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THE KING OF ARCADIA
BY FRANCIS LYNDE
Author of "A Romance in Transit," "The Quickening," etc.
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
1909
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published February, 1909
To my daughter Dorothea,
AMANUENSIS OF THE
LOVING HEART AND WILLING HANDS
IN ITS WRITING,
THIS BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
[Illustration: "You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a
single step ahead."]
CONTENTS
I THE CRYPTOGRAM
II THE TRIPPERS
III THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR
IV ARCADY
V "FIRE IN THE ROCK!"
VI ELBOW CANYON
VII THE POLO PLAYERS
VIII CASTLE 'CADIA
IX THE BRINK OF HAZARD
X HOSKINS'S GHOST
XI GUN PLAY
XII THE RUSTLERS
XIII THE LAW AND THE LADY
XIV THE MAXIM
XV _HOSPES ET HOSTIS_
XVI THE RETURN OF THE OMEN
XVII THE DERRICK FUMBLES
XVIII THE INDICTMENT
XIX IN THE LABORATORY
XX THE GEOLOGIST
XXI MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG
XXII A CRY IN THE NIGHT
XXIII DEEP UNTO DEEP
ILLUSTRATIONS
"You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a single step
ahead."
"Senor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
like-a-that!"
The muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathing hard, like
a spent runner.
"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play."
THE KING OF ARCADIA
I
THE CRYPTOGRAM
The strenuous rush of the day of suddenly changed plans was over, and
with Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology, to bid him God-speed,
Ballard had got as far as the track platform gates of the Boston &
Albany Station when Lassley's telegram, like a detaining hand stretched
forth out of the invisible, brought him to a stand.
He read it, with a little frown of perplexity sobering his strong,
enthusiastic face.
"_S.S. Carania_,
NEW YORK.
"_To_ BRECKENRIDGE BALLARD,
_Boston_.
"You love life and crave success. Arcadia Irrigation has killed
its originator and two chiefs of construction. It will kill
you. Let it alone.
"LASSLEY."
He signed the book, tipped the boy for his successful chase, and passed
the telegram on to Gardiner.
"If you were called in as an expert, what would you make of that?" he
asked.
The assistant professor adjusted his eye-glasses, read the message, and
returned it without suggestive comment.
"My field being altogether prosaic, I should make nothing of it. There
are no assassinations in geology. What does it mean?"
Ballard shook his head.
"I haven't the remotest idea. I wired Lassley this morning telling him
that I had thrown up the Cuban sugar mills construction to accept the
chief engineer's billet on Arcadia Irrigation. I didn't suppose he had
ever heard of Arcadia before my naming of it to him."
"I thought the Lassleys were in Europe," said Gardiner.
"They are sailing to-day in the _Carania_, from New York. My wire was to
wish them a safe voyage, and to give my prospective address. That
explains the date-line of this telegram."
"But it does not explain the warning. Is it true that the Colorado
irrigation scheme has blotted out three of its field officers?"
"Oh, an imaginative person might put it that way, I suppose," said
Ballard, his tone asserting that none but an imaginative person would be
so foolish. "Braithwaite, of the Geodetic Survey, was the originator of
the plan for constructing a storage reservoir in the upper Boiling Water
basin, and for transforming Arcadia Park into an irrigated agricultural
district. He interested Mr. Pelham and a few other Denver capitalists,
and they sent him out as chief engineer to stand the project on its
feet. Shortly after he had laid the foundations for the reservoir dam,
he fell into the Boiling Water and was drowned."
Gardiner's humour was as dry as his professional specialty. "One," he
said, checking off the unfortunate Braithwaite on his fingers.
"Then Billy Sanderson took it--you remember Billy, in my year? He made
the preliminary survey for an inlet railroad over the mountains, and put
a few more stones on Braithwaite's dam. As they say out on the Western
edge of things, Sanderson died with his boots on; got into trouble with
somebody about a camp-following woman and was shot."
"Two," checked the assistant in geology. "Who was the third?"
"An elderly, dyspeptic Scotchman named Macpherson. He took up the work
where Sanderson dropped it; built the railroad over the mountain and
through Arcadia Park to the headquarters at the dam, and lived to see
the dam itself something more than half completed."
"And what happened to Mr. Macpherson?" queried Gardiner.
"He was killed a few weeks ago. The derrick fell on him. The accident
provoked a warm discussion in the technical periodicals. A wire guy
cable parted--'rusted off,' the newspaper report said--and there was a
howl from the wire-rope makers, who protested that a rope made of
galvanised wire couldn't possibly 'rust off.'"
"Nevertheless, Mr. Macpherson was successfully killed," remarked the
professor dryly. "That would seem to be the persisting fact in the
discussion. Does none of these things move you?"
"Certainly not," returned the younger man. "I shall neither fall into
the river, nor stand under a derrick whose guy lines are unsafe."
Gardiner's smile was a mere eye wrinkle of good-natured cynicism. "You
carefully omit poor Sanderson's fate. One swims out of a torrent--if he
can--and an active young fellow might possibly be able to dodge a
falling derrick. But who can escape the toils of the woman 'whose hands
are as bands, and whose feet----'"
"Oh, piff!" said the Kentuckian; and then he laughed aloud. "There is,
indeed, one woman in the world, my dear _Herr_ Professor, for whose sake
I would joyfully stand up and be shot at; but she isn't in Colorado, by
a good many hundred miles."
"No? Nevertheless, Breckenridge, my son, there lies your best chance of
making the fourth in the list of sacrifices. You are a Kentuckian; an
ardent and chivalric Southerner. If the Fates really wish to interpose
in contravention of the Arcadian scheme, they will once more bait the
deadfall with the eternal feminine--always presuming, of course, that
there are any Fates, and that they have ordinary intelligence."
Ballard shook his head as if he took the prophecy seriously.
"I am in no danger on that score. Bromley--he was Sanderson's assistant,
and afterward Macpherson's, you know--wrote me that the Scotchman's
first general order was an edict banishing every woman from the
construction camps."
"Now, if he had only banished the derricks at the same time," commented
Gardiner reflectively. Then he added: "You may be sure the Fates will
find you an enchantress, Breckenridge; the oracles have spoken. What
would the most peerless Arcadia be without its shepherdess? But we are
jesting when Lassley appears to be very much in earnest. Could there be
anything more than coincidence in these fatalities?"
"How could there be?" demanded Ballard. "Two sheer accidents and one
commonplace tragedy, which last was the fault--or the misfortune--of
poor Billy's temperament, it appears; though he was a sober enough
fellow when he was here learning his trade. Let me prophesy awhile: I
shall live and I shall finish building the Arcadian dam. Now let us
side-track Lassley and his cryptogram and go back to what I was trying
to impress on your mind when he butted in; which is that you are not to
forget your promise to come out and loaf with me in August. You shall
have all the luxuries a construction camp affords, and you can geologise
to your heart's content in virgin soil."
"That sounds whettingly enticing," said the potential guest. "And,
besides, I am immensely interested in dams; and in wire cables that give
way at inopportune moments. If I were you, Breckenridge, I should make
it a point to lay that broken guy cable aside. It might make interesting
matter for an article in the _Engineer_; say, 'On the Effect of the
Atmosphere in High Altitudes upon Galvanised Wire.'"
Ballard paid the tributary laugh. "I believe you'd have your joke if you
were dying. However, I'll keep the broken cable for you, and the pool
where Braithwaite was drowned, and Sanderson's inamorata--only I suppose
Macpherson obliterated her at the earliest possible.... Say, by Jove!
that's my train he's calling. Good-by, and don't forget your promise."
After which, but for a base-runner's dash down the platform, Ballard
would have lost the reward of the strenuous day of changed plans at the
final moment.
II
THE TRIPPERS
It was on the Monday afternoon that Breckenridge Ballard made the
base-runner's dash through the station gates in the Boston terminal, and
stood in the rearmost vestibule of his outgoing train to watch for the
passing of a certain familiar suburb where, at the home of the
hospitable Lassleys, he had first met Miss Craigmiles.
On the Wednesday evening following, he was gathering his belongings in
the sleeper of a belated Chicago train preparatory to another dash
across platforms--this time in the echoing station at Council Bluffs--to
catch the waiting "Overland Flyer" for the run to Denver.
President Pelham's telegram, which had found him in Boston on the eve of
closing a contract with the sugar magnates to go and build refineries in
Cuba, was quite brief, but it bespoke haste:
"We need a fighting man who can build railroads and dams and
dig ditches in Arcadia. Salary satisfactory to you. Wire quick
if you can come."
This was the wording of it; and at the evening hour of train-changing in
Council Bluffs, Ballard was sixteen hundred miles on his way, racing
definitely to a conference with the president of Arcadia Irrigation in
Denver, with the warning telegram from Lassley no more than a vague
disturbing under-thought.
What would lie beyond the conference he knew only in the large. As an
industrial captain in touch with the moving world of great projects, he
was familiar with the plan for the reclamation of the Arcadian desert. A
dam was in process of construction, the waters of a mountain torrent
were to be impounded, a system of irrigating canals opened, and a
connecting link of railway built. Much of the work, he understood, was
already done; and he was to take charge as chief of construction and
carry it to its conclusion.
So much President Pelham's summons made clear. But what was the mystery
hinted at in Lassley's telegram? And did it have any connection with
that phrase in President Pelham's wire: "We need a fighting man"?
These queries, not yet satisfactorily answered, were presenting
themselves afresh when Ballard followed the porter to the section
reserved for him in the Denver sleeper. The car was well filled; and
when he could break away from the speculative entanglement long enough
to look about him, he saw that the women passengers were numerous enough
to make it more than probable that he would be asked, later on, to give
up his lower berth to one of them.
Being masculinely selfish, and a seasoned traveller withal, he was
steeling himself to say "No" to this request what time the train was
rumbling over the great bridge spanning the Missouri. The bridge passage
was leisurely, and there was time for a determined strengthening of the
selfish defenses.
But at the Omaha station there was a fresh influx of passengers for the
Denver car, and to Ballard's dismay they appeared at the first hasty
glance to be all women.
"O good Lord!" he ejaculated; and finding his pipe retreated
precipitately in the direction of the smoking-compartment, vaguely
hoping to dodge the inevitable.
At the turn around the corner of the linen locker he glanced back. Two
or three figures in the group of late comers might have asked for
recognition if he had looked fairly at them; but he had eyes for only
one: a modish young woman in a veiled hat and a shapeless gray box
travelling-coat, who was evidently trying to explain something to the
Pullman conductor.
"Jove!" he exclaimed; "if I weren't absolutely certain that Elsa
Craigmiles is half-way across the Atlantic with the Lassleys--but she
is; and if she were not, she wouldn't be here, doing the 'personally
conducted' for that mob." And he went on to smoke.
It was a very short time afterward that an apologetic Pullman conductor
found him, and the inevitable came to pass.
"This is Mr. Ballard, I believe?"
A nod, and an uphanding of tickets.
"Thank you. I don't like to discommode you, Mr. Ballard; but--er--you
have an entire section, and----"
"I know," said Ballard crisply. "The lady got on the wrong train, or she
bought the wrong kind of ticket, or she took chances on finding the
good-natured fellow who would give up his berth and go hang himself on a
clothes-hook in the vestibule. I have been there before, but I have not
yet learned how to say 'No.' Fix it up any way you please, only don't
give me an upper over a flat-wheeled truck, if you can help it."
An hour later the dining-car dinner was announced; and Ballard, who had
been poring over a set of the Arcadian maps and profiles and a thick
packet of documents mailed to intercept him at Chicago, brought up the
rear of the outgoing group from the Denver car.
In the vestibule of the diner he found the steward wrestling suavely
with a late contingent of hungry ones, and explaining that the tables
were all temporarily full. Ballard had broad shoulders and the Kentucky
stature to match them. Looking over the heads of the others, he marked,
at the farther end of the car, a table for two, with one vacant place.
"I beg your pardon--there is only one of me," he cut in; and the steward
let him pass. When he had dodged the laden waiters and was taking the
vacant seat he found himself confronting the young woman in the veiled
hat and the gray box-coat, identified her, and discovered in a
petrifying shock of astoundment that she was not Miss Elsa Craigmiles's
fancied double, but Miss Craigmiles herself.
"Why, Mr. Ballard--of all people!" she cried, with a brow-lifting of
genuine or well-assumed surprise. And then in mock consternation: "Don't
tell me that _you_ are the good-natured gentleman I drove out of his
section in the sleeping-car."
"I sha'n't; because I don't know how many more there are of me," said
Ballard. Then, astonishment demanding its due: "Did I only dream that
you were going to Europe with the Herbert Lassleys, or----"
She made a charming little face at him.
"Do you never change your plans suddenly, Mr. Ballard? Never mind; you
needn't confess: I know you do. Well, so do I. At the last moment I
begged off, and Mrs. Lassley fairly scolded. She even went so far as to
accuse me of not knowing my own mind for two minutes at a time."
Ballard's smile was almost grim.
"You have given me that impression now and then; when I wanted to be
serious and you did not. Did you come aboard with that party at Omaha?"
"Did I not? It's my--that is, it's cousin Janet Van Bryck's party; and
we are going to do Colorado this summer. Think of that as an exchange
for England and a yachting voyage to Tromsoe!"
This time Ballard's smile was affectionately cynical.
"I didn't suppose you ever forgot yourself so far as to admit that there
was any America west of the Alleghany Mountains."
Miss Elsa's laugh was one of her most effective weapons. Ballard was
made to feel that he had laid himself open at some vulnerable point,
without knowing how or why.
"Dear me!" she protested. "How long does it take you to really get
acquainted with people?" Then with reproachful demureness: "The man has
been waiting for five full minutes to take your dinner order."
One of Ballard's gifts was pertinacity; and after he had told the waiter
what to bring, he returned to her question.
"It is taking me long enough to get acquainted with you," he ventured.
"It will be two years next Tuesday since we first met at the Herbert
Lassleys', and you have been delightfully good to me, and even chummy
with me--when you felt like it. Yet do you know you have never once gone
back of your college days in speaking of yourself? I don't know to this
blessed moment whether you ever had any girlhood; and that being the
case----"
"Oh, spare me!" she begged, in well-counterfeited dismay. "One would
think----"
"One would not think anything of you that he ought not to think," he
broke in gravely; adding: "We are a long way past the Alleghanies now,
and I am glad you are aware of an America somewhat broader than it is
long. Do I know any of your sight-seers, besides Mrs. Van Bryck?"
"I don't know; I'll list them for you," she offered. "There are Major
Blacklock, United States Engineers, retired, who always says, 'H'm--ha!'
before he contradicts you; the major's nieces, Madge and Margery
Cantrell--the idea of splitting one name for two girls in the same
family!--and the major's son, Jerry, most hopeful when he is pitted
against other young savages on the football field. All strangers, so
far?"
Ballard nodded, and she went on.
"Then there are Mrs. Van Bryck and Dosia--I am sure you have met them;
and Hetty Bigelow, their cousin, twice removed, whom you have never met,
if Cousin Janet could help it; and Hetty's brother, Lucius, who is
something or other in the Forestry Service. Let me see; how many is
that?"
"Eight," said Ballard, "counting the negligible Miss Bigelow and her
tree-nursing brother."
"Good. I merely wanted to make sure you were paying attention. Last, but
by no means least, there is Mr. Wingfield--_the_ Mr. Wingfield, who
writes plays."
Without ever having been suffered to declare himself Miss Elsa's lover,
Ballard resented the saving of the playwright for the climax; also, he
resented the respectful awe, real or assumed, with which his name was
paraded.
"Let me remember," he said, with the frown reflective. "I believe it was
Jack Forsyth the last time you confided in me. Is it Mr. Wingfield now?"
"Would you listen!" she laughed; but he made quite sure there was a
blush to go with the laugh. "Do you expect me to tell you about it here
and now?--with Mr. Wingfield sitting just three seats back of me, on the
right?"
Ballard scowled, looked as directed, and took the measure of his latest
rival.
Wingfield was at a table for four, with Mrs. Van Bryck, her daughter,
and a shock-headed young man, whom Ballard took to be the
football-playing Blacklock. In defiance of the clean-shaven custom of
the moment, or, perhaps, because he was willing to individualise
himself, the playwright wore a beard closely trimmed and pointed in the
French manner; this, the quick-grasping eyes, and a certain vulpine
showing of white teeth when he laughed, made Ballard liken him to an
unnamed singer he had once heard in the part of _Mephistopheles_.
The overlooking glance necessarily included Wingfield's table
companions: Mrs. Van Bryck's high-bred contours lost in adipose; Dosia's
cool and placid prettiness--the passionless charms of unrelieved
milk-whiteness of skin and masses of flaxen hair and baby-blue eyes; the
Blacklock boy's square shoulders, heavy jaw, and rather fine eyes--which
he kept resolutely in his plate for the better part of the time.
At the next table Ballard saw a young man with the brown of an out-door
occupation richly colouring face and hands; an old one with the
contradictory "H'm--ha!" written out large in every gesture; and two
young women who looked as if they might be the sharers of the single
Christian name. Miss Bigelow, the remaining member of the party, had
apparently been lost in the dinner seating. At all events, Ballard did
not identify her.
"Well?" said Miss Craigmiles, seeming to intimate that he had looked
long enough.
"I shall know Mr. Wingfield, if I ever see him again," remarked Ballard.
"Whose guest is he? Or are you all Mrs. Van Bryck's guests?"
"What an idea!" she scoffed. "Cousin Janet is going into the absolutely
unknown. She doesn't reach even to the Alleghanies; her America stops
short at Philadelphia. She is the chaperon; but our host isn't with us.
We are to meet him in the wilds of Colorado."
"Anybody I know?" queried Ballard.
"No. And--oh, yes, I forgot; Professor Gardiner is to join us later. I
knew there must be one more somewhere. But he was an afterthought.
I--Cousin Janet, I mean--got his acceptance by wire at Omaha."
"Gardiner is not going to join you," said Ballard, with the cool
effrontery of a proved friend. "He is going to join me."
"Where? In Cuba?"
"Oh, no; I am not going to Cuba. I am going to live the simple life;
building dams and digging ditches in Arcadia."
He was well used to her swiftly changing moods. What Miss Elsa's
critics, who were chiefly of her own sex, spoke of disapprovingly as her
flightiness, was to Ballard one of her characterizing charms. Yet he was
quite unprepared for her grave and frankly reproachful question:
"Why aren't you going to Cuba? Didn't Mr. Lassley telegraph you not to
go to Arcadia?"
"He did, indeed. But what do you know about it?--if I may venture to
ask?"
For the first time in their two years' acquaintance he saw her visibly
embarrassed. And her explanation scarcely explained.
"I--I was with the Lassleys in New York, you know; I went to the steamer
to see them off. Mr. Lassley showed me his telegram to you after he had
written it."
They had come to the little coffees, and the other members of Miss
Craigmiles's party had risen and gone rearward to the sleeping-car.
Ballard, more mystified than he had been at the Boston moment when
Lassley's wire had found him, was still too considerate to make his
companion a reluctant source of further information. Moreover, Mr.
Lester Wingfield was weighing upon him more insistently than the
mysteries. In times past Miss Craigmiles had made him the target for
certain little arrows of confidence: he gave her an opportunity to do it
again.
"Tell me about Mr. Wingfield," he suggested. "Is he truly Jack Forsyth's
successor?"
"How can you question it?" she retorted gayly. "Some time--not here or
now--I will tell you all about it."
"'Some time,'" he repeated. "Is it always going to be 'some time'? You
have been calling me your friend for a good while, but there has always
been a closed door beyond which you have never let me penetrate. And it
is not my fault, as you intimated a few minutes ago. Why is it? Is it
because I'm only one of many? Or is it your attitude toward all men?"
She was knotting her veil and her eyes were downcast when she answered
him.
"A closed door? There is, indeed, my dear friend: two hands, one dead
and one still living, closed it for us. It may be opened some time"--the
phrase persisted, and she could not get away from it--"and then you will
be sorry. Let us go back to the sleeping-car. I want you to meet the
others." Then with a quick return to mockery: "Only I suppose you will
not care to meet Mr. Wingfield?"
He tried to match her mood; he was always trying to keep up with her
kaleidoscopic changes of front.
"Try me, and see," he laughed. "I guess I can stand it, if he can."
And a few minutes later he had been presented to the other members of
the sight-seeing party; had taken Mrs. Van Bryck's warm fat hand of
welcome and Dosia's cool one, and was successfully getting himself
contradicted at every other breath by the florid-faced old campaigner,
who, having been a major of engineers, was contentiously critical of
young civilians who had taken their B.S. degree otherwhere than at West
Point.
III
THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR
It was shortly after midnight when the "Overland Flyer" made its
unscheduled stop behind a freight train which was blocking the track at
the blind siding at Coyote. Always a light sleeper, Ballard was aroused
by the jar and grind of the sudden brake-clipping; and after lying awake
and listening for some time, he got up and dressed and went forward to
see what had happened.
The accident was a box-car derailment, caused by a broken truck, and the
men of both train crews were at work trying to get the disabled car back
upon the steel and the track-blocking train out of the "Flyer's" way.
Inasmuch as such problems were acutely in his line, Ballard thought of
offering to help; but since there seemed to be no special need, he sat
down on the edge of the ditch-cutting to look on.
The night was picture fine; starlit, and with the silent wideness of the
great upland plain to give it immensity. The wind, which for the first
hundred miles of the westward flight had whistled shrilly in the car
ventilators, was now lulled to a whispering zephyr, pungent with the
subtle soil essence of the grass-land spring.
Ballard found a cigar and smoked it absently. His eyes followed the
toilings of the train crews prying and heaving under the derailed car,
with the yellow torch flares to pick them out; but his thoughts were far
afield, with his dinner-table companion to beckon them.
"Companion" was the word which fitted her better than any other. Ballard
had found few men, and still fewer women, completely companionable. Some
one has said that comradeship is the true test of affinity; and the
Kentuckian remembered with a keen appreciation of the truth of this
saying a summer fortnight spent at the Herbert Lassleys' cottage on the
North Shore, with Miss Craigmiles as one of his fellow-guests.
Margaret Lassley had been kind to him on that occasion, holding the
reins of chaperonage lightly. There had been sunny afternoons on the
breezy headlands, and blood-quickening mornings in Captain Tinkham's
schooner-rigged whale-boat, when the white horses were racing across the
outer reef and the water was too rough to tempt the other members of the
house-party.
He had monopolised Elsa Craigmiles crudely during those two weeks,
glorying in her beauty, in her bright mind, in her triumphant physical
fitness. He remembered how sturdily their comradeship had grown during
the uninterrupted fortnight. He had told her all there was to tell about
himself, and in return she had alternately mocked him and pretended to
confide in him; the confidences touching such sentimental passages as
the devotion of the Toms, the Dicks, and the Harrys of her college
years.
Since he had sometimes wished to be sentimental on his own account,
Ballard had been a little impatient under these frivolous appeals for
sympathy. But there is a certain tonic for growing love even in such
bucketings of cold water as the loved one may administer in telling the
tale of the predecessor. It is a cold heart, masculine, that will not
find warmth in anything short of the ice of indifference; and whatever
her faults, Miss Elsa was never indifferent. Ballard recalled how he had
groaned under the jesting confidences. Also, he remembered that he had
never dared to repel them, choosing rather to clasp the thorns than to
relinquish the rose.
From the sentimental journey past to the present stage of the same was
but a step; but the present situation was rather perplexingly befogged.
Why had Elsa Craigmiles changed her mind so suddenly about spending the
summer in Europe? What could have induced her to substitute a summer in
Colorado, travelling under Mrs. Van Bryck's wing?
The answer to the queryings summed itself up, for the Kentuckian, in a
name--the name of a man and a playwright. He held Mr. Lester Wingfield
responsible for the changed plans, and was irritably resentful. In the
after-dinner visit with the sight-seeing party in the Pullman there had
been straws to indicate the compass-point of the wind. Elsa deferred to
Wingfield, as the other women did; only in her case Ballard was sure it
meant more. And the playwright, between his posings as a literary
oracle, assumed a quiet air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles that
was maddening.
Ballard recalled this, sitting upon the edge of the ditch-cutting in the
heart of the fragrant night, and figuratively punched Mr. Wingfield's
head. Fate had been unkind to him, throwing him thus under the wheels of
the opportune when the missing of a single train by either the
sight-seers or himself would have spared him.
Taking that view of the matter, there was grim comfort in the thought
that the mangling could not be greatly prolonged. The two orbits
coinciding for the moment would shortly go apart again; doubtless upon
the morning's arrival in Denver. It was well. Heretofore he had been
asked to sympathise only in a subjective sense. With another lover
corporeally present and answering to his name, the torture would become
objective--and blankly unendurable.
Notwithstanding, he found himself looking forward with keen desire to
one more meeting with the beloved tormentor--to a table exchange of
thoughts and speech at the dining-car breakfast which he masterfully
resolved not all the playmakers in a mumming world should forestall or
interrupt.
This determination was shaping itself in the Kentuckian's brain when,
after many futile backings and slack-takings, the ditched car was
finally induced to climb the frogs and to drop successfully upon the
rails. When the obstructing freight began to move, Ballard flung away
the stump of his cigar and climbed the steps of the first open vestibule
on the "Flyer," making his way to the rear between the sleeping
emigrants in the day-coaches.
Being by this time hopelessly wakeful, he filled his pipe and sought the
smoking-compartment of the sleeping-car. It was a measure of his
abstraction that he did not remark the unfamiliarity of the place; all
other reminders failing, he should have realised that the fat negro
porter working his way perspiringly with brush and polish paste through
a long line of shoes was not the man to whom he had given his suit-cases
in the Council Bluffs terminal.
But thinking pointedly of Elsa Craigmiles, and of the joy of sharing
another meal with her in spite of the Lester Wingfields, he saw nothing,
noted nothing; and the reverie, now frankly traversing the field of
sentiment, ran on unbroken until he became vaguely aware that the train
had stopped and started again, and that during the pause there had been
sundry clankings and jerkings betokening the cutting off of a car.
A hasty question fired at the fat porter cleared the atmosphere of
doubt.
"What station was that we just passed?"
"Short Line Junction, sah; whah we leaves the Denver cyar--yes, sah."
"What? Isn't this the Denver car?"
"No, indeed, sah. Dish yer cyar goes on th'oo to Ogden; yes, sah."
Ballard leaned back again and chuckled in ironic self-derision. He was
not without a saving sense of humour. What with midnight prowlings and
sentimental reveries he had managed to sever himself most abruptly and
effectually from his car, from his hand-baggage, from the prefigured
breakfast, with Miss Elsa for his _vis-a-vis_; and, what was of vastly
greater importance, from the chance of a day-long business conference
with President Pelham!
"Gardiner, old man, you are a true prophet; it isn't in me to think girl
and to play the great game at one and the same moment," he said,
flinging a word to the assistant professor of geology across the
distance abysses; and the fat porter said: "Sah?"
"I was just asking what time I shall reach Denver, going in by way of
the main line and Cheyenne," said Ballard, with cheerful mendacity.
"Erbout six o'clock in the evenin', sah; yes, sah. Huccome you to get
lef', Cap'n Boss?"
"I didn't get left; it was the Denver sleeper that got left," laughed
the Kentuckian. After which he refilled his pipe, wrote a telegram to
Mr. Pelham, and one to the Pullman conductor about his hand-baggage, and
resigned himself to the inevitable, hoping that the chapter of accidents
had done its utmost.
Unhappily, it had not, as the day forthcoming amply proved. Reaching
Cheyenne at late breakfast-time, Ballard found that the Denver train
over the connecting line waited for the "Overland" from the West; also,
that on this day of all days, the "Overland" was an hour behind her
schedule. Hence there was haste-making extraordinary at the end of the
Boston-Denver flight. When the delayed Cheyenne train clattered in over
the switches, it was an hour past dark. President Pelham was waiting
with his automobile to whisk the new chief off to a hurried dinner-table
conference at the Brown Palace; and what few explanations and
instructions Ballard got were sandwiched between the _consomme au
gratin_ and the dessert.
Two items of information were grateful. The Fitzpatrick Brothers,
favourably known to Ballard, were the contractors on the work; and
Loudon Bromley, who had been his friend and loyal understudy in the
technical school, was still the assistant engineer, doing his best to
push the construction in the absence of a superior.
Since the chief of any army stands or falls pretty largely by the grace
of his subordinates, Ballard was particularly thankful for Bromley. He
was little and he was young; he dressed like an exquisite, wore neat
little patches of side-whiskers, shot straight, played the violin, and
stuffed birds for relaxation. But in spite of these hindrances, or,
perhaps, because of some of them, he could handle men like a born
captain, and he was a friend whose faithfulness had been proved more
than once.
"I shall be only too glad to retain Bromley," said Ballard, when the
president told him he might choose his own assistant. And, as time
pressed, he asked if there were any other special instructions.
"Nothing specific," was the reply. "Bromley has kept things moving, but
they can be made to move faster, and we believe you are the man to set
the pace, Mr. Ballard; that's all. And now, if you are ready, we have
fifteen minutes in which to catch the Alta Vista train--plenty of time,
but none to throw away. I have reserved your sleeper."
It was not until after the returning automobile spin; after Ballard had
checked his baggage and had given his recovered suit-cases to the porter
of the Alta Vista car; that he learned the significance of the fighting
clause in the president's Boston telegram.
They were standing at the steps of the Pullman for the final word; had
drawn aside to make room for a large party of still later comers; when
the president said, with the air of one who gathers up the unconsidered
trifles:
"By the way, Mr. Ballard, you may not find it all plain sailing up
yonder. Arcadia Park has been for twenty years a vast cattle-ranch,
owned, or rather usurped, by a singular old fellow who is known as the
'King of Arcadia.' Quite naturally, he opposes our plan of turning the
park into a well-settled agricultural field, to the detriment of his
free cattle range, and he is fighting us."
"In the courts, you mean?"
"In the courts and out of them. I might mention that it was one of his
cow-men who killed Sanderson; though that was purely a personal quarrel,
I believe. The trouble began with his refusal to sell us a few acres of
land and a worthless mining-claim which our reservoir may submerge, and
we were obliged to resort to the courts. He is fighting for delay now,
and in the meantime he encourages his cow-boys to maintain a sort of
guerrilla warfare on the contractors: stealing tools, disabling
machinery, and that sort of thing. This was Macpherson's story, and I'm
passing it on to you. You are forty miles from the nearest sheriff's
office over there; but when you need help, you'll get it. Of course, the
company will back you--to the last dollar in the treasury, if
necessary."
Ballard's rejoinder was placatory. "It seems a pity to open up the new
country with a feud," he said, thinking of his native State and of what
these little wars had done for some portions of it. "Can't the old
fellow be conciliated in some way?"
"I don't know," replied the president doubtfully. "We want peaceable
possession, of course, if we can get it; capital is always on the side
of peace. In fact, we authorised Macpherson to buy peace at any price in
reason, and we'll give you the same authority. But Macpherson always
represented the old cattle king as being unapproachable on that side. On
the other hand, we all know what Macpherson was. He had a pretty rough
tongue when he was at his best; and he was in bad health for a long time
before the derrick fell on him. I dare say he didn't try diplomacy."
"I'll make love to the cow-punching princesses," laughed Ballard; "that
is, if there are any."
"There is one, I understand; but I believe she doesn't spend much of her
time at home. The old man is a widower, and, apart from his senseless
fight on the company, he appears to be--but I won't prejudice you in
advance."
"No, don't," said Ballard. "I'll size things up for myself on the
ground. I----"
The interruption was the dash of a switch-engine up the yard with
another car to be coupled to the waiting mountain line train. Ballard
saw the lettering on the medallion: "08".
"Somebody's private hotel?" he remarked.
"Yes. It's Mr. Brice's car, I guess. He was in town to-day."
Ballard was interested at once.
"Mr. Richard Brice?--the general manager of the D. & U. P.?"
The president nodded.
"That's great luck," said Ballard, warmly. "We were classmates in the
Institute, and I haven't seen him since he came West. I think I'll ride
in the Naught-eight till bedtime."
"Glad you know him," said the president. "Get in a good word for our
railroad connection with his line at Alta Vista, while you're about it.
There is your signal; good-by, and good luck to you. Don't
forget--'drive' is the word; for every man, minute, and dollar there is
in it."
Ballard shook the presidential hand and swung up to the platform of the
private car. A reluctant porter admitted him, and thus it came about
that he did not see the interior of his own sleeper until long after the
other passengers had gone to bed.
"Good load to-night, John?" he said to the porter, when, the private car
visit being ended, the man was showing him to his made-down berth.
"Yes, sah; mighty good for de branch. But right smart of dem is ladies,
and dey don't he'p de po' portah much."
"Well, I'll pay for one of them, anyway," said the Kentuckian,
good-naturedly doubling his tip. "Be sure you rout me out bright and
early; I want to get ahead of the crowd."
And he wound his watch and went to bed, serenely unconscious that the
hat upon the rail-hook next to his own belonged to Mr. Lester Wingfield;
that the hand-bags over which he had stumbled in the dimly lighted aisle
were the _impedimenta_ of the ladies Van Bryck; or that the dainty
little boots proclaiming the sex--and youth--of his fellow-traveller in
the opposite Number Six were the foot-gear of Miss Elsa Craigmiles.
IV
ARCADY
Arcadia Park, as the government map-makers have traced it, is a
high-lying, enclosed valley in the heart of the middle Rockies, roughly
circular in outline, with a curving westward sweep of the great range
for one-half of its circumscribing rampart, and the bent bow of the Elk
Mountains for the other.
Apart from storming the rampart heights, accessible only to the hardy
prospector or to the forest ranger, there are three ways of approach to
the shut-in valley: up the outlet gorge of the Boiling Water, across the
Elk Mountains from the Roaring Fork, or over the high pass in the
Continental Divide from Alta Vista.
It was from the summit of the high pass that Ballard had his first view
of Arcadia. From Alta Vista the irrigation company's narrow-gauge
railway climbs through wooded gorges and around rock-ribbed snow balds,
following the route of the old stage trail; and Ballard's introductory
picture of the valley was framed in the cab window of the locomotive
sent over by Bromley to transport him to the headquarters camp on the
Boiling Water.
In the wide prospect opened by the surmounting of the high pass there
was little to suggest the human activities, and still less to foreshadow
strife. Ballard saw a broad-acred oasis in the mountain desert, billowed
with undulating meadows, and having for its colour scheme the gray-green
of the range grasses. Winding among the billowy hills in the middle
distance, a wavering double line of aspens marked the course of the
Boiling Water. Nearer at hand the bald slopes of the Saguache pitched
abruptly to the forested lower reaches; and the path of the railway,
losing itself at the timber line, reappeared as a minute scratch scoring
the edge of the gray-green oasis, to vanish, distance effaced, near a
group of mound-shaped hills to the eastward.
The start from Alta Vista with the engine "special" had been made at
sunrise, long before any of Ballard's fellow-travellers in the
sleeping-car were stirring. But the day had proved unseasonably warm in
the upper snow fields, and there had been time-killing delays.
Every gulch had carried its torrent of melted snow to threaten the
safety of the unballasted track, and what with slow speed over the
hazards and much shovelling of land-slips in the cuttings, the sun was
dipping to the westward range when the lumbering little construction
engine clattered down the last of the inclines and found the long level
tangents in the park.
On the first of the tangents the locomotive was stopped at a
watering-tank. During the halt Ballard climbed down from his cramped
seat on the fireman's box and crossed the cab to the engine-man's
gangway. Hoskins, the engine-driver, leaning from his window, pointed
out the projected course of the southern lateral canal in the great
irrigation system.
"It'll run mighty nigh due west here, about half-way between us and the
stage trail," he explained; and Ballard, looking in the direction
indicated, said: "Where is the stage trail? I haven't seen it since we
left the snow balds."
"It's over yonder in the edge of the timber," was the reply; and a
moment later its precise location was defined by three double-seated
buckboards, passenger-laden and drawn by four-in-hand teams of
tittupping broncos, flicking in and out among the pines and pushing
rapidly eastward. The distance was too great for recognition, but
Ballard could see that there were women in each of the vehicles.
"Hello!" he exclaimed. "Those people must have crossed the range from
Alta Vista to-day. What is the attraction over here?--a summer-resort
hotel?"
"Not any in this valley," said the engineman. "They might be going on
over to Ashcroft, or maybe to Aspen, on the other side o' the Elk
Mountains. But if that's their notion, they're due to camp out
somewhere, right soon. It's all o' forty mile to the neardest of the
Roaring Fork towns."
The engine tank was filled, and the fireman was flinging the dripping
spout to its perpendicular. Ballard took his seat again, and became once
more immersed in his topographical studies of the new field; which was
possibly why the somewhat singular spectacle of a party of tourists
hastening on to meet night and the untaverned wilderness passed from his
mind.
The approach to the headquarters camp of the Arcadia Company skirted the
right bank of the Boiling Water, in this portion of its course a river
of the plain, eddying swiftly between the aspen-fringed banks. But a few
miles farther on, where the gentle undulations of the rich grass-land
gave place to bare, rock-capped hills, the stream broke at intervals
into noisy rapids, with deep pools to mark the steps of its descent.
Ballard's seat on the fireman's box was on the wrong side for the
topographical purpose, and he crossed the cab to stand at Hoskins's
elbow. As they were passing one of the stillest of the pools, the
engineman said, with a sidewise jerk of his thumb:
"That's the place where Mr. Braithwaite was drowned. Came down here from
camp to catch a mess o' trout for his supper and fell in--from the far
bank."
"Couldn't he swim?" Ballard asked.
"They all say he could. Anyhow, it looks as if he might 'a' got out o'
that little mill-pond easy enough. But he didn't. They found his fishing
tackle on the bank, and him down at the foot of the second rapid
below--both arms broke and the top of his head caved in, like he'd been
run through a rock crusher. They can say what they please; I ain't
believin' the river done it."
"What do you believe?" Ballard was looking across to a collection of low
buildings and corrals--evidently the headquarters of the old cattle
king's ranch outfit--nestling in a sheltered cove beyond the stream, and
his question was a half-conscious thought slipping into speech.
"I believe this whole blame' job is a hoodoo," was the prompt rejoinder.
And then, with the freedom born of long service in the unfettered areas
where discipline means obedience but not servility, the man added: "I
wouldn't be standin' in your shoes this minute for all the money the
Arcadia Company could pay me, Mr. Ballard."
Ballard was young, fit, vigorous, and in abounding health. Moreover, he
was a typical product of an age which scoffs at superstition and is
impatient of all things irreducible to the terms of algebraic formulas.
But here and now, on the actual scene of the fatalities, the "two sheer
accidents and a commonplace tragedy" were somewhat less easily dismissed
than when he had thus contemptuously named them for Gardiner in the
Boston railway station. Notwithstanding, he was quite well able to shake
off the little thrill of disquietude and to laugh at Hoskins's vicarious
anxiety.
"I wasn't raised in the woods, Hoskins, but there was plenty of tall
timber near enough to save me from being scared by an owl," he
asseverated. Then, as a towering derrick head loomed gallows-like in the
gathering dusk, with a white blotch of masonry to fill the ravine over
which it stood sentinel: "Is that our camp?"
"That's Elbow Canyon," said the engineman; and he shut off steam and
woke the hill echoes with the whistle.
Ballard made out something of the lay of the land at the headquarters
while the engine was slowing through the temporary yard. There was the
orderly disorder of a construction terminal: tracks littered with cars
of material, a range of rough shed shelters for the stone-cutters, a
dotting of sleeping-huts and adobes on a little mesa above, and a huge,
weathered mess-tent, lighted within, and glowing orange-hued in the
twilight. Back of the camp the rounded hills grew suddenly precipitous,
but through the river gap guarded by the sentinel derrick, there was a
vista distantly backgrounded by the mass of the main range rising darkly
under its evergreens, with the lights of a great house starring the
deeper shadow.
V
"FIRE IN THE ROCK!"
Bromley was on hand to meet his new chief when Ballard dropped from the
step of the halted engine. A few years older, and browned to a tender
mahogany by the sun of the altitudes and the winds of the desert, he was
still the Bromley of Ballard's college memories: compact, alert,
boyishly smiling, neat, and well-groomed. With Anglo-Saxon ancestry on
both sides, the meeting could not be demonstrative.
"Same little old 'Beau Bromley,'" was Ballard's greeting to go with the
hearty hand-grip; and Bromley's reply was in keeping. After which they
climbed the slope to the mesa and the headquarters office in comradely
silence, not because there was nothing to be said, but because the
greater part of it would keep.
Having picked up the engine "special" with his field-glass as it came
down the final zigzag in the descent from the pass, Bromley had supper
waiting in the adobe-walled shack which served as the engineers'
quarters; and until the pipes were lighted after the meal there was
little talk save of the golden past. But when the camp cook had cleared
the table, Ballard reluctantly closed the book of reminiscence and gave
the business affair its due.
"How are you coming on with the work, Loudon?" he asked. "Don't need a
chief, do you?"
"Don't you believe it!" said the substitute, with such heartfelt
emphasis that Ballard smiled. "I'm telling you right now, Breckenridge,
I never was so glad to shift a responsibility since I was born. Another
month of it alone would have turned me gray."
"And yet, in my hearing, people are always saying that you are nothing
less than a genius when it comes to handling workingmen. Isn't it so?"
"Oh, that part of it is all right. It's the hoodoo that is making an old
man of me before my time."
"The what?"