door of the pay office. "There's a man out here wanting to speak to you,
Mr. Fitzpatrick," he announced; and the contractor went out, returning
presently to break into Ballard's preoccupied effort to raise the office
at Elbow Canyon.
"One of the foremen came in to say that the Craigmiles men were coming
back. For the last half-hour horsemen by twos and threes have been
trailing up the river road and heading for the ranch headquarters," was
the information he brought.
"It's Carson's gang," said Ballard, at once.
"Yes; but I didn't give it away to the foreman. Their scheme is to make
as much of a round-up as they can while it's light enough to see.
There'll be a small piece of a moon, and that'll do for the drive down
the canyon. Oh, I'll bet you they've got it all figured out to a dot.
Carson's plenty smooth when it comes to plannin' any devilment."
Ballard turned back to the telegraph key and rattled it impatiently.
Time was growing precious; was already temerariously short for carrying
out the programme he had hastily determined upon in the few minutes of
brown study.
"That you, Loudon?" he clicked, when, after interminable tappings, the
breaking answer came; and upon the heels of the snipped-out affirmative
he cut in masterfully.
"Ask no questions, but do as I say, quick. You said colonel had
machine-gun at his mine: Rally gang stone-buckies, rush that gun, and
capture it. Can you do it?"
"Yes," was the prompt reply, "if you don't mind good big bill funeral
expenses, followed by labour riot."
"We've got to have gun."
"The colonel would lend it if--hold wire minute, Miss Elsa just crossing
bridge in runabout. I'll ask her."
Ballard's sigh of relief was almost a groan, and he waited with good
hope. Elsa would know why he wanted the Maxim, and if the thing could be
done without an express order from her father to the Mexican mine
guards, she would do it. After what seemed to the engineer like the
longest fifteen minutes he had ever endured, the tapping began again.
"Gun here," from Bromley. "What shall I do with it?"
The answer went back shot-like: "Load on engine and get it down to end
of branch nearest this camp quick."
"Want me to come with it?"
"No; stay where you are, and you may be next Arcadian chief
construction. Hurry gun."
Fitzpatrick was his own telegrapher, and as he read what passed through
key and sounder his smile was like that which goes with the
prize-fighter's preliminary hand-shaking.
"Carson'll need persuading," he commented. "'Tis well ye've got the
artillery moving. What's next?"
"The next thing is to get out the best team you have, the one that will
make the best time, and send it to the end of track to meet Bromley's
special. How far is it--six miles, or thereabouts?"
"Seven, or maybe a little worse. I'll go with the team myself, and push
on the reins. Do I bring the gun here?"
Ballard thought a moment. "No; since we're to handle this thing by
ourselves, there is no need of making talk in the camps. Do you know a
little sand creek in the hogback called Dry Valley?"
"Sure, I do."
"Good. Make a straight line for the head of that arroyo, and we'll meet
you there, Blacklock and I, with an extra saddle-horse."
Fitzpatrick was getting a duck driving-coat out of a locker.
"What's your notion, Mr. Ballard?--if a man might be asking?"
"Wait, and you'll see," was the crisp reply. "It will work; you'll see
it work like a charm, Bourke. But you must burn the miles with that team
of broncos. We'll be down and out if you don't make connections with the
Maxim. And say; toss a coil of that quarter-inch rope into your wagon as
you go. We'll need that, too."
When the contractor was gone, Ballard called the collegian into the pay
office and put him in touch with the pressing facts. A raid was to be
made on Colonel Craigmiles's cattle by a band of cattle thieves; the
raid was to be prevented; means to the preventing end--three men and a
Maxim automatic rapid-fire gun. Would Blacklock be one of the three?
"Would a hungry little dog eat his supper, Mr. Ballard? By Jove! but
you're a good angel in disguise--to let me in for the fun! And you've
pressed the right button, too, by George! There's a Maxim in the
military kit at college, and I can work her to the queen's taste."
"Then you may consider yourself chief of the artillery," was the prompt
rejoinder. "I suppose I don't need to ask if you can ride a range pony?"
Blacklock's laugh was an excited chuckle.
"Now you're shouting. What I don't know about cow-ponies would make the
biggest book you ever saw. But I'd ride a striped zebra rather than be
left out of this. Do we hike out now?--right away?"
"There is no rush; you can smoke a pipe or two--as I'm going to.
Fitzpatrick has to drive fourteen miles to work off his handicap."
Ballard filled his pipe and lighting it sat down to let the mental
polishing wheels grind upon the details of his plan. Blacklock tried
hard to assume the manly attitude of nonchalance; tried and failed
utterly. Once for every five minutes of the waiting he had to jump up
and make a trip to the front of the commissary to ease off the excess
pressure; and at the eleventh return Ballard was knocking the ash out of
his pipe.
"Getting on your nerves, Jerry?" he asked. "All right: we'll go and bore
a couple of holes into the night, if that's what you're anxious to be
doing."
The start was made without advertisement. Fitzpatrick's horse-keeper was
smoking cigarettes on the little porch platform, and at a word from
Ballard he disappeared in the direction of the horse-rope. Giving him
the necessary saddling time, the two made their way around the
card-playing groups at the plaza fire, and at the back of the darkened
mess-tent found the man waiting with three saddled broncos, all with
rifle holsters under the stirrup leathers. Ballard asked a single
question at the mounting moment.
"You haven't seen young Carson in the last hour or so, have you, Patsy?"
"Niver a hair av him: 'tis all day long he's been gone, wid Misther
Bourke swearing thremenjous about the cayuse he took."
Ballard took the bridle of the led horse and the ride down the line of
the canal, with Fitzpatrick's "piece of a moon" to silver the darkness,
was begun as a part of the day's work by the engineer, but with some
little trepidation by the young collegian, whose saddle-strivings
hitherto had been confined to the well-behaved cobs in his father's
stables.
At the end of the first mile Blacklock found himself growing painfully
conscious of every start of the wiry little steed between his knees, and
was fain to seek comfort.
"Say, Mr. Ballard; what do you do when a horse bucks under you?" he
asked, wedging the inquiry between the jolts of the racking gallop.
"You don't do anything," replied Ballard, taking the pronoun in the
generic sense. "The bronco usually does it all."
"I--believe this brute's--getting ready to--buck," gasped the tyro.
"He's working--my knee-holds loose--with his confounded
sh--shoulder-blades."
"Freeze to him," laughed Ballard. Then he added the word of heartening:
"He can't buck while you keep him on the run. Here's a smooth bit of
prairie: let him out a few notches."
That was the beginning of a mad race that swept them down the canal
line, past Riley's camp and out to the sand-floored cleft in the
foothills far ahead of the planned meeting with Fitzpatrick. But this
time the waiting interval was not wasted. Picketing the three horses,
and arming themselves with a pair of the short-barrelled rifles, the
advance guard of two made a careful study of the ground, pushing the
reconnaissance down to the mouth of the dry valley, and a little way
along the main river trail in both directions.
"Right here," said Ballard, indicating a point on the river trail just
below the intersecting valley mouth, "is where you will be posted with
the Maxim. If you take this boulder for a shield, you can command the
gulch and the upper trail for a hundred yards or more, and still be out
of range of their Winchesters. They'll probably shoot at you, but you
won't mind that, with six or eight feet of granite for a breastwork,
will you, Jerry?"
"Well, I should say not! Just you watch me burn 'em up when you give the
word, Mr. Ballard. I believe I could hold a hundred of 'em from this
rock."
"That is exactly what I want you to do--to hold them. It would be
cold-blooded murder to turn the Maxim loose on them from this short
range unless they force you to it. Don't forget that, Jerry."
"I sha'n't," promised the collegian; and after some further study of the
topographies, they went back to the horses.
Thereupon ensued a tedious wait of an hour or more, with no sight or
sound of the expected waggon, and with anxiety growing like a juggler's
rose during the slowly passing minutes. Anyone of a dozen things might
have happened to delay Fitzpatrick, or even to make his errand a
fruitless one. The construction track was rough, and the hurrying engine
might have jumped the rails. The rustlers might have got wind of the gun
dash and ditched the locomotive. Failing that, some of their round-up
men might have stumbled upon the contractor and halted and overpowered
him. Ballard and Blacklock listened anxiously for the drumming of
wheels. But when the silence was broken it was not by waggon noises; the
sound was in the air--a distant lowing of a herd in motion, and the
shuffling murmur of many hoofs. The inference was plain.
"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars are
coming down-valley with the cattle, _and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick_!"
That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hasty
command to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo,
with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.
"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're less
than a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beef
herd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"
With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting of
the precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men,
horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting of
the terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder on
the main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harness
animals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan briskly
to his two subordinates.
"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man or
two ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," he
predicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which we
must turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sand
gulch where we came in. Later on----"
A rattling clatter of horse-shoes on stone rose above the muffled lowing
and milling of the oncoming drove, and there was no time for further
explanations. As Ballard and his companions drew back among the tree
shadows in the small inner valley, a single horseman galloped down the
canyon trail, wheeling abruptly in the gulch mouth to head off the
cattle if they should try to turn back by way of the hogback valley.
Before the echo of his shrill whistle had died away among the canyon
crags, three men rose up out of the darkness, and with business-like
celerity the trail guard was jerked from his saddle, bound, gagged, and
tossed into the bed of an empty waggon.
"Now for the cut-out!" shouted Ballard; and the advance stragglers of
the stolen herd were already in the mouth of the little valley when the
three amateur line-riders dashed at them and strove to turn the drive at
right angles up the dry gulch.
For a sweating minute or two the battle with brute bewilderment hung in
the balance. Wheel and shout and flog as they would, they seemed able
only to mass the bellowing drove in the narrow mouth of the turn-out.
But at the critical instant, when the milling tangle threatened to
become a jam that must crowd itself from the trail into the near-by
torrent of the Boiling Water, a few of the leaders found the open way to
freedom up the hogback valley, and in another throat-parching minute
there was only a cloud of dust hanging between the gulch heads to show
where the battle had been raging.
This was the situation a little later when the main body of the
rustlers, ten men strong, ambled unsuspectingly into the valley-mouth
trap: dust in the air, a withdrawing thunder of hoof-beats, and apparent
desertion of the point of hazard. Carson was the first to grasp the
meaning of the dust cloud and the vanishing murmur of hoof-tramplings.
"Hell!" he rasped. "Billings has let 'em cut back up the gulch! That's
on you, Buck Cummin's: I told you ye'd better hike along 'ith Billings."
"You always _was_ one o' them 'I-told-ye-so' kind of liars," was the
pessimistic retort of the man called Cummings; and Carson's right hand
was flicking toward the ready pistol butt when a voice out of the
shadows under the western cliff shaped a command clear-cut and incisive.
"Hands up out there--every man of you!" Then, by way of charitable
explanation: "You're covered--with a rapid-fire Maxim."
There were doubters among the ten; desperate men whose lawless days and
nights were filled with hair's-breadth chance-takings. From these came a
scattering volley of pistol shots spitting viciously at the cliff
shadows.
"Show 'em, Jerry," said the voice, curtly; and from the shelter of a
great boulder at the side of the main trail leaped a sheet of flame with
a roar comparable to nothing on earth save its ear-splitting,
nerve-shattering self. Blacklock had swept the machine-gun in a short
arc over the heads of the cattle thieves, and from the cliff face and
ledges above them a dropping rain of clipped pine branches and
splintered rock chippings fell upon the trapped ten.
It is the new and untried that terrifies. In the group of rustlers there
were men who would have wheeled horse and run a gauntlet of spitting
Winchesters without a moment's hesitation. But this hidden
murder-machine belching whole regiment volleys out of the shadows....
"Sojers, by cripes!" muttered Carson, under his breath. Then aloud: "All
right, Cap'n; what you say goes as it lays."
"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the pale
moonlight pricked out the cattle-lifters in the attitude of submission:
"First man on the right--knee your horse into the clump of trees
straight ahead of you."
It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed,
wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones as
Ballard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pine
grove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through the
neutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on the
seventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawn
upon them.
"_Sufferin' Jehu!_" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust and
humiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man called
Cummings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of the
cattle thieves laughed like a good loser.
"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?"
he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor in
sight.
"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly.
"And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head.
D'ye see?"
They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to his
saddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actors
in the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.
"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, when
Fitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulder
redoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-wound
Billings.
"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up--for us easy-marks, Cap'n
Ballard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.
"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.
"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chief
rustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right--if you feel called to
take up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mud
you turn over in th' big valley."
Fitzpatrick was leading the way up the hoof-trampled bed of the dry
valley with the waggon team, and Blacklock was marshalling the line of
prisoners to follow in single file when Ballard wheeled his bronco to
mount.
"I fight my own battles, Carson," he said, quietly. "You set a deadfall
for me, and I tumbled in like a tenderfoot. That put it up to me to
knock out your raid. Incidentally, you and your gang will get what is
coming to you for blowing a few thousand yards of earth into our canal.
That's all. Line up there with the others; you've shot your string and
lost."
The return route led the straggling cavalcade through the arroyo mouth,
and among the low hills back of Riley's camp to a junction with the
canal line grade half way to Fitzpatrick's headquarters. Approaching the
big camp, Ballard held a conference with the contractor, as a result of
which the waggon mules were headed to the left in a semicircular detour
around the sleeping camp, the string of prisoners following as the
knotted trail ropes steered it.
Another hour of easting saw the crescent moon poising over the black
sky-line of the Elks, and it brought captors and captured to the end of
track of the railroad where there was a siding, with a half-dozen empty
material cars and Bromley's artillery special, the engine hissing softly
and the men asleep on the cab cushions.
Ballard cut his prisoners foot-free, dismounted them, and locked them
into an empty box-car. This done, the engine crew was aroused, the Maxim
was reloaded upon the tender, and the chief gave the trainmen their
instructions.
"Take the gun, and that locked box-car, back to Elbow Canyon," he
directed. "Mr. Bromley will give you orders from there."
"Carload o' hosses?" said the engineman, noting the position of the
box-car opposite a temporary chute built for debarking a consignment of
Fitzpatrick's scraper teams.
"No; jackasses," was Ballard's correction; and when the engine was
clattering away to the eastward with its one-car train, the waggon was
headed westward, with Blacklock sharing the seat beside Fitzpatrick,
Ballard lying full-length on his back in the deep box-bed, and the long
string of saddle animals towing from the tailboard.
At the headquarters commissary Blacklock tumbled into the handiest bunk
and was asleep when he did it. But Ballard roused himself sufficiently
to send a message over the wire to Bromley directing the disposal of the
captured cattle thieves, who were to be transported by way of Alta Vista
and the D. & U. P. to the county seat.
After that he remembered nothing until he awoke to blink at the sun
shining into the little bunk room at the back of the pay office; awoke
with a start to find Fitzpatrick handing him a telegram scrawled upon a
bit of wrapping-paper.
"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor,
grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:
"D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side
doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside
but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and
corn whiskey.
"BROMLEY."
XV
HOSPES ET HOSTIS
It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid before
Ballard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley's
laugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.
"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn't
it, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over the
interval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peace
pipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. I
tried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair of
sheep, of course."
"Assume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it go
at that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up on
you long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused--even at a
poor joke on me."
"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since you
went down-valley. And I've been wondering why."
"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead and
buried, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."
Bromley grinned again.
"Meaning that this cow-boy cattle-thief tangle in the lower valley has
made you _persona non grata_ at Castle 'Cadia? You're off; 'way off. You
don't know Colonel Adam. So far from holding malice, he has been down
here twice to thank you for stopping the Carson raid. And that reminds
me: there's a Castle 'Cadia note in your mail-box--came down by the
hands of one of the little Japs this afternoon." And he went in to get
it.
It proved to be another dinner bidding for the chief engineer, to be
accepted informally whenever he had time to spare. It was written and
signed by the daughter, but she said that she spoke both for her father
and herself when she urged him to come soon.
"You'll go?" queried Bromley, when Ballard had passed the faintly
perfumed bit of note-paper across the arm's-reach between the two
lazy-chairs.
"You know I'll go," was the half morose answer.
Bromley's smile was perfunctory.
"Of course you will," he assented. "To-night?"
"As well one time as another. Won't you go along?"
"Miss Elsa's invitation does not include me," was the gentle reminder.
"Bosh! You've had the open door, first, last, and all the time, haven't
you?"
"Of course. I was only joking. But it isn't good for both of us to be
off the job at the same time. I'll stay and keep on intimidating the
hoodoo."
There was a material train coming in from Alta Vista, and when its
long-drawn chime woke the canyon echoes, they both left the mesa and
went down to the railroad yard. It was an hour later, and Ballard was
changing his clothes in his bunk-room when he called to Bromley, who was
checking the way-bills for the lately arrived material.
"Oh, I say, Loudon; has that canyon path been dug out again?--where the
slide was?"
"Sure," said Bromley, without looking up. Then: "You're going to walk?"
"How else would I get there?" returned Ballard, who still seemed to be
labouring with his handicap of moroseness.
The assistant did not reply, but a warm flush crept up under the sunburn
as he went on checking the way-bills. Later, when Ballard swung out to
go to the Craigmiles's, the man at the desk let him pass with a brief
"So-long," and bent still lower over his work.
Under much less embarrassing conditions, Ballard would have been
prepared to find himself breathing an atmosphere of constraint when he
joined the Castle 'Cadia house-party on the great tree-pillared portico
of the Craigmiles mansion. But the embarrassment, if any there were, was
all his own. The colonel was warmly hospitable; under her outward
presentment of cheerful mockery, Elsa was palpably glad to see him; Miss
Cauffrey was gently reproachful because he had not let them send Otto
and the car to drive him around from the canyon; and the various guests
welcomed him each after his or her kind.
During the ante-dinner pause the talk was all of the engineer's prompt
snuffing-out of the cattle raid, and the praiseful comment on the little
_coup de main_ was not marred by any reference to the mistaken zeal
which had made the raid possible. More than once Ballard found himself
wondering if the colonel and Elsa, Bigelow and Blacklock, had conspired
generously to keep the story of his egregious blunder from reaching the
others. If they had not, there was a deal more charity in human nature
than the most cheerful optimist ever postulated, he concluded.
At the dinner-table the enthusiastic _rapport_ was evenly sustained.
Ballard took in the elder of the Cantrell sisters; and Wingfield, who
sat opposite, quite neglected Miss Van Bryck in his efforts to make an
inquisitive third when Miss Cantrell insistently returned to the
exciting topic of the Carson capture--which she did after each separate
endeavour on Ballard's part to escape the enthusiasm.
"Your joking about it doesn't make it any less heroic, Mr. Ballard," was
one of Miss Cantrell's phrasings of the song of triumph. "Just think of
it--three of you against eleven desperate outlaws!"