XV
HOSPES ET HOSTIS
It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid beforeBallard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley'slaugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.
"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn'tit, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over theinterval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peacepipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. Itried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair ofsheep, of course."
"Assume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it goat that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up onyou long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused--even at apoor joke on me."
"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since youwent down-valley. And I've been wondering why."
"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead andburied, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."
Bromley grinned again.
"Meaning that this cow-boy cattle-thief tangle in the lower valley hasmade you _persona non grata_ at Castle 'Cadia? You're off; 'way off. Youdon't know Colonel Adam. So far from holding malice, he has been downhere twice to thank you for stopping the Carson raid. And that remindsme: there's a Castle 'Cadia note in your mail-box--came down by thehands of one of the little Japs this afternoon." And he went in to getit.
It proved to be another dinner bidding for the chief engineer, to beaccepted informally whenever he had time to spare. It was written andsigned by the daughter, but she said that she spoke both for her fatherand herself when she urged him to come soon.
"You'll go?" queried Bromley, when Ballard had passed the faintlyperfumed bit of note-paper across the arm's-reach between the twolazy-chairs.
"You know I'll go," was the half morose answer.
Bromley's smile was perfunctory.
"Of course you will," he assented. "To-night?"
"As well one time as another. Won't you go along?"
"Miss Elsa's invitation does not include me," was the gentle reminder.
"Bosh! You've had the open door, first, last, and all the time, haven'tyou?"
"Of course. I was only joking. But it isn't good for both of us to beoff the job at the same time. I'll stay and keep on intimidating thehoodoo."
There was a material train coming in from Alta Vista, and when itslong-drawn chime woke the canyon echoes, they both left the mesa andwent down to the railroad yard. It was an hour later, and Ballard waschanging his clothes in his bunk-room when he called to Bromley, who waschecking the way-bills for the lately arrived material.
"Oh, I say, Loudon; has that canyon path been dug out again?--where theslide was?"
"Sure," said Bromley, without looking up. Then: "You're going to walk?"
"How else would I get there?" returned Ballard, who still seemed to belabouring with his handicap of moroseness.
The assistant did not reply, but a warm flush crept up under the sunburnas he went on checking the way-bills. Later, when Ballard swung out togo to the Craigmiles's, the man at the desk let him pass with a brief"So-long," and bent still lower over his work.
Under much less embarrassing conditions, Ballard would have beenprepared to find himself breathing an atmosphere of constraint when hejoined the Castle 'Cadia house-party on the great tree-pillared porticoof the Craigmiles mansion. But the embarrassment, if any there were, wasall his own. The colonel was warmly hospitable; under her outwardpresentment of cheerful mockery, Elsa was palpably glad to see him; MissCauffrey was gently reproachful because he had not let them send Ottoand the car to drive him around from the canyon; and the various guestswelcomed him each after his or her kind.
During the ante-dinner pause the talk was all of the engineer's promptsnuffing-out of the cattle raid, and the praiseful comment on the little_coup de main_ was not marred by any reference to the mistaken zealwhich had made the raid possible. More than once Ballard found himselfwondering if the colonel and Elsa, Bigelow and Blacklock, had conspiredgenerously to keep the story of his egregious blunder from reaching theothers. If they had not, there was a deal more charity in human naturethan the most cheerful optimist ever postulated, he concluded.
At the dinner-table the enthusiastic _rapport_ was evenly sustained.Ballard took in the elder of the Cantrell sisters; and Wingfield, whosat opposite, quite neglected Miss Van Bryck in his efforts to make aninquisitive third when Miss Cantrell insistently returned to theexciting topic of the Carson capture--which she did after each separateendeavour on Ballard's part to escape the enthusiasm.
"Your joking about it doesn't make it any less heroic, Mr. Ballard," wasone of Miss Cantrell's phrasings of the song of triumph. "Just think ofit--three of you against eleven desperate outlaws!"
"Three of us, a carefully planned ambush, and a Maxim rapid-firemachine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all getaway a few hours later."
"And I--the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses whocould have made the most of it--_I_ wasn't there to see," cut inWingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"
"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing--for aplay," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and MissCantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramaticquality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of thereal thing. It's always inadequate."
"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene andlofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've beento your camp, and what I didn't find out about that hoodoo of yours----"
It was Miss Elsa, sitting at Wingfield's right, who broke in with anentirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding ananswer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafterexclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield'sliterary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was preparedto draw its teeth when the time should come.
As on the occasion of the engineer's former visit to Castle 'Cadia,there was an after-dinner adjournment to the big portico, where theJapanese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell intopairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.
Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at thedispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece ofmistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in themidst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off withgenial protests.
"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it"--with a benedictorywave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uhlittle blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generousintervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through themachinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, Ishould probably have done precisely the same thing--only I'm not sure Ishould have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try oneof these conchas, suh--unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havanahas been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."
Ballard took the gold-banded cigar as one who, having taken a man'scoat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to thecolonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever hedoubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any ofthe mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of theirrigation company's industrial army.
Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy withthe colonel had cost him a possible chance of a _tete-a-tete_ with Elsa.She was swinging gently in her own particular corner hammock; but thistime it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tinycoffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which thesweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to hercoffee-holder:
"I am taking you at your sister's valuation and trusting you very fully,M
r. Bigelow. You are quite sure you were followed, you and Mr. Ballard,on the day before the dynamiting of the canal?"
"No; I merely suspected it. I wasn't sure enough to warrant me incalling Ballard's attention to the single horseman who seemed to bekeeping us in view. But in the light of later events----"
"Yes; I know," she interrupted hastily. "Were you near enough toidentify the man if--if you should see him again?"
"Oh, no. Most of the time he was a mere galloping dot in the distance.Only once--it was when Ballard and I had stopped to wrangle over a bitof deforesting vandalism on the part of the contractors--I saw himfairly as he drew rein on a hilltop in our rear."
"Describe him for me," she directed, briefly.
"I'm afraid I can't do that. I had only this one near-by glimpse of him,you know. But I remarked that he was riding a large horse, like one ofthose in your father's stables; that he sat straight in the saddle; andthat he was wearing some kind of a skirted coat that blew out behind himwhen he wheeled to face the breeze."
Miss Craigmiles sat up in the hammock and pressed her fingers upon herclosed eyes. When she spoke again after the lapse of a long minute, itwas to ask Bigelow to retell the story of the brief fight in thedarkness at the sand arroyo on the night of the explosion.
The Forestry man went over the happenings of the night, and of the dayfollowing, circumstantially, while the growing moon tilted like a silvershallop in a sea of ebony toward the distant Elks, and the groups andpairs on the broad portico rearranged themselves choir-wise to singhymns for which one of the Cantrell sisters went to the piano beyond theopen windows of the drawing-room to play the accompaniments.
When the not too harmonious chorus began to drone upon the windlessnight air, Miss Craigmiles came out of her fit of abstraction andthanked Bigelow for his patience with her.
"It isn't altogether morbid curiosity on my part," she explained, halfpathetically. "Some day I may be able to tell you just what it is--butnot to-night. Now you may go and rescue Madge from the major, who hasbeen 'H'm-ha-ing' her to extinction for the last half-hour. And ifyou're brave enough you may tell Mr. Ballard that his bass is somethingdreadful--or send him here and I'll tell him."
The open-eyed little ruse worked like a piece of well-oiled mechanism,and Ballard broke off in the middle of a verse to go and drag Bigelow'sdeserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.
"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mockpetulance. "Didn't you know it?"
"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known tosing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."
She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that alwaysbetokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.
"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays theviolin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"
Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable pricking ofimpatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiouslysimilar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. Buthe kept the impatience out of his reply.
"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since Icame on the work."
"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonalitywhich placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; butBallard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.
"I am glad you like him," he said; his tone implying the preciseopposite of the words.
"Are you? You don't say it very enthusiastically."
It was a small challenge, and he lifted it almost roughly.
"I can't be enthusiastic where your liking for other men is concerned."
Her smile was a mere face-lighting of mockery.
"I can't imagine Mr. Bromley saying a thing like that. What was it youtold me once about the high plane of men-friendships? As I remember it,you said that they were the purest passions the world has ever known.And you wouldn't admit that women could breathe the rarefied air of thathigh altitude at all."
"That was before I knew all the possibilities; before I knew what itmeans to----"
"Don't say it," she interrupted, the mocking mood slipping from her likea cast-off garment.
"I shall say it," he went on doggedly. "Loudon is nearer to me than anyother man I ever knew. But I honestly believe I should hate him if--tellme that it isn't so, Elsa. For heaven's sake, help me to kill out thisnew madness before it makes a scoundrel of me!"
What she would have said he was not to know. Beyond the zone of lightbounded by the shadows of the maples on the lawn there were sounds as ofsome animal crashing its way through the shrubbery. A moment later, outof the enclosing walls of the night, came a man, running and gasping forbreath. It was one of the labourers from the camp at Elbow Canyon, andhe made for the corner of the portico where Miss Craigmiles's hammockwas swung.
"'Tis Misther Ballard I'm lukin' for!" he panted; and Ballard answeredquickly for himself.
"I'm here," he said. "What's wanted?"
"It's Misther Bromley, this time, sorr. The wather was risin' in theriver, and he'd been up to the wing dam just below this to see was thereanny logs or annything cloggin' it. On the way up or back, we don't knowwhich, he did be stoomblin' from the trail into the canyon; and thedago, Lu'gi, found him." The man was mopping his face with a redbandana, and his hands were shaking as if he had an ague fit.
"Is he badly hurt?" Ballard had put himself quickly between the hammockand the bearer of ill tidings.
"'Tis kilt dead entirely he is, sorr, we're thinkin'," was thelow-spoken reply. The assistant engineer had no enemies among theworkmen at the headquarters' camp.
Ballard heard a horrified gasp behind him, and the hammock suddenlyswung empty. When he turned, Elsa was hurrying out through the openFrench window with his coat and hat.
"You must not lose a moment," she urged. "Don't wait for anything--I'llexplain to father and Aunt June. Hurry! hurry! but, oh, do becareful--_careful_!"
Ballard dropped from the edge of the portico and plunged into theshrubbery at the heels of the messenger. The young woman, still pale andstrangely perturbed, hastened to find her aunt.
"What is it, child? What has happened?"
Miss Cauffrey, the gentle-voiced, had been dozing in her chair, but shewakened quickly when Elsa spoke to her.
"It is another--accident; at the construction camp. Mr. Ballard had togo immediately. Where is father?"
Miss Cauffrey put up her eye-glasses and scanned the various groupswithin eye-reach. Then she remembered. "Oh, yes; I think I must be verysleepy, yet. He went in quite a little time ago; to the library to liedown. He asked me to call him when Mr. Ballard was ready to go."
"Are you sure of that, Aunt June?"
"Why--yes. No, that wasn't it, either; he asked me to excuse him to Mr.Ballard. I recollect now. Dear me, child! What has upset you so? Youlook positively haggard."
But Elsa had fled; first to the library, which was empty, and then toher father's room above stairs. That was empty, too, but the coat andwaistcoat her father had worn earlier in the evening were lying upon thebed as if thrown aside hurriedly. While she was staring panic-strickenat the mute evidences of his absence she heard his step in the corridor.When he came in, less familiar eyes than those of his daughter wouldscarcely have recognised him. He was muffled to the heels in a longrain-coat, the muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathinghard like a spent runner.
The muscles of his face were twitching, and he wasbreathing hard, like a spent runner.]
"Father!" she called, softly; but he either did not hear or did notheed. He had flung the rain-coat aside and was hastily struggling intothe evening dress. When he turned from the dressing-mirror she couldhardly keep from crying out. With the swift change of raiment he hadbecome himself again; and a few minutes later, when she had followed himto the library to find him lying quietly upon the reading-lounge,half-asleep, as it seemed, the transformation scene in the upper
roombecame more than ever like the fleeting impression of an incredibledream.
"Father, are you asleep?" she asked; and when he sat up quickly she toldhim her tidings without preface.
"Mr. Bromley is hurt--fatally, they think--by a fall from the path intothe lower canyon. Mr. Ballard has gone with the man who came to bringthe news. Will you send Otto in the car to see if there is anything wecan do?"
"Bromley? Oh, no, child; it can't be _Bromley_!" He had risen to hisfeet at her mention of the name, but now he sat down again as if thefull tale of the years had smitten him suddenly. Then he gave hisdirections, brokenly, and with a curious thickening of the deep-toned,mellifluous voice: "Tell Otto to bring the small car around at--at once,and fetch me my coat. Of cou'se, my deah, I shall go myself"--this inresponse to her swift protest. "I'm quite well and able; just alittle--a little sho'tness of breath. Fetch me my coat and thedoctor-box, thah's a good girl. But--but I assure you it can'tbe--Bromley!"