And then, with the freedom born of long service in the unfettered areas where discipline means obedience but not servility, the man added: "I wouldn't be standin' in your shoes this minute for all the money the Arcadia Company could pay me, Mr. Ballard."

Ballard was young, fit, vigorous, and in abounding health. Moreover, he was a typical product of an age which scoffs at superst.i.tion and is impatient of all things irreducible to the terms of algebraic formulas.

But here and now, on the actual scene of the fatalities, the "two sheer accidents and a commonplace tragedy" were somewhat less easily dismissed than when he had thus contemptuously named them for Gardiner in the Boston railway station. Notwithstanding, he was quite well able to shake off the little thrill of disquietude and to laugh at Hoskins's vicarious anxiety.

"I wasn't raised in the woods, Hoskins, but there was plenty of tall timber near enough to save me from being scared by an owl," he a.s.severated. Then, as a towering derrick head loomed gallows-like in the gathering dusk, with a white blotch of masonry to fill the ravine over which it stood sentinel: "Is that our camp?"

"That's Elbow Canyon," said the engineman; and he shut off steam and woke the hill echoes with the whistle.

Ballard made out something of the lay of the land at the headquarters while the engine was slowing through the temporary yard. There was the orderly disorder of a construction terminal: tracks littered with cars of material, a range of rough shed shelters for the stone-cutters, a dotting of sleeping-huts and adobes on a little mesa above, and a huge, weathered mess-tent, lighted within, and glowing orange-hued in the twilight. Back of the camp the rounded hills grew suddenly precipitous, but through the river gap guarded by the sentinel derrick, there was a vista distantly backgrounded by the ma.s.s of the main range rising darkly under its evergreens, with the lights of a great house starring the deeper shadow.

V

"FIRE IN THE ROCK!"

Bromley was on hand to meet his new chief when Ballard dropped from the step of the halted engine. A few years older, and browned to a tender mahogany by the sun of the alt.i.tudes and the winds of the desert, he was still the Bromley of Ballard's college memories: compact, alert, boyishly smiling, neat, and well-groomed. With Anglo-Saxon ancestry on both sides, the meeting could not be demonstrative.

"Same little old 'Beau Bromley,'" was Ballard's greeting to go with the hearty hand-grip; and Bromley's reply was in keeping. After which they climbed the slope to the mesa and the headquarters office in comradely silence, not because there was nothing to be said, but because the greater part of it would keep.

Having picked up the engine "special" with his field-gla.s.s as it came down the final zigzag in the descent from the pa.s.s, Bromley had supper waiting in the adobe-walled shack which served as the engineers'

quarters; and until the pipes were lighted after the meal there was little talk save of the golden past. But when the camp cook had cleared the table, Ballard reluctantly closed the book of reminiscence and gave the business affair its due.

"How are you coming on with the work, Loudon?" he asked. "Don't need a chief, do you?"

"Don't you believe it!" said the subst.i.tute, with such heartfelt emphasis that Ballard smiled. "I'm telling you right now, Breckenridge, I never was so glad to shift a responsibility since I was born. Another month of it alone would have turned me gray."

"And yet, in my hearing, people are always saying that you are nothing less than a genius when it comes to handling workingmen. Isn't it so?"

"Oh, that part of it is all right. It's the hoodoo that is making an old man of me before my time."

"The what?"

Bromley moved uneasily in his chair, and Ballard could have sworn that he gave a quick glance into the dark corners of the room before he said: "I'm giving you the men's name for it. But with or without a name, it hangs over this job like the shadow of a devil-bat's wings. The men sit around and smoke and talk about it till bedtime, and the next day some fellow makes a bad hitch on a stone, or a team runs away, or a blast hangs fire in the quarry, and we have a dead man for supper.

Breckenridge, it is simply _h.e.l.l_!"

Ballard shook his head incredulously.

"You've let a few ill-natured coincidences rattle you," was his comment.

"What is it? Or, rather, what is at the bottom of it?"

"I don't know; n.o.body knows. The 'coincidences,' as you call them, were here when I came; handed down from Braithwaite's drowning, I suppose.

Then Sanderson got tangled up with Manuel's woman--as clear a case of superinduced insanity as ever existed--and in less than two months he and Manuel jumped in with Winchesters, and poor Billy pa.s.sed out. That got on everybody's nerves, of course; and then Macpherson came. You know what he was--a hard-headed, sarcastic old Scotchman, with the bitterest tongue that was ever hung in the middle and adjusted to wag both ways.

He tried ridicule; and when that didn't stop the crazy happenings, he took to bullyragging. The day the derrick fell on him he was swearing horribly at the hoister engineer; and he died with an oath in his mouth."

The Kentuckian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head.

"Let me get one thing straight before you go on. Mr. Pelham told me of a sc.r.a.p between the company and an old fellow up here who claims everything in sight. Has this emotional insanity you are talking about anything to do with the old cattle king's objection to being syndicated out of existence?"

"No; only incidentally in Sanderson's affair--which, after all, was a purely personal quarrel between two men over a woman. And I wouldn't care to say that Manuel was wholly to blame in that."

"Who is this Manuel?" queried Ballard.

"Oh, I thought you knew. He is the colonel's manager and ranch foreman.

He is a Mexican and an all-round scoundrel, with one lonesome good quality--absolute and unimpeachable loyalty to his master. The colonel turns the entire business of the cattle raising and selling over to him; doesn't go near the ranch once a month himself."

"'The colonel,'" repeated Ballard. "You call him 'the colonel,' and Mr.

Pelham calls him the 'King of Arcadia.' I a.s.sume that he has a name, like other men?"

"Sure!" said Bromley. "Hadn't you heard it? It's Craigmiles."

"What!" exclaimed Ballard, holding the match with which he was about to relight his pipe until the flame crept up and scorched his fingers.

"That's it--Craigmiles; Colonel Adam Craigmiles--the King of Arcadia.

Didn't Mr. Pelham tell you----"

"Hold on a minute," Ballard cut in; and he got out of his chair to pace back and forth on his side of the table while he was gathering up the pieces scattered broadcast by this explosive petard of a name.

At first he saw only the clearing up of the little mysteries shrouding Miss Elsa's suddenly changed plans for the summer; how they were instantly resolved into the commonplace and the obvious. She had merely decided to come home and play hostess to her father's guests. And since she knew about the war for the possession of Arcadia, and would quite naturally be sorry to have her friend pitted against her father, it seemed unnecessary to look further for the origin of La.s.sley's curiously worded telegram. "La.s.sley's," Ballard called it; but if La.s.sley had signed it, it was fairly certain now that Miss Craigmiles had dictated it.

Ballard thought her use of the fatalities as an argument in the warning message was a purely feminine touch. None the less he held her as far above the influences of the superst.i.tions as he held himself, and it was a deeper and more reflective second thought that turned a fresh leaf in the book of mysteries.

Was it possible that the three violent deaths were not mere coincidences, after all? And, admitting design, could it be remotely conceivable that Adam Craigmiles's daughter was implicated, even to the guiltless degree of suspecting it? Ballard stopped short in his pacing sentry beat and began to investigate, not without certain misgivings.

"Loudon, what manner of man is this Colonel Craigmiles?"

Bromley's reply was characteristic. "The finest ever--type of the American country gentleman; suave, courteous, a little inclined to be grandiloquent; does the paternal with you till you catch yourself on the edge of saying 'sir' to him; and has the biggest, deepest, sweetest voice that ever drawled the Southern 'r.'"

"Humph! That isn't exactly the portrait of a fire-eater."

"Don't you make any mistake. I've described the man you'll meet socially. On the other side, he's a fighter from away back; the kind of man who makes no account of the odds against him, and who doesn't know when he is licked. He has told us openly and repeatedly that he will do us up if we swamp his house and mine; that he will make it pinch us for the entire value of our investment in the dam. I believe he'll do it, too; but President Pelham won't back down an inch. So there you are--irresistible moving body; immovable fixed body: the collision imminent; and we poor devils in between."

Ballard drew back his chair and sat down again. "You are miles beyond my depth now," he a.s.serted. "I had less than an hour with Mr. Pelham in Denver, and what he didn't tell me would make a good-sized library.

Begin at the front, and let me have the story of this feud between the company and Colonel Craigmiles."

Again Bromley said: "I supposed, of course, that you knew all about it"--after which he supplied the missing details.

"It was Braithwaite who was primarily to blame. When the company's plans were made public, the colonel did not oppose them, though he knew that the irrigation scheme spelled death to the cattle industry. The fight began when Braithwaite located the dam here at Elbow Canyon in the foothill hogback. There is a better site farther down the river; a second depression where an earthwork dike might have taken the place of all this costly rockwork."

"I saw it as we came up this evening."

"Yes. Well, the colonel argued for the lower site; offered to donate three or four homesteads in it which he had taken up through his employees; offered further to take stock in the company; but Braithwaite was pig-headed about it. He had been a Government man, and was a crank on permanent structures and things monumental; wherefore he was determined on building masonry. He ignored the colonel, reported on the present site, and the work was begun."

"Go on," said Ballard.

"Naturally, the colonel took this as a flat declaration of war. He has a magnificent country house in the upper valley, which must have cost him, at this distance from a base of supplies, a round half-million or more.

When we fill our reservoir, this house will stand on an island of less than a half-dozen acres in extent, with its orchards, lawns, and ornamental grounds all under water. Which the same is tough."