them remains untouched," he commented. "How can the genial, kindly,
magnanimous man we know, or think we know, be such a fiend incarnate?"
Then he broke ground again in the old field. "Will you do now what I
begged you to do at first?--throw up this cursed job and go away?"
Ballard stopped short in his tramping and his answer was an explosive
"No!"
"That is half righteous anger, and half something else. What is the
other half, Breckenridge?" And when Ballard did not define it: "I can
guess it; it is the same thing that made you stuff Wingfield's theories
down his throat a few minutes ago. You are sorry for the daughter."
Through the open door Ballard saw Fitzpatrick coming across the stone
yard.
"You've guessed it, Loudon; or rather, I think you have known it all
along. I love Elsa Craigmiles; I loved her long before I ever heard of
Arcadia or its king. Now you know why Wingfield mustn't be allowed to
talk; why I mustn't go away and give place to a new chief who might live
to see Elsa's father hanged. She must be spared and defended at any
cost. One other word before Fitzpatrick cuts in: When my time comes, if
it does come, you and one other man will know how I passed out and why.
I want your promise that you'll keep still, and that you will keep
Wingfield still. Blacklock doesn't count."
"Sure," said Bromley, quietly; and then, with the big Irish contractor's
shadow fairly darkening the door: "You'll do the same for me,
Breckenridge, won't you? Because--oh, confound it all!--I'm in the same
boat with you; without a ghost of a show, you understand."
Ballard put his back squarely to Michael Fitzpatrick scraping his feet
on the puncheon-floored porch of the bungalow, and gripped Bromley's
hand across the table.
"It's a bargain," he declared warmly. "We'll take the long chance and
stand by her together, old man. And if she chooses the better part in
the end, I'll try not to act like a jealous fool. Now you turn in and
lie down a while. I've got to go with Michael."
This time it was Bromley who saved the situation. "What a pair of
luminous donkeys we are!" he laughed. "She calls you 'dear friend,' and
me 'little brother.' If we're right good and tractable, we may get cards
to her wedding--with Wingfield."
XIX
IN THE LABORATORY
Ballard had a small shock while he was crossing the stone yard with
Fitzpatrick. It turned upon the sight of the handsome figure of the
Craigmiles ranch foreman calmly rolling a cigarette in the shade of one
of the cutting sheds.
"What is the Mexican doing here?" he demanded abruptly of Fitzpatrick;
and the Irishman's manner was far from reassuring.
"'Tis you he'll be wanting to see, I'm thinking. He's been hanging
'round the office f'r the betther part of an hour. Shall I run him off
the riservation?"
"Around the office, you say?" Ballard cut himself instantly out of the
contractor's company and crossed briskly to the shed where the Mexican
was lounging. "You are waiting to see me?" he asked shortly, ignoring
the foreman's courtly bow and sombrero-sweep.
"I wait to h-ask for the 'ealth of Senor Bromley. It is report' to me
that he is recover from hees sobad h-accident."
"Mr. Bromley is getting along all right. Is that all?"
The Mexican bowed again.
"I bring-a da message from the Senorita to da Senor Wingfiel'. He is
som'where on da camp?"
"No; he has gone back to the upper valley. You have been waiting some
time? You must have seen him go."
For the third time the Mexican removed his hat. "I'll have been here
one, two, t'ree little minute, Senor Ballar'," he lied smoothly. "And
now I make to myself the honour of saying to you, _Adios_."
Ballard let him go because there was nothing else to do. His presence in
the construction camp, and the ready lie about the length of his stay,
were both sufficiently ominous. What if he had overheard the talk in the
office? It was easily possible that he had. The windows were open, and
the adobe was only a few steps withdrawn from the busy cutting yard. The
eavesdropper might have sat unremarked upon the office porch, if he had
cared to.
The Kentuckian was deep in the labyrinth of reflection when he rejoined
Fitzpatrick; and the laying-out of the new side-track afterward was
purely mechanical. When the work was done, Ballard returned to the
bungalow, to find Bromley sleeping the sleep of pure exhaustion on the
blanket-covered couch. Obeying a sudden impulse, the Kentuckian took a
field-glass from its case on the wall, and went out, tip-toeing to avoid
waking Bromley. If Manuel had overheard, it was comparatively easy to
prefigure his next step.
"Which way did the Mexican go?" Ballard asked of a cutter in the
stone-yard.
"The last I saw of him he was loungin' off towards the Elbow. That was
just after you was talkin' to him," said the man, lifting his cap to
scratch his head with one finger.
"Did he come here horseback?"
"Not up here on the mesa. Might 'a' left his nag down below; but he
wa'n't headin' that way when I saw him."
Ballard turned away and climbed the hill in the rear of the bungalow;
the hill from which the table-smashing rock had been hurled. From its
crest there was a comprehensive view of the upper valley, with the river
winding through it, with Castle 'Cadia crowning the island-like knoll in
its centre, with the densely forested background range billowing green
and grey in the afternoon sunlight.
Throwing himself flat on the brown hilltop, Ballard trained his glass
first on the inner valley reaches of a bridle-path leading over the
southern hogback. There was no living thing in sight in that field,
though sufficient time had elapsed to enable the Mexican to ride across
the bridge and over the hills, if he had left the camp mounted.
The engineer frowned and slipped easily into the out-of-door man's habit
of thinking aloud.
"It was a bare chance, of course. If he had news to carry to his master,
he would save time by walking one mile as against riding four. Hello!"
The exclamation emphasised a small discovery. From the hilltop the
entrance to the colonel's mysterious mine was in plain view, and for the
first time in Ballard's observings of it the massive, iron-bound door
was open. Bringing the glass to bear on the tunnel-mouth square of
shadow, Ballard made out the figures of two men standing just within the
entrance and far enough withdrawn to be hidden from prying eyes on the
camp plateau. With the help of the glass, the young engineer could
distinguish the shape of a huge white sombrero, and under the sombrero
the red spark of a cigarette. Wherefore he rolled quickly to a less
exposed position and awaited developments.
The suspense was short. In a few minutes the Mexican foreman emerged
from the gloom of the mine-mouth, and with a single swift backward
glance for the industries at the canyon portal, walked rapidly up the
path toward the inner valley. Ballard sat up and trained the field-glass
again. Why had Manuel gone out of his way to stop at the mine? The
answer, or at least one possible answer, was under the foreman's arm,
taking the shape of a short-barrelled rifle of the type carried by
express messengers on Western railways.
Ballard screwed the glass into its smallest compass, dropped it into his
pocket, and made his way down to the camp mesa. The gun meant nothing
more than that the Mexican had not deemed it advisable to appear in the
construction camp armed. But, on the other hand, Ballard was fully
convinced that he was on his way to Colonel Craigmiles as the bearer of
news.
It was an hour later when Otto, the colonel's chauffeur, kicked out the
clutch of the buzzing runabout before the door of the office bungalow
and announced that he had come to take the convalescent back to Castle
'Cadia. Bromley was still asleep; hence there had been no opportunity
for a joint discussion of the latest development in the little war. But
when Ballard was helping him into the mechanician's seat, and Otto had
gone for a bucket of water to cool the hissing radiator, there was time
for a hurried word or two.
"More trouble, Loudon--it turned up while you were asleep. Manuel was
here, in the camp, while we were hammering it out with Wingfield. It is
measurably certain that he overheard all or part of the talk. What he
knows, the colonel doubtless knows, too, by this time, and----"
"Oh, good Lord!" groaned Bromley. "It was bad enough as it stood, but
this drags Wingfield into it, neck and heels! What will they do to him?"
Ballard knitted his brows. "As Manuel could very easily make it appear
in his tale-bearing, anything that might happen to Wingfield would be a
pretty clear case of self-defence for Colonel Craigmiles. Wingfield
knows too much."
"A great deal too much. If I dared say ten words to Elsa----"
"No," Ballard objected; "she is the one person to be shielded and
spared. It's up to us to get Wingfield away from Castle 'Cadia and out
of the country--before anything does happen to him."
"If I were only half a man again!" Bromley lamented. "But I know just
how it will be; I sha'n't have a shadow of chance at Wingfield this
evening. As soon as I show up, Miss Cauffrey and the others will scold
me for overstaying my leave, and chase me off to bed."
"That's so; and it's right," mused Ballard. "You've no business to be
out of bed this minute; you're not fit to be facing a ten-mile drive in
this jig-wagon. By Jove: that's our way out of it! You climb down and
let me go in your place. I'll tell them we let you overdo yourself; that
you were too tired to stand the motor trip--which is the fact, if you'd
only admit it. That will give me a chance at Wingfield; the chance you
wouldn't have if you were to go. What do you say?"
"I've already said it," was the convalescent's reply; and he let Ballard
help him out of the mechanic's seat and into the bungalow.
This is how it chanced that the chauffeur, coming back from Garou's
kitchen barrel with the second bucket of water, found his fares changed
and the chief engineer waiting to be his passenger over the ten miles of
roundabout road. It was all one to the Berliner. He listened to
Ballard's brief explanation with true German impassiveness, cranked the
motor, pulled himself in behind the pilot-wheel, and sent the little car
bounding down the mesa hill to the Boiling Water bridge what time the
hoister whistles were blowing the six-o'clock quitting signal. The
Kentuckian looked at his watch mechanically, as one will at some
familiar reminder of the time. Seven o'clock was the Castle 'Cadia
dinner hour: thirty minutes should suffice for the covering of the ten
miles of country road, and with the fates propitious there would be an
empty half-hour for the cajoling or compelling of Wingfield, imperilled
in his character of overcurious delver into other people's affairs.
So ran the reasonable prefiguring; but plans and prefigurings based upon
the performance of a gasolene motor call for a generous factor of
safety. Five miles from a tool-box in either direction, the engines of
the runabout set up an ominous knocking. A stop was made, and Ballard
filled and lighted his pipe while the chauffeur opened the bonnet and
tapped and pried and screwed and adjusted. Ten minutes were lost in the
testing and trying, and then the German named the trouble, with an
emphatic "_Himmel!_" for a foreword. A broken bolt-head had dropped into
the crank-case, and it would be necessary to take the engines to pieces
to get it out. Ballard consulted his watch again. It lacked only a
quarter of an hour of the Castle 'Cadia dinner-time; and a five-mile
tramp over the hills would consume at least an hour. Whatever danger
might be threatening the playwright (and the farther Ballard got away
from the revelations of the early afternoon, the more the entire fabric
of accusation threatened to crumble into the stuff nightmares are made
of), a delay of an hour or two could hardly bring it to a crisis. Hence,
when Otto lighted the lamps and got out his wrenches, his passenger
stayed with him and became a very efficient mechanic's helper.
This, as we have seen, was at a quarter before seven. At a quarter
before nine the broken bolt was replaced, the last nut was screwed home,
and the engines of the runabout were once more in commission.
"A handy bit of road repairing, Otto," was Ballard's comment. "And we
did it five miles from a lemon. How long will it take us to get in?"
The Berliner did not know. With no further bad luck, fifteen or twenty
minutes should be enough. And in fifteen minutes or less the little car
was racing up the maple-shaded avenue to the Castle 'Cadia carriage
entrance.
Ballard felt trouble in the air before he descended from the car. The
great portico was deserted, the piano was silent, and the lights were on
in the upper rooms of the house. At the mounting of the steps, the
Forestry man met him and drew him aside into the library, which was as
empty as the portico.
"I heard the car and thought it would be Mr. Bromley," Bigelow
explained; adding: "I'm glad he didn't come. There has been an
accident."
"To--to Wingfield?"
"Yes. How did you know? It was just after dinner. The colonel had some
experimental mixture cooking in his electric furnace, and he invited us
all down to the laboratory to see the result. Wingfield tangled himself
in the wires in some unaccountable way and got a terrible shock. For a
few minutes we all thought he was killed, but the colonel would not give
up, and now he is slowly recovering."
Ballard sat down in the nearest chair and held his head in his hands.
His mind was in the condition of a coffer-dam that has been laboriously
pumped out, only to be overwhelmed by a sudden and irresistible return
of the flood. The theory of premeditated assassination was no nightmare;
it was a pitiless, brutal, inhuman fact. Wingfield, an invited guest,
and with a guest's privileges and immunities, had been tried, convicted,
and sentenced for knowing too much.
"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" he said to Bigelow, feeling the necessity
of saying something, and realising at the same instant the futility of
putting the horror of it into words for one who knew nothing of the true
state of affairs.
"Bad enough, certainly. You can imagine how it harrowed all of us, and
especially the women. Cousin Janet fainted and had to be carried up to
the house; and Miss Elsa was the only one of the young women who wasn't
perfectly helpless. Colonel Craigmiles was our stand-by; he knew just
what to do, and how to do it. He is a wonderful man, Mr. Ballard."
"He is--in more ways than a casual observer would suspect." Ballard
suffered so much of his thought to set itself in words. To minimise the
temptation to say more he turned his back upon the accident and
accounted for himself and his presence at Castle 'Cadia.
"Bromley was pretty well tired out when Otto came down with the car, and
I offered to ride around and make his excuses. We broke an engine bolt
on the road: otherwise I should have been here two hours earlier. You
say Wingfield is recovering? I wonder if I could see him for a few
minutes, before I go back to camp?"
Bigelow offered to go up-stairs and find out; and Ballard waited in the
silence of the deserted library for what seemed like a long time. And
when the waiting came to an end it was not Bigelow who parted the
portieres and came silently to stand before his chair; it was the king's
daughter.
"You have heard?" she asked, and her voice seemed to come from some
immeasurable depth of anguish.
"Yes. Is he better?"
"Much better; though he is terribly weak and shaken." Then suddenly:
"What brought you here--so late?"
He explained the ostensible object of his coming, and mentioned the
cause of the delay. She heard him through without comment, but there was
doubt and keen distress and a great fear in the gray eyes when he was
permitted to look into their troubled depths.
"If you are telling me the truth, you are not telling me all of it," she
said, sinking wearily into one of the deepest of the easy-chairs and
shading the tell-tale eyes with her hand.
"Why shouldn't I tell you all of it?" he rejoined evasively.
"I don't know your reasons: I can only fear them."
"If you could put the fear into words, perhaps I might be able to allay
it," he returned gently.
"It is past alleviation; you know it. Mr. Wingfield was with you again
to-day, and when he came home I knew that the thing I had been dreading
had come to pass."
"How could you know it? Not from anything Wingfield said or did, I'm
sure."
"No; but Jerry Blacklock was with him--and Jerry's face is an open book
for any one who cares to read it. Won't you please tell me the worst,
Breckenridge?"
"There isn't any worst," denied Ballard, lying promptly for love's sake.
"We had luncheon together, the four of us, in honour of Bromley's
recovery. Afterward, Wingfield spun yarns for us--as he has a habit of
doing when he can get an audience of more than one person. Some of his
stories were more grewsome than common. I don't wonder that Jerry had a
left-over thrill or two in his face."
She looked up from behind the eye-shading hand. "Do you dare to repeat
those stories to me?"
His laugh lacked something of spontaneity.
"It is hardly a question of daring; it is rather a matter of memory--or
the lack of it. Who ever tries to make a record of after-dinner
fictions? Wingfield's story was a tale of impossible crimes and their
more impossible detection; the plot and outline for a new play, I
fancied, which he was trying first on the dog. Blacklock was the only
one of his three listeners who took him seriously."
She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and when she spoke again it
was of the convalescent assistant.
"You are not going to keep Mr. Bromley at the camp, are you? He isn't
able to work yet."
"Oh, no. You may send for him in the morning, if you wish. I--he was a
little tired to-night, and I thought----"
"Yes; you have told me what you thought," she reminded him, half
absently. And then, with a note of constraint in her voice that was
quite new to him: "You are not obliged to go back to Elbow Canyon
to-night, are you? Your room is always ready for you at Castle 'Cadia."
"Thank you; but I'll have to go back. If I don't, Bromley will think
he's the whole thing and start in to run the camp in the morning before
I could show up."
She rose when he did, but her face was averted and he could not see her
eyes when he went on in a tone from which every emotion save that of
mere friendly solicitude was carefully effaced: "May I go up and jolly
Wingfield a bit? He'll think it odd if I go without looking in at him."
"If you should go without doing that for which you came," she corrected,
with the same impersonal note in her voice. "Of course, you may see him:
come with me."
She led the way up the grand stair and left him at the door of a room in
the wing which commanded a view of the sky-pitched backgrounding
mountains. The door was ajar, and when he knocked and pushed it open he
saw that the playwright was in bed, and that he was alone.
"By Jove, now!" said a weak voice from the pillows; "this is neighbourly
of you, Ballard. How the dickens did you manage to hear of it?"
"Bad news travels fast," said Ballard, drawing a chair to the bedside.
He did not mean to go into details if he could help it; and to get away
from them he asked how the miracle of recovery was progressing.
"Oh, I'm all right now," was the cheerful response--"coming alive at the
rate of two nerves to the minute. And I wouldn't have missed it for the
newest thousand-dollar bill that ever crackled in the palm of poverty.
What few thrills I can't put into a description of electrocution, after
this, won't be worth mentioning."
"They have left you alone?" queried Ballard, with a glance around the
great room.
"Just this moment. The colonel and Miss Cauffrey and Miss Dosia were
with me when the buzzer went off. Whoever sent you up pressed the button
down stairs. Neat, isn't it. How's Bromley? I hope you didn't come to
tell us that his first day in camp knocked him out."
"No; Bromley is all right. You are the sick man, now."
Wingfield's white teeth gleamed in a rather haggard smile.
"I have looked over the edge, Ballard; that's the fact."
"Tell me about it--if you can."
"There isn't much to tell. We were all crowding around the electric
furnace, taking turns at the coloured-glass protected peep-hole. The
colonel had warned us about the wires, but the warning didn't cut any
figure in my case."
"You stumbled?"
The man in bed flung a swift glance across the room toward the corridor
door which Ballard had left ajar.
"Go quietly and shut that door," was his whispered command; and when
Ballard had obeyed it: "Now pull your chair closer and I'll answer your
question: No, I didn't stumble. Somebody tripped me, and in falling I
grabbed at one of the electrodes."
"I was sure of it," said Ballard, quietly. "I knew that in all human
probability you would be the next victim. That is why I persuaded
Bromley to let me take his place in the motor-car. If the car hadn't
broken down, I should have been here in time to warn you. I suppose it
isn't necessary to ask who tripped you?"
The playwright rocked his head on the pillow.
"I'm afraid not, Ballard. The man who afterward saved my life--so they
all say--was the one who stood nearest to me at the moment. The 'why' is
what is tormenting me. I'm not the Arcadia Company, or its chief
engineer, or anybody in particular in this game of 'heads I win, and
tails you lose.'"
Ballard left his chair and walked slowly to the mountain-viewing window.
When he returned to the bedside, he said: "I can help you to the 'why.'
What you said in my office to-day to three of us was overheard by a
fourth--and the fourth was Manuel. An hour or so later he came up this
way, on foot. Does that clear the horizon for you?"
"Perfectly," was the whispered response, followed by a silence heavy
with forecastings.
"Under the changed conditions, it was only fair to you to bring you your
warning, and to take off the embargo on your leaving Castle 'Cadia. Of
course, you'll get yourself recalled to New York at once?" said Ballard.
Wingfield raised himself on one elbow, and again his lips parted in the
grinning smile.
"Not in a thousand years, Ballard. I'll see this thing out now, if I get
killed regularly once a day. You say I mustn't write about it, and
that's so. I'm not a cad. But the experience is worth millions to
me--worth all the chances I'm taking, and more. I'll stay."
Ballard gripped the womanish hand lying on the coverlet. Here, after
all, and under all the overlayings of pose and craftsman egotism, was a
man with a man's heart and courage.
"You're a brave fool, Wingfield," he said, warmly; "and because you are
brave and a man grown, you shall be one of us. We--Bromley and
I--bluffed you to-day for a woman's sake. If you could have got away
from the excitement of the man-hunt for a single second, I know your
first thought would have been for the woman whose lifted finger silences
three of us. Because you seemed to forget this for the moment, I knocked
you down with your own theory. Does that clear another of the horizons
for you?"
"Immensely. And I deserved all you gave me. Until I'm killed off, you
may comfort yourself with the thought that one of the gallant three is
here, in the wings, as you might say, ready and willing to do what he
can to keep the curtain from rising on any more tragedy."
"Thank you," said Ballard, heartily; "that will be a comfort." Then,
with a parting hand-grip and an added word of caution to the man who
knew too much, he left the room and the house, finding his way
unattended to the great portico and to the path leading down to the
river road.
The mile faring down the valley in the velvety blackness of the warm
summer night was a meliorating ending to the day of revelations and
alarms; and for the first time since Wingfield's clever unravelling of
the tangled mesh of mystery, the Kentuckian was able to set the accusing
facts in orderly array. Yet now, as before, the greatest of the
mysteries refused to take its place in the wellnigh completed circle of
incriminating discoveries. That the King of Arcadia, Elsa's father and
the genial host of the great house on the knoll, was a common murderer,
lost to every humane and Christian prompting of the soul, was still as
incredible as a myth of the Middle Ages.