trail and the stream gave him leave.
"That is another of the things that I don't know; I'm a leather-bound
edition of an encyclopaedia when it comes to matters of real
information," was the ironical answer. "But your guess of this morning
was right; there was a sick man--sick or hurt some way. I took the
liberty of investigating a little when I awoke and found the ranch
deserted. The other room of the cabin was a perfect shambles."
"Blood?" queried the engineer; and Bigelow nodded.
"Blood everywhere."
"A falling-out among thieves, I suppose," said Ballard, half-absently;
and again Bigelow said: "I don't know."
"The boy knows," was Ballard's comment. "He knew before he left the
ranch this morning. I haven't been able to get a dozen words out of him
all day."
Just here both stream-noise and trail-narrowing cut in to forbid further
talk, and Bigelow drew back to let Ballard lead in the single-file
progress along the edge of the torrent.
It was in this order that they came finally into the Arcadian
grass-lands, through a portal as abrupt as a gigantic doorway. It was
the hour of sunset for the high peaks of the Elk range, and the purple
shadows were already gathering among the rounded hills of the hogback.
Off to the left the two advanced riders of the posse cavalcade saw the
evening kitchen-smoke of Riley's ditch-camp. On the hills to the right a
few cattle were grazing unherded.
But two things in the prospect conspired to make Ballard draw rein so
suddenly as to bring him awkwardly into collision with his follower. One
was a glimpse of the Castle 'Cadia touring car trundling swiftly away to
the eastward on the river road; and the other was a slight barrier of
tree branches piled across the trail fairly under his horse's nose.
Stuck upon a broken twig of the barrier was a sheet of paper; and there
was still sufficient light to enable the chief engineer to read the
type-written lines upon it when he dropped from the saddle.
"Mr. Ballard:" it ran. "You are about to commit an act of the crudest
injustice. Take the advice of an anxious friend, and quench the fire of
enmity before it gets beyond control."
There was no signature; and Ballard was still staring after the
disappearing automobile when he mechanically passed the sheet of paper
up to Bigelow. The Forestry man read the type-written note and glanced
back at the sheriff's posse just emerging from the canyon portal.
"What will you do?" he asked; and Ballard came alive with a start and
shook his head.
"I don't know: if we could manage to overtake that auto.... But it's too
late now to do anything, Bigelow. I've made my complaint and sworn out
the warrants. Beckwith will serve them--he's obliged to serve them."
"Of course," said Bigelow; and together they waited for the sheriff's
posse to close up.
XIII
THE LAW AND THE LADY
It touched a little spring of wonderment in the Forestry man when
Ballard made the waiting halt merely an excuse for a word of
leave-taking with Sheriff Beckwith; a brittle exchange of formalities in
which no mention was made of the incident of the brush barrier and the
type-written note.
"You have your warrants, and you know your way around in the valley; you
won't need me," was the manner in which the young engineer drew out of
the impending unpleasantness. "When you have taken your prisoners to the
county seat, the company's attorneys will do the rest."
Beckwith, being an ex-cattleman, was grimly sarcastic.
"This is my job, and I'll do it up man-size and b'ligerent, Mr. Ballard.
But between us three and the gate-post, you ain't goin' to make anything
by it--barrin' a lot o' bad blood. The old colonel 'll give a bond and
bail his men, and there you are again, right where you started from."
"That's all right; I believe in the law, and I'm giving it a chance,"
snapped Ballard; and the two parties separated, the sheriff's posse
taking the river road, and Ballard leading the way across country in the
direction of Fitzpatrick's field headquarters.
Rather more than half of the distance from the canyon head to the camp
had been covered before the boy, Carson, had lagged far enough behind to
give Bigelow a chance for free speech with Ballard, but the Forestry man
improved the opportunity as soon as it was given him.
"You still believe there is no hope of a compromise?" he began. "What
the sheriff said a few minutes ago is quite true, you know. The cow-boys
will be back in a day or two, and it will make bad blood."
"Excuse me," said Ballard, irritably; "you are an onlooker, Mr. Bigelow,
and you can afford to pose as a peacemaker. But I've had all I can
stand. If Colonel Craigmiles can't control his flap-hatted bullies,
we'll try to help him. There is a week's work for half a hundred men and
teams lying in that ditch over yonder," pointing with his quirt toward
the dynamited cutting. "Do you think I'm going to lie down and let these
cattle-punchers ride rough-shod over me and the company I represent? Not
to-day, or any other day, I assure you."
"Then you entirely disregard the little type-written note?"
"In justice to my employers, I am bound to call Colonel Craigmiles's
bluff, whatever form it takes."
Bigelow rode in silence for the next hundred yards. Then he began again.
"It doesn't seem like the colonel: to go at you indirectly that way."
"He was in that automobile: I saw him. The notice could scarcely have
been posted without his knowledge."
"No," Bigelow agreed, slowly. But immediately afterward he added: "There
were others in the car."
"I know it--four or five of them. But that doesn't let the colonel out."
Again Bigelow relapsed into silence, and the camp-fires of Fitzpatrick's
headquarters were in sight when he said:
"You confessed to me a few hours ago that one of your weaknesses was the
inability to stay angry. Will you pardon me if I say that it seems to
have its compensation in the law of recurrences?"
Ballard's laugh was frankly apologetic. "You may go farther and say that
I am ill-mannered enough to quarrel with a good friend who cheerfully
gets himself shot up in my behalf. Overlook it, Mr. Bigelow; and I'll
try to remember that I am a partisan, while you are only a good-natured
non-combatant. This little affair is a fact accomplished, so far as we
are concerned. The colonel's cow-men dynamited our ditch; Sheriff
Beckwith will do his duty; and the company's attorney will see to it
that somebody pays the penalty. Let's drop it--as between us two."
Being thus estopped, Bigelow held his peace; and a little later they
were dismounting before the door of Fitzpatrick's commissary. When the
contractor had welcomed and fed them, Ballard rolled into the nearest
bunk and went to sleep to make up the arrearages, leaving his guest to
smoke alone. Bigelow took his desertion good-naturedly, and sat for an
hour or more on a bench in front of the storeroom, puffing quietly at
his pipe, and taking an onlooker's part in the ditch-diggers' games of
dice-throwing and card-playing going on around the great fire in the
plaza.
When the pipe went out after its second filling, he got up and strolled
a little way beyond the camp limits. The night was fine and mild for the
altitudes, and he had walked a circling mile before he found himself
again at the camp confines. It was here, at the back of the mule drove,
that he became once more an onlooker; this time a thoroughly mystified
one.
The little drama, at which the Forestry expert was the single spectator,
was chiefly pantomimic, but it lacked nothing in eloquent action. Flat
upon the ground, and almost among the legs of the grazing mules, lay a
diminutive figure, face down, digging fingers and toes into the hoof-cut
earth, and sobbing out a strange jargon of oaths and childish ragings.
Before Bigelow could speak, the figure rose to its knees, its face
disfigured with passion, and its small fists clenching themselves at the
invisible. It was Dick Carson; and the words which Bigelow heard seemed
to be shaken by some unseen force out of the thin, stoop-shouldered
little body: "Oh, my Lordy! ef it could on'y be somebody else! But ther'
ain't nobody else; an' I'll go to hell if I don't do it!"
Now, at all events, Bigelow would have cut in, but the action of the
drama was too quick for him. Like a flash the water-boy disappeared
among the legs of the grazing animals; and a few minutes afterward the
night gave back the sound of galloping hoofs racing away to the
eastward.
Bigelow marked the direction of the water-boy's flight. Since it was
toward the valley head and Castle 'Cadia, he guessed that young Carson's
errand concerned itself in some way with the sheriff's raid upon the
Craigmiles ranch outfit. Here, however, conjecture tripped itself and
fell down. Both parties in whatever conflict the sheriff's visit might
provoke were the boy's natural enemies.
Bigelow was wrestling with this fresh bit of mystery when he went to
find his bunk in the commissary; it got into his dreams and was still
present when the early morning call of the camp was sounded. But neither
at the candle-lighted breakfast, nor later, when Ballard asked him if he
were fit for a leisurely ride to the southern watershed for the day's
outwearing, did he speak of young Carson's desertion.
Fitzpatrick spoke of it, though, when the chief and his companion were
mounting for the watershed ride.
"You brought my water-boy back with you last night, didn't you, Mr.
Ballard?" he asked.
"Certainly; he came in with us. Why? Have you lost him?"
"Him and one of the saddle broncos. And I don't much like the look of
it."
"Oh, I guess he'll turn up all right," said Ballard easily.
It was Bigelow's time to speak, but something restrained him, and the
contractor's inquiry died a natural death when Ballard gathered the
reins and pointed the way to the southward hills.
By nine o'clock the two riders were among the foothills of the southern
Elks, and the chief engineer of the Arcadia Company was making a very
practical use of his guest. Bigelow was an authority on watersheds,
stream-basins, the conservation of moisture by forested slopes, and
kindred subjects of vital importance to the construction chief of an
irrigation scheme; and the talk held steadily to the technical problems,
with the Forestry expert as the lecturer.
Only once was there a break and a lapse into the humanities. It was when
the horses had climbed one of the bald hills from the summit of which
the great valley, with its dottings of camps and its streaking of canal
gradings, was spread out map-like beneath them. On the distant river
road, progressing by perspective inches toward the lower end of the
valley, trotted a mixed mob of horsemen, something more than doubling in
numbers the sheriff's posse that had ridden over the same road in the
opposite direction the previous evening.
"Beckwith with his game-bag?" queried Bigelow, gravely; and Ballard
said: "I guess so," and immediately switched the talk back to the
watershed technicalities.
It was within an hour of the grading-camp supper-time when the two
investigators of moisture-beds and auxiliary reservoirs rode into
Fitzpatrick's headquarters and found a surprise awaiting them. The
Castle 'Cadia runabout was drawn up before the commissary; and young
Blacklock, in cap and gloves and dust-coat, was tinkering with the
motor.
"The same to you, gentlemen," he said, jocosely, when he took his head
out of the bonnet. "I was just getting ready to go and chase you some
more. We've been waiting a solid hour, I should say."
"'We'?" questioned Ballard.
"Yes; Miss Elsa and I. We've been hunting you in every place a set of
rubber tires wouldn't balk at, all afternoon. Say; you don't happen to
have an extra spark-plug about your clothes, either of you, do you? One
of these is cracked in the porcelain, and she skips like a dog on three
legs."
Ballard ignored the motor disability completely.
"You brought Miss Craigmiles here? Where is she now?" he demanded.
The collegian laughed.
"She's in the grand _salon_, and Fitzpatrick the gallant is making her a
cup of commissary tea. Wouldn't that jar you?"
Ballard swung out of his saddle and vanished through the open door of
the commissary, leaving Bigelow and the motor-maniac to their own
devices. In the littered storeroom he found Miss Craigmiles, sitting
upon a coil of rope and calmly drinking her tea from a new tin can.
"At last!" she sighed, smiling up at him; and then: "Mercy me! how
savage you look! We are trespassers; I admit it. But you'll be lenient
with us, won't you? Jerry says there is a broken spark-plug, or
something; but I am sure we can move on if we're told to. You have come
to tell us to move on, Mr. Ballard?"
His frown was only the outward and visible sign of the inward attempt to
grapple with the possibilities; but it made his words sound something
less than solicitous.
"This is no place for you," he began; but she would not let him go on.
"I have been finding it quite a pleasant place, I assure you. Mr.
Fitzpatrick is an Irish gentleman. No one could have been kinder. You've
no idea of the horrible things he promised to do to the cook if this tea
wasn't just right."
If she were trying to make him smile, she succeeded. Fitzpatrick's
picturesque language to his men was the one spectacular feature of the
headquarters camp.
"That proves what I said--that this is no place for you," he rejoined,
still deprecating the camp crudities. "And you've been here an hour,
Blacklock says."
"An hour and twelve minutes, to be exact," she admitted, tilting the
tiny watch pinned upon the lapel of her driving-coat. "But you left us
no alternative. We have driven uncounted miles this afternoon, looking
for you and Mr. Bigelow."
Ballard flushed uncomfortably under the tan and sunburn. Miss Craigmiles
could have but one object in seeking him, he decided; and he would have
given worlds to be able to set the business affair and the sentimental
on opposite sides of an impassable chasm. Since it was not to be, he
said what he was constrained to say with characteristic abruptness.
"It is too late. The matter is out of my hands, now. The provocation was
very great; and in common loyalty to my employers I was obliged to
strike back. Your father----"
She stopped him with a gesture that brought the blood to his face again.
"I know there has been provocation," she qualified. "But it has not been
all on one side. Your men have told you how our range-riders have
annoyed them: probably they have not told you how they have given blow
for blow, killing cattle on the railroad, supplying themselves with
fresh meat from our herd, filling up or draining the water-holes. And
two days ago, at this very camp.... I don't know the merits of the case;
but I do know that one of our men was shot through the shoulder, and is
lying critically near to death."
He nodded gloomily. "That was bad," he admitted, adding: "And it
promptly brought on more violence. On the night of the same day your
cow-men returned and dynamited the canal."
Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.
"Did you see them do it?"
"Naturally, no one saw them do it. But it was done, nevertheless."
She rose and faced him fairly.
"You found my note last evening--when you were returning with Sheriff
Beckwith?"
"I found an unsigned note on a little barrier of tree-branches on the
trail; yes."
"I wrote it and put it there," she declared. "I told you you were about
to commit an act of injustice, and you have committed it--a very great
one, indeed, Mr. Ballard."
"I am open to conviction," he conceded, almost morosely. She was
confronting him like an angry goddess, and mixed up with the thought
that he had never seen her so beautiful and so altogether desirable was
another thought that he should like to run away and hide.
"Yes; you are open to conviction--after the fact!" she retorted,
bitterly. "Do you know what you have done? You have fallen like a
hot-headed boy into a trap set for you by my father's enemies. You have
carefully stripped Arcadia of every man who could defend our
cattle--just as it was planned for you to do."
"But, good heavens!" he began, "I----"
"Hear me out," she commanded, looking more than ever the princess of her
father's kingdom. "Down in the canyon of the Boiling Water there is a
band of outlaws that has harried this valley for years. Assuming that
you would do precisely what you have done, some of these men came up and
dynamited your canal, timing the raid to fit your inspection tour. Am I
making it sufficiently plain?"
"O my sainted ancestors!" he groaned. And then: "Please go on; you can't
make it any worse."
"They confidently expected that you would procure a wholesale arrest of
the Arcadia ranch force; but they did not expect you to act as promptly
as you did. That is why they turned and fired upon you in Dry Valley
Gulch: they thought they were suspected and pursued, not by you or any
of your men, but by our cow-boys. Your appearance at the cabin at the
mouth of Deer Creek yesterday morning explained things, and they let you
go on without taking vengeance for the man Mr. Bigelow had shot in the
Dry Valley affray. They were willing to let the greater matter outweigh
the smaller."
Ballard said "Good heavens!" again, and leaned weakly against the
commissary counter. Then, suddenly, it came over him like a cool blast
of wind on a hot day that this clear-eyed, sweet-faced young woman's
intimate knowledge of the labyrinthine tangle was almost superhuman
enough to be uncanny. Would the nerve-shattering mysteries never be
cleared away?
"You know all this--as only an eye-witness could know," he stammered.
"How, in the name of all that is wonderful----"
"We are not without friends--even in your camps," she admitted. "Word
came to Castle 'Cadia of your night ride and its purpose. For the later
details there was little Dick. My father once had his father sent to the
penitentiary for cattle-stealing. In pity for the boy, I persuaded some
of our Denver friends to start a petition for a pardon. Dick has not
forgotten it; and last night he rode to Castle 'Cadia to tell me what I
have told you--the poor little lad being more loyal to me than he is to
his irreclaimable wretch of a father. Also, he told me another thing:
to-night, while the range cattle are entirely unguarded, there will be
another raid from Deer Creek. I thought you might like to know how hard
a blow you have struck us, this time. That is why I have made Jerry
drive me a hundred miles or so up and down the valley this afternoon."
The situation was well beyond speech, any exculpatory speech of
Ballard's, but there was still an opportunity for deeds. Going to the
door he called to Bigelow, and when the Forestry man came in, his part
in what was to be done was assigned abruptly.
"Mr. Bigelow, you can handle the runabout with one good arm, I'm sure:
drive Miss Craigmiles home, if you please, and let me have Blacklock."
"Certainly, if Miss Elsa is willing to exchange a good chauffeur for a
poor one," was the good-natured reply. And then to his hostess: "Are you
willing, Miss Craigmiles?"
"Mr. Ballard is the present tyrant of Arcadia. If he shows us the
door----"
Bigelow was already at the car step, waiting to help her in. There was
time only for a single sentence of caution, and Ballard got it in a
swift aside.
"Don't be rash again," she warned him. "You have plenty of men here. If
Carson can be made to understand that you will not let him take
advantage of the plot in which he has made you his innocent
accessory----"
"Set your mind entirely at rest," he cut in, with a curtness which was
born altogether of his determination, and not at all of his attitude
toward the woman he loved. "There will be no cattle-lifting in this
valley to-night--or at any other time until your own caretakers have
returned."
"Thank you," she said simply; and a minute later Ballard and young
Blacklock stood aside to let Bigelow remove himself, his companion, and
the smart little car swiftly from the scene.
"Say, Mr. Ballard, this is no end good of you--to let me in for a little
breather of sport," said the collegian, when the fast runabout was
fading to a dusty blur in the sunset purplings. "Bigelow gave me a hint;
said there was a scrap of some sort on. Make me your side partner, and
I'll do you proud."
"You are all right," laughed Ballard, with a sudden access of
light-heartedness. "But the first thing to do is to get a little hay out
of the rack. Come in and let us see what you can make of a camp supper.
Fitzpatrick bets high on his cook--which is more than I'd do if he were
mine."
XIV
THE MAXIM
Ballard and Blacklock ate supper at the contractor's table in the
commissary, and the talk, what there was of it, left the Kentuckian
aside. The Arcadian summering was the young collegian's first plunge
into the manful realities, and it was not often that he came upon so
much raw material in the lump as the contractor's camp, and more
especially the jovial Irish contractor himself, afforded.
Ballard was silent for cause. Out of the depths of humiliation for the
part he had been made to play in the plan for robbing Colonel Craigmiles
he had promised unhesitatingly to prevent the robbery. But the means for
preventing it were not so obvious as they might have been. Force was the
only argument which would appeal to the cattle-lifters, and assuredly
there were men enough and arms enough in the Fitzpatrick camps to hold
up any possible number of rustlers that Carson could bring into the
valley. But would the contractor's men consent to fight the colonel's
battle?
This was the crucial query which only Fitzpatrick could answer; and at
the close of the meal, Ballard made haste to have private speech with
the contractor in the closet-like pay office.
"You see what we are up against, Bourke," he summed up when he had
explained the true inwardness of the situation to the Irishman. "Bare
justice, the justice that even an enemy has a right to expect, shoves us
into the breach. We've got to stop this raid on the Craigmiles cattle."
Fitzpatrick was shaking his head dubiously.
"Sure, now; _I'm_ with you, Mr. Ballard," he allowed, righting himself
with an effort that was a fine triumph over personal prejudice. "But
it's only fair to warn you that not a man in any of the ditch camps will
lift a finger in any fight to save the colonel's property. This shindy
with the cow-boys has gone on too long, and it has been too bitter."
"But this time they've got it to do," Ballard insisted warmly. "They are
your men, under your orders."
"Under my orders to throw dirt, maybe; but not to shoulder the guns and
do the tin-soldier act. There's plinty of men, as you say; Polacks and
Hungarians and Eyetalians and Irish--and the Irish are the only ones you
could count on in a hooraw, boys! I know every man of them, Mr. Ballard,
and, not to be mincin' the wor-rd, they'd see you--or me, either--in the
hot place before they'd point a gun at anybody who was giving the
Craigmiles outfit a little taste of its own medicine."
Fitzpatrick's positive assurance was discouraging, but Ballard would not
give up.
"How many men do you suppose Carson can muster for this cattle
round-up?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know; eighteen or twenty at the outside, maybe."
"You've got two hundred and forty-odd here and at Riley's; in all that
number don't you suppose you could find a dozen or two who would stand
by us?"
"Honestly, then, I don't, Mr. Ballard. I'm not lukewarm, as ye might
think: I'll stand with you while I can squint an eye to sight th' gun.
But the minute you tell the b'ys what you're wantin' them to do, that
same minute they'll give you the high-ball signal and quit."
"Strike work, you mean?"
"Just that."
Ballard went into a brown study, and Fitzpatrick respected it. After a
time the silence was broken by the faint tapping of the tiny telegraph
instrument on the contractor's desk. Ballard's chair righted itself with
a crash.
"The wire," he exclaimed; "I had forgotten that you had brought it down
this far on the line. I wonder if I can get Bromley?"
"Sure ye can," said the contractor; and Ballard sat at the desk to try.