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, andmuddigging 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."
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 thetempois 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 buckboardsen routewas 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-builtcaballero, with the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of things, red wrath to the fore.
"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"
"Si, Señor," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.
"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia Company."
"Ha! Señor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."
"Never mind that; the pleasure isn't mutual, by a damned sight. You tell your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes back where they found them." Ballard was hot.
"You give-a the h-order in this valley, señor?" asked the Mexican softly.
"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"
"Señor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me like-a that!"
"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.
It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills; and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not speed the motor-car.
Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the principal antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky boyhood—all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his attitude so affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the vanishing point.
"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed, gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.
The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the hogback foothills well to the southward, and approaching the inner valley at right angles to the course of the river and the railway.
The sun had sunk behind the western mountain barrier and the dusk was gathering when the colonel quickened the pace, and the car topped the last of the hills in a staccato rush. Ballard heard the low thunder of the Boiling Water in its upper canyon, and had glimpses of weird shapes of eroded sandstone looming in huge pillars and fantastic mushroom figures in the growing darkness.
Then the lights of Castle 'Cadia twinkled in their tree-setting at the top of the little knoll; the drought-hardened road became a gravelled carriage-drive under the pneumatic tires; and a final burst of speed sent the car rocketing to the summit of the knoll through a maple-shadowed avenue.
The great tree-trunk-pillared portico of the country house was deserted when the colonel cut out the motor-battery switch at the carriage step. But a moment later a white-gowned figure appeared in the open doorway, and the colonel's daughter came to the step, to laugh gayly, and to say:
"Why, Mr. Ballard, I'm astounded! Have you really decided that it is quite safe to trust yourself in the camp of the enemy?"
Ballard had seen Castle 'Cadia at field-glass range; and he had Bromley's enthusiastic description of the house of marvels to push anticipation some little distance along the way to meet the artistic reality. None the less, the reality came with the shock of the unexpected.
In the softened light of the shaded electric pendants, the massive pillars of the portico appeared as single trees standing as they had grown in the mountain forest. Underfoot the floor was of hewn tree-trunks; but the house walls, like the pillars, were of logs in the rough, cunningly matched and fitted to conceal the carpentry.
A man had come to take the automobile, and the colonel paused to call attention to a needed adjustment of the motor. Ballard made use of the isolated moment.
"I have accounted for you at last," he said, prolonging the greeting hand-clasp to the ultimate limit. "I know now what has made you what you are."
"Really?" she questioned lightly. "And all these years I have been vainly imagining that I had acquired the manner of the civilized East! Isn't it pathetic?"
"Very," he agreed quite gravely. "But the pathos is all on my side."
"Meaning that I might let you go and dress for dinner? I shall. Enter the house of the enemy, Mr. Ballard. A cow-punching princess bids you welcome."
She was looking him fairly in the eyes when she said it, and he acquitted her doubtfully of the charge of intention. But her repetition, accidental or incidental, of his own phrase was sufficiently disconcerting to make him awkwardly silent while she led the way into the spacious reception-hall.
Here the spell of the enchantments laid fresh hold on him. The rustic exterior of the great house was only the artistically designed contrast—within were richness, refinement, and luxury unbounded. The floors were of polished wood, and the rugs were costly Daghestans. Beyond portières of curious Indian bead-work, there were vistas of harmonious interiors; carved furnishings, beamed and panelled ceilings, book-lined walls. The light everywhere came from the softly tinted electric globes. There was a great stone fireplace in the hall, but radiators flanked the openings, giving an added touch of modernity.
Ballard pulled himself together and strove to recall the fifty-mile, sky-reaching mountain barrier lying between all this twentieth-century country-house luxury and the nearest outpost of urban civilisation. It asked for a tremendous effort; and the realising anchor dragged again when Miss Craigmiles summoned a Japanese servant and gave him in charge.
"Show Mr. Ballard to the red room, Tagawi," she directed. And then to the guest: "We dine at seven—as informally as you please. You will find your bag in your room, and Tagawi will serve you. As you once told me when I teased you in your Boston workshop—'If you don't see what you want, ask for it.'"
The Kentuckian followed his guide up the broad stair and through a second-floor corridor which abated no jot of the down-stair magnificence. Neither did his room, for that matter. Hangings of Pompeian red gave it its name; and it was spacious and high-studded, and critically up to date in its appointments.
The little brown serving-man deftly opened the bag brought by the colonel's messenger from Ballard's quarters at the Elbow Canyon camp, and laid out the guest's belongings. That done, he opened the door of the bath. "The honourable excellency will observe the hot water; also cold. Are the orders other for me?"
Ballard shook his head, dismissed the smiling little man, and turned on the water.
"I reckon I'd better take it cold," he said to himself; "then I'll know certainly whether I'm awake or dreaming. By Jove! but this place is a poem! I don't wonder that the colonel is fighting Berserk to save it alive. And Mr. Pelham and his millionaires come calmly up to the counter and offer to buy it—with mere money!"
He filled the porcelain bath with a crystal-clear flood that, measured by its icy temperature, might have been newly distilled glacier drip; and the cold plunge did something toward establishing the reality of things. But the incredibilities promptly reasserted themselves when he went down a little in advance of the house-party guests, and met Elsa, and was presented to a low-voiced lady with silvery hair and the face of a chastened saint, named to him as Miss Cauffrey, but addressed by Elsa as "Aunt June."
"I hope you find yourself somewhat refreshed, Mr. Ballard," said the sweet-voiced châtelaine. "Elsa tells me you have been in the tropics, and our high altitudes must be almost distressing at first; I know I found them so."
"Really, I hadn't noticed the change," returned Ballard rather vaguely. Then he bestirred himself, and tried to live up to the singularly out-of-place social requirements. "I'm not altogether new to the altitudes, though I haven't been in the West for the past year or two. For that matter, I can't quite realise that I am in the West at this moment—at least in the uncitied part."
Miss Cauffrey smiled, and the king's daughter laughed softly.
"It does me so much good!" she declared, mocking him. "All through that dining-car dinner on the 'Overland Flyer' you were trying to reconcile me with the Western barbarities. Didn't you say something about being hopeful because I was aware of the existence of an America west of the Alleghanies?"
"Please let me down as easily as you can," pleaded the engineer. "You must remember that I am only a plain workingman."
"You are come to take poor Mr. Macpherson's place?" queried Miss Cauffrey; which was Ballard's first intimation that the Arcadian promotion scheme was not taboo by the entire house-hold of Castle 'Cadia.
"That is what I supposed I was doing, up to this evening. But it seems that I have stumbled into fairyland instead."
"No," said the house-daughter, laughing at him again—"only into the least Arcadian part of Arcadia. And after dinner you will be free to go where you are impatient to be at this very moment."
"I don't know about that," was Ballard's rejoinder. "I was just now wondering if I could be heroic enough to go contentedly from all this to my adobe shack in the construction camp."
Miss Craigmiles mocked him again.
"My window in the Alta Vista sleeper chanced to be open that night while the train was standing in the Denver station. Didn't I hear Mr. Pelham say that the watchword—your watchword—was to be 'drive,' for every man, minute, and dollar there was in it?"
Ballard said, "Oh, good Lord!" under his breath, and a hot flush rose to humiliate him, in spite of his efforts to keep it down. Now it was quite certain that her word of welcome was not a mere coincidence. She had overheard that brutal and uncalled-for boast of his about making love to "the cow-punching princesses"; and this was his punishment.
It was a moment for free speech of the explanatory sort, but Miss Cauffrey's presence forbade it. So he could only say, in a voice that might have melted a heart of stone: "I am wholly at your mercy—and I am your guest. You shouldn't step on a man when he's down. It isn't Christian."
Whether she would have stepped on him or not was left a matter indeterminate, since the members of the house-party were coming down by twos and threes, and shortly afterward dinner was announced.
By this time Ballard was growing a little hardened to the surprises; and the exquisitely appointed dining-room evoked only a left-over thrill. And at dinner, in the intervals allowed him by Miss Dosia Van Bryck, who was his table companion, there were other things to think of. For example, he was curious to know if Wingfield's air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles would persist under Colonel Craigmiles's own roof.
Apparently it did persist. Before the first course was removed Ballard's curiosity was in the way of being amply satisfied; and he was saying "Yes" and "No" like a well-adjusted automaton to Miss Van Bryck.
In the seating he had Major Blacklock and one of the Cantrell girls for his opposites; and Lucius Bigelow and the other sharer of the common Cantrell Christian name widened the gap. But the centrepiece in the middle of the great mahogany was low; and Ballard could see over it only too well.
Wingfield and Elsa were discussing playmaking and the playmaker's art; or, rather, Wingfield was talking shop with cheerful dogmatism, and Miss Craigmiles was listening; and if the rapt expression of her face meant anything.... Ballard lost himself in gloomy abstraction, and the colours of the electric spectrum suddenly merged for him into a greenish-gray.
"I should think your profession would be perfectly grand, Mr. Ballard. Don't you find it so?" Thus Miss Dosia, who, being quite void of subjective enthusiasm, felt constrained to try to evoke it in others.
"Very," said Ballard, hearing nothing save the upward inflection which demanded a reply.
Miss Van Bryck seemed mildly surprised; but after a time she tried again.
"Has any one told you that Mr. Wingfield is making the studies for a new play?" she asked.
Again Ballard marked the rising inflection; said "Yes," at a venture; and was straightway humiliated, as he deserved to be.
"It seems so odd that he should come out here for his material," Miss Van Bryck went on evenly. "I don't begin to understand how there can be any dramatic possibilities in a wilderness house-party, with positively no social setting whatever."
"Ah, no; of course not," stammered Ballard, realising now that he was fairly at sea. And then, to make matters as bad as they could be: "You were speaking of Mr. Wingfield?"
Miss Van Bryck's large blue eyes mirrored reproachful astonishment; but she was too placid and too good-natured to be genuinely piqued.
"I fear you must have had a hard day, Mr. Ballard. All this is very wearisome to you, isn't it?" she said, letting him have a glimpse of the real kindness underlying the inanities.
"My day has been rather strenuous," he confessed. "But you make me ashamed. Won't you be merciful and try me again?" And this time he knew what he was saying, and meant it.
"It is hardly worth repeating," she qualified—nevertheless, she did repeat it.
Ballard, listening now, found the little note of distress in the protest against play-building in the wilderness; and his heart warmed to Miss Dosia. In the sentimental field, disappointment for one commonly implies disappointment for two; and he became suddenly conscious of a fellow-feeling for the heiress of the Van Bryck millions.
"There is plenty of dramatic material in Arcadia for Mr. Wingfield, if he knows where to look for it," he submitted. "For example, our camp at the dam furnishes a 'situation' every now and then." And here he told the story of the catapulted stone, adding the little dash of mystery to give it the dramatic flavour.
Miss Dosia's interest was as eager as her limitations would permit. "May I tell Mr. Wingfield?" she asked, with such innocent craft that Ballard could scarcely restrain a smile.
"Certainly. And if Mr. Wingfield is open to suggestion on that side, you may bring him down, and I'll put him on the trail of a lot more of the mysteries."
"Thank you so much. And may I call it my discovery?"
Again her obviousness touched the secret spring of laughter in him. It was very evident that Miss Van Bryck would do anything in reason to bring about a solution of continuity in the sympathetic intimacy growing up between the pair on the opposite side of the table.
"It is yours, absolutely," he made haste to say. "I should never have thought of the dramatic utility if you hadn't suggested it."
"H'm!—ha!" broke in the major. "What are you two young people plotting about over there?"
Ballard turned the edge of the query; blunted it permanently by attacking a piece of government engineering in which, as he happened to know, the major had figured in an advisory capacity. This carrying of the war into Africa brought on a battle technical which ran on unbroken to the ices and beyond; to the moment when Colonel Craigmiles proposed an adjournment to the portico for the coffee and the tobacco. Ballard came off second-best, but he had accomplished his object, which was to make the shrewd-eyed old major forget if he had overheard too much; and Miss Van Bryck gave him his meed of praise.
"You are a very brave man, Mr. Ballard," she said, as he drew the portières aside for her. "Everybody else is afraid of the major."
"I've met him before," laughed the Kentuckian; "in one or another of his various incarnations. And I didn't learn my trade at West Point, you remember."
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 theCarania. 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—Idoknow."
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 animpasse, 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 thepad padof 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."
The wreck in the rocky hills west of the Elbow Canyon railroad yard proved to be less calamitous than Bessinger's report, handed on from the excited alarm brought in by a demoralized train flagman, had pictured it. When Ballard and Bromley, hastening to the rescue on Fitzpatrick's relief train, reached the scene of the accident, they found Hoskins's engine and fifteen cars in the ditch, and the second flagman with a broken arm; but Hoskins himself was unhurt, as were the remaining members of the train crew.
Turning the work of track clearing over to Bromley and the relief crew, Ballard began at once to pry irritably into causes; irritably since wrecks meant delays, and President Pelham's letters were already cracking the whip for greater expedition.
It was a singular derailment, and at first none of the trainmen seemed to be able to account for it. The point of disaster was on a sharp curve where the narrow-gauge track bent like a strained bow around one of the rocky hills. As the débris lay, the train seemed to have broken in two on the knuckle of the curve, and here the singularity was emphasised. The overturned cars were not merely derailed; they were locked and crushed together, and heaped up and strewn abroad, in a fashion to indicate a collision rather than a simple jumping of the track.
Ballard used Galliford, the train conductor, for the first heel of his pry.
"I guess you and Hoskins both need about thirty days," was the way he opened upon Galliford. "How long had your train been broken in two before the two sections came in collision?"
"If we was broke in two, nobody knew it. I was in the caboose 'lookout' myself, and I saw the Two's gauge-light track around the curve. Next I knew, I was smashin' the glass in the 'lookout' with my head, and the train was chasin' out on the prairie. I'll take the thirty days, all right, and I won't sue the company for the cuts on my head. But I'll be danged if I'll take the blame, Mr. Ballard." The conductor spoke as a man.
"Somebody's got to take it," snapped the chief. "If you didn't break in two, what did happen?"
"Now you've got me guessing, and I hain't got any more guesses left. At first I thought Hoskins had hit something 'round on the far side o' the curve. That's what it felt like. Then, for a second or two, I could have sworn he had the Two in the reverse, backing his end of the train up against my end and out into the sage-brush."
"What does Hoskins say? Where is he?" demanded Ballard; and together they picked their way around to the other end of the wreck, looking for the engineman.
Hoskins, however, was not to be found. Fitzpatrick had seen him groping about in the cab of his overturned engine; and Bromley, when the inquiry reached him, explained that he had sent Hoskins up to camp on a hand-car which was going back for tools.
"He was pretty badly shaken up, and I told him he'd better hunt the bunk shanty and rest his nerves awhile. We didn't need him," said the assistant, accounting for the engine-man's disappearance.
Ballard let the investigation rest for the moment, but later, when Bromley was working the contractor's gang on the track obstructions farther along, he lighted a flare torch at the fire some of the men had made out of the wreck kindling wood, and began a critical examination of the derailed and débris-covered locomotive.
It was a Baldwin ten-wheel type, with the boiler extending rather more than half-way through the cab, and since it had rolled over on the right-hand side, the controlling levers were under the crushed wreckage of the cab. None the less, Ballard saw what he was looking for; afterward making assurance doubly sure by prying at the engine's brake-shoes and thrusting the pinch-bar of inquiry into various mechanisms under the trucks and driving-wheels.
It was an hour past midnight when Bromley reported the track clear, and asked if the volunteer wrecking crew should go on and try to pick up the cripples.
"Not to-night," was Ballard's decision. "We'll get Williams and his track-layers in from the front to-morrow and let them tackle it. Williams used to be Upham's wrecking boss over on the D. & U. P. main line, and he'll make short work of this little pile-up, engine and all."
Accordingly, the whistle of the relief train's engine was blown to recall Fitzpatrick's men, and a little later the string of flats, men-laden, trailed away among the up-river hills, leaving the scene of the disaster with only the dull red glow of the workmen's night fire to illuminate it.
When the rumble of the receding relief train was no longer audible, the figure of a man, dimly outlined in the dusky glow of the fire, materialised out of the shadows of the nearest arroyo. First making sure that no watchman had been left to guard the point of hazard, the man groped purposefully under the fallen locomotive and drew forth a stout steel bar which had evidently been hidden for this later finding. With this bar for a lever, the lone wrecker fell fiercely at work under the broken cab, prying and heaving until the sweat started in great drops under the visor of his workman's cap and ran down to make rivulets of gray in the grime on his face.
Whatever he was trying to do seemed difficult of accomplishment, if not impossible. Again and again he strove at his task, pausing now and then to take breath or to rub his moist hands in the dry sand for the better gripping of the smooth steel. Finally—it was when the embers of the fire on the hill slope were flickering to their extinction—the bar slipped and let him down heavily. The fall must have partly stunned him, since it was some little time before he staggered to his feet, flung the bar into the wreck with a morose oath, and limped away up the track toward the headquarters camp, turning once and again to shake his fist at the capsized locomotive in the ditch at the curve.
It was in the afternoon of the day following the wreck that Ballard made the laboratory test for blame; the office room in the adobe shack serving as the "sweat-box."
First came the flagmen, one at a time, their stories agreeing well enough, and both corroborating Galliford's account. Next came Hoskins's fireman, a green boy from the Alta Vista mines, who had been making his first trip over the road. He knew nothing save that he had looked up between shovelfuls to see Hoskins fighting with his levers, and had judged the time to be ripe for the life-saving jump.
Last of all came Hoskins, hanging his head and looking as if he had been caught stealing sheep.
"Tell it straight," was Ballard's curt caution; and the engineman stumbled through a recital in which haziness and inconsistency struggled for first place. He had seen something on the track or he thought he had, and had tried to stop. Before he could bring the train under control he had heard the crashing of the wreck in the rear. He admitted that he had jumped while the engine was still in motion.
"Which way was she running when you jumped, John?—forward or backward?" asked Ballard, quietly.
Bromley, who was making pencil notes of the evidence, looked up quickly and saw the big engine-man's jaw drop.
"How could she be runnin' any way but forrards?" he returned, sullenly.
Ballard was smoking, and he shifted his cigar to say: "I didn't know." Then, with sudden heat:
"But I mean to know, Hoskins; I mean to go quite to the bottom of this, here and now! You've been garbling the facts; purposely, or because you are still too badly rattled to know what you are talking about. I can tell you what you did: for some reason you made an emergency stop; youdidmake it, either with the brakes or without them. Then you put your engine in the reverse motion andbacked; 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 wherehefell 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 Isawhim. 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.