Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.

"Did you see them do it?"

"Naturally, no one saw them do it. But it was done, nevertheless."

She rose and faced him fairly.

"You found my note last evening--when you were returning with Sheriff Beckwith?"

"I found an unsigned note on a little barrier of tree-branches on the trail; yes."

"I wrote it and put it there," she declared. "I told you you were about to commit an act of injustice, and you have committed it--a very great one, indeed, Mr. Ballard."

"I am open to conviction," he conceded, almost morosely. She was confronting him like an angry G.o.ddess, and mixed up with the thought that he had never seen her so beautiful and so altogether desirable was another thought that he should like to run away and hide.

"Yes; you are open to conviction--after the fact!" she retorted, bitterly. "Do you know what you have done? You have fallen like a hot-headed boy into a trap set for you by my father's enemies. You have carefully stripped Arcadia of every man who could defend our cattle--just as it was planned for you to do."

"But, good heavens!" he began, "I----"

"Hear me out," she commanded, looking more than ever the princess of her father's kingdom. "Down in the canyon of the Boiling Water there is a band of outlaws that has harried this valley for years. a.s.suming that you would do precisely what you have done, some of these men came up and dynamited your ca.n.a.l, timing the raid to fit your inspection tour. Am I making it sufficiently plain?"

"O my sainted ancestors!" he groaned. And then: "Please go on; you can't make it any worse."

"They confidently expected that you would procure a wholesale arrest of the Arcadia ranch force; but they did not expect you to act as promptly as you did. That is why they turned and fired upon you in Dry Valley Gulch: they thought they were suspected and pursued, not by you or any of your men, but by our cow-boys. Your appearance at the cabin at the mouth of Deer Creek yesterday morning explained things, and they let you go on without taking vengeance for the man Mr. Bigelow had shot in the Dry Valley affray. They were willing to let the greater matter outweigh the smaller."

Ballard said "Good heavens!" again, and leaned weakly against the commissary counter. Then, suddenly, it came over him like a cool blast of wind on a hot day that this clear-eyed, sweet-faced young woman's intimate knowledge of the labyrinthine tangle was almost superhuman enough to be uncanny. Would the nerve-shattering mysteries never be cleared away?

"You know all this--as only an eye-witness could know," he stammered.

"How, in the name of all that is wonderful----"

"We are not without friends--even in your camps," she admitted. "Word came to Castle 'Cadia of your night ride and its purpose. For the later details there was little d.i.c.k. My father once had his father sent to the penitentiary for cattle-stealing. In pity for the boy, I persuaded some of our Denver friends to start a pet.i.tion for a pardon. d.i.c.k has not forgotten it; and last night he rode to Castle 'Cadia to tell me what I have told you--the poor little lad being more loyal to me than he is to his irreclaimable wretch of a father. Also, he told me another thing: to-night, while the range cattle are entirely unguarded, there will be another raid from Deer Creek. I thought you might like to know how hard a blow you have struck us, this time. That is why I have made Jerry drive me a hundred miles or so up and down the valley this afternoon."

The situation was well beyond speech, any exculpatory speech of Ballard's, but there was still an opportunity for deeds. Going to the door he called to Bigelow, and when the Forestry man came in, his part in what was to be done was a.s.signed abruptly.

"Mr. Bigelow, you can handle the runabout with one good arm, I'm sure: drive Miss Craigmiles home, if you please, and let me have Blacklock."

"Certainly, if Miss Elsa is willing to exchange a good chauffeur for a poor one," was the good-natured reply. And then to his hostess: "Are you willing, Miss Craigmiles?"

"Mr. Ballard is the present tyrant of Arcadia. If he shows us the door----"

Bigelow was already at the car step, waiting to help her in. There was time only for a single sentence of caution, and Ballard got it in a swift aside.

"Don't be rash again," she warned him. "You have plenty of men here. If Carson can be made to understand that you will not let him take advantage of the plot in which he has made you his innocent accessory----"

"Set your mind entirely at rest," he cut in, with a curtness which was born altogether of his determination, and not at all of his att.i.tude toward the woman he loved. "There will be no cattle-lifting in this valley to-night--or at any other time until your own caretakers have returned."

"Thank you," she said simply; and a minute later Ballard and young Blacklock stood aside to let Bigelow remove himself, his companion, and the smart little car swiftly from the scene.

"Say, Mr. Ballard, this is no end good of you--to let me in for a little breather of sport," said the collegian, when the fast runabout was fading to a dusty blur in the sunset purplings. "Bigelow gave me a hint; said there was a sc.r.a.p of some sort on. Make me your side partner, and I'll do you proud."

"You are all right," laughed Ballard, with a sudden access of light-heartedness. "But the first thing to do is to get a little hay out of the rack. Come in and let us see what you can make of a camp supper.

Fitzpatrick bets high on his cook--which is more than I'd do if he were mine."

XIV

THE MAXIM

Ballard and Blacklock ate supper at the contractor's table in the commissary, and the talk, what there was of it, left the Kentuckian aside. The Arcadian summering was the young collegian's first plunge into the manful realities, and it was not often that he came upon so much raw material in the lump as the contractor's camp, and more especially the jovial Irish contractor himself, afforded.

Ballard was silent for cause. Out of the depths of humiliation for the part he had been made to play in the plan for robbing Colonel Craigmiles he had promised unhesitatingly to prevent the robbery. But the means for preventing it were not so obvious as they might have been. Force was the only argument which would appeal to the cattle-lifters, and a.s.suredly there were men enough and arms enough in the Fitzpatrick camps to hold up any possible number of rustlers that Carson could bring into the valley. But would the contractor's men consent to fight the colonel's battle?

This was the crucial query which only Fitzpatrick could answer; and at the close of the meal, Ballard made haste to have private speech with the contractor in the closet-like pay office.

"You see what we are up against, Bourke," he summed up when he had explained the true inwardness of the situation to the Irishman. "Bare justice, the justice that even an enemy has a right to expect, shoves us into the breach. We've got to stop this raid on the Craigmiles cattle."

Fitzpatrick was shaking his head dubiously.

"Sure, now; _I'm_ with you, Mr. Ballard," he allowed, righting himself with an effort that was a fine triumph over personal prejudice. "But it's only fair to warn you that not a man in any of the ditch camps will lift a finger in any fight to save the colonel's property. This shindy with the cow-boys has gone on too long, and it has been too bitter."

"But this time they've got it to do," Ballard insisted warmly. "They are your men, under your orders."

"Under my orders to throw dirt, maybe; but not to shoulder the guns and do the tin-soldier act. There's plinty of men, as you say; Polacks and Hungarians and Eyetalians and Irish--and the Irish are the only ones you could count on in a hooraw, boys! I know every man of them, Mr. Ballard, and, not to be mincin' the wor-rd, they'd see you--or me, either--in the hot place before they'd point a gun at anybody who was giving the Craigmiles outfit a little taste of its own medicine."

Fitzpatrick's positive a.s.surance was discouraging, but Ballard would not give up.

"How many men do you suppose Carson can muster for this cattle round-up?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know; eighteen or twenty at the outside, maybe."

"You've got two hundred and forty-odd here and at Riley's; in all that number don't you suppose you could find a dozen or two who would stand by us?"

"Honestly, then, I don't, Mr. Ballard. I'm not lukewarm, as ye might think: I'll stand with you while I can squint an eye to sight th' gun.

But the minute you tell the b'ys what you're wantin' them to do, that same minute they'll give you the high-ball signal and quit."

"Strike work, you mean?"

"Just that."

Ballard went into a brown study, and Fitzpatrick respected it. After a time the silence was broken by the faint tapping of the tiny telegraph instrument on the contractor's desk. Ballard's chair righted itself with a crash.

"The wire," he exclaimed; "I had forgotten that you had brought it down this far on the line. I wonder if I can get Bromley?"

"Sure ye can," said the contractor; and Ballard sat at the desk to try.

It was during the preliminary key-clickings that Blacklock came to the door of the pay office. "There's a man out here wanting to speak to you, Mr. Fitzpatrick," he announced; and the contractor went out, returning presently to break into Ballard's preoccupied effort to raise the office at Elbow Canyon.