machine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all get
away a few hours later."
"And I--the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses who
could have made the most of it--_I_ wasn't there to see," cut in
Wingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"
"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing--for a
play," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and Miss
Cantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramatic
quality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of the
real thing. It's always inadequate."
"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene and
lofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've been
to your camp, and what I didn't find out about that hoodoo of yours----"
It was Miss Elsa, sitting at Wingfield's right, who broke in with an
entirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding an
answer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafter
exclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield's
literary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was prepared
to draw its teeth when the time should come.
As on the occasion of the engineer's former visit to Castle 'Cadia,
there was an after-dinner adjournment to the big portico, where the
Japanese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell into
pairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.
Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at the
dispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece of
mistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in the
midst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off with
genial protests.
"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it"--with a benedictory
wave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uh
little blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generous
intervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through the
machinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, I
should probably have done precisely the same thing--only I'm not sure I
should have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try one
of these conchas, suh--unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havana
has been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."
Ballard took the gold-banded cigar as one who, having taken a man's
coat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to the
colonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever he
doubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any of
the mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of the
irrigation company's industrial army.
Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy with
the colonel had cost him a possible chance of a _tete-a-tete_ with Elsa.
She was swinging gently in her own particular corner hammock; but this
time it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tiny
coffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which the
sweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to her
coffee-holder:
"I am taking you at your sister's valuation and trusting you very fully,
Mr. Bigelow. You are quite sure you were followed, you and Mr. Ballard,
on the day before the dynamiting of the canal?"
"No; I merely suspected it. I wasn't sure enough to warrant me in
calling Ballard's attention to the single horseman who seemed to be
keeping us in view. But in the light of later events----"
"Yes; I know," she interrupted hastily. "Were you near enough to
identify the man if--if you should see him again?"
"Oh, no. Most of the time he was a mere galloping dot in the distance.
Only once--it was when Ballard and I had stopped to wrangle over a bit
of deforesting vandalism on the part of the contractors--I saw him
fairly as he drew rein on a hilltop in our rear."
"Describe him for me," she directed, briefly.
"I'm afraid I can't do that. I had only this one near-by glimpse of him,
you know. But I remarked that he was riding a large horse, like one of
those in your father's stables; that he sat straight in the saddle; and
that he was wearing some kind of a skirted coat that blew out behind him
when he wheeled to face the breeze."
Miss Craigmiles sat up in the hammock and pressed her fingers upon her
closed eyes. When she spoke again after the lapse of a long minute, it
was to ask Bigelow to retell the story of the brief fight in the
darkness at the sand arroyo on the night of the explosion.
The Forestry man went over the happenings of the night, and of the day
following, circumstantially, while the growing moon tilted like a silver
shallop in a sea of ebony toward the distant Elks, and the groups and
pairs on the broad portico rearranged themselves choir-wise to sing
hymns for which one of the Cantrell sisters went to the piano beyond the
open windows of the drawing-room to play the accompaniments.
When the not too harmonious chorus began to drone upon the windless
night air, Miss Craigmiles came out of her fit of abstraction and
thanked Bigelow for his patience with her.
"It isn't altogether morbid curiosity on my part," she explained, half
pathetically. "Some day I may be able to tell you just what it is--but
not to-night. Now you may go and rescue Madge from the major, who has
been 'H'm-ha-ing' her to extinction for the last half-hour. And if
you're brave enough you may tell Mr. Ballard that his bass is something
dreadful--or send him here and I'll tell him."
The open-eyed little ruse worked like a piece of well-oiled mechanism,
and Ballard broke off in the middle of a verse to go and drag Bigelow's
deserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.
"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mock
petulance. "Didn't you know it?"
"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known to
sing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."
She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that always
betokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.
"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays the
violin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"
Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable pricking of
impatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiously
similar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. But
he kept the impatience out of his reply.
"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since I
came on the work."
"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonality
which placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; but
Ballard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.
"I am glad you like him," he said; his tone implying the precise
opposite of the words.
"Are you? You don't say it very enthusiastically."
It was a small challenge, and he lifted it almost roughly.
"I can't be enthusiastic where your liking for other men is concerned."
Her smile was a mere face-lighting of mockery.
"I can't imagine Mr. Bromley saying a thing like that. What was it you
told me once about the high plane of men-friendships? As I remember it,
you said that they were the purest passions the world has ever known.
And you wouldn't admit that women could breathe the rarefied air of that
high altitude at all."
"That was before I knew all the possibilities; before I knew what it
means to----"
"Don't say it," she interrupted, the mocking mood slipping from her like
a cast-off garment.
"I shall say it," he went on doggedly. "Loudon is nearer to me than any
other man I ever knew. But I honestly believe I should hate him if--tell
me that it isn't so, Elsa. For heaven's sake, help me to kill out this
new madness before it makes a scoundrel of me!"
What she would have said he was not to know. Beyond the zone of light
bounded by the shadows of the maples on the lawn there were sounds as of
some animal crashing its way through the shrubbery. A moment later, out
of the enclosing walls of the night, came a man, running and gasping for
breath. It was one of the labourers from the camp at Elbow Canyon, and
he made for the corner of the portico where Miss Craigmiles's hammock
was swung.
"'Tis Misther Ballard I'm lukin' for!" he panted; and Ballard answered
quickly for himself.
"I'm here," he said. "What's wanted?"
"It's Misther Bromley, this time, sorr. The wather was risin' in the
river, and he'd been up to the wing dam just below this to see was there
anny logs or annything cloggin' it. On the way up or back, we don't know
which, he did be stoomblin' from the trail into the canyon; and the
dago, Lu'gi, found him." The man was mopping his face with a red
bandana, and his hands were shaking as if he had an ague fit.
"Is he badly hurt?" Ballard had put himself quickly between the hammock
and the bearer of ill tidings.
"'Tis kilt dead entirely he is, sorr, we're thinkin'," was the
low-spoken reply. The assistant engineer had no enemies among the
workmen at the headquarters' camp.
Ballard heard a horrified gasp behind him, and the hammock suddenly
swung empty. When he turned, Elsa was hurrying out through the open
French window with his coat and hat.
"You must not lose a moment," she urged. "Don't wait for anything--I'll
explain to father and Aunt June. Hurry! hurry! but, oh, do be
careful--_careful_!"
Ballard dropped from the edge of the portico and plunged into the
shrubbery at the heels of the messenger. The young woman, still pale and
strangely perturbed, hastened to find her aunt.
"What is it, child? What has happened?"
Miss Cauffrey, the gentle-voiced, had been dozing in her chair, but she
wakened quickly when Elsa spoke to her.
"It is another--accident; at the construction camp. Mr. Ballard had to
go immediately. Where is father?"
Miss Cauffrey put up her eye-glasses and scanned the various groups
within eye-reach. Then she remembered. "Oh, yes; I think I must be very
sleepy, yet. He went in quite a little time ago; to the library to lie
down. He asked me to call him when Mr. Ballard was ready to go."
"Are you sure of that, Aunt June?"
"Why--yes. No, that wasn't it, either; he asked me to excuse him to Mr.
Ballard. I recollect now. Dear me, child! What has upset you so? You
look positively haggard."
But Elsa had fled; first to the library, which was empty, and then to
her father's room above stairs. That was empty, too, but the coat and
waistcoat her father had worn earlier in the evening were lying upon the
bed as if thrown aside hurriedly. While she was staring panic-stricken
at the mute evidences of his absence she heard his step in the corridor.
When he came in, less familiar eyes than those of his daughter would
scarcely have recognised him. He was muffled to the heels in a long
rain-coat, the muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathing
hard like a spent runner.
[Illustration: The muscles of his face were twitching, and he was
breathing hard, like a spent runner.]
"Father!" she called, softly; but he either did not hear or did not
heed. He had flung the rain-coat aside and was hastily struggling into
the evening dress. When he turned from the dressing-mirror she could
hardly keep from crying out. With the swift change of raiment he had
become himself again; and a few minutes later, when she had followed him
to the library to find him lying quietly upon the reading-lounge,
half-asleep, as it seemed, the transformation scene in the upper room
became more than ever like the fleeting impression of an incredible
dream.
"Father, are you asleep?" she asked; and when he sat up quickly she told
him her tidings without preface.
"Mr. Bromley is hurt--fatally, they think--by a fall from the path into
the lower canyon. Mr. Ballard has gone with the man who came to bring
the news. Will you send Otto in the car to see if there is anything we
can do?"
"Bromley? Oh, no, child; it can't be _Bromley_!" He had risen to his
feet at her mention of the name, but now he sat down again as if the
full tale of the years had smitten him suddenly. Then he gave his
directions, brokenly, and with a curious thickening of the deep-toned,
mellifluous voice: "Tell Otto to bring the small car around at--at once,
and fetch me my coat. Of cou'se, my deah, I shall go myself"--this in
response to her swift protest. "I'm quite well and able; just a
little--a little sho'tness of breath. Fetch me my coat and the
doctor-box, thah's a good girl. But--but I assure you it can't
be--Bromley!"
XVI
THE RETURN OF THE OMEN
Loudon Bromley's principal wounding was a pretty seriously broken head,
got, so said Luigi, the Tuscan river-watchman who had found and brought
him in, by the fall from the steep hill path into the rocky canyon.
Ballard reached the camp at the heels of the Irish newsbearer shortly
after the unconscious assistant had been carried up to the adobe
headquarters; and being, like most engineers with field experience, a
rough-and-ready amateur surgeon, he cleared the room of the throng of
sympathising and utterly useless stone "buckies," and fell to work. But
beyond cleansing the wound and telegraphing by way of Denver to Aspen
for skilled help, there was little he could do.
The telegraphing promised nothing. Cutting out all the probable delays,
and assuming the Aspen physician's willingness to undertake a perilous
night gallop over a barely passable mountain trail, twelve hours at the
very shortest must go to the covering of the forty miles.
Ballard counted the slow beats of the fluttering pulse and shook his
head despairingly. Since he had lived thus long after the accident,
Bromley might live a few hours longer. But it seemed much more likely
that the flickering candle of life might go out with the next breath.
Ballard was unashamed when the lights in the little bunk-room grew dim
to his sight, and a lump came in his throat. Jealousy, if the sullen
self-centring in the sentimental affair had grown to that, was quenched
in the upwelling tide of honest grief. For back of the sex-selfishness,
and far more deeply rooted, was the strong passion of brother-loyalty,
reawakened now and eager to make amends--to be given a chance to make
amends--for the momentary lapse into egoism.
To the Kentuckian in this hour of keen misery came an angel of comfort
in the guise of his late host, the master of Castle 'Cadia. There was
the stuttering staccato of a motor-car breasting the steep grade of the
mesa hill, the drumming of the released engines at the door of the
adobe, and the colonel entered, followed by Jerry Blacklock, who had
taken the chauffeur's place behind the pilot wheel for the roundabout
drive from Castle 'Cadia. In professional silence, and with no more than
a nod to the watcher at the bedside, the first gentleman of Arcadia laid
off his coat, opened a kit of surgeon's tools, and proceeded to save
Bromley's life, for the time being, at least, by skilfully lifting the
broken bone which was slowly pressing him to death.
"Thah, suh," he said, the melodious voice filling the tin-roofed shack
until every resonant thing within the mud-brick walls seemed to vibrate
in harmonious sympathy, "thah, suh; what mo' there is to do needn't be
done to-night. To-morrow morning, Mistuh Ballard, you'll make a right
comfo'table litter and have him carried up to Castle 'Cadia, and among
us all we'll try to ansuh for him. Not a word, my deah suh; it's only
what that deah boy would do for the most wo'thless one of us. I tell
you, Mistuh Ballard, we've learned to think right much of Loudon; yes,
suh--right much."
Ballard was thankful, and he said so. Then he spoke of the Aspen-aimed
telegram.
"Countehmand it, suh; countehmand it," was the colonel's direction.
"We'll pull him through without calling in the neighbuhs. Living heah,
in such--ah--close proximity to youh man-mangling institutions, I've had
experience enough durin' the past year or so to give me standing as a
regular practitioneh; I have, for a fact, suh." And his mellow laugh was
like the booming of bees among the clover heads.
"I don't doubt it in the least," acknowledged Ballard; and then he
thanked young Blacklock for coming.
"It was up to me, wasn't it, Colonel Craigmiles?" said the collegian.
"Otto--Otto's the house-shover, you know--flunked his job; said he
wouldn't be responsible for anybody's life if he had to drive that road
at speed in the night. We drove it all right, though, didn't we,
Colonel? And we'll drive it back."
The King of Arcadia put a hand on Ballard's shoulder and pointed an
appreciative finger at Blacklock.
"That young cub, suh, hasn't any mo' horse sense than one of youh Dago
mortah-mixers; but the way he drives a motor-car is simply scandalous!
Why, suh, if my hair hadn't been white when we started, it would have
tu'ned on me long befo' we made the loop around Dump Mountain."
Ballard went to the door with the two Good Samaritans, saw the colonel
safely settled in the runabout, and let his gaze follow the winding
course of the little car until the dodging tail-light had crossed the
temporary bridge below the camp, to be lost among the shoulders of the
opposite hills. The elder Fitzpatrick was at his elbow when he turned to
go in.
"There's hope f'r the little man, Misther Ballard?" he inquired
anxiously.
"Good hope, now, I think, Michael."
"That's the brave wor-rd. The min do be sittin' up in th' bunk-shanties
to hear ut. 'Twas all through the camp the minut' they brought him in.
There isn't a man av thim that wouldn't go t'rough fire and wather f'r
Misther Bromley--and that's no joke. Is there annything I can do?"
"Nothing, thank you. Tell the yard watchman to stay within call, and
I'll send for you if you're needed."
With this provision for the possible need, the young chief kept the
vigil alone, sitting where he could see the face of the still
unconscious victim of fate, or tramping three steps and a turn in the
adjoining office room when sleep threatened to overpower him.
It was a time for calm second thought; for a reflective weighing of the
singular and ominous conditions partly revealed in the week agone talk
with Elsa Craigmiles. That she knew more than she was willing to tell
had been plainly evident in that first evening on the tree-pillared
portico at Castle 'Cadia; but beyond this assumption the unanswerable
questions clustered quickly, opening door after door of speculative
conjecture in the background.
What was the motive behind the hurled stone which had so nearly bred a
tragedy on his first evening at Elbow Canyon? He reflected that he had
always been too busy to make personal enemies; therefore, the attempt
upon his life must have been impersonal--must have been directed at the
chief engineer of the Arcadia Company. Assuming this, the chain of
inference linked itself rapidly. Was Macpherson's death purely
accidental?--or Braithwaite's? If not, who was the murderer?--and why
was the colonel's daughter so evidently determined to shield him?
The answer, the purely logical answer, pointed to one man--her
father--and thereupon became a thing to be scoffed at. It was more than
incredible; it was blankly unthinkable.
The young Kentuckian, descendant of pioneers who had hewn their
beginnings out of the primitive wilderness, taking life as they found
it, was practical before all things else. Villains of the Borgian strain
no longer existed, save in the unreal world of the novelist or the
playwriter. And if, by any stretch of imagination, they might still be
supposed to exist....
Ballard brushed the supposition impatiently aside when he thought of the
woman he loved.
"Anything but that!" he exclaimed, breaking the silence of the four bare
walls for the sake of hearing the sound of his own voice. "And, besides,
the colonel himself is a living, breathing refutation of any such
idiotic notion. All the same, if it is not her father she is trying to
shield, who, in the name of all that is good, can it be? And why should
Colonel Craigmiles, or anyone else, be so insanely vindictive as to
imagine that the killing of a few chiefs of construction will cut any
figure with the company which hires them?"
These perplexing questions were still unanswered when the graying dawn
found him dozing in his chair, with the camp whistles sounding the early
turn-out, and Bromley conscious and begging feebly for a drink of water.
XVII
THE DERRICK FUMBLES
Bromley had been a week in hospital at the great house in the upper
valley, and was recovering as rapidly as a clean-living, well-ancestored
man should, when Ballard was surprised one morning by a descent of the
entire Castle 'Cadia garrison, lacking only the colonel and Miss
Cauffrey, upon the scene of activities at the dam.
The chief of construction had to flog himself sharply into the
hospitable line before he could make the invaders welcome. He had a
workingman's shrewd impatience of interruptions; and since the accident
which had deprived him of his assistant, he had been doing double duty.
On this particular morning he was about to leave for a flying round of
the camps on the railroad extension; but he reluctantly countermanded
the order for the locomotive when he saw Elsa picking the way for her
guests among the obstructions in the stone yard.
"Please--oh, please don't look so inhospitable!" she begged, in
well-simulated dismay, when the irruption of sight-seers had fairly
surrounded him. "We have driven and fished and climbed mountains and
played children's games at home until there was positively nothing else
to do. Pacify him, Cousin Janet--he's going to warn us off!"
Ballard laughingly disclaimed any such ungracious intention, and
proceeded to prove his words by deeds. Young Blacklock and Bigelow were
easily interested in the building details; the women were given an
opportunity to see the inside workings of the men's housekeeping in the
shacks, the mess-tent and the camp kitchen; the major was permitted and
encouraged to be loftily critical of everything; and Wingfield--but
Ballard kept the playwright carefully tethered in a sort of moral
hitching-rope, holding the end of the rope in his own hands.
Once openly committed as entertainer, the young Kentuckian did all that
could be expected of him--and more. When the visitors had surfeited
themselves on concrete-mixing and stone-laying and camp housekeeping,
the chief engineer had plank seats placed on a flat car, and the
invaders were whisked away on an impromptu and personally conducted
railway excursion to some of the nearer ditch camps.
Before leaving the headquarters, Ballard gave Fitzpatrick an Irish hint;
and when the excursionists returned from the railway jaunt, there was a
miraculous luncheon served in the big mess-tent. Garou, the
French-Canadian camp cook, had a soul above the bare necessities when
the occasion demanded; and he had Ballard's private commissary to draw
upon.
After the luncheon Ballard let his guests scatter as they pleased,
charging himself, as before, particularly with the oversight and
wardenship of Mr. Lester Wingfield. There was only one chance in a
hundred that the playwright, left to his own devices, might stumble upon
the skeleton in the camp closet. But the Kentuckian was determined to
make that one chance ineffective.
Several things came of the hour spent as Wingfield's keeper while the
others were visiting the wing dam and the quarry, the spillway, and the
cut-off tunnel, under Fitzpatrick as megaphonist. One of them was a
juster appreciation of the playwright as a man and a brother. Ballard
smiled mentally when he realised that his point of view had been that of
the elemental lover, jealous of a possible rival. Wingfield was not half
a bad sort, he admitted; a little inclined to pose, since it was his art
to epitomise a world of _poseurs_; an enthusiast in his calling; but at
bottom a workable companion and the shrewdest of observers.