"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 beallfool!"
"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 theburr-rand 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."
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 littlepaseardown canyon, and the herd-riders can chase out and round up their stock again: see?"
Ballard made the sign of acquiescence; and presently the thing was done substantially as the boy had planned. The grazing mules, startled by the sudden dash of the three mounted broncos among them, and helped along by a few judicious quirt blows, broke and ran in frightened panic, carrying the three riders in the thick of the rout.
Young Carson, skilful as the son of the convict stock-lifter had been trained to be, deftly herded the thundering stampede in the desired direction; and at the end of a galloping mile abruptly gave the shrill yell of command to the two men whom he was piloting. There was a swerve aside out of the pounding melée, a dash for an opening between the swelling foothills, and the ruck of snorting mules swept on in a broad circle that would later make recapture by the night herders a simple matter of gathering up the trailing picket-ropes.
The three riders drew rein in the shelter of the arroyo gulch to breathe their horses, and Ballard gave the boy due credit.
"That was very neatly done, Dick," he said, when the thunder of the pounding hoofs had died away in the up-river distances. "Is it going to bump those fellows off of our trail?"
The water-boy was humped over the horn of his saddle as if he had found a stomach-ache in the breathless gallop. But he was merely listening.
"I ain't reskin' any money on it," he qualified. "If them cow-punch's 've caught on to where you're goin', and what you're goin'fer——"
Out of the stillness filling the hill-gorge like a black sea of silence came a measured thudding of hoofs and an unmistakable squeaking of saddle leather. Like a flash the boy was afoot and reaching under his bronco's belly for a tripping hold on the horse's forefoot. "Down! and pitch the cayuses!" he quavered stridently; and as the three horses rolled in the dry sand of the arroyo bed with their late riders flattened upon their heads, the inner darkness of the gorge spat fire and there was a fine singing whine of bullets overhead.
In defiance of all the laws of precedence, it was the guest who first rose to the demands of the spiteful occasion. While Ballard was still struggling with the holster strappings of his rifle, Bigelow had disengaged his weapon and was industriously pumping a rapid-fire volley into the flame-spitting darkness of the gorge.
The effect of the prompt reply in kind was quickly made manifest. The firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, a riderless horse dashed snorting down the bed of the dry arroyo, narrowly missing a stumbling collision with the living obstructions lying in his way, and other gallopings were heard withdrawing into the hill-shadowed obscurities.
It was Ballard who took the water-boy to task when they had waited long enough to be measurably certain that the attackers had left the field.
"You were mistaken, Dick," he said, breaking the strained silence. "There were more than two of them."
Young Carson was getting his horse up, and he appeared to be curiously at fault.
"You're plumb right, Cap'n Ballard," he admitted. "But that ain't what's pinchin' me: there's always enough of 'em night-herdin' this end of the range so 'at they could have picked up another hand 'r two. What I cayn't tumble to is how they-all out-rid us."
"To get ahead of us, you mean?"
"That's it. We're in the neck of a little hogback draw that goes on down to the big canyon. The only other trail into the draw is along by the river and up this-a-way—'bout a mile and a half furder 'n the road we come, I reckon."
It was the persistent element of mystery once more thrusting itself into the prosaic field of the industries; but before Ballard could grapple with it, the fighting guest cut in quietly.
"One of their bullets seems to have nipped me in the arm," he said, admitting the fact half reluctantly and as if it were something to be ashamed of. "Will you help me tie it up?"
Ballard came out of the speculative fog with a bound.
"Good heavens, Bigelow! are you hit? Why didn't you say something?" he exclaimed, diving into the pockets of his duck coat for matches and a candle-end.
"It wasn't worth while; it's only a scratch, I guess."
But the lighted candle-end proved it to be something more; a ragged furrow plowed diagonally across the forearm. Ballard dressed it as well as he could, the water-boy holding the candle, and when the rough job of surgery was done, was for sending the Forestry man back to the valley head and Castle 'Cadia with the wound for a sufficient reason. But Bigelow developed a sudden vein of stubbornness. He would neither go back alone, nor would he consent to be escorted.
"A little thing like this is all in the day's work," he protested. "We'll go on, when you're ready; or, rather, we'll go and hunt for the owner of that horse whose saddle I suppose I must have emptied. I'm just vindictive enough to hope that its rider was the fellow who pinked me."
As it happened, the hope was to be neither confirmed nor positively denied. A little farther up the dry arroyo the candle-end, sputtering to its extinction, showed them a confusion of hoof tramplings in the yielding sand, but nothing more. Dead or wounded, the horse-losing rider had evidently been carried off by his companions.
"Which proves pretty conclusively that there must have been more than two," was Ballard's deduction, when they were again pushing cautiously down the inner valley toward its junction with the great canyon. "But why should two, or a dozen of them, fire on us in the dark? How could they know whether we were friends or enemies?"
Bigelow's quiet laugh had a touch of grimness in it.
"Your Elbow Canyon mysteries have broken bounds," he suggested. "Your staff should include an expert psychologist, Mr. Ballard."
Ballard's reply was belligerent. "If we had one, I'd swap him for a section of mounted police," he declared; and beyond that the narrow trail in the cliff-walled gorge of the Boiling Water forbade conversation.
Three hours farther down the river trail, when the summer dawn was paling the stars in the narrow strip of sky overhead, the perpendicular walls of the great canyon gave back a little, and looking past the water-boy guide, Ballard saw an opening marking the entrance of a small tributary stream from the north; a little green oasis in the vast desert of frowning cliffs and tumbled boulders, with a log cabin and a tiny corral nestling under the portal rock of the smaller stream.
"Hello!" said Bigelow, breaking the silence in which they had been riding for the greater part of the three hours, "what's this we are coming to?"
Ballard was about to pass the query on to the boy when an armed man in the flapped hat and overalls of a range rider stepped from behind a boulder and barred the way. There was a halt, an exchange of words between young Carson and the flap-hatted trail-watcher in tones so low as to be inaudible to the others, and the armed one faced about, rather reluctantly, it seemed, to lead the way to the cabin under the cliff.
At the dismounting before the cabin door, the boy cleared away a little of the mystery.
"This yere is whar I live when I'm at home," he drawled, lapsing by the influence of the propinquity into the Tennessee idiom which was his birthright. "Pap'll get ye your breakfas' while I'm feedin' the bronc's."
Ballard glanced quickly at his guest and met the return glance of complete intelligence in the steady gray eyes of the Forestry man. The cabin and the corral in the secluded canyon were sufficiently accounted for. But one use could be made of a stock enclosure in such an inaccessible mountain fastness. The trail station in the heart of the Boiling Water wilderness was doubtless the headquarters of the "rustlers" who lived by preying upon the King of Arcadia's flocks and herds.
"Your allies in the little war against Colonel Craigmiles," said Bigelow, and there was something like a touch of mild reproach in his low tone when he added: "Misery isn't the only thing that 'acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.'"
"Apparently not," said Ballard; and they went together into the kitchen half of the cabin which was built, in true Tennessee fashion, as "two pens and a passage."
The welcome accorded them by the sullen-faced man who was already frying rashers of bacon over the open fire on the hearth was not especially cordial. "Mek' ye an arm and re'ch for yerselves," was his sole phrase of hospitality, when the bacon and pan-bread were smoking on the huge hewn slab which served for a table; and he neither ate with his guests nor waited upon them, save to refill the tin coffee cups as they were emptied.
Neither of the two young men stayed longer than they were obliged to in the dirty, leather-smelling kitchen. There was freedom outside, with the morning world of fresh, zestful immensities for a smoking-room; and when they had eaten, they went to sit on a flat rock by the side of the little stream to fill and light their pipes, Ballard crumbling the cut-plug and stoppering the pipe for his crippled companion.
"How is the bullet-gouge by this time?" he questioned, when the tobacco was alight.
"It's pretty sore, and no mistake," Bigelow acknowledged frankly. Whereupon Ballard insisted upon taking the bandages off and re-dressing the wound, with the crystal-clear, icy water of the mountain stream for its cleansing.
"It was a sheer piece of idiocy on my part—letting you come on with me after you got this," was his verdict, when he had a daylight sight of the bullet score. "But I don't mean to be idiotic twice in the same day," he went on. "You're going to stay right here and keep quiet until we come along back and pick you up, late this afternoon."
Bigelow made a wry face.
"Nice, cheerful prospect," he commented. "The elder cattle thief isn't precisely one's ideal of the jovial host. By the way, what was the matter with him while we were eating breakfast? He looked and acted as if there were a sick child in some one of the dark corners which he was afraid we might disturb."
Ballard nodded. "I was wondering if you remarked it. Did you hear the sick baby?"
"I heard noises—besides those that Carson was so carefully making with the skillet and the tin plates. The room across the passage from us wasn't empty."
"That was my guess," rejoined Ballard, pulling thoughtfully at his short pipe. "I heard voices and tramplings, and, once in a while, something that sounded remarkably like a groan—or an oath."
Bigelow nodded in his turn. "More of the mysteries, you'd say; but this time they don't especially concern us. Have you fully made up your mind to leave me here while you go on down to the railroad? Because if you have, you and the boy will have to compel my welcome from the old robber: I'd never have the face to ask him for a whole day's hospitality."
"I'll fix that," said Ballard, and when the boy came from the corral with the saddled horses, he went to do it, leaving Bigelow to finish his pipe on the flat rock of conference.
The "fixing" was not accomplished without some difficulty, as it appeared to the young man sitting on the flat stone at the stream side. Dick brought his father to the door, and Ballard did the talking—considerably more of it than might have been deemed necessary for the simple request to be proffered. At the end of the talk, Ballard came back to the flat stone.
"You stay," he said briefly to Bigelow. "Carson will give you your dinner. But he says he has a sick man on his hands in the cabin, and you'll have to excuse him."
"He was willing?" queried Bigelow.
"No; he wasn't at all willing. He acted as if he were a loaded camel, and your staying was going to be the final back-breaking straw. But he's a Tennessean, and we've been kind to his boy. The ranch is yours for the day, only if I were you, I shouldn't make too free use of it."
Bigelow smiled.
"I'll be 'meachum' and keep fair in the middle of the road. I don't know anything that a prosecuting attorney could make use of against the man who has given me my breakfast, and who promises to give me my dinner, and I don't want to know anything. Please don't waste any more daylight on me: Dick has the horses ready, and he is evidently growing anxious."
Ballard left the Forestry man smoking and sunning himself on the flat boulder when he took the down-canyon trail with the sober-faced boy for his file leader, and more than once during the rather strenuous day to which the pocket-gulch incident was the introduction, his thoughts went back to Bigelow, marooned in the depths of the great canyon with the saturnine cattle thief, the sick man, and doubtless other members of the band of "rustlers."
It was therefore, with no uncertain feeling of relief that he returned in the late afternoon at the head of a file of as hard-looking miscreants as ever were gathered in a sheriff's posse, and found Bigelow sitting on the step of the Carson cabin, still nursing the bandaged arm, and still smoking the pipe of patience.
"I'm left to do the honours, gentlemen," said the Forestry man, rising and smiling quaintly. "The owner of the ranch regrets to say that he has been unavoidably called away; but the feed in the corral and the provisions in the kitchen are yours for the taking and the cooking."
The sheriff, a burly giant whose face, figure, garmenting and graceful saddle-seat proclaimed the ex-cattleman, laughed appreciatively.
"Bat Carson knows a healthy climate as far as he can see the sun a-shinin'," he chuckled; and then to his deputies: "Light down, boys, and we'll see what sort o' chuck he's left for us."
In the dismounting Ballard drew Bigelow aside. "What has happened?" he asked.
"You can prove nothing by me," returned Bigelow, half quizzically. "I've been asleep most of the day. When I woke up, an hour or so ago, the doors were open and the cabin was empty. Also, there was a misspelled note charcoaled on a box-cover in the kitchen, making us free of the horse-bait and the provisions. Also, again, a small bunch of cattle that I had seen grazing in a little park up the creek had disappeared."
"Um," said Ballard, discontentedly. "All of which makes us accessories after the fact in another raid on Colonel Craigmiles's range herd. I don't like that."
"Nor do I," Bigelow agreed. "But you can't eat a man's bread, and then stay awake to see which way he escapes. I'm rather glad I was sleepy enough not to be tempted. Which reminds me: you must be about all in on that score yourself, Mr. Ballard."
"I? Oh, no; I got in five or six hours on the railroad train, going and coming between Jack's Cabin and the county seat."
The posse members were tramping into the kitchen to ransack it for food and drink, and Bigelow stood still farther aside.
"You managed to gather up a beautiful lot of cutthroats in the short time at your disposal," he remarked.
"Didn't I? And now you come against one of my weaknesses, Bigelow: I can't stay mad. Last night I thought I'd be glad to see a bunch of the colonel's cow-boys well hanged. To-day I'm sick and ashamed to be seen tagging this crew of hired sure-shots into the colonel's domain."
"Just keep on calling it the Arcadia Company's domain, and perhaps the feeling will wear off," suggested the Forestry man.
"It's no joke," said Ballard, crustily; and then he went in to take his chance of supper with the sheriff and his "sure-shots."
There was still sufficient daylight for the upper canyon passage when the rough-riders had eaten Carson out of house and home, and were mounted again for the ascent to the Kingdom of Arcadia. In the up-canyon climb, the sheriff kept the boy, Dick, within easy bridle clutch, remembering a certain other canyon faring in which the cattle thief's son had narrowly missed putting his father's captors, men and horses, into the torrent of the Boiling Water. Ballard and Bigelow rode ahead; and when the thunderous diapason of the river permitted, they talked.
"How did they manage to move the sick man?" asked Ballard, when the trail and the stream gave him leave.
"That is another of the things that I don't know; I'm a leather-bound edition of an encyclopædia when it comes to matters of real information," was the ironical answer. "But your guess of this morning was right; there was a sick man—sick or hurt some way. I took the liberty of investigating a little when I awoke and found the ranch deserted. The other room of the cabin was a perfect shambles."
"Blood?" queried the engineer; and Bigelow nodded.
"Blood everywhere."
"A falling-out among thieves, I suppose," said Ballard, half-absently; and again Bigelow said: "I don't know."
"The boy knows," was Ballard's comment. "He knew before he left the ranch this morning. I haven't been able to get a dozen words out of him all day."
Just here both stream-noise and trail-narrowing cut in to forbid further talk, and Bigelow drew back to let Ballard lead in the single-file progress along the edge of the torrent.
It was in this order that they came finally into the Arcadian grass-lands, through a portal as abrupt as a gigantic doorway. It was the hour of sunset for the high peaks of the Elk range, and the purple shadows were already gathering among the rounded hills of the hogback. Off to the left the two advanced riders of the posse cavalcade saw the evening kitchen-smoke of Riley's ditch-camp. On the hills to the right a few cattle were grazing unherded.
But two things in the prospect conspired to make Ballard draw rein so suddenly as to bring him awkwardly into collision with his follower. One was a glimpse of the Castle 'Cadia touring car trundling swiftly away to the eastward on the river road; and the other was a slight barrier of tree branches piled across the trail fairly under his horse's nose. Stuck upon a broken twig of the barrier was a sheet of paper; and there was still sufficient light to enable the chief engineer to read the type-written lines upon it when he dropped from the saddle.
"Mr. Ballard:" it ran. "You are about to commit an act of the crudest injustice. Take the advice of an anxious friend, and quench the fire of enmity before it gets beyond control."
There was no signature; and Ballard was still staring after the disappearing automobile when he mechanically passed the sheet of paper up to Bigelow. The Forestry man read the type-written note and glanced back at the sheriff's posse just emerging from the canyon portal.
"What will you do?" he asked; and Ballard came alive with a start and shook his head.
"I don't know: if we could manage to overtake that auto.... But it's too late now to do anything, Bigelow. I've made my complaint and sworn out the warrants. Beckwith will serve them—he's obliged to serve them."
"Of course," said Bigelow; and together they waited for the sheriff's posse to close up.
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 grandsalon, 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."