The King of Arcadia Part 7

"If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"

The contractor shook his head.

"The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all, as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican foreman; and Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody.

Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang that roped him."

Ballard was feeling less peaceable when he rode on to the next camp, and as he made the round of the northern outposts the fighting strain which had come down to him from his pioneer ancestors began to a.s.sert itself in spite of his efforts to control it. At every stopping-place Fitzpatrick's complaint was amplified. Depredations had followed each other with increasing frequency since Macpherson's death; and once, when one of the subcontractors had been provoked into resistance, arms had been used and a free fight had ensued.

Turning the matter over in his mind in growing indignation, Ballard had determined, by the time he had made the complete round of the outlying camps, upon the course he should pursue. "I'll run a sheriff's posse in here and clean up the entire outfit; that's about what I'll do!" he was saying wrathfully to himself as he galloped eastward on the stage trail late in the afternoon of the final day. "The Lord knows I don't want to make a blood-feud of it, but if they will have it----"

The interruption was a little object-lesson ill.u.s.trating the grievances of the contractors. Roughly paralleling the stage trail ran the line of the proposed southern lateral ca.n.a.l, marked by its double row of location stakes. At a turn in the road Ballard came suddenly upon what appeared to be an impromptu game of polo.

Flap-hatted herdsmen in s.h.a.ggy overalls, and swinging long clubs in lieu of polo sticks, were riding in curious zigzags over the ca.n.a.l course, and bending for a drive at each right and left swerve of their wiry little mounts. It took the Kentuckian a full minute to master the intricacies of the game. Then he saw what was doing. The location stakes for the ditch boundaries were set opposite and alternate, and the object of the dodging riders was to determine which of them could club the greatest number of stakes out of the ground without missing a blow or drawing rein.

Ballard singled out the leader, a handsome, well-built _caballero_, with the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of things, red wrath to the fore.

"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"

"_Si, Senor_," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.

"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia Company."

"Ha! Senor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."

"Never mind that; the pleasure isn't mutual, by a d.a.m.ned sight. You tell your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes back where they found them." Ballard was hot.

"You give-a the h-order in this valley, senor?" asked the Mexican softly.

"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"

"Senor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me like-a that!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Senor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for that he spik to me like-a-that!"]

"Have you?" snorted Ballard contemptuously. "Well, you won't kill me.

Call your men off, I say!"

There was no need. The makes.h.i.+ft polo game had paused, and the riders were gathering about the quarrelling two.

"Bat your left eye once, and we'll rope him for you, Manuel," said one.

"Wonder if I c'd knock a two-bagger with that hat o' his'n without mussin' his hair?" said another.

"Say, you fellers, wait a minute till I make that bronc' o' his'n do a cake-walk!" interposed a third, casting the loop of his riata on the ground so that Ballard's horse would be thrown if he lifted hoof.

It was an awkward crisis, and the engineer stood to come off with little credit. He was armed, but even in the unfettered cattle country one cannot pistol a laughing jeer. It was the saving sense of humour that came to his aid, banis.h.i.+ng red wrath. There was no malice in the jeers.

"Sail in when you're ready, boys," he laughed. "I fight for my brand the same as you'd fight for yours. Those pegs have got to go back in the ground where you found them."

One of the flap-hatted riders dropped his reins, drummed with his elbows, and crowed l.u.s.tily. The foreman backed his horse deftly out of the enclosing ring; and the man nearest to Ballard on the right made a little cast of his looped rope, designed to whip Ballard's pistol out of its holster. If the engineer had been the tenderfoot they took him for, the trouble would have culminated quickly.

With the laugh still on his lips, the Kentuckian was watching every move of the Mexican. There was bloodthirst, waiting only for the shadow of an excuse, glooming in the handsome black eyes. Ballard remembered Sanderson's fate, and a quick thrill of racial sympathy for the dead man tuned him to the fighting pitch. He knew he was confronting a treacherous bully of the type known to the West as a "killer"; a man whose regard for human life could be accurately and exactly measured by his chance for escaping the penalty for its taking.

It was at this climaxing moment, while Ballard was tightening his eye-hold upon the one dangerous antagonist, and foiling with his free hand the attempts of the playful "Scotty" at his right to disarm him, that the diversion came. A cloud of dust on the near-by stage trail resolved itself into a fiery-red, purring motor-car with a single occupant; and a moment later the car had left the road and was heading across the gra.s.sy inters.p.a.ce.

Manuel's left hand was hovering above his pistol-b.u.t.t; and Ballard took his eyes from the menace long enough to glance aside at the approaching motorist. He was a kingly figure of a man well on in years, white-haired, ruddy of face, with huge military mustaches and a goatee.

He brought the car with a skilful turn into the midst of things; and Ballard, confident now that the Mexican foreman no longer needed watching, saw a singular happening.

While one might count two, the old man in the motor-car stared hard at him, rose in his place behind the steering-wheel, staggered, groped with his hands as the blind grope, and then fell back into the driving-seat with a groan.

Ballard was off his horse instantly, tendering his pocket-flask. But the old man's indisposition seemed to pa.s.s as suddenly as it had come.

"Thank you, suh," he said in a voice that boomed for its very depth and sweetness; "I reckon I've been driving a little too fast. Youh--youh name is Ballard--Breckenridge Ballard, isn't it?" he inquired courteously, completely ignoring the dissolving ring of practical jokers.

"It is. And you are Colonel Craigmiles?"

"At youh service, suh; entiahly at youh service. I should have known you anywhere for a Ballard. Youh mother was a Hardaway, but you don't take after that side. No, suh"--with calm deliberation--"you are youh father's son, Mistah Ballard." Then, as one coming at a bound from the remote past to the present: "Was thah any--ah--little discussion going on between you and--ah--Manuel, Mistuh Ballard?"

Five minutes earlier the engineer had been angry enough to prefer spiteful charges against the polo players all and singular. But the booming of the deep voice had a curiously mollifying effect.

"It is hardly worth mentioning," he found himself replying. "I was protesting to your foreman because the boys were having a little game of polo at our expense--knocking our location stakes out of the ground."

The kingly old man in the motor-car drew himself up, and there was a mild explosion directed at the Mexican foreman.

"Manuel, I'm suhprised--right much suhprised and humiliated, suh! I thought it was--ah--distinctly undehstood that all this schoolboy triflin' was to be stopped. Let me heah no more of it. And see that these heah stakes are replaced; carefully replaced, if you please, suh."

And then to the complainant: "I'm right sorry, I a.s.sure you, Mistuh Ballard. Let me prove it by carrying you off to dinneh with us at Castle 'Cadia. Grigsby, heah, will lead youh horse to camp, and fetch any little necessaries you might care to send for. Indulge me, suh, and let me make amends. My daughter speaks of you so often that I feel we ought to be mo' friendly."

Under much less favourable conditions it is conceivable that the Kentuckian would have overridden many barriers for the sake of finding the open door at Castle 'Cadia. And, the tour of inspection being completed, there was no special duty call to sound a warning.

"I shall be delighted, I'm sure," he burbled, quite like an infatuated lover; and when the cow-boy messenger was charged with the errand to the headquarters camp, Ballard took his place beside the company's enemy, and the car was sent purring across to the hill-skirting stage road.

VIII

CASTLE 'CADIA

It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills; and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not speed the motor-car.

Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the princ.i.p.al antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky boyhood--all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his att.i.tude so affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the vanis.h.i.+ng point.

"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed, gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.

The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the hogback foothills well to the southward, and approaching the inner valley at right angles to the course of the river and the railway.

The sun had sunk behind the western mountain barrier and the dusk was gathering when the colonel quickened the pace, and the car topped the last of the hills in a staccato rush. Ballard heard the low thunder of the Boiling Water in its upper canyon, and had glimpses of weird shapes of eroded sandstone looming in huge pillars and fantastic mushroom figures in the growing darkness.