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The King of Arcadia

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #33306 · 437,244 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The King of Arcadia

Author: Francis Lynde


        
Release date: July 31, 2010 [eBook #33306]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33306

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
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*** START OF THE 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.)









                             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."

"Senor 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-a-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 _consomme 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, Senor_," 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! Senor 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, senor?" asked the Mexican
softly.

"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"

"Senor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
like-a that!"

[Illustration: "Senor 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 portieres 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 chatelaine. "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
portieres 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 debris 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 debris-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 melee, 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 encyclopaedia 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
ma

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