for the preconceived prejudice and tried to make the playwright's
insulation painless. The sun shone hot on the stone yard, and there was
a jar of passable tobacco in the office adobe: would Wingfield care to
go indoors and lounge until the others came to a proper sense of the
desirability of shade and quietude on a hot afternoon?
Wingfield would, gladly. He confessed shamelessly to a habit of smoking
his after-luncheon pipe on his back. There was a home-made divan in the
office quarters, with cushions and blanket coverings, and Ballard found
the tobacco-jar and a clean pipe; a long-stemmed "churchwarden," dear to
the heart of a lazy man.
"Now this is what I call solid comfort," said the playwright, stretching
his long legs luxuriously on the divan. "A man's den that is a den, and
not a bric-a-brac shop masquerading under the name, a good pipe, good
tobacco, and good company. You fellows have us world-people faded to a
shadow when it comes to the real thing. I've felt it in my bones all
along that I was missing the best part of this trip by not getting in
with you down here. But every time I've tried to break away, something
else has turned up."
Ballard was ready with his bucket of cold water.
"You haven't missed anything. There isn't much in a construction camp to
invite the literary mind, I should say." And he tried to make the saying
sound not too inhospitable.
"Oh, you're off wrong, there," argued the playwright, with cheerful
arrogance. "You probably haven't a sense of the literary values; a good
many people haven't--born blind on that side, you know. Now, Miss Van
Bryck has the seeing eye, to an educated finish. She tells me you have a
dramatic situation down here every little so-while. She told me that
story of yours about the stone smashing into your office in the middle
of the night. That's simply ripping good stuff--worlds of possibilities
in a thing like that, don't you know? By the way, this is the room,
isn't it? Does that patch in the ceiling cover the hole?"
Ballard admitted the fact, and strove manfully to throw the switch ahead
of the querist to the end that the talk might be shunted to some less
dangerous topic.
"Hang the tobacco!" snapped the guest irritably, retorting upon
Ballard's remark about the quality of his pet smoking mixture. "You and
Miss Craigmiles seem to be bitten with the same exasperating mania for
subject-changing. I'd like to hear that rock-throwing story at first
hands, if you don't mind."
Having no good reason for refusing point-blank, Ballard told the story,
carefully divesting it of all the little mystery thrills which he had
included for Miss Dosia's benefit.
"Um!" commented Wingfield, at the close of the bald narration. "It would
seem to have lost a good bit in the way of human interest since Miss Van
Bryck repeated it to me. Did you embroider it for her? or did she put in
the little hemstitchings for me?"
Ballard laughed.
"I am sorry if I have spoiled it for you. But you couldn't make a
dramatic situation out of a careless quarryman's overloading of a
shot-hole."
"Oh, no," said the playwright, apparently giving it up. And he smoked
his pipe out in silence.
Ballard thought the incident was comfortably dead and buried, but he did
not know his man. Long after Wingfield might be supposed to have
forgotten all about the stone catapulting, he sat up suddenly and broke
out again.
"Say! you explained to Miss Dosia that the stone couldn't possibly have
come from the quarry without knocking the science of artillery into a
cocked hat. She made a point of that."
"Oh, hold on!" protested the Kentuckian. "You mustn't hold me
responsible for a bit of dinner-table talk with a very charming young
woman. Perhaps Miss Dosia wished to be mystified. I put it to you as man
to man; would you have disappointed her?"
The playwright's laugh showed his fine teeth.
"They tell me you are at the top of the heap in your profession, Mr.
Ballard, and I can easily believe it. But I have a specialty, too, and
I'm no slouch in it. My little stunt is prying into the inner
consciousness of things. Obviously, there is a mystery--a real
mystery--about this stone-throwing episode, and for some reason you are
trying to keep me from dipping into it. Conversely, I'd like to get to
the bottom of it. Tell me frankly, is there any good reason why I
shouldn't?"
Ballard's salvation for this time personified itself in the figure of
Contractor Fitzpatrick darkening the door of the office to ask a
"question of information," as he phrased it. Hence there was an excuse
for a break and a return to the sun-kissed stone yard.
The engineer purposefully prolonged the talk with Fitzpatrick until the
scattered sight-seers had gathered for a descent, under Jerry
Blacklock's lead, to the great ravine below the dam where the river
thundered out of the cut-off tunnel. But when he saw that Miss
Craigmiles had elected to stay behind, and that Wingfield had attached
himself to the younger Miss Cantrell, he gave the contractor his
information boiled down into a curt sentence or two, and hastened to
join the stay-behind.
"You'll melt, out here in the sun," he said, overtaking her as she stood
looking down into the whirling vortex made by the torrent's plunge into
the entrance of the cut-off tunnel.
She ignored the care-taking phrase as if she had not heard it.
"Mr. Wingfield?--you have kept him from getting interested in the--in
the----"
Ballard nodded.
"He is interested, beyond doubt. But for the present moment I have kept
him from adding anything to Miss Dosia's artless gossip. Will you permit
me to suggest that it was taking rather a long chance?--your bringing
him down here?"
"I know; but I couldn't help it. Dosia would have brought him on your
invitation. I did everything I could think of to obstruct; and when they
had beaten me, I made a party affair of it. You'll have to forgive me
for spoiling an entire working day for you."
"Since it has given me a chance to be with you, I'm only too happy in
losing the day," he said; and he meant it. But he let her know the worst
in the other matter in an added sentence. "I'm afraid the mischief is
done in Wingfield's affair, in spite of everything."
"How?" she asked, and the keen anxiety in the grey eyes cut him to the
heart.
He told her briefly of the chance arousing of Wingfield's curiosity, and
of the playwright's expressed determination to fathom the mystery of the
table-smashing stone. Her dismay was pathetic.
"You should never have taken him into your office," she protested
reproachfully. "He was sure to be reminded of Dosia's story there."
"I didn't foresee that, and he was beginning to gossip with the workmen.
I knew it wouldn't be long before he would get the story of the
happenings out of the men--with all the garnishings."
"You _must_ find a way to stop him," she insisted. "If you could only
know what terrible consequences are wrapped up in it!"
He waited until a stone block, dangling in the clutch of the
derrick-fall above its appointed resting-place on the growing wall of
masonry, had been lowered into the cement bed prepared for it before he
said, soberly: "That is the trouble--I _don't_ know. And, short of
quarrelling outright with Wingfield, I don't think of any effective way
of muzzling him."
"No; you mustn't do that. There is misery enough and enmity enough,
without making any more. I'll try to keep him away."
"You will fail," he prophesied, with conviction. "Mr. Wingfield calls
himself a builder of plots; but I can assure you from this one day's
observation of him that he would much rather unravel a plot than build
one."
She was silent while the workmen were swinging another great stone out
over the canyon chasm. The shadow of the huge derrick-boom swept around
and across them, and she shuddered as if the intangible thing had been
an icy finger to touch her.
"You must help me," she pleaded. "I cannot see the way a single step
ahead."
"And I am in still deeper darkness," he reminded her gently. "You forget
that I do not know what threatens you, or how it threatens."
"I can't tell you; I can't tell any one," she said; and he made sure
there was a sob at the catching of her breath.
As once before, he grew suddenly masterful.
"You are wronging yourself and me, Elsa, dear. You forget that your
trouble is mine; that in the end we two shall be one in spite of all the
obstacles that a crazy fate can invent."
She shook her head. "I told you once that you must not forget yourself
again; and you are forgetting. There is one obstacle which can never be
overcome this side of the grave. You must always remember that."
"I remember only that I love you," he dared; adding: "And you are afraid
to tell me what this obstacle is. You know it would vanish in the
telling."
She did not answer.
"You won't tell me that you are in love with Wingfield?" he persisted.
Still no reply.
"Elsa, dearest, can you look me in the eyes and tell me that you do not
love _me_?"
She neither looked nor denied.
"Then that is all I need to know at present," he went on doggedly. "I
shall absolutely and positively refuse to recognise any other obstacle."
She broke silence so swiftly that the words seemed to leap to her lips.
"There is one, dear friend," she said, with a warm upflash of strong
emotion; "one that neither you nor I, nor any one can overcome!" She
pointed down at the boulder-riven flood churning itself into spray in
the canyon pot at their feet. "I will measure it for you--and for
myself, God help us! Rather than be your wife--the mother of your
children--I should gladly, joyfully, fling myself into that."
The motion he made to catch her, to draw her back from the brink of the
chasm, was purely mechanical, but it served to break the strain of a
situation that had become suddenly impossible.
"That was almost tragic, wasn't it?" she asked, with a swift retreat
behind the barricades of mockery. "In another minute we should have
tumbled headlong into melodrama, with poor Mr. Wingfield hopelessly out
of reach for the note-taking process."
"Then you didn't mean what you were saying?" he demanded, trying hard to
overtake the fleeing realities.
"I did, indeed; don't make me say it again. The lights are up, and the
audience might be looking. See how manfully Mr. Bigelow is trying not to
let Cousin Janet discover how she is crushing him!"
Out of the lower ravine the other members of the party were straggling,
with Bigelow giving first aid to a breathless and panting Mrs. Van
Bryck, and Wingfield and young Blacklock helping first one and then
another of the four younger women. The workmen in the cutting yard were
preparing to swing a third massive face-block into place on the dam; and
Miss Craigmiles, quite her serene self again, was asking to be shown how
the grappling hooks were made fast in the process of "toggling."
Ballard accepted his defeat with what philosophy he could muster, and
explained the technical detail. Then the others came up, and the
buckboards sent down from Castle 'Cadia to take the party home were seen
wheeling into line at the upper end of the short foothill canyon.
"There is our recall at last, Mr. Ballard," gasped the breathless
chaperon, "and I daresay you are immensely relieved. But you mustn't be
too sorry for your lost day. We have had a perfectly lovely time."
"Such a delightful day!" echoed the two sharers of the common Christian
name in unison; and the king's daughter added demurely: "Don't you see
we are all waiting for you to ask us to come again, Mr. Ballard?"
"Oh, certainly; any time," said Ballard, coming to the surface.
Notwithstanding, on the short walk up to the waiting buckboards he sank
into the sea of perplexity again. Elsa's moods had always puzzled him.
If they were not real, as he often suspected, they were artistically
perfect imitations; and he was never quite sure that he could
distinguish between the real and the simulated.
As at the present moment: the light-hearted young woman walking beside
him up the steep canyon path was the very opposite of the sorely tried
and anxious one who had twice let him see the effects of the anxiety,
however carefully she concealed the cause.
The perplexed wonder was still making him half abstracted when he put
himself in the way to help her into one of the homeward-headed vehicles.
They were a little in advance of the others, and when she faced him to
say good-bye, he saw her eyes. Behind the smile in them the troubled
shadows were still lurking; and when the heartening word was on his lips
they looked past him, dilating suddenly with a great horror.
"Look!" she cried, pointing back to the dam; and when he wheeled he saw
that they were all looking; standing agape as if they had been shown the
Medusa's head. The third great stone had been swung out over the dam,
and, little by little, with jerkings that made the wire cables snap and
sing, the grappling-hooks were losing their hold in mid-air. The yells
of the workmen imperilled rose sharply above the thunder of the river,
and the man at the winding-drums seemed to have lost his nerve and his
head.
Young Blacklock, who was taking an engineering course in college, turned
and ran back down the path, shouting like a madman. Ballard made a
megaphone of his hands and bellowed an order to the unnerved hoister
engineer. "Lower away! Drop it, you blockhead!" he shouted; but the
command came too late. With a final jerk the slipping hooks gave way,
and the three-ton cube of granite dropped like a huge projectile,
striking the stonework of the dam with a crash like an explosion of
dynamite.
Dosia Van Bryck's shriek was ringing in Ballard's ears, and the look of
frozen horror on Elsa's face was before his eyes, when he dashed down
the steep trail at Blacklock's heels. Happily, there was no one killed;
no one seriously hurt. On the dam-head Fitzpatrick was climbing to a
point of vantage to shout the news to the yard men clustering thickly on
the edge of the cliff above, and Ballard went only far enough to make
sure that there had been no loss of life. Then he turned and hastened
back to the halted buckboards.
"Thank God, it's only a money loss, this time!" he announced. "The hooks
held long enough to give the men time to get out of the way."
"There was no one hurt? Are you sure there was no one hurt?" panted Mrs.
Van Bryck, fanning herself vigorously.
"No one at all. I'm awfully sorry we had to give you such a shock for
your leave-taking, but accidents will happen, now and then. You will
excuse me if I go at once? There is work to be done."
"H'm--ha! One moment, Mr. Ballard," rasped the major, swelling up like a
man on the verge of apoplexy. But Mrs. Van Bryck was not to be set
aside.
"Oh, certainly, we will excuse you. Please don't waste a moment on us.
You shouldn't have troubled to come back. So sorry--it was very
dreadful--terrible!"
While the chaperon was groping for her misplaced self-composure,
Wingfield said a word or two to Dosia, who was his seat-mate, and sprang
to the ground.
"Hold on a second, Ballard!" he called. "I'm going with you. What you
need right now is a trained investigator, and I'm your man. Great Scott!
to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to
see it!" And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very
earnestly to dissuade him: "Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha'n't get underfoot
or be in Mr. Ballard's way; and you needn't trouble to send down for me.
I can pad home on my two feet, later on."
XVIII
THE INDICTMENT
In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block,
Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle 'Cadia and the
construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a
companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling
him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could
think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in
ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be
presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him
in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.
How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and
mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock,
who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward
at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was
merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening
to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous
stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on
his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow,
smoking Ballard's tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and
reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another
of Bromley's dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the
taxidermic art.
"Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and
the camp 'bogie' isn't happening," Ballard told the king's daughter one
morning when he came down from Bromley's hospital room at Castle 'Cadia
and found Elsa waiting for him under the portieres of the darkened
library. "For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery
of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of
simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn't half
asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or
stone-cutters, he is reading straight through Bromley's shelf of
bird-books. He may be absorbing 'local color,' but if he is, he is
letting the environment do all the work. I don't believe he has had a
consciously active idea since he began loafing with us."
"You are mistaken--greatly mistaken," was all she would say; and in the
fulness of time a day came when the event proved how far a woman's
intuition may outrun a man's reasoning.
It was the occasion of Bromley's first return to the camp at Elbow
Canyon, four full weeks after the night of stumbling on the steep path.
Young Blacklock had driven him by the roundabout road in the little
motor-car; and the camp industries paused while the men gave the "Little
Boss" an enthusiastic ovation. Afterward, the convalescent was glad
enough to lie down on the makeshift lounge in the office bungalow; but
when Jerry would have driven him back in time for luncheon at Castle
'Cadia, as his strict orders from Miss Elsa ran, Bromley begged to be
allowed to put his feet under the office mess-table with his chief and
his volunteer chauffeur.
To the three, doing justice to the best that Garou could find in the
camp commissary stores, came Mr. Lester Wingfield, to drag up a stool
and to make himself companionably at home at the engineers' mess, as his
custom had come to be. Until the meal was ended and the pipes were
filled, he was silent and abstracted to the edge of rudeness. But when
Ballard made a move to go down to the railroad yard with Fitzpatrick,
the spell was broken.
"Hold up a minute; don't rush off so frantically," he cut in abruptly.
"I have been waiting for many days to get you and Bromley together for a
little confidential confab about matters and things, and the time has
come. Sit down."
Ballard resumed his seat at the table with an air of predetermined
patience, and the playwright nodded approval. "That's right," he went
on, "brace yourself to take it as it comes; but you needn't write your
reluctance so plainly in your face. It's understood."
"I don't know what you mean," objected Ballard, not quite truthfully.
Wingfield laughed.
"You didn't want me to come down here at first; and since I've been
coming you haven't been too excitedly glad to see me. But that's all
right, too. It's what the public benefactor usually gets for butting in.
Just the same, there is a thing to be done, and I've got to do it. I may
bore you both in the process, but I have reached a point where a pow-wow
is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I've unearthed
the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a
mare's nest of fairly heroic proportions."
By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still
rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table.
Blacklock got up to stand behind the assistant's chair. Ballard thrust
his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived
when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles's sake,
and he was pulling himself together for the battle.
"I know beforehand about what you are going to say," he interjected;
"but let's have your version of it."
"You shall have it hot and hot," promised the playwright. "For quite a
little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been
interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds
so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the assumption that
there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn't exactly creative in
the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr.
Ballard, that your workmen are superstitious fools, and that their
mental attitude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that
the fact--the cause-fact--existed before the superstition; was the
legitimate ancestor of the superstition. Don't you believe it?"
Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. "I've always
believed it," he admitted.
"There isn't the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary
cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it _must_ antedate the
diseased mental condition," resumed the theorist, oracularly. "I don't
know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite's drowning
will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing
mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive
driver, said to me: 'They can say what they like, but _I_ ain't
believing that the river stove him all up as if he'd been stomped on in
a cattle pen.' There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into
the field of the unaccountable."
It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.
"You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one
that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain,
unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the
superstitious twist."
"The sequence in this particular instance is immaterial--quite
immaterial," argued the playwright, with obstinate assurance. "The fact
stays with us that there _was_ something partly unaccountable in this
first tragedy to which the thought of Hoskins--the thoughts of all those
who knew the circumstances--could revert."
"Well?" said Ballard.
"It is on this hypothesis that I have constructed my theory. Casting out
all the accidents chargeable to carelessness, to disobedience of orders,
or to temporary aberration on the part of the workmen, there still
remains a goodly number of them carrying this disturbing atom of
mystery. Take Sanderson's case: he came here, I'm told, with a decent
record; he was not in any sense of the words a moral degenerate. Yet in
a very short time he was killed in a quarrel over a woman at whom the
average man wouldn't look twice. Blacklock, here, has seen this woman;
but I'd like to ask if either of you two have?"--this to Ballard and the
assistant.
Ballard shook his head, and Bromley confessed that he had not.
"Well, Jerry and I have the advantage of you--we have seen her," said
Wingfield, scoring the point with a self-satisfied smile. "She is a
gray-haired Mexican crone, apparently old enough, and certainly hideous
enough, to be the Mexican foreman's mother. I'll venture the assertion
that Sanderson never thought of her as a feminine possibility at all."
"Hold on; I shall be obliged to spoil your theory there," interrupted
Bromley. "Billy unquestionably put himself in Manuel's hands. He used to
go down to the ranch two or three times a week, and he spent money, a
good bit of it, on the woman. I know it, because he borrowed from me.
And along toward the last, he never rode in that direction without
slinging his Winchester under the stirrup-leather."
"Looking for trouble with Manuel, you would say?" interjected Wingfield.