Ballard was Elsa Craigmiles's lover, and he agreed in a single forcible expletive. Bromley acquiesced in the expletive, and went on.

"The colonel refused to sell his country-house holding, as a matter of course; and the company decided to take chances on the suit for damages which will naturally follow the flooding of the property. Meanwhile, Braithwaite had organised his camp, and the foundations were going in. A month or so later, he and the colonel had a personal collision, and, although Craigmiles was old enough to be his father, Braithwaite struck him. There was blood on the moon, right there and then, as you'd imagine. The colonel was unarmed, and he went home to get a gun.

Braithwaite, who was always a cold-blooded brute, got out his fishing-tackle and sauntered off down the river to catch a mess of trout. He never came back alive."

"Good heavens! But the colonel couldn't have had any hand in Braithwaite's drowning!" Ballard burst out, thinking altogether of Colonel Craigmiles's daughter.

"Oh, no. At the time of the accident, the colonel was back here at the camp, looking high and low for Braithwaite with fire in his eye. They say he went crazy mad with disappointment when he found that the river had robbed him of his right to kill the man who had struck him."

Ballard was silent for a time. Then he said: "You spoke of a mine that would also be flooded by our reservoir. What about that?"

"That came in after Braithwaite's death and Sanderson's appointment as chief engineer. When Braithwaite made his location here, there was an old prospect tunnel in the hill across the canyon. It was boarded up and apparently abandoned, and no one seemed to know who owned it. Later on it transpired that the colonel was the owner, and that the mining claim, which was properly patented and secured, actually covers the ground upon which our dam stands. While Sanderson was busy brewing trouble for himself with Manuel, the colonel put three Mexicans at work in the tunnel; and they have been digging away there ever since."

"Gold?" asked Ballard.

Bromley laughed quietly.

"Maybe you can find out--n.o.body else has been able to. But it isn't gold; it must be something infinitely more valuable. The tunnel is fortified like a fortress, and one or another of the Mexicans is on guard day and night. The mouth of the tunnel is lower than the proposed level of the dam, and the colonel threatens all kinds of things, telling us frankly that it will break the Arcadia Company financially when we flood that mine. I have heard him tell Mr. Pelham to his face that the water should never flow over any dam the company might build here; that he would stick at nothing to defend his property. Mr. Pelham says all this is only bluff; that the mine is worthless. But the fact remains that the colonel is immensely rich--and is apparently growing richer."

"Has n.o.body ever seen the inside of this Golconda of a mine?" queried Ballard.

"n.o.body from our side of the fence. As I've said, it is guarded like the sultan's seraglio; and the Mexicans might as well be deaf and dumb for all you can get out of them. Macpherson, who was loyal to the company, first, last, and all the time, had an a.s.say made from some of the stuff spilled out on the dump; but there was nothing doing, so far as the best a.n.a.lytical chemist in Denver could find out."

For the first time since the strenuous day of plan-changing in Boston, Ballard was almost sorry he had given up the Cuban undertaking.

"It's a beautiful tangle!" he snapped, thinking, one would say, of the breach that must be opened between the company's chief engineer and the daughter of the militant old cattle king. Then he changed the subject abruptly.

"What do you know about the colonel's house-hold, Loudon?"

"All there is to know, I guess. He lives in state in his big country mansion that looks like a World's Fair Forest Products Exhibit on the outside, and is fitted and furnished regardless of expense in its interiors. He is a widower with one daughter--who comes and goes as she pleases--and a sister-in-law who is the dearest, finest piece of fragile old china you ever read about."

"You've been in the country house, then?"

"Oh, yes. The colonel hasn't made it a personal fight on the working force since Braithwaite's time."

"Perhaps you have met Miss--er--the daughter who comes and goes?"

"Sure I have! If you'll promise not to discipline me for hobn.o.bbing with the enemy, I'll confess that I've even played duets with her. She discovered my weakness for music when she was home last summer."

"Do you happen to know where she is now?"

"On her way to Europe, I believe. At least, that is what Miss Cauffrey--she's the fragile-china aunt--was telling me."

"I think not," said Ballard, after a pause. "I think she changed her mind and decided to spend the summer at home. When we stopped at Ackerman's to take water this evening, I saw three loaded buckboards driving in this direction."

"That doesn't prove anything," a.s.serted Bromley. "The old colonel has a house-party every little while. He's no anchorite, if he does live in the desert."

Ballard was musing again. "Adam Craigmiles," he said, thoughtfully. "I wonder what there is in that name to set some sort of bee buzzing in my head. If I believed in transmigration, I should say that I had known that name, and known it well, in some other existence."

"Oh, I don't know," said Bromley. "It's not such an unusual name."

"No; if it were, I might trace it. How long did you say the colonel had lived in Arcadia?"

"I didn't say. But it must be something over twenty years. Miss Elsa was born here."

"And the family is Southern--from what section?"

"I don't know that--Virginia, perhaps, measuring by the colonel's accent, pride, hot-headedness, and reckless hospitality."

The clue, if any there were, appeared to be lost; and again Ballard smoked on in silence. When the pipe burned out he refilled it, and at the match-striking instant a sing-song cry of "Fire in the rock!"

floated down from the hill crags above the adobe, and the jar of a near-by explosion shook the air and rattled the windows.

"What was that?" he queried.

"It's our quarry gang getting out stone," was Bromley's reply. "We were running short of headers for the tie courses, and I put on a night-shift."

"Whereabouts is your quarry?"

"Just around the shoulder of the hill, and a hundred feet, or such a matter, above us. It is far enough to be out of range."

A second explosion punctuated the explanation. Then there was a third and still heavier shock, a rattling of pebbles on the sheet-iron roof of the adobe, and a scant half-second later a fragment of stone the size of a man's head crashed through roof and ceiling and made kindling-wood of the light pine table at which the two men were sitting. Ballard sprang to his feet, and said something under his breath; but Bromley sat still, with a faint yellow tint discolouring the sunburn on his face.

"Which brings us back to our starting-point--the hoodoo," he said quietly. "To-morrow morning, when you go around the hill and see where that stone came from, you'll say that it was a sheer impossibility. Yet the impossible thing has happened. It is reaching for you now, Breckenridge; and a foot or two farther that way would have--" He stopped, swallowed hard, and rose unsteadily. "For G.o.d's sake, old man, throw up this cursed job and get out of here, while you can do it alive!"

"Not much!" said the new chief contemptuously. And then he asked which of the two bunks in the adjoining sleeping-room was his.

VI

ELBOW CANYON

Ballard had his first appreciative view of his new field of labor before breakfast on the morning following his arrival, with Bromley as his sightsman.

Viewed in their entirety by daylight, the topographies appealed irresistibly to the technical eye; and Ballard no longer wondered that Braithwaite had overlooked or disregarded all other possible sites for the great dam.

The basin enclosed by the circling foothills and backed by the forested slopes of the main range was a natural reservoir, lacking only a comparatively short wall of masonry to block the crooked gap in the hills through which the river found its way to the lower levels of the gra.s.s-lands.

The gap itself was an invitation to the engineer. Its rock-bound slopes promised the best of anchorages for the sh.o.r.e-ends of the masonry; and at its lower extremity a jutting promontory on the right bank of the stream made a sharp angle in the chasm; the elbow which gave the outlet canyon its name.

The point or crook of the elbow, the narrowest pa.s.s in the cleft, had been chosen as the site for the dam. Through the promontory a short tunnel was driven at the river-level to provide a diverting spillway for the torrent; and by this simple expedient a dry river-bed in which to build the great wall of concrete and masonry had been secured.

"That was Braithwaite's notion, I suppose?" said Ballard, indicating the tunnel through which the stream, now at summer freshet volume, thundered on its way around the building site to plunge sullenly into its natural bed below the promontory. "n.o.body but a Government man would have had the courage to spend so much time and money on a mere preliminary. It's a good notion, though."

"I'm not so sure of that," was Bromley's reply. "Doylan, the rock-boss, tells a fairy-story about the tunnel that will interest you when you hear it. He had the contract for driving it, you know."

"What was the story?"