Don't you find it so?" Thus Miss Dosia, who, being quite void of
subjective enthusiasm, felt constrained to try to evoke it in others.
"Very," said Ballard, hearing nothing save the upward inflection which
demanded a reply.
Miss Van Bryck seemed mildly surprised; but after a time she tried
again.
"Has any one told you that Mr. Wingfield is making the studies for a new
play?" she asked.
Again Ballard marked the rising inflection; said "Yes," at a venture;
and was straightway humiliated, as he deserved to be.
"It seems so odd that he should come out here for his material," Miss
Van Bryck went on evenly. "I don't begin to understand how there can be
any dramatic possibilities in a wilderness house-party, with positively
no social setting whatever."
"Ah, no; of course not," stammered Ballard, realising now that he was
fairly at sea. And then, to make matters as bad as they could be: "You
were speaking of Mr. Wingfield?"
Miss Van Bryck's large blue eyes mirrored reproachful astonishment; but
she was too placid and too good-natured to be genuinely piqued.
"I fear you must have had a hard day, Mr. Ballard. All this is very
wearisome to you, isn't it?" she said, letting him have a glimpse of the
real kindness underlying the inanities.
"My day has been rather strenuous," he confessed. "But you make me
ashamed. Won't you be merciful and try me again?" And this time he knew
what he was saying, and meant it.
"It is hardly worth repeating," she qualified--nevertheless, she did
repeat it.
Ballard, listening now, found the little note of distress in the protest
against play-building in the wilderness; and his heart warmed to Miss
Dosia. In the sentimental field, disappointment for one commonly implies
disappointment for two; and he became suddenly conscious of a
fellow-feeling for the heiress of the Van Bryck millions.
"There is plenty of dramatic material in Arcadia for Mr. Wingfield, if
he knows where to look for it," he submitted. "For example, our camp at
the dam furnishes a 'situation' every now and then." And here he told
the story of the catapulted stone, adding the little dash of mystery to
give it the dramatic flavour.
Miss Dosia's interest was as eager as her limitations would permit. "May
I tell Mr. Wingfield?" she asked, with such innocent craft that Ballard
could scarcely restrain a smile.
"Certainly. And if Mr. Wingfield is open to suggestion on that side, you
may bring him down, and I'll put him on the trail of a lot more of the
mysteries."
"Thank you so much. And may I call it my discovery?"
Again her obviousness touched the secret spring of laughter in him. It
was very evident that Miss Van Bryck would do anything in reason to
bring about a solution of continuity in the sympathetic intimacy growing
up between the pair on the opposite side of the table.
"It is yours, absolutely," he made haste to say. "I should never have
thought of the dramatic utility if you hadn't suggested it."
"H'm!--ha!" broke in the major. "What are you two young people plotting
about over there?"
Ballard turned the edge of the query; blunted it permanently by
attacking a piece of government engineering in which, as he happened to
know, the major had figured in an advisory capacity. This carrying of
the war into Africa brought on a battle technical which ran on unbroken
to the ices and beyond; to the moment when Colonel Craigmiles proposed
an adjournment to the portico for the coffee and the tobacco. Ballard
came off second-best, but he had accomplished his object, which was to
make the shrewd-eyed old major forget if he had overheard too much; and
Miss Van Bryck gave him his meed of praise.
"You are a very brave man, Mr. Ballard," she said, as he drew the
portieres aside for her. "Everybody else is afraid of the major."
"I've met him before," laughed the Kentuckian; "in one or another of his
various incarnations. And I didn't learn my trade at West Point, you
remember."
IX
THE BRINK OF HAZARD
The summer night was perfect, and the after-dinner gathering under the
great portico became rather a dispersal. The company fell apart into
couples and groups when the coffee was served; and while Miss Craigmiles
and the playwright were still fraying the worn threads of the dramatic
unities, Ballard consoled himself with the older of the Cantrell girls,
talking commonplace nothings until his heart ached.
Later on, when young Bigelow had relieved him, and he had given up all
hope of breaking into the dramatic duet, he rose to go and make his
parting acknowledgments to Miss Cauffrey and the colonel. It was at that
moment that Miss Elsa confronted him.
"You are not leaving?" she said. "The evening is still young--even for
country folk."
"Measuring by the hours I've been neglected, the evening is old, very
old," he retorted reproachfully.
"Which is another way of saying that we have bored you until you are
sleepy?" she countered. "But you mustn't go yet--I want to talk to you."
And she wheeled a great wicker lounging-chair into a quiet corner, and
beat up the pillows in a near-by hammock, and bade him smoke his pipe if
he preferred it to the Castle 'Cadia cigars.
"I don't care to smoke anything if you will stay and talk to me," he
said, love quickly blotting out the disappointments foregone.
"For this one time you may have both--your pipe and me. Are you obliged
to go back to your camp to-night?"
"Yes, indeed. I ran away, as it was. Bromley will have it in for me for
dodging him this way."
"Is Mr. Bromley your boss?"
"He is something much better--he is my friend."
Her hammock was swung diagonally across the quiet corner, and she
arranged her pillows so that the shadow of a spreading potted palm came
between her eyes and the nearest electric globe.
"Am I not your friend, too?" she asked.
Jerry Blacklock and the younger Miss Cantrell were pacing a slow sentry
march up and down the open space in front of the lounging-chairs; and
Ballard waited until they had made the turn and were safely out of
ear-shot before he said: "There are times when I have to admit it,
reluctantly."
"How ridiculous!" she scoffed. "What is finer than true friendship?"
"Love," he said simply.
"Cousin Janet will hear you," she warned. Then she mocked him, as was
her custom. "Does that mean that you would like to have me tell you
about Mr. Wingfield?"
He played trumps again.
"Yes. When is it to be?"
"How crudely elemental you are to-night! Suppose you ask him?"
"He hasn't given me the right."
"Oh. And I have?"
"You are trying to give it to me, aren't you?"
She was swinging gently in the hammock, one daintily booted foot
touching the floor.
"You are so painfully direct at times," she complained. "It's like a
cold shower-bath; invigorating, but shivery. Do you think Mr. Wingfield
really cares anything for me? I don't. I think he regards me merely as
so much literary material. He lives from moment to moment in the hope of
discovering 'situations.'"
"Well,"--assentingly. "I am sure he has chosen a most promising
subject--and surroundings. The kingdom of Arcadia reeks with dramatic
possibilities, I should say."
Her face was still in the shadow of the branching palm, but the changed
tone betrayed her changed mood.
"I have often accused you of having no insight--no intuition," she said
musingly. "Yet you have a way of groping blindly to the very heart of
things. How could you know that it has come to be the chief object of my
life to keep Mr. Wingfield from becoming interested in what you
flippantly call 'the dramatic possibilities'?"
"I didn't know it," he returned.
"Of course you didn't. Yet it is true. It is one of the reasons why I
gave up going with the Herbert Lassleys after my passage was actually
booked on the _Carania_. Cousin Janet's party was made up. Dosia and
Jerry Blacklock came down to the steamer to see us off. Dosia told me
that Mr. Wingfield was included. You have often said that I have the
courage of a man--I hadn't, then. I was horribly afraid."
"Of what?" he queried.
"Of many things. You would not understand if I should try to explain
them."
"I do understand," he hastened to say. "But you have nothing to fear.
Castle 'Cadia will merely gain an ally when Wingfield hears the story of
the little war. Besides, I was not including your father's controversy
with the Arcadia Company in the dramatic material; I was thinking more
particularly of the curious and unaccountable happenings that are
continually occurring on the work--the accidents."
"There is no connection between the two--in your mind?" she asked. She
was looking away from him, and he could not see her face. But the
question was eager, almost pathetically eager.
"Assuredly not," he denied promptly. "Otherwise----"
"Otherwise you wouldn't be here to-night as my father's guest, you would
say. But others are not as charitable. Mr. Macpherson was one of them.
He charged all the trouble to us, though he could prove nothing. He said
that if all the circumstances were made public--" She faced him quickly,
and he saw that the beautiful eyes were full of trouble. "Can't you see
what would happen--what is likely to happen if Mr. Wingfield sees fit to
make literary material out of all these mysteries?"
The Kentuckian nodded. "The unthinking, newspaper-reading public would
probably make one morsel of the accidents and your father's known
antagonism to the company. But Wingfield would be something less than a
man and a lover if he could bring himself to the point of making
literary capital out of anything that might remotely involve you or your
father."
She shook her head doubtfully.
"You don't understand the artistic temperament. It's a passion. I once
heard Mr. Wingfield say that a true artist would make copy out of his
grandmother."
Ballard scowled. It was quite credible that the Lester Wingfields were
lost to all sense of the common decencies, but that Elsa Craigmiles
should be in love with the sheik of the caddish tribe was quite beyond
belief.
"I'll choke him off for you," he said; and his tone took its colour from
the contemptuous under-thought. "But I'm afraid I've already made a mess
of it. To tell the truth, I suggested to Miss Van Bryck at dinner that
our camp might be a good hunting-ground for Wingfield."
"_You said that to Dosia?_" There was something like suppressed horror
in the low-spoken query.
"Not knowing any better, I did. She was speaking of Wingfield, and of
the literary barrenness of house-parties in general. I mentioned the
camp as an alternative--told her to bring him down, and I'd--Good
heavens! what have I done?"
Even in the softened light of the electric globes he saw that her face
had become a pallid mask of terror; that she was swaying in the hammock.
He was beside her instantly; and when she hid her face in her hands, his
arm went about her for her comforting--this, though Wingfield was
chatting amiably with Mrs. Van Bryck no more than three chairs away.
"Don't!" he begged. "I'll get out of it some way--lie out of it, fight
out of it, if needful. I didn't know it meant anything to you. If I
had--Elsa, dear, I love you; you've known it from the first. You can
make believe with other men as you please, but in the end I shall claim
you. Now tell me what it is that you want me to do."
Impulsively she caught at the caressing hand on her shoulder, kissed it,
and pushed him away with resolute strength.
"You must never forget yourself again, dear friend--or make me forget,"
she said steadily. "And you must help me as you can. There is
trouble--deeper trouble than you know or suspect. I tried to keep you
out of it--away from it; and now you are here in Arcadia, to make it
worse, infinitely worse. You have seen me laugh and talk with the
others, playing the part of the woman you know. Yet there is never a
waking moment when the burden of anxiety is lifted."
He mistook her meaning.
"You needn't be anxious about Wingfield's material hunt," he interposed.
"If Miss Dosia takes him to the camp, I'll see to it that he doesn't
hear any of the ghost stories."
"That is only one of the anxieties," she went on hurriedly. "The
greatest of them is--for you."
"For me? Because----"
"Because your way to Arcadia lay over three graves. That means nothing
to you--does it also mean nothing that your life was imperilled within
an hour of your arrival at your camp?"
He drew the big chair nearer to the hammock and sat down again.
"Now you are letting Bromley's imagination run away with yours. That
rock came from our quarry. There was a night gang getting out stone for
the dam."
She laid her hand softly on his knee.
"Do you want to know how much I trust you? That stone was thrown by a
man who was standing upon the high bluff back of your headquarters. He
thought you were alone in the office, and he meant to kill you. Don't
ask me who it was, or how I know--I _do_ know."
Ballard started involuntarily. It was not in human nature to take such
an announcement calmly.
"Do you mean to say that I was coolly ambushed before I could----"
She silenced him with a quick little gesture. Blacklock and Miss
Cantrell were still pacing their sentry beat, and the major's "H'm--ha!"
rose in irascible contradiction above the hum of voices.
"I have said all that I dare to say; more than I should have said if you
were not so rashly determined to make light of things you do not
understand," she rejoined evenly.
"They are things which I should understand--which I must understand if I
am to deal intelligently with them," he insisted. "I have been calling
them one part accident and three parts superstition or imagination. But
if there is design----"
Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.
"I did not say there was design," she denied.
It was an _impasse_, and the silence which followed emphasised it. When
he rose to take his leave, love prompted an offer of service, and he
made it.
"I cannot help believing that you are mistaken," he qualified. "But I
respect your anxiety so much that I would willingly share it if I could.
What do you want me to do?"
She turned to look away down the maple-shadowed avenue and her answer
had tears in it.
"I want you to be watchful--always watchful. I wish you to believe that
your life is in peril, and to act accordingly. And, lastly, I beg you to
help me to keep Mr. Wingfield away from Elbow Canyon."
"I shall be heedful," he promised. "And if Mr. Wingfield comes
material-hunting, I shall be as inhospitable as possible. May I come
again to Castle 'Cadia?"
The invitation was given instantly, almost eagerly.
"Yes; come as often as you can spare the time. Must you go now? Shall I
have Otto bring the car and drive you around to your camp?"
Ballard promptly refused to put the chauffeur to the trouble. It was
only a little more than a mile in the direct line from the house on the
knoll to the point where the river broke through the foothill hogback,
and the night was fine and starlit. After the day of hard riding he
should enjoy the walk.
Elsa did not go with him when he went to say good-night to Miss Cauffrey
and to his host. He left her sitting in the hammock, and found her still
there a few minutes later when he came back to say that he must make his
acknowledgments to her father through her. "I can't find him, and no one
seems to know where he is," he explained.
She rose quickly and went to the end of the portico to look down a
second tree-shadowed avenue skirting the mountainward slope of the
knoll.
"He must have gone to the laboratory; the lights are on," she said; and
then with a smile that thrilled him ecstatically: "You see what your
footing is to be at Castle 'Cadia. Father will not make company of you;
he expects you to come and go as one of us."
With this heart-warming word for his leave-taking Ballard sought out the
path to which she directed him and swung off down the hill to find the
trail, half bridle-path and half waggon road, which led by way of the
river's windings to the outlet canyon and the camp on the outer mesa.
When he was but a little distance from the house he heard the _pad pad_
of soft footfalls behind him, and presently a great dog of the St.
Bernard breed overtook him and walked sedately at his side. Ballard
loved a good dog only less than he loved a good horse, and he stopped to
pat the St. Bernard, talking to it as he might have talked to a human
being.
Afterward, when he went on, the dog kept even pace with him, and would
not go back, though Ballard tried to send him, coaxing first and then
commanding. To the blandishments the big retriever made his return in
kind, wagging his tail and thrusting his huge head between Ballard's
knees in token of affection and loyal fealty. To the commands he was
entirely deaf, and when Ballard desisted, the dog took his place at one
side and one step in advance, as if half impatient at his temporary
master's waste of time.
At the foot-bridge crossing the river the dog ran ahead and came back
again, much as if he were a scout pioneering the way; and at Ballard's
"Good dog! Fine old fellow!" he padded along with still graver dignity,
once more catching the step in advance and looking neither to right nor
left.
At another time Ballard might have wondered why the great St. Bernard,
most sagacious of his tribe, should thus attach himself to a stranger
and refuse to be shaken off. But at the moment the young man had a
heartful of other and more insistent queryings. Gained ground with the
loved one is always the lover's most heady cup of intoxication; but the
lees at the bottom of the present cup were sharply tonic, if not bitter.
What was the mystery so evidently enshrouding the tragedies at Elbow
Canyon? That they were tragedies rather than accidents there seemed no
longer any reasonable doubt. But with the doubt removed the mystery
cloud grew instantly thicker and more impenetrable. If the tragedies
were growing out of the fight for the possession of Arcadia Park, what
manner of man could Colonel Craigmiles be to play the kindly, courteous
host at one moment and the backer and instigator of murderers at the
next? And if the charge against the colonel be allowed to stand, it
immediately dragged in a sequent which was clearly inadmissible: the
unavoidable inference being that Elsa Craigmiles was in no uncertain
sense her father's accessory.
Ballard was a man and a lover; and his first definition of love was
unquestioning loyalty. He was prepared to doubt the evidence of his
senses, if need be, but not the perfections of the ideal he had set up
in the inner chamber of his heart, naming it Elsa Craigmiles.
These communings and queryings, leading always into the same
metaphysical labyrinth, brought the young engineer far on the down-river
trail; were still with him when the trail narrowed to a steep one-man
path and began to climb the hogback, with one side buttressed by a low
cliff and the other falling sheer into the Boiling Water on the left. On
this narrow ledge the dog went soberly ahead; and at one of the turns in
the path Ballard came upon him standing solidly across the way and
effectually blocking it.
"What is it, old boy?" was the man's query; and the dog's answer was a
wag of the tail and a low whine. "Go on, old fellow," said Ballard; but
the big St. Bernard merely braced himself and whined again. It was quite
dark on the high ledge, a fringe of scrub pines on the upper side of the
cutting blotting out a fair half of the starlight. Ballard struck a
match and looked beyond the dog; looked and drew back with a startled
exclamation. Where the continuation of the path should have been there
was a gaping chasm pitching steeply down into the Boiling Water.
More lighted matches served to show the extent of the hazard and the
trap-like peril of it. A considerable section of the path had slid away
in a land- or rock-slide, and Ballard saw how he might easily have
walked into the gulf if the dog had not stopped on the brink of it.
"I owe you one, good old boy," he said, stooping to pat the words out on
the St. Bernard's head. "I'll pay it when I can; to you, to your
mistress, or possibly even to your master. Come on, old fellow, and
we'll find another way with less risk in it," and he turned back to
climb over the mesa hill under the stone quarries, approaching the
headquarters camp from the rear.
When the hill was surmounted and the electric mast lights of the camp
lay below, the great dog stopped, sniffing the air suspiciously.
"Don't like the looks of it, do you?" said Ballard. "Well, I guess you'd
better go back home. It isn't a very comfortable place down there for
little dogs--or big ones. Good-night, old fellow." And, quite as if he
understood, the St. Bernard faced about and trotted away toward Castle
'Cadia.
There was a light in the adobe shack when Ballard descended the hill,
and he found Bromley sitting up for him. The first assistant engineer
was killing time by working on the current estimate for the quarry
subcontractor, and he looked up quizzically when his chief came in.
"Been bearding the lion in his den, have you?" he said, cheerfully.
"That's right; there's nothing like being neighbourly, even with our
friend the enemy. Didn't you find him all the things I said he was--and
then some?"
"Yes," returned Ballard, gravely. Then, abruptly: "Loudon, who uses the
path that goes up on our side of the canyon and over into the Castle
'Cadia valley?"
"Who?--why, anybody having occasion to. It's the easiest way to reach
the wing dam that Sanderson built at the canyon inlet to turn the
current against the right bank. Fitzpatrick sends a man over now and
then to clear the driftwood from the dam."
"Anybody been over to-day?"
"No."
"How about the cow-puncher--Grigsby--who brought my horse over and got
my bag?"
"He was riding, and he came and went by way of our bridge below the dam.
You couldn't ride a horse over that hill path."
"You certainly could not," said Ballard grimly. "There is a chunk about
the size of this shack gone out of it--dropped into the river, I
suppose."
Bromley was frowning reflectively.
"More accidents?" he suggested.
"One more--apparently."
Bromley jumped up, sudden realization grappling him.
"Why, Breckenridge!--you've just come over that path--alone, and in the
dark!"
"Part way over it, and in the dark, yes; but not alone, luckily. The
Craigmiles's dog--the big St. Bernard--was with me, and he stopped on
the edge of the break. Otherwise I might have walked into it--most
probably should have walked into it."
Bromley began to tramp the floor with his hands in his pockets.
"I can't remember," he said; and again, "I can't remember. I was over
there yesterday, or the day before. It was all right then. It was a good
trail. Why, Breckenridge"--with sudden emphasis--"it would have taken a
charge of dynamite to blow it down!"
Ballard dropped lazily into a chair and locked his hands at the back of
his head. "And you say that the hoodoo hasn't got around to using high
explosives yet, eh? By the way, have there been any more visitations
since I went out on the line last Tuesday?"
Bromley was shaking his head in the negative when the door opened with a
jerk and Bessinger, the telegraph operator whose wire was in the
railroad yard office, tumbled in, white faced.
"Hoskins and the Two!" he gasped. "They're piled up under a material
train three miles down the track! Fitzpatrick is turning out a wrecking
crew from the bunk shanties, and he sent me up to call you!"
Bromley's quick glance aside for Ballard was acutely significant.
"I guess I'd better change that 'No' of mine to a qualified 'Yes,'" he
corrected. "The visitation seems to have come." Then to Bessinger: "Get
your breath, Billy, and then chase back to Fitzpatrick. Tell him we'll
be with him as soon as Mr. Ballard can change his clothes."
X
HOSKINS'S GHOST
The wreck in the rocky hills west of the Elbow Canyon railroad yard
proved to be less calamitous than Bessinger's report, handed on from the
excited alarm brought in by a demoralized train flagman, had pictured
it. When Ballard and Bromley, hastening to the rescue on Fitzpatrick's
relief train, reached the scene of the accident, they found Hoskins's
engine and fifteen cars in the ditch, and the second flagman with a
broken arm; but Hoskins himself was unhurt, as were the remaining
members of the train crew.