concrete gangs yourself?" queried Bromley.
"That is what it means, for the present," replied the new chief; and at
daybreak Monday morning he was off, bronco-back, to put in a busy
fortnight quartering the field in all directions and getting in touch
with the various subcontractors at the many subsidiary camps of ditch
diggers and railroad builders scattered over the length and breadth of
the Kingdom of Arcadia.
On one of the few nights when he was able to return to the headquarters
camp for supper and lodging, Bromley proposed a visit to Castle 'Cadia.
Ballard's refusal was prompt and decided.
"No, Loudon; not for me, yet a while. I'm too tired to be anybody's good
company," was the form the refusal took. "Go gossiping, if you feel like
it, but leave me out of the social game until I get a little better grip
on the working details. Later on, perhaps, I'll go with you and pay my
respects to Colonel Craigmiles--but not to-night."
Bromley went alone and found that Ballard's guess based upon his glimpse
of the loaded buckboards _en route_ was borne out by the facts. Castle
'Cadia was comfortably filled with a summer house-party; and Miss
Craigmiles had given up her European yachting voyage to come home and
play the hostess to her father's guests.
Also, Bromley discovered that the colonel's daughter drew her own
conclusions from Ballard's refusal to present himself, the discovery
developing upon Miss Elsa's frank statement of her convictions.
"I know your new tyrant," she laughed; "I have known him for ages. He
won't come to Castle 'Cadia; he is afraid we might make him disloyal to
his Arcadia Irrigation salt. You may tell him I said so, if you happen
to remember it."
Bromley did remember it, but it was late when he returned to the camp at
the canyon, and Ballard was asleep. And the next morning the diligent
new chief was mounted and gone as usual long before the "turn-out"
whistle blew; for which cause Miss Elsa's challenge remained
undelivered; was allowed to lie until the dust of intervening busy days
had quite obscured it.
It was on these scouting gallops to the outlying camps that Ballard
defined the limits of the "hoodoo." Its influence, he found, diminished
proportionately as the square of the distance from the headquarters camp
at Elbow Canyon. But in the wider field there were hindrances of another
and more tangible sort.
Bourke Fitzpatrick, the younger of the brothers in the contracting firm,
was in charge of the ditch digging; and he had irritating tales to tell
of the lawless doings of Colonel Craigmiles's herdsmen.
"I'm telling you, Mr. Ballard, there isn't anything them devils won't be
up to," he complained, not without bitterness. "One night they'll
uncouple every wagon on the job and throw the coupling-pins away; and
the next, maybe, they'll be stampeding the mules. Two weeks ago, on Dan
Moriarty's section, they came with men and horses in the dead of night,
hitched up the scrapers, and put a thousand yards of earth back into the
ditch."
"Wear it out good-naturedly, if you can, Bourke; it is only horse-play,"
was Ballard's advice. That grown men should seriously hope to defeat the
designs of a great corporation by any such puerile means was
inconceivable.
"Horse-play, is it?" snapped Fitzpatrick. "Don't you believe it, Mr.
Ballard. I can take a joke with any man living; but this is no joke. It
comes mighty near being war--with the scrapping all on one side."
"A night guard?" suggested Ballard.
Fitzpatrick shook his head.
"We've tried that; and you'll not get a man to patrol the work since
Denny Flaherty took his medicine. The cow-punchers roped him and skidded
him 'round over the prairie till it took one of the men a whole blessed
day to dig the cactus thorns out of him. And me paying both of them
overtime. Would you call that a joke?"
Ballard's reply revealed some latent doubt as to the justification for
Bromley's defense of Colonel Craigmiles's fighting methods.
"If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you
say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these
fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"
The contractor shook his head.
"The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all,
as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican
foreman; and Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody.
Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang
that roped him."
Ballard was feeling less peaceable when he rode on to the next camp, and
as he made the round of the northern outposts the fighting strain which
had come down to him from his pioneer ancestors began to assert itself
in spite of his efforts to control it. At every stopping-place
Fitzpatrick's complaint was amplified. Depredations had followed each
other with increasing frequency since Macpherson's death; and once, when
one of the subcontractors had been provoked into resistance, arms had
been used and a free fight had ensued.
Turning the matter over in his mind in growing indignation, Ballard had
determined, by the time he had made the complete round of the outlying
camps, upon the course he should pursue. "I'll run a sheriff's posse in
here and clean up the entire outfit; that's about what I'll do!" he was
saying wrathfully to himself as he galloped eastward on the stage trail
late in the afternoon of the final day. "The Lord knows I don't want to
make a blood-feud of it, but if they will have it----"
The interruption was a little object-lesson illustrating the grievances
of the contractors. Roughly paralleling the stage trail ran the line of
the proposed southern lateral canal, marked by its double row of
location stakes. At a turn in the road Ballard came suddenly upon what
appeared to be an impromptu game of polo.
Flap-hatted herdsmen in shaggy overalls, and swinging long clubs in lieu
of polo sticks, were riding in curious zigzags over the canal course,
and bending for a drive at each right and left swerve of their wiry
little mounts. It took the Kentuckian a full minute to master the
intricacies of the game. Then he saw what was doing. The location stakes
for the ditch boundaries were set opposite and alternate, and the object
of the dodging riders was to determine which of them could club the
greatest number of stakes out of the ground without missing a blow or
drawing rein.
Ballard singled out the leader, a handsome, well-built _caballero_, with
the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of
things, red wrath to the fore.
"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"
"_Si, Senor_," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his
bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.
"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia
Company."
"Ha! Senor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."
"Never mind that; the pleasure isn't mutual, by a damned sight. You tell
your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes
back where they found them." Ballard was hot.
"You give-a the h-order in this valley, senor?" asked the Mexican
softly.
"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"
"Senor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
like-a that!"
[Illustration: "Senor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for
that he spik to me like-a-that!"]
"Have you?" snorted Ballard contemptuously. "Well, you won't kill me.
Call your men off, I say!"
There was no need. The makeshift polo game had paused, and the riders
were gathering about the quarrelling two.
"Bat your left eye once, and we'll rope him for you, Manuel," said one.
"Wonder if I c'd knock a two-bagger with that hat o' his'n without
mussin' his hair?" said another.
"Say, you fellers, wait a minute till I make that bronc' o' his'n do a
cake-walk!" interposed a third, casting the loop of his riata on the
ground so that Ballard's horse would be thrown if he lifted hoof.
It was an awkward crisis, and the engineer stood to come off with little
credit. He was armed, but even in the unfettered cattle country one
cannot pistol a laughing jeer. It was the saving sense of humour that
came to his aid, banishing red wrath. There was no malice in the jeers.
"Sail in when you're ready, boys," he laughed. "I fight for my brand the
same as you'd fight for yours. Those pegs have got to go back in the
ground where you found them."
One of the flap-hatted riders dropped his reins, drummed with his
elbows, and crowed lustily. The foreman backed his horse deftly out of
the enclosing ring; and the man nearest to Ballard on the right made a
little cast of his looped rope, designed to whip Ballard's pistol out of
its holster. If the engineer had been the tenderfoot they took him for,
the trouble would have culminated quickly.
With the laugh still on his lips, the Kentuckian was watching every move
of the Mexican. There was bloodthirst, waiting only for the shadow of an
excuse, glooming in the handsome black eyes. Ballard remembered
Sanderson's fate, and a quick thrill of racial sympathy for the dead man
tuned him to the fighting pitch. He knew he was confronting a
treacherous bully of the type known to the West as a "killer"; a man
whose regard for human life could be accurately and exactly measured by
his chance for escaping the penalty for its taking.
It was at this climaxing moment, while Ballard was tightening his
eye-hold upon the one dangerous antagonist, and foiling with his free
hand the attempts of the playful "Scotty" at his right to disarm him,
that the diversion came. A cloud of dust on the near-by stage trail
resolved itself into a fiery-red, purring motor-car with a single
occupant; and a moment later the car had left the road and was heading
across the grassy interspace.
Manuel's left hand was hovering above his pistol-butt; and Ballard took
his eyes from the menace long enough to glance aside at the approaching
motorist. He was a kingly figure of a man well on in years,
white-haired, ruddy of face, with huge military mustaches and a goatee.
He brought the car with a skilful turn into the midst of things; and
Ballard, confident now that the Mexican foreman no longer needed
watching, saw a singular happening.
While one might count two, the old man in the motor-car stared hard at
him, rose in his place behind the steering-wheel, staggered, groped with
his hands as the blind grope, and then fell back into the driving-seat
with a groan.
Ballard was off his horse instantly, tendering his pocket-flask. But the
old man's indisposition seemed to pass as suddenly as it had come.
"Thank you, suh," he said in a voice that boomed for its very depth and
sweetness; "I reckon I've been driving a little too fast. Youh--youh
name is Ballard--Breckenridge Ballard, isn't it?" he inquired
courteously, completely ignoring the dissolving ring of practical
jokers.
"It is. And you are Colonel Craigmiles?"
"At youh service, suh; entiahly at youh service. I should have known you
anywhere for a Ballard. Youh mother was a Hardaway, but you don't take
after that side. No, suh"--with calm deliberation--"you are youh father's
son, Mistah Ballard." Then, as one coming at a bound from the remote past
to the present: "Was thah any--ah--little discussion going on between you
and--ah--Manuel, Mistuh Ballard?"
Five minutes earlier the engineer had been angry enough to prefer
spiteful charges against the polo players all and singular. But the
booming of the deep voice had a curiously mollifying effect.
"It is hardly worth mentioning," he found himself replying. "I was
protesting to your foreman because the boys were having a little game of
polo at our expense--knocking our location stakes out of the ground."
The kingly old man in the motor-car drew himself up, and there was a
mild explosion directed at the Mexican foreman.
"Manuel, I'm suhprised--right much suhprised and humiliated, suh! I
thought it was--ah--distinctly undehstood that all this schoolboy
triflin' was to be stopped. Let me heah no more of it. And see that
these heah stakes are replaced; carefully replaced, if you please, suh."
And then to the complainant: "I'm right sorry, I assure you, Mistuh
Ballard. Let me prove it by carrying you off to dinneh with us at Castle
'Cadia. Grigsby, heah, will lead youh horse to camp, and fetch any
little necessaries you might care to send for. Indulge me, suh, and let
me make amends. My daughter speaks of you so often that I feel we ought
to be mo' friendly."
Under much less favourable conditions it is conceivable that the
Kentuckian would have overridden many barriers for the sake of finding
the open door at Castle 'Cadia. And, the tour of inspection being
completed, there was no special duty call to sound a warning.
"I shall be delighted, I'm sure," he burbled, quite like an infatuated
lover; and when the cow-boy messenger was charged with the errand to the
headquarters camp, Ballard took his place beside the company's enemy,
and the car was sent purring across to the hill-skirting stage road.
VIII
CASTLE 'CADIA
It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills;
and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not
speed the motor-car.
Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once
suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the
principal antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of
Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky
boyhood--all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so
winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his attitude so
affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a
fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the
vanishing point.
"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If
it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed,
gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured
guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.
The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the
headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the
hogback foothills well to the southward, and approaching the inner
valley at right angles to the course of the river and the railway.
The sun had sunk behind the western mountain barrier and the dusk was
gathering when the colonel quickened the pace, and the car topped the
last of the hills in a staccato rush. Ballard heard the low thunder of
the Boiling Water in its upper canyon, and had glimpses of weird shapes
of eroded sandstone looming in huge pillars and fantastic mushroom
figures in the growing darkness.
Then the lights of Castle 'Cadia twinkled in their tree-setting at the
top of the little knoll; the drought-hardened road became a gravelled
carriage-drive under the pneumatic tires; and a final burst of speed
sent the car rocketing to the summit of the knoll through a
maple-shadowed avenue.
The great tree-trunk-pillared portico of the country house was deserted
when the colonel cut out the motor-battery switch at the carriage step.
But a moment later a white-gowned figure appeared in the open doorway,
and the colonel's daughter came to the step, to laugh gayly, and to say:
"Why, Mr. Ballard, I'm astounded! Have you really decided that it is
quite safe to trust yourself in the camp of the enemy?"
Ballard had seen Castle 'Cadia at field-glass range; and he had
Bromley's enthusiastic description of the house of marvels to push
anticipation some little distance along the way to meet the artistic
reality. None the less, the reality came with the shock of the
unexpected.
In the softened light of the shaded electric pendants, the massive
pillars of the portico appeared as single trees standing as they had
grown in the mountain forest. Underfoot the floor was of hewn
tree-trunks; but the house walls, like the pillars, were of logs in the
rough, cunningly matched and fitted to conceal the carpentry.
A man had come to take the automobile, and the colonel paused to call
attention to a needed adjustment of the motor. Ballard made use of the
isolated moment.
"I have accounted for you at last," he said, prolonging the greeting
hand-clasp to the ultimate limit. "I know now what has made you what you
are."
"Really?" she questioned lightly. "And all these years I have been
vainly imagining that I had acquired the manner of the civilized East!
Isn't it pathetic?"
"Very," he agreed quite gravely. "But the pathos is all on my side."
"Meaning that I might let you go and dress for dinner? I shall. Enter
the house of the enemy, Mr. Ballard. A cow-punching princess bids you
welcome."
She was looking him fairly in the eyes when she said it, and he
acquitted her doubtfully of the charge of intention. But her repetition,
accidental or incidental, of his own phrase was sufficiently
disconcerting to make him awkwardly silent while she led the way into
the spacious reception-hall.
Here the spell of the enchantments laid fresh hold on him. The rustic
exterior of the great house was only the artistically designed
contrast--within were richness, refinement, and luxury unbounded. The
floors were of polished wood, and the rugs were costly Daghestans.
Beyond portieres of curious Indian bead-work, there were vistas of
harmonious interiors; carved furnishings, beamed and panelled ceilings,
book-lined walls. The light everywhere came from the softly tinted
electric globes. There was a great stone fireplace in the hall, but
radiators flanked the openings, giving an added touch of modernity.
Ballard pulled himself together and strove to recall the fifty-mile,
sky-reaching mountain barrier lying between all this twentieth-century
country-house luxury and the nearest outpost of urban civilisation. It
asked for a tremendous effort; and the realising anchor dragged again
when Miss Craigmiles summoned a Japanese servant and gave him in charge.
"Show Mr. Ballard to the red room, Tagawi," she directed. And then to
the guest: "We dine at seven--as informally as you please. You will find
your bag in your room, and Tagawi will serve you. As you once told me
when I teased you in your Boston workshop--'If you don't see what you
want, ask for it.'"
The Kentuckian followed his guide up the broad stair and through a
second-floor corridor which abated no jot of the down-stair
magnificence. Neither did his room, for that matter. Hangings of
Pompeian red gave it its name; and it was spacious and high-studded, and
critically up to date in its appointments.
The little brown serving-man deftly opened the bag brought by the
colonel's messenger from Ballard's quarters at the Elbow Canyon camp,
and laid out the guest's belongings. That done, he opened the door of
the bath. "The honourable excellency will observe the hot water; also
cold. Are the orders other for me?"
Ballard shook his head, dismissed the smiling little man, and turned on
the water.
"I reckon I'd better take it cold," he said to himself; "then I'll know
certainly whether I'm awake or dreaming. By Jove! but this place is a
poem! I don't wonder that the colonel is fighting Berserk to save it
alive. And Mr. Pelham and his millionaires come calmly up to the counter
and offer to buy it--with mere money!"
He filled the porcelain bath with a crystal-clear flood that, measured
by its icy temperature, might have been newly distilled glacier drip;
and the cold plunge did something toward establishing the reality of
things. But the incredibilities promptly reasserted themselves when he
went down a little in advance of the house-party guests, and met Elsa,
and was presented to a low-voiced lady with silvery hair and the face of
a chastened saint, named to him as Miss Cauffrey, but addressed by Elsa
as "Aunt June."
"I hope you find yourself somewhat refreshed, Mr. Ballard," said the
sweet-voiced chatelaine. "Elsa tells me you have been in the tropics,
and our high altitudes must be almost distressing at first; I know I
found them so."
"Really, I hadn't noticed the change," returned Ballard rather vaguely.
Then he bestirred himself, and tried to live up to the singularly
out-of-place social requirements. "I'm not altogether new to the
altitudes, though I haven't been in the West for the past year or two.
For that matter, I can't quite realise that I am in the West at this
moment--at least in the uncitied part."
Miss Cauffrey smiled, and the king's daughter laughed softly.
"It does me so much good!" she declared, mocking him. "All through that
dining-car dinner on the 'Overland Flyer' you were trying to reconcile
me with the Western barbarities. Didn't you say something about being
hopeful because I was aware of the existence of an America west of the
Alleghanies?"
"Please let me down as easily as you can," pleaded the engineer. "You
must remember that I am only a plain workingman."
"You are come to take poor Mr. Macpherson's place?" queried Miss
Cauffrey; which was Ballard's first intimation that the Arcadian
promotion scheme was not taboo by the entire house-hold of Castle
'Cadia.
"That is what I supposed I was doing, up to this evening. But it seems
that I have stumbled into fairyland instead."
"No," said the house-daughter, laughing at him again--"only into the
least Arcadian part of Arcadia. And after dinner you will be free to go
where you are impatient to be at this very moment."
"I don't know about that," was Ballard's rejoinder. "I was just now
wondering if I could be heroic enough to go contentedly from all this to
my adobe shack in the construction camp."
Miss Craigmiles mocked him again.
"My window in the Alta Vista sleeper chanced to be open that night while
the train was standing in the Denver station. Didn't I hear Mr. Pelham
say that the watchword--your watchword--was to be 'drive,' for every
man, minute, and dollar there was in it?"
Ballard said, "Oh, good Lord!" under his breath, and a hot flush rose to
humiliate him, in spite of his efforts to keep it down. Now it was quite
certain that her word of welcome was not a mere coincidence. She had
overheard that brutal and uncalled-for boast of his about making love to
"the cow-punching princesses"; and this was his punishment.
It was a moment for free speech of the explanatory sort, but Miss
Cauffrey's presence forbade it. So he could only say, in a voice that
might have melted a heart of stone: "I am wholly at your mercy--and I am
your guest. You shouldn't step on a man when he's down. It isn't
Christian."
Whether she would have stepped on him or not was left a matter
indeterminate, since the members of the house-party were coming down by
twos and threes, and shortly afterward dinner was announced.
By this time Ballard was growing a little hardened to the surprises; and
the exquisitely appointed dining-room evoked only a left-over thrill.
And at dinner, in the intervals allowed him by Miss Dosia Van Bryck, who
was his table companion, there were other things to think of. For
example, he was curious to know if Wingfield's air of proprietorship in
Miss Craigmiles would persist under Colonel Craigmiles's own roof.
Apparently it did persist. Before the first course was removed Ballard's
curiosity was in the way of being amply satisfied; and he was saying
"Yes" and "No" like a well-adjusted automaton to Miss Van Bryck.
In the seating he had Major Blacklock and one of the Cantrell girls for
his opposites; and Lucius Bigelow and the other sharer of the common
Cantrell Christian name widened the gap. But the centrepiece in the
middle of the great mahogany was low; and Ballard could see over it only
too well.
Wingfield and Elsa were discussing playmaking and the playmaker's art;
or, rather, Wingfield was talking shop with cheerful dogmatism, and Miss
Craigmiles was listening; and if the rapt expression of her face meant
anything.... Ballard lost himself in gloomy abstraction, and the colours
of the electric spectrum suddenly merged for him into a greenish-gray.