior.
+
+Since the chief of any army stands or falls pretty largely by the grace
+of his subordinates, Ballard was particularly thankful for Bromley. He
+was little and he was young; he dressed like an exquisite, wore neat
+little patches of side-whiskers, shot straight, played the violin, and
+stuffed birds for relaxation. But in spite of these hindrances, or,
+perhaps, because of some of them, he could handle men like a born
+captain, and he was a friend whose faithfulness had been proved more
+than once.
+
+"I shall be only too glad to retain Bromley," said Ballard, when the
+president told him he might choose his own assistant. And, as time
+pressed, he asked if there were any other special instructions.
+
+"Nothing specific," was the reply. "Bromley has kept things moving, but
+they can be made to move faster, and we believe you are the man to set
+the pace, Mr. Ballard; that's all. And now, if you are ready, we have
+fifteen minutes in which to catch the Alta Vista train--plenty of time,
+but none to throw away. I have reserved your sleeper."
+
+It was not until after the returning automobile spin; after Ballard had
+checked his baggage and had given his recovered suit-cases to the porter
+of the Alta Vista car; that he learned the significance of the fighting
+clause in the president's Boston telegram.
+
+They were standing at the steps of the Pullman for the final word; had
+drawn aside to make room for a large party of still later comers; when
+the president said, with the air of one who gathers up the unconsidered
+trifles:
+
+"By the way, Mr. Ballard, you may not find it all plain sailing up
+yonder. Arcadia Park has been for twenty years a vast cattle-ranch,
+owned, or rather usurped, by a singular old fellow who is known as the
+'King of Arcadia.' Quite naturally, he opposes our plan of turning the
+park into a well-settled agricultural field, to the detriment of his
+free cattle range, and he is fighting us."
+
+"In the courts, you mean?"
+
+"In the courts and out of them. I might mention that it was one of his
+cow-men who killed Sanderson; though that was purely a personal quarrel,
+I believe. The trouble began with his refusal to sell us a few acres of
+land and a worthless mining-claim which our reservoir may submerge, and
+we were obliged to resort to the courts. He is fighting for delay now,
+and in the meantime he encourages his cow-boys to maintain a sort of
+guerrilla warfare on the contractors: stealing tools, disabling
+machinery, and that sort of thing. This was Macpherson's story, and I'm
+passing it on to you. You are forty miles from the nearest sheriff's
+office over there; but when you need help, you'll get it. Of course, the
+company will back you--to the last dollar in the treasury, if
+necessary."
+
+Ballard's rejoinder was placatory. "It seems a pity to open up the new
+country with a feud," he said, thinking of his native State and of what
+these little wars had done for some portions of it. "Can't the old
+fellow be conciliated in some way?"
+
+"I don't know," replied the president doubtfully. "We want peaceable
+possession, of course, if we can get it; capital is always on the side
+of peace. In fact, we authorised Macpherson to buy peace at any price in
+reason, and we'll give you the same authority. But Macpherson always
+represented the old cattle king as being unapproachable on that side. On
+the other hand, we all know what Macpherson was. He had a pretty rough
+tongue when he was at his best; and he was in bad health for a long time
+before the derrick fell on him. I dare say he didn't try diplomacy."
+
+"I'll make love to the cow-punching princesses," laughed Ballard; "that
+is, if there are any."
+
+"There is one, I understand; but I believe she doesn't spend much of her
+time at home. The old man is a widower, and, apart from his senseless
+fight on the company, he appears to be--but I won't prejudice you in
+advance."
+
+"No, don't," said Ballard. "I'll size things up for myself on the
+ground. I----"
+
+The interruption was the dash of a switch-engine up the yard with
+another car to be coupled to the waiting mountain line train. Ballard
+saw the lettering on the medallion: "08".
+
+"Somebody's private hotel?" he remarked.
+
+"Yes. It's Mr. Brice's car, I guess. He was in town to-day."
+
+Ballard was interested at once.
+
+"Mr. Richard Brice?--the general manager of the D. & U. P.?"
+
+The president nodded.
+
+"That's great luck," said Ballard, warmly. "We were classmates in the
+Institute, and I haven't seen him since he came West. I think I'll ride
+in the Naught-eight till bedtime."
+
+"Glad you know him," said the president. "Get in a good word for our
+railroad connection with his line at Alta Vista, while you're about it.
+There is your signal; good-by, and good luck to you. Don't
+forget--'drive' is the word; for every man, minute, and dollar there is
+in it."
+
+Ballard shook the presidential hand and swung up to the platform of the
+private car. A reluctant porter admitted him, and thus it came about
+that he did not see the interior of his own sleeper until long after the
+other passengers had gone to bed.
+
+"Good load to-night, John?" he said to the porter, when, the private car
+visit being ended, the man was showing him to his made-down berth.
+
+"Yes, sah; mighty good for de branch. But right smart of dem is ladies,
+and dey don't he'p de po' portah much."
+
+"Well, I'll pay for one of them, anyway," said the Kentuckian,
+good-naturedly doubling his tip. "Be sure you rout me out bright and
+early; I want to get ahead of the crowd."
+
+And he wound his watch and went to bed, serenely unconscious that the
+hat upon the rail-hook next to his own belonged to Mr. Lester Wingfield;
+that the hand-bags over which he had stumbled in the dimly lighted aisle
+were the _impedimenta_ of the ladies Van Bryck; or that the dainty
+little boots proclaiming the sex--and youth--of his fellow-traveller in
+the opposite Number Six were the foot-gear of Miss Elsa Craigmiles.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ARCADY
+
+
+Arcadia Park, as the government map-makers have traced it, is a
+high-lying, enclosed valley in the heart of the middle Rockies, roughly
+circular in outline, with a curving westward sweep of the great range
+for one-half of its circumscribing rampart, and the bent bow of the Elk
+Mountains for the other.
+
+Apart from storming the rampart heights, accessible only to the hardy
+prospector or to the forest ranger, there are three ways of approach to
+the shut-in valley: up the outlet gorge of the Boiling Water, across the
+Elk Mountains from the Roaring Fork, or over the high pass in the
+Continental Divide from Alta Vista.
+
+It was from the summit of the high pass that Ballard had his first view
+of Arcadia. From Alta Vista the irrigation company's narrow-gauge
+railway climbs through wooded gorges and around rock-ribbed snow balds,
+following the route of the old stage trail; and Ballard's introductory
+picture of the valley was framed in the cab window of the locomotive
+sent over by Bromley to transport him to the headquarters camp on the
+Boiling Water.
+
+In the wide prospect opened by the surmounting of the high pass there
+was little to suggest the human activities, and still less to foreshadow
+strife. Ballard saw a broad-acred oasis in the mountain desert, billowed
+with undulating meadows, and having for its colour scheme the gray-green
+of the range grasses. Winding among the billowy hills in the middle
+distance, a wavering double line of aspens marked the course of the
+Boiling Water. Nearer at hand the bald slopes of the Saguache pitched
+abruptly to the forested lower reaches; and the path of the railway,
+losing itself at the timber line, reappeared as a minute scratch scoring
+the edge of the gray-green oasis, to vanish, distance effaced, near a
+group of mound-shaped hills to the eastward.
+
+The start from Alta Vista with the engine "special" had been made at
+sunrise, long before any of Ballard's fellow-travellers in the
+sleeping-car were stirring. But the day had proved unseasonably warm in
+the upper snow fields, and there had been time-killing delays.
+
+Every gulch had carried its torrent of melted snow to threaten the
+safety of the unballasted track, and what with slow speed over the
+hazards and much shovelling of land-slips in the cuttings, the sun was
+dipping to the westward range when the lumbering little construction
+engine clattered down the last of the inclines and found the long level
+tangents in the park.
+
+On the first of the tangents the locomotive was stopped at a
+watering-tank. During the halt Ballard climbed down from his cramped
+seat on the fireman's box and crossed the cab to the engine-man's
+gangway. Hoskins, the engine-driver, leaning from his window, pointed
+out the projected course of the southern lateral canal in the great
+irrigation system.
+
+"It'll run mighty nigh due west here, about half-way between us and the
+stage trail," he explained; and Ballard, looking in the direction
+indicated, said: "Where is the stage trail? I haven't seen it since we
+left the snow balds."
+
+"It's over yonder in the edge of the timber," was the reply; and a
+moment later its precise location was defined by three double-seated
+buckboards, passenger-laden and drawn by four-in-hand teams of
+tittupping broncos, flicking in and out among the pines and pushing
+rapidly eastward. The distance was too great for recognition, but
+Ballard could see that there were women in each of the vehicles.
+
+"Hello!" he exclaimed. "Those people must have crossed the range from
+Alta Vista to-day. What is the attraction over here?--a summer-resort
+hotel?"
+
+"Not any in this valley," said the engineman. "They might be going on
+over to Ashcroft, or maybe to Aspen, on the other side o' the Elk
+Mountains. But if that's their notion, they're due to camp out
+somewhere, right soon. It's all o' forty mile to the neardest of the
+Roaring Fork towns."
+
+The engine tank was filled, and the fireman was flinging the dripping
+spout to its perpendicular. Ballard took his seat again, and became once
+more immersed in his topographical studies of the new field; which was
+possibly why the somewhat singular spectacle of a party of tourists
+hastening on to meet night and the untaverned wilderness passed from his
+mind.
+
+The approach to the headquarters camp of the Arcadia Company skirted the
+right bank of the Boiling Water, in this portion of its course a river
+of the plain, eddying swiftly between the aspen-fringed banks. But a few
+miles farther on, where the gentle undulations of the rich grass-land
+gave place to bare, rock-capped hills, the stream broke at intervals
+into noisy rapids, with deep pools to mark the steps of its descent.
+
+Ballard's seat on the fireman's box was on the wrong side for the
+topographical purpose, and he crossed the cab to stand at Hoskins's
+elbow. As they were passing one of the stillest of the pools, the
+engineman said, with a sidewise jerk of his thumb:
+
+"That's the place where Mr. Braithwaite was drowned. Came down here from
+camp to catch a mess o' trout for his supper and fell in--from the far
+bank."
+
+"Couldn't he swim?" Ballard asked.
+
+"They all say he could. Anyhow, it looks as if he might 'a' got out o'
+that little mill-pond easy enough. But he didn't. They found his fishing
+tackle on the bank, and him down at the foot of the second rapid
+below--both arms broke and the top of his head caved in, like he'd been
+run through a rock crusher. They can say what they please; I ain't
+believin' the river done it."
+
+"What do you believe?" Ballard was looking across to a collection of low
+buildings and corrals--evidently the headquarters of the old cattle
+king's ranch outfit--nestling in a sheltered cove beyond the stream, and
+his question was a half-conscious thought slipping into speech.
+
+"I believe this whole blame' job is a hoodoo," was the prompt rejoinder.
+And then, with the freedom born of long service in the unfettered areas
+where discipline means obedience but not servility, the man added: "I
+wouldn't be standin' in your shoes this minute for all the money the
+Arcadia Company could pay me, Mr. Ballard."
+
+Ballard was young, fit, vigorous, and in abounding health. Moreover, he
+was a typical product of an age which scoffs at superstition and is
+impatient of all things irreducible to the terms of algebraic formulas.
+But here and now, on the actual scene of the fatalities, the "two sheer
+accidents and a commonplace tragedy" were somewhat less easily dismissed
+than when he had thus contemptuously named them for Gardiner in the
+Boston railway station. Notwithstanding, he was quite well able to shake
+off the little thrill of disquietude and to laugh at Hoskins's vicarious
+anxiety.
+
+"I wasn't raised in the woods, Hoskins, but there was plenty of tall
+timber near enough to save me from being scared by an owl," he
+asseverated. Then, as a towering derrick head loomed gallows-like in the
+gathering dusk, with a white blotch of masonry to fill the ravine over
+which it stood sentinel: "Is that our camp?"
+
+"That's Elbow Canyon," said the engineman; and he shut off steam and
+woke the hill echoes with the whistle.
+
+Ballard made out something of the lay of the land at the headquarters
+while the engine was slowing through the temporary yard. There was the
+orderly disorder of a construction terminal: tracks littered with cars
+of material, a range of rough shed shelters for the stone-cutters, a
+dotting of sleeping-huts and adobes on a little mesa above, and a huge,
+weathered mess-tent, lighted within, and glowing orange-hued in the
+twilight. Back of the camp the rounded hills grew suddenly precipitous,
+but through the river gap guarded by the sentinel derrick, there was a
+vista distantly backgrounded by the mass of the main range rising darkly
+under its evergreens, with the lights of a great house starring the
+deeper shadow.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"FIRE IN THE ROCK!"
+
+
+Bromley was on hand to meet his new chief when Ballard dropped from the
+step of the halted engine. A few years older, and browned to a tender
+mahogany by the sun of the altitudes and the winds of the desert, he was
+still the Bromley of Ballard's college memories: compact, alert,
+boyishly smiling, neat, and well-groomed. With Anglo-Saxon ancestry on
+both sides, the meeting could not be demonstrative.
+
+"Same little old 'Beau Bromley,'" was Ballard's greeting to go with the
+hearty hand-grip; and Bromley's reply was in keeping. After which they
+climbed the slope to the mesa and the headquarters office in comradely
+silence, not because there was nothing to be said, but because the
+greater part of it would keep.
+
+Having picked up the engine "special" with his field-glass as it came
+down the final zigzag in the descent from the pass, Bromley had supper
+waiting in the adobe-walled shack which served as the engineers'
+quarters; and until the pipes were lighted after the meal there was
+little talk save of the golden past. But when the camp cook had cleared
+the table, Ballard reluctantly closed the book of reminiscence and gave
+the business affair its due.
+
+"How are you coming on with the work, Loudon?" he asked. "Don't need a
+chief, do you?"
+
+"Don't you believe it!" said the substitute, with such heartfelt
+emphasis that Ballard smiled. "I'm telling you right now, Breckenridge,
+I never was so glad to shift a responsibility since I was born. Another
+month of it alone would have turned me gray."
+
+"And yet, in my hearing, people are always saying that you are nothing
+less than a genius when it comes to handling workingmen. Isn't it so?"
+
+"Oh, that part of it is all right. It's the hoodoo that is making an old
+man of me before my time."
+
+"The what?"
+
+Bromley moved uneasily in his chair, and Ballard could have sworn that
+he gave a quick glance into the dark corners of the room before he said:
+"I'm giving you the men's name for it. But with or without a name, it
+hangs over this job like the shadow of a devil-bat's wings. The men sit
+around and smoke and talk about it till bedtime, and the next day some
+fellow makes a bad hitch on a stone, or a team runs away, or a blast
+hangs fire in the quarry, and we have a dead man for supper.
+Breckenridge, it is simply _hell_!"
+
+Ballard shook his head incredulously.
+
+"You've let a few ill-natured coincidences rattle you," was his comment.
+"What is it? Or, rather, what is at the bottom of it?"
+
+"I don't know; nobody knows. The 'coincidences,' as you call them, were
+here when I came; handed down from Braithwaite's drowning, I suppose.
+Then Sanderson got tangled up with Manuel's woman--as clear a case of
+superinduced insanity as ever existed--and in less than two months he
+and Manuel jumped in with Winchesters, and poor Billy passed out. That
+got on everybody's nerves, of course; and then Macpherson came. You know
+what he was--a hard-headed, sarcastic old Scotchman, with the bitterest
+tongue that was ever hung in the middle and adjusted to wag both ways.
+He tried ridicule; and when that didn't stop the crazy happenings, he
+took to bullyragging. The day the derrick fell on him he was swearing
+horribly at the hoister engineer; and he died with an oath in his
+mouth."
+
+The Kentuckian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his
+head.
+
+"Let me get one thing straight before you go on. Mr. Pelham told me of a
+scrap between the company and an old fellow up here who claims
+everything in sight. Has this emotional insanity you are talking about
+anything to do with the old cattle king's objection to being syndicated
+out of existence?"
+
+"No; only incidentally in Sanderson's affair--which, after all, was a
+purely personal quarrel between two men over a woman. And I wouldn't
+care to say that Manuel was wholly to blame in that."
+
+"Who is this Manuel?" queried Ballard.
+
+"Oh, I thought you knew. He is the colonel's manager and ranch foreman.
+He is a Mexican and an all-round scoundrel, with one lonesome good
+quality--absolute and unimpeachable loyalty to his master. The colonel
+turns the entire business of the cattle raising and selling over to him;
+doesn't go near the ranch once a month himself."
+
+"'The colonel,'" repeated Ballard. "You call him 'the colonel,' and Mr.
+Pelham calls him the 'King of Arcadia.' I assume that he has a name,
+like other men?"
+
+"Sure!" said Bromley. "Hadn't you heard it? It's Craigmiles."
+
+"What!" exclaimed Ballard, holding the match with which he was about to
+relight his pipe until the flame crept up and scorched his fingers.
+
+"That's it--Craigmiles; Colonel Adam Craigmiles--the King of Arcadia.
+Didn't Mr. Pelham tell you----"
+
+"Hold on a minute," Ballard cut in; and he got out of his chair to pace
+back and forth on his side of the table while he was gathering up the
+pieces scattered broadcast by this explosive petard of a name.
+
+At first he saw only the clearing up of the little mysteries shrouding
+Miss Elsa's suddenly changed plans for the summer; how they were
+instantly resolved into the commonplace and the obvious. She had merely
+decided to come home and play hostess to her father's guests. And since
+she knew about the war for the possession of Arcadia, and would quite
+naturally be sorry to have her friend pitted against her father, it
+seemed unnecessary to look further for the origin of Lassley's curiously
+worded telegram. "Lassley's," Ballard called it; but if Lassley had
+signed it, it was fairly certain now that Miss Craigmiles had dictated
+it.
+
+Ballard thought her use of the fatalities as an argument in the warning
+message was a purely feminine touch. None the less he held her as far
+above the influences of the superstitions as he held himself, and it was
+a deeper and more reflective second thought that turned a fresh leaf in
+the book of mysteries.
+
+Was it possible that the three violent deaths were not mere
+coincidences, after all? And, admitting design, could it be remotely
+conceivable that Adam Craigmiles's daughter was implicated, even to the
+guiltless degree of suspecting it? Ballard stopped short in his pacing
+sentry beat and began to investigate, not without certain misgivings.
+
+"Loudon, what manner of man is this Colonel Craigmiles?"
+
+Bromley's reply was characteristic. "The finest ever--type of the
+American country gentleman; suave, courteous, a little inclined to be
+grandiloquent; does the paternal with you till you catch yourself on the
+edge of saying 'sir' to him; and has the biggest, deepest, sweetest
+voice that ever drawled the Southern 'r.'"
+
+"Humph! That isn't exactly the portrait of a fire-eater."
+
+"Don't you make any mistake. I've described the man you'll meet
+socially. On the other side, he's a fighter from away back; the kind of
+man who makes no account of the odds against him, and who doesn't know
+when he is licked. He has told us openly and repeatedly that he will do
+us up if we swamp his house and mine; that he will make it pinch us for
+the entire value of our investment in the dam. I believe he'll do it,
+too; but President Pelham won't back down an inch. So there you
+are--irresistible moving body; immovable fixed body: the collision
+imminent; and we poor devils in between."
+
+Ballard drew back his chair and sat down again. "You are miles beyond my
+depth now," he asserted. "I had less than an hour with Mr. Pelham in
+Denver, and what he didn't tell me would make a good-sized library.
+Begin at the front, and let me have the story of this feud between the
+company and Colonel Craigmiles."
+
+Again Bromley said: "I supposed, of course, that you knew all about
+it"--after which he supplied the missing details.
+
+"It was Braithwaite who was primarily to blame. When the company's plans
+were made public, the colonel did not oppose them, though he knew that
+the irrigation scheme spelled death to the cattle industry. The fight
+began when Braithwaite located the dam here at Elbow Canyon in the
+foothill hogback. There is a better site farther down the river; a
+second depression where an earthwork dike might have taken the place of
+all this costly rockwork."
+
+"I saw it as we came up this evening."
+
+"Yes. Well, the colonel argued for the lower site; offered to donate
+three or four homesteads in it which he had taken up through his
+employees; offered further to take stock in the company; but Braithwaite
+was pig-headed about it. He had been a Government man, and was a crank
+on permanent structures and things monumental; wherefore he was
+determined on building masonry. He ignored the colonel, reported on the
+present site, and the work was begun."
+
+"Go on," said Ballard.
+
+"Naturally, the colonel took this as a flat declaration of war. He has a
+magnificent country house in the upper valley, which must have cost him,
+at this distance from a base of supplies, a round half-million or more.
+When we fill our reservoir, this house will stand on an island of less
+than a half-dozen acres in extent, with its orchards, lawns, and
+ornamental grounds all under water. Which the same is tough."
+
+Ballard was Elsa Craigmiles's lover, and he agreed in a single forcible
+expletive. Bromley acquiesced in the expletive, and went on.
+
+"The colonel refused to sell his country-house holding, as a matter of
+course; and the company decided to take chances on the suit for damages
+which will naturally follow the flooding of the property. Meanwhile,
+Braithwaite had organised his camp, and the foundations were going in. A
+month or so later, he and the colonel had a personal collision, and,
+although Craigmiles was old enough to be his father, Braithwaite struck
+him. There was blood on the moon, right there and then, as you'd
+imagine. The colonel was unarmed, and he went home to get a gun.
+Braithwaite, who was always a cold-blooded brute, got out his
+fishing-tackle and sauntered off down the river to catch a mess of
+trout. He never came back alive."
+
+"Good heavens! But the colonel couldn't have had any hand in
+Braithwaite's drowning!" Ballard burst out, thinking altogether of
+Colonel Craigmiles's daughter.
+
+"Oh, no. At the time of the accident, the colonel was back here at the
+camp, looking high and low for Braithwaite with fire in his eye. They
+say he went crazy mad with disappointment when he found that the river
+had robbed him of his right to kill the man who had struck him."
+
+Ballard was silent for a time. Then he said: "You spoke of a mine that
+would also be flooded by our reservoir. What about that?"
+
+"That came in after Braithwaite's death and Sanderson's appointment as
+chief engineer. When Braithwaite made his location here, there was an
+old prospect tunnel in the hill across the canyon. It was boarded up and
+apparently abandoned, and no one seemed to know who owned it. Later on
+it transpired that the colonel was the owner, and that the mining claim,
+which was properly patented and secured, actually covers the ground upon
+which our dam stands. While Sanderson was busy brewing trouble for
+himself with Manuel, the colonel put three Mexicans at work in the
+tunnel; and they have been digging away there ever since."
+
+"Gold?" asked Ballard.
+
+Bromley laughed quietly.
+
+"Maybe you can find out--nobody else has been able to. But it isn't
+gold; it must be something infinitely more valuable. The tunnel is
+fortified like a fortress, and one or another of the Mexicans is on
+guard day and night. The mouth of the tunnel is lower than the proposed
+level of the dam, and the colonel threatens all kinds of things, telling
+us frankly that it will break the Arcadia Company financially when we
+flood that mine. I have heard him tell Mr. Pelham to his face that the
+water should never flow over any dam the company might build here; that
+he would stick at nothing to defend his property. Mr. Pelham says all
+this is only bluff; that the mine is worthless. But the fact remains
+that the colonel is immensely rich--and is apparently growing richer."
+
+"Has nobody ever seen the inside of this Golconda of a mine?" queried
+Ballard.
+
+"Nobody from our side of the fence. As I've said, it is guarded like the
+sultan's seraglio; and the Mexicans might as well be deaf and dumb for
+all you can get out of them. Macpherson, who was loyal to the company,
+first, last, and all the time, had an assay made from some of the stuff
+spilled out on the dump; but there was nothing doing, so far as the best
+analytical chemist in Denver could find out."
+
+For the first time since the strenuous day of plan-changing in Boston,
+Ballard was almost sorry he had given up the Cuban undertaking.
+
+"It's a beautiful tangle!" he snapped, thinking, one would say, of the
+breach that must be opened between the company's chief engineer and the
+daughter of the militant old cattle king. Then he changed the subject
+abruptly.
+
+"What do you know about the colonel's house-hold, Loudon?"
+
+"All there is to know, I guess. He lives in state in his big country
+mansion that looks like a World's Fair Forest Products Exhibit on the
+outside, and is fitted and furnished regardless of expense in its
+interiors. He is a widower with one daughter--who comes and goes as she
+pleases--and a sister-in-law who is the dearest, finest piece of fragile
+old china you ever read about."
+
+"You've been in the country house, then?"
+
+"Oh, yes. The colonel hasn't made it a personal fight on the working
+force since Braithwaite's time."
+
+"Perhaps you have met Miss--er--the daughter who comes and goes?"
+
+"Sure I have! If you'll promise not to discipline me for hobnobbing with
+the enemy, I'll confess that I've even played duets with her. She
+discovered my weakness for music when she was home last summer."
+
+"Do you happen to know where she is now?"
+
+"On her way to Europe, I believe. At least, that is what Miss
+Cauffrey--she's the fragile-china aunt--was telling me."
+
+"I think not," said Ballard, after a pause. "I think she changed her
+mind and decided to spend the summer at home. When we stopped at
+Ackerman's to take water this evening, I saw three loaded buckboards
+driving in this direction."
+
+"That doesn't prove anything," asserted Bromley. "The old colonel has a
+house-party every little while. He's no anchorite, if he does live in
+the desert."
+
+Ballard was musing again. "Adam Craigmiles," he said, thoughtfully. "I
+wonder what there is in that name to set some sort of bee buzzing in my
+head. If I believed in transmigration, I should say that I had known
+that name, and known it well, in some other existence."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Bromley. "It's not such an unusual name."
+
+"No; if it were, I might trace it. How long did you say the colonel had
+lived in Arcadia?"
+
+"I didn't say. But it must be something over twenty years. Miss Elsa was
+born here."
+
+"And the family is Southern--from what section?"
+
+"I don't know that--Virginia, perhaps, measuring by the colonel's
+accent, pride, hot-headedness, and reckless hospitality."
+
+The clue, if any there were, appeared to be lost; and again Ballard
+smoked on in silence. When the pipe burned out he refilled it, and at
+the match-striking instant a sing-song cry of "Fire in the rock!"
+floated down from the hill crags above the adobe, and the jar of a
+near-by explosion shook the air and rattled the windows.
+
+"What was that?" he queried.
+
+"It's our quarry gang getting out stone," was Bromley's reply. "We were
+running short of headers for the tie courses, and I put on a
+night-shift."
+
+"Whereabouts is your quarry?"
+
+"Just around the shoulder of the hill, and a hundred feet, or such a
+matter, above us. It is far enough to be out of range."
+
+A second explosion punctuated the explanation. Then there was a third
+and still heavier shock, a rattling of pebbles on the sheet-iron roof of
+the adobe, and a scant half-second later a fragment of stone the size of
+a man's head crashed through roof and ceiling and made kindling-wood of
+the light pine table at which the two men were sitting. Ballard sprang
+to his feet, and said something under his breath; but Bromley sat still,
+with a faint yellow tint discolouring the sunburn on his face.
+
+"Which brings us back to our starting-point--the hoodoo," he said
+quietly. "To-morrow morning, when you go around the hill and see where
+that stone came from, you'll say that it was a sheer impossibility. Yet
+the impossible thing has happened. It is reaching for you now,
+Breckenridge; and a foot or two farther that way would have--" He
+stopped, swallowed hard, and rose unsteadily. "For God's sake, old man,
+throw up this cursed job and get out of here, while you can do it
+alive!"
+
+"Not much!" said the new chief contemptuously. And then he asked which
+of the two bunks in the adjoining sleeping-room was his.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ELBOW CANYON
+
+
+Ballard had his first appreciative view of his new field of labor before
+breakfast on the morning following his arrival, with Bromley as his
+sightsman.
+
+Viewed in their entirety by daylight, the topographies appealed
+irresistibly to the technical eye; and Ballard no longer wondered that
+Braithwaite had overlooked or disregarded all other possible sites for
+the great dam.
+
+The basin enclosed by the circling foothills and backed by the forested
+slopes of the main range was a natural reservoir, lacking only a
+comparatively short wall of masonry to block the crooked gap in the
+hills through which the river found its way to the lower levels of the
+grass-lands.
+
+The gap itself was an invitation to the engineer. Its rock-bound slopes
+promised the best of anchorages for the shore-ends of the masonry; and
+at its lower extremity a jutting promontory on the right bank of the
+stream made a sharp angle in the chasm; the elbow which gave the outlet
+canyon its name.
+
+The point or crook of the elbow, the narrowest pass in the cleft, had
+been chosen as the site for the dam. Through the promontory a short
+tunnel was driven at the river-level to provide a diverting spillway for
+the torrent; and by this simple expedient a dry river-bed in which to
+build the great wall of concrete and masonry had been secured.
+
+"That was Braithwaite's notion, I suppose?" said Ballard, indicating the
+tunnel through which the stream, now at summer freshet volume, thundered
+on its way around the building site to plunge sullenly into its natural
+bed below the promontory. "Nobody but a Government man would have had
+the courage to spend so much time and money on a mere preliminary. It's
+a good notion, though."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that," was Bromley's reply. "Doylan, the rock-boss,
+tells a fairy-story about the tunnel that will interest you when you
+hear it. He had the contract for driving it, you know."
+
+"What was the story?"
+
+Bromley laughed. "You'll have to get Mike to tell it, with the proper
+Irish frills. But the gist of it is this: You know these hogback
+hills--how they seem to be made up of all the geological odds and ends
+left over after the mountains were built. Mike swears they drove through
+limestone, sandstone, porphyry, fire-clay, chert, mica-schist, and _mud_
+digging that tunnel; which the same, if true, doesn't promise very well
+for the foundations of our dam."
+
+"But the plans call for bed-rock under the masonry," Ballard objected.
+
+"Oh, yes; and we have it--apparently. But some nights, when I've lain
+awake listening to the peculiar hollow roar of the water pounding
+through that tunnel, I've wondered if Doylan's streak of mud mightn't
+under-lie our bed-rock."
+
+Ballard's smile was good-naturedly tolerant.
+
+"You'd be a better engineer, if you were not a musician, Loudon. You
+have too much imagination. Is that the colonel's country house up yonder
+in the middle of our reservoir-that-is-to-be?"
+
+"It is."
+
+Ballard focussed his field-glass upon the tree-dotted knoll a mile away
+in the centre of the upper valley. It was an ideal building site for the
+spectacular purpose. On all sides the knoll sloped gently to the valley
+level; and the river, a placid vale-land stream in this upper reach,
+encircled three sides of the little hill. Among the trees, and
+distinguishable from them only by its right lines and gable angles,
+stood a noble house, built, as it seemed, of great tree-trunks with the
+bark on.
+
+Ballard could imagine the inspiring outlook from the brown-pillared
+Greek portico facing westward; the majestic sweep of the enclosing
+hills, bare and with their rocky crowns worn into a thousand fantastic
+shapes; the uplift of the silent, snow-capped mountains to right and
+left; the vista of the broad, outer valley opening through the gap where
+the dam was building.
+
+"The colonel certainly had an eye for the picturesque when he pitched
+upon that knoll for his building-site," was his comment. "How does he
+get the water up there to make all that greenery?"
+
+"Pumps it, bless your heart! What few modern improvements you won't find
+installed at Castle 'Cadia aren't worth mentioning. And, by the way,
+there is another grouch--we're due to drown his power-pumping and
+electric plant at the portal of the upper canyon under twenty feet of
+our lake. More bad blood, and a lot more damages."
+
+"Oh, damn!" said Ballard; and he meant the imprecation, and not the pile
+of masonry which his predecessors had heaped up in the rocky chasm at
+his feet.
+
+Bromley chuckled. "That is what the colonel is apt to say when you
+mention the Arcadia Company in his hearing. Do you blame him so very
+much?"
+
+"Not I. If I owned a home like that, in a wilderness that I had
+discovered for myself, I'd fight for it to a finish. Last night when you
+showed me the true inwardness of this mix-up, I was sick and sorry. If I
+had known five days ago what I know now, you couldn't have pulled me
+into it with a two-inch rope."
+
+"On general principles?" queried Bromley curiously.
+
+"Not altogether. Business is business; and you've intimated that the
+colonel is not so badly overmatched in the money field--and when all is
+said, it is a money fight with the long purse to win. But there is a
+personal reason why I, of all men in the world, should have stayed out.
+I did not know it when I accepted Mr. Pelham's offer, and now it is too
+late to back down. I'm a thousand times sorrier for Colonel Craigmiles
+than ever you can be, Loudon; but, as the chief engineer of the Arcadia
+Company, I'm pledged to obliterate him."
+
+"That is precisely what he declares he will do to the company," laughed
+Bromley. "And there,"--pointing across the ravine to an iron-bound door
+closing a tunnel entrance in the opposite hillside--"is his advanced
+battery. That is the mine I was telling you about."
+
+"H'm," said the new chief, measuring the distance with his eyes. "If
+that mining-claim is the regulation size, it doesn't leave us much elbow
+room over there."
+
+"It doesn't leave us any--as I told you last night, the dam itself
+stands upon a portion of the claim. In equity, if there were any equity
+in a law fight against a corporation, the colonel could enjoin us right
+now. He hasn't done it; he has contented himself with marking out that
+dead-line you can see over there just above our spillway. The colonel
+staked that out in Billy Sanderson's time, and courteously informed us
+that trespassers would be potted from behind that barricade; that there
+was a machine-gun mounted just inside of that door which commanded the
+approaches. Just to see if he meant what he said, some of the boys
+rigged up a scarecrow dummy, and carefully pushed it over the line one
+evening after supper. I wasn't here, but Fitzpatrick says the colonel's
+Mexican garrison in the tunnel fairly set the air afire with a volley
+from the machine-gun."
+
+Ballard said "H'm" again, and was silent what time they were climbing
+the hill to the quarries on their own side of the ravine. When he spoke,
+it was not of the stone the night shift had been getting out.
+
+"Loudon, has it ever occurred to you that the colonel's mine play is a
+very large-sized trump card? We can submerge the house, the grounds, and
+his improvements up yonder in the upper canyon and know approximately
+how much it is going to cost the company to pay the bill. But when the
+water backs up into that tunnel, we are stuck for whatever damages he
+cares to claim."
+
+"Sure thing," said Bromley. "No one on earth will ever know whether
+we've swamped a five-million-dollar mine or a twenty-five-cent hole in
+the ground."
+
+"That being the case, I mean to see the inside of that tunnel," Ballard
+went on doggedly. "I am sorry I allowed Mr. Pelham to let me in for
+this; but in justice to the people who pay my salary, I must know what
+we are up against over there."
+
+"I don't believe you will make any bad breaks in that direction,"
+Bromley suggested. "If you try it by main strength and awkwardness, as
+Macpherson did, you'll get what he very narrowly escaped--a young lead
+mine started inside of you by one of the colonel's Mexican bandits. If
+you try it any other way, the colonel will be sure to spot you; and you
+go out of his good books and Miss Elsa's--no invitations to the big
+house, no social alleviations, no ice-cream and cake, no heavenly summer
+nights when you can sit out on the Greek-pillared portico with a pretty
+girl, and forget for the moment that you are a buccaneering bully of
+labouring men, marooned, with a lot of dry-land pirates like yourself,
+in the Arcadia desert. No, my dear Breckenridge; I think it is safe to
+prophesy that you won't do anything you say you will."
+
+"Won't I?" growled the new chief, looking at his watch. Then: "Let's go
+down to breakfast." And, with a sour glance at the hill over which the
+roof-smashing rock of the previous night must have been hurled: "Don't
+forget to tell Quinlan to be a little more sparing with his powder up
+here. Impress it on his mind that he is getting out building stone--not
+shooting the hill down for concrete."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE POLO PLAYERS
+
+
+Ballard gave the Saturday, his first day in the new field, to Bromley
+and the work on the dam, inspecting, criticising, suggesting changes,
+and otherwise adjusting the wheels of the complicated constructing
+mechanism at the Elbow Canyon nerve centre to run efficiently and
+smoothly, and at accelerated speed.
+
+"That's about all there is to say," he summed up to his admiring
+assistant, at the close of his first administrative day. "You're keyed
+up to concert pitch all right, here, and the _tempo_ is not so bad. But
+'drive' is the word, Loudon. Wherever you see a chance to cut a corner,
+cut it. The Fitzpatricks are a little inclined to be slow and sure:
+crowd the idea into old Brian's head that bonuses are earned by being
+swift and sure."
+
+"Which means that you're not going to stay here and drive the stone and
+concrete gangs yourself?" queried Bromley.
+
+"That is what it means, for the present," replied the new chief; and at
+daybreak Monday morning he was off, bronco-back, to put in a busy
+fortnight quartering the field in all directions and getting in touch
+with the various subcontractors at the many subsidiary camps of ditch
+diggers and railroad builders scattered over the length and breadth of
+the Kingdom of Arcadia.
+
+On one of the few nights when he was able to return to the headquarters
+camp for supper and lodging, Bromley proposed a visit to Castle 'Cadia.
+Ballard's refusal was prompt and decided.
+
+"No, Loudon; not for me, yet a while. I'm too tired to be anybody's good
+company," was the form the refusal took. "Go gossiping, if you feel like
+it, but leave me out of the social game until I get a little better grip
+on the working details. Later on, perhaps, I'll go with you and pay my
+respects to Colonel Craigmiles--but not to-night."
+
+Bromley went alone and found that Ballard's guess based upon his glimpse
+of the loaded buckboards _en route_ was borne out by the facts. Castle
+'Cadia was comfortably filled with a summer house-party; and Miss
+Craigmiles had given up her European yachting voyage to come home and
+play the hostess to her father's guests.
+
+Also, Bromley discovered that the colonel's daughter drew her own
+conclusions from Ballard's refusal to present himself, the discovery
+developing upon Miss Elsa's frank statement of her convictions.
+
+"I know your new tyrant," she laughed; "I have known him for ages. He
+won't come to Castle 'Cadia; he is afraid we might make him disloyal to
+his Arcadia Irrigation salt. You may tell him I said so, if you happen
+to remember it."
+
+Bromley did remember it, but it was late when he returned to the camp at
+the canyon, and Ballard was asleep. And the next morning the diligent
+new chief was mounted and gone as usual long before the "turn-out"
+whistle blew; for which cause Miss Elsa's challenge remained
+undelivered; was allowed to lie until the dust of intervening busy days
+had quite obscured it.
+
+It was on these scouting gallops to the outlying camps that Ballard
+defined the limits of the "hoodoo." Its influence, he found, diminished
+proportionately as the square of the distance from the headquarters camp
+at Elbow Canyon. But in the wider field there were hindrances of another
+and more tangible sort.
+
+Bourke Fitzpatrick, the younger of the brothers in the contracting firm,
+was in charge of the ditch digging; and he had irritating tales to tell
+of the lawless doings of Colonel Craigmiles's herdsmen.
+
+"I'm telling you, Mr. Ballard, there isn't anything them devils won't be
+up to," he complained, not without bitterness. "One night they'll
+uncouple every wagon on the job and throw the coupling-pins away; and
+the next, maybe, they'll be stampeding the mules. Two weeks ago, on Dan
+Moriarty's section, they came with men and horses in the dead of night,
+hitched up the scrapers, and put a thousand yards of earth back into the
+ditch."
+
+"Wear it out good-naturedly, if you can, Bourke; it is only horse-play,"
+was Ballard's advice. That grown men should seriously hope to defeat the
+designs of a great corporation by any such puerile means was
+inconceivable.
+
+"Horse-play, is it?" snapped Fitzpatrick. "Don't you believe it, Mr.
+Ballard. I can take a joke with any man living; but this is no joke. It
+comes mighty near being war--with the scrapping all on one side."
+
+"A night guard?" suggested Ballard.
+
+Fitzpatrick shook his head.
+
+"We've tried that; and you'll not get a man to patrol the work since
+Denny Flaherty took his medicine. The cow-punchers roped him and skidded
+him 'round over the prairie till it took one of the men a whole blessed
+day to dig the cactus thorns out of him. And me paying both of them
+overtime. Would you call that a joke?"
+
+Ballard's reply revealed some latent doubt as to the justification for
+Bromley's defense of Colonel Craigmiles's fighting methods.
+
+"If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you
+say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these
+fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"
+
+The contractor shook his head.
+
+"The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all,
+as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican
+foreman; and Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody.
+Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang
+that roped him."
+
+Ballard was feeling less peaceable when he rode on to the next camp, and
+as he made the round of the northern outposts the fighting strain which
+had come down to him from his pioneer ancestors began to assert itself
+in spite of his efforts to control it. At every stopping-place
+Fitzpatrick's complaint was amplified. Depredations had followed each
+other with increasing frequency since Macpherson's death; and once, when
+one of the subcontractors had been provoked into resistance, arms had
+been used and a free fight had ensued.
+
+Turning the matter over in his mind in growing indignation, Ballard had
+determined, by the time he had made the complete round of the outlying
+camps, upon the course he should pursue. "I'll run a sheriff's posse in
+here and clean up the entire outfit; that's about what I'll do!" he was
+saying wrathfully to himself as he galloped eastward on the stage trail
+late in the afternoon of the final day. "The Lord knows I don't want to
+make a blood-feud of it, but if they will have it----"
+
+The interruption was a little object-lesson illustrating the grievances
+of the contractors. Roughly paralleling the stage trail ran the line of
+the proposed southern lateral canal, marked by its double row of
+location stakes. At a turn in the road Ballard came suddenly upon what
+appeared to be an impromptu game of polo.
+
+Flap-hatted herdsmen in shaggy overalls, and swinging long clubs in lieu
+of polo sticks, were riding in curious zigzags over the canal course,
+and bending for a drive at each right and left swerve of their wiry
+little mounts. It took the Kentuckian a full minute to master the
+intricacies of the game. Then he saw what was doing. The location stakes
+for the ditch boundaries were set opposite and alternate, and the object
+of the dodging riders was to determine which of them could club the
+greatest number of stakes out of the ground without missing a blow or
+drawing rein.
+
+Ballard singled out the leader, a handsome, well-built _caballero_, with
+the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of
+things, red wrath to the fore.
+
+"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"
+
+"_Si, Señor_," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his
+bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.
+
+"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia
+Company."
+
+"Ha! Señor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."
+
+"Never mind that; the pleasure isn't mutual, by a damned sight. You tell
+your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes
+back where they found them." Ballard was hot.
+
+"You give-a the h-order in this valley, señor?" asked the Mexican
+softly.
+
+"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"
+
+"Señor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
+like-a that!"
+
+[Illustration: "Señor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for
+that he spik to me like-a-that!"]
+
+"Have you?" snorted Ballard contemptuously. "Well, you won't kill me.
+Call your men off, I say!"
+
+There was no need. The makeshift polo game had paused, and the riders
+were gathering about the quarrelling two.
+
+"Bat your left eye once, and we'll rope him for you, Manuel," said one.
+
+"Wonder if I c'd knock a two-bagger with that hat o' his'n without
+mussin' his hair?" said another.
+
+"Say, you fellers, wait a minute till I make that bronc' o' his'n do a
+cake-walk!" interposed a third, casting the loop of his riata on the
+ground so that Ballard's horse would be thrown if he lifted hoof.
+
+It was an awkward crisis, and the engineer stood to come off with little
+credit. He was armed, but even in the unfettered cattle country one
+cannot pistol a laughing jeer. It was the saving sense of humour that
+came to his aid, banishing red wrath. There was no malice in the jeers.
+
+"Sail in when you're ready, boys," he laughed. "I fight for my brand the
+same as you'd fight for yours. Those pegs have got to go back in the
+ground where you found them."
+
+One of the flap-hatted riders dropped his reins, drummed with his
+elbows, and crowed lustily. The foreman backed his horse deftly out of
+the enclosing ring; and the man nearest to Ballard on the right made a
+little cast of his looped rope, designed to whip Ballard's pistol out of
+its holster. If the engineer had been the tenderfoot they took him for,
+the trouble would have culminated quickly.
+
+With the laugh still on his lips, the Kentuckian was watching every move
+of the Mexican. There was bloodthirst, waiting only for the shadow of an
+excuse, glooming in the handsome black eyes. Ballard remembered
+Sanderson's fate, and a quick thrill of racial sympathy for the dead man
+tuned him to the fighting pitch. He knew he was confronting a
+treacherous bully of the type known to the West as a "killer"; a man
+whose regard for human life could be accurately and exactly measured by
+his chance for escaping the penalty for its taking.
+
+It was at this climaxing moment, while Ballard was tightening his
+eye-hold upon the one dangerous antagonist, and foiling with his free
+hand the attempts of the playful "Scotty" at his right to disarm him,
+that the diversion came. A cloud of dust on the near-by stage trail
+resolved itself into a fiery-red, purring motor-car with a single
+occupant; and a moment later the car had left the road and was heading
+across the grassy interspace.
+
+Manuel's left hand was hovering above his pistol-butt; and Ballard took
+his eyes from the menace long enough to glance aside at the approaching
+motorist. He was a kingly figure of a man well on in years,
+white-haired, ruddy of face, with huge military mustaches and a goatee.
+He brought the car with a skilful turn into the midst of things; and
+Ballard, confident now that the Mexican foreman no longer needed
+watching, saw a singular happening.
+
+While one might count two, the old man in the motor-car stared hard at
+him, rose in his place behind the steering-wheel, staggered, groped with
+his hands as the blind grope, and then fell back into the driving-seat
+with a groan.
+
+Ballard was off his horse instantly, tendering his pocket-flask. But the
+old man's indisposition seemed to pass as suddenly as it had come.
+
+"Thank you, suh," he said in a voice that boomed for its very depth and
+sweetness; "I reckon I've been driving a little too fast. Youh--youh
+name is Ballard--Breckenridge Ballard, isn't it?" he inquired
+courteously, completely ignoring the dissolving ring of practical
+jokers.
+
+"It is. And you are Colonel Craigmiles?"
+
+"At youh service, suh; entiahly at youh service. I should have known you
+anywhere for a Ballard. Youh mother was a Hardaway, but you don't take
+after that side. No, suh"--with calm deliberation--"you are youh father's
+son, Mistah Ballard." Then, as one coming at a bound from the remote past
+to the present: "Was thah any--ah--little discussion going on between you
+and--ah--Manuel, Mistuh Ballard?"
+
+Five minutes earlier the engineer had been angry enough to prefer
+spiteful charges against the polo players all and singular. But the
+booming of the deep voice had a curiously mollifying effect.
+
+"It is hardly worth mentioning," he found himself replying. "I was
+protesting to your foreman because the boys were having a little game of
+polo at our expense--knocking our location stakes out of the ground."
+
+The kingly old man in the motor-car drew himself up, and there was a
+mild explosion directed at the Mexican foreman.
+
+"Manuel, I'm suhprised--right much suhprised and humiliated, suh! I
+thought it was--ah--distinctly undehstood that all this schoolboy
+triflin' was to be stopped. Let me heah no more of it. And see that
+these heah stakes are replaced; carefully replaced, if you please, suh."
+And then to the complainant: "I'm right sorry, I assure you, Mistuh
+Ballard. Let me prove it by carrying you off to dinneh with us at Castle
+'Cadia. Grigsby, heah, will lead youh horse to camp, and fetch any
+little necessaries you might care to send for. Indulge me, suh, and let
+me make amends. My daughter speaks of you so often that I feel we ought
+to be mo' friendly."
+
+Under much less favourable conditions it is conceivable that the
+Kentuckian would have overridden many barriers for the sake of finding
+the open door at Castle 'Cadia. And, the tour of inspection being
+completed, there was no special duty call to sound a warning.
+
+"I shall be delighted, I'm sure," he burbled, quite like an infatuated
+lover; and when the cow-boy messenger was charged with the errand to the
+headquarters camp, Ballard took his place beside the company's enemy,
+and the car was sent purring across to the hill-skirting stage road.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+CASTLE 'CADIA
+
+
+It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills;
+and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not
+speed the motor-car.
+
+Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once
+suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the
+principal antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of
+Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky
+boyhood--all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so
+winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his attitude so
+affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a
+fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the
+vanishing point.
+
+"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If
+it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed,
+gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured
+guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.
+
+The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the
+headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the
+hogback foothills well to the southward, and approaching the inner
+valley at right angles to the course of the river and the railway.
+
+The sun had sunk behind the western mountain barrier and the dusk was
+gathering when the colonel quickened the pace, and the car topped the
+last of the hills in a staccato rush. Ballard heard the low thunder of
+the Boiling Water in its upper canyon, and had glimpses of weird shapes
+of eroded sandstone looming in huge pillars and fantastic mushroom
+figures in the growing darkness.
+
+Then the lights of Castle 'Cadia twinkled in their tree-setting at the
+top of the little knoll; the drought-hardened road became a gravelled
+carriage-drive under the pneumatic tires; and a final burst of speed
+sent the car rocketing to the summit of the knoll through a
+maple-shadowed avenue.
+
+The great tree-trunk-pillared portico of the country house was deserted
+when the colonel cut out the motor-battery switch at the carriage step.
+But a moment later a white-gowned figure appeared in the open doorway,
+and the colonel's daughter came to the step, to laugh gayly, and to say:
+
+"Why, Mr. Ballard, I'm astounded! Have you really decided that it is
+quite safe to trust yourself in the camp of the enemy?"
+
+Ballard had seen Castle 'Cadia at field-glass range; and he had
+Bromley's enthusiastic description of the house of marvels to push
+anticipation some little distance along the way to meet the artistic
+reality. None the less, the reality came with the shock of the
+unexpected.
+
+In the softened light of the shaded electric pendants, the massive
+pillars of the portico appeared as single trees standing as they had
+grown in the mountain forest. Underfoot the floor was of hewn
+tree-trunks; but the house walls, like the pillars, were of logs in the
+rough, cunningly matched and fitted to conceal the carpentry.
+
+A man had come to take the automobile, and the colonel paused to call
+attention to a needed adjustment of the motor. Ballard made use of the
+isolated moment.
+
+"I have accounted for you at last," he said, prolonging the greeting
+hand-clasp to the ultimate limit. "I know now what has made you what you
+are."
+
+"Really?" she questioned lightly. "And all these years I have been
+vainly imagining that I had acquired the manner of the civilized East!
+Isn't it pathetic?"
+
+"Very," he agreed quite gravely. "But the pathos is all on my side."
+
+"Meaning that I might let you go and dress for dinner? I shall. Enter
+the house of the enemy, Mr. Ballard. A cow-punching princess bids you
+welcome."
+
+She was looking him fairly in the eyes when she said it, and he
+acquitted her doubtfully of the charge of intention. But her repetition,
+accidental or incidental, of his own phrase was sufficiently
+disconcerting to make him awkwardly silent while she led the way into
+the spacious reception-hall.
+
+Here the spell of the enchantments laid fresh hold on him. The rustic
+exterior of the great house was only the artistically designed
+contrast--within were richness, refinement, and luxury unbounded. The
+floors were of polished wood, and the rugs were costly Daghestans.
+Beyond portières of curious Indian bead-work, there were vistas of
+harmonious interiors; carved furnishings, beamed and panelled ceilings,
+book-lined walls. The light everywhere came from the softly tinted
+electric globes. There was a great stone fireplace in the hall, but
+radiators flanked the openings, giving an added touch of modernity.
+
+Ballard pulled himself together and strove to recall the fifty-mile,
+sky-reaching mountain barrier lying between all this twentieth-century
+country-house luxury and the nearest outpost of urban civilisation. It
+asked for a tremendous effort; and the realising anchor dragged again
+when Miss Craigmiles summoned a Japanese servant and gave him in charge.
+
+"Show Mr. Ballard to the red room, Tagawi," she directed. And then to
+the guest: "We dine at seven--as informally as you please. You will find
+your bag in your room, and Tagawi will serve you. As you once told me
+when I teased you in your Boston workshop--'If you don't see what you
+want, ask for it.'"
+
+The Kentuckian followed his guide up the broad stair and through a
+second-floor corridor which abated no jot of the down-stair
+magnificence. Neither did his room, for that matter. Hangings of
+Pompeian red gave it its name; and it was spacious and high-studded, and
+critically up to date in its appointments.
+
+The little brown serving-man deftly opened the bag brought by the
+colonel's messenger from Ballard's quarters at the Elbow Canyon camp,
+and laid out the guest's belongings. That done, he opened the door of
+the bath. "The honourable excellency will observe the hot water; also
+cold. Are the orders other for me?"
+
+Ballard shook his head, dismissed the smiling little man, and turned on
+the water.
+
+"I reckon I'd better take it cold," he said to himself; "then I'll know
+certainly whether I'm awake or dreaming. By Jove! but this place is a
+poem! I don't wonder that the colonel is fighting Berserk to save it
+alive. And Mr. Pelham and his millionaires come calmly up to the counter
+and offer to buy it--with mere money!"
+
+He filled the porcelain bath with a crystal-clear flood that, measured
+by its icy temperature, might have been newly distilled glacier drip;
+and the cold plunge did something toward establishing the reality of
+things. But the incredibilities promptly reasserted themselves when he
+went down a little in advance of the house-party guests, and met Elsa,
+and was presented to a low-voiced lady with silvery hair and the face of
+a chastened saint, named to him as Miss Cauffrey, but addressed by Elsa
+as "Aunt June."
+
+"I hope you find yourself somewhat refreshed, Mr. Ballard," said the
+sweet-voiced châtelaine. "Elsa tells me you have been in the tropics,
+and our high altitudes must be almost distressing at first; I know I
+found them so."
+
+"Really, I hadn't noticed the change," returned Ballard rather vaguely.
+Then he bestirred himself, and tried to live up to the singularly
+out-of-place social requirements. "I'm not altogether new to the
+altitudes, though I haven't been in the West for the past year or two.
+For that matter, I can't quite realise that I am in the West at this
+moment--at least in the uncitied part."
+
+Miss Cauffrey smiled, and the king's daughter laughed softly.
+
+"It does me so much good!" she declared, mocking him. "All through that
+dining-car dinner on the 'Overland Flyer' you were trying to reconcile
+me with the Western barbarities. Didn't you say something about being
+hopeful because I was aware of the existence of an America west of the
+Alleghanies?"
+
+"Please let me down as easily as you can," pleaded the engineer. "You
+must remember that I am only a plain workingman."
+
+"You are come to take poor Mr. Macpherson's place?" queried Miss
+Cauffrey; which was Ballard's first intimation that the Arcadian
+promotion scheme was not taboo by the entire house-hold of Castle
+'Cadia.
+
+"That is what I supposed I was doing, up to this evening. But it seems
+that I have stumbled into fairyland instead."
+
+"No," said the house-daughter, laughing at him again--"only into the
+least Arcadian part of Arcadia. And after dinner you will be free to go
+where you are impatient to be at this very moment."
+
+"I don't know about that," was Ballard's rejoinder. "I was just now
+wondering if I could be heroic enough to go contentedly from all this to
+my adobe shack in the construction camp."
+
+Miss Craigmiles mocked him again.
+
+"My window in the Alta Vista sleeper chanced to be open that night while
+the train was standing in the Denver station. Didn't I hear Mr. Pelham
+say that the watchword--your watchword--was to be 'drive,' for every
+man, minute, and dollar there was in it?"
+
+Ballard said, "Oh, good Lord!" under his breath, and a hot flush rose to
+humiliate him, in spite of his efforts to keep it down. Now it was quite
+certain that her word of welcome was not a mere coincidence. She had
+overheard that brutal and uncalled-for boast of his about making love to
+"the cow-punching princesses"; and this was his punishment.
+
+It was a moment for free speech of the explanatory sort, but Miss
+Cauffrey's presence forbade it. So he could only say, in a voice that
+might have melted a heart of stone: "I am wholly at your mercy--and I am
+your guest. You shouldn't step on a man when he's down. It isn't
+Christian."
+
+Whether she would have stepped on him or not was left a matter
+indeterminate, since the members of the house-party were coming down by
+twos and threes, and shortly afterward dinner was announced.
+
+By this time Ballard was growing a little hardened to the surprises; and
+the exquisitely appointed dining-room evoked only a left-over thrill.
+And at dinner, in the intervals allowed him by Miss Dosia Van Bryck, who
+was his table companion, there were other things to think of. For
+example, he was curious to know if Wingfield's air of proprietorship in
+Miss Craigmiles would persist under Colonel Craigmiles's own roof.
+
+Apparently it did persist. Before the first course was removed Ballard's
+curiosity was in the way of being amply satisfied; and he was saying
+"Yes" and "No" like a well-adjusted automaton to Miss Van Bryck.
+
+In the seating he had Major Blacklock and one of the Cantrell girls for
+his opposites; and Lucius Bigelow and the other sharer of the common
+Cantrell Christian name widened the gap. But the centrepiece in the
+middle of the great mahogany was low; and Ballard could see over it only
+too well.
+
+Wingfield and Elsa were discussing playmaking and the playmaker's art;
+or, rather, Wingfield was talking shop with cheerful dogmatism, and Miss
+Craigmiles was listening; and if the rapt expression of her face meant
+anything.... Ballard lost himself in gloomy abstraction, and the colours
+of the electric spectrum suddenly merged for him into a greenish-gray.
+
+"I should think your profession would be perfectly grand, Mr. Ballard.
+Don't you find it so?" Thus Miss Dosia, who, being quite void of
+subjective enthusiasm, felt constrained to try to evoke it in others.
+
+"Very," said Ballard, hearing nothing save the upward inflection which
+demanded a reply.
+
+Miss Van Bryck seemed mildly surprised; but after a time she tried
+again.
+
+"Has any one told you that Mr. Wingfield is making the studies for a new
+play?" she asked.
+
+Again Ballard marked the rising inflection; said "Yes," at a venture;
+and was straightway humiliated, as he deserved to be.
+
+"It seems so odd that he should come out here for his material," Miss
+Van Bryck went on evenly. "I don't begin to understand how there can be
+any dramatic possibilities in a wilderness house-party, with positively
+no social setting whatever."
+
+"Ah, no; of course not," stammered Ballard, realising now that he was
+fairly at sea. And then, to make matters as bad as they could be: "You
+were speaking of Mr. Wingfield?"
+
+Miss Van Bryck's large blue eyes mirrored reproachful astonishment; but
+she was too placid and too good-natured to be genuinely piqued.
+
+"I fear you must have had a hard day, Mr. Ballard. All this is very
+wearisome to you, isn't it?" she said, letting him have a glimpse of the
+real kindness underlying the inanities.
+
+"My day has been rather strenuous," he confessed. "But you make me
+ashamed. Won't you be merciful and try me again?" And this time he knew
+what he was saying, and meant it.
+
+"It is hardly worth repeating," she qualified--nevertheless, she did
+repeat it.
+
+Ballard, listening now, found the little note of distress in the protest
+against play-building in the wilderness; and his heart warmed to Miss
+Dosia. In the sentimental field, disappointment for one commonly implies
+disappointment for two; and he became suddenly conscious of a
+fellow-feeling for the heiress of the Van Bryck millions.
+
+"There is plenty of dramatic material in Arcadia for Mr. Wingfield, if
+he knows where to look for it," he submitted. "For example, our camp at
+the dam furnishes a 'situation' every now and then." And here he told
+the story of the catapulted stone, adding the little dash of mystery to
+give it the dramatic flavour.
+
+Miss Dosia's interest was as eager as her limitations would permit. "May
+I tell Mr. Wingfield?" she asked, with such innocent craft that Ballard
+could scarcely restrain a smile.
+
+"Certainly. And if Mr. Wingfield is open to suggestion on that side, you
+may bring him down, and I'll put him on the trail of a lot more of the
+mysteries."
+
+"Thank you so much. And may I call it my discovery?"
+
+Again her obviousness touched the secret spring of laughter in him. It
+was very evident that Miss Van Bryck would do anything in reason to
+bring about a solution of continuity in the sympathetic intimacy growing
+up between the pair on the opposite side of the table.
+
+"It is yours, absolutely," he made haste to say. "I should never have
+thought of the dramatic utility if you hadn't suggested it."
+
+"H'm!--ha!" broke in the major. "What are you two young people plotting
+about over there?"
+
+Ballard turned the edge of the query; blunted it permanently by
+attacking a piece of government engineering in which, as he happened to
+know, the major had figured in an advisory capacity. This carrying of
+the war into Africa brought on a battle technical which ran on unbroken
+to the ices and beyond; to the moment when Colonel Craigmiles proposed
+an adjournment to the portico for the coffee and the tobacco. Ballard
+came off second-best, but he had accomplished his object, which was to
+make the shrewd-eyed old major forget if he had overheard too much; and
+Miss Van Bryck gave him his meed of praise.
+
+"You are a very brave man, Mr. Ballard," she said, as he drew the
+portières aside for her. "Everybody else is afraid of the major."
+
+"I've met him before," laughed the Kentuckian; "in one or another of his
+various incarnations. And I didn't learn my trade at West Point, you
+remember."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE BRINK OF HAZARD
+
+
+The summer night was perfect, and the after-dinner gathering under the
+great portico became rather a dispersal. The company fell apart into
+couples and groups when the coffee was served; and while Miss Craigmiles
+and the playwright were still fraying the worn threads of the dramatic
+unities, Ballard consoled himself with the older of the Cantrell girls,
+talking commonplace nothings until his heart ached.
+
+Later on, when young Bigelow had relieved him, and he had given up all
+hope of breaking into the dramatic duet, he rose to go and make his
+parting acknowledgments to Miss Cauffrey and the colonel. It was at that
+moment that Miss Elsa confronted him.
+
+"You are not leaving?" she said. "The evening is still young--even for
+country folk."
+
+"Measuring by the hours I've been neglected, the evening is old, very
+old," he retorted reproachfully.
+
+"Which is another way of saying that we have bored you until you are
+sleepy?" she countered. "But you mustn't go yet--I want to talk to you."
+And she wheeled a great wicker lounging-chair into a quiet corner, and
+beat up the pillows in a near-by hammock, and bade him smoke his pipe if
+he preferred it to the Castle 'Cadia cigars.
+
+"I don't care to smoke anything if you will stay and talk to me," he
+said, love quickly blotting out the disappointments foregone.
+
+"For this one time you may have both--your pipe and me. Are you obliged
+to go back to your camp to-night?"
+
+"Yes, indeed. I ran away, as it was. Bromley will have it in for me for
+dodging him this way."
+
+"Is Mr. Bromley your boss?"
+
+"He is something much better--he is my friend."
+
+Her hammock was swung diagonally across the quiet corner, and she
+arranged her pillows so that the shadow of a spreading potted palm came
+between her eyes and the nearest electric globe.
+
+"Am I not your friend, too?" she asked.
+
+Jerry Blacklock and the younger Miss Cantrell were pacing a slow sentry
+march up and down the open space in front of the lounging-chairs; and
+Ballard waited until they had made the turn and were safely out of
+ear-shot before he said: "There are times when I have to admit it,
+reluctantly."
+
+"How ridiculous!" she scoffed. "What is finer than true friendship?"
+
+"Love," he said simply.
+
+"Cousin Janet will hear you," she warned. Then she mocked him, as was
+her custom. "Does that mean that you would like to have me tell you
+about Mr. Wingfield?"
+
+He played trumps again.
+
+"Yes. When is it to be?"
+
+"How crudely elemental you are to-night! Suppose you ask him?"
+
+"He hasn't given me the right."
+
+"Oh. And I have?"
+
+"You are trying to give it to me, aren't you?"
+
+She was swinging gently in the hammock, one daintily booted foot
+touching the floor.
+
+"You are so painfully direct at times," she complained. "It's like a
+cold shower-bath; invigorating, but shivery. Do you think Mr. Wingfield
+really cares anything for me? I don't. I think he regards me merely as
+so much literary material. He lives from moment to moment in the hope of
+discovering 'situations.'"
+
+"Well,"--assentingly. "I am sure he has chosen a most promising
+subject--and surroundings. The kingdom of Arcadia reeks with dramatic
+possibilities, I should say."
+
+Her face was still in the shadow of the branching palm, but the changed
+tone betrayed her changed mood.
+
+"I have often accused you of having no insight--no intuition," she said
+musingly. "Yet you have a way of groping blindly to the very heart of
+things. How could you know that it has come to be the chief object of my
+life to keep Mr. Wingfield from becoming interested in what you
+flippantly call 'the dramatic possibilities'?"
+
+"I didn't know it," he returned.
+
+"Of course you didn't. Yet it is true. It is one of the reasons why I
+gave up going with the Herbert Lassleys after my passage was actually
+booked on the _Carania_. Cousin Janet's party was made up. Dosia and
+Jerry Blacklock came down to the steamer to see us off. Dosia told me
+that Mr. Wingfield was included. You have often said that I have the
+courage of a man--I hadn't, then. I was horribly afraid."
+
+"Of what?" he queried.
+
+"Of many things. You would not understand if I should try to explain
+them."
+
+"I do understand," he hastened to say. "But you have nothing to fear.
+Castle 'Cadia will merely gain an ally when Wingfield hears the story of
+the little war. Besides, I was not including your father's controversy
+with the Arcadia Company in the dramatic material; I was thinking more
+particularly of the curious and unaccountable happenings that are
+continually occurring on the work--the accidents."
+
+"There is no connection between the two--in your mind?" she asked. She
+was looking away from him, and he could not see her face. But the
+question was eager, almost pathetically eager.
+
+"Assuredly not," he denied promptly. "Otherwise----"
+
+"Otherwise you wouldn't be here to-night as my father's guest, you would
+say. But others are not as charitable. Mr. Macpherson was one of them.
+He charged all the trouble to us, though he could prove nothing. He said
+that if all the circumstances were made public--" She faced him quickly,
+and he saw that the beautiful eyes were full of trouble. "Can't you see
+what would happen--what is likely to happen if Mr. Wingfield sees fit to
+make literary material out of all these mysteries?"
+
+The Kentuckian nodded. "The unthinking, newspaper-reading public would
+probably make one morsel of the accidents and your father's known
+antagonism to the company. But Wingfield would be something less than a
+man and a lover if he could bring himself to the point of making
+literary capital out of anything that might remotely involve you or your
+father."
+
+She shook her head doubtfully.
+
+"You don't understand the artistic temperament. It's a passion. I once
+heard Mr. Wingfield say that a true artist would make copy out of his
+grandmother."
+
+Ballard scowled. It was quite credible that the Lester Wingfields were
+lost to all sense of the common decencies, but that Elsa Craigmiles
+should be in love with the sheik of the caddish tribe was quite beyond
+belief.
+
+"I'll choke him off for you," he said; and his tone took its colour from
+the contemptuous under-thought. "But I'm afraid I've already made a mess
+of it. To tell the truth, I suggested to Miss Van Bryck at dinner that
+our camp might be a good hunting-ground for Wingfield."
+
+"_You said that to Dosia?_" There was something like suppressed horror
+in the low-spoken query.
+
+"Not knowing any better, I did. She was speaking of Wingfield, and of
+the literary barrenness of house-parties in general. I mentioned the
+camp as an alternative--told her to bring him down, and I'd--Good
+heavens! what have I done?"
+
+Even in the softened light of the electric globes he saw that her face
+had become a pallid mask of terror; that she was swaying in the hammock.
+He was beside her instantly; and when she hid her face in her hands, his
+arm went about her for her comforting--this, though Wingfield was
+chatting amiably with Mrs. Van Bryck no more than three chairs away.
+
+"Don't!" he begged. "I'll get out of it some way--lie out of it, fight
+out of it, if needful. I didn't know it meant anything to you. If I
+had--Elsa, dear, I love you; you've known it from the first. You can
+make believe with other men as you please, but in the end I shall claim
+you. Now tell me what it is that you want me to do."
+
+Impulsively she caught at the caressing hand on her shoulder, kissed it,
+and pushed him away with resolute strength.
+
+"You must never forget yourself again, dear friend--or make me forget,"
+she said steadily. "And you must help me as you can. There is
+trouble--deeper trouble than you know or suspect. I tried to keep you
+out of it--away from it; and now you are here in Arcadia, to make it
+worse, infinitely worse. You have seen me laugh and talk with the
+others, playing the part of the woman you know. Yet there is never a
+waking moment when the burden of anxiety is lifted."
+
+He mistook her meaning.
+
+"You needn't be anxious about Wingfield's material hunt," he interposed.
+"If Miss Dosia takes him to the camp, I'll see to it that he doesn't
+hear any of the ghost stories."
+
+"That is only one of the anxieties," she went on hurriedly. "The
+greatest of them is--for you."
+
+"For me? Because----"
+
+"Because your way to Arcadia lay over three graves. That means nothing
+to you--does it also mean nothing that your life was imperilled within
+an hour of your arrival at your camp?"
+
+He drew the big chair nearer to the hammock and sat down again.
+
+"Now you are letting Bromley's imagination run away with yours. That
+rock came from our quarry. There was a night gang getting out stone for
+the dam."
+
+She laid her hand softly on his knee.
+
+"Do you want to know how much I trust you? That stone was thrown by a
+man who was standing upon the high bluff back of your headquarters. He
+thought you were alone in the office, and he meant to kill you. Don't
+ask me who it was, or how I know--I _do_ know."
+
+Ballard started involuntarily. It was not in human nature to take such
+an announcement calmly.
+
+"Do you mean to say that I was coolly ambushed before I could----"
+
+She silenced him with a quick little gesture. Blacklock and Miss
+Cantrell were still pacing their sentry beat, and the major's "H'm--ha!"
+rose in irascible contradiction above the hum of voices.
+
+"I have said all that I dare to say; more than I should have said if you
+were not so rashly determined to make light of things you do not
+understand," she rejoined evenly.
+
+"They are things which I should understand--which I must understand if I
+am to deal intelligently with them," he insisted. "I have been calling
+them one part accident and three parts superstition or imagination. But
+if there is design----"
+
+Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.
+
+"I did not say there was design," she denied.
+
+It was an _impasse_, and the silence which followed emphasised it. When
+he rose to take his leave, love prompted an offer of service, and he
+made it.
+
+"I cannot help believing that you are mistaken," he qualified. "But I
+respect your anxiety so much that I would willingly share it if I could.
+What do you want me to do?"
+
+She turned to look away down the maple-shadowed avenue and her answer
+had tears in it.
+
+"I want you to be watchful--always watchful. I wish you to believe that
+your life is in peril, and to act accordingly. And, lastly, I beg you to
+help me to keep Mr. Wingfield away from Elbow Canyon."
+
+"I shall be heedful," he promised. "And if Mr. Wingfield comes
+material-hunting, I shall be as inhospitable as possible. May I come
+again to Castle 'Cadia?"
+
+The invitation was given instantly, almost eagerly.
+
+"Yes; come as often as you can spare the time. Must you go now? Shall I
+have Otto bring the car and drive you around to your camp?"
+
+Ballard promptly refused to put the chauffeur to the trouble. It was
+only a little more than a mile in the direct line from the house on the
+knoll to the point where the river broke through the foothill hogback,
+and the night was fine and starlit. After the day of hard riding he
+should enjoy the walk.
+
+Elsa did not go with him when he went to say good-night to Miss Cauffrey
+and to his host. He left her sitting in the hammock, and found her still
+there a few minutes later when he came back to say that he must make his
+acknowledgments to her father through her. "I can't find him, and no one
+seems to know where he is," he explained.
+
+She rose quickly and went to the end of the portico to look down a
+second tree-shadowed avenue skirting the mountainward slope of the
+knoll.
+
+"He must have gone to the laboratory; the lights are on," she said; and
+then with a smile that thrilled him ecstatically: "You see what your
+footing is to be at Castle 'Cadia. Father will not make company of you;
+he expects you to come and go as one of us."
+
+With this heart-warming word for his leave-taking Ballard sought out the
+path to which she directed him and swung off down the hill to find the
+trail, half bridle-path and half waggon road, which led by way of the
+river's windings to the outlet canyon and the camp on the outer mesa.
+
+When he was but a little distance from the house he heard the _pad pad_
+of soft footfalls behind him, and presently a great dog of the St.
+Bernard breed overtook him and walked sedately at his side. Ballard
+loved a good dog only less than he loved a good horse, and he stopped to
+pat the St. Bernard, talking to it as he might have talked to a human
+being.
+
+Afterward, when he went on, the dog kept even pace with him, and would
+not go back, though Ballard tried to send him, coaxing first and then
+commanding. To the blandishments the big retriever made his return in
+kind, wagging his tail and thrusting his huge head between Ballard's
+knees in token of affection and loyal fealty. To the commands he was
+entirely deaf, and when Ballard desisted, the dog took his place at one
+side and one step in advance, as if half impatient at his temporary
+master's waste of time.
+
+At the foot-bridge crossing the river the dog ran ahead and came back
+again, much as if he were a scout pioneering the way; and at Ballard's
+"Good dog! Fine old fellow!" he padded along with still graver dignity,
+once more catching the step in advance and looking neither to right nor
+left.
+
+At another time Ballard might have wondered why the great St. Bernard,
+most sagacious of his tribe, should thus attach himself to a stranger
+and refuse to be shaken off. But at the moment the young man had a
+heartful of other and more insistent queryings. Gained ground with the
+loved one is always the lover's most heady cup of intoxication; but the
+lees at the bottom of the present cup were sharply tonic, if not bitter.
+
+What was the mystery so evidently enshrouding the tragedies at Elbow
+Canyon? That they were tragedies rather than accidents there seemed no
+longer any reasonable doubt. But with the doubt removed the mystery
+cloud grew instantly thicker and more impenetrable. If the tragedies
+were growing out of the fight for the possession of Arcadia Park, what
+manner of man could Colonel Craigmiles be to play the kindly, courteous
+host at one moment and the backer and instigator of murderers at the
+next? And if the charge against the colonel be allowed to stand, it
+immediately dragged in a sequent which was clearly inadmissible: the
+unavoidable inference being that Elsa Craigmiles was in no uncertain
+sense her father's accessory.
+
+Ballard was a man and a lover; and his first definition of love was
+unquestioning loyalty. He was prepared to doubt the evidence of his
+senses, if need be, but not the perfections of the ideal he had set up
+in the inner chamber of his heart, naming it Elsa Craigmiles.
+
+These communings and queryings, leading always into the same
+metaphysical labyrinth, brought the young engineer far on the down-river
+trail; were still with him when the trail narrowed to a steep one-man
+path and began to climb the hogback, with one side buttressed by a low
+cliff and the other falling sheer into the Boiling Water on the left. On
+this narrow ledge the dog went soberly ahead; and at one of the turns in
+the path Ballard came upon him standing solidly across the way and
+effectually blocking it.
+
+"What is it, old boy?" was the man's query; and the dog's answer was a
+wag of the tail and a low whine. "Go on, old fellow," said Ballard; but
+the big St. Bernard merely braced himself and whined again. It was quite
+dark on the high ledge, a fringe of scrub pines on the upper side of the
+cutting blotting out a fair half of the starlight. Ballard struck a
+match and looked beyond the dog; looked and drew back with a startled
+exclamation. Where the continuation of the path should have been there
+was a gaping chasm pitching steeply down into the Boiling Water.
+
+More lighted matches served to show the extent of the hazard and the
+trap-like peril of it. A considerable section of the path had slid away
+in a land- or rock-slide, and Ballard saw how he might easily have
+walked into the gulf if the dog had not stopped on the brink of it.
+
+"I owe you one, good old boy," he said, stooping to pat the words out on
+the St. Bernard's head. "I'll pay it when I can; to you, to your
+mistress, or possibly even to your master. Come on, old fellow, and
+we'll find another way with less risk in it," and he turned back to
+climb over the mesa hill under the stone quarries, approaching the
+headquarters camp from the rear.
+
+When the hill was surmounted and the electric mast lights of the camp
+lay below, the great dog stopped, sniffing the air suspiciously.
+
+"Don't like the looks of it, do you?" said Ballard. "Well, I guess you'd
+better go back home. It isn't a very comfortable place down there for
+little dogs--or big ones. Good-night, old fellow." And, quite as if he
+understood, the St. Bernard faced about and trotted away toward Castle
+'Cadia.
+
+There was a light in the adobe shack when Ballard descended the hill,
+and he found Bromley sitting up for him. The first assistant engineer
+was killing time by working on the current estimate for the quarry
+subcontractor, and he looked up quizzically when his chief came in.
+
+"Been bearding the lion in his den, have you?" he said, cheerfully.
+"That's right; there's nothing like being neighbourly, even with our
+friend the enemy. Didn't you find him all the things I said he was--and
+then some?"
+
+"Yes," returned Ballard, gravely. Then, abruptly: "Loudon, who uses the
+path that goes up on our side of the canyon and over into the Castle
+'Cadia valley?"
+
+"Who?--why, anybody having occasion to. It's the easiest way to reach
+the wing dam that Sanderson built at the canyon inlet to turn the
+current against the right bank. Fitzpatrick sends a man over now and
+then to clear the driftwood from the dam."
+
+"Anybody been over to-day?"
+
+"No."
+
+"How about the cow-puncher--Grigsby--who brought my horse over and got
+my bag?"
+
+"He was riding, and he came and went by way of our bridge below the dam.
+You couldn't ride a horse over that hill path."
+
+"You certainly could not," said Ballard grimly. "There is a chunk about
+the size of this shack gone out of it--dropped into the river, I
+suppose."
+
+Bromley was frowning reflectively.
+
+"More accidents?" he suggested.
+
+"One more--apparently."
+
+Bromley jumped up, sudden realization grappling him.
+
+"Why, Breckenridge!--you've just come over that path--alone, and in the
+dark!"
+
+"Part way over it, and in the dark, yes; but not alone, luckily. The
+Craigmiles's dog--the big St. Bernard--was with me, and he stopped on
+the edge of the break. Otherwise I might have walked into it--most
+probably should have walked into it."
+
+Bromley began to tramp the floor with his hands in his pockets.
+
+"I can't remember," he said; and again, "I can't remember. I was over
+there yesterday, or the day before. It was all right then. It was a good
+trail. Why, Breckenridge"--with sudden emphasis--"it would have taken a
+charge of dynamite to blow it down!"
+
+Ballard dropped lazily into a chair and locked his hands at the back of
+his head. "And you say that the hoodoo hasn't got around to using high
+explosives yet, eh? By the way, have there been any more visitations
+since I went out on the line last Tuesday?"
+
+Bromley was shaking his head in the negative when the door opened with a
+jerk and Bessinger, the telegraph operator whose wire was in the
+railroad yard office, tumbled in, white faced.
+
+"Hoskins and the Two!" he gasped. "They're piled up under a material
+train three miles down the track! Fitzpatrick is turning out a wrecking
+crew from the bunk shanties, and he sent me up to call you!"
+
+Bromley's quick glance aside for Ballard was acutely significant.
+
+"I guess I'd better change that 'No' of mine to a qualified 'Yes,'" he
+corrected. "The visitation seems to have come." Then to Bessinger: "Get
+your breath, Billy, and then chase back to Fitzpatrick. Tell him we'll
+be with him as soon as Mr. Ballard can change his clothes."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+HOSKINS'S GHOST
+
+
+The wreck in the rocky hills west of the Elbow Canyon railroad yard
+proved to be less calamitous than Bessinger's report, handed on from the
+excited alarm brought in by a demoralized train flagman, had pictured
+it. When Ballard and Bromley, hastening to the rescue on Fitzpatrick's
+relief train, reached the scene of the accident, they found Hoskins's
+engine and fifteen cars in the ditch, and the second flagman with a
+broken arm; but Hoskins himself was unhurt, as were the remaining
+members of the train crew.
+
+Turning the work of track clearing over to Bromley and the relief crew,
+Ballard began at once to pry irritably into causes; irritably since
+wrecks meant delays, and President Pelham's letters were already
+cracking the whip for greater expedition.
+
+It was a singular derailment, and at first none of the trainmen seemed
+to be able to account for it. The point of disaster was on a sharp curve
+where the narrow-gauge track bent like a strained bow around one of the
+rocky hills. As the débris lay, the train seemed to have broken in two
+on the knuckle of the curve, and here the singularity was emphasised.
+The overturned cars were not merely derailed; they were locked and
+crushed together, and heaped up and strewn abroad, in a fashion to
+indicate a collision rather than a simple jumping of the track.
+
+Ballard used Galliford, the train conductor, for the first heel of his
+pry.
+
+"I guess you and Hoskins both need about thirty days," was the way he
+opened upon Galliford. "How long had your train been broken in two
+before the two sections came in collision?"
+
+"If we was broke in two, nobody knew it. I was in the caboose 'lookout'
+myself, and I saw the Two's gauge-light track around the curve. Next I
+knew, I was smashin' the glass in the 'lookout' with my head, and the
+train was chasin' out on the prairie. I'll take the thirty days, all
+right, and I won't sue the company for the cuts on my head. But I'll be
+danged if I'll take the blame, Mr. Ballard." The conductor spoke as a
+man.
+
+"Somebody's got to take it," snapped the chief. "If you didn't break in
+two, what did happen?"
+
+"Now you've got me guessing, and I hain't got any more guesses left. At
+first I thought Hoskins had hit something 'round on the far side o' the
+curve. That's what it felt like. Then, for a second or two, I could have
+sworn he had the Two in the reverse, backing his end of the train up
+against my end and out into the sage-brush."
+
+"What does Hoskins say? Where is he?" demanded Ballard; and together
+they picked their way around to the other end of the wreck, looking for
+the engineman.
+
+Hoskins, however, was not to be found. Fitzpatrick had seen him groping
+about in the cab of his overturned engine; and Bromley, when the inquiry
+reached him, explained that he had sent Hoskins up to camp on a hand-car
+which was going back for tools.
+
+"He was pretty badly shaken up, and I told him he'd better hunt the bunk
+shanty and rest his nerves awhile. We didn't need him," said the
+assistant, accounting for the engine-man's disappearance.
+
+Ballard let the investigation rest for the moment, but later, when
+Bromley was working the contractor's gang on the track obstructions
+farther along, he lighted a flare torch at the fire some of the men had
+made out of the wreck kindling wood, and began a critical examination of
+the derailed and débris-covered locomotive.
+
+It was a Baldwin ten-wheel type, with the boiler extending rather more
+than half-way through the cab, and since it had rolled over on the
+right-hand side, the controlling levers were under the crushed wreckage
+of the cab. None the less, Ballard saw what he was looking for;
+afterward making assurance doubly sure by prying at the engine's
+brake-shoes and thrusting the pinch-bar of inquiry into various
+mechanisms under the trucks and driving-wheels.
+
+It was an hour past midnight when Bromley reported the track clear, and
+asked if the volunteer wrecking crew should go on and try to pick up the
+cripples.
+
+"Not to-night," was Ballard's decision. "We'll get Williams and his
+track-layers in from the front to-morrow and let them tackle it.
+Williams used to be Upham's wrecking boss over on the D. & U. P. main
+line, and he'll make short work of this little pile-up, engine and all."
+
+Accordingly, the whistle of the relief train's engine was blown to
+recall Fitzpatrick's men, and a little later the string of flats,
+men-laden, trailed away among the up-river hills, leaving the scene of
+the disaster with only the dull red glow of the workmen's night fire to
+illuminate it.
+
+When the rumble of the receding relief train was no longer audible, the
+figure of a man, dimly outlined in the dusky glow of the fire,
+materialised out of the shadows of the nearest arroyo. First making sure
+that no watchman had been left to guard the point of hazard, the man
+groped purposefully under the fallen locomotive and drew forth a stout
+steel bar which had evidently been hidden for this later finding. With
+this bar for a lever, the lone wrecker fell fiercely at work under the
+broken cab, prying and heaving until the sweat started in great drops
+under the visor of his workman's cap and ran down to make rivulets of
+gray in the grime on his face.
+
+Whatever he was trying to do seemed difficult of accomplishment, if not
+impossible. Again and again he strove at his task, pausing now and then
+to take breath or to rub his moist hands in the dry sand for the better
+gripping of the smooth steel. Finally--it was when the embers of the
+fire on the hill slope were flickering to their extinction--the bar
+slipped and let him down heavily. The fall must have partly stunned him,
+since it was some little time before he staggered to his feet, flung the
+bar into the wreck with a morose oath, and limped away up the track
+toward the headquarters camp, turning once and again to shake his fist
+at the capsized locomotive in the ditch at the curve.
+
+It was in the afternoon of the day following the wreck that Ballard made
+the laboratory test for blame; the office room in the adobe shack
+serving as the "sweat-box."
+
+First came the flagmen, one at a time, their stories agreeing well
+enough, and both corroborating Galliford's account. Next came Hoskins's
+fireman, a green boy from the Alta Vista mines, who had been making his
+first trip over the road. He knew nothing save that he had looked up
+between shovelfuls to see Hoskins fighting with his levers, and had
+judged the time to be ripe for the life-saving jump.
+
+Last of all came Hoskins, hanging his head and looking as if he had been
+caught stealing sheep.
+
+"Tell it straight," was Ballard's curt caution; and the engineman
+stumbled through a recital in which haziness and inconsistency struggled
+for first place. He had seen something on the track or he thought he
+had, and had tried to stop. Before he could bring the train under
+control he had heard the crashing of the wreck in the rear. He admitted
+that he had jumped while the engine was still in motion.
+
+"Which way was she running when you jumped, John?--forward or backward?"
+asked Ballard, quietly.
+
+Bromley, who was making pencil notes of the evidence, looked up quickly
+and saw the big engine-man's jaw drop.
+
+"How could she be runnin' any way but forrards?" he returned, sullenly.
+
+Ballard was smoking, and he shifted his cigar to say: "I didn't know."
+Then, with sudden heat:
+
+"But I mean to know, Hoskins; I mean to go quite to the bottom of this,
+here and now! You've been garbling the facts; purposely, or because you
+are still too badly rattled to know what you are talking about. I can
+tell you what you did: for some reason you made an emergency stop; you
+_did_ make it, either with the brakes or without them. Then you put your
+engine in the reverse motion and _backed_; you were backing when you
+jumped, and the engine was still backing when it left the rails."
+
+Hoskins put his shoulders against the wall and passed from sullenness to
+deep dejection. "I've got a wife and two kids back in Alta Vista, and
+I'm all in," he said. "What is there about it that you don't know, Mr.
+Ballard?"
+
+"There are two or three other things that I do know, and one that I
+don't. You didn't come up to the camp on the hand-car last night; and
+after we left the wreck, somebody dug around in the Two's cab trying to
+fix things so that they would look a little better for John Hoskins. So
+much I found out this morning. But I don't care particularly about that:
+what I want to know is the first cause. What made you lose your head?"
+
+"I told you; there was something on the track."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"It was--well, it was what once was a man."
+
+Ballard bit hard on his cigar, and all the phrases presenting themselves
+were profane. But a glance from Bromley enabled him to say, with decent
+self-control: "Go on; tell us about it."
+
+"There ain't much to tell, and I reckon you won't believe a thing 'at I
+say," Hoskins began monotonously. "Did you or Mr. Bromley notice what
+bend o' the river that curve is at?"
+
+Ballard said "No," and Bromley shook his head. The engineman went on.
+
+"It's where _he_ fell in and got drownded--Mr. Braithwaite, I mean. I
+reckon it sounds mighty foolish to you-all, sittin' here in the good old
+daylight, with nothin' happening: but I _saw_ him. When the Two's
+headlight jerked around the curve and picked him up, he was standing
+between the rails, sideways, and lookin' off toward the river. He had
+the same little old two-peaked cap on that he always wore, and he had
+his fishin'-rod over his shoulder. I didn't have three car lengths to
+the good when I saw him; and--and--well, I reckon I went plumb crazy."
+Hoskins was a large man and muscular rather than fat; but he was
+sweating again, and could not hold his hands still.
+
+Ballard got up and walked to the window which looked out upon the stone
+yard. When he turned again it was to ask Hoskins, quite mildly, if he
+believed in ghosts.
+
+"I never allowed to, before this, Mr. Ballard."
+
+"Yet you have often thought of Braithwaite's drowning, when you have
+been rounding that particular curve? I remember you pointed out the
+place to me."
+
+Hoskins nodded. "I reckon I never have run by there since without
+thinking of it."
+
+Ballard sat down again and tilted his chair to the reflective angle.
+
+"One more question, John, and then you may go. You had a two-hour
+lay-over in Alta Vista yesterday while the D. & U. P. people were
+transferring your freight. How many drinks did you take in those two
+hours?"
+
+"Before God, Mr. Ballard, I never touched a drop! I don't say I'm too
+good to do it: I ain't. But any man that'd go crookin' his elbow when he
+had that mountain run ahead of him would be _all_ fool!"
+
+"That's so," said Ballard. And then: "That will do. Go and turn in again
+and sleep the clock around. I'll tell you what is going to happen to you
+when you're better fit to hear it."
+
+"Well?" queried Bromley, when Hoskins was gone.
+
+"Say your say, and then I'll say mine," was Ballard's rejoinder.
+
+"I should call it a pretty harsh joke on Hoskins, played by somebody
+with more spite than common sense. There has been some little ill blood
+between Fitzpatrick's men and the railroad gangs; more particularly
+between the stone-cutters here at the dam and the train crews. It grew
+out of Fitzpatrick's order putting his men on the water-wagon. When the
+camp canteen was closed, the stone 'buckies' tried to open up a jug-line
+from Alta Vista. The trainmen wouldn't stand for it against Macpherson's
+promise to fire the first 'boot-legger' he caught."
+
+"And you think one of the stone-cutters went down from the camp to give
+Hoskins a jolt?"
+
+"That is my guess."
+
+Ballard laughed.
+
+"Mine isn't quite as practical, I'll admit; but I believe it is the
+right one. I've been probing Hoskins's record quietly, and his long suit
+is superstition. Half the 'hoodoo' talk of the camp can be traced back
+to him if you'll take the trouble. He confessed just now that he never
+passed that point in the road without thinking of Braithwaite and his
+taking-off. From that to seeing things isn't a very long step."
+
+Bromley made the sign of acquiescence.
+
+"I'd rather accept your hypothesis than mine, Breckenridge. I'd hate to
+believe that we have the other kind of a fool on the job; a man who
+would deliberately make scare medicine to add to that which is already
+made. What will you do with Hoskins?"
+
+"Let him work in the repair shop for a while, till he gets the fever out
+of his blood. I don't want to discharge him."
+
+"Good. Now that is settled, will you take a little walk with me? I want
+to show you something."
+
+Ballard found his pipe and filled it, and they went out together. It was
+a perfect summer afternoon, still and cloudless, and with the peculiar
+high-mountain resonance in the air that made the clink of the stone
+hammers ring like a musical chorus beaten out upon steel anvils.
+Peaceful, orderly industry struck the key-note, and for the moment there
+were no discords. Out on the great ramparts of the dam the masons were
+swinging block after block of the face wall into place, and the _burr-r_
+and cog-chatter of the huge derrick hoisting gear were incessant. Back
+of the masonry the concrete mixers poured their viscous charges into the
+forms, and the puddlers walked back and forth on their stagings, tamping
+the plastic material into the network of metal bars binding the mass
+with the added strength of steel.
+
+Bromley led the way through the stone-yard activities and around the
+quarry hill to the path notched in the steep slope of the canyon side.
+The second turn brought them to the gap made by the land-slide. It was a
+curious breach, abrupt and clean-cut; its shape and depth suggesting the
+effect of a mighty hammer blow scoring its groove from the path level to
+the river's edge. The material was a compact yellow shale, showing no
+signs of disintegration elsewhere.
+
+"What's your notion, Loudon?" said Ballard, when they were standing on
+the edge of the newly made gash.
+
+Bromley wagged his head doubtfully.
+
+"I'm not so sure of it now as I thought I was when I came up here this
+morning. Do you see that black streak out there on the shale, just about
+at the path level? A few hours ago I could have sworn it was a powder
+burn; the streak left by a burning fuse. It doesn't look so much like it
+now, I'll confess."
+
+"You've 'got 'em' about as bad as Hoskins has," laughed Ballard. "A
+dynamite charge that would account for this would advertise itself
+pretty loudly in a live camp five hundred yards away. Besides, it would
+have had to be drilled before it could be shot, and the drill-holes
+would show up--as they don't."
+
+"Yes," was the reply; "I grant you the drill-holes. I guess I have 'got
+'em,' as you say. But the bang wouldn't count. Quinlan let off half a
+dozen blasts in the quarry at quitting time yesterday, and one jar more
+or less just at that time wouldn't have been noticed."
+
+Ballard put his arm across the theorist's shoulders and faced him about
+to front the down-canyon industries.
+
+"You mustn't let this mystery-smoke get into your nostrils, Loudon,
+boy," he said. "Whatever happens, there must always be two cool heads
+and two sets of steady nerves on this job--yours and mine. Now let's go
+down the railroad on the push-car and see how Williams is getting along
+with his pick-up stunt. He ought to have the Two standing on her feet by
+this time."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+GUN PLAY
+
+
+Three days after the wreck in the Lava Hills, Ballard was again making
+the round of the outpost camps in the western end of the valley,
+verifying grade lines, re-establishing data stakes lost, or destroyed by
+the Craigmiles range riders, hustling the ditch diggers, and,
+incidentally, playing host to young Lucius Bigelow, the Forestry Service
+member of Miss Elsa's house-party.
+
+Bigelow's inclusion as a guest on the inspection gallop had been
+planned, not by his temporary host, but by Miss Elsa herself. Mr.
+Bigelow's time was his own, she had explained in her note to Ballard,
+but he was sufficiently an enthusiast in his chosen profession to wish
+to combine a field study of the Arcadian watersheds with the pleasures
+of a summer outing. If Mr. Ballard would be so kind ... and all the
+other fitting phrases in which my lady begs the boon she may strictly
+require at the hands of the man who has said the talismanic words, "I
+love you."
+
+As he was constrained to be, Ballard was punctiliously hospitable to the
+quiet, self-contained young man who rode an entire day at his
+pace-setter's side without uttering a dozen words on his own initiative.
+The hospitality was purely dutiful at first; but later Bigelow earned it
+fairly. Making no advances on his own part, the guest responded
+generously when Ballard drew him out; and behind the mask of thoughtful
+reticence the Kentuckian discovered a man of stature, gentle of speech,
+simple of heart, and a past-master of the wood- and plains-craft that a
+constructing engineer, however broad-minded, can acquire only as his
+work demands it.
+
+"You gentlemen of the tree bureau can certainly give us points on
+ordinary common sense, Mr. Bigelow," Ballard admitted on this, the third
+day out, when the student of natural conditions had called attention to
+the recklessness of the contractors in cutting down an entire forest of
+slope-protecting young pines to make trestle-bents for a gulch flume. "I
+am afraid I should have done precisely what Richards has done here:
+taken the first and most convenient timber I could lay hands on."
+
+"That is the point of view the Forestry Service is trying to modify,"
+rejoined Bigelow, mildly. "To the average American, educated or
+ignorant, wood seems the cheapest material in a world of plenty. Yet I
+venture to say that in this present instance your company could better
+have afforded almost any other material for those trestle-bents. That
+slope will make you pay high for its stripping before you can grow
+another forest to check the flood wash."
+
+"Of course it will; that says itself, now that you have pointed it out,"
+Ballard agreed. "Luckily, the present plans of the company don't call
+for much flume timber; I say 'luckily,' because I don't like to do
+violence to my convictions, when I'm happy enough to have any."
+
+Bigelow's grave smile came and went like the momentary glow from some
+inner light of prescience.
+
+"Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are a man of very strong convictions,
+Mr. Ballard," he ventured to say.
+
+"Think so? I don't know. A fair knowledge of my trade, a few opinions,
+and a certain pig-headed stubbornness that doesn't know when it is
+beaten: shake these up together and you have the compound which has
+misled you. I'm afraid I don't often wait for convincement--of the
+purely philosophical brand."
+
+They were riding together down the line of the northern lateral canal,
+with Bourke Fitzpatrick's new headquarters in the field for the
+prospective night's bivouac. The contractor's camp, a disorderly blot of
+shanties and well-weathered tents on the fair grass-land landscape, came
+in sight just as the sun was sinking below the Elks, and Ballard
+quickened the pace.
+
+"You'll be ready to quit for the day when we get in, won't you?" he said
+to Bigelow, when the broncos came neck and neck in the scurry for the
+hay racks.
+
+"Oh, I'm fit enough, by now," was the ready rejoinder. "It was only the
+first day that got on my nerves."
+
+There was a rough-and-ready welcome awaiting the chief engineer and his
+guest when they drew rein before Fitzpatrick's commissary; and a supper
+of the void-filling sort was quickly set before them in the back room of
+the contractor's quarters. But there was trouble in the air. Ballard saw
+that Fitzpatrick was cruelly hampered by the presence of Bigelow; and
+when the meal was finished he gave the contractor his chance in the
+privacy of the little cramped pay-office.
+
+"What is it, Bourke?" he asked, when the closed door cut them off from
+the Forest Service man.
+
+Fitzpatrick was shaking his head. "It's a blood feud now, Mr. Ballard.
+Gallagher's gang--all Irishmen--went up against four of the colonel's
+men early this morning. The b'ys took shelter in the ditch, and the
+cow-punchers tried to run 'em out. Some of our teamsters were armed, and
+one of the Craigmiles men was killed or wounded--we don't know which:
+the others picked him up and carried him off."
+
+Ballard's eyes narrowed under his thoughtful frown.
+
+"I've been afraid it would come to that, sooner or later," he said
+slowly. Then he added: "We ought to be able to stop it. The colonel
+seems to deprecate the scrapping part of it as much as we do."
+
+Fitzpatrick's exclamation was of impatient disbelief. "Any time he'll
+hold up his little finger, Mr. Ballard, this monkey-business will go out
+like a squib fuse in a wet hole! He isn't wanting to stop it."
+
+Ballard became reflective again, and hazarded another guess.
+
+"Perhaps the object-lesson of this morning will have a good effect. A
+chance shot has figured as a peacemaker before this."
+
+"Don't you believe it's going to work that way this time!" was the
+earnest protest. "If the Craigmiles outfit doesn't whirl in and shoot up
+this camp before to-morrow morning, I'm missing my guess."
+
+Ballard rapped the ashes from his briar, and refilled and lighted it.
+When the tobacco was glowing in the bowl, he said, quite decisively: "In
+that case, we'll try to give them what they are needing. Are you
+picketed?"
+
+"No."
+
+"See to it at once. Make a corral of the wagons and scrapers and get the
+stock inside of it. Then put out a line of sentries, with relays to
+relieve the men every two hours. We needn't be taken by surprise,
+whatever happens."
+
+Fitzpatrick jerked a thumb toward the outer room where Bigelow was
+smoking his after-supper pipe.
+
+"How about your friend?" he asked.
+
+At the query Ballard realised that the presence of the Forest Service
+man was rather unfortunate. Constructively his own guest, Bigelow was
+really the guest of Colonel Craigmiles; and the position of a neutral in
+any war is always a difficult one.
+
+"Mr. Bigelow is a member of the house-party at Castle 'Cadia," he said,
+in reply to the contractor's doubtful question. "But I can answer for
+his discretion. I'll tell him what he ought to know, and he may do as he
+pleases."
+
+Following out the pointing of his own suggestion, Ballard gave Bigelow a
+brief outline of the Arcadian conflict while Fitzpatrick was posting the
+sentries. The Government man made no comment, save to say that it was a
+most unhappy situation; but when Ballard offered to show him to his
+quarters for the night, he protested at once.
+
+"No, indeed, Mr. Ballard," he said, quite heartily, for him; "you
+mustn't leave me out that way. At the worst, you may be sure that I
+stand for law and order. I have heard something of this fight between
+your company and the colonel, and while I can't pretend to pass upon the
+merits of it, I don't propose to go to bed and let you stand guard over
+me."
+
+"All right, and thank you," laughed Ballard; and together they went out
+to help Fitzpatrick with his preliminaries for the camp defence.
+
+This was between eight and nine o'clock; and by ten the stock was
+corralled within the line of shacks and tents, a cordon of watchers had
+been stretched around the camp, and the greater number of Fitzpatrick's
+men were asleep in the bunk tents and shanties.
+
+The first change of sentries was made at midnight, and Ballard and
+Bigelow both walked the rounds with Fitzpatrick. Peace and quietness
+reigned supreme. The stillness of the beautiful summer night was
+undisturbed, and the roundsmen found a good half of the sentinels asleep
+at their posts. Ballard was disposed to make light of Fitzpatrick's
+fears, and the contractor took it rather hard.
+
+"I know 'tis all hearsay with you, yet, Mr. Ballard; you haven't been up
+against it," he protested, when the three of them were back at the
+camp-fire which was burning in front of the commissary. "But if you had
+been scrapping with these devils for the better part of two years, as we
+have----"
+
+The interruption was a sudden quaking tremor of earth and atmosphere
+followed by a succession of shocks like the quick firing of a battleship
+squadron. A sucking draught of wind swept through the camp, and the fire
+leaped up as from the blast of an underground bellows. Instantly the
+open spaces of the headquarters were alive with men tumbling from their
+bunks; and into the thick of the confusion rushed the lately posted
+sentries.
+
+For a few minutes the turmoil threatened to become a panic, but
+Fitzpatrick and a handful of the cooler-headed gang bosses got it under,
+the more easily since there was no attack to follow the explosions. Then
+came a cautious reconnaissance in force down the line of the canal in
+the direction of the earthquake, and a short quarter of a mile below the
+camp the scouting detachment reached the scene of destruction.
+
+The raiders had chosen their ground carefully. At a point where the
+canal cutting passed through the shoulder of a hill they had planted
+charges of dynamite deep in the clay of the upper hillside. The
+explosions had started a land-slide, and the patient digging work of
+weeks had been obliterated in a moment.
+
+Ballard said little. Fitzpatrick was on the ground to do the swearing,
+and the money loss was his, if Mr. Pelham's company chose to make him
+stand it. What Celtic rage could compass in the matter of cursings was
+not lacking; and at the finish of the outburst there was an appeal,
+vigorous and forceful.
+
+"You're the boss, Mr. Ballard, and 'tis for you to say whether we throw
+up this job and quit, or give these blank, blank imps iv hell what's
+comin' to 'em!" was the form the appeal took; and the new chief accepted
+the challenge promptly.
+
+"What are your means of communication with the towns in the Gunnison
+valley?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Fitzpatrick pulled himself down from the rage heights and made shift to
+answer as a man.
+
+"There's a bridle trail down the canyon to Jack's Cabin; and from that
+on you hit the railroad."
+
+"And the distance to Jack's Cabin?"
+
+"Twenty-five miles, good and strong, by the canyon crookings; but only
+about half of it is bad going."
+
+"Is there anybody in your camp who knows the trail?"
+
+"Yes. Dick Carson, the water-boy."
+
+"Good. We'll go back with you, and you'll let me have the boy and two of
+your freshest horses."
+
+"You'll not be riding that trail in the dark, Mr. Ballard! It's a
+fright, even in daylight."
+
+"That's my affair," said the engineer, curtly. "If your boy can find the
+trail, I'll ride it."
+
+That settled it for the moment, and the scouting party made its way up
+to the headquarters to carry the news of the land-slide. Bigelow walked
+in silence beside his temporary host, saying nothing until after they
+had reached camp, and Fitzpatrick had gone to assemble the horses and
+the guide. Then he said, quite as if it were a matter of course:
+
+"I'm going with you, Mr. Ballard, if you don't object."
+
+Ballard did object, pointedly and emphatically, making the most of the
+night ride and the hazardous trail. When these failed to discourage the
+young man from Washington, the greater objection came out baldly.
+
+"You owe it to your earlier host to ride back to Castle 'Cadia from
+here, Mr. Bigelow. I'm going to declare war, and you can't afford to
+identify yourself with me," was the way Ballard put it; but Bigelow only
+smiled and shook his head.
+
+"I'm not to be shunted quite so easily," he said. "Unless you'll say
+outright that I'll be a butt-in, I'm going with you."
+
+"All right; if it's the thing you want to do," Ballard yielded. "Of
+course, I shall be delighted to have you along." And when Fitzpatrick
+came with two horses he sent him back to the corral for a third.
+
+The preparations for the night ride were soon made, and it was not until
+Ballard and Bigelow were making ready to mount at the door of the
+commissary that Fitzpatrick reappeared with the guide, a grave-faced lad
+who looked as if he might be years older than any guess his diminutive
+stature warranted. Ballard's glance was an eye-sweep of shrewd
+appraisal.
+
+"You're not much bigger than a pint of cider, Dickie boy," he commented.
+"Why don't you take a start and grow some?"
+
+"I'm layin' off to; when I get time. Pap allows I got to'r he won't own
+to me," said the boy soberly.
+
+"Who is your father?" The query was a mere fill-in, bridging the
+momentary pause while Ballard was inspecting the saddle cinchings of the
+horse he was to ride; and evidently the boy so regarded it.
+
+"He's a man," he answered briefly, adding nothing to the supposable
+fact.
+
+Bigelow was up, and Ballard was putting a leg over his wiry little mount
+when Fitzpatrick emerged from the dimly lighted interior of the
+commissary bearing arms--a pair of short-barrelled repeating rifles in
+saddle-holsters.
+
+"Better be slinging these under the stirrup-leathers--you and your
+friend, Mr. Ballard," he suggested. "All sorts of things are liable to
+get up in the tall hills when a man hasn't got a gun."
+
+This was so patently said for the benefit of the little circle of
+onlooking workmen that Ballard bent to the saddle-horn while Fitzpatrick
+was buckling the rifle-holster in place.
+
+"What is it, Bourke?" he asked quietly.
+
+"More of the same," returned the contractor, matching the low tone of
+the inquiry. "Craigmiles has got his spies in every camp, and you're
+probably spotted, same as old man Macpherson used to be when he rode the
+work. If that cussed Mexican foreman does be getting wind of this, and
+shy a guess at why you're heading for Jack's Cabin and the railroad in
+the dead o' night----"
+
+Ballard's exclamation was impatient.
+
+"This thing has got on your digestion, Bourke," he said, rallying the
+big contractor. "Up at the Elbow Canyon camp it's a hoodoo bogey, and
+down here it's the Craigmiles cow-boys. Keep your shirt on, and we'll
+stop it--stop it short." Then, lowering his voice again: "Is the boy
+trustworthy?"
+
+Fitzpatrick's shrug was more French than Irish.
+
+"He can show you the trail; and he hates the Craigmiles outfit as the
+devil hates holy water. His father was a 'rustler,' and the colonel got
+him sent over the road for cattle-stealing. Dick comes of pretty tough
+stock, but I guess he'll do you right."
+
+Ballard nodded, found his seat in the saddle, and gave the word.
+
+"Pitch out, Dick," he commanded; and the small cavalcade of three
+skirted the circle of tents and shacks to take the westward trail in
+single file, the water-boy riding in advance and the Forestry man
+bringing up the rear.
+
+In this order the three passed the scene of the assisted land-slide,
+where the acrid fumes of the dynamite were still hanging in the air, and
+came upon ground new to Bigelow and practically so to Ballard. For a
+mile or more the canal line hugged the shoulders of the foothills,
+doubling and reversing until only the steadily rising sky-line of the
+Elks gave evidence of its progress westward.
+
+As in its earlier half, the night was still and cloudless, and the stars
+burned with the white lustre of the high altitudes, swinging slowly to
+the winding course in their huge inverted bowl of velvety blackness.
+From camp to camp on the canal grade there was desertion absolute; and
+even Bigelow, with ears attuned to the alarm sounds of the wilds, had
+heard nothing when the cavalcade came abruptly upon Riley's camp, the
+outpost of the ditch-diggers.
+
+At Riley's they found only the horse-watchers awake. From these they
+learned that the distant booming of the explosions had aroused only a
+few of the lightest sleepers. Ballard made inquiry pointing to the
+Craigmiles riders. Had any of them been seen in the vicinity of the
+outpost camp?
+
+"Not since sundown," was the horse-watcher's answer. "About an hour
+before candle-lightin', two of 'em went ridin' along up-river, drivin' a
+little bunch o' cattle."
+
+The engineer gathered rein and was about to pull his horse once more
+into the westward trail, when the boy guide put in his word.
+
+"Somebody's taggin' us, all right, if that's what you're aimin' to find
+out," he said, quite coolly.
+
+Ballard started. "What's that?" he demanded. "How do you know?"
+
+"Been listenin'--when you-all didn't make so much noise that I
+couldn't," was the calm rejoinder. "There's two of 'em, and they struck
+in just after we passed the dynamite heave-down."
+
+Ballard bent his head and listened. "I don't hear anything," he
+objected.
+
+"Nachelly," said the boy. "They-all ain't sech tenderfoots as to keep on
+comin' when we've stopped. Want to dodge 'em?"
+
+"There's no question about that," was the mandatory reply.
+
+The sober-faced lad took a leaf out of the book of the past--his own or
+his cattle-stealing father's.
+
+"We got to stampede your stock a few lines, Pete," he said, shortly, to
+the horse-watcher who had answered Ballard's inquiry. "Get up and pull
+your picket-pins."
+
+"Is that right, Mr. Ballard?" asked the man.
+
+"It is if Dick says so. I'll back his orders."
+
+The boy gave the orders tersely after the horse-guard had risen and
+kicked his two companions awake. The night herdsmen were to pick and
+saddle their own mounts, and to pull the picket-pins for the grazing
+mule drove. While this was doing, the small plotter vouchsafed the
+necessary word of explanation to Ballard and Bigelow.
+
+"We ride into the bunch and stampede it, headin' it along the trail the
+way we're goin'. After we've done made noise enough and tracks enough,
+and gone far enough to make them fellers lose the sound of us that
+they've been follerin', we cut out of the crowd and make our little
+_pasear_ down canyon, and the herd-riders can chase out and round up
+their stock again: see?"
+
+Ballard made the sign of acquiescence; and presently the thing was done
+substantially as the boy had planned. The grazing mules, startled by the
+sudden dash of the three mounted broncos among them, and helped along by
+a few judicious quirt blows, broke and ran in frightened panic, carrying
+the three riders in the thick of the rout.
+
+Young Carson, skilful as the son of the convict stock-lifter had been
+trained to be, deftly herded the thundering stampede in the desired
+direction; and at the end of a galloping mile abruptly gave the shrill
+yell of command to the two men whom he was piloting. There was a swerve
+aside out of the pounding melée, a dash for an opening between the
+swelling foothills, and the ruck of snorting mules swept on in a broad
+circle that would later make recapture by the night herders a simple
+matter of gathering up the trailing picket-ropes.
+
+The three riders drew rein in the shelter of the arroyo gulch to breathe
+their horses, and Ballard gave the boy due credit.
+
+"That was very neatly done, Dick," he said, when the thunder of the
+pounding hoofs had died away in the up-river distances. "Is it going to
+bump those fellows off of our trail?"
+
+The water-boy was humped over the horn of his saddle as if he had found
+a stomach-ache in the breathless gallop. But he was merely listening.
+
+"I ain't reskin' any money on it," he qualified. "If them cow-punch's
+'ve caught on to where you're goin', and what you're goin' _fer_----"
+
+Out of the stillness filling the hill-gorge like a black sea of silence
+came a measured thudding of hoofs and an unmistakable squeaking of
+saddle leather. Like a flash the boy was afoot and reaching under his
+bronco's belly for a tripping hold on the horse's forefoot. "Down! and
+pitch the cayuses!" he quavered stridently; and as the three horses
+rolled in the dry sand of the arroyo bed with their late riders
+flattened upon their heads, the inner darkness of the gorge spat fire
+and there was a fine singing whine of bullets overhead.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE RUSTLERS
+
+
+In defiance of all the laws of precedence, it was the guest who first
+rose to the demands of the spiteful occasion. While Ballard was still
+struggling with the holster strappings of his rifle, Bigelow had
+disengaged his weapon and was industriously pumping a rapid-fire volley
+into the flame-spitting darkness of the gorge.
+
+The effect of the prompt reply in kind was quickly made manifest. The
+firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, a riderless horse dashed
+snorting down the bed of the dry arroyo, narrowly missing a stumbling
+collision with the living obstructions lying in his way, and other
+gallopings were heard withdrawing into the hill-shadowed obscurities.
+
+It was Ballard who took the water-boy to task when they had waited long
+enough to be measurably certain that the attackers had left the field.
+
+"You were mistaken, Dick," he said, breaking the strained silence.
+"There were more than two of them."
+
+Young Carson was getting his horse up, and he appeared to be curiously
+at fault.
+
+"You're plumb right, Cap'n Ballard," he admitted. "But that ain't what's
+pinchin' me: there's always enough of 'em night-herdin' this end of the
+range so 'at they could have picked up another hand 'r two. What I
+cayn't tumble to is how they-all out-rid us."
+
+"To get ahead of us, you mean?"
+
+"That's it. We're in the neck of a little hogback draw that goes on down
+to the big canyon. The only other trail into the draw is along by the
+river and up this-a-way--'bout a mile and a half furder 'n the road we
+come, I reckon."
+
+It was the persistent element of mystery once more thrusting itself into
+the prosaic field of the industries; but before Ballard could grapple
+with it, the fighting guest cut in quietly.
+
+"One of their bullets seems to have nipped me in the arm," he said,
+admitting the fact half reluctantly and as if it were something to be
+ashamed of. "Will you help me tie it up?"
+
+Ballard came out of the speculative fog with a bound.
+
+"Good heavens, Bigelow! are you hit? Why didn't you say something?" he
+exclaimed, diving into the pockets of his duck coat for matches and a
+candle-end.
+
+"It wasn't worth while; it's only a scratch, I guess."
+
+But the lighted candle-end proved it to be something more; a ragged
+furrow plowed diagonally across the forearm. Ballard dressed it as well
+as he could, the water-boy holding the candle, and when the rough job of
+surgery was done, was for sending the Forestry man back to the valley
+head and Castle 'Cadia with the wound for a sufficient reason. But
+Bigelow developed a sudden vein of stubbornness. He would neither go
+back alone, nor would he consent to be escorted.
+
+"A little thing like this is all in the day's work," he protested.
+"We'll go on, when you're ready; or, rather, we'll go and hunt for the
+owner of that horse whose saddle I suppose I must have emptied. I'm just
+vindictive enough to hope that its rider was the fellow who pinked me."
+
+As it happened, the hope was to be neither confirmed nor positively
+denied. A little farther up the dry arroyo the candle-end, sputtering to
+its extinction, showed them a confusion of hoof tramplings in the
+yielding sand, but nothing more. Dead or wounded, the horse-losing rider
+had evidently been carried off by his companions.
+
+"Which proves pretty conclusively that there must have been more than
+two," was Ballard's deduction, when they were again pushing cautiously
+down the inner valley toward its junction with the great canyon. "But
+why should two, or a dozen of them, fire on us in the dark? How could
+they know whether we were friends or enemies?"
+
+Bigelow's quiet laugh had a touch of grimness in it.
+
+"Your Elbow Canyon mysteries have broken bounds," he suggested. "Your
+staff should include an expert psychologist, Mr. Ballard."
+
+Ballard's reply was belligerent. "If we had one, I'd swap him for a
+section of mounted police," he declared; and beyond that the narrow
+trail in the cliff-walled gorge of the Boiling Water forbade
+conversation.
+
+Three hours farther down the river trail, when the summer dawn was
+paling the stars in the narrow strip of sky overhead, the perpendicular
+walls of the great canyon gave back a little, and looking past the
+water-boy guide, Ballard saw an opening marking the entrance of a small
+tributary stream from the north; a little green oasis in the vast desert
+of frowning cliffs and tumbled boulders, with a log cabin and a tiny
+corral nestling under the portal rock of the smaller stream.
+
+"Hello!" said Bigelow, breaking the silence in which they had been
+riding for the greater part of the three hours, "what's this we are
+coming to?"
+
+Ballard was about to pass the query on to the boy when an armed man in
+the flapped hat and overalls of a range rider stepped from behind a
+boulder and barred the way. There was a halt, an exchange of words
+between young Carson and the flap-hatted trail-watcher in tones so low
+as to be inaudible to the others, and the armed one faced about, rather
+reluctantly, it seemed, to lead the way to the cabin under the cliff.
+
+At the dismounting before the cabin door, the boy cleared away a little
+of the mystery.
+
+"This yere is whar I live when I'm at home," he drawled, lapsing by the
+influence of the propinquity into the Tennessee idiom which was his
+birthright. "Pap'll get ye your breakfas' while I'm feedin' the
+bronc's."
+
+Ballard glanced quickly at his guest and met the return glance of
+complete intelligence in the steady gray eyes of the Forestry man. The
+cabin and the corral in the secluded canyon were sufficiently accounted
+for. But one use could be made of a stock enclosure in such an
+inaccessible mountain fastness. The trail station in the heart of the
+Boiling Water wilderness was doubtless the headquarters of the
+"rustlers" who lived by preying upon the King of Arcadia's flocks and
+herds.
+
+"Your allies in the little war against Colonel Craigmiles," said
+Bigelow, and there was something like a touch of mild reproach in his
+low tone when he added: "Misery isn't the only thing that 'acquaints a
+man with strange bedfellows.'"
+
+"Apparently not," said Ballard; and they went together into the kitchen
+half of the cabin which was built, in true Tennessee fashion, as "two
+pens and a passage."
+
+The welcome accorded them by the sullen-faced man who was already frying
+rashers of bacon over the open fire on the hearth was not especially
+cordial. "Mek' ye an arm and re'ch for yerselves," was his sole phrase
+of hospitality, when the bacon and pan-bread were smoking on the huge
+hewn slab which served for a table; and he neither ate with his guests
+nor waited upon them, save to refill the tin coffee cups as they were
+emptied.
+
+Neither of the two young men stayed longer than they were obliged to in
+the dirty, leather-smelling kitchen. There was freedom outside, with the
+morning world of fresh, zestful immensities for a smoking-room; and when
+they had eaten, they went to sit on a flat rock by the side of the
+little stream to fill and light their pipes, Ballard crumbling the
+cut-plug and stoppering the pipe for his crippled companion.
+
+"How is the bullet-gouge by this time?" he questioned, when the tobacco
+was alight.
+
+"It's pretty sore, and no mistake," Bigelow acknowledged frankly.
+Whereupon Ballard insisted upon taking the bandages off and re-dressing
+the wound, with the crystal-clear, icy water of the mountain stream for
+its cleansing.
+
+"It was a sheer piece of idiocy on my part--letting you come on with me
+after you got this," was his verdict, when he had a daylight sight of
+the bullet score. "But I don't mean to be idiotic twice in the same
+day," he went on. "You're going to stay right here and keep quiet until
+we come along back and pick you up, late this afternoon."
+
+Bigelow made a wry face.
+
+"Nice, cheerful prospect," he commented. "The elder cattle thief isn't
+precisely one's ideal of the jovial host. By the way, what was the
+matter with him while we were eating breakfast? He looked and acted as
+if there were a sick child in some one of the dark corners which he was
+afraid we might disturb."
+
+Ballard nodded. "I was wondering if you remarked it. Did you hear the
+sick baby?"
+
+"I heard noises--besides those that Carson was so carefully making with
+the skillet and the tin plates. The room across the passage from us
+wasn't empty."
+
+"That was my guess," rejoined Ballard, pulling thoughtfully at his short
+pipe. "I heard voices and tramplings, and, once in a while, something
+that sounded remarkably like a groan--or an oath."
+
+Bigelow nodded in his turn. "More of the mysteries, you'd say; but this
+time they don't especially concern us. Have you fully made up your mind
+to leave me here while you go on down to the railroad? Because if you
+have, you and the boy will have to compel my welcome from the old
+robber: I'd never have the face to ask him for a whole day's
+hospitality."
+
+"I'll fix that," said Ballard, and when the boy came from the corral
+with the saddled horses, he went to do it, leaving Bigelow to finish his
+pipe on the flat rock of conference.
+
+The "fixing" was not accomplished without some difficulty, as it
+appeared to the young man sitting on the flat stone at the stream side.
+Dick brought his father to the door, and Ballard did the
+talking--considerably more of it than might have been deemed necessary
+for the simple request to be proffered. At the end of the talk, Ballard
+came back to the flat stone.
+
+"You stay," he said briefly to Bigelow. "Carson will give you your
+dinner. But he says he has a sick man on his hands in the cabin, and
+you'll have to excuse him."
+
+"He was willing?" queried Bigelow.
+
+"No; he wasn't at all willing. He acted as if he were a loaded camel,
+and your staying was going to be the final back-breaking straw. But he's
+a Tennessean, and we've been kind to his boy. The ranch is yours for the
+day, only if I were you, I shouldn't make too free use of it."
+
+Bigelow smiled.
+
+"I'll be 'meachum' and keep fair in the middle of the road. I don't know
+anything that a prosecuting attorney could make use of against the man
+who has given me my breakfast, and who promises to give me my dinner,
+and I don't want to know anything. Please don't waste any more daylight
+on me: Dick has the horses ready, and he is evidently growing anxious."
+
+Ballard left the Forestry man smoking and sunning himself on the flat
+boulder when he took the down-canyon trail with the sober-faced boy for
+his file leader, and more than once during the rather strenuous day to
+which the pocket-gulch incident was the introduction, his thoughts went
+back to Bigelow, marooned in the depths of the great canyon with the
+saturnine cattle thief, the sick man, and doubtless other members of the
+band of "rustlers."
+
+It was therefore, with no uncertain feeling of relief that he returned
+in the late afternoon at the head of a file of as hard-looking
+miscreants as ever were gathered in a sheriff's posse, and found Bigelow
+sitting on the step of the Carson cabin, still nursing the bandaged arm,
+and still smoking the pipe of patience.
+
+"I'm left to do the honours, gentlemen," said the Forestry man, rising
+and smiling quaintly. "The owner of the ranch regrets to say that he has
+been unavoidably called away; but the feed in the corral and the
+provisions in the kitchen are yours for the taking and the cooking."
+
+The sheriff, a burly giant whose face, figure, garmenting and graceful
+saddle-seat proclaimed the ex-cattleman, laughed appreciatively.
+
+"Bat Carson knows a healthy climate as far as he can see the sun
+a-shinin'," he chuckled; and then to his deputies: "Light down, boys,
+and we'll see what sort o' chuck he's left for us."
+
+In the dismounting Ballard drew Bigelow aside. "What has happened?" he
+asked.
+
+"You can prove nothing by me," returned Bigelow, half quizzically. "I've
+been asleep most of the day. When I woke up, an hour or so ago, the
+doors were open and the cabin was empty. Also, there was a misspelled
+note charcoaled on a box-cover in the kitchen, making us free of the
+horse-bait and the provisions. Also, again, a small bunch of cattle that
+I had seen grazing in a little park up the creek had disappeared."
+
+"Um," said Ballard, discontentedly. "All of which makes us accessories
+after the fact in another raid on Colonel Craigmiles's range herd. I
+don't like that."
+
+"Nor do I," Bigelow agreed. "But you can't eat a man's bread, and then
+stay awake to see which way he escapes. I'm rather glad I was sleepy
+enough not to be tempted. Which reminds me: you must be about all in on
+that score yourself, Mr. Ballard."
+
+"I? Oh, no; I got in five or six hours on the railroad train, going and
+coming between Jack's Cabin and the county seat."
+
+The posse members were tramping into the kitchen to ransack it for food
+and drink, and Bigelow stood still farther aside.
+
+"You managed to gather up a beautiful lot of cutthroats in the short
+time at your disposal," he remarked.
+
+"Didn't I? And now you come against one of my weaknesses, Bigelow: I
+can't stay mad. Last night I thought I'd be glad to see a bunch of the
+colonel's cow-boys well hanged. To-day I'm sick and ashamed to be seen
+tagging this crew of hired sure-shots into the colonel's domain."
+
+"Just keep on calling it the Arcadia Company's domain, and perhaps the
+feeling will wear off," suggested the Forestry man.
+
+"It's no joke," said Ballard, crustily; and then he went in to take his
+chance of supper with the sheriff and his "sure-shots."
+
+There was still sufficient daylight for the upper canyon passage when
+the rough-riders had eaten Carson out of house and home, and were
+mounted again for the ascent to the Kingdom of Arcadia. In the up-canyon
+climb, the sheriff kept the boy, Dick, within easy bridle clutch,
+remembering a certain other canyon faring in which the cattle thief's
+son had narrowly missed putting his father's captors, men and horses,
+into the torrent of the Boiling Water. Ballard and Bigelow rode ahead;
+and when the thunderous diapason of the river permitted, they talked.
+
+"How did they manage to move the sick man?" asked Ballard, when the
+trail and the stream gave him leave.
+
+"That is another of the things that I don't know; I'm a leather-bound
+edition of an encyclopædia when it comes to matters of real
+information," was the ironical answer. "But your guess of this morning
+was right; there was a sick man--sick or hurt some way. I took the
+liberty of investigating a little when I awoke and found the ranch
+deserted. The other room of the cabin was a perfect shambles."
+
+"Blood?" queried the engineer; and Bigelow nodded.
+
+"Blood everywhere."
+
+"A falling-out among thieves, I suppose," said Ballard, half-absently;
+and again Bigelow said: "I don't know."
+
+"The boy knows," was Ballard's comment. "He knew before he left the
+ranch this morning. I haven't been able to get a dozen words out of him
+all day."
+
+Just here both stream-noise and trail-narrowing cut in to forbid further
+talk, and Bigelow drew back to let Ballard lead in the single-file
+progress along the edge of the torrent.
+
+It was in this order that they came finally into the Arcadian
+grass-lands, through a portal as abrupt as a gigantic doorway. It was
+the hour of sunset for the high peaks of the Elk range, and the purple
+shadows were already gathering among the rounded hills of the hogback.
+Off to the left the two advanced riders of the posse cavalcade saw the
+evening kitchen-smoke of Riley's ditch-camp. On the hills to the right a
+few cattle were grazing unherded.
+
+But two things in the prospect conspired to make Ballard draw rein so
+suddenly as to bring him awkwardly into collision with his follower. One
+was a glimpse of the Castle 'Cadia touring car trundling swiftly away to
+the eastward on the river road; and the other was a slight barrier of
+tree branches piled across the trail fairly under his horse's nose.
+Stuck upon a broken twig of the barrier was a sheet of paper; and there
+was still sufficient light to enable the chief engineer to read the
+type-written lines upon it when he dropped from the saddle.
+
+"Mr. Ballard:" it ran. "You are about to commit an act of the crudest
+injustice. Take the advice of an anxious friend, and quench the fire of
+enmity before it gets beyond control."
+
+There was no signature; and Ballard was still staring after the
+disappearing automobile when he mechanically passed the sheet of paper
+up to Bigelow. The Forestry man read the type-written note and glanced
+back at the sheriff's posse just emerging from the canyon portal.
+
+"What will you do?" he asked; and Ballard came alive with a start and
+shook his head.
+
+"I don't know: if we could manage to overtake that auto.... But it's too
+late now to do anything, Bigelow. I've made my complaint and sworn out
+the warrants. Beckwith will serve them--he's obliged to serve them."
+
+"Of course," said Bigelow; and together they waited for the sheriff's
+posse to close up.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE LAW AND THE LADY
+
+
+It touched a little spring of wonderment in the Forestry man when
+Ballard made the waiting halt merely an excuse for a word of
+leave-taking with Sheriff Beckwith; a brittle exchange of formalities in
+which no mention was made of the incident of the brush barrier and the
+type-written note.
+
+"You have your warrants, and you know your way around in the valley; you
+won't need me," was the manner in which the young engineer drew out of
+the impending unpleasantness. "When you have taken your prisoners to the
+county seat, the company's attorneys will do the rest."
+
+Beckwith, being an ex-cattleman, was grimly sarcastic.
+
+"This is my job, and I'll do it up man-size and b'ligerent, Mr. Ballard.
+But between us three and the gate-post, you ain't goin' to make anything
+by it--barrin' a lot o' bad blood. The old colonel 'll give a bond and
+bail his men, and there you are again, right where you started from."
+
+"That's all right; I believe in the law, and I'm giving it a chance,"
+snapped Ballard; and the two parties separated, the sheriff's posse
+taking the river road, and Ballard leading the way across country in the
+direction of Fitzpatrick's field headquarters.
+
+Rather more than half of the distance from the canyon head to the camp
+had been covered before the boy, Carson, had lagged far enough behind to
+give Bigelow a chance for free speech with Ballard, but the Forestry man
+improved the opportunity as soon as it was given him.
+
+"You still believe there is no hope of a compromise?" he began. "What
+the sheriff said a few minutes ago is quite true, you know. The cow-boys
+will be back in a day or two, and it will make bad blood."
+
+"Excuse me," said Ballard, irritably; "you are an onlooker, Mr. Bigelow,
+and you can afford to pose as a peacemaker. But I've had all I can
+stand. If Colonel Craigmiles can't control his flap-hatted bullies,
+we'll try to help him. There is a week's work for half a hundred men and
+teams lying in that ditch over yonder," pointing with his quirt toward
+the dynamited cutting. "Do you think I'm going to lie down and let these
+cattle-punchers ride rough-shod over me and the company I represent? Not
+to-day, or any other day, I assure you."
+
+"Then you entirely disregard the little type-written note?"
+
+"In justice to my employers, I am bound to call Colonel Craigmiles's
+bluff, whatever form it takes."
+
+Bigelow rode in silence for the next hundred yards. Then he began again.
+
+"It doesn't seem like the colonel: to go at you indirectly that way."
+
+"He was in that automobile: I saw him. The notice could scarcely have
+been posted without his knowledge."
+
+"No," Bigelow agreed, slowly. But immediately afterward he added: "There
+were others in the car."
+
+"I know it--four or five of them. But that doesn't let the colonel out."
+
+Again Bigelow relapsed into silence, and the camp-fires of Fitzpatrick's
+headquarters were in sight when he said:
+
+"You confessed to me a few hours ago that one of your weaknesses was the
+inability to stay angry. Will you pardon me if I say that it seems to
+have its compensation in the law of recurrences?"
+
+Ballard's laugh was frankly apologetic. "You may go farther and say that
+I am ill-mannered enough to quarrel with a good friend who cheerfully
+gets himself shot up in my behalf. Overlook it, Mr. Bigelow; and I'll
+try to remember that I am a partisan, while you are only a good-natured
+non-combatant. This little affair is a fact accomplished, so far as we
+are concerned. The colonel's cow-men dynamited our ditch; Sheriff
+Beckwith will do his duty; and the company's attorney will see to it
+that somebody pays the penalty. Let's drop it--as between us two."
+
+Being thus estopped, Bigelow held his peace; and a little later they
+were dismounting before the door of Fitzpatrick's commissary. When the
+contractor had welcomed and fed them, Ballard rolled into the nearest
+bunk and went to sleep to make up the arrearages, leaving his guest to
+smoke alone. Bigelow took his desertion good-naturedly, and sat for an
+hour or more on a bench in front of the storeroom, puffing quietly at
+his pipe, and taking an onlooker's part in the ditch-diggers' games of
+dice-throwing and card-playing going on around the great fire in the
+plaza.
+
+When the pipe went out after its second filling, he got up and strolled
+a little way beyond the camp limits. The night was fine and mild for the
+altitudes, and he had walked a circling mile before he found himself
+again at the camp confines. It was here, at the back of the mule drove,
+that he became once more an onlooker; this time a thoroughly mystified
+one.
+
+The little drama, at which the Forestry expert was the single spectator,
+was chiefly pantomimic, but it lacked nothing in eloquent action. Flat
+upon the ground, and almost among the legs of the grazing mules, lay a
+diminutive figure, face down, digging fingers and toes into the hoof-cut
+earth, and sobbing out a strange jargon of oaths and childish ragings.
+Before Bigelow could speak, the figure rose to its knees, its face
+disfigured with passion, and its small fists clenching themselves at the
+invisible. It was Dick Carson; and the words which Bigelow heard seemed
+to be shaken by some unseen force out of the thin, stoop-shouldered
+little body: "Oh, my Lordy! ef it could on'y be somebody else! But ther'
+ain't nobody else; an' I'll go to hell if I don't do it!"
+
+Now, at all events, Bigelow would have cut in, but the action of the
+drama was too quick for him. Like a flash the water-boy disappeared
+among the legs of the grazing animals; and a few minutes afterward the
+night gave back the sound of galloping hoofs racing away to the
+eastward.
+
+Bigelow marked the direction of the water-boy's flight. Since it was
+toward the valley head and Castle 'Cadia, he guessed that young Carson's
+errand concerned itself in some way with the sheriff's raid upon the
+Craigmiles ranch outfit. Here, however, conjecture tripped itself and
+fell down. Both parties in whatever conflict the sheriff's visit might
+provoke were the boy's natural enemies.
+
+Bigelow was wrestling with this fresh bit of mystery when he went to
+find his bunk in the commissary; it got into his dreams and was still
+present when the early morning call of the camp was sounded. But neither
+at the candle-lighted breakfast, nor later, when Ballard asked him if he
+were fit for a leisurely ride to the southern watershed for the day's
+outwearing, did he speak of young Carson's desertion.
+
+Fitzpatrick spoke of it, though, when the chief and his companion were
+mounting for the watershed ride.
+
+"You brought my water-boy back with you last night, didn't you, Mr.
+Ballard?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly; he came in with us. Why? Have you lost him?"
+
+"Him and one of the saddle broncos. And I don't much like the look of
+it."
+
+"Oh, I guess he'll turn up all right," said Ballard easily.
+
+It was Bigelow's time to speak, but something restrained him, and the
+contractor's inquiry died a natural death when Ballard gathered the
+reins and pointed the way to the southward hills.
+
+By nine o'clock the two riders were among the foothills of the southern
+Elks, and the chief engineer of the Arcadia Company was making a very
+practical use of his guest. Bigelow was an authority on watersheds,
+stream-basins, the conservation of moisture by forested slopes, and
+kindred subjects of vital importance to the construction chief of an
+irrigation scheme; and the talk held steadily to the technical problems,
+with the Forestry expert as the lecturer.
+
+Only once was there a break and a lapse into the humanities. It was when
+the horses had climbed one of the bald hills from the summit of which
+the great valley, with its dottings of camps and its streaking of canal
+gradings, was spread out map-like beneath them. On the distant river
+road, progressing by perspective inches toward the lower end of the
+valley, trotted a mixed mob of horsemen, something more than doubling in
+numbers the sheriff's posse that had ridden over the same road in the
+opposite direction the previous evening.
+
+"Beckwith with his game-bag?" queried Bigelow, gravely; and Ballard
+said: "I guess so," and immediately switched the talk back to the
+watershed technicalities.
+
+It was within an hour of the grading-camp supper-time when the two
+investigators of moisture-beds and auxiliary reservoirs rode into
+Fitzpatrick's headquarters and found a surprise awaiting them. The
+Castle 'Cadia runabout was drawn up before the commissary; and young
+Blacklock, in cap and gloves and dust-coat, was tinkering with the
+motor.
+
+"The same to you, gentlemen," he said, jocosely, when he took his head
+out of the bonnet. "I was just getting ready to go and chase you some
+more. We've been waiting a solid hour, I should say."
+
+"'We'?" questioned Ballard.
+
+"Yes; Miss Elsa and I. We've been hunting you in every place a set of
+rubber tires wouldn't balk at, all afternoon. Say; you don't happen to
+have an extra spark-plug about your clothes, either of you, do you? One
+of these is cracked in the porcelain, and she skips like a dog on three
+legs."
+
+Ballard ignored the motor disability completely.
+
+"You brought Miss Craigmiles here? Where is she now?" he demanded.
+
+The collegian laughed.
+
+"She's in the grand _salon_, and Fitzpatrick the gallant is making her a
+cup of commissary tea. Wouldn't that jar you?"
+
+Ballard swung out of his saddle and vanished through the open door of
+the commissary, leaving Bigelow and the motor-maniac to their own
+devices. In the littered storeroom he found Miss Craigmiles, sitting
+upon a coil of rope and calmly drinking her tea from a new tin can.
+
+"At last!" she sighed, smiling up at him; and then: "Mercy me! how
+savage you look! We are trespassers; I admit it. But you'll be lenient
+with us, won't you? Jerry says there is a broken spark-plug, or
+something; but I am sure we can move on if we're told to. You have come
+to tell us to move on, Mr. Ballard?"
+
+His frown was only the outward and visible sign of the inward attempt to
+grapple with the possibilities; but it made his words sound something
+less than solicitous.
+
+"This is no place for you," he began; but she would not let him go on.
+
+"I have been finding it quite a pleasant place, I assure you. Mr.
+Fitzpatrick is an Irish gentleman. No one could have been kinder. You've
+no idea of the horrible things he promised to do to the cook if this tea
+wasn't just right."
+
+If she were trying to make him smile, she succeeded. Fitzpatrick's
+picturesque language to his men was the one spectacular feature of the
+headquarters camp.
+
+"That proves what I said--that this is no place for you," he rejoined,
+still deprecating the camp crudities. "And you've been here an hour,
+Blacklock says."
+
+"An hour and twelve minutes, to be exact," she admitted, tilting the
+tiny watch pinned upon the lapel of her driving-coat. "But you left us
+no alternative. We have driven uncounted miles this afternoon, looking
+for you and Mr. Bigelow."
+
+Ballard flushed uncomfortably under the tan and sunburn. Miss Craigmiles
+could have but one object in seeking him, he decided; and he would have
+given worlds to be able to set the business affair and the sentimental
+on opposite sides of an impassable chasm. Since it was not to be, he
+said what he was constrained to say with characteristic abruptness.
+
+"It is too late. The matter is out of my hands, now. The provocation was
+very great; and in common loyalty to my employers I was obliged to
+strike back. Your father----"
+
+She stopped him with a gesture that brought the blood to his face again.
+
+"I know there has been provocation," she qualified. "But it has not been
+all on one side. Your men have told you how our range-riders have
+annoyed them: probably they have not told you how they have given blow
+for blow, killing cattle on the railroad, supplying themselves with
+fresh meat from our herd, filling up or draining the water-holes. And
+two days ago, at this very camp.... I don't know the merits of the case;
+but I do know that one of our men was shot through the shoulder, and is
+lying critically near to death."
+
+He nodded gloomily. "That was bad," he admitted, adding: "And it
+promptly brought on more violence. On the night of the same day your
+cow-men returned and dynamited the canal."
+
+Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.
+
+"Did you see them do it?"
+
+"Naturally, no one saw them do it. But it was done, nevertheless."
+
+She rose and faced him fairly.
+
+"You found my note last evening--when you were returning with Sheriff
+Beckwith?"
+
+"I found an unsigned note on a little barrier of tree-branches on the
+trail; yes."
+
+"I wrote it and put it there," she declared. "I told you you were about
+to commit an act of injustice, and you have committed it--a very great
+one, indeed, Mr. Ballard."
+
+"I am open to conviction," he conceded, almost morosely. She was
+confronting him like an angry goddess, and mixed up with the thought
+that he had never seen her so beautiful and so altogether desirable was
+another thought that he should like to run away and hide.
+
+"Yes; you are open to conviction--after the fact!" she retorted,
+bitterly. "Do you know what you have done? You have fallen like a
+hot-headed boy into a trap set for you by my father's enemies. You have
+carefully stripped Arcadia of every man who could defend our
+cattle--just as it was planned for you to do."
+
+"But, good heavens!" he began, "I----"
+
+"Hear me out," she commanded, looking more than ever the princess of her
+father's kingdom. "Down in the canyon of the Boiling Water there is a
+band of outlaws that has harried this valley for years. Assuming that
+you would do precisely what you have done, some of these men came up and
+dynamited your canal, timing the raid to fit your inspection tour. Am I
+making it sufficiently plain?"
+
+"O my sainted ancestors!" he groaned. And then: "Please go on; you can't
+make it any worse."
+
+"They confidently expected that you would procure a wholesale arrest of
+the Arcadia ranch force; but they did not expect you to act as promptly
+as you did. That is why they turned and fired upon you in Dry Valley
+Gulch: they thought they were suspected and pursued, not by you or any
+of your men, but by our cow-boys. Your appearance at the cabin at the
+mouth of Deer Creek yesterday morning explained things, and they let you
+go on without taking vengeance for the man Mr. Bigelow had shot in the
+Dry Valley affray. They were willing to let the greater matter outweigh
+the smaller."
+
+Ballard said "Good heavens!" again, and leaned weakly against the
+commissary counter. Then, suddenly, it came over him like a cool blast
+of wind on a hot day that this clear-eyed, sweet-faced young woman's
+intimate knowledge of the labyrinthine tangle was almost superhuman
+enough to be uncanny. Would the nerve-shattering mysteries never be
+cleared away?
+
+"You know all this--as only an eye-witness could know," he stammered.
+"How, in the name of all that is wonderful----"
+
+"We are not without friends--even in your camps," she admitted. "Word
+came to Castle 'Cadia of your night ride and its purpose. For the later
+details there was little Dick. My father once had his father sent to the
+penitentiary for cattle-stealing. In pity for the boy, I persuaded some
+of our Denver friends to start a petition for a pardon. Dick has not
+forgotten it; and last night he rode to Castle 'Cadia to tell me what I
+have told you--the poor little lad being more loyal to me than he is to
+his irreclaimable wretch of a father. Also, he told me another thing:
+to-night, while the range cattle are entirely unguarded, there will be
+another raid from Deer Creek. I thought you might like to know how hard
+a blow you have struck us, this time. That is why I have made Jerry
+drive me a hundred miles or so up and down the valley this afternoon."
+
+The situation was well beyond speech, any exculpatory speech of
+Ballard's, but there was still an opportunity for deeds. Going to the
+door he called to Bigelow, and when the Forestry man came in, his part
+in what was to be done was assigned abruptly.
+
+"Mr. Bigelow, you can handle the runabout with one good arm, I'm sure:
+drive Miss Craigmiles home, if you please, and let me have Blacklock."
+
+"Certainly, if Miss Elsa is willing to exchange a good chauffeur for a
+poor one," was the good-natured reply. And then to his hostess: "Are you
+willing, Miss Craigmiles?"
+
+"Mr. Ballard is the present tyrant of Arcadia. If he shows us the
+door----"
+
+Bigelow was already at the car step, waiting to help her in. There was
+time only for a single sentence of caution, and Ballard got it in a
+swift aside.
+
+"Don't be rash again," she warned him. "You have plenty of men here. If
+Carson can be made to understand that you will not let him take
+advantage of the plot in which he has made you his innocent
+accessory----"
+
+"Set your mind entirely at rest," he cut in, with a curtness which was
+born altogether of his determination, and not at all of his attitude
+toward the woman he loved. "There will be no cattle-lifting in this
+valley to-night--or at any other time until your own caretakers have
+returned."
+
+"Thank you," she said simply; and a minute later Ballard and young
+Blacklock stood aside to let Bigelow remove himself, his companion, and
+the smart little car swiftly from the scene.
+
+"Say, Mr. Ballard, this is no end good of you--to let me in for a little
+breather of sport," said the collegian, when the fast runabout was
+fading to a dusty blur in the sunset purplings. "Bigelow gave me a hint;
+said there was a scrap of some sort on. Make me your side partner, and
+I'll do you proud."
+
+"You are all right," laughed Ballard, with a sudden access of
+light-heartedness. "But the first thing to do is to get a little hay out
+of the rack. Come in and let us see what you can make of a camp supper.
+Fitzpatrick bets high on his cook--which is more than I'd do if he were
+mine."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE MAXIM
+
+
+Ballard and Blacklock ate supper at the contractor's table in the
+commissary, and the talk, what there was of it, left the Kentuckian
+aside. The Arcadian summering was the young collegian's first plunge
+into the manful realities, and it was not often that he came upon so
+much raw material in the lump as the contractor's camp, and more
+especially the jovial Irish contractor himself, afforded.
+
+Ballard was silent for cause. Out of the depths of humiliation for the
+part he had been made to play in the plan for robbing Colonel Craigmiles
+he had promised unhesitatingly to prevent the robbery. But the means for
+preventing it were not so obvious as they might have been. Force was the
+only argument which would appeal to the cattle-lifters, and assuredly
+there were men enough and arms enough in the Fitzpatrick camps to hold
+up any possible number of rustlers that Carson could bring into the
+valley. But would the contractor's men consent to fight the colonel's
+battle?
+
+This was the crucial query which only Fitzpatrick could answer; and at
+the close of the meal, Ballard made haste to have private speech with
+the contractor in the closet-like pay office.
+
+"You see what we are up against, Bourke," he summed up when he had
+explained the true inwardness of the situation to the Irishman. "Bare
+justice, the justice that even an enemy has a right to expect, shoves us
+into the breach. We've got to stop this raid on the Craigmiles cattle."
+
+Fitzpatrick was shaking his head dubiously.
+
+"Sure, now; _I'm_ with you, Mr. Ballard," he allowed, righting himself
+with an effort that was a fine triumph over personal prejudice. "But
+it's only fair to warn you that not a man in any of the ditch camps will
+lift a finger in any fight to save the colonel's property. This shindy
+with the cow-boys has gone on too long, and it has been too bitter."
+
+"But this time they've got it to do," Ballard insisted warmly. "They are
+your men, under your orders."
+
+"Under my orders to throw dirt, maybe; but not to shoulder the guns and
+do the tin-soldier act. There's plinty of men, as you say; Polacks and
+Hungarians and Eyetalians and Irish--and the Irish are the only ones you
+could count on in a hooraw, boys! I know every man of them, Mr. Ballard,
+and, not to be mincin' the wor-rd, they'd see you--or me, either--in the
+hot place before they'd point a gun at anybody who was giving the
+Craigmiles outfit a little taste of its own medicine."
+
+Fitzpatrick's positive assurance was discouraging, but Ballard would not
+give up.
+
+"How many men do you suppose Carson can muster for this cattle
+round-up?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't know; eighteen or twenty at the outside, maybe."
+
+"You've got two hundred and forty-odd here and at Riley's; in all that
+number don't you suppose you could find a dozen or two who would stand
+by us?"
+
+"Honestly, then, I don't, Mr. Ballard. I'm not lukewarm, as ye might
+think: I'll stand with you while I can squint an eye to sight th' gun.
+But the minute you tell the b'ys what you're wantin' them to do, that
+same minute they'll give you the high-ball signal and quit."
+
+"Strike work, you mean?"
+
+"Just that."
+
+Ballard went into a brown study, and Fitzpatrick respected it. After a
+time the silence was broken by the faint tapping of the tiny telegraph
+instrument on the contractor's desk. Ballard's chair righted itself with
+a crash.
+
+"The wire," he exclaimed; "I had forgotten that you had brought it down
+this far on the line. I wonder if I can get Bromley?"
+
+"Sure ye can," said the contractor; and Ballard sat at the desk to try.
+
+It was during the preliminary key-clickings that Blacklock came to the
+door of the pay office. "There's a man out here wanting to speak to you,
+Mr. Fitzpatrick," he announced; and the contractor went out, returning
+presently to break into Ballard's preoccupied effort to raise the office
+at Elbow Canyon.
+
+"One of the foremen came in to say that the Craigmiles men were coming
+back. For the last half-hour horsemen by twos and threes have been
+trailing up the river road and heading for the ranch headquarters," was
+the information he brought.
+
+"It's Carson's gang," said Ballard, at once.
+
+"Yes; but I didn't give it away to the foreman. Their scheme is to make
+as much of a round-up as they can while it's light enough to see.
+There'll be a small piece of a moon, and that'll do for the drive down
+the canyon. Oh, I'll bet you they've got it all figured out to a dot.
+Carson's plenty smooth when it comes to plannin' any devilment."
+
+Ballard turned back to the telegraph key and rattled it impatiently.
+Time was growing precious; was already temerariously short for carrying
+out the programme he had hastily determined upon in the few minutes of
+brown study.
+
+"That you, Loudon?" he clicked, when, after interminable tappings, the
+breaking answer came; and upon the heels of the snipped-out affirmative
+he cut in masterfully.
+
+"Ask no questions, but do as I say, quick. You said colonel had
+machine-gun at his mine: Rally gang stone-buckies, rush that gun, and
+capture it. Can you do it?"
+
+"Yes," was the prompt reply, "if you don't mind good big bill funeral
+expenses, followed by labour riot."
+
+"We've got to have gun."
+
+"The colonel would lend it if--hold wire minute, Miss Elsa just crossing
+bridge in runabout. I'll ask her."
+
+Ballard's sigh of relief was almost a groan, and he waited with good
+hope. Elsa would know why he wanted the Maxim, and if the thing could be
+done without an express order from her father to the Mexican mine
+guards, she would do it. After what seemed to the engineer like the
+longest fifteen minutes he had ever endured, the tapping began again.
+
+"Gun here," from Bromley. "What shall I do with it?"
+
+The answer went back shot-like: "Load on engine and get it down to end
+of branch nearest this camp quick."
+
+"Want me to come with it?"
+
+"No; stay where you are, and you may be next Arcadian chief
+construction. Hurry gun."
+
+Fitzpatrick was his own telegrapher, and as he read what passed through
+key and sounder his smile was like that which goes with the
+prize-fighter's preliminary hand-shaking.
+
+"Carson'll need persuading," he commented. "'Tis well ye've got the
+artillery moving. What's next?"
+
+"The next thing is to get out the best team you have, the one that will
+make the best time, and send it to the end of track to meet Bromley's
+special. How far is it--six miles, or thereabouts?"
+
+"Seven, or maybe a little worse. I'll go with the team myself, and push
+on the reins. Do I bring the gun here?"
+
+Ballard thought a moment. "No; since we're to handle this thing by
+ourselves, there is no need of making talk in the camps. Do you know a
+little sand creek in the hogback called Dry Valley?"
+
+"Sure, I do."
+
+"Good. Make a straight line for the head of that arroyo, and we'll meet
+you there, Blacklock and I, with an extra saddle-horse."
+
+Fitzpatrick was getting a duck driving-coat out of a locker.
+
+"What's your notion, Mr. Ballard?--if a man might be asking?"
+
+"Wait, and you'll see," was the crisp reply. "It will work; you'll see
+it work like a charm, Bourke. But you must burn the miles with that team
+of broncos. We'll be down and out if you don't make connections with the
+Maxim. And say; toss a coil of that quarter-inch rope into your wagon as
+you go. We'll need that, too."
+
+When the contractor was gone, Ballard called the collegian into the pay
+office and put him in touch with the pressing facts. A raid was to be
+made on Colonel Craigmiles's cattle by a band of cattle thieves; the
+raid was to be prevented; means to the preventing end--three men and a
+Maxim automatic rapid-fire gun. Would Blacklock be one of the three?
+
+"Would a hungry little dog eat his supper, Mr. Ballard? By Jove! but
+you're a good angel in disguise--to let me in for the fun! And you've
+pressed the right button, too, by George! There's a Maxim in the
+military kit at college, and I can work her to the queen's taste."
+
+"Then you may consider yourself chief of the artillery," was the prompt
+rejoinder. "I suppose I don't need to ask if you can ride a range pony?"
+
+Blacklock's laugh was an excited chuckle.
+
+"Now you're shouting. What I don't know about cow-ponies would make the
+biggest book you ever saw. But I'd ride a striped zebra rather than be
+left out of this. Do we hike out now?--right away?"
+
+"There is no rush; you can smoke a pipe or two--as I'm going to.
+Fitzpatrick has to drive fourteen miles to work off his handicap."
+
+Ballard filled his pipe and lighting it sat down to let the mental
+polishing wheels grind upon the details of his plan. Blacklock tried
+hard to assume the manly attitude of nonchalance; tried and failed
+utterly. Once for every five minutes of the waiting he had to jump up
+and make a trip to the front of the commissary to ease off the excess
+pressure; and at the eleventh return Ballard was knocking the ash out of
+his pipe.
+
+"Getting on your nerves, Jerry?" he asked. "All right: we'll go and bore
+a couple of holes into the night, if that's what you're anxious to be
+doing."
+
+The start was made without advertisement. Fitzpatrick's horse-keeper was
+smoking cigarettes on the little porch platform, and at a word from
+Ballard he disappeared in the direction of the horse-rope. Giving him
+the necessary saddling time, the two made their way around the
+card-playing groups at the plaza fire, and at the back of the darkened
+mess-tent found the man waiting with three saddled broncos, all with
+rifle holsters under the stirrup leathers. Ballard asked a single
+question at the mounting moment.
+
+"You haven't seen young Carson in the last hour or so, have you, Patsy?"
+
+"Niver a hair av him: 'tis all day long he's been gone, wid Misther
+Bourke swearing thremenjous about the cayuse he took."
+
+Ballard took the bridle of the led horse and the ride down the line of
+the canal, with Fitzpatrick's "piece of a moon" to silver the darkness,
+was begun as a part of the day's work by the engineer, but with some
+little trepidation by the young collegian, whose saddle-strivings
+hitherto had been confined to the well-behaved cobs in his father's
+stables.
+
+At the end of the first mile Blacklock found himself growing painfully
+conscious of every start of the wiry little steed between his knees, and
+was fain to seek comfort.
+
+"Say, Mr. Ballard; what do you do when a horse bucks under you?" he
+asked, wedging the inquiry between the jolts of the racking gallop.
+
+"You don't do anything," replied Ballard, taking the pronoun in the
+generic sense. "The bronco usually does it all."
+
+"I--believe this brute's--getting ready to--buck," gasped the tyro.
+"He's working--my knee-holds loose--with his confounded
+sh--shoulder-blades."
+
+"Freeze to him," laughed Ballard. Then he added the word of heartening:
+"He can't buck while you keep him on the run. Here's a smooth bit of
+prairie: let him out a few notches."
+
+That was the beginning of a mad race that swept them down the canal
+line, past Riley's camp and out to the sand-floored cleft in the
+foothills far ahead of the planned meeting with Fitzpatrick. But this
+time the waiting interval was not wasted. Picketing the three horses,
+and arming themselves with a pair of the short-barrelled rifles, the
+advance guard of two made a careful study of the ground, pushing the
+reconnaissance down to the mouth of the dry valley, and a little way
+along the main river trail in both directions.
+
+"Right here," said Ballard, indicating a point on the river trail just
+below the intersecting valley mouth, "is where you will be posted with
+the Maxim. If you take this boulder for a shield, you can command the
+gulch and the upper trail for a hundred yards or more, and still be out
+of range of their Winchesters. They'll probably shoot at you, but you
+won't mind that, with six or eight feet of granite for a breastwork,
+will you, Jerry?"
+
+"Well, I should say not! Just you watch me burn 'em up when you give the
+word, Mr. Ballard. I believe I could hold a hundred of 'em from this
+rock."
+
+"That is exactly what I want you to do--to hold them. It would be
+cold-blooded murder to turn the Maxim loose on them from this short
+range unless they force you to it. Don't forget that, Jerry."
+
+"I sha'n't," promised the collegian; and after some further study of the
+topographies, they went back to the horses.
+
+Thereupon ensued a tedious wait of an hour or more, with no sight or
+sound of the expected waggon, and with anxiety growing like a juggler's
+rose during the slowly passing minutes. Anyone of a dozen things might
+have happened to delay Fitzpatrick, or even to make his errand a
+fruitless one. The construction track was rough, and the hurrying engine
+might have jumped the rails. The rustlers might have got wind of the gun
+dash and ditched the locomotive. Failing that, some of their round-up
+men might have stumbled upon the contractor and halted and overpowered
+him. Ballard and Blacklock listened anxiously for the drumming of
+wheels. But when the silence was broken it was not by waggon noises; the
+sound was in the air--a distant lowing of a herd in motion, and the
+shuffling murmur of many hoofs. The inference was plain.
+
+"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars are
+coming down-valley with the cattle, _and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick_!"
+
+That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hasty
+command to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo,
+with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.
+
+"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're less
+than a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beef
+herd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"
+
+With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting of
+the precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men,
+horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting of
+the terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder on
+the main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harness
+animals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan briskly
+to his two subordinates.
+
+"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man or
+two ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," he
+predicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which we
+must turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sand
+gulch where we came in. Later on----"
+
+A rattling clatter of horse-shoes on stone rose above the muffled lowing
+and milling of the oncoming drove, and there was no time for further
+explanations. As Ballard and his companions drew back among the tree
+shadows in the small inner valley, a single horseman galloped down the
+canyon trail, wheeling abruptly in the gulch mouth to head off the
+cattle if they should try to turn back by way of the hogback valley.
+Before the echo of his shrill whistle had died away among the canyon
+crags, three men rose up out of the darkness, and with business-like
+celerity the trail guard was jerked from his saddle, bound, gagged, and
+tossed into the bed of an empty waggon.
+
+"Now for the cut-out!" shouted Ballard; and the advance stragglers of
+the stolen herd were already in the mouth of the little valley when the
+three amateur line-riders dashed at them and strove to turn the drive at
+right angles up the dry gulch.
+
+For a sweating minute or two the battle with brute bewilderment hung in
+the balance. Wheel and shout and flog as they would, they seemed able
+only to mass the bellowing drove in the narrow mouth of the turn-out.
+But at the critical instant, when the milling tangle threatened to
+become a jam that must crowd itself from the trail into the near-by
+torrent of the Boiling Water, a few of the leaders found the open way to
+freedom up the hogback valley, and in another throat-parching minute
+there was only a cloud of dust hanging between the gulch heads to show
+where the battle had been raging.
+
+This was the situation a little later when the main body of the
+rustlers, ten men strong, ambled unsuspectingly into the valley-mouth
+trap: dust in the air, a withdrawing thunder of hoof-beats, and apparent
+desertion of the point of hazard. Carson was the first to grasp the
+meaning of the dust cloud and the vanishing murmur of hoof-tramplings.
+
+"Hell!" he rasped. "Billings has let 'em cut back up the gulch! That's
+on you, Buck Cummin's: I told you ye'd better hike along 'ith Billings."
+
+"You always _was_ one o' them 'I-told-ye-so' kind of liars," was the
+pessimistic retort of the man called Cummings; and Carson's right hand
+was flicking toward the ready pistol butt when a voice out of the
+shadows under the western cliff shaped a command clear-cut and incisive.
+
+"Hands up out there--every man of you!" Then, by way of charitable
+explanation: "You're covered--with a rapid-fire Maxim."
+
+There were doubters among the ten; desperate men whose lawless days and
+nights were filled with hair's-breadth chance-takings. From these came a
+scattering volley of pistol shots spitting viciously at the cliff
+shadows.
+
+"Show 'em, Jerry," said the voice, curtly; and from the shelter of a
+great boulder at the side of the main trail leaped a sheet of flame with
+a roar comparable to nothing on earth save its ear-splitting,
+nerve-shattering self. Blacklock had swept the machine-gun in a short
+arc over the heads of the cattle thieves, and from the cliff face and
+ledges above them a dropping rain of clipped pine branches and
+splintered rock chippings fell upon the trapped ten.
+
+It is the new and untried that terrifies. In the group of rustlers there
+were men who would have wheeled horse and run a gauntlet of spitting
+Winchesters without a moment's hesitation. But this hidden
+murder-machine belching whole regiment volleys out of the shadows....
+"Sojers, by cripes!" muttered Carson, under his breath. Then aloud: "All
+right, Cap'n; what you say goes as it lays."
+
+"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the pale
+moonlight pricked out the cattle-lifters in the attitude of submission:
+"First man on the right--knee your horse into the clump of trees
+straight ahead of you."
+
+It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed,
+wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones as
+Ballard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pine
+grove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through the
+neutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on the
+seventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawn
+upon them.
+
+"_Sufferin' Jehu!_" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust and
+humiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man called
+Cummings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of the
+cattle thieves laughed like a good loser.
+
+"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?"
+he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor in
+sight.
+
+"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly.
+"And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head.
+D'ye see?"
+
+They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to his
+saddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actors
+in the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.
+
+"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, when
+Fitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulder
+redoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-wound
+Billings.
+
+"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up--for us easy-marks, Cap'n
+Ballard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.
+
+"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.
+
+"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chief
+rustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right--if you feel called to
+take up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mud
+you turn over in th' big valley."
+
+Fitzpatrick was leading the way up the hoof-trampled bed of the dry
+valley with the waggon team, and Blacklock was marshalling the line of
+prisoners to follow in single file when Ballard wheeled his bronco to
+mount.
+
+"I fight my own battles, Carson," he said, quietly. "You set a deadfall
+for me, and I tumbled in like a tenderfoot. That put it up to me to
+knock out your raid. Incidentally, you and your gang will get what is
+coming to you for blowing a few thousand yards of earth into our canal.
+That's all. Line up there with the others; you've shot your string and
+lost."
+
+The return route led the straggling cavalcade through the arroyo mouth,
+and among the low hills back of Riley's camp to a junction with the
+canal line grade half way to Fitzpatrick's headquarters. Approaching the
+big camp, Ballard held a conference with the contractor, as a result of
+which the waggon mules were headed to the left in a semicircular detour
+around the sleeping camp, the string of prisoners following as the
+knotted trail ropes steered it.
+
+Another hour of easting saw the crescent moon poising over the black
+sky-line of the Elks, and it brought captors and captured to the end of
+track of the railroad where there was a siding, with a half-dozen empty
+material cars and Bromley's artillery special, the engine hissing softly
+and the men asleep on the cab cushions.
+
+Ballard cut his prisoners foot-free, dismounted them, and locked them
+into an empty box-car. This done, the engine crew was aroused, the Maxim
+was reloaded upon the tender, and the chief gave the trainmen their
+instructions.
+
+"Take the gun, and that locked box-car, back to Elbow Canyon," he
+directed. "Mr. Bromley will give you orders from there."
+
+"Carload o' hosses?" said the engineman, noting the position of the
+box-car opposite a temporary chute built for debarking a consignment of
+Fitzpatrick's scraper teams.
+
+"No; jackasses," was Ballard's correction; and when the engine was
+clattering away to the eastward with its one-car train, the waggon was
+headed westward, with Blacklock sharing the seat beside Fitzpatrick,
+Ballard lying full-length on his back in the deep box-bed, and the long
+string of saddle animals towing from the tailboard.
+
+At the headquarters commissary Blacklock tumbled into the handiest bunk
+and was asleep when he did it. But Ballard roused himself sufficiently
+to send a message over the wire to Bromley directing the disposal of the
+captured cattle thieves, who were to be transported by way of Alta Vista
+and the D. & U. P. to the county seat.
+
+After that he remembered nothing until he awoke to blink at the sun
+shining into the little bunk room at the back of the pay office; awoke
+with a start to find Fitzpatrick handing him a telegram scrawled upon a
+bit of wrapping-paper.
+
+"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor,
+grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:
+
+     "D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side
+     doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside
+     but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and
+     corn whiskey.
+
+     "BROMLEY."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+HOSPES ET HOSTIS
+
+
+It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid before
+Ballard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley's
+laugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.
+
+"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn't
+it, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over the
+interval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peace
+pipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. I
+tried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair of
+sheep, of course."
+
+"Assume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it go
+at that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up on
+you long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused--even at a
+poor joke on me."
+
+"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since you
+went down-valley. And I've been wondering why."
+
+"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead and
+buried, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."
+
+Bromley grinned again.
+
+"Meaning that this cow-boy cattle-thief tangle in the lower valley has
+made you _persona non grata_ at Castle 'Cadia? You're off; 'way off. You
+don't know Colonel Adam. So far from holding malice, he has been down
+here twice to thank you for stopping the Carson raid. And that reminds
+me: there's a Castle 'Cadia note in your mail-box--came down by the
+hands of one of the little Japs this afternoon." And he went in to get
+it.
+
+It proved to be another dinner bidding for the chief engineer, to be
+accepted informally whenever he had time to spare. It was written and
+signed by the daughter, but she said that she spoke both for her father
+and herself when she urged him to come soon.
+
+"You'll go?" queried Bromley, when Ballard had passed the faintly
+perfumed bit of note-paper across the arm's-reach between the two
+lazy-chairs.
+
+"You know I'll go," was the half morose answer.
+
+Bromley's smile was perfunctory.
+
+"Of course you will," he assented. "To-night?"
+
+"As well one time as another. Won't you go along?"
+
+"Miss Elsa's invitation does not include me," was the gentle reminder.
+
+"Bosh! You've had the open door, first, last, and all the time, haven't
+you?"
+
+"Of course. I was only joking. But it isn't good for both of us to be
+off the job at the same time. I'll stay and keep on intimidating the
+hoodoo."
+
+There was a material train coming in from Alta Vista, and when its
+long-drawn chime woke the canyon echoes, they both left the mesa and
+went down to the railroad yard. It was an hour later, and Ballard was
+changing his clothes in his bunk-room when he called to Bromley, who was
+checking the way-bills for the lately arrived material.
+
+"Oh, I say, Loudon; has that canyon path been dug out again?--where the
+slide was?"
+
+"Sure," said Bromley, without looking up. Then: "You're going to walk?"
+
+"How else would I get there?" returned Ballard, who still seemed to be
+labouring with his handicap of moroseness.
+
+The assistant did not reply, but a warm flush crept up under the sunburn
+as he went on checking the way-bills. Later, when Ballard swung out to
+go to the Craigmiles's, the man at the desk let him pass with a brief
+"So-long," and bent still lower over his work.
+
+Under much less embarrassing conditions, Ballard would have been
+prepared to find himself breathing an atmosphere of constraint when he
+joined the Castle 'Cadia house-party on the great tree-pillared portico
+of the Craigmiles mansion. But the embarrassment, if any there were, was
+all his own. The colonel was warmly hospitable; under her outward
+presentment of cheerful mockery, Elsa was palpably glad to see him; Miss
+Cauffrey was gently reproachful because he had not let them send Otto
+and the car to drive him around from the canyon; and the various guests
+welcomed him each after his or her kind.
+
+During the ante-dinner pause the talk was all of the engineer's prompt
+snuffing-out of the cattle raid, and the praiseful comment on the little
+_coup de main_ was not marred by any reference to the mistaken zeal
+which had made the raid possible. More than once Ballard found himself
+wondering if the colonel and Elsa, Bigelow and Blacklock, had conspired
+generously to keep the story of his egregious blunder from reaching the
+others. If they had not, there was a deal more charity in human nature
+than the most cheerful optimist ever postulated, he concluded.
+
+At the dinner-table the enthusiastic _rapport_ was evenly sustained.
+Ballard took in the elder of the Cantrell sisters; and Wingfield, who
+sat opposite, quite neglected Miss Van Bryck in his efforts to make an
+inquisitive third when Miss Cantrell insistently returned to the
+exciting topic of the Carson capture--which she did after each separate
+endeavour on Ballard's part to escape the enthusiasm.
+
+"Your joking about it doesn't make it any less heroic, Mr. Ballard," was
+one of Miss Cantrell's phrasings of the song of triumph. "Just think of
+it--three of you against eleven desperate outlaws!"
+
+"Three of us, a carefully planned ambush, and a Maxim rapid-fire
+machine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all get
+away a few hours later."
+
+"And I--the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses who
+could have made the most of it--_I_ wasn't there to see," cut in
+Wingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"
+
+"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing--for a
+play," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and Miss
+Cantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramatic
+quality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of the
+real thing. It's always inadequate."
+
+"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene and
+lofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've been
+to your camp, and what I didn't find out about that hoodoo of yours----"
+
+It was Miss Elsa, sitting at Wingfield's right, who broke in with an
+entirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding an
+answer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafter
+exclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield's
+literary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was prepared
+to draw its teeth when the time should come.
+
+As on the occasion of the engineer's former visit to Castle 'Cadia,
+there was an after-dinner adjournment to the big portico, where the
+Japanese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell into
+pairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.
+
+Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at the
+dispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece of
+mistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in the
+midst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off with
+genial protests.
+
+"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it"--with a benedictory
+wave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uh
+little blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generous
+intervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through the
+machinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, I
+should probably have done precisely the same thing--only I'm not sure I
+should have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try one
+of these conchas, suh--unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havana
+has been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."
+
+Ballard took the gold-banded cigar as one who, having taken a man's
+coat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to the
+colonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever he
+doubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any of
+the mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of the
+irrigation company's industrial army.
+
+Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy with
+the colonel had cost him a possible chance of a _tête-à-tête_ with Elsa.
+She was swinging gently in her own particular corner hammock; but this
+time it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tiny
+coffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which the
+sweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to her
+coffee-holder:
+
+"I am taking you at your sister's valuation and trusting you very fully,
+Mr. Bigelow. You are quite sure you were followed, you and Mr. Ballard,
+on the day before the dynamiting of the canal?"
+
+"No; I merely suspected it. I wasn't sure enough to warrant me in
+calling Ballard's attention to the single horseman who seemed to be
+keeping us in view. But in the light of later events----"
+
+"Yes; I know," she interrupted hastily. "Were you near enough to
+identify the man if--if you should see him again?"
+
+"Oh, no. Most of the time he was a mere galloping dot in the distance.
+Only once--it was when Ballard and I had stopped to wrangle over a bit
+of deforesting vandalism on the part of the contractors--I saw him
+fairly as he drew rein on a hilltop in our rear."
+
+"Describe him for me," she directed, briefly.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't do that. I had only this one near-by glimpse of him,
+you know. But I remarked that he was riding a large horse, like one of
+those in your father's stables; that he sat straight in the saddle; and
+that he was wearing some kind of a skirted coat that blew out behind him
+when he wheeled to face the breeze."
+
+Miss Craigmiles sat up in the hammock and pressed her fingers upon her
+closed eyes. When she spoke again after the lapse of a long minute, it
+was to ask Bigelow to retell the story of the brief fight in the
+darkness at the sand arroyo on the night of the explosion.
+
+The Forestry man went over the happenings of the night, and of the day
+following, circumstantially, while the growing moon tilted like a silver
+shallop in a sea of ebony toward the distant Elks, and the groups and
+pairs on the broad portico rearranged themselves choir-wise to sing
+hymns for which one of the Cantrell sisters went to the piano beyond the
+open windows of the drawing-room to play the accompaniments.
+
+When the not too harmonious chorus began to drone upon the windless
+night air, Miss Craigmiles came out of her fit of abstraction and
+thanked Bigelow for his patience with her.
+
+"It isn't altogether morbid curiosity on my part," she explained, half
+pathetically. "Some day I may be able to tell you just what it is--but
+not to-night. Now you may go and rescue Madge from the major, who has
+been 'H'm-ha-ing' her to extinction for the last half-hour. And if
+you're brave enough you may tell Mr. Ballard that his bass is something
+dreadful--or send him here and I'll tell him."
+
+The open-eyed little ruse worked like a piece of well-oiled mechanism,
+and Ballard broke off in the middle of a verse to go and drag Bigelow's
+deserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.
+
+"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mock
+petulance. "Didn't you know it?"
+
+"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known to
+sing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."
+
+She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that always
+betokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.
+
+"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays the
+violin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"
+
+Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable pricking of
+impatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiously
+similar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. But
+he kept the impatience out of his reply.
+
+"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since I
+came on the work."
+
+"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonality
+which placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; but
+Ballard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.
+
+"I am glad you like him," he said; his tone implying the precise
+opposite of the words.
+
+"Are you? You don't say it very enthusiastically."
+
+It was a small challenge, and he lifted it almost roughly.
+
+"I can't be enthusiastic where your liking for other men is concerned."
+
+Her smile was a mere face-lighting of mockery.
+
+"I can't imagine Mr. Bromley saying a thing like that. What was it you
+told me once about the high plane of men-friendships? As I remember it,
+you said that they were the purest passions the world has ever known.
+And you wouldn't admit that women could breathe the rarefied air of that
+high altitude at all."
+
+"That was before I knew all the possibilities; before I knew what it
+means to----"
+
+"Don't say it," she interrupted, the mocking mood slipping from her like
+a cast-off garment.
+
+"I shall say it," he went on doggedly. "Loudon is nearer to me than any
+other man I ever knew. But I honestly believe I should hate him if--tell
+me that it isn't so, Elsa. For heaven's sake, help me to kill out this
+new madness before it makes a scoundrel of me!"
+
+What she would have said he was not to know. Beyond the zone of light
+bounded by the shadows of the maples on the lawn there were sounds as of
+some animal crashing its way through the shrubbery. A moment later, out
+of the enclosing walls of the night, came a man, running and gasping for
+breath. It was one of the labourers from the camp at Elbow Canyon, and
+he made for the corner of the portico where Miss Craigmiles's hammock
+was swung.
+
+"'Tis Misther Ballard I'm lukin' for!" he panted; and Ballard answered
+quickly for himself.
+
+"I'm here," he said. "What's wanted?"
+
+"It's Misther Bromley, this time, sorr. The wather was risin' in the
+river, and he'd been up to the wing dam just below this to see was there
+anny logs or annything cloggin' it. On the way up or back, we don't know
+which, he did be stoomblin' from the trail into the canyon; and the
+dago, Lu'gi, found him." The man was mopping his face with a red
+bandana, and his hands were shaking as if he had an ague fit.
+
+"Is he badly hurt?" Ballard had put himself quickly between the hammock
+and the bearer of ill tidings.
+
+"'Tis kilt dead entirely he is, sorr, we're thinkin'," was the
+low-spoken reply. The assistant engineer had no enemies among the
+workmen at the headquarters' camp.
+
+Ballard heard a horrified gasp behind him, and the hammock suddenly
+swung empty. When he turned, Elsa was hurrying out through the open
+French window with his coat and hat.
+
+"You must not lose a moment," she urged. "Don't wait for anything--I'll
+explain to father and Aunt June. Hurry! hurry! but, oh, do be
+careful--_careful_!"
+
+Ballard dropped from the edge of the portico and plunged into the
+shrubbery at the heels of the messenger. The young woman, still pale and
+strangely perturbed, hastened to find her aunt.
+
+"What is it, child? What has happened?"
+
+Miss Cauffrey, the gentle-voiced, had been dozing in her chair, but she
+wakened quickly when Elsa spoke to her.
+
+"It is another--accident; at the construction camp. Mr. Ballard had to
+go immediately. Where is father?"
+
+Miss Cauffrey put up her eye-glasses and scanned the various groups
+within eye-reach. Then she remembered. "Oh, yes; I think I must be very
+sleepy, yet. He went in quite a little time ago; to the library to lie
+down. He asked me to call him when Mr. Ballard was ready to go."
+
+"Are you sure of that, Aunt June?"
+
+"Why--yes. No, that wasn't it, either; he asked me to excuse him to Mr.
+Ballard. I recollect now. Dear me, child! What has upset you so? You
+look positively haggard."
+
+But Elsa had fled; first to the library, which was empty, and then to
+her father's room above stairs. That was empty, too, but the coat and
+waistcoat her father had worn earlier in the evening were lying upon the
+bed as if thrown aside hurriedly. While she was staring panic-stricken
+at the mute evidences of his absence she heard his step in the corridor.
+When he came in, less familiar eyes than those of his daughter would
+scarcely have recognised him. He was muffled to the heels in a long
+rain-coat, the muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathing
+hard like a spent runner.
+
+[Illustration: The muscles of his face were twitching, and he was
+breathing hard, like a spent runner.]
+
+"Father!" she called, softly; but he either did not hear or did not
+heed. He had flung the rain-coat aside and was hastily struggling into
+the evening dress. When he turned from the dressing-mirror she could
+hardly keep from crying out. With the swift change of raiment he had
+become himself again; and a few minutes later, when she had followed him
+to the library to find him lying quietly upon the reading-lounge,
+half-asleep, as it seemed, the transformation scene in the upper room
+became more than ever like the fleeting impression of an incredible
+dream.
+
+"Father, are you asleep?" she asked; and when he sat up quickly she told
+him her tidings without preface.
+
+"Mr. Bromley is hurt--fatally, they think--by a fall from the path into
+the lower canyon. Mr. Ballard has gone with the man who came to bring
+the news. Will you send Otto in the car to see if there is anything we
+can do?"
+
+"Bromley? Oh, no, child; it can't be _Bromley_!" He had risen to his
+feet at her mention of the name, but now he sat down again as if the
+full tale of the years had smitten him suddenly. Then he gave his
+directions, brokenly, and with a curious thickening of the deep-toned,
+mellifluous voice: "Tell Otto to bring the small car around at--at once,
+and fetch me my coat. Of cou'se, my deah, I shall go myself"--this in
+response to her swift protest. "I'm quite well and able; just a
+little--a little sho'tness of breath. Fetch me my coat and the
+doctor-box, thah's a good girl. But--but I assure you it can't
+be--Bromley!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE RETURN OF THE OMEN
+
+
+Loudon Bromley's principal wounding was a pretty seriously broken head,
+got, so said Luigi, the Tuscan river-watchman who had found and brought
+him in, by the fall from the steep hill path into the rocky canyon.
+
+Ballard reached the camp at the heels of the Irish newsbearer shortly
+after the unconscious assistant had been carried up to the adobe
+headquarters; and being, like most engineers with field experience, a
+rough-and-ready amateur surgeon, he cleared the room of the throng of
+sympathising and utterly useless stone "buckies," and fell to work. But
+beyond cleansing the wound and telegraphing by way of Denver to Aspen
+for skilled help, there was little he could do.
+
+The telegraphing promised nothing. Cutting out all the probable delays,
+and assuming the Aspen physician's willingness to undertake a perilous
+night gallop over a barely passable mountain trail, twelve hours at the
+very shortest must go to the covering of the forty miles.
+
+Ballard counted the slow beats of the fluttering pulse and shook his
+head despairingly. Since he had lived thus long after the accident,
+Bromley might live a few hours longer. But it seemed much more likely
+that the flickering candle of life might go out with the next breath.
+Ballard was unashamed when the lights in the little bunk-room grew dim
+to his sight, and a lump came in his throat. Jealousy, if the sullen
+self-centring in the sentimental affair had grown to that, was quenched
+in the upwelling tide of honest grief. For back of the sex-selfishness,
+and far more deeply rooted, was the strong passion of brother-loyalty,
+reawakened now and eager to make amends--to be given a chance to make
+amends--for the momentary lapse into egoism.
+
+To the Kentuckian in this hour of keen misery came an angel of comfort
+in the guise of his late host, the master of Castle 'Cadia. There was
+the stuttering staccato of a motor-car breasting the steep grade of the
+mesa hill, the drumming of the released engines at the door of the
+adobe, and the colonel entered, followed by Jerry Blacklock, who had
+taken the chauffeur's place behind the pilot wheel for the roundabout
+drive from Castle 'Cadia. In professional silence, and with no more than
+a nod to the watcher at the bedside, the first gentleman of Arcadia laid
+off his coat, opened a kit of surgeon's tools, and proceeded to save
+Bromley's life, for the time being, at least, by skilfully lifting the
+broken bone which was slowly pressing him to death.
+
+"Thah, suh," he said, the melodious voice filling the tin-roofed shack
+until every resonant thing within the mud-brick walls seemed to vibrate
+in harmonious sympathy, "thah, suh; what mo' there is to do needn't be
+done to-night. To-morrow morning, Mistuh Ballard, you'll make a right
+comfo'table litter and have him carried up to Castle 'Cadia, and among
+us all we'll try to ansuh for him. Not a word, my deah suh; it's only
+what that deah boy would do for the most wo'thless one of us. I tell
+you, Mistuh Ballard, we've learned to think right much of Loudon; yes,
+suh--right much."
+
+Ballard was thankful, and he said so. Then he spoke of the Aspen-aimed
+telegram.
+
+"Countehmand it, suh; countehmand it," was the colonel's direction.
+"We'll pull him through without calling in the neighbuhs. Living heah,
+in such--ah--close proximity to youh man-mangling institutions, I've had
+experience enough durin' the past year or so to give me standing as a
+regular practitioneh; I have, for a fact, suh." And his mellow laugh was
+like the booming of bees among the clover heads.
+
+"I don't doubt it in the least," acknowledged Ballard; and then he
+thanked young Blacklock for coming.
+
+"It was up to me, wasn't it, Colonel Craigmiles?" said the collegian.
+"Otto--Otto's the house-shover, you know--flunked his job; said he
+wouldn't be responsible for anybody's life if he had to drive that road
+at speed in the night. We drove it all right, though, didn't we,
+Colonel? And we'll drive it back."
+
+The King of Arcadia put a hand on Ballard's shoulder and pointed an
+appreciative finger at Blacklock.
+
+"That young cub, suh, hasn't any mo' horse sense than one of youh Dago
+mortah-mixers; but the way he drives a motor-car is simply scandalous!
+Why, suh, if my hair hadn't been white when we started, it would have
+tu'ned on me long befo' we made the loop around Dump Mountain."
+
+Ballard went to the door with the two Good Samaritans, saw the colonel
+safely settled in the runabout, and let his gaze follow the winding
+course of the little car until the dodging tail-light had crossed the
+temporary bridge below the camp, to be lost among the shoulders of the
+opposite hills. The elder Fitzpatrick was at his elbow when he turned to
+go in.
+
+"There's hope f'r the little man, Misther Ballard?" he inquired
+anxiously.
+
+"Good hope, now, I think, Michael."
+
+"That's the brave wor-rd. The min do be sittin' up in th' bunk-shanties
+to hear ut. 'Twas all through the camp the minut' they brought him in.
+There isn't a man av thim that wouldn't go t'rough fire and wather f'r
+Misther Bromley--and that's no joke. Is there annything I can do?"
+
+"Nothing, thank you. Tell the yard watchman to stay within call, and
+I'll send for you if you're needed."
+
+With this provision for the possible need, the young chief kept the
+vigil alone, sitting where he could see the face of the still
+unconscious victim of fate, or tramping three steps and a turn in the
+adjoining office room when sleep threatened to overpower him.
+
+It was a time for calm second thought; for a reflective weighing of the
+singular and ominous conditions partly revealed in the week agone talk
+with Elsa Craigmiles. That she knew more than she was willing to tell
+had been plainly evident in that first evening on the tree-pillared
+portico at Castle 'Cadia; but beyond this assumption the unanswerable
+questions clustered quickly, opening door after door of speculative
+conjecture in the background.
+
+What was the motive behind the hurled stone which had so nearly bred a
+tragedy on his first evening at Elbow Canyon? He reflected that he had
+always been too busy to make personal enemies; therefore, the attempt
+upon his life must have been impersonal--must have been directed at the
+chief engineer of the Arcadia Company. Assuming this, the chain of
+inference linked itself rapidly. Was Macpherson's death purely
+accidental?--or Braithwaite's? If not, who was the murderer?--and why
+was the colonel's daughter so evidently determined to shield him?
+
+The answer, the purely logical answer, pointed to one man--her
+father--and thereupon became a thing to be scoffed at. It was more than
+incredible; it was blankly unthinkable.
+
+The young Kentuckian, descendant of pioneers who had hewn their
+beginnings out of the primitive wilderness, taking life as they found
+it, was practical before all things else. Villains of the Borgian strain
+no longer existed, save in the unreal world of the novelist or the
+playwriter. And if, by any stretch of imagination, they might still be
+supposed to exist....
+
+Ballard brushed the supposition impatiently aside when he thought of the
+woman he loved.
+
+"Anything but that!" he exclaimed, breaking the silence of the four bare
+walls for the sake of hearing the sound of his own voice. "And, besides,
+the colonel himself is a living, breathing refutation of any such
+idiotic notion. All the same, if it is not her father she is trying to
+shield, who, in the name of all that is good, can it be? And why should
+Colonel Craigmiles, or anyone else, be so insanely vindictive as to
+imagine that the killing of a few chiefs of construction will cut any
+figure with the company which hires them?"
+
+These perplexing questions were still unanswered when the graying dawn
+found him dozing in his chair, with the camp whistles sounding the early
+turn-out, and Bromley conscious and begging feebly for a drink of water.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE DERRICK FUMBLES
+
+
+Bromley had been a week in hospital at the great house in the upper
+valley, and was recovering as rapidly as a clean-living, well-ancestored
+man should, when Ballard was surprised one morning by a descent of the
+entire Castle 'Cadia garrison, lacking only the colonel and Miss
+Cauffrey, upon the scene of activities at the dam.
+
+The chief of construction had to flog himself sharply into the
+hospitable line before he could make the invaders welcome. He had a
+workingman's shrewd impatience of interruptions; and since the accident
+which had deprived him of his assistant, he had been doing double duty.
+On this particular morning he was about to leave for a flying round of
+the camps on the railroad extension; but he reluctantly countermanded
+the order for the locomotive when he saw Elsa picking the way for her
+guests among the obstructions in the stone yard.
+
+"Please--oh, please don't look so inhospitable!" she begged, in
+well-simulated dismay, when the irruption of sight-seers had fairly
+surrounded him. "We have driven and fished and climbed mountains and
+played children's games at home until there was positively nothing else
+to do. Pacify him, Cousin Janet--he's going to warn us off!"
+
+Ballard laughingly disclaimed any such ungracious intention, and
+proceeded to prove his words by deeds. Young Blacklock and Bigelow were
+easily interested in the building details; the women were given an
+opportunity to see the inside workings of the men's housekeeping in the
+shacks, the mess-tent and the camp kitchen; the major was permitted and
+encouraged to be loftily critical of everything; and Wingfield--but
+Ballard kept the playwright carefully tethered in a sort of moral
+hitching-rope, holding the end of the rope in his own hands.
+
+Once openly committed as entertainer, the young Kentuckian did all that
+could be expected of him--and more. When the visitors had surfeited
+themselves on concrete-mixing and stone-laying and camp housekeeping,
+the chief engineer had plank seats placed on a flat car, and the
+invaders were whisked away on an impromptu and personally conducted
+railway excursion to some of the nearer ditch camps.
+
+Before leaving the headquarters, Ballard gave Fitzpatrick an Irish hint;
+and when the excursionists returned from the railway jaunt, there was a
+miraculous luncheon served in the big mess-tent. Garou, the
+French-Canadian camp cook, had a soul above the bare necessities when
+the occasion demanded; and he had Ballard's private commissary to draw
+upon.
+
+After the luncheon Ballard let his guests scatter as they pleased,
+charging himself, as before, particularly with the oversight and
+wardenship of Mr. Lester Wingfield. There was only one chance in a
+hundred that the playwright, left to his own devices, might stumble upon
+the skeleton in the camp closet. But the Kentuckian was determined to
+make that one chance ineffective.
+
+Several things came of the hour spent as Wingfield's keeper while the
+others were visiting the wing dam and the quarry, the spillway, and the
+cut-off tunnel, under Fitzpatrick as megaphonist. One of them was a
+juster appreciation of the playwright as a man and a brother. Ballard
+smiled mentally when he realised that his point of view had been that of
+the elemental lover, jealous of a possible rival. Wingfield was not half
+a bad sort, he admitted; a little inclined to pose, since it was his art
+to epitomise a world of _poseurs_; an enthusiast in his calling; but at
+bottom a workable companion and the shrewdest of observers.
+
+In deference to the changed point of view, the Kentuckian did penance
+for the preconceived prejudice and tried to make the playwright's
+insulation painless. The sun shone hot on the stone yard, and there was
+a jar of passable tobacco in the office adobe: would Wingfield care to
+go indoors and lounge until the others came to a proper sense of the
+desirability of shade and quietude on a hot afternoon?
+
+Wingfield would, gladly. He confessed shamelessly to a habit of smoking
+his after-luncheon pipe on his back. There was a home-made divan in the
+office quarters, with cushions and blanket coverings, and Ballard found
+the tobacco-jar and a clean pipe; a long-stemmed "churchwarden," dear to
+the heart of a lazy man.
+
+"Now this is what I call solid comfort," said the playwright, stretching
+his long legs luxuriously on the divan. "A man's den that is a den, and
+not a bric-a-brac shop masquerading under the name, a good pipe, good
+tobacco, and good company. You fellows have us world-people faded to a
+shadow when it comes to the real thing. I've felt it in my bones all
+along that I was missing the best part of this trip by not getting in
+with you down here. But every time I've tried to break away, something
+else has turned up."
+
+Ballard was ready with his bucket of cold water.
+
+"You haven't missed anything. There isn't much in a construction camp to
+invite the literary mind, I should say." And he tried to make the saying
+sound not too inhospitable.
+
+"Oh, you're off wrong, there," argued the playwright, with cheerful
+arrogance. "You probably haven't a sense of the literary values; a good
+many people haven't--born blind on that side, you know. Now, Miss Van
+Bryck has the seeing eye, to an educated finish. She tells me you have a
+dramatic situation down here every little so-while. She told me that
+story of yours about the stone smashing into your office in the middle
+of the night. That's simply ripping good stuff--worlds of possibilities
+in a thing like that, don't you know? By the way, this is the room,
+isn't it? Does that patch in the ceiling cover the hole?"
+
+Ballard admitted the fact, and strove manfully to throw the switch ahead
+of the querist to the end that the talk might be shunted to some less
+dangerous topic.
+
+"Hang the tobacco!" snapped the guest irritably, retorting upon
+Ballard's remark about the quality of his pet smoking mixture. "You and
+Miss Craigmiles seem to be bitten with the same exasperating mania for
+subject-changing. I'd like to hear that rock-throwing story at first
+hands, if you don't mind."
+
+Having no good reason for refusing point-blank, Ballard told the story,
+carefully divesting it of all the little mystery thrills which he had
+included for Miss Dosia's benefit.
+
+"Um!" commented Wingfield, at the close of the bald narration. "It would
+seem to have lost a good bit in the way of human interest since Miss Van
+Bryck repeated it to me. Did you embroider it for her? or did she put in
+the little hemstitchings for me?"
+
+Ballard laughed.
+
+"I am sorry if I have spoiled it for you. But you couldn't make a
+dramatic situation out of a careless quarryman's overloading of a
+shot-hole."
+
+"Oh, no," said the playwright, apparently giving it up. And he smoked
+his pipe out in silence.
+
+Ballard thought the incident was comfortably dead and buried, but he did
+not know his man. Long after Wingfield might be supposed to have
+forgotten all about the stone catapulting, he sat up suddenly and broke
+out again.
+
+"Say! you explained to Miss Dosia that the stone couldn't possibly have
+come from the quarry without knocking the science of artillery into a
+cocked hat. She made a point of that."
+
+"Oh, hold on!" protested the Kentuckian. "You mustn't hold me
+responsible for a bit of dinner-table talk with a very charming young
+woman. Perhaps Miss Dosia wished to be mystified. I put it to you as man
+to man; would you have disappointed her?"
+
+The playwright's laugh showed his fine teeth.
+
+"They tell me you are at the top of the heap in your profession, Mr.
+Ballard, and I can easily believe it. But I have a specialty, too, and
+I'm no slouch in it. My little stunt is prying into the inner
+consciousness of things. Obviously, there is a mystery--a real
+mystery--about this stone-throwing episode, and for some reason you are
+trying to keep me from dipping into it. Conversely, I'd like to get to
+the bottom of it. Tell me frankly, is there any good reason why I
+shouldn't?"
+
+Ballard's salvation for this time personified itself in the figure of
+Contractor Fitzpatrick darkening the door of the office to ask a
+"question of information," as he phrased it. Hence there was an excuse
+for a break and a return to the sun-kissed stone yard.
+
+The engineer purposefully prolonged the talk with Fitzpatrick until the
+scattered sight-seers had gathered for a descent, under Jerry
+Blacklock's lead, to the great ravine below the dam where the river
+thundered out of the cut-off tunnel. But when he saw that Miss
+Craigmiles had elected to stay behind, and that Wingfield had attached
+himself to the younger Miss Cantrell, he gave the contractor his
+information boiled down into a curt sentence or two, and hastened to
+join the stay-behind.
+
+"You'll melt, out here in the sun," he said, overtaking her as she stood
+looking down into the whirling vortex made by the torrent's plunge into
+the entrance of the cut-off tunnel.
+
+She ignored the care-taking phrase as if she had not heard it.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield?--you have kept him from getting interested in the--in
+the----"
+
+Ballard nodded.
+
+"He is interested, beyond doubt. But for the present moment I have kept
+him from adding anything to Miss Dosia's artless gossip. Will you permit
+me to suggest that it was taking rather a long chance?--your bringing
+him down here?"
+
+"I know; but I couldn't help it. Dosia would have brought him on your
+invitation. I did everything I could think of to obstruct; and when they
+had beaten me, I made a party affair of it. You'll have to forgive me
+for spoiling an entire working day for you."
+
+"Since it has given me a chance to be with you, I'm only too happy in
+losing the day," he said; and he meant it. But he let her know the worst
+in the other matter in an added sentence. "I'm afraid the mischief is
+done in Wingfield's affair, in spite of everything."
+
+"How?" she asked, and the keen anxiety in the grey eyes cut him to the
+heart.
+
+He told her briefly of the chance arousing of Wingfield's curiosity, and
+of the playwright's expressed determination to fathom the mystery of the
+table-smashing stone. Her dismay was pathetic.
+
+"You should never have taken him into your office," she protested
+reproachfully. "He was sure to be reminded of Dosia's story there."
+
+"I didn't foresee that, and he was beginning to gossip with the workmen.
+I knew it wouldn't be long before he would get the story of the
+happenings out of the men--with all the garnishings."
+
+"You _must_ find a way to stop him," she insisted. "If you could only
+know what terrible consequences are wrapped up in it!"
+
+He waited until a stone block, dangling in the clutch of the
+derrick-fall above its appointed resting-place on the growing wall of
+masonry, had been lowered into the cement bed prepared for it before he
+said, soberly: "That is the trouble--I _don't_ know. And, short of
+quarrelling outright with Wingfield, I don't think of any effective way
+of muzzling him."
+
+"No; you mustn't do that. There is misery enough and enmity enough,
+without making any more. I'll try to keep him away."
+
+"You will fail," he prophesied, with conviction. "Mr. Wingfield calls
+himself a builder of plots; but I can assure you from this one day's
+observation of him that he would much rather unravel a plot than build
+one."
+
+She was silent while the workmen were swinging another great stone out
+over the canyon chasm. The shadow of the huge derrick-boom swept around
+and across them, and she shuddered as if the intangible thing had been
+an icy finger to touch her.
+
+"You must help me," she pleaded. "I cannot see the way a single step
+ahead."
+
+"And I am in still deeper darkness," he reminded her gently. "You forget
+that I do not know what threatens you, or how it threatens."
+
+"I can't tell you; I can't tell any one," she said; and he made sure
+there was a sob at the catching of her breath.
+
+As once before, he grew suddenly masterful.
+
+"You are wronging yourself and me, Elsa, dear. You forget that your
+trouble is mine; that in the end we two shall be one in spite of all the
+obstacles that a crazy fate can invent."
+
+She shook her head. "I told you once that you must not forget yourself
+again; and you are forgetting. There is one obstacle which can never be
+overcome this side of the grave. You must always remember that."
+
+"I remember only that I love you," he dared; adding: "And you are afraid
+to tell me what this obstacle is. You know it would vanish in the
+telling."
+
+She did not answer.
+
+"You won't tell me that you are in love with Wingfield?" he persisted.
+
+Still no reply.
+
+"Elsa, dearest, can you look me in the eyes and tell me that you do not
+love _me_?"
+
+She neither looked nor denied.
+
+"Then that is all I need to know at present," he went on doggedly. "I
+shall absolutely and positively refuse to recognise any other obstacle."
+
+She broke silence so swiftly that the words seemed to leap to her lips.
+
+"There is one, dear friend," she said, with a warm upflash of strong
+emotion; "one that neither you nor I, nor any one can overcome!" She
+pointed down at the boulder-riven flood churning itself into spray in
+the canyon pot at their feet. "I will measure it for you--and for
+myself, God help us! Rather than be your wife--the mother of your
+children--I should gladly, joyfully, fling myself into that."
+
+The motion he made to catch her, to draw her back from the brink of the
+chasm, was purely mechanical, but it served to break the strain of a
+situation that had become suddenly impossible.
+
+"That was almost tragic, wasn't it?" she asked, with a swift retreat
+behind the barricades of mockery. "In another minute we should have
+tumbled headlong into melodrama, with poor Mr. Wingfield hopelessly out
+of reach for the note-taking process."
+
+"Then you didn't mean what you were saying?" he demanded, trying hard to
+overtake the fleeing realities.
+
+"I did, indeed; don't make me say it again. The lights are up, and the
+audience might be looking. See how manfully Mr. Bigelow is trying not to
+let Cousin Janet discover how she is crushing him!"
+
+Out of the lower ravine the other members of the party were straggling,
+with Bigelow giving first aid to a breathless and panting Mrs. Van
+Bryck, and Wingfield and young Blacklock helping first one and then
+another of the four younger women. The workmen in the cutting yard were
+preparing to swing a third massive face-block into place on the dam; and
+Miss Craigmiles, quite her serene self again, was asking to be shown how
+the grappling hooks were made fast in the process of "toggling."
+
+Ballard accepted his defeat with what philosophy he could muster, and
+explained the technical detail. Then the others came up, and the
+buckboards sent down from Castle 'Cadia to take the party home were seen
+wheeling into line at the upper end of the short foothill canyon.
+
+"There is our recall at last, Mr. Ballard," gasped the breathless
+chaperon, "and I daresay you are immensely relieved. But you mustn't be
+too sorry for your lost day. We have had a perfectly lovely time."
+
+"Such a delightful day!" echoed the two sharers of the common Christian
+name in unison; and the king's daughter added demurely: "Don't you see
+we are all waiting for you to ask us to come again, Mr. Ballard?"
+
+"Oh, certainly; any time," said Ballard, coming to the surface.
+Notwithstanding, on the short walk up to the waiting buckboards he sank
+into the sea of perplexity again. Elsa's moods had always puzzled him.
+If they were not real, as he often suspected, they were artistically
+perfect imitations; and he was never quite sure that he could
+distinguish between the real and the simulated.
+
+As at the present moment: the light-hearted young woman walking beside
+him up the steep canyon path was the very opposite of the sorely tried
+and anxious one who had twice let him see the effects of the anxiety,
+however carefully she concealed the cause.
+
+The perplexed wonder was still making him half abstracted when he put
+himself in the way to help her into one of the homeward-headed vehicles.
+They were a little in advance of the others, and when she faced him to
+say good-bye, he saw her eyes. Behind the smile in them the troubled
+shadows were still lurking; and when the heartening word was on his lips
+they looked past him, dilating suddenly with a great horror.
+
+"Look!" she cried, pointing back to the dam; and when he wheeled he saw
+that they were all looking; standing agape as if they had been shown the
+Medusa's head. The third great stone had been swung out over the dam,
+and, little by little, with jerkings that made the wire cables snap and
+sing, the grappling-hooks were losing their hold in mid-air. The yells
+of the workmen imperilled rose sharply above the thunder of the river,
+and the man at the winding-drums seemed to have lost his nerve and his
+head.
+
+Young Blacklock, who was taking an engineering course in college, turned
+and ran back down the path, shouting like a madman. Ballard made a
+megaphone of his hands and bellowed an order to the unnerved hoister
+engineer. "Lower away! Drop it, you blockhead!" he shouted; but the
+command came too late. With a final jerk the slipping hooks gave way,
+and the three-ton cube of granite dropped like a huge projectile,
+striking the stonework of the dam with a crash like an explosion of
+dynamite.
+
+Dosia Van Bryck's shriek was ringing in Ballard's ears, and the look of
+frozen horror on Elsa's face was before his eyes, when he dashed down
+the steep trail at Blacklock's heels. Happily, there was no one killed;
+no one seriously hurt. On the dam-head Fitzpatrick was climbing to a
+point of vantage to shout the news to the yard men clustering thickly on
+the edge of the cliff above, and Ballard went only far enough to make
+sure that there had been no loss of life. Then he turned and hastened
+back to the halted buckboards.
+
+"Thank God, it's only a money loss, this time!" he announced. "The hooks
+held long enough to give the men time to get out of the way."
+
+"There was no one hurt? Are you sure there was no one hurt?" panted Mrs.
+Van Bryck, fanning herself vigorously.
+
+"No one at all. I'm awfully sorry we had to give you such a shock for
+your leave-taking, but accidents will happen, now and then. You will
+excuse me if I go at once? There is work to be done."
+
+"H'm--ha! One moment, Mr. Ballard," rasped the major, swelling up like a
+man on the verge of apoplexy. But Mrs. Van Bryck was not to be set
+aside.
+
+"Oh, certainly, we will excuse you. Please don't waste a moment on us.
+You shouldn't have troubled to come back. So sorry--it was very
+dreadful--terrible!"
+
+While the chaperon was groping for her misplaced self-composure,
+Wingfield said a word or two to Dosia, who was his seat-mate, and sprang
+to the ground.
+
+"Hold on a second, Ballard!" he called. "I'm going with you. What you
+need right now is a trained investigator, and I'm your man. Great Scott!
+to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to
+see it!" And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very
+earnestly to dissuade him: "Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha'n't get underfoot
+or be in Mr. Ballard's way; and you needn't trouble to send down for me.
+I can pad home on my two feet, later on."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE INDICTMENT
+
+
+In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block,
+Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle 'Cadia and the
+construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a
+companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling
+him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could
+think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in
+ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be
+presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him
+in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.
+
+How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and
+mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock,
+who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward
+at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was
+merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening
+to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous
+stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on
+his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow,
+smoking Ballard's tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and
+reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another
+of Bromley's dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the
+taxidermic art.
+
+"Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and
+the camp 'bogie' isn't happening," Ballard told the king's daughter one
+morning when he came down from Bromley's hospital room at Castle 'Cadia
+and found Elsa waiting for him under the portières of the darkened
+library. "For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery
+of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of
+simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn't half
+asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or
+stone-cutters, he is reading straight through Bromley's shelf of
+bird-books. He may be absorbing 'local color,' but if he is, he is
+letting the environment do all the work. I don't believe he has had a
+consciously active idea since he began loafing with us."
+
+"You are mistaken--greatly mistaken," was all she would say; and in the
+fulness of time a day came when the event proved how far a woman's
+intuition may outrun a man's reasoning.
+
+It was the occasion of Bromley's first return to the camp at Elbow
+Canyon, four full weeks after the night of stumbling on the steep path.
+Young Blacklock had driven him by the roundabout road in the little
+motor-car; and the camp industries paused while the men gave the "Little
+Boss" an enthusiastic ovation. Afterward, the convalescent was glad
+enough to lie down on the makeshift lounge in the office bungalow; but
+when Jerry would have driven him back in time for luncheon at Castle
+'Cadia, as his strict orders from Miss Elsa ran, Bromley begged to be
+allowed to put his feet under the office mess-table with his chief and
+his volunteer chauffeur.
+
+To the three, doing justice to the best that Garou could find in the
+camp commissary stores, came Mr. Lester Wingfield, to drag up a stool
+and to make himself companionably at home at the engineers' mess, as his
+custom had come to be. Until the meal was ended and the pipes were
+filled, he was silent and abstracted to the edge of rudeness. But when
+Ballard made a move to go down to the railroad yard with Fitzpatrick,
+the spell was broken.
+
+"Hold up a minute; don't rush off so frantically," he cut in abruptly.
+"I have been waiting for many days to get you and Bromley together for a
+little confidential confab about matters and things, and the time has
+come. Sit down."
+
+Ballard resumed his seat at the table with an air of predetermined
+patience, and the playwright nodded approval. "That's right," he went
+on, "brace yourself to take it as it comes; but you needn't write your
+reluctance so plainly in your face. It's understood."
+
+"I don't know what you mean," objected Ballard, not quite truthfully.
+
+Wingfield laughed.
+
+"You didn't want me to come down here at first; and since I've been
+coming you haven't been too excitedly glad to see me. But that's all
+right, too. It's what the public benefactor usually gets for butting in.
+Just the same, there is a thing to be done, and I've got to do it. I may
+bore you both in the process, but I have reached a point where a pow-wow
+is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I've unearthed
+the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a
+mare's nest of fairly heroic proportions."
+
+By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still
+rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table.
+Blacklock got up to stand behind the assistant's chair. Ballard thrust
+his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived
+when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles's sake,
+and he was pulling himself together for the battle.
+
+"I know beforehand about what you are going to say," he interjected;
+"but let's have your version of it."
+
+"You shall have it hot and hot," promised the playwright. "For quite a
+little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been
+interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds
+so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the assumption that
+there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn't exactly creative in
+the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr.
+Ballard, that your workmen are superstitious fools, and that their
+mental attitude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that
+the fact--the cause-fact--existed before the superstition; was the
+legitimate ancestor of the superstition. Don't you believe it?"
+
+Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. "I've always
+believed it," he admitted.
+
+"There isn't the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary
+cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it _must_ antedate the
+diseased mental condition," resumed the theorist, oracularly. "I don't
+know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite's drowning
+will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing
+mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive
+driver, said to me: 'They can say what they like, but _I_ ain't
+believing that the river stove him all up as if he'd been stomped on in
+a cattle pen.' There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into
+the field of the unaccountable."
+
+It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.
+
+"You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one
+that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain,
+unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the
+superstitious twist."
+
+"The sequence in this particular instance is immaterial--quite
+immaterial," argued the playwright, with obstinate assurance. "The fact
+stays with us that there _was_ something partly unaccountable in this
+first tragedy to which the thought of Hoskins--the thoughts of all those
+who knew the circumstances--could revert."
+
+"Well?" said Ballard.
+
+"It is on this hypothesis that I have constructed my theory. Casting out
+all the accidents chargeable to carelessness, to disobedience of orders,
+or to temporary aberration on the part of the workmen, there still
+remains a goodly number of them carrying this disturbing atom of
+mystery. Take Sanderson's case: he came here, I'm told, with a decent
+record; he was not in any sense of the words a moral degenerate. Yet in
+a very short time he was killed in a quarrel over a woman at whom the
+average man wouldn't look twice. Blacklock, here, has seen this woman;
+but I'd like to ask if either of you two have?"--this to Ballard and the
+assistant.
+
+Ballard shook his head, and Bromley confessed that he had not.
+
+"Well, Jerry and I have the advantage of you--we have seen her," said
+Wingfield, scoring the point with a self-satisfied smile. "She is a
+gray-haired Mexican crone, apparently old enough, and certainly hideous
+enough, to be the Mexican foreman's mother. I'll venture the assertion
+that Sanderson never thought of her as a feminine possibility at all."
+
+"Hold on; I shall be obliged to spoil your theory there," interrupted
+Bromley. "Billy unquestionably put himself in Manuel's hands. He used to
+go down to the ranch two or three times a week, and he spent money, a
+good bit of it, on the woman. I know it, because he borrowed from me.
+And along toward the last, he never rode in that direction without
+slinging his Winchester under the stirrup-leather."
+
+"Looking for trouble with Manuel, you would say?" interjected Wingfield.
+
+"No doubt of it. And when the thing finally came to a focus, the Mexican
+gave Billy a fair show; there were witnesses to that part of it. Manuel
+told Sanderson to take his gun, which the woman was trying to hide, get
+on his horse, and ride to the north corner of the corral, where he was
+to wheel and begin shooting--or be shot in the back. The programme was
+carried out to the letter. Manuel walked his own horse to the south
+corner, and the two men wheeled and began to shoot. Three or four shots
+were fired by each before Billy was hit."
+
+"Um!" said the playwright thoughtfully. "There were witnesses, you say?
+Some of the Craigmiles cow-boys, I suppose. You took their word for
+these little details?"
+
+Bromley made a sorrowful face. "No; it was Billy's own story. The poor
+fellow lived long enough to tell me what I've been passing on to you. He
+tried to tell me something else, something about Manuel and the woman,
+but there wasn't time enough."
+
+Wingfield had found the long-stemmed pipe and was filling it from the
+jar of tobacco on the table. "Was that all?" he inquired.
+
+"All but the finish--which was rather heart-breaking. When he could no
+longer speak he kept pointing to me and to his rifle, which had been
+brought in with him. I understood he was trying to tell me that I should
+keep the gun."
+
+"You did keep it?"
+
+"Yes; I have it yet."
+
+"Let me have a look at it, will you?"
+
+The weapon was found, and Wingfield examined it curiously. "Is it
+loaded?" he asked.
+
+Bromley nodded. "I guess it is. It hasn't been out of its case or that
+cupboard since the day of the killing."
+
+The playwright worked the lever cautiously, and an empty cartridge shell
+flipped out and fell to the floor. "William Sanderson's last shot," he
+remarked reflectively, and went on slowly pumping the lever until eleven
+loaded cartridges lay in an orderly row on the table. "You were wrong in
+your count of the number of shots fired, or else the magazine was not
+full when Sanderson began," he commented. Then, as Blacklock was about
+to pick up one of the cartridges: "Hold on, Jerry; don't disturb them,
+if you please."
+
+Blacklock laughed nervously. "Mr. Wingfield's got a notion," he said.
+"He's always getting 'em."
+
+"I have," was the quiet reply. "But first let me ask you, Bromley: What
+sort of a rifle marksman was Sanderson?"
+
+"One of the best I ever knew. I have seen him drill a silver dollar
+three times out of five at a hundred yards when he was feeling well.
+There is your element of mystery again: I could never understand how he
+missed the Mexican three or four times in succession at less than
+seventy-five yards--unless Manuel's first shot was the one that hit him.
+That might have been it. Billy was all sand; the kind of man to go on
+shooting after he was killed."
+
+"My notion is that he didn't have the slightest chance in the wide
+world," was Wingfield's comment. "Let us prove or disprove it if we
+can," and he opened a blade of his penknife and dug the point of it into
+the bullet of the cartridge first extracted from the dead man's gun.
+"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he
+added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully
+moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the
+knife-blade.
+
+[Illustration: "There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican
+fair play."]
+
+The playwright's audience was interested now, beyond all question of
+doubt. If Wingfield had suddenly hypnotised the three who saw this
+unexpected confirmation of his theory of treachery in the Sanderson
+tragedy, the awed silence that fell upon the little group around the
+table could not have been more profound. It was Bromley who broke the
+spell, prefacing his exclamation with a mirthless laugh.
+
+"Your gifts of deduction are almost uncanny, Wingfield," he asserted.
+"How could you reason your way around to that?"--pointing at the clay
+bullet.
+
+"I didn't," was the calm reply. "Imagination can double discount pure
+logic in the investigative field, nine times out of ten. And in this
+instance it wasn't my imagination: it was another man's. I once read a
+story in which the author made his villain kill a man with this same
+little trick of sham bullets. I merely remembered the story. Now let us
+see how many more there are to go with this."
+
+There were four of the cartridges capped with the dummy bullets; the
+remaining seven being genuine. Wingfield did the sum arithmetical aloud.
+"Four and five are nine, and nine and seven are sixteen. Sanderson
+started out that day with a full magazine, we'll assume. He fired five
+of these dummies--with perfect immunity for Manuel--and here are the
+other four. If the woman had had a little more time, when she was
+pretending to hide the gun, she would have pumped out all of the good
+cartridges. Being somewhat hurried, she exchanged only nine, which, in
+an even game and shot for shot, gave Manuel ten chances to Sanderson's
+one. It was a cinch."
+
+Ballard sat back in his chair handling the empty rifle. Bromley's pallid
+face turned gray. The tragedy had touched him very sharply at the time;
+and this new and unexpected evidence of gross treachery revived all the
+horror of the day when Sanderson had been carried in and laid upon the
+office couch to die.
+
+"Poor Billy!" he said. "It was a cold-blooded murder, and he knew it.
+That was what he was trying to tell me--and couldn't."
+
+"That was my hypothesis from the first," Wingfield asserted promptly.
+"But the motive seemed to be lacking; it still seems to be lacking. Have
+either of you two imagination enough to help me out?"
+
+"The motive?" queried Bromley. "Why, that remains the same, doesn't
+it?--more's the pity."
+
+The playwright had lighted the long-stemmed pipe, and was thoughtfully
+blowing smoke rings toward the new patch in the bungalow ceiling.
+
+"Not if my theory is to stand, Mr. Bromley. You see, I am proceeding
+confidently upon the supposition that Sanderson wasn't messing in
+Manuel's domestic affairs. I can't believe for a moment that it was a
+quarrel over the woman, with Manuel's jealousy to account for the
+killing. It's too absurdly preposterous. Settling that fact to my own
+complete satisfaction, I began to search for the real motive, and it is
+for you to say whether I am right or wrong. Tell me: was Sanderson more
+than casually interested in the details of Braithwaite's drowning? That
+story must have been pretty fresh and raw in everybody's recollection at
+that time."
+
+Bromley's rejoinder was promptly affirmative. "It was; and Sanderson
+_was_ interested. As Braithwaite's successor, and with the fight between
+the company and the colonel transferred to him, he couldn't shirk his
+responsibility. Now that you recall it, I remember very well that he had
+notions of his own about Braithwaite's taking off. He was a quiet sort;
+didn't talk much; but what little he did say gave me to understand that
+he suspected foul play of some kind. And here's your theory again, Mr.
+Wingfield: if a hint of what he suspected ever got wind in the camp, it
+would account for the superstitious twist given to the drowning by
+Hoskins and the others, wouldn't it?"
+
+Wingfield smote the table with his fist.
+
+"There is your connecting link!" he exclaimed. "We have just proved
+beyond doubt that Sanderson wasn't killed in a fair fight: he was
+murdered, and the murder was carefully planned beforehand. By the same
+token, Braithwaite was murdered, too! Recall the circumstances as they
+have been related by the eye-witnesses: when they found the Government
+man and took him out of the river, his skull was crushed and both arms
+were broken ... see here!" he threw himself quickly into the attitude of
+one fishing from a riverbank. "Suppose somebody creeps up behind me with
+a club raised to brain me: I get a glimpse of him or his shadow, dodge,
+fling up my arms, so--and one good, smashing blow does the business.
+That's all; or all but one little item. Manuel's woman knows who struck
+that blow, and Sanderson was trying to bribe her to tell."
+
+If the announcement had been an explosion to rock the bungalow on its
+foundations, the effect could scarcely have been more striking. Ballard
+flung the empty gun aside and sprang to his feet. The collegian sat down
+weakly and stared. Bromley's jaw dropped, and he glared across at
+Wingfield as if the clever deduction were a mortal affront to be crammed
+down the throat of its originator.
+
+The playwright's smile was the eye-wrinkling of one who prides himself
+upon the ability to keep his head when others are panic-stricken.
+
+"Seems to knock you fellows all in a heap," he remarked, calmly. "What
+have you been doing all these months that you haven't dug it out for
+yourselves?"
+
+Bromley was moistening his lips.
+
+"Go on, Mr. Wingfield, if you please. Tell us all you know--or think you
+know."
+
+"There is more; a good bit more," was the cool reply. "Three months ago
+you had a train wreck on the railroad--two men killed. 'Rough track,'
+was the cause assigned, Mr. Bromley; but that was one time when your
+cautious chief, Macpherson, fell down. The two surviving trainmen,
+questioned separately by me within the past week, both say that there
+were at least inferential proofs of pulled spikes and a loosened rail. A
+little later one man was killed and two were crippled by the premature
+explosion of a charge of dynamite in the quarry. Carelessness, this
+time, on the part of the men involved; and _you_ said it, Mr. Bromley.
+It was nothing of the kind. Some one had substituted a coil of
+quick-firing fuse for the ordinary slow-match the men had been using,
+and the thing went off before the cry of 'fire' could be given. How do I
+know?"
+
+"Yes; how _do_ you know?" demanded Bromley.
+
+"By a mere fluke, and not by any process of deduction, in this instance,
+as it happens. One of the survivors was crafty enough to steal the coil
+of substituted fuse, having some vague notion of suing the company for
+damages for supplying poor material. Like other men of his class, he
+gave up the notion when he got well of his injuries; but it was revived
+again the other day when one of his comrades told him I was a lawyer. He
+made a date with me, told me his tale, and showed me the carefully
+preserved coil of bad fuse. I cut off a bit of it and did a little
+experimenting. Look at this." He took a piece of fuse from his pocket,
+uncoiled it upon the table, and applied a match. It went off like a
+flash of dry gunpowder, burning through from end to end in a fraction of
+a second.
+
+"Go on," said Ballard, speaking for the first time since the playwright
+had begun his unravelling of the tangled threads of disaster.
+
+"We dismiss the quarry catastrophe and come to the fall of a great
+boulder from the hill-crags on the farther side of the river some two
+weeks later. This heaven-sent projectile smashed into the dam structure,
+broke out a chunk of the completed masonry, killed two men outright and
+injured half a dozen others--correct me if I distort the details, Mr.
+Bromley. This time there was no investigation worthy of the name, if I
+have gathered my information carefully enough. Other rocks had fallen
+from the same slope; and after Fitzpatrick had assured himself that
+there were no more likely to fall, the matter was charged off to the
+accident account. If you and Michael Fitzpatrick had been the typical
+coroner's jury, Mr. Bromley, you couldn't have been more easily
+satisfied with purely inferential evidence. I wasn't satisfied until I
+had climbed painfully to the almost inaccessible ledge from which the
+boulder had fallen. Once there, however, the 'act of God' became very
+plainly the act of man. The 'heel' used as a fulcrum in levering the
+rock from the ledge was still in place; and the man in the case, in his
+haste or in his indifference to discovery, had left the iron crowbar
+with which he had pried the stone from its bed. The crowbar is still
+there."
+
+"Is that all?" asked Bromley, wetting his lips again.
+
+"By no manner of means," was the equable rejoinder. "I could go on
+indefinitely. The falling derrick may or may not have been aimed
+specially at Macpherson; but it committed premeditated murder, just the
+same--the broken guy cable was rotted in two with acid. Again you will
+demand to know how I know. I satisfied myself by making a few simple
+tests on the broken ends with chemicals filched out of Colonel
+Craigmiles's laboratory up yonder in the second story of his electric
+plant. No; I'm no chemist. But you will find, when you come to write
+stories and plays, that a smattering knowledge of every man's trade
+comes in handy. Otherwise you'll be writing yourself down as a
+blundering ass in every second paragraph."
+
+Wingfield paused, but it was only to relight his pipe. When the tobacco
+was burning again he went on, in the same even tone.
+
+"The falling derrick brings us down to your _régime_, Mr. Ballard. I
+pass by the incident of the hurled stone that made that awkward patch
+necessary in your ceiling: you yourself have admitted that the stone
+could not have come from the blasting in the quarry. But there was
+another railroad accident which deserves mention. No doubt Hoskins has
+told you what he saw almost on the very spot where Braithwaite's
+snuffing-out occurred. He thought it was Braithwaite's ghost--he still
+thinks so. But we are less credulous; or, at least, I was. Like
+Sanderson, I have been making friends--or enemies--at the Craigmiles
+cattle ranch. In fact, I was down there the day following Hoskins's
+misfortune. Curiously enough, there was another man who saw the
+Braithwaite ghost--one 'Scotty,' a cow-boy. He was night-herding on the
+ranch bunch of beef cattle on the night of the accident, and he saw the
+ghost, leather leggings, Norfolk shooting-jacket, and double-visored
+British cap all complete, riding a horse down to the river a little
+while before the train came around the curve. And after the hullabaloo,
+he saw it again, riding quietly back to the ranch."
+
+Bromley was gripping the edge of the table and exchanging glances with
+Ballard. It was the Kentuckian who broke the silence which fell upon the
+group around the table when the playwright made an end.
+
+"Summing it all up, what is your conclusion, Wingfield? You have reached
+one long before this, I take it."
+
+The amateur Vidocq made a slow sign of assent.
+
+"As I have told you, I went into this thing out of sheer curiosity, and
+partly because there were obstructions put in my way. That's human
+nature. But afterward it laid hold of me and held me by its own grip.
+I'm not sure that there have been any simon-pure accidents at all. So
+far as I have gone, everything that has happened has been made to
+happen; has been carefully planned and prepared for in advance by some
+one of more than ordinary intelligence--and vindictiveness. And,
+unhappily, the motive is only too painfully apparent. The work on this
+irrigation project of yours is to be hampered and delayed by all
+possible means, even to the sacrificing of human life."
+
+Again there was a silence in the thick-walled office room; a silence so
+strained that the clickings of the stone hammers in the yard and the
+rasping cacophonies of the hoisting engines at the dam seemed far
+removed. It was Bromley who spoke first, and his question was pointedly
+suggestive.
+
+"You haven't stopped with the broad generalisation, Mr. Wingfield?"
+
+"Meaning that I have found the man who is responsible for all these
+desperate and deadly doings? I am afraid I have. There would seem to be
+only one man in the world whose personal interests are at stake.
+Naturally, I haven't gone very deeply into that part of it. But didn't
+somebody tell me there is a fight on in the courts between the Arcadia
+Company and Colonel Craigmiles?--a fight in which delay is the one thing
+needful for the colonel?"
+
+Ballard came back to the table and stood within arm's-reach of the
+speaker. His square jaw had taken on the fighting angle, and his eyes
+were cold and hard.
+
+"What are you going to do about it, Mr. Wingfield? Have you arrived at
+that conclusion, also?"
+
+Wingfield's doubtful glance was in young Blacklock's direction, and his
+reply was evasive.
+
+"That is a very natural question; but doesn't it strike you, Mr.
+Ballard, that this is hardly the time or place to go into it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Very well.... Jerry, what we are talking about now is strictly between
+gentlemen: do you understand?"
+
+"Sure thing," said the collegian.
+
+"You ask me what I am going to do, Mr. Ballard; and in return I'll ask
+you to put yourself in my place. Clearly, it is a law-abiding citizen's
+plain duty to go and lay the bald facts before the nearest prosecuting
+attorney and let the law take its course. On the other hand, I'm only a
+man like other men, and----"
+
+"And you are Colonel Craigmiles's guest. Go on," said Ballard,
+straightening the path of hesitation for him.
+
+"That's it," nodded Wingfield. "As you say, I am his guest;
+and--er--well, there is another reason why I should be the last person
+in the world to make or meddle. At first, I was brashly incredulous, as
+anyone would be who was mixing and mingling with the colonel in the
+daily amenities. Later, when the ugly fact persisted and I was obliged
+to admit it, the personal factor entered the equation. It's bad
+medicine, any way you decide to take it."
+
+"Still you are not telling us what you mean to do, Mr. Wingfield,"
+Bromley reminded him gently.
+
+"No; but I don't mind telling you. I have about decided upon a weak sort
+of compromise. This thing will come out--it's bound to come out in the
+pretty immediate hence; and I don't want to be here when the sheriff
+arrives. I think I shall have a very urgent call to go back to New
+York."
+
+Bromley laid hold of the table and pulled himself to his feet; but it
+was Ballard who said, slowly, as one who weighs his words and the full
+import of them: "Mr. Wingfield, you are more different kinds of an ass
+than I took you to be, and that is saying a great deal. Out of a mass of
+hearsay, the idle stories of a lot of workmen whose idea of humour has
+been to make a butt of you, you have built up this fantastic fairy tale.
+I am charitable enough to believe that you couldn't help it; it is a
+part of your equipment as a professional maker of fairy tales. But there
+are two things for which I shall take it upon myself to answer
+personally. You will not leave Castle 'Cadia until your time is out; and
+you'll not leave this room until you have promised the three of us that
+this cock-and-bull story of yours stops right here with its first
+telling."
+
+"That's so," added Bromley, with a quiet menace in his tone.
+
+It was the playwright's turn to gasp, and he did it, very realistically.
+
+"You--you don't believe it? with all the three-sheet-poster evidence
+staring you in the face? Why, great Joash! you must be stark, staring
+mad--both of you!" he raved. And then to Blacklock: "Are you in it, too,
+Jerry?"
+
+"I guess I am," returned the collegian, meaning no more than that he
+felt constrained to stand with the men of his chosen profession.
+
+Wingfield drew a long breath and with it regained the impersonal heights
+of the unemotional observer. "Of course, it is just as you please," he
+said, carelessly. "I had a foolish notion I was doing you two a good
+turn; but if you choose to take the other view of it--well, there is no
+accounting for tastes. Drink your own liquor and give the house a good
+name. I'll dig up my day-pay later on: it's cracking good material, you
+know."
+
+"That is another thing," Ballard went on, still more decisively. "If you
+ever put pen to paper with these crazy theories of yours for a basis, I
+shall make it my business to hunt you down as I would a wild beast."
+
+"So shall I," echoed Bromley.
+
+Wingfield rose and put the long-stemmed pipe carefully aside.
+
+"You are a precious pair of bally idiots," he remarked, quite without
+heat. Then he looked at his watch and spoke pointedly to Blacklock.
+"You're forgetting Miss Elsa's fishing party to the upper canyon, aren't
+you? Suppose we drive around to Castle 'Cadia in the car. You can send
+Otto back after Mr. Bromley later on." And young Blacklock was so
+blankly dazed by the cool impudence of the suggestion that he consented
+and left the bungalow with the playwright.
+
+For some little time after the stuttering purr of the motor-car had died
+away the two men sat as Wingfield had left them, each busy with his own
+thoughts. Bromley was absently fingering the cartridges from Sanderson's
+rifle, mute proofs of the truth of the playwright's theories, and
+Ballard seemed to have forgotten that he had promised Fitzpatrick to run
+a line for an additional side-track in the railroad yard.
+
+"Do you blame me, Loudon?" he asked, after the silence had wrought its
+perfect work.
+
+"No; there was nothing else to do. But I couldn't help being sorry for
+him."
+
+"So was I," was the instant rejoinder. "Wingfield is all kinds of a
+decent fellow; and the way he has untangled the thing is nothing short
+of masterly. But I had to tie his tongue; you know I had to do that,
+Loudon."
+
+"Of course, you had to."
+
+Silence again for a little space; and then:
+
+"There is no doubt in your mind that he has hit upon the true solution
+of all the little mysteries?"
+
+Bromley shook his head slowly. "None at all, I am sorry to say. I have
+suspected it, in part, at least, for a good while. And I had proof
+positive before Wingfield gave it to us."
+
+"How?" queried Ballard.
+
+Bromley was still fingering the cartridges. "I hate to tell you,
+Breckenridge. And yet you ought to know," he added. "It concerns you
+vitally."
+
+Ballard's smile was patient. "I am well past the shocking point," he
+averred. "After what we have pulled through in the last hour we may as
+well make a clean sweep of it."
+
+"Well, then; I didn't stumble over the canyon cliff that night four
+weeks ago: I was knocked over."
+
+"What!"
+
+"It's true."
+
+"And you know who did it?"
+
+"I can make a pretty good guess. While I was down at the wing dam a man
+passed me, coming from the direction of the great house. He was a big
+man, and he was muffled to the ears in a rain-coat. I know, because I
+heard the peculiar 'mackintosh' rustle as he went by me. I knew then who
+it was; would have known even if I hadn't had a glimpse of his face at
+the passing instant. It is one of the colonel's eccentricities never to
+go out after nightfall--in a bone-dry country, mind you--without wearing
+a rain-coat."
+
+"Well?" said Ballard.
+
+"He didn't see me, though I thought at first that he did; he kept
+looking back as if he were expecting somebody to follow him. He took the
+path on our side of the canyon--the one I took a few minutes later.
+That's all; except that I would swear that I heard the 'slither' of a
+mackintosh just as the blow fell that knocked me down and out.
+
+"Heavens, Loudon! It's too grossly unbelievable! Why, man, he saved your
+life after the fact, risking his own in a mad drive down here from
+Castle 'Cadia in the car to do it! You wouldn't have lived until morning
+if he hadn't come."
+
+"It is unbelievable, as you say; and yet it isn't, when you have
+surrounded all the facts. What is the reason, the only reason, why
+Colonel Craigmiles should resort to all these desperate expedients?"
+
+"Delay, of course; time to get his legal fight shaped up in the courts."
+
+"Exactly. If he can hold us back long enough, the dam will never be
+completed. He knows this, and Mr. Pelham knows it, too. Unhappily for
+us, the colonel has found a way to ensure the delay. The work can't go
+on without a chief of construction."
+
+"But, good Lord, Loudon, you're not the 'Big Boss'; and, besides, the
+man loves you like a son! Why should he try to kill you one minute and
+move heaven and earth to save your life the next?"
+
+Bromley shook his head sorrowfully.
+
+"That is what made me say what I did about not wanting to tell you,
+Breckenridge. That crack over the head wasn't meant for me; it was meant
+for you. If it had not been so dark under the hill that night--but it
+was; pocket-dark in the shadow of the pines. And he knew you'd be coming
+along that path on your way back to camp--knew you'd be coming, and
+wasn't expecting anybody else. Don't you see?"
+
+Ballard jumped up and began to pace the floor.
+
+"My God!" he ejaculated; "I was his guest; I had just broken bread at
+his table! Bromley, when he went out to lie in wait for me, he left me
+talking with his daughter! It's too horrible!"
+
+Bromley had stood the eleven cartridges, false and true, in a curving
+row on the table. The crooking line took the shape of a huge
+interrogation point.
+
+"Wingfield thought he had solved all the mysteries, but the darkest of
+them remains untouched," he commented. "How can the genial, kindly,
+magnanimous man we know, or think we know, be such a fiend incarnate?"
+Then he broke ground again in the old field. "Will you do now what I
+begged you to do at first?--throw up this cursed job and go away?"
+
+Ballard stopped short in his tramping and his answer was an explosive
+"No!"
+
+"That is half righteous anger, and half something else. What is the
+other half, Breckenridge?" And when Ballard did not define it: "I can
+guess it; it is the same thing that made you stuff Wingfield's theories
+down his throat a few minutes ago. You are sorry for the daughter."
+
+Through the open door Ballard saw Fitzpatrick coming across the stone
+yard.
+
+"You've guessed it, Loudon; or rather, I think you have known it all
+along. I love Elsa Craigmiles; I loved her long before I ever heard of
+Arcadia or its king. Now you know why Wingfield mustn't be allowed to
+talk; why I mustn't go away and give place to a new chief who might live
+to see Elsa's father hanged. She must be spared and defended at any
+cost. One other word before Fitzpatrick cuts in: When my time comes, if
+it does come, you and one other man will know how I passed out and why.
+I want your promise that you'll keep still, and that you will keep
+Wingfield still. Blacklock doesn't count."
+
+"Sure," said Bromley, quietly; and then, with the big Irish contractor's
+shadow fairly darkening the door: "You'll do the same for me,
+Breckenridge, won't you? Because--oh, confound it all!--I'm in the same
+boat with you; without a ghost of a show, you understand."
+
+Ballard put his back squarely to Michael Fitzpatrick scraping his feet
+on the puncheon-floored porch of the bungalow, and gripped Bromley's
+hand across the table.
+
+"It's a bargain," he declared warmly. "We'll take the long chance and
+stand by her together, old man. And if she chooses the better part in
+the end, I'll try not to act like a jealous fool. Now you turn in and
+lie down a while. I've got to go with Michael."
+
+This time it was Bromley who saved the situation. "What a pair of
+luminous donkeys we are!" he laughed. "She calls you 'dear friend,' and
+me 'little brother.' If we're right good and tractable, we may get cards
+to her wedding--with Wingfield."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+IN THE LABORATORY
+
+
+Ballard had a small shock while he was crossing the stone yard with
+Fitzpatrick. It turned upon the sight of the handsome figure of the
+Craigmiles ranch foreman calmly rolling a cigarette in the shade of one
+of the cutting sheds.
+
+"What is the Mexican doing here?" he demanded abruptly of Fitzpatrick;
+and the Irishman's manner was far from reassuring.
+
+"'Tis you he'll be wanting to see, I'm thinking. He's been hanging
+'round the office f'r the betther part of an hour. Shall I run him off
+the riservation?"
+
+"Around the office, you say?" Ballard cut himself instantly out of the
+contractor's company and crossed briskly to the shed where the Mexican
+was lounging. "You are waiting to see me?" he asked shortly, ignoring
+the foreman's courtly bow and sombrero-sweep.
+
+"I wait to h-ask for the 'ealth of Señor Bromley. It is report' to me
+that he is recover from hees sobad h-accident."
+
+"Mr. Bromley is getting along all right. Is that all?"
+
+The Mexican bowed again.
+
+"I bring-a da message from the Señorita to da Señor Wingfiel'. He is
+som'where on da camp?"
+
+"No; he has gone back to the upper valley. You have been waiting some
+time? You must have seen him go."
+
+For the third time the Mexican removed his hat. "I'll have been here
+one, two, t'ree little minute, Señor Ballar'," he lied smoothly. "And
+now I make to myself the honour of saying to you, _Adios_."
+
+Ballard let him go because there was nothing else to do. His presence in
+the construction camp, and the ready lie about the length of his stay,
+were both sufficiently ominous. What if he had overheard the talk in the
+office? It was easily possible that he had. The windows were open, and
+the adobe was only a few steps withdrawn from the busy cutting yard. The
+eavesdropper might have sat unremarked upon the office porch, if he had
+cared to.
+
+The Kentuckian was deep in the labyrinth of reflection when he rejoined
+Fitzpatrick; and the laying-out of the new side-track afterward was
+purely mechanical. When the work was done, Ballard returned to the
+bungalow, to find Bromley sleeping the sleep of pure exhaustion on the
+blanket-covered couch. Obeying a sudden impulse, the Kentuckian took a
+field-glass from its case on the wall, and went out, tip-toeing to avoid
+waking Bromley. If Manuel had overheard, it was comparatively easy to
+prefigure his next step.
+
+"Which way did the Mexican go?" Ballard asked of a cutter in the
+stone-yard.
+
+"The last I saw of him he was loungin' off towards the Elbow. That was
+just after you was talkin' to him," said the man, lifting his cap to
+scratch his head with one finger.
+
+"Did he come here horseback?"
+
+"Not up here on the mesa. Might 'a' left his nag down below; but he
+wa'n't headin' that way when I saw him."
+
+Ballard turned away and climbed the hill in the rear of the bungalow;
+the hill from which the table-smashing rock had been hurled. From its
+crest there was a comprehensive view of the upper valley, with the river
+winding through it, with Castle 'Cadia crowning the island-like knoll in
+its centre, with the densely forested background range billowing green
+and grey in the afternoon sunlight.
+
+Throwing himself flat on the brown hilltop, Ballard trained his glass
+first on the inner valley reaches of a bridle-path leading over the
+southern hogback. There was no living thing in sight in that field,
+though sufficient time had elapsed to enable the Mexican to ride across
+the bridge and over the hills, if he had left the camp mounted.
+
+The engineer frowned and slipped easily into the out-of-door man's habit
+of thinking aloud.
+
+"It was a bare chance, of course. If he had news to carry to his master,
+he would save time by walking one mile as against riding four. Hello!"
+
+The exclamation emphasised a small discovery. From the hilltop the
+entrance to the colonel's mysterious mine was in plain view, and for the
+first time in Ballard's observings of it the massive, iron-bound door
+was open. Bringing the glass to bear on the tunnel-mouth square of
+shadow, Ballard made out the figures of two men standing just within the
+entrance and far enough withdrawn to be hidden from prying eyes on the
+camp plateau. With the help of the glass, the young engineer could
+distinguish the shape of a huge white sombrero, and under the sombrero
+the red spark of a cigarette. Wherefore he rolled quickly to a less
+exposed position and awaited developments.
+
+The suspense was short. In a few minutes the Mexican foreman emerged
+from the gloom of the mine-mouth, and with a single swift backward
+glance for the industries at the canyon portal, walked rapidly up the
+path toward the inner valley. Ballard sat up and trained the field-glass
+again. Why had Manuel gone out of his way to stop at the mine? The
+answer, or at least one possible answer, was under the foreman's arm,
+taking the shape of a short-barrelled rifle of the type carried by
+express messengers on Western railways.
+
+Ballard screwed the glass into its smallest compass, dropped it into his
+pocket, and made his way down to the camp mesa. The gun meant nothing
+more than that the Mexican had not deemed it advisable to appear in the
+construction camp armed. But, on the other hand, Ballard was fully
+convinced that he was on his way to Colonel Craigmiles as the bearer of
+news.
+
+It was an hour later when Otto, the colonel's chauffeur, kicked out the
+clutch of the buzzing runabout before the door of the office bungalow
+and announced that he had come to take the convalescent back to Castle
+'Cadia. Bromley was still asleep; hence there had been no opportunity
+for a joint discussion of the latest development in the little war. But
+when Ballard was helping him into the mechanician's seat, and Otto had
+gone for a bucket of water to cool the hissing radiator, there was time
+for a hurried word or two.
+
+"More trouble, Loudon--it turned up while you were asleep. Manuel was
+here, in the camp, while we were hammering it out with Wingfield. It is
+measurably certain that he overheard all or part of the talk. What he
+knows, the colonel doubtless knows, too, by this time, and----"
+
+"Oh, good Lord!" groaned Bromley. "It was bad enough as it stood, but
+this drags Wingfield into it, neck and heels! What will they do to him?"
+
+Ballard knitted his brows. "As Manuel could very easily make it appear
+in his tale-bearing, anything that might happen to Wingfield would be a
+pretty clear case of self-defence for Colonel Craigmiles. Wingfield
+knows too much."
+
+"A great deal too much. If I dared say ten words to Elsa----"
+
+"No," Ballard objected; "she is the one person to be shielded and
+spared. It's up to us to get Wingfield away from Castle 'Cadia and out
+of the country--before anything does happen to him."
+
+"If I were only half a man again!" Bromley lamented. "But I know just
+how it will be; I sha'n't have a shadow of chance at Wingfield this
+evening. As soon as I show up, Miss Cauffrey and the others will scold
+me for overstaying my leave, and chase me off to bed."
+
+"That's so; and it's right," mused Ballard. "You've no business to be
+out of bed this minute; you're not fit to be facing a ten-mile drive in
+this jig-wagon. By Jove: that's our way out of it! You climb down and
+let me go in your place. I'll tell them we let you overdo yourself; that
+you were too tired to stand the motor trip--which is the fact, if you'd
+only admit it. That will give me a chance at Wingfield; the chance you
+wouldn't have if you were to go. What do you say?"
+
+"I've already said it," was the convalescent's reply; and he let Ballard
+help him out of the mechanic's seat and into the bungalow.
+
+This is how it chanced that the chauffeur, coming back from Garou's
+kitchen barrel with the second bucket of water, found his fares changed
+and the chief engineer waiting to be his passenger over the ten miles of
+roundabout road. It was all one to the Berliner. He listened to
+Ballard's brief explanation with true German impassiveness, cranked the
+motor, pulled himself in behind the pilot-wheel, and sent the little car
+bounding down the mesa hill to the Boiling Water bridge what time the
+hoister whistles were blowing the six-o'clock quitting signal. The
+Kentuckian looked at his watch mechanically, as one will at some
+familiar reminder of the time. Seven o'clock was the Castle 'Cadia
+dinner hour: thirty minutes should suffice for the covering of the ten
+miles of country road, and with the fates propitious there would be an
+empty half-hour for the cajoling or compelling of Wingfield, imperilled
+in his character of overcurious delver into other people's affairs.
+
+So ran the reasonable prefiguring; but plans and prefigurings based upon
+the performance of a gasolene motor call for a generous factor of
+safety. Five miles from a tool-box in either direction, the engines of
+the runabout set up an ominous knocking. A stop was made, and Ballard
+filled and lighted his pipe while the chauffeur opened the bonnet and
+tapped and pried and screwed and adjusted. Ten minutes were lost in the
+testing and trying, and then the German named the trouble, with an
+emphatic "_Himmel!_" for a foreword. A broken bolt-head had dropped into
+the crank-case, and it would be necessary to take the engines to pieces
+to get it out. Ballard consulted his watch again. It lacked only a
+quarter of an hour of the Castle 'Cadia dinner-time; and a five-mile
+tramp over the hills would consume at least an hour. Whatever danger
+might be threatening the playwright (and the farther Ballard got away
+from the revelations of the early afternoon, the more the entire fabric
+of accusation threatened to crumble into the stuff nightmares are made
+of), a delay of an hour or two could hardly bring it to a crisis. Hence,
+when Otto lighted the lamps and got out his wrenches, his passenger
+stayed with him and became a very efficient mechanic's helper.
+
+This, as we have seen, was at a quarter before seven. At a quarter
+before nine the broken bolt was replaced, the last nut was screwed home,
+and the engines of the runabout were once more in commission.
+
+"A handy bit of road repairing, Otto," was Ballard's comment. "And we
+did it five miles from a lemon. How long will it take us to get in?"
+
+The Berliner did not know. With no further bad luck, fifteen or twenty
+minutes should be enough. And in fifteen minutes or less the little car
+was racing up the maple-shaded avenue to the Castle 'Cadia carriage
+entrance.
+
+Ballard felt trouble in the air before he descended from the car. The
+great portico was deserted, the piano was silent, and the lights were on
+in the upper rooms of the house. At the mounting of the steps, the
+Forestry man met him and drew him aside into the library, which was as
+empty as the portico.
+
+"I heard the car and thought it would be Mr. Bromley," Bigelow
+explained; adding: "I'm glad he didn't come. There has been an
+accident."
+
+"To--to Wingfield?"
+
+"Yes. How did you know? It was just after dinner. The colonel had some
+experimental mixture cooking in his electric furnace, and he invited us
+all down to the laboratory to see the result. Wingfield tangled himself
+in the wires in some unaccountable way and got a terrible shock. For a
+few minutes we all thought he was killed, but the colonel would not give
+up, and now he is slowly recovering."
+
+Ballard sat down in the nearest chair and held his head in his hands.
+His mind was in the condition of a coffer-dam that has been laboriously
+pumped out, only to be overwhelmed by a sudden and irresistible return
+of the flood. The theory of premeditated assassination was no nightmare;
+it was a pitiless, brutal, inhuman fact. Wingfield, an invited guest,
+and with a guest's privileges and immunities, had been tried, convicted,
+and sentenced for knowing too much.
+
+"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" he said to Bigelow, feeling the necessity
+of saying something, and realising at the same instant the futility of
+putting the horror of it into words for one who knew nothing of the true
+state of affairs.
+
+"Bad enough, certainly. You can imagine how it harrowed all of us, and
+especially the women. Cousin Janet fainted and had to be carried up to
+the house; and Miss Elsa was the only one of the young women who wasn't
+perfectly helpless. Colonel Craigmiles was our stand-by; he knew just
+what to do, and how to do it. He is a wonderful man, Mr. Ballard."
+
+"He is--in more ways than a casual observer would suspect." Ballard
+suffered so much of his thought to set itself in words. To minimise the
+temptation to say more he turned his back upon the accident and
+accounted for himself and his presence at Castle 'Cadia.
+
+"Bromley was pretty well tired out when Otto came down with the car, and
+I offered to ride around and make his excuses. We broke an engine bolt
+on the road: otherwise I should have been here two hours earlier. You
+say Wingfield is recovering? I wonder if I could see him for a few
+minutes, before I go back to camp?"
+
+Bigelow offered to go up-stairs and find out; and Ballard waited in the
+silence of the deserted library for what seemed like a long time. And
+when the waiting came to an end it was not Bigelow who parted the
+portières and came silently to stand before his chair; it was the king's
+daughter.
+
+"You have heard?" she asked, and her voice seemed to come from some
+immeasurable depth of anguish.
+
+"Yes. Is he better?"
+
+"Much better; though he is terribly weak and shaken." Then suddenly:
+"What brought you here--so late?"
+
+He explained the ostensible object of his coming, and mentioned the
+cause of the delay. She heard him through without comment, but there was
+doubt and keen distress and a great fear in the gray eyes when he was
+permitted to look into their troubled depths.
+
+"If you are telling me the truth, you are not telling me all of it," she
+said, sinking wearily into one of the deepest of the easy-chairs and
+shading the tell-tale eyes with her hand.
+
+"Why shouldn't I tell you all of it?" he rejoined evasively.
+
+"I don't know your reasons: I can only fear them."
+
+"If you could put the fear into words, perhaps I might be able to allay
+it," he returned gently.
+
+"It is past alleviation; you know it. Mr. Wingfield was with you again
+to-day, and when he came home I knew that the thing I had been dreading
+had come to pass."
+
+"How could you know it? Not from anything Wingfield said or did, I'm
+sure."
+
+"No; but Jerry Blacklock was with him--and Jerry's face is an open book
+for any one who cares to read it. Won't you please tell me the worst,
+Breckenridge?"
+
+"There isn't any worst," denied Ballard, lying promptly for love's sake.
+"We had luncheon together, the four of us, in honour of Bromley's
+recovery. Afterward, Wingfield spun yarns for us--as he has a habit of
+doing when he can get an audience of more than one person. Some of his
+stories were more grewsome than common. I don't wonder that Jerry had a
+left-over thrill or two in his face."
+
+She looked up from behind the eye-shading hand. "Do you dare to repeat
+those stories to me?"
+
+His laugh lacked something of spontaneity.
+
+"It is hardly a question of daring; it is rather a matter of memory--or
+the lack of it. Who ever tries to make a record of after-dinner
+fictions? Wingfield's story was a tale of impossible crimes and their
+more impossible detection; the plot and outline for a new play, I
+fancied, which he was trying first on the dog. Blacklock was the only
+one of his three listeners who took him seriously."
+
+She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and when she spoke again it
+was of the convalescent assistant.
+
+"You are not going to keep Mr. Bromley at the camp, are you? He isn't
+able to work yet."
+
+"Oh, no. You may send for him in the morning, if you wish. I--he was a
+little tired to-night, and I thought----"
+
+"Yes; you have told me what you thought," she reminded him, half
+absently. And then, with a note of constraint in her voice that was
+quite new to him: "You are not obliged to go back to Elbow Canyon
+to-night, are you? Your room is always ready for you at Castle 'Cadia."
+
+"Thank you; but I'll have to go back. If I don't, Bromley will think
+he's the whole thing and start in to run the camp in the morning before
+I could show up."
+
+She rose when he did, but her face was averted and he could not see her
+eyes when he went on in a tone from which every emotion save that of
+mere friendly solicitude was carefully effaced: "May I go up and jolly
+Wingfield a bit? He'll think it odd if I go without looking in at him."
+
+"If you should go without doing that for which you came," she corrected,
+with the same impersonal note in her voice. "Of course, you may see him:
+come with me."
+
+She led the way up the grand stair and left him at the door of a room in
+the wing which commanded a view of the sky-pitched backgrounding
+mountains. The door was ajar, and when he knocked and pushed it open he
+saw that the playwright was in bed, and that he was alone.
+
+"By Jove, now!" said a weak voice from the pillows; "this is neighbourly
+of you, Ballard. How the dickens did you manage to hear of it?"
+
+"Bad news travels fast," said Ballard, drawing a chair to the bedside.
+He did not mean to go into details if he could help it; and to get away
+from them he asked how the miracle of recovery was progressing.
+
+"Oh, I'm all right now," was the cheerful response--"coming alive at the
+rate of two nerves to the minute. And I wouldn't have missed it for the
+newest thousand-dollar bill that ever crackled in the palm of poverty.
+What few thrills I can't put into a description of electrocution, after
+this, won't be worth mentioning."
+
+"They have left you alone?" queried Ballard, with a glance around the
+great room.
+
+"Just this moment. The colonel and Miss Cauffrey and Miss Dosia were
+with me when the buzzer went off. Whoever sent you up pressed the button
+down stairs. Neat, isn't it. How's Bromley? I hope you didn't come to
+tell us that his first day in camp knocked him out."
+
+"No; Bromley is all right. You are the sick man, now."
+
+Wingfield's white teeth gleamed in a rather haggard smile.
+
+"I have looked over the edge, Ballard; that's the fact."
+
+"Tell me about it--if you can."
+
+"There isn't much to tell. We were all crowding around the electric
+furnace, taking turns at the coloured-glass protected peep-hole. The
+colonel had warned us about the wires, but the warning didn't cut any
+figure in my case."
+
+"You stumbled?"
+
+The man in bed flung a swift glance across the room toward the corridor
+door which Ballard had left ajar.
+
+"Go quietly and shut that door," was his whispered command; and when
+Ballard had obeyed it: "Now pull your chair closer and I'll answer your
+question: No, I didn't stumble. Somebody tripped me, and in falling I
+grabbed at one of the electrodes."
+
+"I was sure of it," said Ballard, quietly. "I knew that in all human
+probability you would be the next victim. That is why I persuaded
+Bromley to let me take his place in the motor-car. If the car hadn't
+broken down, I should have been here in time to warn you. I suppose it
+isn't necessary to ask who tripped you?"
+
+The playwright rocked his head on the pillow.
+
+"I'm afraid not, Ballard. The man who afterward saved my life--so they
+all say--was the one who stood nearest to me at the moment. The 'why' is
+what is tormenting me. I'm not the Arcadia Company, or its chief
+engineer, or anybody in particular in this game of 'heads I win, and
+tails you lose.'"
+
+Ballard left his chair and walked slowly to the mountain-viewing window.
+When he returned to the bedside, he said: "I can help you to the 'why.'
+What you said in my office to-day to three of us was overheard by a
+fourth--and the fourth was Manuel. An hour or so later he came up this
+way, on foot. Does that clear the horizon for you?"
+
+"Perfectly," was the whispered response, followed by a silence heavy
+with forecastings.
+
+"Under the changed conditions, it was only fair to you to bring you your
+warning, and to take off the embargo on your leaving Castle 'Cadia. Of
+course, you'll get yourself recalled to New York at once?" said Ballard.
+
+Wingfield raised himself on one elbow, and again his lips parted in the
+grinning smile.
+
+"Not in a thousand years, Ballard. I'll see this thing out now, if I get
+killed regularly once a day. You say I mustn't write about it, and
+that's so. I'm not a cad. But the experience is worth millions to
+me--worth all the chances I'm taking, and more. I'll stay."
+
+Ballard gripped the womanish hand lying on the coverlet. Here, after
+all, and under all the overlayings of pose and craftsman egotism, was a
+man with a man's heart and courage.
+
+"You're a brave fool, Wingfield," he said, warmly; "and because you are
+brave and a man grown, you shall be one of us. We--Bromley and
+I--bluffed you to-day for a woman's sake. If you could have got away
+from the excitement of the man-hunt for a single second, I know your
+first thought would have been for the woman whose lifted finger silences
+three of us. Because you seemed to forget this for the moment, I knocked
+you down with your own theory. Does that clear another of the horizons
+for you?"
+
+"Immensely. And I deserved all you gave me. Until I'm killed off, you
+may comfort yourself with the thought that one of the gallant three is
+here, in the wings, as you might say, ready and willing to do what he
+can to keep the curtain from rising on any more tragedy."
+
+"Thank you," said Ballard, heartily; "that will be a comfort." Then,
+with a parting hand-grip and an added word of caution to the man who
+knew too much, he left the room and the house, finding his way
+unattended to the great portico and to the path leading down to the
+river road.
+
+The mile faring down the valley in the velvety blackness of the warm
+summer night was a meliorating ending to the day of revelations and
+alarms; and for the first time since Wingfield's clever unravelling of
+the tangled mesh of mystery, the Kentuckian was able to set the accusing
+facts in orderly array. Yet now, as before, the greatest of the
+mysteries refused to take its place in the wellnigh completed circle of
+incriminating discoveries. That the King of Arcadia, Elsa's father and
+the genial host of the great house on the knoll, was a common murderer,
+lost to every humane and Christian prompting of the soul, was still as
+incredible as a myth of the Middle Ages.
+
+"I'll wake up some time in the good old daylight of the every-day,
+commonplace world, I hope," was Ballard's summing-up, when he had
+traversed the reflective mile and had let himself into the office
+bungalow to find Bromley sleeping peacefully in his bunk. "But it's a
+little hard to wait--with the air full of Damocles-swords, and with the
+dear girl's heart gripped in a vise that I can't unscrew. That is what
+makes it bitterer than death: she knows, and it is killing her by
+inches--in spite of the bravest heart that ever loved and suffered. God
+help her; God help us all!"
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE GEOLOGIST
+
+
+It was Miss Craigmiles herself who gave Ballard the exact date of
+Professor Gardiner's coming; driving down to the construction camp alone
+in the little motor-car for that avowed purpose.
+
+A cloud-burst in the main range had made the stage road from Alta Vista
+impassable for the moment, leaving the Arcadia Company's railroad--by
+some unexplained miracle of good fortune--unharmed. Hence, unless the
+expected guest could be brought over from Alta Vista on the material
+train, he would be indefinitely detained on the other side of the
+mountain. Miss Elsa came ostensibly to beg a favour.
+
+"Of course, I'll send over for him," said Ballard, when the favour had
+been named. "Didn't I tell you he is going to be _my_ guest?"
+
+"But he isn't," she insisted, playfully. Bromley was out and at work,
+Wingfield had entirely recovered from the effects of his electric shock,
+and there had been no untoward happenings for three peaceful weeks.
+Wherefore there was occasion for light-heartedness.
+
+Ballard descended from the bungalow porch and arbitrarily stopped the
+buzzing engines of the runabout by cutting out the batteries. "This is
+the first time I've seen you for three weeks," he asserted--which was a
+lover's exaggeration. "Please come up and sit on the porch. There is any
+number of things I want to say."
+
+"Where is Mr. Bromley?" she asked, making no move to leave the
+driving-seat.
+
+"He is out on the ditch survey--luckily for me. Won't you please 'light
+and come in?--as we say back in the Blue-grass."
+
+"You don't deserve it. You haven't been near us since Mr. Bromley went
+back to work. Why?"
+
+"I have been exceedingly busy; we are coming down the home-stretch on
+our job here, as you know." The commonplace excuse was the only one
+available. He could not tell her that it was impossible for him to
+accept further hospitalities at Castle 'Cadia.
+
+"Mr. Bromley hasn't been too busy," she suggested.
+
+"Bromley owes all of you a very great debt of gratitude."
+
+"And you do not, you would say. That is quite true. You owe us nothing
+but uncompromising antagonism--hatred, if you choose to carry it to that
+extreme."
+
+"No," he returned gravely. "I can't think of you and of enmity at the
+same moment."
+
+"If you could only know," she said, half absently, and the trouble
+shadow came quickly into the backgrounding depths of the beautiful eyes.
+"There is no real cause for enmity or hatred--absolutely none."
+
+"I am thinking of you," he reminded her, reverting to the impossibility
+of associating that thought with the other.
+
+"Thank you; I am glad you can make even that much of a concession. It is
+more than another would make." Then, with the unexpectedness which was
+all her own: "I am still curious to know what you did to Mr. Wingfield:
+that day when he so nearly lost his life in the laboratory?"
+
+"At what time in that day?" he asked, meaning to dodge if he could.
+
+"You know--when you had him here in your office, with Jerry and Mr.
+Bromley."
+
+"I don't remember all the things I did to him, that day and before it. I
+believe I made him welcome--when I had to. He hasn't been using his
+welcome much lately, though."
+
+"No; not since that day that came near ending so terribly. I'd like to
+know what happened."
+
+"Nothing--of any consequence. I believe I told you that Wingfield was
+boring us with the plot of a new play."
+
+"Yes; and you said you couldn't remember it."
+
+"I don't want to remember it. Let's talk of something else. Is your
+anxiety--the trouble you refuse to share with me--any lighter?"
+
+"No--yes; just for the moment, perhaps."
+
+"Are you still determined not to let me efface it for you?"
+
+"You couldn't; no one can. It can never be effaced."
+
+His smile was the man's smile of superior wisdom.
+
+"Don't we always say that when the trouble is personal?"
+
+She ignored the query completely, and her rejoinder was totally
+irrelevant--or it seemed to be.
+
+"You think I came down here to ask you to send over to Alta Vista for
+Professor Gardiner. That was merely an excuse. I wanted to beg you once
+again to suspend judgment--not to be vindictive."
+
+Again he dissimulated. "I'm not vindictive: why should I be?"
+
+"You have every reason; or, at least, you believe you have." She leaned
+over the arm of the driving-seat and searched his eyes pleadingly:
+"Please tell me: how much did Mr. Wingfield find out?"
+
+It was blankly impossible to tell her the hideous truth, or anything
+remotely approaching it. But his parrying of her question was passing
+skilless.
+
+"Not being a mind-reader, I can't say what Wingfield knows--or thinks he
+knows. Our disagreement turned upon his threat to make literary material
+out of--well, out of matters that were in a good measure my own private
+and personal affairs."
+
+"Oh; so there _was_ a quarrel? That is more than you were willing to
+admit a moment ago."
+
+"You dignify it too much. I believe I called him an ass, and he called
+me an idiot. There was no bloodshed."
+
+"You are jesting again. You always jest when I want to be serious."
+
+"I might retort that I learned the trick of it from you--in the blessed
+days that are now a part of another existence."
+
+"Oh!" she said; and there was so much more of distress than of
+impatience in the little outcry that he was mollified at once.
+
+"I'm going to crank the engines and send you home," he asseverated. "I'm
+not fit to talk to you to-day." And he started the engines of the
+motor-car.
+
+She put a dainty foot on the clutch-pedal. "You'll come up and see me?"
+she asked; adding: "Some time when you are fit?"
+
+"I'll come when I am needed; yes."
+
+He walked beside the slowly moving car as she sent it creeping down the
+mesa hill on the brakes. At the hill-bottom turn, where the camp street
+ended and the roundabout road led off to the temporary bridge, she
+stopped the car. The towering wall of the great dam, with its dotting of
+workmen silhouetted black against the blue of the Colorado sky, rose
+high on the left. She let her gaze climb to the summit of the huge dike.
+
+"You are nearly through?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. Two other weeks, with no bad luck, will see us ready to turn on
+the water."
+
+She was looking straight ahead again.
+
+"You know what that means to us at Castle 'Cadia?--but of course you
+do."
+
+"I know I'd rather be a 'mucker' with a pick and shovel out yonder in
+the ditch than to be the boss here when the spillway gates are closed at
+the head of the cut-off tunnel. And that is the pure truth."
+
+"This time I believe you without reservation, Breckenridge--my friend."
+Then: "Will Mr. Pelham come out to the formal and triumphal opening of
+the Arcadian Irrigation District?"
+
+"Oh, you can count on that--with all the trimmings. There is to be a
+demonstration in force, as Major Blacklock would say; special trains
+from Denver to bring the crowd, a barbecue dinner, speeches, a
+land-viewing excursion over the completed portion of the railroad, and
+fireworks in the evening while the band plays 'America.' You can trust
+Mr. Pelham to beat the big drum and to clash the cymbals vigorously and
+man-fashion at the psychological instant."
+
+"For purely commercial reasons, of course? I could go a step further and
+tell you something else that will happen. There will be a good many
+transfers of the Arcadia Company's stock at the triumphal climax."
+
+He was standing with one foot on the car step and his hands buried in
+the pockets of his short working-coat. His eyes narrowed to regard her
+thoughtfully.
+
+"What do you know about such things?" he demurred. "You know altogether
+too much for one small bachelor maid. It's uncanny."
+
+"I am the cow-punching princess of Arcadia, and Mr. Pelham's natural
+enemy, you must remember," she countered, with a laugh that sounded
+entirely care-free. "I could tell you more about the stock affair. Mr.
+Pelham has been very liberal with his friends in the floating of this
+great and glorious undertaking--to borrow one of his pet phrases. He has
+placed considerable quantities of the Arcadia Company's stock among them
+at merely nominal prices, asking only that they sign a 'gentlemen's
+agreement' not to resell any of it, so that my father could get it. But
+there is a wheel within that wheel, too. Something more than half of the
+nominal capitalisation has been reserved as 'treasury stock.' When the
+enthusiasm reaches the proper height, this reserved stock will be put
+upon the market. People will be eager to buy it--won't they?--with the
+work all done, and everything in readiness to tap the stream of sudden
+wealth?"
+
+"Probably: that would be the natural inference."
+
+"I thought so. And, as the company's chief engineer, you could doubtless
+get in on the 'ground floor' that Mr. Pelham is always talking about,
+couldn't you?"
+
+The question was one to prick an honest man in his tenderest part.
+Ballard was hurt, and his face advertised it.
+
+"See here, little girl," he said, flinging the formalities to the winds;
+"I am the company's hired man at the present moment, but that is
+entirely without prejudice to my convictions, or to the fact that some
+day I am going to marry you. I hope that defines my attitude. As matters
+stand, Mr. Pelham couldn't hand me out any of his stock on a silver
+platter!"
+
+"And Mr. Bromley?"
+
+"You needn't fear for Loudon; he isn't going to invest, either. You know
+very well that he is in precisely the same boat that I am."
+
+"How shocking!" she exclaimed, with an embarrassed little laugh. "Is Mr.
+Bromley to marry your widow? Or are you to figure as the consolation
+prize for his widow? Doubtless you have arranged it amicably between
+you."
+
+Having said the incendiary thing, he brazened it out like a man and a
+lover.
+
+"It's no joke. I suppose I might sidestep, but I sha'n't. You know very
+well that Bromley is in love with you--up to his chin, and I'm afraid
+you have been too kind to him. That is a little hard on Loudon, you
+know--when you are going to marry some one else. But let that rest, and
+tell me a little more about this stock deal. Why should there be a
+'gentlemen's agreement' to exclude your father? To a rank outsider like
+myself, Arcadia Irrigation would seem to be about the last thing in the
+world Colonel Adam Craigmiles would want to buy."
+
+"Under present conditions, I think it is," she said. "_I_ shouldn't buy
+it now."
+
+"What would you do, O wise virgin of the market-place?"
+
+"I'd wait patiently while the rocket is going up; I might even clap my
+hands and say 'Ah-h-h!' with the admiring multitude. But afterward, when
+the stick comes down, I'd buy every bit of Arcadia Irrigation I could
+find."
+
+Again he was regarding her through half-closed eyelids.
+
+"As I said before, you know too much about such things--altogether too
+much." He said it half in raillery, but his deduction was made seriously
+enough. "You think your father will win his law-suit and so break the
+market?"
+
+"No; on the contrary, I'm quite sure he will be beaten. I am going, now.
+Don't ask me any more questions: I've said too much to the company's
+engineer, as it is."
+
+"You have said nothing to the company's engineer," he denied. "You have
+been talking to Breckenridge Ballard, your future----"
+
+She set the car in motion before he could complete the sentence, and he
+stood looking after it as it shot away up the hills. It was quite out of
+sight, and the sound of its drumming motor was lost in the hoarse
+grumbling of the river, before he began to realise that Elsa's visit had
+not been for the purpose of asking him to send for Gardiner, nor yet to
+beg him not to be vindictive. Her real object had been to warn him not
+to buy Arcadia Irrigation. "Why?" came the unfailing question,
+shot-like; and, like all the others of its tribe, it had to go
+unanswered.
+
+It was two days later when Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology,
+kept his appointment, was duly met at Alta Vista by Ballard's special
+engine and a "dinkey" way-car, and was transported in state to the
+Arcadian fastnesses. Ballard had it in mind to run down the line on the
+other engine to meet the Bostonian; but Elsa forestalled him by
+intercepting the "special" at Ackerman's with the motor-car and whisking
+the guest over the roundabout road to Castle 'Cadia.
+
+Gardiner walked down to the construction camp at Elbow Canyon bright and
+early the following morning to make his peace with Ballard.
+
+"Age has its privileges which youth is obliged to concede, Breckenridge,
+my son," was the form his apology took. "When I learned that I might
+have my visit with you, and still be put up at the millionaire hostelry
+in the valley above, I didn't hesitate a moment. I am far beyond the
+point of bursting into enthusiastic raptures over a bunk shake-down in a
+camp shanty, steel forks, tin platters, and plum-duff, when I can live
+on the fat of the land and sleep on a modern mattress. How are you
+coming on? Am I still in time to be in at the death?"
+
+"I hope there isn't going to be any death," was the laughing rejoinder.
+"Because, in the natural sequence of things, it would have to be mine,
+you know."
+
+"Ah! You are tarred a little with the superstitious stick, yourself, are
+you? What was it you said to me about 'two sheer accidents and a
+commonplace tragedy'? You may remember that I warned you, and the event
+proves that I was a true prophet. I predicted that Arcadia would have
+its shepherdess, you recollect."
+
+Thus, with dry humour, the wise man from the East. But Ballard was not
+prepared at the moment for a plunge into the pool of sentiment with the
+mildly cynical old schoolman for a bath-master, and he proposed, as the
+readiest alternative, a walking tour of the industries.
+
+Gardiner was duly impressed by the industrial miracles, and by the
+magnitude of the irrigation scheme. Also, he found fitting words in
+which to express his appreciation of the thoroughness of Ballard's work,
+and of the admirable system under which it was pressing swiftly to its
+conclusion. But these matters became quickly subsidiary when he began to
+examine the curious geological formation of the foothill range through
+which the river elbowed its tumultuous course.
+
+"These little wrinklings of the earth's crust at the foot of the great
+mountain systems are nature's puzzle-pieces for us," he remarked. "I
+foresee an extremely enjoyable vacation for me--if you have forgiven me
+to the extent of a snack at your mess-table now and then, and a possible
+night's lodging in your bungalow if I should get caught out too late to
+reach the millionaire luxuries of Castle 'Cadia."
+
+"If I haven't forgiven you, Bromley will take you in," laughed Ballard.
+"Make yourself one of us--when you please and as you please. The camp
+and everything in it belongs to you for as long as you can persuade
+yourself to stay."
+
+Gardiner accepted the invitation in its largest sense, and the afternoon
+of the same day found him prowling studiously in the outlet canyon with
+hammer and specimen-bag; a curious figure of complete abstraction in
+brown duck and service leggings, overshadowed by an enormous cork-lined
+helmet-hat that had been faded and stained by the sun and rains of three
+continents. Ballard passed the word among his workmen. The absent-minded
+stranger under the cork hat was the guest of the camp, who was to be
+permitted to go and come as he chose, whose questions were to be
+answered without reserve, and whose peculiarities, if he had any, were
+to pass unremarked.
+
+With the completion of the dam so near at hand, neither of the two young
+men who were responsible for the great undertaking had much time to
+spare for extraneous things. But Gardiner asked little of his secondary
+hosts; and presently the thin, angular figure prowling and tapping at
+the rocks became a familiar sight in the busy construction camp. It was
+Lamoine, the camp jester, who started the story that the figure in brown
+canvas was a mascot, imported specially by the "boss" to hold the
+"hoodoo" in check until the work should be done; and thereafter the
+Boston professor might have chipped his specimens from the facing stones
+on the dam without let or hindrance.
+
+The masons were setting the coping course on the great wall on a day
+when Gardiner's studious enthusiasm carried him beyond the dinner-hour
+at Castle 'Cadia and made him an evening guest in the engineer's adobe;
+and in the after-supper talk it transpired that the assistant in geology
+had merely snatched a meagre fortnight out of his work in the summer
+school, and would be leaving for home in another day or two.
+
+Both of the young men protested their disappointment. They had been too
+busy to see anything of their guest in a comradely way, and they had
+been looking forward to the lull in the activities which would follow
+the opening celebration and promising themselves a more hospitable
+entertainment of the man who had been both Mentor and elder brother to
+them in the Boston years.
+
+"You are not regretting it half as keenly as I am," the guest assured
+them. "Apart from losing the chance to thresh it out with you two, I
+have never been on more fascinatingly interesting geological ground. I
+could spend an entire summer among these wonderful hills of yours
+without exhausting their astonishing resources."
+
+Ballard made allowances for scholastic enthusiasm. He had slighted
+geology for the more strictly practical studies in his college course.
+
+"Meaning the broken formations?" he asked.
+
+"Meaning the general topsyturvyism of all the formations. Where you
+might reasonably expect to find one stratum, you find others perhaps
+thousands of years older--or younger--in the geological chronology. I
+wonder you haven't galvanised a little enthusiasm over it: you discredit
+your alma mater and me when you regard these marvellous hills merely as
+convenient buttresses for your wall of masonry. And, by the way, that
+reminds me: neither of you two youngsters is responsible for the
+foundations of that dam; isn't that the fact?"
+
+"It is," said Bromley, answering for both. Then he added that the
+specifications called for bed-rock, which Fitzpatrick, who had worked
+under Braithwaite, said had been uncovered and properly benched for the
+structure.
+
+"'Bed-rock,'" said the geologist, reflectively. "That is a workman's
+term, and is apt to be misleading. The vital question, under such
+abnormal conditions as those presenting themselves in your canyon, is,
+What kind of rock was it?"
+
+Bromley shook his head. "You can't prove it by me. The foundations were
+all in before I came on the job. But from Fitzpatrick's description I
+should take it to be the close-grained limestone."
+
+"H'm," said Gardiner. "Dam-building isn't precisely in my line; but I
+shouldn't care to trust anything short of the granites in such a
+locality as this."
+
+"You've seen something?" queried Ballard.
+
+"Nothing immediately alarming; merely an indication of what might be.
+Where the river emerges from your cut-off tunnel below the dam, it has
+worn out a deep pit in the old bed, as you know. The bottom of this pit
+must, in the nature of things, be far below the foundations of the
+masonry. Had you thought of that?"
+
+"I have--more than once or twice," Ballard admitted.
+
+"Very well," continued the Master of the Rocks; "that circumstance
+suggests three interrogation points. Query one: How has the diverted
+torrent managed to dig such a deep cavity if the true primitives--your
+workman's 'bed-rock'--under-lie its channel cutting? Query two: What
+causes the curious reverberatory sound like distant thunder made by the
+stream as it plunges into this pit--a sound suggesting subterranean
+caverns? Query three--and this may be set down as the most important of
+the trio: Why is the detritus washed up out of this singular pot-hole a
+friable brown shale, quite unlike anything found higher up in the bed of
+the stream?"
+
+The two young men exchanged swift glances of apprehension. "Your
+deductions, Professor?" asked Bromley, anxiously.
+
+"Now you are going too fast. True science doesn't deduce: it waits until
+it can prove. But I might hazard a purely speculative guess. Mr.
+Braithwaite's foundation stratum--your contractor's 'bed-rock'--may not
+be the true primitive; it may in its turn be underbedded by this brown
+shale that the stream is washing up out of its pot-hole."
+
+"Which brings on more talk," said Ballard, grappling thoughtfully with
+the new perplexities forming themselves upon Gardiner's guess.
+
+"Decidedly, one would say. Granting my speculative answer to Query
+Number Three, the Arcadia Company's dam may stand for a thousand
+years--or it may not. Its life may possibly be determined in a single
+night, if by any means the water impounded above it should find its way
+through Fitzpatrick's 'bed-rock' to an underlying softer stratum."
+
+Ballard's eyes were fixed upon a blue-print profile of Elbow Canyon
+pinned upon the wall, when he said: "If that pot-hole, or some rift
+similar to it, were above the dam instead of below it, for example?"
+
+"Precisely," said the geologist. "In five minutes after the opening of
+such an underground channel your dam might be transformed into a
+makeshift bridge spanning an erosive torrent comparable in fierce and
+destructive energy, to nothing milder than a suddenly released Niagara."
+
+Silence ensued, and afterward the talk drifted to other fields; was
+chiefly reminiscent of the younger men's university years. It was while
+Bromley and Gardiner were carrying the brunt of it that Ballard got up
+and went out. A few minutes later the out-door stillness of the night
+was shattered by the sharp crack of a rifle, and other shots followed in
+quick succession.
+
+Bromley sprang afoot at the first discharge, but before he could reach
+the door of the adobe, Ballard came in, carrying a hatful of roughly
+crumbled brown earth. He was a little short of breath, and his eyes were
+flashing with excitement. Nevertheless, he was cool enough to stop
+Bromley's question before it could be set in words.
+
+"It was only one of the colonel's Mexican mine guards trying a little
+rifle practice in the dark," he explained; and before there could be any
+comment: "I went out to get this, Gardiner"--indicating the hatful of
+earth. "It's a sample of some stuff I'd like to have you take back to
+Boston with you for a scientific analysis. I've got just enough of the
+prospector's blood in me to make me curious about it."
+
+The geologist examined the brown earth critically; passed a handful of
+it through his fingers; smelled it; tasted it.
+
+"How much have you got of this?" he asked, with interest palpably
+aroused.
+
+"Enough," rejoined the Kentuckian, evasively.
+
+"Then your fortune is made, my son. This 'stuff,' as you call it, is the
+basis of Colonel Craigmile's millions. I hope your vein isn't a part of
+his."
+
+Again Ballard evaded the implied question. "What do you know about it,
+Gardiner? Have you ever seen any of it before?"
+
+"I have, indeed. More than that, I have 'proved up' on it, as your
+Western miners say of their claims. A few evenings ago we were talking
+of expert analyses--the colonel and young Wingfield and I--up at the
+house of luxuries, and the colonel ventured to wager that he could stump
+me; said he could give me a sample of basic material carrying fabulous
+values, the very name of which I wouldn't be able to tell him after the
+most exhaustive laboratory tests. Of course, I had to take him up--if
+only for the honour of the Institute--and the three of us went down to
+his laboratory. The sample he gave me was some of this brown earth."
+
+"And you analysed it?" inquired Ballard with eagerness unconcealed.
+
+"I did; and won a box of the colonel's high-priced cigars, for which,
+unhappily, I have no possible use. The sample submitted, like this in
+your hat, was zirconia; the earth-ore which carries the rare metal
+zirconium. Don't shame me and your alma mater by saying that this means
+nothing to you."
+
+"You've got us down," laughed Bromley. "It's only a name to me; the name
+of one of the theoretical metals cooked up in laboratory experiments.
+And I venture to say it is even less than that to Breckenridge."
+
+"It is a very rare metal, and up to within a few years has never been
+found in a natural state or produced in commercial quantities,"
+explained the analyst, mounting and riding his hobby with apparent zest.
+"A refined product of zirconia, the earth itself, has been used to make
+incandescent gas-mantles; and it was M. Léoffroy, of Paris, who
+discovered a method of electric-furnace reduction for isolating the
+metal. It was a great discovery. Zirconium, which is exceedingly dense
+and practically irreducible by wear, is supplanting iridium for the
+pointing of gold pens, and its value for that purpose is far in excess
+of any other known substance."
+
+"But Colonel Craigmiles never ships anything from his mine, so far as
+any one can see," Ballard cut in.
+
+"No? It isn't necessary. He showed us his reduction-plant--run by
+water-power from the little dam in the upper canyon. It is quite
+perfect. You will understand that the actual quantity of zirconium
+obtained is almost microscopic; but since it is worth much more than
+diamonds, weight for weight, the plant needn't be very extensive. And
+the fortunate miner in this instance is wholly independent of the
+transportation lines. He can carry his output to market in his vest
+pocket."
+
+After this, the talk, resolutely shunted by Ballard, veered aside from
+Arcadian matters. Later on, when Bromley was making up a shake-down bed
+in the rear room for the guest, the Kentuckian went out on the porch to
+smoke. It was here that Bromley found him after the Bostonian had been
+put to bed.
+
+"Now, then, I want to know where you got that sample, Breckenridge?" he
+demanded, without preface.
+
+Ballard's laugh was quite cheerful.
+
+"I stole it out of one of the colonel's ore bins at the entrance of the
+mine over yonder."
+
+"I thought so. And the shots?"
+
+"They were fired at me by one of the Mexican night guards, of course.
+One of them hit the hat as I was running away, and I was scared stiff
+for fear Gardiner's sharp old eyes would discover the hole. I'm right
+glad for one thing, Loudon; and that is that the mine is really a mine.
+Sometimes I've been tempted to suspect that it was merely a hole in the
+ground, designed and maintained purely for the purpose of cinching the
+Arcadia Company for damages."
+
+Bromley sat up straight and his teeth came together with a little click.
+He was remembering the professor's talk about the underlying shales, and
+a possible breach into them above the dam when he said: "Or to--" but
+the sentence was left unfinished. Instead, he fell to reproaching
+Ballard for his foolhardiness.
+
+"Confound you, Breckenridge! you haven't sense enough to stay in the
+house when it's raining out-of-doors! The idea of your taking such
+reckless chances on a mere whiff of curiosity! Let me have a pipeful of
+that tobacco--unless you mean to hog that, too--along with all the other
+risky things."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG
+
+
+The _fête champêtre_, as President Pelham named it in the
+trumpet-flourish of announcement, to celebrate the laying of the final
+stone of the great dam at the outlet of Elbow Canyon, anticipated the
+working completion of the irrigation system by some weeks. That the
+canals were not yet in readiness to furnish water to the prospective
+farmer really made little difference. The spectacular event was the
+laying of the top-stone; and in the promoter's plans a well-arranged
+stage-effect was of far greater value than any actual parcelling out of
+the land to intended settlers.
+
+Accordingly, no effort was spared to make the celebration an
+enthusiastic success. For days before the auspicious one on which the
+guest trains began to arrive from Alta Vista and beyond, the camp force
+spent itself in setting the scene for the triumph. The spillway gate,
+designed to close the cut-off tunnel and so to begin the impounding of
+the river, was put in place ready to be forced down by its machinery;
+the camp mesa was scraped and raked and cleared of the industrial
+litter; a platform was erected for the orators and the brass band; a
+towering flagstaff--this by the express direction of the president--was
+planted in the middle of the mesa parade ground; and with the exception
+of camp cook Garou, busy with a small army of assistants over the
+barbecue pits, the construction force was distributed among the camps on
+the canals--this last a final touch of Mr. Pelham's to secure the degree
+of exclusiveness for the celebration which might not have been
+attainable in the presence of an outnumbering throng of workmen.
+
+In the celebration proper the two engineers had an insignificant part.
+When the trains were in and side-tracked, and the working preliminaries
+were out of the way, the triumphal programme, as it had been outlined in
+a five-page letter from the president to Ballard, became automatic,
+moving smoothly from number to number as a well-designed masterpiece of
+the spectacular variety should. There were no hitches, no long waits for
+the audience. Mr. Pelham, carrying his two-hundred-odd pounds of
+avoirdupois as jauntily as the youngest promoter of them all, was at
+once the genial host, the skilful organiser, prompter, stage-manager,
+chorus-leader; playing his many parts letter-perfect, and never missing
+a chance to gain a few more notches on the winding-winch of enthusiasm.
+
+While the band and the orators were alternating, Ballard and Bromley,
+off duty for the time, lounged on the bungalow porch awaiting their cue.
+There had been no awkward happenings thus far. The trains had arrived on
+time; the carefully staged spectacle was running like a well-oiled piece
+of mechanism; the August day, despite a threatening mass of storm cloud
+gathering on the distant slopes of the background mountain range, was
+perfect; and, thanks to Mr. Pelham's gift of leadership, the celebrators
+had been judiciously wrought up to the pitch at which everything was
+applauded and nothing criticised. Hence, there was no apparent reason
+for Ballard's settled gloom; or for Bromley's impatience manifesting
+itself in sarcastic flings at the company's secretary, an ex-politician
+of the golden-tongued tribe, who was the oratorical spellbinder of the
+moment.
+
+"For Heaven's sake! will he never saw it off and let us get that stone
+set?" gritted the assistant, when the crowd cheered, and the mellifluous
+flood, checked for the applausive instant, poured steadily on. "Why in
+the name of common sense did Mr. Pelham want to spring this batch of
+human phonographs on us!"
+
+"The realities will hit us soon enough," growled Ballard, whose
+impatience took the morose form. Then, with a sudden righting of his
+tilted camp-stool: "Good Lord, Loudon! Look yonder--up the canyon!"
+
+The porch outlook commanded a view of the foothill canyon, and of a
+limited area of the bowl-shaped upper valley. At the canyon head, and on
+the opposite side of the river, three double-seated buckboards were
+wheeling to disembark their passengers; and presently the Castle 'Cadia
+house-party, led by Colonel Craigmiles himself, climbed the left-hand
+path to the little level space fronting the mysterious mine.
+
+"By Jove!" gasped Bromley; "I nearly had a fit--I thought they were
+coming over here. Now what in the name of----"
+
+"It's all right," cut in Ballard, irritably. "Why shouldn't the colonel
+want to be present at his own funeral? And you needn't be afraid of
+their coming over here. The colonel wouldn't wipe his feet on that mob
+of money-hunters around the band-stand. See; they are making a private
+box of the mine entrance."
+
+The remark framed itself upon the fact. At the colonel's signal the
+iron-bound tunnel door had swung open, and Wingfield and Blacklock,
+junior, with the help of the buckboard drivers, were piling timbers on
+the little plateau for the party's seating.
+
+It was Colonel Craigmiles's own proposal, this descent upon the
+commercial festivities at the dam; and Elsa had yielded only after
+exhausting her ingenuity in trying to defeat it. She had known in
+advance that it could not be defeated. For weeks her father's attitude
+had been explainable only upon a single hypothesis; one which she had
+alternately accepted and rejected a hundred times during the two years
+of dam-building; and this excursion was less singular than many other
+consequences of the mysterious attitude.
+
+She was recalling the mysteries as she sat on the pile of timbers with
+Wingfield, hearing but not heeding the resounding periods of the orator
+across the narrow chasm. With the inundation of the upper valley an
+impending certainty, measurable by weeks and then by days, and now by
+hours, nothing of any consequence had been done at Castle 'Cadia by way
+of preparing for it. Coming down early one morning to cut flowers for
+the breakfast-table, she had found two men in mechanics' overclothes
+installing a small gasolene electric plant near the stables; this, she
+supposed, was for the house-lighting when the laboratory should be
+submerged. A few days later she had come upon Otto, the chauffeur,
+building a light rowboat in a secluded nook in the upper canyon.
+
+But beyond these apparently trivial precautions, nothing had been done,
+and her father had said no word to her or to the guests of what was to
+be done when the closed-in valley should become a lake with Castle
+'Cadia for its single island. Meanwhile, the daily routine of the
+country house had gone on uninterruptedly; and once, when Mrs. Van Bryck
+had asked her host what would happen when the floods came, Elsa had
+heard her father laughingly assure his guest in the presence of the
+others that nothing would happen.
+
+That Wingfield knew more than these surface indications could tell the
+keenest observer, Elsa was well convinced; how much more, she could only
+guess. But one thing was certain: ever since the day spent with Ballard
+and Bromley and Jerry Blacklock at the construction camp--the day of his
+narrow escape from death--the playwright had been a changed man;
+cynical, ill at ease, or profoundly abstracted by turns, and never less
+companionable than at the present moment while he sat beside her on the
+timber balk, scowling up and across at the band-stand, at the spellbound
+throng ringing it in, and at the spellbinding secretary shaming the
+pouring torrent in the ravine below with his flood of rhetoric.
+
+"What sickening rot!" he scoffed in open disgust. And then: "It must be
+delightfully comforting to Ballard and Bromley to have that wild ass of
+the market-place braying over their work! Somebody ought to hit him."
+
+But the orator was preparing to do a little of the hitting, himself. The
+appearance of the party at the mine entrance had not gone unremarked,
+and the company's secretary recognised the company's enemy at a glance.
+He was looking over the heads of the celebrators and down upon the group
+on the opposite side of the narrow chasm when he said:
+
+"So, ladies and gentlemen, this great project, in the face of the most
+obstinate, and, I may say, lawless, opposition; in spite of violence and
+petty obstruction on the part of those who would rejoice, even to-day,
+in its failure; this great work has been carried on to its triumphant
+conclusion, and we are gathered here on this beautiful morning in the
+bright sunshine and under the shadow of these magnificent mountains to
+witness the final momentous act which shall add the finishing stone to
+this grand structure; a structure which shall endure and subserve its
+useful and fructifying purpose so long as these mighty mountains rear
+their snowy heads to look down in approving majesty upon a desert made
+fair and beautiful by the hand of man."
+
+Hand-clappings, cheers, a stirring of the crowd, and the upstarting of
+the brass band climaxed the rhetorical peroration, and Elsa glanced
+anxiously over her shoulder. She knew her father's temper and the fierce
+quality of it when the provocation was great enough to arouse it; but he
+was sitting quietly between Dosia and Madge Cantrell, and the publicly
+administered affront seemed to have missed him.
+
+When the blare of brass ceased, the mechanical part of the spectacle
+held the stage for a few brief minutes. The completing stone was
+carefully toggled in the grappling-hooks of the derrick-fall, and at
+Ballard's signal the hoisting engine coughed sharply, besprinkling the
+spectators liberally with a shower of cinders, the derrick-boom swung
+around, and the stone was lowered cautiously into its place.
+
+With a final rasping of trowels, the workmen finished their task, and
+Ballard walked out upon the abutment and laid his hand on the wheel
+controlling the drop-gate which would cut off the escape of the river
+through the outlet tunnel. There was a moment of impressive silence, and
+Elsa held her breath. The day, the hour, the instant which her father
+had striven so desperately to avert had come. Would it pass without its
+tragedy?
+
+She saw Ballard give the last searching glance at the gate mechanism;
+saw President Pelham step out to give the signal. Then there was a stir
+in the group behind her, and she became conscious that her father was on
+his feet; that his voice was dominating the droning roar of the torrent
+and the muttering of the thunder on the far-distant heights.
+
+"Mistuh-uh Pelham--and you otheh gentlemen of the Arcadia Company--you
+have seen fit to affront me, suhs, in the most public manneh, befo' the
+members of my family and my guests. This was youh privilege, and you
+have used it acco'ding to youh gifts. Neve'theless, it shall not be said
+that I failed in my neighbo'ly duty at this crisis. Gentlemen, when you
+close that gate----"
+
+The president turned impatiently and waved his hand to Ballard. The band
+struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," a round ball of bunting shot to
+the top of the flagstaff over the band-stand and broke out in a broad
+flag, and Elsa saw the starting-wheel turning slowly under Ballard's
+hand. The clapping and cheering and the band clamour drowned all other
+sounds; and the colonel's daughter, rising to stand beside Wingfield,
+felt rather than heard the jarring shock of a near-by explosion
+punctuating the plunge of the great gate as it was driven down by the
+geared power-screws.
+
+What followed passed unnoticed by the wildly cheering spectators
+crowding the canyon brink to see the foaming, churning torrent recoil
+upon itself and beat fiercely upon the lowered gate and the steep-sloped
+wall of the dam's foundation courses. But Elsa saw Ballard start as from
+the touch of a hot iron; saw Bromley run out quickly to lay hold of him.
+Most terrible of all, she turned swiftly to see her father coming out of
+the mine entrance with a gun in his hands--saw and understood.
+
+It was Wingfield, seeing all that she saw and understanding quite as
+clearly, who came to her rescue at a moment when the bright August
+sunshine was filling with dancing black motes for her.
+
+"Be brave!" he whispered. "See--he isn't hurt much: he has let go of the
+wheel, and Bromley is only steadying him a bit." And then to the others,
+with his habitual air of bored cheerfulness: "The show is over, good
+people, and the water is rising to cut us off from luncheon. Sound the
+retreat, somebody, and let's mount and ride before we get wet feet."
+
+A movement toward the waiting vehicles followed, and at the facing about
+Elsa observed that her father hastily flung the rifle into the mine
+tunnel-mouth; and had a fleeting glimpse of Ballard and Bromley walking
+slowly arm-in-arm toward the mesa shore along the broad coping of the
+abutment.
+
+At the buckboards Wingfield stood her friend again. "Send Jerry
+Blacklock down to see how serious it is," he suggested, coming between
+her and the others; and while she was doing it, he held the group for a
+final look down the canyon at the raging flood still churning and
+leaping at its barriers like some sentient wild thing trapped and
+maddened with the first fury of restraint.
+
+Young Blacklock made a sprinter's record on his errand and was back
+almost immediately. Mr. Ballard had got his arm pinched in some way at
+the gate-head, he reported: it was nothing serious, and the Kentuckian
+sent word that he was sorry that the feeding of the multitude kept him
+from saying so to Miss Elsa in person. Elsa did not dare to look at
+Wingfield while Blacklock was delivering his message; and in the
+buckboard-seating for the return to Castle 'Cadia, she contrived to have
+Bigelow for her companion.
+
+It was only a few minutes after Jerry Blacklock had raced away up the
+canyon path with his message of reassurance that Bromley, following
+Ballard into the office room of the adobe bungalow and locking the door,
+set to work deftly to dress and bandage a deep bullet-crease across the
+muscles of his chief's arm; a wound painful enough, but not disabling.
+
+"Well, what do you think now, Breckenridge?" he asked, in the midst of
+the small surgical service.
+
+"I haven't any more thinks coming to me," was the sober reply. "And it
+is not specially comforting to have the old ones confirmed. You are sure
+it was the colonel who fired at me?"
+
+"I saw the whole thing; all but the actual trigger-pulling, you might
+say. When Mr. Pelham cut him off, he turned and stepped back into the
+mouth of the mine. Then, while they were all standing up to see you
+lower the gate, I heard the shot and saw him come out with the gun in
+his hands. I was cool enough that far along to take in all the little
+details: the gun was a short-barrelled Winchester--the holster-rifle of
+the cow-punchers."
+
+"_Ouch!_" said Ballard, wincing under the bandaging. Then: "The
+mysteries have returned, Loudon; we were on the wrong track--all of us.
+Wingfield and you and I had figured out that the colonel was merely
+playing a cold-blooded game for delay. That guess comes back to us like
+a fish-hook with the bait gone. There was nothing, less than nothing, to
+be gained by killing me to-day."
+
+Bromley made the negative sign of assenting perplexity.
+
+"It's miles too deep for me," he admitted. "Three nights ago, when I was
+dining at Castle 'Cadia, Colonel Craigmiles spoke of you as a father
+might speak of the man whom he would like to have for a son-in-law:
+talked about the good old gentlemanly Kentucky stock, and all that, you
+know. I can't begin to sort it out."
+
+"I am going to sort it out, some day when I have time," declared
+Ballard; and the hurt being temporarily repaired, they went out to
+superintend the arrangements for feeding the visiting throng in the big
+mess-tent.
+
+After the barbecue, and more speech-making around the trestle-tables in
+the mess-tent, the railroad trains were brought into requisition, and
+various tours of inspection through the park ate out the heart of the
+afternoon for the visitors. Bromley took charge of that part of the
+entertainment, leaving Ballard to nurse his sore arm and to watch the
+slow submersion of the dam as the rising flood crept in little lapping
+waves up the sloping back-wall.
+
+The afternoon sun beat fiercely upon the deserted construction camp, and
+the heat, rarely oppressive in the mountain-girt altitudes, was
+stifling. Down in the cook camp, Garou and his helpers were washing
+dishes by the crate and preparing the evening luncheon to be served
+after the trains returned; and the tinkling clatter of china was the
+only sound to replace the year-long clamour of the industries and the
+hoarse roar of the river through the cut-off.
+
+Between his occasional strolls over to the dam and the canyon brink to
+mark the rising of the water, Ballard sat on the bungalow porch and
+smoked. From the time-killing point of view the great house in the upper
+valley loomed in mirage-like proportions in the heat haze; and by three
+o'clock the double line of aspens marking the river's course had
+disappeared in a broad band of molten silver half encircling the knoll
+upon which the mirage mansion swayed and shimmered.
+
+Ballard wondered what the house-party was doing; what preparations, if
+any, had been made for its dispersal. For his own satisfaction he had
+carefully run bench-levels with his instruments from the dam height
+through the upper valley. When the water should reach the coping course,
+some three or four acres of the house-bearing knoll would form an island
+in the middle of the reservoir lake. The house would be completely cut
+off, the orchards submerged, and the nearest shore, that from which the
+roundabout road approached, would be fully a half-mile distant, with the
+water at least ten feet deep over the raised causeway of the road
+itself.
+
+Surely the colonel would not subject his guests to the inconvenience of
+a stay at Castle 'Cadia when the house would be merely an isolated
+shelter upon an island in the middle of the great lake, Ballard
+concluded; and when the mirage effect cleared away to give him a better
+view, he got out the field-glass and looked for some signs of the
+inevitable retreat.
+
+There were no signs, so far as he could determine. With the help of the
+glass he could pick out the details of the summer afternoon scene on the
+knoll-top; could see that there were a number of people occupying the
+hammocks and lazy-chairs under the tree-pillared portico; could make out
+two figures, which he took to be Bigelow and one of the Cantrell
+sisters, strolling back and forth in a lovers' walk under the shade of
+the maples.
+
+It was all very perplexing. The sweet-toned little French clock on its
+shelf in the office room behind him had struck three, and there were
+only a few more hours of daylight left in Castle 'Cadia's last day as a
+habitable dwelling. And yet, if he could trust the evidence of his
+senses, the castle's garrison was making no move to escape: this though
+the members of it must all know that the rising of another sun would see
+their retreat cut off by the impounded flood.
+
+After he had returned the field-glass to its case on the wall of the
+office the ticking telegraph instrument on Bromley's table called him,
+signing "E--T," the end-of-track on the High Line Extension. It was
+Bromley, wiring in to give the time of the probable return of the
+excursion trains for Garou's supper serving.
+
+"How are you getting on?" clicked Ballard, when the time had been given.
+
+"Fine," was the answer. "Everything lovely, and the goose honks high.
+Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs are
+surrounding Mr. Pelham on the canal embankment and singing 'For he's a
+jolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we're
+all hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."
+
+After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of the
+deserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of a
+furnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when the
+declining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the little
+mesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.
+
+Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flow
+of the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel was
+laid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurity
+of the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newly
+turned leaf in the record of the great chasm.
+
+What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed was
+more instructive than reassuring. The great pit described by Gardiner
+was still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, and
+the cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent was
+alarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of the
+stream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off in
+all directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, and
+which formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined and
+tunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a huge
+hollow tooth.
+
+The extreme length of the underground passage was a scant five hundred
+feet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts--possible only
+after he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubber
+thigh-boots--the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to the
+great stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here the
+burden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or less
+running water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leak
+around the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.
+
+"That settles it," he mused gloomily. "It is seeping through this
+ghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with the
+concrete mixers--and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaite
+was thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compost
+heaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."
+
+The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched western
+horizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns.
+There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, and
+he was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At a
+conservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollars
+must be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and in
+plugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any one
+of the ninety days the water might find its increasing way through the
+"compost heap"; whereupon the devastating end would come swiftly.
+
+It was disheartening from every point of view. Ballard knew nothing of
+the financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdly
+that Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could not
+be seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for the
+safety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, the
+work must be done. Otherwise----
+
+The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the harassed scowl
+when Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.
+
+"The grouch is all yours," said the cheerful one, comfortingly, "and you
+have a good right and title to it. It's been a hard day for you. Is the
+arm hurting like sin?"
+
+"No; not more than it has to. But something else is. Listen, Bromley."
+And he briefed the story of the hollow-tooth promontory for the
+assistant.
+
+"Great ghosts!--worse and more of it!" was Bromley's comment. Then he
+added: "I've seen a queer thing, too, Breckenridge: the colonel has
+moved out, vanished, taken to the hills."
+
+"Out of Castle 'Cadia? You're mistaken. There is absolutely nothing
+doing at the big house: I've been reconnoitring with the glass."
+
+"No, I didn't mean that," was the qualifying rejoinder. "I mean the
+ranch outfit down in the Park. It's gone. You know the best grazing at
+this time of the year is along the river: well, you won't find hair,
+hoof or horn of the colonel's cattle anywhere in the bottom lands--not a
+sign of them. Also, the ranch itself is deserted and the corrals are all
+open."
+
+The harassed scowl would have taken on other added lines if there had
+been room for them.
+
+"What do you make of it, Loudon?--what does it mean?"
+
+"You can search me," was the puzzled reply. "But while you're doing it,
+you can bet high that it means something. To a man up a tall tree it
+looks as if the colonel were expecting a flood. Why should he expect it?
+What does he know?--more than we know?"
+
+"It's another of the cursed mysteries," Ballard broke out in sullen
+anger. "It's enough to jar a man's sanity!"
+
+"Mine was screwed a good bit off its base a long time ago," Bromley
+confessed. Then he came back to the present and its threatenings: "I'd
+give a month's pay if we had this crazy city crowd off of our hands and
+out of the Park."
+
+"We'll get rid of it pretty early. I've settled that with Mr. Pelham. To
+get his people back to Denver by breakfast-time to-morrow, the trains
+will have to leave here between eight and eight-thirty."
+
+"That is good news--as far as it goes. Will you tell Mr. Pelham about
+the rotten tooth--to-night, I mean?"
+
+"I certainly shall," was the positive rejoinder; and an hour later, when
+the evening luncheon in the big mess-tent had been served, and the crowd
+was gathered on the camp mesa to wait for the fireworks, Ballard got the
+president into the bungalow office, shut the door on possible
+interruptions, and laid bare the discouraging facts.
+
+Singularly enough, as he thought, the facts seemed to make little
+impression upon the head of Arcadia Irrigation. Mr. Pelham sat back in
+Macpherson's home-made easy-chair, relighted his cigar, and refused to
+be disturbed or greatly interested. Assuming that he had not made the
+new involvement plain enough, Ballard went over the situation again.
+
+"Another quarter of a million will be needed," he summed up, "and we
+shouldn't lose a single day in beginning. As I have said, there seems to
+be considerable seepage through the hill already, with less than half of
+the working head of water behind the dam. What it will be under a full
+head, no man can say."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the president, easily. "A new boat always leaks
+a little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a few
+days--or weeks."
+
+"That is a possibility," granted the engineer; "but it is scarcely one
+upon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of the
+company said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under the
+lower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; that
+settlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not be
+done, Mr. Pelham."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before we
+have filled that hollow tooth would take his life in his hands."
+
+The president's smile was blandly genial.
+
+"You've been having a pretty strenuous day of it, Mr. Ballard, and I can
+make allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a good
+night's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how you
+came to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?"
+
+"The arm is all right," said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort to
+change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog
+tenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to the
+original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?"
+
+The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.
+
+"Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning
+you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various
+camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the
+time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake--or Mr.
+Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural
+anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a
+great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were
+you."
+
+"Not mention it?--to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully----"
+
+"Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be
+excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----"
+
+Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost
+a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks
+sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full
+moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows
+of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had
+left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fête
+champêtre_.
+
+"It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans.
+You don't care to go to the foot of the pass with one of the trains, do
+you?"
+
+"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is
+filling, and I'm the one."
+
+"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the first
+section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from
+Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Then
+he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelham
+take the new grief?"
+
+"He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you,
+there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish."
+
+Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section
+of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.
+
+"I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day," he averred. "I'll
+tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been
+busy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't spellbinding from
+some platform or other. There is something doing--something that the
+baa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring are
+doing it."
+
+Ballard got up and went to the door with the assistant.
+
+"And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon," he said, with an air of sudden
+and vehement conviction. "This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's a
+stock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollow
+tooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'll
+never get orders to plug that tunnel!"
+
+Bromley nodded agreement. "I've been working my way around to that, too.
+All right; so let it be. My resignation goes in to-morrow morning, and I
+take it yours will?"
+
+"It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off short
+with Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuade
+you to go over the pass. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep you
+can."
+
+Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlight
+on the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw the
+twinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.
+
+"Good-by, Mr. Howard Pelham. I shouldn't be shocked speechless if you
+never came back to Arcadia," he muttered, apostrophising the departing
+president of Arcadia Irrigation. Then he put away the business
+entanglement and let his gaze wander in the opposite direction; toward
+the great house in the upper valley.
+
+At the first eastward glance he sprang up with an exclamation of
+astonishment. The old king's palace was looming vast in the moonlight,
+with a broad sea of silver to take the place of the brown valley level
+in the bridging of the middle distance. But the curious thing was the
+lights, unmistakable electrics, as aforetime, twinkling through the
+tree-crownings of the knoll.
+
+The Kentuckian left the porch and went to the edge of the mesa cliff to
+look down upon the flood, rising now by imperceptible gradations as the
+enlarging area of the reservoir lake demanded more water. The lapping
+tide was fully half way up the back wall of the dam, which meant that
+the colonel's power plant at the mouth of the upper canyon must be
+submerged past using. Yet the lights were on at Castle 'Cadia.
+
+While he was speculating over this new mystery, the head-lamps of an
+automobile came in sight on the roundabout road below the dam, and
+presently a huge tonneau car, well filled, rolled noiselessly over the
+plank bridge and pointed its goblin eyes up the incline leading to the
+camp mesa. When it came to a stand at the cliff's edge, Ballard saw that
+it held Mrs. Van Bryck, Bigelow, and one of the Cantrell girls in the
+tonneau; and that Elsa was sharing the driving-seat with young
+Blacklock.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Ballard," said a voice from the shared half of the
+driving-seat. And then: "We are trying out the new car--isn't it a
+beauty?--and we decided to make a neighbourly call. Aren't you delighted
+to see us? Please say you are, anyway. It is the least you can do."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+A CRY IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+The little French office clock--Bromley's testimonial from his
+enthusiastic and admiring classmates of the _École Polytechnique_--had
+chimed the hour of ten; the August moon rose high in a firmament of
+infinite depths above the deserted bunk shanties and the silent
+machinery on the camp mesa; the big touring car, long since cooled from
+its racing climb over the hills of the roundabout road, cast a grotesque
+and fore-shortened shadow like that of a dwarfed band-wagon on the
+stone-chip whiteness of the cutting yard; and still the members of the
+auto party lingered on the porch of the adobe bungalow.
+
+For Ballard, though he was playing the part of the unprepared host, the
+prolonged stay of the Castle-'Cadians was an unalloyed joy. When he had
+established Mrs. Van Bryck in the big easy-chair, reminiscent of
+Engineer Macpherson and his canny skill with carpenter's tools, and had
+dragged out the blanket-covered divan for Miss Cantrell and Bigelow, he
+was free. And freedom, at that moment, meant the privilege of sitting a
+little apart on the porch step with Elsa Craigmiles.
+
+For the first time in weeks the Kentuckian was able to invite his soul
+and to think and speak in terms of comfortable unembarrassment. The long
+strain of the industrial battle was off, and Mr. Pelham's triumphal
+beating of drums had been accomplished without loss of life, and with no
+more serious consequences than a lamed arm for the man who was best able
+to keep his own counsel. Having definitely determined to send in his
+resignation in the morning, and thus to avoid any possible entanglement
+which might arise when the instability of the great dam's foundations
+should become generally known, the burden of responsibility was
+immeasurably lightened. And to cap the ecstatic climax in its
+sentimental part, Elsa's mood was not mocking; it was sympathetic to a
+heart-mellowing degree.
+
+One thing only sounded a jarring note in the soothing theme. That was
+young Blacklock's very palpable anxiety and restlessness. When the
+collegian had placed the big car, and had stopped its motor and
+extinguished its lights, he had betaken himself to the desert of stone
+chips, rambling therein aimlessly, but never, as Ballard observed,
+wandering out of eye-reach of the great gray wall of masonry, of the
+growing lake in the crooking elbow of the canyon, and the path-girted
+hillside of the opposite shore. Blacklock's too ostentatious
+time-killing was the latest of the small mysteries; and when the
+Kentuckian came to earth long enough to remark it, he fancied that Jerry
+was waiting for a cue of some kind--waiting and quite obviously
+watching.
+
+It was some time after Mrs. Van Bryck, plaintively protesting against
+being kept out so late, had begun to doze in her chair, and Bigelow had
+fetched wraps from the car wherewith to cloak a shuddery Miss Cantrell,
+that Ballard's companion said, guardedly: "Don't you think it would be
+in the nature of a charity to these two behind us if we were to share
+Jerry's wanderings for a while?"
+
+"I'm not sharing with Jerry--or any other man--just now," Ballard
+objected. None the less, he rose and strolled with her across the stone
+yard; and at the foot of the great derrick he pulled out one of the
+cutter's benches for a seat. "This is better than the porch step," he
+was saying, when Blacklock got up from behind a rejected thorough-stone
+a few yards away and called to him.
+
+"Just a minute, Mr. Ballard: I've got a corking big rattler under this
+rock. Bring a stick, if you can find one."
+
+Ballard found a stick and went to the help of the snake-catcher.
+
+"Don't give him a chance at you, Jerry," he warned. "Where is he?"
+
+The collegian drew him around to the farther side of the great
+thorough-block.
+
+"It was only a leg-pull," was the low-toned explanation. "I've been
+trying all evening to get a word with you, and I had to invent the
+snake. Wingfield says we're all off wrong on the mystery chase--'way
+off. You're to watch the dam--that's what he told me to tell you; watch
+it close till he comes down here from Castle 'Cadia."
+
+"Watch the dam?" queried the engineer. "What am I to look for?"
+
+"I don't know another blessed thing about it. But there's something
+doing; something bigger than--'sh! Miss Elsa's asking about the snake.
+Cut it out--cut it all out!"
+
+"It was a false alarm," Ballard explained, when he rejoined his
+companion at the derrick's foot. "Jerry has an aggravated attack of
+imaginationitis. You were saying----?"
+
+"I wasn't saying anything; but I shall begin now--if you'll sit down.
+You must be dying to know why we came down here to-night, of all the
+nights that ever were; and why we are staying so long past our welcome."
+
+"I never felt less like dying since the world began; and you couldn't
+outstay your welcome if you should try," he answered, out of a full
+heart. "My opportunities to sit quietly in blissful nearness to you
+haven't been so frequent that I can afford to spoil this one with
+foolish queryings about the whys and wherefores."
+
+"Hush!" she broke in imperatively. "You are saying light things again in
+the very thick of the miseries! Have you forgotten that to-day--a few
+hours ago--another attempt was made upon your life?"
+
+"No; I haven't forgotten," he admitted.
+
+"Be honest with me," she insisted. "You are not as indifferent as you
+would like to have me believe. Do you know who made the attempt?"
+
+"Yes." He answered without realising that the single word levelled all
+the carefully raised barriers of concealment; and when the realisation
+came, he could have bitten his tongue for its incautious slip.
+
+"Then you doubtless know who is responsible for all the terrible
+happenings; the--the _crimes_?"
+
+Denial was useless now, and he said "Yes," again.
+
+"How long have you known this?"
+
+"I have suspected it almost from the first."
+
+She turned upon him like some wild creature at bay.
+
+"Why are you waiting? Why haven't you had him arrested and tried and
+condemned, like any other common murderer?"
+
+He regarded her gravely, as the hard, white moonlight permitted. No man
+ever plumbs a woman's heart in its ultimate depths; least of all the
+heart of the woman he knows best and loves most.
+
+"You seem to overlook the fact that I am his daughter's lover," he said,
+as if the simple fact settled the matter beyond question.
+
+"And you have never sought for an explanation?--beyond the one which
+would stamp him as the vilest, the most inhuman of criminals?" she went
+on, ignoring his reason for condoning the crimes.
+
+"I have; though quite without success, I think--until to-day."
+
+"But to-day?" she questioned, anxiously, eagerly.
+
+He hesitated, picking and choosing among the words. And in the end he
+merely begged her to help him. "To-day, hope led me over into the valley
+of a great shadow. Tell me, Elsa, dear: is your father always fully
+accountable for his actions?"
+
+Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and there were tense lines of
+suffering about the sweet mouth.
+
+"You have guessed the secret--my secret," she said, with the heart-break
+in her tone. And then: "Oh, you don't know, you can't imagine, what
+terrible agonies I have endured: and alone, always alone!"
+
+"Tell me," he commanded lovingly. "I have a good right to know."
+
+"The best right of all: the right of a patient and loving friend." She
+stopped, and then went on in the monotone of despair: "It is in the
+blood--a dreadful heritage. Do you--do you know how your father died,
+Breckenridge?"
+
+"Not circumstantially; in an illness, I have been told. I was too young
+to know anything more than I was told; too young to feel the loss. Did
+some one tell me it was a fever?"
+
+"It was not a fever," she said sorrowfully. "He was poisoned--by a
+horrible mistake. My father and his brother Abner were practising
+physicians in Lexington, your old home and ours; both of them young,
+ardent and enthusiastic in their profession. Uncle Abner was called to
+prescribe for your father--his life-long friend--in a trivial sickness.
+By some frightful mistake, the wrong drug was given and your father
+died. Poor Uncle Abner paid for it with his reason, and, a few months
+later, with his own life. And a little while after his brother's death
+in the asylum, Father threw up his practice and his profession, and came
+here to bury himself in Arcadia."
+
+The Kentuckian remembered Colonel Craigmiles's sudden seizure at his
+first sight of the dead Ballard's son, and saw the pointing of it.
+Nevertheless, he said, soberly: "That proves nothing, you know."
+
+"Nothing of itself, perhaps. But it explains all the fearful things I
+have seen with my own eyes. Two years ago, after the trouble with Mr.
+Braithwaite, father seemed to change. He became bitterly vindictive
+against the Arcadia Company, and at times seemed to put his whole soul
+into the fight against it. Then the accidents began to happen, and--oh,
+I can't tell you the dreadful things I have seen, or the more dreadful
+ones I have suspected! I have watched him--followed him--when he did not
+suspect it. After dinner, the night you arrived, he left us all on the
+portico at Castle 'Cadia, telling me that he was obliged to come down
+here to the mine. Are you listening?"
+
+"You needn't ask that: please go on."
+
+"I thought it very strange; that he would let even a business errand
+take him away from us on our first evening; and so I--I made an excuse
+to the others and followed him. Breckenridge, I saw him throw the stone
+from the top of that cliff--the stone that came so near killing you or
+Mr. Bromley, or both of you."
+
+There had been a time when he would have tried to convince her that she
+must doubt the evidence of her own senses; but now it was too late: that
+milestone had been passed in the first broken sentence of her pitiful
+confession.
+
+"There was no harm done, that time," he said, groping loyally for the
+available word of comforting.
+
+"It was God's mercy," she asserted. "But listen again: that other night,
+when Mr. Bromley was hurt ... After you had gone with the man who came
+for you, I hurried to find my father, meaning to ask him to send Otto in
+the little car to see if there was anything we could do. Aunt June said
+that father was lying down in the library: he was not there. I ran
+up-stairs. His coat and waistcoat were on the bed, and his
+mackintosh--the one he always wears when he goes out after sundown--was
+gone. After a little while he came in, hurriedly, secretly, and he would
+not believe me when I told him Mr. Bromley was hurt; he seemed to be
+sure it must be some one else. Then I knew. He had gone out to waylay
+you on your walk back to the camp, and by some means had mistaken Mr.
+Bromley for you."
+
+She was in the full flood-tide of the heart-broken confession now, and
+in sheer pity he tried to stop her.
+
+"Let it all go," he counselled tenderly. "What is done, is done; and now
+that the work here is also done, there will be no more trouble for you."
+
+"No; I must go on," she insisted. "Since others, who have no right to
+know, have found out, I must tell you."
+
+"Others?" he queried.
+
+"Yes: Mr. Wingfield, for one. Unlike you, he has not tried to be
+charitable. He believes----"
+
+"He doesn't love you as I do," Ballard interrupted quickly.
+
+"He doesn't love me at all--that way; it's Dosia. Hadn't you suspected?
+That was why he joined Aunt Janet's party--to be with Dosia."
+
+"Thus vanishes the final shadow: there is nothing to come between us
+now," he exulted; and his unhurt arm drew her close.
+
+"Don't!" she shuddered, shrinking away from him. "That is the bitterest
+drop in the cup of misery. You refuse to think of the awful heritage I
+should bring you; but I think of it--day and night. When your telegram
+came from Boston to Mr. Lassley at New York, I was going with the
+Lassleys--not to Norway, but to Paris, to try to persuade Doctor Perard,
+the great alienist, to come over and be our guest at Castle 'Cadia. It
+seemed to be the only remaining hope. But when you telegraphed your
+changed plans, I knew I couldn't go; I knew I must come home. And in
+spite of all, he has tried three times to kill you. You know he must be
+insane; tell me you know it," she pleaded.
+
+"Since it lifts a burden too heavy to be borne, I am very willing to
+believe it," he rejoined gravely. "I understand quite fully now. And it
+makes no difference--between us, I mean. You must not let it make a
+difference. Let the past be past, and let us come back to the present.
+Where is your father now?"
+
+"After dinner he went with Mr. Wingfield and Otto to the upper canyon.
+There is a breakwater at the canyon portal which they hoped might save
+the power-house and laboratory from being undermined by the river, and
+they were going to strengthen it with bags of sand. I was afraid of what
+might come afterward--that you might be here alone and unsuspecting. So
+I persuaded Cousin Janet and the others to make up the car-party."
+
+From where they were sitting at the derrick's foot, the great boom
+leaned out like a giant's arm uplifted above the canyon lake. With the
+moon sweeping toward the zenith, the shadow of the huge iron beam was
+clearly cut on the surface of the water. Ballard's eye had been
+mechanically marking the line of shadow and its changing position as the
+water level rose in the Elbow.
+
+"The reservoir is filling a great deal faster than I supposed it would,"
+he said, bearing his companion resolutely away from the painful things.
+
+"There have been storms on the main range all day," was the reply.
+"Father has a series of electrical signal stations all along the upper
+canyon. He said at the dinner-table that the rise to-night promises to
+be greater than any we have ever seen."
+
+Ballard came alive upon the professional side of him with a sudden
+quickening of the workaday faculties. With the utmost confidence in that
+part of the great retaining-wall for which he was personally
+responsible--the superstructure--he had still been hoping that the huge
+reservoir lake would fill normally; that the dam would not be called
+upon to take its enormous stresses like an engine starting under a full
+load. It was for this reason that he had been glad to time the closing
+of the spillway in August, when the flow of the river was at its
+minimum. But fate, the persistent ill-fortune which had dogged the
+Arcadian enterprise from the beginning, seemed to be gathering its
+forces for a final blow.
+
+"Cloud-bursts?" he questioned. "Are they frequent in the head basin of
+the Boiling Water?"
+
+"Not frequent, but very terrible when they do occur. I have seen the
+Elbow toss its spray to the top of this cliff--once, when I was quite
+small; and on that day the lower part of our valley was, for a few
+hours, a vast flood lake."
+
+"Was that before or after the opening of your father's mine over
+yonder?" queried Ballard.
+
+"It was after. I suppose the mine was flooded, and I remember there was
+no work done in it for a long time. When it was reopened, a few years
+ago, father had that immense bulkhead and heavy, water-tight door put in
+to guard against another possible flood."
+
+Ballard made the sign of comprehension. Here was one of the mysteries
+very naturally accounted for. The bulkhead and iron-bound door of the
+zirconium mine were, indeed, fortifications; but the enemy to be
+repulsed was nature--not man.
+
+"And the electric signal service system in the upper canyon is a part of
+the defence for the mine?" he predicated.
+
+"Yes. It has served on two or three occasions to give timely warning so
+that the miners could come up and seal the door in the bulkhead. But it
+has been a long time since a cloud-burst flood has risen high enough in
+the Elbow to threaten the mine."
+
+Silence supervened; the silence of the flooding moonlight, the stark
+hills and the gently lapping waters. Ballard's brain was busy with the
+newly developed responsibilities. There was a little space for action,
+but what could be done? In all probability the newly completed dam was
+about to be subjected to the supreme test, violently and suddenly
+applied. The alternative was to open the spillway gate, using the
+cut-off tunnel as a sort of safety-valve when the coming flood water
+should reach the Elbow.
+
+But there were an objection and an obstacle. Now that he knew the
+condition of the honeycombed tunnel, Ballard hesitated to make it the
+raceway for the tremendously augmented torrent. And for the obstacle
+there was a mechanical difficulty: with the weight of the deepening lake
+upon it, the stop-gate could be raised only by the power-screws; and the
+fires were out in the engine that must furnish the power.
+
+The Kentuckian was afoot and alert when he said: "You know the
+probabilities better than any of us: how much time have we before these
+flood tides will come down?"
+
+She had risen to stand with him, steadying herself by the hook of the
+derrick-fall. "I don't know," she began; and at that instant a great
+slice of the zirconium mine dump slid off and settled into the eddying
+depths with a splash.
+
+"It is nothing but a few more cubic yards of the waste," he said, when
+she started and caught her breath with a little gasp.
+
+"Not that--but the door!" she faltered, pointing across the chasm. "It
+was shut when we came out here--I am positive!"
+
+The heavy, iron-studded door in the bulkhead was open now, at all
+events, as they could both plainly see; and presently she went on in a
+frightened whisper: "Look! there is something moving--this side of the
+door--among the loose timbers!"
+
+The moving object defined itself clearly in the next half-minute; for
+the two at the derrick-heel, and for another--young Blacklock, who was
+crouching behind his rejected thorough-stone directly opposite the mine
+entrance. It took shape as the figure of a man, slouch-hatted and
+muffled in a long coat, creeping on hands and knees toward the farther
+dam-head; creeping by inches and dragging what appeared to be a six-foot
+length of iron pipe. The king's daughter spoke again, and this time her
+whisper was full of sharp agony.
+
+"_Breckenridge!_ it is my father--just as I have seen him before! That
+thing he is dragging after him: isn't it a--merciful Heaven! he is going
+to blow up the dam! Oh, for pity's sake can't you think of some way to
+stop him?"
+
+There are crises when the mind, acting like a piece of automatic
+machinery, flies from suggestion to conclusion with such facile rapidity
+that all the intermediate steps are slurred and effaced. Ballard marked
+the inching advance, realised its object and saw that he would not have
+time to intervene by crossing the dam, all in the same instant. Another
+click of the mental mechanism and the alternative suggested itself, was
+grasped, weighed, accepted and transmuted into action.
+
+It was a gymnast's trick, neatly done. The looped-up derrick-fall was a
+double wire cable, running through a heavy iron sheave which carried the
+hook and grappling chains. Released from its rope lashings at the
+mast-heel, it would swing out and across the canyon like a monster
+pendulum. Ballard forgot his bandaged arm when he laid hold of the
+sheave-hook and slashed at the yarn seizings with his pocket-knife; was
+still oblivious to it when the released pendulum surged free and swept
+him out over the chasm.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+DEEP UNTO DEEP
+
+
+Mechanically as such things are done, Ballard remembered afterward that
+he was keenly alive to all that was passing. He heard Elsa's
+half-stifled cry of horror, Blacklock's shout of encouragement from some
+point higher up on the mesa, and mingled with these the quick _pad-pad_
+of footfalls as of men running. In mid-air he had a glimpse of the
+running men; two of them racing down the canyon on the side toward which
+his swinging bridge was projecting him. Then the derrick-fall swept him
+on, reached the extreme of its arc, and at the reversing pause he
+dropped, all fingers to clutch and tensely strung muscles to hold,
+fairly upon the crouching man in the muffling rain-coat.
+
+For Blacklock, charging in upon the battle-field by way of the dam, the
+happenings of the next half-minute resolved themselves into a fierce
+hand-to-hand struggle between the two men for the possession of the
+piece of iron pipe. At the pendulum-swinging instant, the collegian had
+seen the sputtering flare of a match in the dynamiter's hands; and in
+the dash across the dam he had a whiff of burning gunpowder.
+
+When the two rose up out of the dust of the grapple, Ballard was the
+victor. He had wrested the ignited pipe-bomb from his antagonist, and
+turning quickly he hurled it in a mighty javelin-cast far up the Elbow.
+There was a splash, a smothered explosion, and a geyser-like column of
+water shot up from the plunging-point, spouting high to fall in sheets
+of silver spray upon the two upcoming runners who were alertly springing
+from foothold to foothold across the dissolving mine dump.
+
+So much young Blacklock noted at the moment of uprushing. In the next
+breath he had wrapped the mackintoshed bomb-firer in a wrestler's hug
+from behind, and the knife raised to be driven into Ballard's back
+clattered upon the stones of the path. There was a gasping oath in a
+strange tongue, a fierce struggle on the part of the garroted one to
+turn and face his new assailant, and then the collegian, with his chin
+burrowing between the shoulder-blades of his man, heard swift footsteps
+approaching and a deep-toned, musical voice booming out a sharp command:
+"Manuel! you grand scoundrel!--drop that thah gun, suh!"
+
+Something else, also metallic, and weightier than the knife, clicked
+upon the stones; whereupon Blacklock loosed his strangler's grip and
+stepped back. Ballard stooped to pick up the knife and the pistol.
+Wingfield, who had been the colonel's second in the race along the
+hazardous mine path, drew aside; and master and man were left facing
+each other.
+
+The Mexican straightened up and folded his arms. He was breathing hard
+from the effect of Blacklock's gripping hug, but his dark face was as
+impassive as an Indian's. The white-haired King of Arcadia turned to
+Ballard, and the mellow voice broke a little.
+
+"Mistuh-uh Ballard, you, suh, are a Kentuckian, of a race that knows to
+the fullest extent the meaning of henchman loyalty. You shall say what
+is to be done with this po' villain of mine. By his own confession, made
+to me this afte'noon, he is a cutthroat and an assassin. Undeh a
+mistaken idea of loyalty to me"--the deep voice grew more tremulous at
+this--"undeh a mistaken idea of loyalty to me, suh, he has been fighting
+in his own peculiah fashion what he conceived to be my battle with the
+Arcadia Company. Without compunction, without remo'se, he has taken
+nearly a score of human lives since the day when he killed the man
+Braithwaite and flung his body into the riveh. Am I making it cleah to
+you, Mistuh Ballard?"
+
+How he managed to convey his sense of entire comprehension, Ballard
+scarcely knew. One thought was submerging all others under a mounting
+wave of triumphant joy: Colonel Adam, the father of the princess of
+heart's delight, was neither a devil in human guise nor a homicidal
+madman. Elsa's trouble was a phantom appeased; it had vanished like the
+dew on a summer morning.
+
+"I thank you, suh," was the courtly acknowledgment; and then the deep
+voice continued, with an added note of emotion. "I am not pleading for
+the murderer, but for my po' liegeman who knew no law of God or man
+higheh than what he mistakenly took to be his masteh's desiah. How long
+all this would have continued, if I hadn't suhprised him in the ve'y act
+of trying to kill you as you were lowering that thah stop-gate to-day,
+we shall neveh know. But the entiah matteh lies heavy on my conscience,
+suh. I ought to have suspected the true sou'ce of all the mysterious
+tragedies long ago; I should have suspected it if I hadn't been
+chin-deep myself, suh, in a similah pool of animosity against Mr. Pelham
+and his fellow-robbehs. What will you do with this po' scoundrel of
+mine, Mistuh Ballard?"
+
+"Nothing, at present," said Ballard, gravely, "or nothing more than to
+ask him a question or two." He turned upon the Mexican, who was still
+standing statue-like with his back to the low cliff of the path ledge.
+"Did you kill Macpherson?--as well as Braithwaite and Sanderson?"
+
+"I kill-a dem all," was the cool reply. "You say--he all say--'I make-a
+da dam.' I'll say: '_Caramba!_ You _no_ make-a da dam w'at da Colonel no
+want for you to make.' Dass all."
+
+"So it was you who hit Bromley on the head and knocked him into the
+canyon?"
+
+The statuesque foreman showed his teeth. "Dat was one bad _mees_take.
+I'll been try for knock _you_ on da haid, dat time, for sure, Señor
+Ballar'."
+
+"And you were wearing that rain-coat when you did it?"
+
+The Mexican nodded. "I'll wear heem h-always w'en da sun gone down--same
+like-a da Colonel."
+
+"Also, you were wearing it that other night, when you heaved a stone
+down on my office roof?"
+
+Another nod.
+
+"But on the night when you scared Hoskins and made him double up his
+train on Dead Man's Curve, you didn't wear it; you wore a shooting-coat
+and a cap like the one Braithwaite used to wear."
+
+The posing statue laughed hardily. "Dat was one--w'at you call
+heem?--one beeg joke. I'll been like to make dat 'Oskins break hees
+h'own neck, _si_: hees talk too much 'bout da man w'at drown' heself."
+
+"And the Carson business: you were mixed up in that, too?"
+
+"Dat was one _mees_take, al-so; one ver' beeg _mees_take. I'll hire dat
+dam'-fool Carson to shoot da ditch. I t'ink you and da beeg h-Irishman
+take-a da trail and Carson keel you. Carson, he'll take-a da money, and
+make for leetle scheme to steal cattle. Som' day I keel heem for dat."
+
+"Not in this world," cut in Ballard, briefly. "You're out of the game,
+from this on." And then, determined to be at the bottom of the final
+mystery: "You played the spy on Mr. Wingfield, Bromley, Blacklock and me
+one afternoon when we were talking about these deviltries. Afterward,
+you went up to Castle 'Cadia. That evening Mr. Wingfield nearly lost his
+life. Did you have a hand in that?"
+
+Again the Mexican laughed. "Señor Wingfiel' he is know too moch. Som'
+day he is make me ver' sorry for myself. So I'll hide be'ind dat
+fornace, and give heem one leetle push, so"--with the appropriate
+gesture.
+
+"That is all," said Ballard, curtly. And then to the colonel: "I think
+we'd better be moving over to the other side. The ladies will be
+anxious. Jerry, take that fellow on ahead of you, and see that he
+doesn't get away. I'm sorry for you, Colonel Craigmiles; and that is no
+empty form of words. As you have said, I am a Kentuckian, and I do know
+what loyalty--even mistaken loyalty--is worth. My own grudge is nothing;
+I haven't any. But there are other lives to answer for. Am I right?"
+
+"You are quite right, suh; quite right," was the sober rejoinder; and
+then Blacklock said "_Vamos!_" to his prisoner, airing his one word of
+Spanish, and in single file the five men crossed on the dam to the mesa
+side of the rising lake where Bigelow, with Elsa and Miss Cantrell and a
+lately awakened Mrs. Van Bryck, were waiting. At the reassembling,
+Ballard cut the colonel's daughter out of the storm of eager
+questionings swiftly, masterfully.
+
+"You were wrong--we were all wrong," he whispered joyously. "The man
+whom you saw, the man who has done it all in your father's absolute and
+utter ignorance of what was going on, is Manuel. He has confessed; first
+to his master, and just now to all of us. Your father is as sane as he
+is blameless. There is no obstacle now for either of us. I shall resign
+to-morrow morning, and----"
+
+It was the colonel's call that interrupted.
+
+"One moment, Mistuh Ballard, if you please, suh. Are there any of youh
+ditch camps at present in the riveh valley below heah?"
+
+Ballard shook his head. "Not now; they are all on the high land." Then,
+remembering Bromley's report of the empty ranch headquarters and
+corrals: "You think there is danger?"
+
+"I don't think, suh: I _know_. Look thah," waving an arm toward the
+dissolving mine dump on the opposing slope; "when the wateh reaches that
+tunnel and finds its way behind the bulkhead, Mistuh Ballard, youh dam's
+gone--doomed as surely as that sinful world that wouldn't listen to
+Preachuh Noah!"
+
+"But, Colonel--you can't know positively!"
+
+"I do, suh. And Mistuh Pelham knows quite as well as I do. You may have
+noticed that we have no pumping machinery oveh yondeh, Mistuh Ballard:
+_That is because the mine drains out into youh pot-hole below the dam!_"
+
+"Heavens and earth!" ejaculated Ballard, aghast at the possibilities
+laid bare in this single explanatory sentence. "And you say that Mr.
+Pelham knows this?"
+
+"He has known it all along. I deemed it my neighbo'ly duty to inform him
+when we opened the lower level in the mine. But he won't be the loseh;
+no, suh; not Mistuh Howard Pelham. It'll be those po' sheep that he
+brought up here to-day to prepare them for the shearing--if the riveh
+gives him time to make the turn."
+
+"The danger is immediate, then?" said Bigelow.
+
+The white-haired King of Arcadia was standing on the brink of the mesa
+cliff, a stark figure in the white moonlight, with his hand at his ear.
+"Hark, gentlemen!" he commanded; and then: "Youh ears are all youngeh
+than mine. What do you heah?"
+
+It was Ballard who replied: "The wind is rising on the range; I can hear
+it singing in the pines."
+
+"No, suh; that isn't the wind--it's wateh; torrents and oceans of it.
+There have been great and phenomenal storms up in the basin all day;
+storms and cloud-bursts. See thah!"
+
+A rippling wave a foot high came sweeping down the glassy surface of the
+reservoir lake, crowding and rioting until it doubled its depth in
+rushing into the foothill canyon. Passing the mine, it swept away other
+tons of the dump; and an instant later the water at the feet of the
+onlookers lifted like the heave of a great ground-swell--lifted, but did
+not subside.
+
+Ballard's square jaw was out-thrust. "We did not build for any such
+brutal tests as this," he muttered. "Another surge like that----"
+
+"It is coming!" cried Elsa. "The power dam in the upper canyon is gone!"
+and the sharer of the single Cantrell Christian name shrieked and took
+shelter under Bigelow's arm.
+
+Far up the moon-silvered expanse of the lake a black line was advancing
+at railway speed. It was like the ominous flattening of the sea before a
+hurricane; but the chief terror of it lay in the peaceful surroundings.
+No cloud flecked the sky; no breath of air was stirring; the calm of the
+matchless summer night was unbroken, save by the surf-like murmur of the
+great wave as it rose high and still higher in the narrowing raceway.
+Instinctively Ballard put his arm about Elsa and drew her back from the
+cliff's edge. There could be no chance of danger for the group looking
+on from the top of the high mesa; yet the commanding roar of the menace
+was irresistible.
+
+When the wave entered the wedge-shaped upper end of the Elbow it was a
+foam-crested wall ten feet high, advancing with the black-arched front
+of a tidal billow, mighty, terrifying, the cold breath of it blowing
+like a chill wind from the underworld upon the group of watchers. In its
+onrush the remains of the mine dump melted and vanished, and the heavy
+bulkhead timbering at the mouth of the workings was torn away, to be
+hurled, with other tons of floating débris, against the back-wall of the
+dam.
+
+Knowing all the conditions, Ballard thought the masonry would never
+withstand the hammer-blow impact of the wreck-laden billow. Yet it
+stood, apparently undamaged, even after the splintered mass of wreckage,
+tossed high on the crest of the wave, had leaped the coping course to
+plunge thundering into the ravine below. The great wall was like some
+massive fortification reared to endure such shocks; and Elsa, facing the
+terrific spectacle beside her lover, like a reincarnation of one of the
+battle-maidens, gave him his rightful meed of praise.
+
+"You builded well--you and the others!" she cried. "It will not break!"
+
+But even as she spoke, the forces that sap and destroy were at work.
+There was a hoarse groaning from the underground caverns of the
+zirconium mine--sounds as of a volcano in travail. The wave retreated
+for a little space, and the white line of the coping showed bare and
+unbroken in the moonlight. Silence, the deafening silence which follows
+the thunderclap, succeeded to the clamour of the waters, and this in
+turn gave place to a curious gurgling roar as of some gigantic vessel
+emptying itself through an orifice in its bottom.
+
+The white-haired king was nearest to the brink of peril. At the gurgling
+roar he turned with arms outspread and swept the onlooking group,
+augmented now by the men from Garou's cook camp, back and away from the
+dam-head. Out of the torrent-worn pit in the lower ravine a great jet of
+water was spurting intermittently, like the blood from a severed artery.
+
+"That is the end!" groaned Ballard, turning away from the death grapple
+between his work and the blind giant of the Boiling Water; and just then
+Blacklock shouted, snatched, wrestled for an instant with a writhing
+captive--and was left with a torn mackintosh in his hands for his only
+trophy.
+
+They all saw the Mexican when he slipped out of the rain-coat, eluded
+Blacklock, and broke away, to dart across the chasm on the white pathway
+of the dam's coping course. He was half-way over to the shore of escape
+when his nerve failed. To the spouting fountain in the gulch below and
+the sucking whirlpool in the Elbow above was added a second tidal wave
+from the cloud-burst sources; a mere ripple compared with the first, but
+yet great enough to make a maelstrom of the gurgling whirlpool, and to
+send its crest of spray flying over the narrow causeway. When the
+barrier was bared again the Mexican was seen clinging limpet-like to the
+rocks, his courage gone and his death-warrant signed. For while he
+clung, the great wall lost its perfect alignment, sagged, swayed outward
+under the irresistible pressure from above, crumbled, and was gone in a
+thunder-burst of sound that stunned the watchers and shook the solid
+earth of the mesa where they stood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Are you quite sure it wasn't all a frightful dream?" asked the young
+woman in a charming house gown and pointed Turkish slippers of the young
+man with his left arm in a sling; the pair waiting the breakfast call in
+the hammock-bridged corner of the great portico at Castle 'Cadia.
+
+It was a Colorado mountain morning of the sort called "Italian" by
+enthusiastic tourists. The air was soft and balmy; a rare blue haze lay
+in the gulches; and the patches of yellowing aspens on the mountain
+shoulders added the needed touch of colour to relieve the dun-browns and
+grays of the balds and the heavy greens of the forested slopes. Save for
+the summer-dried grass, lodged and levelled in great swaths by the
+sudden freeing of the waters, the foreground of the scene was unchanged.
+Through the bowl-shaped valley the Boiling Water, once more an
+August-dwindled mountain stream, flowed murmurously as before; and a
+mile away in the foothill gap of the Elbow, the huge steel-beamed
+derrick lined itself against the farther distances.
+
+"No, it wasn't a dream," said Ballard. "The thirty-mile, nerve-trying
+drive home in the car, with the half-wrecked railroad bridge for a river
+crossing, ought to have convinced you of the realities."
+
+"Nothing convinces me any more," she confessed, with the air of one who
+has seen chaos and cosmos succeed each other in dizzying alternations;
+and when Ballard would have gone into the particulars of that with her,
+the King of Arcadia came up from his morning walk around the homestead
+knoll.
+
+"Ah, you youngstehs!" he said, with the note of fatherly indulgence in
+the mellow voice. "Out yondeh undeh the maples, I run across the Bigelow
+boy and Madge Cantrell;--'Looking to see what damage the water had
+done,' they said, as innocent as a pair of turtle-doves! Oveh in the
+orcha'd I stumble upon Mistuh Wingfield and Dosia. I didn't make them
+lie to me, and I'm not going to make you two. But I should greatly
+appreciate a word with you, Mistuh Ballard."
+
+Elsa got up to go in, but Ballard sat in the hammock and drew her down
+beside him again. "With your permission, which I was going to ask
+immediately after breakfast, Colonel Craigmiles, we two are one," he
+said, with the frank, boyish smile that even his critics found hard to
+resist. "Will you so regard us?"
+
+The colonel's answering laugh had no hint of obstacles in it.
+
+"It was merely a little matteh of business," he explained. "Will youh
+shot-up arm sanction a day's travel, Mistuh Ballard?"
+
+"Surely. This sling is wholly Miss Elsa's idea and invention. I don't
+need it."
+
+"Well, then; heah's the programme: Afteh breakfast, Otto will drive you
+oveh to Alta Vista in the light car. From there you will take the train
+to Denver. When you arrive, you will find the tree of the Arcadia
+Company pretty well shaken by the news of the catastrophe to the dam. Am
+I safe in assuming so much?"
+
+"More than safe: every stockholder in the outfit will be ducking to
+cover."
+
+"Ve'y good. Quietly, then, and without much--ah--ostentation, as youh
+own good sense would dictate, you will pick up, in youh name or mine, a
+safe majority of the stock. Do I make myself cleah?"
+
+"Perfectly, so far."
+
+"Then you will come back to Arcadia, reorganise youh force--you and
+Mistuh Bromley--and build you anotheh dam; this time in the location
+below the Elbow, where it should have been built befo'. Am I still
+cleah?"
+
+"Why, clear enough, certainly. But I thought--I've been given to
+understand that you were fighting the irrigation scheme on its merits;
+that you didn't want your kingdom of Arcadia turned into a farming
+community. I don't blame you, you know."
+
+The old cattle king's gaze went afar, through the gap to the foothills
+and beyond to the billowing grass-lands of Arcadia Park, and the shrewd
+old eyes lost something of their militant fire when he said:
+
+"I reckon I was right selfish about that, in the beginning, Mistuh
+Ballard. It's a mighty fine range, suh, and I was greedy for the
+isolation--as some otheh men are greedy for money and the power it
+brings. But this heah little girl of mine she went out into the world,
+and came back to shame me, suh. Here was land and a living, independence
+and happiness, for hundreds of the world's po' strugglers, and I was
+making a cattle paschuh of it! Right then and thah was bo'n the idea,
+suh, of making a sure-enough kingdom of Arcadia, and it was my laying of
+the foundations that attracted Mr. Pelham and his money-hungry crowd."
+
+"Your idea!" ejaculated Ballard. "Then Pelham and his people were
+interlopers?"
+
+"You can put it that way; yes, suh. Thei-uh idea was wrapped up in a
+coin-sack; you could fai'ly heah it clink! Thei-uh proposal was to sell
+the land, and to make the water an eve'lasting tax upon it; mine was to
+make the water free. We hitched on that, and then they proposed to
+_me_--to _me_, suh--to make a stock-selling swindle of it. When I told
+them they were a pack of damned scoundrels, they elected to fight me,
+suh; and last night, please God, we saw the beginning of the end that is
+to be--the righteous end. But come on in to breakfast; you can't live on
+sentiment for always, Mistuh Ballard."
+
+They went in together behind him, the two for whom Arcadia had suddenly
+been transformed into paradise, and on the way the Elsa whom Ballard had
+first known and learned to love in the far-distant world beyond the
+barrier mountains reasserted herself.
+
+"What do you suppose Mr. Pelham will say when he hears that you have
+really made love to the cow-punching princess?" she asked, flippantly.
+"Do you usually boast of such things in advance, Mr. Ballard?"
+
+But his answer ignored the little pin-prick of mockery.
+
+"I'm thinking altogether of Colonel Adam Craigmiles, my dear; and of the
+honour he does you by being your father. He is a king, every inch of
+him, Elsa, girl! I'm telling you right now that we'll have to put in the
+high speed, and keep it in, to live up to him."
+
+And afterward, when the house-party guests had gathered, in good old
+Kentucky fashion, around the early breakfast-table, and the story of the
+night had been threshed out, and word was brought that Otto and the car
+were waiting, he stood up with his hand on the back of Elsa's chair and
+lifted his claret class with the loyal thought still uppermost. "A toast
+with me, good friends--my stirrup-cup: I drink to our host, the Knight
+Commander of Castle 'Cadia, and the reigning monarch of the Land of
+Heart's Delight--Long live the King of Arcadia!"
+
+And they drank it standing.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The King of Arcadia, by Francis Lynde
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