found in a natural state or produced in commercial quantities,"
explained the analyst, mounting and riding his hobby with apparent zest.
"A refined product of zirconia, the earth itself, has been used to make
incandescent gas-mantles; and it was M. Leoffroy, of Paris, who
discovered a method of electric-furnace reduction for isolating the
metal. It was a great discovery. Zirconium, which is exceedingly dense
and practically irreducible by wear, is supplanting iridium for the
pointing of gold pens, and its value for that purpose is far in excess
of any other known substance."
"But Colonel Craigmiles never ships anything from his mine, so far as
any one can see," Ballard cut in.
"No? It isn't necessary. He showed us his reduction-plant--run by
water-power from the little dam in the upper canyon. It is quite
perfect. You will understand that the actual quantity of zirconium
obtained is almost microscopic; but since it is worth much more than
diamonds, weight for weight, the plant needn't be very extensive. And
the fortunate miner in this instance is wholly independent of the
transportation lines. He can carry his output to market in his vest
pocket."
After this, the talk, resolutely shunted by Ballard, veered aside from
Arcadian matters. Later on, when Bromley was making up a shake-down bed
in the rear room for the guest, the Kentuckian went out on the porch to
smoke. It was here that Bromley found him after the Bostonian had been
put to bed.
"Now, then, I want to know where you got that sample, Breckenridge?" he
demanded, without preface.
Ballard's laugh was quite cheerful.
"I stole it out of one of the colonel's ore bins at the entrance of the
mine over yonder."
"I thought so. And the shots?"
"They were fired at me by one of the Mexican night guards, of course.
One of them hit the hat as I was running away, and I was scared stiff
for fear Gardiner's sharp old eyes would discover the hole. I'm right
glad for one thing, Loudon; and that is that the mine is really a mine.
Sometimes I've been tempted to suspect that it was merely a hole in the
ground, designed and maintained purely for the purpose of cinching the
Arcadia Company for damages."
Bromley sat up straight and his teeth came together with a little click.
He was remembering the professor's talk about the underlying shales, and
a possible breach into them above the dam when he said: "Or to--" but
the sentence was left unfinished. Instead, he fell to reproaching
Ballard for his foolhardiness.
"Confound you, Breckenridge! you haven't sense enough to stay in the
house when it's raining out-of-doors! The idea of your taking such
reckless chances on a mere whiff of curiosity! Let me have a pipeful of
that tobacco--unless you mean to hog that, too--along with all the other
risky things."
XXI
MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG
The _fete champetre_, as President Pelham named it in the
trumpet-flourish of announcement, to celebrate the laying of the final
stone of the great dam at the outlet of Elbow Canyon, anticipated the
working completion of the irrigation system by some weeks. That the
canals were not yet in readiness to furnish water to the prospective
farmer really made little difference. The spectacular event was the
laying of the top-stone; and in the promoter's plans a well-arranged
stage-effect was of far greater value than any actual parcelling out of
the land to intended settlers.
Accordingly, no effort was spared to make the celebration an
enthusiastic success. For days before the auspicious one on which the
guest trains began to arrive from Alta Vista and beyond, the camp force
spent itself in setting the scene for the triumph. The spillway gate,
designed to close the cut-off tunnel and so to begin the impounding of
the river, was put in place ready to be forced down by its machinery;
the camp mesa was scraped and raked and cleared of the industrial
litter; a platform was erected for the orators and the brass band; a
towering flagstaff--this by the express direction of the president--was
planted in the middle of the mesa parade ground; and with the exception
of camp cook Garou, busy with a small army of assistants over the
barbecue pits, the construction force was distributed among the camps on
the canals--this last a final touch of Mr. Pelham's to secure the degree
of exclusiveness for the celebration which might not have been
attainable in the presence of an outnumbering throng of workmen.
In the celebration proper the two engineers had an insignificant part.
When the trains were in and side-tracked, and the working preliminaries
were out of the way, the triumphal programme, as it had been outlined in
a five-page letter from the president to Ballard, became automatic,
moving smoothly from number to number as a well-designed masterpiece of
the spectacular variety should. There were no hitches, no long waits for
the audience. Mr. Pelham, carrying his two-hundred-odd pounds of
avoirdupois as jauntily as the youngest promoter of them all, was at
once the genial host, the skilful organiser, prompter, stage-manager,
chorus-leader; playing his many parts letter-perfect, and never missing
a chance to gain a few more notches on the winding-winch of enthusiasm.
While the band and the orators were alternating, Ballard and Bromley,
off duty for the time, lounged on the bungalow porch awaiting their cue.
There had been no awkward happenings thus far. The trains had arrived on
time; the carefully staged spectacle was running like a well-oiled piece
of mechanism; the August day, despite a threatening mass of storm cloud
gathering on the distant slopes of the background mountain range, was
perfect; and, thanks to Mr. Pelham's gift of leadership, the celebrators
had been judiciously wrought up to the pitch at which everything was
applauded and nothing criticised. Hence, there was no apparent reason
for Ballard's settled gloom; or for Bromley's impatience manifesting
itself in sarcastic flings at the company's secretary, an ex-politician
of the golden-tongued tribe, who was the oratorical spellbinder of the
moment.
"For Heaven's sake! will he never saw it off and let us get that stone
set?" gritted the assistant, when the crowd cheered, and the mellifluous
flood, checked for the applausive instant, poured steadily on. "Why in
the name of common sense did Mr. Pelham want to spring this batch of
human phonographs on us!"
"The realities will hit us soon enough," growled Ballard, whose
impatience took the morose form. Then, with a sudden righting of his
tilted camp-stool: "Good Lord, Loudon! Look yonder--up the canyon!"
The porch outlook commanded a view of the foothill canyon, and of a
limited area of the bowl-shaped upper valley. At the canyon head, and on
the opposite side of the river, three double-seated buckboards were
wheeling to disembark their passengers; and presently the Castle 'Cadia
house-party, led by Colonel Craigmiles himself, climbed the left-hand
path to the little level space fronting the mysterious mine.
"By Jove!" gasped Bromley; "I nearly had a fit--I thought they were
coming over here. Now what in the name of----"
"It's all right," cut in Ballard, irritably. "Why shouldn't the colonel
want to be present at his own funeral? And you needn't be afraid of
their coming over here. The colonel wouldn't wipe his feet on that mob
of money-hunters around the band-stand. See; they are making a private
box of the mine entrance."
The remark framed itself upon the fact. At the colonel's signal the
iron-bound tunnel door had swung open, and Wingfield and Blacklock,
junior, with the help of the buckboard drivers, were piling timbers on
the little plateau for the party's seating.
It was Colonel Craigmiles's own proposal, this descent upon the
commercial festivities at the dam; and Elsa had yielded only after
exhausting her ingenuity in trying to defeat it. She had known in
advance that it could not be defeated. For weeks her father's attitude
had been explainable only upon a single hypothesis; one which she had
alternately accepted and rejected a hundred times during the two years
of dam-building; and this excursion was less singular than many other
consequences of the mysterious attitude.
She was recalling the mysteries as she sat on the pile of timbers with
Wingfield, hearing but not heeding the resounding periods of the orator
across the narrow chasm. With the inundation of the upper valley an
impending certainty, measurable by weeks and then by days, and now by
hours, nothing of any consequence had been done at Castle 'Cadia by way
of preparing for it. Coming down early one morning to cut flowers for
the breakfast-table, she had found two men in mechanics' overclothes
installing a small gasolene electric plant near the stables; this, she
supposed, was for the house-lighting when the laboratory should be
submerged. A few days later she had come upon Otto, the chauffeur,
building a light rowboat in a secluded nook in the upper canyon.
But beyond these apparently trivial precautions, nothing had been done,
and her father had said no word to her or to the guests of what was to
be done when the closed-in valley should become a lake with Castle
'Cadia for its single island. Meanwhile, the daily routine of the
country house had gone on uninterruptedly; and once, when Mrs. Van Bryck
had asked her host what would happen when the floods came, Elsa had
heard her father laughingly assure his guest in the presence of the
others that nothing would happen.
That Wingfield knew more than these surface indications could tell the
keenest observer, Elsa was well convinced; how much more, she could only
guess. But one thing was certain: ever since the day spent with Ballard
and Bromley and Jerry Blacklock at the construction camp--the day of his
narrow escape from death--the playwright had been a changed man;
cynical, ill at ease, or profoundly abstracted by turns, and never less
companionable than at the present moment while he sat beside her on the
timber balk, scowling up and across at the band-stand, at the spellbound
throng ringing it in, and at the spellbinding secretary shaming the
pouring torrent in the ravine below with his flood of rhetoric.
"What sickening rot!" he scoffed in open disgust. And then: "It must be
delightfully comforting to Ballard and Bromley to have that wild ass of
the market-place braying over their work! Somebody ought to hit him."
But the orator was preparing to do a little of the hitting, himself. The
appearance of the party at the mine entrance had not gone unremarked,
and the company's secretary recognised the company's enemy at a glance.
He was looking over the heads of the celebrators and down upon the group
on the opposite side of the narrow chasm when he said:
"So, ladies and gentlemen, this great project, in the face of the most
obstinate, and, I may say, lawless, opposition; in spite of violence and
petty obstruction on the part of those who would rejoice, even to-day,
in its failure; this great work has been carried on to its triumphant
conclusion, and we are gathered here on this beautiful morning in the
bright sunshine and under the shadow of these magnificent mountains to
witness the final momentous act which shall add the finishing stone to
this grand structure; a structure which shall endure and subserve its
useful and fructifying purpose so long as these mighty mountains rear
their snowy heads to look down in approving majesty upon a desert made
fair and beautiful by the hand of man."
Hand-clappings, cheers, a stirring of the crowd, and the upstarting of
the brass band climaxed the rhetorical peroration, and Elsa glanced
anxiously over her shoulder. She knew her father's temper and the fierce
quality of it when the provocation was great enough to arouse it; but he
was sitting quietly between Dosia and Madge Cantrell, and the publicly
administered affront seemed to have missed him.
When the blare of brass ceased, the mechanical part of the spectacle
held the stage for a few brief minutes. The completing stone was
carefully toggled in the grappling-hooks of the derrick-fall, and at
Ballard's signal the hoisting engine coughed sharply, besprinkling the
spectators liberally with a shower of cinders, the derrick-boom swung
around, and the stone was lowered cautiously into its place.
With a final rasping of trowels, the workmen finished their task, and
Ballard walked out upon the abutment and laid his hand on the wheel
controlling the drop-gate which would cut off the escape of the river
through the outlet tunnel. There was a moment of impressive silence, and
Elsa held her breath. The day, the hour, the instant which her father
had striven so desperately to avert had come. Would it pass without its
tragedy?
She saw Ballard give the last searching glance at the gate mechanism;
saw President Pelham step out to give the signal. Then there was a stir
in the group behind her, and she became conscious that her father was on
his feet; that his voice was dominating the droning roar of the torrent
and the muttering of the thunder on the far-distant heights.
"Mistuh-uh Pelham--and you otheh gentlemen of the Arcadia Company--you
have seen fit to affront me, suhs, in the most public manneh, befo' the
members of my family and my guests. This was youh privilege, and you
have used it acco'ding to youh gifts. Neve'theless, it shall not be said
that I failed in my neighbo'ly duty at this crisis. Gentlemen, when you
close that gate----"
The president turned impatiently and waved his hand to Ballard. The band
struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," a round ball of bunting shot to
the top of the flagstaff over the band-stand and broke out in a broad
flag, and Elsa saw the starting-wheel turning slowly under Ballard's
hand. The clapping and cheering and the band clamour drowned all other
sounds; and the colonel's daughter, rising to stand beside Wingfield,
felt rather than heard the jarring shock of a near-by explosion
punctuating the plunge of the great gate as it was driven down by the
geared power-screws.
What followed passed unnoticed by the wildly cheering spectators
crowding the canyon brink to see the foaming, churning torrent recoil
upon itself and beat fiercely upon the lowered gate and the steep-sloped
wall of the dam's foundation courses. But Elsa saw Ballard start as from
the touch of a hot iron; saw Bromley run out quickly to lay hold of him.
Most terrible of all, she turned swiftly to see her father coming out of
the mine entrance with a gun in his hands--saw and understood.
It was Wingfield, seeing all that she saw and understanding quite as
clearly, who came to her rescue at a moment when the bright August
sunshine was filling with dancing black motes for her.
"Be brave!" he whispered. "See--he isn't hurt much: he has let go of the
wheel, and Bromley is only steadying him a bit." And then to the others,
with his habitual air of bored cheerfulness: "The show is over, good
people, and the water is rising to cut us off from luncheon. Sound the
retreat, somebody, and let's mount and ride before we get wet feet."
A movement toward the waiting vehicles followed, and at the facing about
Elsa observed that her father hastily flung the rifle into the mine
tunnel-mouth; and had a fleeting glimpse of Ballard and Bromley walking
slowly arm-in-arm toward the mesa shore along the broad coping of the
abutment.
At the buckboards Wingfield stood her friend again. "Send Jerry
Blacklock down to see how serious it is," he suggested, coming between
her and the others; and while she was doing it, he held the group for a
final look down the canyon at the raging flood still churning and
leaping at its barriers like some sentient wild thing trapped and
maddened with the first fury of restraint.
Young Blacklock made a sprinter's record on his errand and was back
almost immediately. Mr. Ballard had got his arm pinched in some way at
the gate-head, he reported: it was nothing serious, and the Kentuckian
sent word that he was sorry that the feeding of the multitude kept him
from saying so to Miss Elsa in person. Elsa did not dare to look at
Wingfield while Blacklock was delivering his message; and in the
buckboard-seating for the return to Castle 'Cadia, she contrived to have
Bigelow for her companion.
It was only a few minutes after Jerry Blacklock had raced away up the
canyon path with his message of reassurance that Bromley, following
Ballard into the office room of the adobe bungalow and locking the door,
set to work deftly to dress and bandage a deep bullet-crease across the
muscles of his chief's arm; a wound painful enough, but not disabling.
"Well, what do you think now, Breckenridge?" he asked, in the midst of
the small surgical service.
"I haven't any more thinks coming to me," was the sober reply. "And it
is not specially comforting to have the old ones confirmed. You are sure
it was the colonel who fired at me?"
"I saw the whole thing; all but the actual trigger-pulling, you might
say. When Mr. Pelham cut him off, he turned and stepped back into the
mouth of the mine. Then, while they were all standing up to see you
lower the gate, I heard the shot and saw him come out with the gun in
his hands. I was cool enough that far along to take in all the little
details: the gun was a short-barrelled Winchester--the holster-rifle of
the cow-punchers."
"_Ouch!_" said Ballard, wincing under the bandaging. Then: "The
mysteries have returned, Loudon; we were on the wrong track--all of us.
Wingfield and you and I had figured out that the colonel was merely
playing a cold-blooded game for delay. That guess comes back to us like
a fish-hook with the bait gone. There was nothing, less than nothing, to
be gained by killing me to-day."
Bromley made the negative sign of assenting perplexity.
"It's miles too deep for me," he admitted. "Three nights ago, when I was
dining at Castle 'Cadia, Colonel Craigmiles spoke of you as a father
might speak of the man whom he would like to have for a son-in-law:
talked about the good old gentlemanly Kentucky stock, and all that, you
know. I can't begin to sort it out."
"I am going to sort it out, some day when I have time," declared
Ballard; and the hurt being temporarily repaired, they went out to
superintend the arrangements for feeding the visiting throng in the big
mess-tent.
After the barbecue, and more speech-making around the trestle-tables in
the mess-tent, the railroad trains were brought into requisition, and
various tours of inspection through the park ate out the heart of the
afternoon for the visitors. Bromley took charge of that part of the
entertainment, leaving Ballard to nurse his sore arm and to watch the
slow submersion of the dam as the rising flood crept in little lapping
waves up the sloping back-wall.
The afternoon sun beat fiercely upon the deserted construction camp, and
the heat, rarely oppressive in the mountain-girt altitudes, was
stifling. Down in the cook camp, Garou and his helpers were washing
dishes by the crate and preparing the evening luncheon to be served
after the trains returned; and the tinkling clatter of china was the
only sound to replace the year-long clamour of the industries and the
hoarse roar of the river through the cut-off.
Between his occasional strolls over to the dam and the canyon brink to
mark the rising of the water, Ballard sat on the bungalow porch and
smoked. From the time-killing point of view the great house in the upper
valley loomed in mirage-like proportions in the heat haze; and by three
o'clock the double line of aspens marking the river's course had
disappeared in a broad band of molten silver half encircling the knoll
upon which the mirage mansion swayed and shimmered.
Ballard wondered what the house-party was doing; what preparations, if
any, had been made for its dispersal. For his own satisfaction he had
carefully run bench-levels with his instruments from the dam height
through the upper valley. When the water should reach the coping course,
some three or four acres of the house-bearing knoll would form an island
in the middle of the reservoir lake. The house would be completely cut
off, the orchards submerged, and the nearest shore, that from which the
roundabout road approached, would be fully a half-mile distant, with the
water at least ten feet deep over the raised causeway of the road
itself.
Surely the colonel would not subject his guests to the inconvenience of
a stay at Castle 'Cadia when the house would be merely an isolated
shelter upon an island in the middle of the great lake, Ballard
concluded; and when the mirage effect cleared away to give him a better
view, he got out the field-glass and looked for some signs of the
inevitable retreat.
There were no signs, so far as he could determine. With the help of the
glass he could pick out the details of the summer afternoon scene on the
knoll-top; could see that there were a number of people occupying the
hammocks and lazy-chairs under the tree-pillared portico; could make out
two figures, which he took to be Bigelow and one of the Cantrell
sisters, strolling back and forth in a lovers' walk under the shade of
the maples.
It was all very perplexing. The sweet-toned little French clock on its
shelf in the office room behind him had struck three, and there were
only a few more hours of daylight left in Castle 'Cadia's last day as a
habitable dwelling. And yet, if he could trust the evidence of his
senses, the castle's garrison was making no move to escape: this though
the members of it must all know that the rising of another sun would see
their retreat cut off by the impounded flood.
After he had returned the field-glass to its case on the wall of the
office the ticking telegraph instrument on Bromley's table called him,
signing "E--T," the end-of-track on the High Line Extension. It was
Bromley, wiring in to give the time of the probable return of the
excursion trains for Garou's supper serving.
"How are you getting on?" clicked Ballard, when the time had been given.
"Fine," was the answer. "Everything lovely, and the goose honks high.
Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs are
surrounding Mr. Pelham on the canal embankment and singing 'For he's a
jolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we're
all hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."
After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of the
deserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of a
furnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when the
declining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the little
mesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.
Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flow
of the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel was
laid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurity
of the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newly
turned leaf in the record of the great chasm.
What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed was
more instructive than reassuring. The great pit described by Gardiner
was still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, and
the cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent was
alarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of the
stream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off in
all directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, and
which formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined and
tunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a huge
hollow tooth.
The extreme length of the underground passage was a scant five hundred
feet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts--possible only
after he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubber
thigh-boots--the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to the
great stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here the
burden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or less
running water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leak
around the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.