"Yes," was the reply; "I grant you the drill-holes. I guess I have 'got 'em,' as you say. But the bang wouldn't count. Quinlan let off half a dozen blasts in the quarry at quitting time yesterday, and one jar more or less just at that time wouldn't have been noticed."

Ballard put his arm across the theorist's shoulders and faced him about to front the down-canyon industries.

"You mustn't let this mystery-smoke get into your nostrils, Loudon, boy," he said. "Whatever happens, there must always be two cool heads and two sets of steady nerves on this job--yours and mine. Now let's go down the railroad on the push-car and see how Williams is getting along with his pick-up stunt. He ought to have the Two standing on her feet by this time."

XI

GUN PLAY

Three days after the wreck in the Lava Hills, Ballard was again making the round of the outpost camps in the western end of the valley, verifying grade lines, re-establishing data stakes lost, or destroyed by the Craigmiles range riders, hustling the ditch diggers, and, incidentally, playing host to young Lucius Bigelow, the Forestry Service member of Miss Elsa's house-party.

Bigelow's inclusion as a guest on the inspection gallop had been planned, not by his temporary host, but by Miss Elsa herself. Mr.

Bigelow's time was his own, she had explained in her note to Ballard, but he was sufficiently an enthusiast in his chosen profession to wish to combine a field study of the Arcadian watersheds with the pleasures of a summer outing. If Mr. Ballard would be so kind ... and all the other fitting phrases in which my lady begs the boon she may strictly require at the hands of the man who has said the talismanic words, "I love you."

As he was constrained to be, Ballard was punctiliously hospitable to the quiet, self-contained young man who rode an entire day at his pace-setter's side without uttering a dozen words on his own initiative.

The hospitality was purely dutiful at first; but later Bigelow earned it fairly. Making no advances on his own part, the guest responded generously when Ballard drew him out; and behind the mask of thoughtful reticence the Kentuckian discovered a man of stature, gentle of speech, simple of heart, and a past-master of the wood- and plains-craft that a constructing engineer, however broad-minded, can acquire only as his work demands it.

"You gentlemen of the tree bureau can certainly give us points on ordinary common sense, Mr. Bigelow," Ballard admitted on this, the third day out, when the student of natural conditions had called attention to the recklessness of the contractors in cutting down an entire forest of slope-protecting young pines to make trestle-bents for a gulch flume. "I am afraid I should have done precisely what Richards has done here: taken the first and most convenient timber I could lay hands on."

"That is the point of view the Forestry Service is trying to modify,"

rejoined Bigelow, mildly. "To the average American, educated or ignorant, wood seems the cheapest material in a world of plenty. Yet I venture to say that in this present instance your company could better have afforded almost any other material for those trestle-bents. That slope will make you pay high for its stripping before you can grow another forest to check the flood wash."

"Of course it will; that says itself, now that you have pointed it out,"

Ballard agreed. "Luckily, the present plans of the company don't call for much flume timber; I say 'luckily,' because I don't like to do violence to my convictions, when I'm happy enough to have any."

Bigelow's grave smile came and went like the momentary glow from some inner light of prescience.

"Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are a man of very strong convictions, Mr. Ballard," he ventured to say.

"Think so? I don't know. A fair knowledge of my trade, a few opinions, and a certain pig-headed stubbornness that doesn't know when it is beaten: shake these up together and you have the compound which has misled you. I'm afraid I don't often wait for convincement--of the purely philosophical brand."

They were riding together down the line of the northern lateral ca.n.a.l, with Bourke Fitzpatrick's new headquarters in the field for the prospective night's bivouac. The contractor's camp, a disorderly blot of shanties and well-weathered tents on the fair gra.s.s-land landscape, came in sight just as the sun was sinking below the Elks, and Ballard quickened the pace.

"You'll be ready to quit for the day when we get in, won't you?" he said to Bigelow, when the broncos came neck and neck in the scurry for the hay racks.

"Oh, I'm fit enough, by now," was the ready rejoinder. "It was only the first day that got on my nerves."

There was a rough-and-ready welcome awaiting the chief engineer and his guest when they drew rein before Fitzpatrick's commissary; and a supper of the void-filling sort was quickly set before them in the back room of the contractor's quarters. But there was trouble in the air. Ballard saw that Fitzpatrick was cruelly hampered by the presence of Bigelow; and when the meal was finished he gave the contractor his chance in the privacy of the little cramped pay-office.

"What is it, Bourke?" he asked, when the closed door cut them off from the Forest Service man.

Fitzpatrick was shaking his head. "It's a blood feud now, Mr. Ballard.

Gallagher's gang--all Irishmen--went up against four of the colonel's men early this morning. The b'ys took shelter in the ditch, and the cow-punchers tried to run 'em out. Some of our teamsters were armed, and one of the Craigmiles men was killed or wounded--we don't know which: the others picked him up and carried him off."

Ballard's eyes narrowed under his thoughtful frown.

"I've been afraid it would come to that, sooner or later," he said slowly. Then he added: "We ought to be able to stop it. The colonel seems to deprecate the sc.r.a.pping part of it as much as we do."

Fitzpatrick's exclamation was of impatient disbelief. "Any time he'll hold up his little finger, Mr. Ballard, this monkey-business will go out like a squib fuse in a wet hole! He isn't wanting to stop it."

Ballard became reflective again, and hazarded another guess.

"Perhaps the object-lesson of this morning will have a good effect. A chance shot has figured as a peacemaker before this."

"Don't you believe it's going to work that way this time!" was the earnest protest. "If the Craigmiles outfit doesn't whirl in and shoot up this camp before to-morrow morning, I'm missing my guess."

Ballard rapped the ashes from his briar, and refilled and lighted it.

When the tobacco was glowing in the bowl, he said, quite decisively: "In that case, we'll try to give them what they are needing. Are you picketed?"

"No."

"See to it at once. Make a corral of the wagons and sc.r.a.pers and get the stock inside of it. Then put out a line of sentries, with relays to relieve the men every two hours. We needn't be taken by surprise, whatever happens."

Fitzpatrick jerked a thumb toward the outer room where Bigelow was smoking his after-supper pipe.

"How about your friend?" he asked.

At the query Ballard realised that the presence of the Forest Service man was rather unfortunate. Constructively his own guest, Bigelow was really the guest of Colonel Craigmiles; and the position of a neutral in any war is always a difficult one.

"Mr. Bigelow is a member of the house-party at Castle 'Cadia," he said, in reply to the contractor's doubtful question. "But I can answer for his discretion. I'll tell him what he ought to know, and he may do as he pleases."

Following out the pointing of his own suggestion, Ballard gave Bigelow a brief outline of the Arcadian conflict while Fitzpatrick was posting the sentries. The Government man made no comment, save to say that it was a most unhappy situation; but when Ballard offered to show him to his quarters for the night, he protested at once.

"No, indeed, Mr. Ballard," he said, quite heartily, for him; "you mustn't leave me out that way. At the worst, you may be sure that I stand for law and order. I have heard something of this fight between your company and the colonel, and while I can't pretend to pa.s.s upon the merits of it, I don't propose to go to bed and let you stand guard over me."

"All right, and thank you," laughed Ballard; and together they went out to help Fitzpatrick with his preliminaries for the camp defence.

This was between eight and nine o'clock; and by ten the stock was corralled within the line of shacks and tents, a cordon of watchers had been stretched around the camp, and the greater number of Fitzpatrick's men were asleep in the bunk tents and shanties.

The first change of sentries was made at midnight, and Ballard and Bigelow both walked the rounds with Fitzpatrick. Peace and quietness reigned supreme. The stillness of the beautiful summer night was undisturbed, and the roundsmen found a good half of the sentinels asleep at their posts. Ballard was disposed to make light of Fitzpatrick's fears, and the contractor took it rather hard.

"I know 'tis all hearsay with you, yet, Mr. Ballard; you haven't been up against it," he protested, when the three of them were back at the camp-fire which was burning in front of the commissary. "But if you had been sc.r.a.pping with these devils for the better part of two years, as we have----"

The interruption was a sudden quaking tremor of earth and atmosphere followed by a succession of shocks like the quick firing of a battleship squadron. A sucking draught of wind swept through the camp, and the fire leaped up as from the blast of an underground bellows. Instantly the open s.p.a.ces of the headquarters were alive with men tumbling from their bunks; and into the thick of the confusion rushed the lately posted sentries.

For a few minutes the turmoil threatened to become a panic, but Fitzpatrick and a handful of the cooler-headed gang bosses got it under, the more easily since there was no attack to follow the explosions. Then came a cautious reconnaissance in force down the line of the ca.n.a.l in the direction of the earthquake, and a short quarter of a mile below the camp the scouting detachment reached the scene of destruction.

The raiders had chosen their ground carefully. At a point where the ca.n.a.l cutting pa.s.sed through the shoulder of a hill they had planted charges of dynamite deep in the clay of the upper hillside. The explosions had started a land-slide, and the patient digging work of weeks had been obliterated in a moment.

Ballard said little. Fitzpatrick was on the ground to do the swearing, and the money loss was his, if Mr. Pelham's company chose to make him stand it. What Celtic rage could compa.s.s in the matter of cursings was not lacking; and at the finish of the outburst there was an appeal, vigorous and forceful.

"You're the boss, Mr. Ballard, and 'tis for you to say whether we throw up this job and quit, or give these blank, blank imps iv h.e.l.l what's comin' to 'em!" was the form the appeal took; and the new chief accepted the challenge promptly.

"What are your means of communication with the towns in the Gunnison valley?" he asked abruptly.