"Under present conditions, I think it is," she said. "Ishouldn't buy it now."
"What would you do, O wise virgin of the market-place?"
"I'd wait patiently while the rocket is going up; I might even clap my hands and say 'Ah-h-h!' with the admiring multitude. But afterward, when the stick comes down, I'd buy every bit of Arcadia Irrigation I could find."
Again he was regarding her through half-closed eyelids.
"As I said before, you know too much about such things—altogether too much." He said it half in raillery, but his deduction was made seriously enough. "You think your father will win his law-suit and so break the market?"
"No; on the contrary, I'm quite sure he will be beaten. I am going, now. Don't ask me any more questions: I've said too much to the company's engineer, as it is."
"You have said nothing to the company's engineer," he denied. "You have been talking to Breckenridge Ballard, your future——"
She set the car in motion before he could complete the sentence, and he stood looking after it as it shot away up the hills. It was quite out of sight, and the sound of its drumming motor was lost in the hoarse grumbling of the river, before he began to realise that Elsa's visit had not been for the purpose of asking him to send for Gardiner, nor yet to beg him not to be vindictive. Her real object had been to warn him not to buy Arcadia Irrigation. "Why?" came the unfailing question, shot-like; and, like all the others of its tribe, it had to go unanswered.
It was two days later when Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology, kept his appointment, was duly met at Alta Vista by Ballard's special engine and a "dinkey" way-car, and was transported in state to the Arcadian fastnesses. Ballard had it in mind to run down the line on the other engine to meet the Bostonian; but Elsa forestalled him by intercepting the "special" at Ackerman's with the motor-car and whisking the guest over the roundabout road to Castle 'Cadia.
Gardiner walked down to the construction camp at Elbow Canyon bright and early the following morning to make his peace with Ballard.
"Age has its privileges which youth is obliged to concede, Breckenridge, my son," was the form his apology took. "When I learned that I might have my visit with you, and still be put up at the millionaire hostelry in the valley above, I didn't hesitate a moment. I am far beyond the point of bursting into enthusiastic raptures over a bunk shake-down in a camp shanty, steel forks, tin platters, and plum-duff, when I can live on the fat of the land and sleep on a modern mattress. How are you coming on? Am I still in time to be in at the death?"
"I hope there isn't going to be any death," was the laughing rejoinder. "Because, in the natural sequence of things, it would have to be mine, you know."
"Ah! You are tarred a little with the superstitious stick, yourself, are you? What was it you said to me about 'two sheer accidents and a commonplace tragedy'? You may remember that I warned you, and the event proves that I was a true prophet. I predicted that Arcadia would have its shepherdess, you recollect."
Thus, with dry humour, the wise man from the East. But Ballard was not prepared at the moment for a plunge into the pool of sentiment with the mildly cynical old schoolman for a bath-master, and he proposed, as the readiest alternative, a walking tour of the industries.
Gardiner was duly impressed by the industrial miracles, and by the magnitude of the irrigation scheme. Also, he found fitting words in which to express his appreciation of the thoroughness of Ballard's work, and of the admirable system under which it was pressing swiftly to its conclusion. But these matters became quickly subsidiary when he began to examine the curious geological formation of the foothill range through which the river elbowed its tumultuous course.
"These little wrinklings of the earth's crust at the foot of the great mountain systems are nature's puzzle-pieces for us," he remarked. "I foresee an extremely enjoyable vacation for me—if you have forgiven me to the extent of a snack at your mess-table now and then, and a possible night's lodging in your bungalow if I should get caught out too late to reach the millionaire luxuries of Castle 'Cadia."
"If I haven't forgiven you, Bromley will take you in," laughed Ballard. "Make yourself one of us—when you please and as you please. The camp and everything in it belongs to you for as long as you can persuade yourself to stay."
Gardiner accepted the invitation in its largest sense, and the afternoon of the same day found him prowling studiously in the outlet canyon with hammer and specimen-bag; a curious figure of complete abstraction in brown duck and service leggings, overshadowed by an enormous cork-lined helmet-hat that had been faded and stained by the sun and rains of three continents. Ballard passed the word among his workmen. The absent-minded stranger under the cork hat was the guest of the camp, who was to be permitted to go and come as he chose, whose questions were to be answered without reserve, and whose peculiarities, if he had any, were to pass unremarked.
With the completion of the dam so near at hand, neither of the two young men who were responsible for the great undertaking had much time to spare for extraneous things. But Gardiner asked little of his secondary hosts; and presently the thin, angular figure prowling and tapping at the rocks became a familiar sight in the busy construction camp. It was Lamoine, the camp jester, who started the story that the figure in brown canvas was a mascot, imported specially by the "boss" to hold the "hoodoo" in check until the work should be done; and thereafter the Boston professor might have chipped his specimens from the facing stones on the dam without let or hindrance.
The masons were setting the coping course on the great wall on a day when Gardiner's studious enthusiasm carried him beyond the dinner-hour at Castle 'Cadia and made him an evening guest in the engineer's adobe; and in the after-supper talk it transpired that the assistant in geology had merely snatched a meagre fortnight out of his work in the summer school, and would be leaving for home in another day or two.
Both of the young men protested their disappointment. They had been too busy to see anything of their guest in a comradely way, and they had been looking forward to the lull in the activities which would follow the opening celebration and promising themselves a more hospitable entertainment of the man who had been both Mentor and elder brother to them in the Boston years.
"You are not regretting it half as keenly as I am," the guest assured them. "Apart from losing the chance to thresh it out with you two, I have never been on more fascinatingly interesting geological ground. I could spend an entire summer among these wonderful hills of yours without exhausting their astonishing resources."
Ballard made allowances for scholastic enthusiasm. He had slighted geology for the more strictly practical studies in his college course.
"Meaning the broken formations?" he asked.
"Meaning the general topsyturvyism of all the formations. Where you might reasonably expect to find one stratum, you find others perhaps thousands of years older—or younger—in the geological chronology. I wonder you haven't galvanised a little enthusiasm over it: you discredit your alma mater and me when you regard these marvellous hills merely as convenient buttresses for your wall of masonry. And, by the way, that reminds me: neither of you two youngsters is responsible for the foundations of that dam; isn't that the fact?"
"It is," said Bromley, answering for both. Then he added that the specifications called for bed-rock, which Fitzpatrick, who had worked under Braithwaite, said had been uncovered and properly benched for the structure.
"'Bed-rock,'" said the geologist, reflectively. "That is a workman's term, and is apt to be misleading. The vital question, under such abnormal conditions as those presenting themselves in your canyon, is, What kind of rock was it?"
Bromley shook his head. "You can't prove it by me. The foundations were all in before I came on the job. But from Fitzpatrick's description I should take it to be the close-grained limestone."
"H'm," said Gardiner. "Dam-building isn't precisely in my line; but I shouldn't care to trust anything short of the granites in such a locality as this."
"You've seen something?" queried Ballard.
"Nothing immediately alarming; merely an indication of what might be. Where the river emerges from your cut-off tunnel below the dam, it has worn out a deep pit in the old bed, as you know. The bottom of this pit must, in the nature of things, be far below the foundations of the masonry. Had you thought of that?"
"I have—more than once or twice," Ballard admitted.
"Very well," continued the Master of the Rocks; "that circumstance suggests three interrogation points. Query one: How has the diverted torrent managed to dig such a deep cavity if the true primitives—your workman's 'bed-rock'—under-lie its channel cutting? Query two: What causes the curious reverberatory sound like distant thunder made by the stream as it plunges into this pit—a sound suggesting subterranean caverns? Query three—and this may be set down as the most important of the trio: Why is the detritus washed up out of this singular pot-hole a friable brown shale, quite unlike anything found higher up in the bed of the stream?"
The two young men exchanged swift glances of apprehension. "Your deductions, Professor?" asked Bromley, anxiously.
"Now you are going too fast. True science doesn't deduce: it waits until it can prove. But I might hazard a purely speculative guess. Mr. Braithwaite's foundation stratum—your contractor's 'bed-rock'—may not be the true primitive; it may in its turn be underbedded by this brown shale that the stream is washing up out of its pot-hole."
"Which brings on more talk," said Ballard, grappling thoughtfully with the new perplexities forming themselves upon Gardiner's guess.
"Decidedly, one would say. Granting my speculative answer to Query Number Three, the Arcadia Company's dam may stand for a thousand years—or it may not. Its life may possibly be determined in a single night, if by any means the water impounded above it should find its way through Fitzpatrick's 'bed-rock' to an underlying softer stratum."
Ballard's eyes were fixed upon a blue-print profile of Elbow Canyon pinned upon the wall, when he said: "If that pot-hole, or some rift similar to it, were above the dam instead of below it, for example?"
"Precisely," said the geologist. "In five minutes after the opening of such an underground channel your dam might be transformed into a makeshift bridge spanning an erosive torrent comparable in fierce and destructive energy, to nothing milder than a suddenly released Niagara."
Silence ensued, and afterward the talk drifted to other fields; was chiefly reminiscent of the younger men's university years. It was while Bromley and Gardiner were carrying the brunt of it that Ballard got up and went out. A few minutes later the out-door stillness of the night was shattered by the sharp crack of a rifle, and other shots followed in quick succession.
Bromley sprang afoot at the first discharge, but before he could reach the door of the adobe, Ballard came in, carrying a hatful of roughly crumbled brown earth. He was a little short of breath, and his eyes were flashing with excitement. Nevertheless, he was cool enough to stop Bromley's question before it could be set in words.
"It was only one of the colonel's Mexican mine guards trying a little rifle practice in the dark," he explained; and before there could be any comment: "I went out to get this, Gardiner"—indicating the hatful of earth. "It's a sample of some stuff I'd like to have you take back to Boston with you for a scientific analysis. I've got just enough of the prospector's blood in me to make me curious about it."
The geologist examined the brown earth critically; passed a handful of it through his fingers; smelled it; tasted it.
"How much have you got of this?" he asked, with interest palpably aroused.
"Enough," rejoined the Kentuckian, evasively.
"Then your fortune is made, my son. This 'stuff,' as you call it, is the basis of Colonel Craigmile's millions. I hope your vein isn't a part of his."
Again Ballard evaded the implied question. "What do you know about it, Gardiner? Have you ever seen any of it before?"
"I have, indeed. More than that, I have 'proved up' on it, as your Western miners say of their claims. A few evenings ago we were talking of expert analyses—the colonel and young Wingfield and I—up at the house of luxuries, and the colonel ventured to wager that he could stump me; said he could give me a sample of basic material carrying fabulous values, the very name of which I wouldn't be able to tell him after the most exhaustive laboratory tests. Of course, I had to take him up—if only for the honour of the Institute—and the three of us went down to his laboratory. The sample he gave me was some of this brown earth."
"And you analysed it?" inquired Ballard with eagerness unconcealed.
"I did; and won a box of the colonel's high-priced cigars, for which, unhappily, I have no possible use. The sample submitted, like this in your hat, was zirconia; the earth-ore which carries the rare metal zirconium. Don't shame me and your alma mater by saying that this means nothing to you."
"You've got us down," laughed Bromley. "It's only a name to me; the name of one of the theoretical metals cooked up in laboratory experiments. And I venture to say it is even less than that to Breckenridge."
"It is a very rare metal, and up to within a few years has never been found in a natural state or produced in commercial quantities," explained the analyst, mounting and riding his hobby with apparent zest. "A refined product of zirconia, the earth itself, has been used to make incandescent gas-mantles; and it was M. Léoffroy, of Paris, who discovered a method of electric-furnace reduction for isolating the metal. It was a great discovery. Zirconium, which is exceedingly dense and practically irreducible by wear, is supplanting iridium for the pointing of gold pens, and its value for that purpose is far in excess of any other known substance."
"But Colonel Craigmiles never ships anything from his mine, so far as any one can see," Ballard cut in.
"No? It isn't necessary. He showed us his reduction-plant—run by water-power from the little dam in the upper canyon. It is quite perfect. You will understand that the actual quantity of zirconium obtained is almost microscopic; but since it is worth much more than diamonds, weight for weight, the plant needn't be very extensive. And the fortunate miner in this instance is wholly independent of the transportation lines. He can carry his output to market in his vest pocket."
After this, the talk, resolutely shunted by Ballard, veered aside from Arcadian matters. Later on, when Bromley was making up a shake-down bed in the rear room for the guest, the Kentuckian went out on the porch to smoke. It was here that Bromley found him after the Bostonian had been put to bed.
"Now, then, I want to know where you got that sample, Breckenridge?" he demanded, without preface.
Ballard's laugh was quite cheerful.
"I stole it out of one of the colonel's ore bins at the entrance of the mine over yonder."
"I thought so. And the shots?"
"They were fired at me by one of the Mexican night guards, of course. One of them hit the hat as I was running away, and I was scared stiff for fear Gardiner's sharp old eyes would discover the hole. I'm right glad for one thing, Loudon; and that is that the mine is really a mine. Sometimes I've been tempted to suspect that it was merely a hole in the ground, designed and maintained purely for the purpose of cinching the Arcadia Company for damages."
Bromley sat up straight and his teeth came together with a little click. He was remembering the professor's talk about the underlying shales, and a possible breach into them above the dam when he said: "Or to—" but the sentence was left unfinished. Instead, he fell to reproaching Ballard for his foolhardiness.
"Confound you, Breckenridge! you haven't sense enough to stay in the house when it's raining out-of-doors! The idea of your taking such reckless chances on a mere whiff of curiosity! Let me have a pipeful of that tobacco—unless you mean to hog that, too—along with all the other risky things."
Thefête champêtre, as President Pelham named it in the trumpet-flourish of announcement, to celebrate the laying of the final stone of the great dam at the outlet of Elbow Canyon, anticipated the working completion of the irrigation system by some weeks. That the canals were not yet in readiness to furnish water to the prospective farmer really made little difference. The spectacular event was the laying of the top-stone; and in the promoter's plans a well-arranged stage-effect was of far greater value than any actual parcelling out of the land to intended settlers.
Accordingly, no effort was spared to make the celebration an enthusiastic success. For days before the auspicious one on which the guest trains began to arrive from Alta Vista and beyond, the camp force spent itself in setting the scene for the triumph. The spillway gate, designed to close the cut-off tunnel and so to begin the impounding of the river, was put in place ready to be forced down by its machinery; the camp mesa was scraped and raked and cleared of the industrial litter; a platform was erected for the orators and the brass band; a towering flagstaff—this by the express direction of the president—was planted in the middle of the mesa parade ground; and with the exception of camp cook Garou, busy with a small army of assistants over the barbecue pits, the construction force was distributed among the camps on the canals—this last a final touch of Mr. Pelham's to secure the degree of exclusiveness for the celebration which might not have been attainable in the presence of an outnumbering throng of workmen.
In the celebration proper the two engineers had an insignificant part. When the trains were in and side-tracked, and the working preliminaries were out of the way, the triumphal programme, as it had been outlined in a five-page letter from the president to Ballard, became automatic, moving smoothly from number to number as a well-designed masterpiece of the spectacular variety should. There were no hitches, no long waits for the audience. Mr. Pelham, carrying his two-hundred-odd pounds of avoirdupois as jauntily as the youngest promoter of them all, was at once the genial host, the skilful organiser, prompter, stage-manager, chorus-leader; playing his many parts letter-perfect, and never missing a chance to gain a few more notches on the winding-winch of enthusiasm.
While the band and the orators were alternating, Ballard and Bromley, off duty for the time, lounged on the bungalow porch awaiting their cue. There had been no awkward happenings thus far. The trains had arrived on time; the carefully staged spectacle was running like a well-oiled piece of mechanism; the August day, despite a threatening mass of storm cloud gathering on the distant slopes of the background mountain range, was perfect; and, thanks to Mr. Pelham's gift of leadership, the celebrators had been judiciously wrought up to the pitch at which everything was applauded and nothing criticised. Hence, there was no apparent reason for Ballard's settled gloom; or for Bromley's impatience manifesting itself in sarcastic flings at the company's secretary, an ex-politician of the golden-tongued tribe, who was the oratorical spellbinder of the moment.
"For Heaven's sake! will he never saw it off and let us get that stone set?" gritted the assistant, when the crowd cheered, and the mellifluous flood, checked for the applausive instant, poured steadily on. "Why in the name of common sense did Mr. Pelham want to spring this batch of human phonographs on us!"
"The realities will hit us soon enough," growled Ballard, whose impatience took the morose form. Then, with a sudden righting of his tilted camp-stool: "Good Lord, Loudon! Look yonder—up the canyon!"
The porch outlook commanded a view of the foothill canyon, and of a limited area of the bowl-shaped upper valley. At the canyon head, and on the opposite side of the river, three double-seated buckboards were wheeling to disembark their passengers; and presently the Castle 'Cadia house-party, led by Colonel Craigmiles himself, climbed the left-hand path to the little level space fronting the mysterious mine.
"By Jove!" gasped Bromley; "I nearly had a fit—I thought they were coming over here. Now what in the name of——"
"It's all right," cut in Ballard, irritably. "Why shouldn't the colonel want to be present at his own funeral? And you needn't be afraid of their coming over here. The colonel wouldn't wipe his feet on that mob of money-hunters around the band-stand. See; they are making a private box of the mine entrance."
The remark framed itself upon the fact. At the colonel's signal the iron-bound tunnel door had swung open, and Wingfield and Blacklock, junior, with the help of the buckboard drivers, were piling timbers on the little plateau for the party's seating.
It was Colonel Craigmiles's own proposal, this descent upon the commercial festivities at the dam; and Elsa had yielded only after exhausting her ingenuity in trying to defeat it. She had known in advance that it could not be defeated. For weeks her father's attitude had been explainable only upon a single hypothesis; one which she had alternately accepted and rejected a hundred times during the two years of dam-building; and this excursion was less singular than many other consequences of the mysterious attitude.
She was recalling the mysteries as she sat on the pile of timbers with Wingfield, hearing but not heeding the resounding periods of the orator across the narrow chasm. With the inundation of the upper valley an impending certainty, measurable by weeks and then by days, and now by hours, nothing of any consequence had been done at Castle 'Cadia by way of preparing for it. Coming down early one morning to cut flowers for the breakfast-table, she had found two men in mechanics' overclothes installing a small gasolene electric plant near the stables; this, she supposed, was for the house-lighting when the laboratory should be submerged. A few days later she had come upon Otto, the chauffeur, building a light rowboat in a secluded nook in the upper canyon.
But beyond these apparently trivial precautions, nothing had been done, and her father had said no word to her or to the guests of what was to be done when the closed-in valley should become a lake with Castle 'Cadia for its single island. Meanwhile, the daily routine of the country house had gone on uninterruptedly; and once, when Mrs. Van Bryck had asked her host what would happen when the floods came, Elsa had heard her father laughingly assure his guest in the presence of the others that nothing would happen.
That Wingfield knew more than these surface indications could tell the keenest observer, Elsa was well convinced; how much more, she could only guess. But one thing was certain: ever since the day spent with Ballard and Bromley and Jerry Blacklock at the construction camp—the day of his narrow escape from death—the playwright had been a changed man; cynical, ill at ease, or profoundly abstracted by turns, and never less companionable than at the present moment while he sat beside her on the timber balk, scowling up and across at the band-stand, at the spellbound throng ringing it in, and at the spellbinding secretary shaming the pouring torrent in the ravine below with his flood of rhetoric.
"What sickening rot!" he scoffed in open disgust. And then: "It must be delightfully comforting to Ballard and Bromley to have that wild ass of the market-place braying over their work! Somebody ought to hit him."
But the orator was preparing to do a little of the hitting, himself. The appearance of the party at the mine entrance had not gone unremarked, and the company's secretary recognised the company's enemy at a glance. He was looking over the heads of the celebrators and down upon the group on the opposite side of the narrow chasm when he said:
"So, ladies and gentlemen, this great project, in the face of the most obstinate, and, I may say, lawless, opposition; in spite of violence and petty obstruction on the part of those who would rejoice, even to-day, in its failure; this great work has been carried on to its triumphant conclusion, and we are gathered here on this beautiful morning in the bright sunshine and under the shadow of these magnificent mountains to witness the final momentous act which shall add the finishing stone to this grand structure; a structure which shall endure and subserve its useful and fructifying purpose so long as these mighty mountains rear their snowy heads to look down in approving majesty upon a desert made fair and beautiful by the hand of man."
Hand-clappings, cheers, a stirring of the crowd, and the upstarting of the brass band climaxed the rhetorical peroration, and Elsa glanced anxiously over her shoulder. She knew her father's temper and the fierce quality of it when the provocation was great enough to arouse it; but he was sitting quietly between Dosia and Madge Cantrell, and the publicly administered affront seemed to have missed him.
When the blare of brass ceased, the mechanical part of the spectacle held the stage for a few brief minutes. The completing stone was carefully toggled in the grappling-hooks of the derrick-fall, and at Ballard's signal the hoisting engine coughed sharply, besprinkling the spectators liberally with a shower of cinders, the derrick-boom swung around, and the stone was lowered cautiously into its place.
With a final rasping of trowels, the workmen finished their task, and Ballard walked out upon the abutment and laid his hand on the wheel controlling the drop-gate which would cut off the escape of the river through the outlet tunnel. There was a moment of impressive silence, and Elsa held her breath. The day, the hour, the instant which her father had striven so desperately to avert had come. Would it pass without its tragedy?
She saw Ballard give the last searching glance at the gate mechanism; saw President Pelham step out to give the signal. Then there was a stir in the group behind her, and she became conscious that her father was on his feet; that his voice was dominating the droning roar of the torrent and the muttering of the thunder on the far-distant heights.
"Mistuh-uh Pelham—and you otheh gentlemen of the Arcadia Company—you have seen fit to affront me, suhs, in the most public manneh, befo' the members of my family and my guests. This was youh privilege, and you have used it acco'ding to youh gifts. Neve'theless, it shall not be said that I failed in my neighbo'ly duty at this crisis. Gentlemen, when you close that gate——"
The president turned impatiently and waved his hand to Ballard. The band struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," a round ball of bunting shot to the top of the flagstaff over the band-stand and broke out in a broad flag, and Elsa saw the starting-wheel turning slowly under Ballard's hand. The clapping and cheering and the band clamour drowned all other sounds; and the colonel's daughter, rising to stand beside Wingfield, felt rather than heard the jarring shock of a near-by explosion punctuating the plunge of the great gate as it was driven down by the geared power-screws.
What followed passed unnoticed by the wildly cheering spectators crowding the canyon brink to see the foaming, churning torrent recoil upon itself and beat fiercely upon the lowered gate and the steep-sloped wall of the dam's foundation courses. But Elsa saw Ballard start as from the touch of a hot iron; saw Bromley run out quickly to lay hold of him. Most terrible of all, she turned swiftly to see her father coming out of the mine entrance with a gun in his hands—saw and understood.
It was Wingfield, seeing all that she saw and understanding quite as clearly, who came to her rescue at a moment when the bright August sunshine was filling with dancing black motes for her.
"Be brave!" he whispered. "See—he isn't hurt much: he has let go of the wheel, and Bromley is only steadying him a bit." And then to the others, with his habitual air of bored cheerfulness: "The show is over, good people, and the water is rising to cut us off from luncheon. Sound the retreat, somebody, and let's mount and ride before we get wet feet."
A movement toward the waiting vehicles followed, and at the facing about Elsa observed that her father hastily flung the rifle into the mine tunnel-mouth; and had a fleeting glimpse of Ballard and Bromley walking slowly arm-in-arm toward the mesa shore along the broad coping of the abutment.
At the buckboards Wingfield stood her friend again. "Send Jerry Blacklock down to see how serious it is," he suggested, coming between her and the others; and while she was doing it, he held the group for a final look down the canyon at the raging flood still churning and leaping at its barriers like some sentient wild thing trapped and maddened with the first fury of restraint.
Young Blacklock made a sprinter's record on his errand and was back almost immediately. Mr. Ballard had got his arm pinched in some way at the gate-head, he reported: it was nothing serious, and the Kentuckian sent word that he was sorry that the feeding of the multitude kept him from saying so to Miss Elsa in person. Elsa did not dare to look at Wingfield while Blacklock was delivering his message; and in the buckboard-seating for the return to Castle 'Cadia, she contrived to have Bigelow for her companion.
It was only a few minutes after Jerry Blacklock had raced away up the canyon path with his message of reassurance that Bromley, following Ballard into the office room of the adobe bungalow and locking the door, set to work deftly to dress and bandage a deep bullet-crease across the muscles of his chief's arm; a wound painful enough, but not disabling.
"Well, what do you think now, Breckenridge?" he asked, in the midst of the small surgical service.
"I haven't any more thinks coming to me," was the sober reply. "And it is not specially comforting to have the old ones confirmed. You are sure it was the colonel who fired at me?"
"I saw the whole thing; all but the actual trigger-pulling, you might say. When Mr. Pelham cut him off, he turned and stepped back into the mouth of the mine. Then, while they were all standing up to see you lower the gate, I heard the shot and saw him come out with the gun in his hands. I was cool enough that far along to take in all the little details: the gun was a short-barrelled Winchester—the holster-rifle of the cow-punchers."
"Ouch!" said Ballard, wincing under the bandaging. Then: "The mysteries have returned, Loudon; we were on the wrong track—all of us. Wingfield and you and I had figured out that the colonel was merely playing a cold-blooded game for delay. That guess comes back to us like a fish-hook with the bait gone. There was nothing, less than nothing, to be gained by killing me to-day."
Bromley made the negative sign of assenting perplexity.
"It's miles too deep for me," he admitted. "Three nights ago, when I was dining at Castle 'Cadia, Colonel Craigmiles spoke of you as a father might speak of the man whom he would like to have for a son-in-law: talked about the good old gentlemanly Kentucky stock, and all that, you know. I can't begin to sort it out."
"I am going to sort it out, some day when I have time," declared Ballard; and the hurt being temporarily repaired, they went out to superintend the arrangements for feeding the visiting throng in the big mess-tent.
After the barbecue, and more speech-making around the trestle-tables in the mess-tent, the railroad trains were brought into requisition, and various tours of inspection through the park ate out the heart of the afternoon for the visitors. Bromley took charge of that part of the entertainment, leaving Ballard to nurse his sore arm and to watch the slow submersion of the dam as the rising flood crept in little lapping waves up the sloping back-wall.
The afternoon sun beat fiercely upon the deserted construction camp, and the heat, rarely oppressive in the mountain-girt altitudes, was stifling. Down in the cook camp, Garou and his helpers were washing dishes by the crate and preparing the evening luncheon to be served after the trains returned; and the tinkling clatter of china was the only sound to replace the year-long clamour of the industries and the hoarse roar of the river through the cut-off.
Between his occasional strolls over to the dam and the canyon brink to mark the rising of the water, Ballard sat on the bungalow porch and smoked. From the time-killing point of view the great house in the upper valley loomed in mirage-like proportions in the heat haze; and by three o'clock the double line of aspens marking the river's course had disappeared in a broad band of molten silver half encircling the knoll upon which the mirage mansion swayed and shimmered.
Ballard wondered what the house-party was doing; what preparations, if any, had been made for its dispersal. For his own satisfaction he had carefully run bench-levels with his instruments from the dam height through the upper valley. When the water should reach the coping course, some three or four acres of the house-bearing knoll would form an island in the middle of the reservoir lake. The house would be completely cut off, the orchards submerged, and the nearest shore, that from which the roundabout road approached, would be fully a half-mile distant, with the water at least ten feet deep over the raised causeway of the road itself.
Surely the colonel would not subject his guests to the inconvenience of a stay at Castle 'Cadia when the house would be merely an isolated shelter upon an island in the middle of the great lake, Ballard concluded; and when the mirage effect cleared away to give him a better view, he got out the field-glass and looked for some signs of the inevitable retreat.
There were no signs, so far as he could determine. With the help of the glass he could pick out the details of the summer afternoon scene on the knoll-top; could see that there were a number of people occupying the hammocks and lazy-chairs under the tree-pillared portico; could make out two figures, which he took to be Bigelow and one of the Cantrell sisters, strolling back and forth in a lovers' walk under the shade of the maples.
It was all very perplexing. The sweet-toned little French clock on its shelf in the office room behind him had struck three, and there were only a few more hours of daylight left in Castle 'Cadia's last day as a habitable dwelling. And yet, if he could trust the evidence of his senses, the castle's garrison was making no move to escape: this though the members of it must all know that the rising of another sun would see their retreat cut off by the impounded flood.
After he had returned the field-glass to its case on the wall of the office the ticking telegraph instrument on Bromley's table called him, signing "E—T," the end-of-track on the High Line Extension. It was Bromley, wiring in to give the time of the probable return of the excursion trains for Garou's supper serving.
"How are you getting on?" clicked Ballard, when the time had been given.
"Fine," was the answer. "Everything lovely, and the goose honks high. Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs are surrounding Mr. Pelham on the canal embankment and singing 'For he's a jolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we're all hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."
After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of the deserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of a furnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when the declining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the little mesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.
Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flow of the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel was laid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurity of the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newly turned leaf in the record of the great chasm.
What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed was more instructive than reassuring. The great pit described by Gardiner was still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, and the cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent was alarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of the stream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off in all directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, and which formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined and tunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a huge hollow tooth.
The extreme length of the underground passage was a scant five hundred feet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts—possible only after he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubber thigh-boots—the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to the great stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here the burden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or less running water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leak around the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.
"That settles it," he mused gloomily. "It is seeping through this ghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with the concrete mixers—and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaite was thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compost heaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."
The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched western horizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns. There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, and he was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At a conservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollars must be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and in plugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any one of the ninety days the water might find its increasing way through the "compost heap"; whereupon the devastating end would come swiftly.
It was disheartening from every point of view. Ballard knew nothing of the financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdly that Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could not be seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for the safety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, the work must be done. Otherwise——
The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the harassed scowl when Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.
"The grouch is all yours," said the cheerful one, comfortingly, "and you have a good right and title to it. It's been a hard day for you. Is the arm hurting like sin?"
"No; not more than it has to. But something else is. Listen, Bromley." And he briefed the story of the hollow-tooth promontory for the assistant.
"Great ghosts!—worse and more of it!" was Bromley's comment. Then he added: "I've seen a queer thing, too, Breckenridge: the colonel has moved out, vanished, taken to the hills."
"Out of Castle 'Cadia? You're mistaken. There is absolutely nothing doing at the big house: I've been reconnoitring with the glass."
"No, I didn't mean that," was the qualifying rejoinder. "I mean the ranch outfit down in the Park. It's gone. You know the best grazing at this time of the year is along the river: well, you won't find hair, hoof or horn of the colonel's cattle anywhere in the bottom lands—not a sign of them. Also, the ranch itself is deserted and the corrals are all open."
The harassed scowl would have taken on other added lines if there had been room for them.
"What do you make of it, Loudon?—what does it mean?"
"You can search me," was the puzzled reply. "But while you're doing it, you can bet high that it means something. To a man up a tall tree it looks as if the colonel were expecting a flood. Why should he expect it? What does he know?—more than we know?"
"It's another of the cursed mysteries," Ballard broke out in sullen anger. "It's enough to jar a man's sanity!"
"Mine was screwed a good bit off its base a long time ago," Bromley confessed. Then he came back to the present and its threatenings: "I'd give a month's pay if we had this crazy city crowd off of our hands and out of the Park."
"We'll get rid of it pretty early. I've settled that with Mr. Pelham. To get his people back to Denver by breakfast-time to-morrow, the trains will have to leave here between eight and eight-thirty."
"That is good news—as far as it goes. Will you tell Mr. Pelham about the rotten tooth—to-night, I mean?"
"I certainly shall," was the positive rejoinder; and an hour later, when the evening luncheon in the big mess-tent had been served, and the crowd was gathered on the camp mesa to wait for the fireworks, Ballard got the president into the bungalow office, shut the door on possible interruptions, and laid bare the discouraging facts.
Singularly enough, as he thought, the facts seemed to make little impression upon the head of Arcadia Irrigation. Mr. Pelham sat back in Macpherson's home-made easy-chair, relighted his cigar, and refused to be disturbed or greatly interested. Assuming that he had not made the new involvement plain enough, Ballard went over the situation again.
"Another quarter of a million will be needed," he summed up, "and we shouldn't lose a single day in beginning. As I have said, there seems to be considerable seepage through the hill already, with less than half of the working head of water behind the dam. What it will be under a full head, no man can say."
"Oh, I don't know," said the president, easily. "A new boat always leaks a little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a few days—or weeks."
"That is a possibility," granted the engineer; "but it is scarcely one upon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of the company said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under the lower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; that settlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not be done, Mr. Pelham."
"Why not?"
"Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before we have filled that hollow tooth would take his life in his hands."
The president's smile was blandly genial.
"You've been having a pretty strenuous day of it, Mr. Ballard, and I can make allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a good night's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how you came to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?"
"The arm is all right," said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort to change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog tenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to the original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?"
The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.
"Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake—or Mr. Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were you."
"Not mention it?—to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully——"
"Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host——"
Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of thefête champêtre.
"It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans. You don't care to go to the foot of the pass with one of the trains, do you?"
"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is filling, and I'm the one."
"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the first section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Then he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelham take the new grief?"
"He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you, there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish."
Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.
"I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day," he averred. "I'll tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been busy making stock transfers all day—when he wasn't spellbinding from some platform or other. There is something doing—something that the baa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring are doing it."
Ballard got up and went to the door with the assistant.
"And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon," he said, with an air of sudden and vehement conviction. "This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's a stock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollow tooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'll never get orders to plug that tunnel!"
Bromley nodded agreement. "I've been working my way around to that, too. All right; so let it be. My resignation goes in to-morrow morning, and I take it yours will?"
"It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off short with Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuade you to go over the pass. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep you can."
Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlight on the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw the twinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.
"Good-by, Mr. Howard Pelham. I shouldn't be shocked speechless if you never came back to Arcadia," he muttered, apostrophising the departing president of Arcadia Irrigation. Then he put away the business entanglement and let his gaze wander in the opposite direction; toward the great house in the upper valley.
At the first eastward glance he sprang up with an exclamation of astonishment. The old king's palace was looming vast in the moonlight, with a broad sea of silver to take the place of the brown valley level in the bridging of the middle distance. But the curious thing was the lights, unmistakable electrics, as aforetime, twinkling through the tree-crownings of the knoll.
The Kentuckian left the porch and went to the edge of the mesa cliff to look down upon the flood, rising now by imperceptible gradations as the enlarging area of the reservoir lake demanded more water. The lapping tide was fully half way up the back wall of the dam, which meant that the colonel's power plant at the mouth of the upper canyon must be submerged past using. Yet the lights were on at Castle 'Cadia.
While he was speculating over this new mystery, the head-lamps of an automobile came in sight on the roundabout road below the dam, and presently a huge tonneau car, well filled, rolled noiselessly over the plank bridge and pointed its goblin eyes up the incline leading to the camp mesa. When it came to a stand at the cliff's edge, Ballard saw that it held Mrs. Van Bryck, Bigelow, and one of the Cantrell girls in the tonneau; and that Elsa was sharing the driving-seat with young Blacklock.
"Good evening, Mr. Ballard," said a voice from the shared half of the driving-seat. And then: "We are trying out the new car—isn't it a beauty?—and we decided to make a neighbourly call. Aren't you delighted to see us? Please say you are, anyway. It is the least you can do."
The little French office clock—Bromley's testimonial from his enthusiastic and admiring classmates of theÉcole Polytechnique—had chimed the hour of ten; the August moon rose high in a firmament of infinite depths above the deserted bunk shanties and the silent machinery on the camp mesa; the big touring car, long since cooled from its racing climb over the hills of the roundabout road, cast a grotesque and fore-shortened shadow like that of a dwarfed band-wagon on the stone-chip whiteness of the cutting yard; and still the members of the auto party lingered on the porch of the adobe bungalow.
For Ballard, though he was playing the part of the unprepared host, the prolonged stay of the Castle-'Cadians was an unalloyed joy. When he had established Mrs. Van Bryck in the big easy-chair, reminiscent of Engineer Macpherson and his canny skill with carpenter's tools, and had dragged out the blanket-covered divan for Miss Cantrell and Bigelow, he was free. And freedom, at that moment, meant the privilege of sitting a little apart on the porch step with Elsa Craigmiles.
For the first time in weeks the Kentuckian was able to invite his soul and to think and speak in terms of comfortable unembarrassment. The long strain of the industrial battle was off, and Mr. Pelham's triumphal beating of drums had been accomplished without loss of life, and with no more serious consequences than a lamed arm for the man who was best able to keep his own counsel. Having definitely determined to send in his resignation in the morning, and thus to avoid any possible entanglement which might arise when the instability of the great dam's foundations should become generally known, the burden of responsibility was immeasurably lightened. And to cap the ecstatic climax in its sentimental part, Elsa's mood was not mocking; it was sympathetic to a heart-mellowing degree.
One thing only sounded a jarring note in the soothing theme. That was young Blacklock's very palpable anxiety and restlessness. When the collegian had placed the big car, and had stopped its motor and extinguished its lights, he had betaken himself to the desert of stone chips, rambling therein aimlessly, but never, as Ballard observed, wandering out of eye-reach of the great gray wall of masonry, of the growing lake in the crooking elbow of the canyon, and the path-girted hillside of the opposite shore. Blacklock's too ostentatious time-killing was the latest of the small mysteries; and when the Kentuckian came to earth long enough to remark it, he fancied that Jerry was waiting for a cue of some kind—waiting and quite obviously watching.
It was some time after Mrs. Van Bryck, plaintively protesting against being kept out so late, had begun to doze in her chair, and Bigelow had fetched wraps from the car wherewith to cloak a shuddery Miss Cantrell, that Ballard's companion said, guardedly: "Don't you think it would be in the nature of a charity to these two behind us if we were to share Jerry's wanderings for a while?"
"I'm not sharing with Jerry—or any other man—just now," Ballard objected. None the less, he rose and strolled with her across the stone yard; and at the foot of the great derrick he pulled out one of the cutter's benches for a seat. "This is better than the porch step," he was saying, when Blacklock got up from behind a rejected thorough-stone a few yards away and called to him.
"Just a minute, Mr. Ballard: I've got a corking big rattler under this rock. Bring a stick, if you can find one."
Ballard found a stick and went to the help of the snake-catcher.
"Don't give him a chance at you, Jerry," he warned. "Where is he?"
The collegian drew him around to the farther side of the great thorough-block.
"It was only a leg-pull," was the low-toned explanation. "I've been trying all evening to get a word with you, and I had to invent the snake. Wingfield says we're all off wrong on the mystery chase—'way off. You're to watch the dam—that's what he told me to tell you; watch it close till he comes down here from Castle 'Cadia."
"Watch the dam?" queried the engineer. "What am I to look for?"
"I don't know another blessed thing about it. But there's something doing; something bigger than—'sh! Miss Elsa's asking about the snake. Cut it out—cut it all out!"
"It was a false alarm," Ballard explained, when he rejoined his companion at the derrick's foot. "Jerry has an aggravated attack of imaginationitis. You were saying——?"
"I wasn't saying anything; but I shall begin now—if you'll sit down. You must be dying to know why we came down here to-night, of all the nights that ever were; and why we are staying so long past our welcome."
"I never felt less like dying since the world began; and you couldn't outstay your welcome if you should try," he answered, out of a full heart. "My opportunities to sit quietly in blissful nearness to you haven't been so frequent that I can afford to spoil this one with foolish queryings about the whys and wherefores."
"Hush!" she broke in imperatively. "You are saying light things again in the very thick of the miseries! Have you forgotten that to-day—a few hours ago—another attempt was made upon your life?"
"No; I haven't forgotten," he admitted.
"Be honest with me," she insisted. "You are not as indifferent as you would like to have me believe. Do you know who made the attempt?"
"Yes." He answered without realising that the single word levelled all the carefully raised barriers of concealment; and when the realisation came, he could have bitten his tongue for its incautious slip.
"Then you doubtless know who is responsible for all the terrible happenings; the—thecrimes?"
Denial was useless now, and he said "Yes," again.
"How long have you known this?"
"I have suspected it almost from the first."
She turned upon him like some wild creature at bay.
"Why are you waiting? Why haven't you had him arrested and tried and condemned, like any other common murderer?"
He regarded her gravely, as the hard, white moonlight permitted. No man ever plumbs a woman's heart in its ultimate depths; least of all the heart of the woman he knows best and loves most.
"You seem to overlook the fact that I am his daughter's lover," he said, as if the simple fact settled the matter beyond question.
"And you have never sought for an explanation?—beyond the one which would stamp him as the vilest, the most inhuman of criminals?" she went on, ignoring his reason for condoning the crimes.
"I have; though quite without success, I think—until to-day."
"But to-day?" she questioned, anxiously, eagerly.
He hesitated, picking and choosing among the words. And in the end he merely begged her to help him. "To-day, hope led me over into the valley of a great shadow. Tell me, Elsa, dear: is your father always fully accountable for his actions?"
Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and there were tense lines of suffering about the sweet mouth.
"You have guessed the secret—my secret," she said, with the heart-break in her tone. And then: "Oh, you don't know, you can't imagine, what terrible agonies I have endured: and alone, always alone!"
"Tell me," he commanded lovingly. "I have a good right to know."
"The best right of all: the right of a patient and loving friend." She stopped, and then went on in the monotone of despair: "It is in the blood—a dreadful heritage. Do you—do you know how your father died, Breckenridge?"
"Not circumstantially; in an illness, I have been told. I was too young to know anything more than I was told; too young to feel the loss. Did some one tell me it was a fever?"
"It was not a fever," she said sorrowfully. "He was poisoned—by a horrible mistake. My father and his brother Abner were practising physicians in Lexington, your old home and ours; both of them young, ardent and enthusiastic in their profession. Uncle Abner was called to prescribe for your father—his life-long friend—in a trivial sickness. By some frightful mistake, the wrong drug was given and your father died. Poor Uncle Abner paid for it with his reason, and, a few months later, with his own life. And a little while after his brother's death in the asylum, Father threw up his practice and his profession, and came here to bury himself in Arcadia."
The Kentuckian remembered Colonel Craigmiles's sudden seizure at his first sight of the dead Ballard's son, and saw the pointing of it. Nevertheless, he said, soberly: "That proves nothing, you know."
"Nothing of itself, perhaps. But it explains all the fearful things I have seen with my own eyes. Two years ago, after the trouble with Mr. Braithwaite, father seemed to change. He became bitterly vindictive against the Arcadia Company, and at times seemed to put his whole soul into the fight against it. Then the accidents began to happen, and—oh, I can't tell you the dreadful things I have seen, or the more dreadful ones I have suspected! I have watched him—followed him—when he did not suspect it. After dinner, the night you arrived, he left us all on the portico at Castle 'Cadia, telling me that he was obliged to come down here to the mine. Are you listening?"
"You needn't ask that: please go on."
"I thought it very strange; that he would let even a business errand take him away from us on our first evening; and so I—I made an excuse to the others and followed him. Breckenridge, I saw him throw the stone from the top of that cliff—the stone that came so near killing you or Mr. Bromley, or both of you."
There had been a time when he would have tried to convince her that she must doubt the evidence of her own senses; but now it was too late: that milestone had been passed in the first broken sentence of her pitiful confession.
"There was no harm done, that time," he said, groping loyally for the available word of comforting.
"It was God's mercy," she asserted. "But listen again: that other night, when Mr. Bromley was hurt ... After you had gone with the man who came for you, I hurried to find my father, meaning to ask him to send Otto in the little car to see if there was anything we could do. Aunt June said that father was lying down in the library: he was not there. I ran up-stairs. His coat and waistcoat were on the bed, and his mackintosh—the one he always wears when he goes out after sundown—was gone. After a little while he came in, hurriedly, secretly, and he would not believe me when I told him Mr. Bromley was hurt; he seemed to be sure it must be some one else. Then I knew. He had gone out to waylay you on your walk back to the camp, and by some means had mistaken Mr. Bromley for you."
She was in the full flood-tide of the heart-broken confession now, and in sheer pity he tried to stop her.
"Let it all go," he counselled tenderly. "What is done, is done; and now that the work here is also done, there will be no more trouble for you."
"No; I must go on," she insisted. "Since others, who have no right to know, have found out, I must tell you."
"Others?" he queried.
"Yes: Mr. Wingfield, for one. Unlike you, he has not tried to be charitable. He believes——"
"He doesn't love you as I do," Ballard interrupted quickly.
"He doesn't love me at all—that way; it's Dosia. Hadn't you suspected? That was why he joined Aunt Janet's party—to be with Dosia."
"Thus vanishes the final shadow: there is nothing to come between us now," he exulted; and his unhurt arm drew her close.
"Don't!" she shuddered, shrinking away from him. "That is the bitterest drop in the cup of misery. You refuse to think of the awful heritage I should bring you; but I think of it—day and night. When your telegram came from Boston to Mr. Lassley at New York, I was going with the Lassleys—not to Norway, but to Paris, to try to persuade Doctor Perard, the great alienist, to come over and be our guest at Castle 'Cadia. It seemed to be the only remaining hope. But when you telegraphed your changed plans, I knew I couldn't go; I knew I must come home. And in spite of all, he has tried three times to kill you. You know he must be insane; tell me you know it," she pleaded.
"Since it lifts a burden too heavy to be borne, I am very willing to believe it," he rejoined gravely. "I understand quite fully now. And it makes no difference—between us, I mean. You must not let it make a difference. Let the past be past, and let us come back to the present. Where is your father now?"
"After dinner he went with Mr. Wingfield and Otto to the upper canyon. There is a breakwater at the canyon portal which they hoped might save the power-house and laboratory from being undermined by the river, and they were going to strengthen it with bags of sand. I was afraid of what might come afterward—that you might be here alone and unsuspecting. So I persuaded Cousin Janet and the others to make up the car-party."
From where they were sitting at the derrick's foot, the great boom leaned out like a giant's arm uplifted above the canyon lake. With the moon sweeping toward the zenith, the shadow of the huge iron beam was clearly cut on the surface of the water. Ballard's eye had been mechanically marking the line of shadow and its changing position as the water level rose in the Elbow.
"The reservoir is filling a great deal faster than I supposed it would," he said, bearing his companion resolutely away from the painful things.
"There have been storms on the main range all day," was the reply. "Father has a series of electrical signal stations all along the upper canyon. He said at the dinner-table that the rise to-night promises to be greater than any we have ever seen."
Ballard came alive upon the professional side of him with a sudden quickening of the workaday faculties. With the utmost confidence in that part of the great retaining-wall for which he was personally responsible—the superstructure—he had still been hoping that the huge reservoir lake would fill normally; that the dam would not be called upon to take its enormous stresses like an engine starting under a full load. It was for this reason that he had been glad to time the closing of the spillway in August, when the flow of the river was at its minimum. But fate, the persistent ill-fortune which had dogged the Arcadian enterprise from the beginning, seemed to be gathering its forces for a final blow.
"Cloud-bursts?" he questioned. "Are they frequent in the head basin of the Boiling Water?"
"Not frequent, but very terrible when they do occur. I have seen the Elbow toss its spray to the top of this cliff—once, when I was quite small; and on that day the lower part of our valley was, for a few hours, a vast flood lake."
"Was that before or after the opening of your father's mine over yonder?" queried Ballard.
"It was after. I suppose the mine was flooded, and I remember there was no work done in it for a long time. When it was reopened, a few years ago, father had that immense bulkhead and heavy, water-tight door put in to guard against another possible flood."
Ballard made the sign of comprehension. Here was one of the mysteries very naturally accounted for. The bulkhead and iron-bound door of the zirconium mine were, indeed, fortifications; but the enemy to be repulsed was nature—not man.
"And the electric signal service system in the upper canyon is a part of the defence for the mine?" he predicated.
"Yes. It has served on two or three occasions to give timely warning so that the miners could come up and seal the door in the bulkhead. But it has been a long time since a cloud-burst flood has risen high enough in the Elbow to threaten the mine."
Silence supervened; the silence of the flooding moonlight, the stark hills and the gently lapping waters. Ballard's brain was busy with the newly developed responsibilities. There was a little space for action, but what could be done? In all probability the newly completed dam was about to be subjected to the supreme test, violently and suddenly applied. The alternative was to open the spillway gate, using the cut-off tunnel as a sort of safety-valve when the coming flood water should reach the Elbow.
But there were an objection and an obstacle. Now that he knew the condition of the honeycombed tunnel, Ballard hesitated to make it the raceway for the tremendously augmented torrent. And for the obstacle there was a mechanical difficulty: with the weight of the deepening lake upon it, the stop-gate could be raised only by the power-screws; and the fires were out in the engine that must furnish the power.
The Kentuckian was afoot and alert when he said: "You know the probabilities better than any of us: how much time have we before these flood tides will come down?"
She had risen to stand with him, steadying herself by the hook of the derrick-fall. "I don't know," she began; and at that instant a great slice of the zirconium mine dump slid off and settled into the eddying depths with a splash.
"It is nothing but a few more cubic yards of the waste," he said, when she started and caught her breath with a little gasp.
"Not that—but the door!" she faltered, pointing across the chasm. "It was shut when we came out here—I am positive!"
The heavy, iron-studded door in the bulkhead was open now, at all events, as they could both plainly see; and presently she went on in a frightened whisper: "Look! there is something moving—this side of the door—among the loose timbers!"
The moving object defined itself clearly in the next half-minute; for the two at the derrick-heel, and for another—young Blacklock, who was crouching behind his rejected thorough-stone directly opposite the mine entrance. It took shape as the figure of a man, slouch-hatted and muffled in a long coat, creeping on hands and knees toward the farther dam-head; creeping by inches and dragging what appeared to be a six-foot length of iron pipe. The king's daughter spoke again, and this time her whisper was full of sharp agony.
"Breckenridge!it is my father—just as I have seen him before! That thing he is dragging after him: isn't it a—merciful Heaven! he is going to blow up the dam! Oh, for pity's sake can't you think of some way to stop him?"
There are crises when the mind, acting like a piece of automatic machinery, flies from suggestion to conclusion with such facile rapidity that all the intermediate steps are slurred and effaced. Ballard marked the inching advance, realised its object and saw that he would not have time to intervene by crossing the dam, all in the same instant. Another click of the mental mechanism and the alternative suggested itself, was grasped, weighed, accepted and transmuted into action.
It was a gymnast's trick, neatly done. The looped-up derrick-fall was a double wire cable, running through a heavy iron sheave which carried the hook and grappling chains. Released from its rope lashings at the mast-heel, it would swing out and across the canyon like a monster pendulum. Ballard forgot his bandaged arm when he laid hold of the sheave-hook and slashed at the yarn seizings with his pocket-knife; was still oblivious to it when the released pendulum surged free and swept him out over the chasm.