The King of Arcadia Part 34

Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs are surrounding Mr. Pelham on the ca.n.a.l embankment and singing 'For he's a jolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we're all hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."

After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of the deserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of a furnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when the declining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the little mesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.

Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flow of the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel was laid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurity of the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newly turned leaf in the record of the great chasm.

What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed was more instructive than rea.s.suring. The great pit described by Gardiner was still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, and the cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent was alarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of the stream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off in all directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, and which formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined and tunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a huge hollow tooth.

The extreme length of the underground pa.s.sage was a scant five hundred feet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts--possible only after he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubber thigh-boots--the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to the great stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here the burden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or less running water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leak around the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.

"That settles it," he mused gloomily. "It is seeping through this ghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with the concrete mixers--and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaite was thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compost heaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."

The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched western horizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns.

There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, and he was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At a conservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollars must be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and in plugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any one of the ninety days the water might find its increasing way through the "compost heap"; whereupon the devastating end would come swiftly.

It was disheartening from every point of view. Ballard knew nothing of the financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdly that Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could not be seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for the safety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, the work must be done. Otherwise----

The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the hara.s.sed scowl when Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.

"The grouch is all yours," said the cheerful one, comfortingly, "and you have a good right and t.i.tle to it. It's been a hard day for you. Is the arm hurting like sin?"

"No; not more than it has to. But something else is. Listen, Bromley."

And he briefed the story of the hollow-tooth promontory for the a.s.sistant.

"Great ghosts!--worse and more of it!" was Bromley's comment. Then he added: "I've seen a queer thing, too, Breckenridge: the colonel has moved out, vanished, taken to the hills."

"Out of Castle 'Cadia? You're mistaken. There is absolutely nothing doing at the big house: I've been reconnoitring with the gla.s.s."

"No, I didn't mean that," was the qualifying rejoinder. "I mean the ranch outfit down in the Park. It's gone. You know the best grazing at this time of the year is along the river: well, you won't find hair, hoof or horn of the colonel's cattle anywhere in the bottom lands--not a sign of them. Also, the ranch itself is deserted and the corrals are all open."

The hara.s.sed scowl would have taken on other added lines if there had been room for them.

"What do you make of it, Loudon?--what does it mean?"

"You can search me," was the puzzled reply. "But while you're doing it, you can bet high that it means something. To a man up a tall tree it looks as if the colonel were expecting a flood. Why should he expect it?

What does he know?--more than we know?"

"It's another of the cursed mysteries," Ballard broke out in sullen anger. "It's enough to jar a man's sanity!"

"Mine was screwed a good bit off its base a long time ago," Bromley confessed. Then he came back to the present and its threatenings: "I'd give a month's pay if we had this crazy city crowd off of our hands and out of the Park."

"We'll get rid of it pretty early. I've settled that with Mr. Pelham. To get his people back to Denver by breakfast-time to-morrow, the trains will have to leave here between eight and eight-thirty."

"That is good news--as far as it goes. Will you tell Mr. Pelham about the rotten tooth--to-night, I mean?"

"I certainly shall," was the positive rejoinder; and an hour later, when the evening luncheon in the big mess-tent had been served, and the crowd was gathered on the camp mesa to wait for the fireworks, Ballard got the president into the bungalow office, shut the door on possible interruptions, and laid bare the discouraging facts.

Singularly enough, as he thought, the facts seemed to make little impression upon the head of Arcadia Irrigation. Mr. Pelham sat back in Macpherson's home-made easy-chair, relighted his cigar, and refused to be disturbed or greatly interested. a.s.suming that he had not made the new involvement plain enough, Ballard went over the situation again.

"Another quarter of a million will be needed," he summed up, "and we shouldn't lose a single day in beginning. As I have said, there seems to be considerable seepage through the hill already, with less than half of the working head of water behind the dam. What it will be under a full head, no man can say."

"Oh, I don't know," said the president, easily. "A new boat always leaks a little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a few days--or weeks."

"That is a possibility," granted the engineer; "but it is scarcely one upon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of the company said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under the lower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; that settlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not be done, Mr. Pelham."

"Why not?"

"Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before we have filled that hollow tooth would take his life in his hands."

The president's smile was blandly genial.

"You've been having a pretty strenuous day of it, Mr. Ballard, and I can make allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a good night's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how you came to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?"

"The arm is all right," said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort to change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog tenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to the original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?"

The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.

"Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake--or Mr.

Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were you."

"Not mention it?--to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully----"

"Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----"

Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fete champetre_.

"It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans.

You don't care to go to the foot of the pa.s.s with one of the trains, do you?"

"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is filling, and I'm the one."

"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the first section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Then he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelham take the new grief?"

"He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you, there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish."

Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.

"I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day," he averred. "I'll tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been busy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't spellbinding from some platform or other. There is something doing--something that the baa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring are doing it."

Ballard got up and went to the door with the a.s.sistant.

"And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon," he said, with an air of sudden and vehement conviction. "This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's a stock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollow tooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'll never get orders to plug that tunnel!"

Bromley nodded agreement. "I've been working my way around to that, too.

All right; so let it be. My resignation goes in to-morrow morning, and I take it yours will?"

"It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off short with Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuade you to go over the pa.s.s. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep you can."

Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlight on the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw the twinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.