XIX
IN THE LABORATORY
Ballard had a small shock while he was crossing the stone yard withFitzpatrick. It turned upon the sight of the handsome figure of theCraigmiles ranch foreman calmly rolling a cigarette in the shade of oneof the cutting sheds.
"What is the Mexican doing here?" he demanded abruptly of Fitzpatrick;and the Irishman's manner was far from reassuring.
"'Tis you he'll be wanting to see, I'm thinking. He's been hanging'round the office f'r the betther part of an hour. Shall I run him offthe riservation?"
"Around the office, you say?" Ballard cut himself instantly out of thecontractor's company and crossed briskly to the shed where the Mexicanwas lounging. "You are waiting to see me?" he asked shortly, ignoringthe foreman's courtly bow and sombrero-sweep.
"I wait to h-ask for the 'ealth of Senor Bromley. It is report' to methat he is recover from hees sobad h-accident."
"Mr. Bromley is getting along all right. Is that all?"
The Mexican bowed again.
"I bring-a da message from the Senorita to da Senor Wingfiel'. He issom'where on da camp?"
"No; he has gone back to the upper valley. You have been waiting sometime? You must have seen him go."
For the third time the Mexican removed his hat. "I'll have been hereone, two, t'ree little minute, Senor Ballar'," he lied smoothly. "Andnow I make to myself the honour of saying to you, _Adios_."
Ballard let him go because there was nothing else to do. His presence inthe construction camp, and the ready lie about the length of his stay,were both sufficiently ominous. What if he had overheard the talk in theoffice? It was easily possible that he had. The windows were open, andthe adobe was only a few steps withdrawn from the busy cutting yard. Theeavesdropper might have sat unremarked upon the office porch, if he hadcared to.
The Kentuckian was deep in the labyrinth of reflection when he rejoinedFitzpatrick; and the laying-out of the new side-track afterward waspurely mechanical. When the work was done, Ballard returned to thebungalow, to find Bromley sleeping the sleep of pure exhaustion on theblanket-covered couch. Obeying a sudden impulse, the Kentuckian took afield-glass from its case on the wall, and went out, tip-toeing to avoidwaking Bromley. If Manuel had overheard, it was comparatively easy toprefigure his next step.
"Which way did the Mexican go?" Ballard asked of a cutter in thestone-yard.
"The last I saw of him he was loungin' off towards the Elbow. That wasjust after you was talkin' to him," said the man, lifting his cap toscratch his head with one finger.
"Did he come here horseback?"
"Not up here on the mesa. Might 'a' left his nag down below; but hewa'n't headin' that way when I saw him."
Ballard turned away and climbed the hill in the rear of the bungalow;the hill from which the table-smashing rock had been hurled. From itscrest there was a comprehensive view of the upper valley, with the riverwinding through it, with Castle 'Cadia crowning the island-like knoll inits centre, with the densely forested background range billowing greenand grey in the afternoon sunlight.
Throwing himself flat on the brown hilltop, Ballard trained his glassfirst on the inner valley reaches of a bridle-path leading over thesouthern hogback. There was no living thing in sight in that field,though sufficient time had elapsed to enable the Mexican to ride acrossthe bridge and over the hills, if he had left the camp mounted.
The engineer frowned and slipped easily into the out-of-door man's habitof thinking aloud.
"It was a bare chance, of course. If he had news to carry to his master,he would save time by walking one mile as against riding four. Hello!"
The exclamation emphasised a small discovery. From the hilltop theentrance to the colonel's mysterious mine was in plain view, and for thefirst time in Ballard's observings of it the massive, iron-bound doorwas open. Bringing the glass to bear on the tunnel-mouth square ofshadow, Ballard made out the figures of two men standing just within theentrance and far enough withdrawn to be hidden from prying eyes on thecamp plateau. With the help of the glass, the young engineer coulddistinguish the shape of a huge white sombrero, and under the sombrerothe red spark of a cigarette. Wherefore he rolled quickly to a lessexposed position and awaited developments.
The suspense was short. In a few minutes the Mexican foreman emergedfrom the gloom of the mine-mouth, and with a single swift backwardglance for the industries at the canyon portal, walked rapidly up thepath toward the inner valley. Ballard sat up and trained the field-glassagain. Why had Manuel gone out of his way to stop at the mine? Theanswer, or at least one possible answer, was under the foreman's arm,taking the shape of a short-barrelled rifle of the type carried byexpress messengers on Western railways.
Ballard screwed the glass into its smallest compass, dropped it into hispocket, and made his way down to the camp mesa. The gun meant nothingmore than that the Mexican had not deemed it advisable to appear in theconstruction camp armed. But, on the other hand, Ballard was fullyconvinced that he was on his way to Colonel Craigmiles as the bearer ofnews.
It was an hour later when Otto, the colonel's chauffeur, kicked out theclutch of the buzzing runabout before the door of the office bungalowand announced that he had come to take the convalescent back to Castle'Cadia. Bromley was still asleep; hence there had been no opportunityfor a joint discussion of the latest development in the little war. Butwhen Ballard was helping him into the mechanician's seat, and Otto hadgone for a bucket of water to cool the hissing radiator, there was timefor a hurried word or two.
"More trouble, Loudon--it turned up while you were asleep. Manuel washere, in the camp, while we were hammering it out with Wingfield. It ismeasurably certain that he overheard all or part of the talk. What heknows, the colonel doubtless knows, too, by this time, and----"
"Oh, good Lord!" groaned Bromley. "It was bad enough as it stood, butthis drags Wingfield into it, neck and heels! What will they do to him?"
Ballard knitted his brows. "As Manuel could very easily make it appearin his tale-bearing, anything that might happen to Wingfield would be apretty clear case of self-defence for Colonel Craigmiles. Wingfieldknows too much."
"A great deal too much. If I dared say ten words to Elsa----"
"No," Ballard objected; "she is the one person to be shielded andspared. It's up to us to get Wingfield away from Castle 'Cadia and outof the country--before anything does happen to him."
"If I were only half a man again!" Bromley lamented. "But I know justhow it will be; I sha'n't have a shadow of chance at Wingfield thisevening. As soon as I show up, Miss Cauffrey and the others will scoldme for overstaying my leave, and chase me off to bed."
"That's so; and it's right," mused Ballard. "You've no business to beout of bed this minute; you're not fit to be facing a ten-mile drive inthis jig-wagon. By Jove: that's our way out of it! You climb down andlet me go in your place. I'll tell them we let you overdo yourself; thatyou were too tired to stand the motor trip--which is the fact, if you'donly admit it. That will give me a chance at Wingfield; the chance youwouldn't have if you were to go. What do you say?"
"I've already said it," was the convalescent's reply; and he let Ballardhelp him out of the mechanic's seat and into the bungalow.
This is how it chanced that the chauffeur, coming back from Garou'skitchen barrel with the second bucket of water, found his fares changedand the chief engineer waiting to be his passenger over the ten miles ofroundabout road. It was all one to the Berliner. He listened toBallard's brief explanation with true German impassiveness, cranked themotor, pulled himself in behind the pilot-wheel, and sent the little carbounding down the mesa hill to the Boiling Water bridge what time thehoister whistles were blowing the six-o'clock quitting signal. TheKentuckian looked at his watch mechanically, as one will at somefamiliar reminder of the time. Seven o'clock was the Castle 'Cadiadinner hour: thirty minutes should suffice for the covering of the tenmiles of country road, and with the fates propitious there would be anempty half-hour for the cajoling or compelling o
f Wingfield, imperilledin his character of overcurious delver into other people's affairs.
So ran the reasonable prefiguring; but plans and prefigurings based uponthe performance of a gasolene motor call for a generous factor ofsafety. Five miles from a tool-box in either direction, the engines ofthe runabout set up an ominous knocking. A stop was made, and Ballardfilled and lighted his pipe while the chauffeur opened the bonnet andtapped and pried and screwed and adjusted. Ten minutes were lost in thetesting and trying, and then the German named the trouble, with anemphatic "_Himmel!_" for a foreword. A broken bolt-head had dropped intothe crank-case, and it would be necessary to take the engines to piecesto get it out. Ballard consulted his watch again. It lacked only aquarter of an hour of the Castle 'Cadia dinner-time; and a five-miletramp over the hills would consume at least an hour. Whatever dangermight be threatening the playwright (and the farther Ballard got awayfrom the revelations of the early afternoon, the more the entire fabricof accusation threatened to crumble into the stuff nightmares are madeof), a delay of an hour or two could hardly bring it to a crisis. Hence,when Otto lighted the lamps and got out his wrenches, his passengerstayed with him and became a very efficient mechanic's helper.
This, as we have seen, was at a quarter before seven. At a quarterbefore nine the broken bolt was replaced, the last nut was screwed home,and the engines of the runabout were once more in commission.
"A handy bit of road repairing, Otto," was Ballard's comment. "And wedid it five miles from a lemon. How long will it take us to get in?"
The Berliner did not know. With no further bad luck, fifteen or twentyminutes should be enough. And in fifteen minutes or less the little carwas racing up the maple-shaded avenue to the Castle 'Cadia carriageentrance.
Ballard felt trouble in the air before he descended from the car. Thegreat portico was deserted, the piano was silent, and the lights were onin the upper rooms of the house. At the mounting of the steps, theForestry man met him and drew him aside into the library, which was asempty as the portico.
"I heard the car and thought it would be Mr. Bromley," Bigelowexplained; adding: "I'm glad he didn't come. There has been anaccident."
"To--to Wingfield?"
"Yes. How did you know? It was just after dinner. The colonel had someexperimental mixture cooking in his electric furnace, and he invited usall down to the laboratory to see the result. Wingfield tangled himselfin the wires in some unaccountable way and got a terrible shock. For afew minutes we all thought he was killed, but the colonel would not giveup, and now he is slowly recovering."
Ballard sat down in the nearest chair and held his head in his hands.His mind was in the condition of a coffer-dam that has been laboriouslypumped out, only to be overwhelmed by a sudden and irresistible returnof the flood. The theory of premeditated assassination was no nightmare;it was a pitiless, brutal, inhuman fact. Wingfield, an invited guest,and with a guest's privileges and immunities, had been tried, convicted,and sentenced for knowing too much.
"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" he said to Bigelow, feeling the necessityof saying something, and realising at the same instant the futility ofputting the horror of it into words for one who knew nothing of the truestate of affairs.
"Bad enough, certainly. You can imagine how it harrowed all of us, andespecially the women. Cousin Janet fainted and had to be carried up tothe house; and Miss Elsa was the only one of the young women who wasn'tperfectly helpless. Colonel Craigmiles was our stand-by; he knew justwhat to do, and how to do it. He is a wonderful man, Mr. Ballard."
"He is--in more ways than a casual observer would suspect." Ballardsuffered so much of his thought to set itself in words. To minimise thetemptation to say more he turned his back upon the accident andaccounted for himself and his presence at Castle 'Cadia.
"Bromley was pretty well tired out when Otto came down with the car, andI offered to ride around and make his excuses. We broke an engine bolton the road: otherwise I should have been here two hours earlier. Yousay Wingfield is recovering? I wonder if I could see him for a fewminutes, before I go back to camp?"
Bigelow offered to go up-stairs and find out; and Ballard waited in thesilence of the deserted library for what seemed like a long time. Andwhen the waiting came to an end it was not Bigelow who parted theportieres and came silently to stand before his chair; it was the king'sdaughter.
"You have heard?" she asked, and her voice seemed to come from someimmeasurable depth of anguish.
"Yes. Is he better?"
"Much better; though he is terribly weak and shaken." Then suddenly:"What brought you here--so late?"
He explained the ostensible object of his coming, and mentioned thecause of the delay. She heard him through without comment, but there wasdoubt and keen distress and a great fear in the gray eyes when he waspermitted to look into their troubled depths.
"If you are telling me the truth, you are not telling me all of it," shesaid, sinking wearily into one of the deepest of the easy-chairs andshading the tell-tale eyes with her hand.
"Why shouldn't I tell you all of it?" he rejoined evasively.
"I don't know your reasons: I can only fear them."
"If you could put the fear into words, perhaps I might be able to allayit," he returned gently.
"It is past alleviation; you know it. Mr. Wingfield was with you againto-day, and when he came home I knew that the thing I had been dreadinghad come to pass."
"How could you know it? Not from anything Wingfield said or did, I'msure."
"No; but Jerry Blacklock was with him--and Jerry's face is an open bookfor any one who cares to read it. Won't you please tell me the worst,Breckenridge?"
"There isn't any worst," denied Ballard, lying promptly for love's sake."We had luncheon together, the four of us, in honour of Bromley'srecovery. Afterward, Wingfield spun yarns for us--as he has a habit ofdoing when he can get an audience of more than one person. Some of hisstories were more grewsome than common. I don't wonder that Jerry had aleft-over thrill or two in his face."
She looked up from behind the eye-shading hand. "Do you dare to repeatthose stories to me?"
His laugh lacked something of spontaneity.
"It is hardly a question of daring; it is rather a matter of memory--orthe lack of it. Who ever tries to make a record of after-dinnerfictions? Wingfield's story was a tale of impossible crimes and theirmore impossible detection; the plot and outline for a new play, Ifancied, which he was trying first on the dog. Blacklock was the onlyone of his three listeners who took him seriously."
She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and when she spoke again itwas of the convalescent assistant.
"You are not going to keep Mr. Bromley at the camp, are you? He isn'table to work yet."
"Oh, no. You may send for him in the morning, if you wish. I--he was alittle tired to-night, and I thought----"
"Yes; you have told me what you thought," she reminded him, halfabsently. And then, with a note of constraint in her voice that wasquite new to him: "You are not obliged to go back to Elbow Canyonto-night, are you? Your room is always ready for you at Castle 'Cadia."
"Thank you; but I'll have to go back. If I don't, Bromley will thinkhe's the whole thing and start in to run the camp in the morning beforeI could show up."
She rose when he did, but her face was averted and he could not see hereyes when he went on in a tone from which every emotion save that ofmere friendly solicitude was carefully effaced: "May I go up and jollyWingfield a bit? He'll think it odd if I go without looking in at him."
"If you should go without doing that for which you came," she corrected,with the same impersonal note in her voice. "Of course, you may see him:come with me."
She led the way up the grand stair and left him at the door of a room inthe wing which commanded a view of the sky-pitched backgroundingmountains. The door was ajar, and when he knocked and pushed it open hesaw that the playwright was in bed, and that he was alone.
"By Jove, now!" said a weak voice from the pillows;
"this is neighbourlyof you, Ballard. How the dickens did you manage to hear of it?"
"Bad news travels fast," said Ballard, drawing a chair to the bedside.He did not mean to go into details if he could help it; and to get awayfrom them he asked how the miracle of recovery was progressing.
"Oh, I'm all right now," was the cheerful response--"coming alive at therate of two nerves to the minute. And I wouldn't have missed it for thenewest thousand-dollar bill that ever crackled in the palm of poverty.What few thrills I can't put into a description of electrocution, afterthis, won't be worth mentioning."
"They have left you alone?" queried Ballard, with a glance around thegreat room.
"Just this moment. The colonel and Miss Cauffrey and Miss Dosia werewith me when the buzzer went off. Whoever sent you up pressed the buttondown stairs. Neat, isn't it. How's Bromley? I hope you didn't come totell us that his first day in camp knocked him out."
"No; Bromley is all right. You are the sick man, now."
Wingfield's white teeth gleamed in a rather haggard smile.
"I have looked over the edge, Ballard; that's the fact."
"Tell me about it--if you can."
"There isn't much to tell. We were all crowding around the electricfurnace, taking turns at the coloured-glass protected peep-hole. Thecolonel had warned us about the wires, but the warning didn't cut anyfigure in my case."
"You stumbled?"
The man in bed flung a swift glance across the room toward the corridordoor which Ballard had left ajar.
"Go quietly and shut that door," was his whispered command; and whenBallard had obeyed it: "Now pull your chair closer and I'll answer yourquestion: No, I didn't stumble. Somebody tripped me, and in falling Igrabbed at one of the electrodes."
"I was sure of it," said Ballard, quietly. "I knew that in all humanprobability you would be the next victim. That is why I persuadedBromley to let me take his place in the motor-car. If the car hadn'tbroken down, I should have been here in time to warn you. I suppose itisn't necessary to ask who tripped you?"
The playwright rocked his head on the pillow.
"I'm afraid not, Ballard. The man who afterward saved my life--so theyall say--was the one who stood nearest to me at the moment. The 'why' iswhat is tormenting me. I'm not the Arcadia Company, or its chiefengineer, or anybody in particular in this game of 'heads I win, andtails you lose.'"
Ballard left his chair and walked slowly to the mountain-viewing window.When he returned to the bedside, he said: "I can help you to the 'why.'What you said in my office to-day to three of us was overheard by afourth--and the fourth was Manuel. An hour or so later he came up thisway, on foot. Does that clear the horizon for you?"
"Perfectly," was the whispered response, followed by a silence heavywith forecastings.
"Under the changed conditions, it was only fair to you to bring you yourwarning, and to take off the embargo on your leaving Castle 'Cadia. Ofcourse, you'll get yourself recalled to New York at once?" said Ballard.
Wingfield raised himself on one elbow, and again his lips parted in thegrinning smile.
"Not in a thousand years, Ballard. I'll see this thing out now, if I getkilled regularly once a day. You say I mustn't write about it, andthat's so. I'm not a cad. But the experience is worth millions tome--worth all the chances I'm taking, and more. I'll stay."
Ballard gripped the womanish hand lying on the coverlet. Here, afterall, and under all the overlayings of pose and craftsman egotism, was aman with a man's heart and courage.
"You're a brave fool, Wingfield," he said, warmly; "and because you arebrave and a man grown, you shall be one of us. We--Bromley andI--bluffed you to-day for a woman's sake. If you could have got awayfrom the excitement of the man-hunt for a single second, I know yourfirst thought would have been for the woman whose lifted finger silencesthree of us. Because you seemed to forget this for the moment, I knockedyou down with your own theory. Does that clear another of the horizonsfor you?"
"Immensely. And I deserved all you gave me. Until I'm killed off, youmay comfort yourself with the thought that one of the gallant three ishere, in the wings, as you might say, ready and willing to do what hecan to keep the curtain from rising on any more tragedy."
"Thank you," said Ballard, heartily; "that will be a comfort." Then,with a parting hand-grip and an added word of caution to the man whoknew too much, he left the room and the house, finding his wayunattended to the great portico and to the path leading down to theriver road.
The mile faring down the valley in the velvety blackness of the warmsummer night was a meliorating ending to the day of revelations andalarms; and for the first time since Wingfield's clever unravelling ofthe tangled mesh of mystery, the Kentuckian was able to set the accusingfacts in orderly array. Yet now, as before, the greatest of themysteries refused to take its place in the wellnigh completed circle ofincriminating discoveries. That the King of Arcadia, Elsa's father andthe genial host of the great house on the knoll, was a common murderer,lost to every humane and Christian prompting of the soul, was still asincredible as a myth of the Middle Ages.
"I'll wake up some time in the good old daylight of the every-day,commonplace world, I hope," was Ballard's summing-up, when he hadtraversed the reflective mile and had let himself into the officebungalow to find Bromley sleeping peacefully in his bunk. "But it's alittle hard to wait--with the air full of Damocles-swords, and with thedear girl's heart gripped in a vise that I can't unscrew. That is whatmakes it bitterer than death: she knows, and it is killing her byinches--in spite of the bravest heart that ever loved and suffered. Godhelp her; God help us all!"