The King of Arcadia Part 23

"There's hope f'r the little man, Misther Ballard?" he inquired anxiously.

"Good hope, now, I think, Michael."

"That's the brave wor-rd. The min do be sittin' up in th' bunk-shanties to hear ut. 'Twas all through the camp the minut' they brought him in.

There isn't a man av thim that wouldn't go t'rough fire and wather f'r Misther Bromley--and that's no joke. Is there annything I can do?"

"Nothing, thank you. Tell the yard watchman to stay within call, and I'll send for you if you're needed."

With this provision for the possible need, the young chief kept the vigil alone, sitting where he could see the face of the still unconscious victim of fate, or tramping three steps and a turn in the adjoining office room when sleep threatened to overpower him.

It was a time for calm second thought; for a reflective weighing of the singular and ominous conditions partly revealed in the week agone talk with Elsa Craigmiles. That she knew more than she was willing to tell had been plainly evident in that first evening on the tree-pillared portico at Castle 'Cadia; but beyond this a.s.sumption the unanswerable questions cl.u.s.tered quickly, opening door after door of speculative conjecture in the background.

What was the motive behind the hurled stone which had so nearly bred a tragedy on his first evening at Elbow Canyon? He reflected that he had always been too busy to make personal enemies; therefore, the attempt upon his life must have been impersonal--must have been directed at the chief engineer of the Arcadia Company. a.s.suming this, the chain of inference linked itself rapidly. Was Macpherson's death purely accidental?--or Braithwaite's? If not, who was the murderer?--and why was the colonel's daughter so evidently determined to s.h.i.+eld him?

The answer, the purely logical answer, pointed to one man--her father--and thereupon became a thing to be scoffed at. It was more than incredible; it was blankly unthinkable.

The young Kentuckian, descendant of pioneers who had hewn their beginnings out of the primitive wilderness, taking life as they found it, was practical before all things else. Villains of the Borgian strain no longer existed, save in the unreal world of the novelist or the playwriter. And if, by any stretch of imagination, they might still be supposed to exist....

Ballard brushed the supposition impatiently aside when he thought of the woman he loved.

"Anything but that!" he exclaimed, breaking the silence of the four bare walls for the sake of hearing the sound of his own voice. "And, besides, the colonel himself is a living, breathing refutation of any such idiotic notion. All the same, if it is not her father she is trying to s.h.i.+eld, who, in the name of all that is good, can it be? And why should Colonel Craigmiles, or anyone else, be so insanely vindictive as to imagine that the killing of a few chiefs of construction will cut any figure with the company which hires them?"

These perplexing questions were still unanswered when the graying dawn found him dozing in his chair, with the camp whistles sounding the early turn-out, and Bromley conscious and begging feebly for a drink of water.

XVII

THE DERRICK FUMBLES

Bromley had been a week in hospital at the great house in the upper valley, and was recovering as rapidly as a clean-living, well-ancestored man should, when Ballard was surprised one morning by a descent of the entire Castle 'Cadia garrison, lacking only the colonel and Miss Cauffrey, upon the scene of activities at the dam.

The chief of construction had to flog himself sharply into the hospitable line before he could make the invaders welcome. He had a workingman's shrewd impatience of interruptions; and since the accident which had deprived him of his a.s.sistant, he had been doing double duty.

On this particular morning he was about to leave for a flying round of the camps on the railroad extension; but he reluctantly countermanded the order for the locomotive when he saw Elsa picking the way for her guests among the obstructions in the stone yard.

"Please--oh, please don't look so inhospitable!" she begged, in well-simulated dismay, when the irruption of sight-seers had fairly surrounded him. "We have driven and fished and climbed mountains and played children's games at home until there was positively nothing else to do. Pacify him, Cousin Janet--he's going to warn us off!"

Ballard laughingly disclaimed any such ungracious intention, and proceeded to prove his words by deeds. Young Blacklock and Bigelow were easily interested in the building details; the women were given an opportunity to see the inside workings of the men's housekeeping in the shacks, the mess-tent and the camp kitchen; the major was permitted and encouraged to be loftily critical of everything; and Wingfield--but Ballard kept the playwright carefully tethered in a sort of moral hitching-rope, holding the end of the rope in his own hands.

Once openly committed as entertainer, the young Kentuckian did all that could be expected of him--and more. When the visitors had surfeited themselves on concrete-mixing and stone-laying and camp housekeeping, the chief engineer had plank seats placed on a flat car, and the invaders were whisked away on an impromptu and personally conducted railway excursion to some of the nearer ditch camps.

Before leaving the headquarters, Ballard gave Fitzpatrick an Irish hint; and when the excursionists returned from the railway jaunt, there was a miraculous luncheon served in the big mess-tent. Garou, the French-Canadian camp cook, had a soul above the bare necessities when the occasion demanded; and he had Ballard's private commissary to draw upon.

After the luncheon Ballard let his guests scatter as they pleased, charging himself, as before, particularly with the oversight and wardens.h.i.+p of Mr. Lester Wingfield. There was only one chance in a hundred that the playwright, left to his own devices, might stumble upon the skeleton in the camp closet. But the Kentuckian was determined to make that one chance ineffective.

Several things came of the hour spent as Wingfield's keeper while the others were visiting the wing dam and the quarry, the spillway, and the cut-off tunnel, under Fitzpatrick as megaphonist. One of them was a juster appreciation of the playwright as a man and a brother. Ballard smiled mentally when he realised that his point of view had been that of the elemental lover, jealous of a possible rival. Wingfield was not half a bad sort, he admitted; a little inclined to pose, since it was his art to epitomise a world of _poseurs_; an enthusiast in his calling; but at bottom a workable companion and the shrewdest of observers.

In deference to the changed point of view, the Kentuckian did penance for the preconceived prejudice and tried to make the playwright's insulation painless. The sun shone hot on the stone yard, and there was a jar of pa.s.sable tobacco in the office adobe: would Wingfield care to go indoors and lounge until the others came to a proper sense of the desirability of shade and quietude on a hot afternoon?

Wingfield would, gladly. He confessed shamelessly to a habit of smoking his after-luncheon pipe on his back. There was a home-made divan in the office quarters, with cus.h.i.+ons and blanket coverings, and Ballard found the tobacco-jar and a clean pipe; a long-stemmed "churchwarden," dear to the heart of a lazy man.

"Now this is what I call solid comfort," said the playwright, stretching his long legs luxuriously on the divan. "A man's den that is a den, and not a bric-a-brac shop masquerading under the name, a good pipe, good tobacco, and good company. You fellows have us world-people faded to a shadow when it comes to the real thing. I've felt it in my bones all along that I was missing the best part of this trip by not getting in with you down here. But every time I've tried to break away, something else has turned up."

Ballard was ready with his bucket of cold water.

"You haven't missed anything. There isn't much in a construction camp to invite the literary mind, I should say." And he tried to make the saying sound not too inhospitable.

"Oh, you're off wrong, there," argued the playwright, with cheerful arrogance. "You probably haven't a sense of the literary values; a good many people haven't--born blind on that side, you know. Now, Miss Van Bryck has the seeing eye, to an educated finish. She tells me you have a dramatic situation down here every little so-while. She told me that story of yours about the stone smas.h.i.+ng into your office in the middle of the night. That's simply ripping good stuff--worlds of possibilities in a thing like that, don't you know? By the way, this is the room, isn't it? Does that patch in the ceiling cover the hole?"

Ballard admitted the fact, and strove manfully to throw the switch ahead of the querist to the end that the talk might be shunted to some less dangerous topic.

"Hang the tobacco!" snapped the guest irritably, retorting upon Ballard's remark about the quality of his pet smoking mixture. "You and Miss Craigmiles seem to be bitten with the same exasperating mania for subject-changing. I'd like to hear that rock-throwing story at first hands, if you don't mind."

Having no good reason for refusing point-blank, Ballard told the story, carefully divesting it of all the little mystery thrills which he had included for Miss Dosia's benefit.

"Um!" commented Wingfield, at the close of the bald narration. "It would seem to have lost a good bit in the way of human interest since Miss Van Bryck repeated it to me. Did you embroider it for her? or did she put in the little hemst.i.tchings for me?"

Ballard laughed.

"I am sorry if I have spoiled it for you. But you couldn't make a dramatic situation out of a careless quarryman's overloading of a shot-hole."

"Oh, no," said the playwright, apparently giving it up. And he smoked his pipe out in silence.

Ballard thought the incident was comfortably dead and buried, but he did not know his man. Long after Wingfield might be supposed to have forgotten all about the stone catapulting, he sat up suddenly and broke out again.

"Say! you explained to Miss Dosia that the stone couldn't possibly have come from the quarry without knocking the science of artillery into a c.o.c.ked hat. She made a point of that."

"Oh, hold on!" protested the Kentuckian. "You mustn't hold me responsible for a bit of dinner-table talk with a very charming young woman. Perhaps Miss Dosia wished to be mystified. I put it to you as man to man; would you have disappointed her?"

The playwright's laugh showed his fine teeth.

"They tell me you are at the top of the heap in your profession, Mr.

Ballard, and I can easily believe it. But I have a specialty, too, and I'm no slouch in it. My little stunt is prying into the inner consciousness of things. Obviously, there is a mystery--a real mystery--about this stone-throwing episode, and for some reason you are trying to keep me from dipping into it. Conversely, I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Tell me frankly, is there any good reason why I shouldn't?"

Ballard's salvation for this time personified itself in the figure of Contractor Fitzpatrick darkening the door of the office to ask a "question of information," as he phrased it. Hence there was an excuse for a break and a return to the sun-kissed stone yard.

The engineer purposefully prolonged the talk with Fitzpatrick until the scattered sight-seers had gathered for a descent, under Jerry Blacklock's lead, to the great ravine below the dam where the river thundered out of the cut-off tunnel. But when he saw that Miss Craigmiles had elected to stay behind, and that Wingfield had attached himself to the younger Miss Cantrell, he gave the contractor his information boiled down into a curt sentence or two, and hastened to join the stay-behind.

"You'll melt, out here in the sun," he said, overtaking her as she stood looking down into the whirling vortex made by the torrent's plunge into the entrance of the cut-off tunnel.

She ignored the care-taking phrase as if she had not heard it.

"Mr. Wingfield?--you have kept him from getting interested in the--in the----"

Ballard nodded.