XXI
MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG
The _fete champetre_, as President Pelham named it in thetrumpet-flourish of announcement, to celebrate the laying of the finalstone of the great dam at the outlet of Elbow Canyon, anticipated theworking completion of the irrigation system by some weeks. That thecanals were not yet in readiness to furnish water to the prospectivefarmer really made little difference. The spectacular event was thelaying of the top-stone; and in the promoter's plans a well-arrangedstage-effect was of far greater value than any actual parcelling out ofthe land to intended settlers.
Accordingly, no effort was spared to make the celebration anenthusiastic success. For days before the auspicious one on which theguest trains began to arrive from Alta Vista and beyond, the camp forcespent itself in setting the scene for the triumph. The spillway gate,designed to close the cut-off tunnel and so to begin the impounding ofthe river, was put in place ready to be forced down by its machinery;the camp mesa was scraped and raked and cleared of the industriallitter; a platform was erected for the orators and the brass band; atowering flagstaff--this by the express direction of the president--wasplanted in the middle of the mesa parade ground; and with the exceptionof camp cook Garou, busy with a small army of assistants over thebarbecue pits, the construction force was distributed among the camps onthe canals--this last a final touch of Mr. Pelham's to secure the degreeof exclusiveness for the celebration which might not have beenattainable in the presence of an outnumbering throng of workmen.
In the celebration proper the two engineers had an insignificant part.When the trains were in and side-tracked, and the working preliminarieswere out of the way, the triumphal programme, as it had been outlined ina five-page letter from the president to Ballard, became automatic,moving smoothly from number to number as a well-designed masterpiece ofthe spectacular variety should. There were no hitches, no long waits forthe audience. Mr. Pelham, carrying his two-hundred-odd pounds ofavoirdupois as jauntily as the youngest promoter of them all, was atonce the genial host, the skilful organiser, prompter, stage-manager,chorus-leader; playing his many parts letter-perfect, and never missinga chance to gain a few more notches on the winding-winch of enthusiasm.
While the band and the orators were alternating, Ballard and Bromley,off duty for the time, lounged on the bungalow porch awaiting their cue.There had been no awkward happenings thus far. The trains had arrived ontime; the carefully staged spectacle was running like a well-oiled pieceof mechanism; the August day, despite a threatening mass of storm cloudgathering on the distant slopes of the background mountain range, wasperfect; and, thanks to Mr. Pelham's gift of leadership, the celebratorshad been judiciously wrought up to the pitch at which everything wasapplauded and nothing criticised. Hence, there was no apparent reasonfor Ballard's settled gloom; or for Bromley's impatience manifestingitself in sarcastic flings at the company's secretary, an ex-politicianof the golden-tongued tribe, who was the oratorical spellbinder of themoment.
"For Heaven's sake! will he never saw it off and let us get that stoneset?" gritted the assistant, when the crowd cheered, and the mellifluousflood, checked for the applausive instant, poured steadily on. "Why inthe name of common sense did Mr. Pelham want to spring this batch ofhuman phonographs on us!"
"The realities will hit us soon enough," growled Ballard, whoseimpatience took the morose form. Then, with a sudden righting of histilted camp-stool: "Good Lord, Loudon! Look yonder--up the canyon!"
The porch outlook commanded a view of the foothill canyon, and of alimited area of the bowl-shaped upper valley. At the canyon head, and onthe opposite side of the river, three double-seated buckboards werewheeling to disembark their passengers; and presently the Castle 'Cadiahouse-party, led by Colonel Craigmiles himself, climbed the left-handpath to the little level space fronting the mysterious mine.
"By Jove!" gasped Bromley; "I nearly had a fit--I thought they werecoming over here. Now what in the name of----"
"It's all right," cut in Ballard, irritably. "Why shouldn't the colonelwant to be present at his own funeral? And you needn't be afraid oftheir coming over here. The colonel wouldn't wipe his feet on that mobof money-hunters around the band-stand. See; they are making a privatebox of the mine entrance."
The remark framed itself upon the fact. At the colonel's signal theiron-bound tunnel door had swung open, and Wingfield and Blacklock,junior, with the help of the buckboard drivers, were piling timbers onthe little plateau for the party's seating.
It was Colonel Craigmiles's own proposal, this descent upon thecommercial festivities at the dam; and Elsa had yielded only afterexhausting her ingenuity in trying to defeat it. She had known inadvance that it could not be defeated. For weeks her father's attitudehad been explainable only upon a single hypothesis; one which she hadalternately accepted and rejected a hundred times during the two yearsof dam-building; and this excursion was less singular than many otherconsequences of the mysterious attitude.
She was recalling the mysteries as she sat on the pile of timbers withWingfield, hearing but not heeding the resounding periods of the oratoracross the narrow chasm. With the inundation of the upper valley animpending certainty, measurable by weeks and then by days, and now byhours, nothing of any consequence had been done at Castle 'Cadia by wayof preparing for it. Coming down early one morning to cut flowers forthe breakfast-table, she had found two men in mechanics' overclothesinstalling a small gasolene electric plant near the stables; this, shesupposed, was for the house-lighting when the laboratory should besubmerged. A few days later she had come upon Otto, the chauffeur,building a light rowboat in a secluded nook in the upper canyon.
But beyond these apparently trivial precautions, nothing had been done,and her father had said no word to her or to the guests of what was tobe done when the closed-in valley should become a lake with Castle'Cadia for its single island. Meanwhile, the daily routine of thecountry house had gone on uninterruptedly; and once, when Mrs. Van Bryckhad asked her host what would happen when the floods came, Elsa hadheard her father laughingly assure his guest in the presence of theothers that nothing would happen.
That Wingfield knew more than these surface indications could tell thekeenest observer, Elsa was well convinced; how much more, she could onlyguess. But one thing was certain: ever since the day spent with Ballardand Bromley and Jerry Blacklock at the construction camp--the day of hisnarrow escape from death--the playwright had been a changed man;cynical, ill at ease, or profoundly abstracted by turns, and never lesscompanionable than at the present moment while he sat beside her on thetimber balk, scowling up and across at the band-stand, at the spellboundthrong ringing it in, and at the spellbinding secretary shaming thepouring torrent in the ravine below with his flood of rhetoric.
"What sickening rot!" he scoffed in open disgust. And then: "It must bedelightfully comforting to Ballard and Bromley to have that wild ass ofthe market-place braying over their work! Somebody ought to hit him."
But the orator was preparing to do a little of the hitting, himself. Theappearance of the party at the mine entrance had not gone unremarked,and the company's secretary recognised the company's enemy at a glance.He was looking over the heads of the celebrators and down upon the groupon the opposite side of the narrow chasm when he said:
"So, ladies and gentlemen, this great project, in the face of the mostobstinate, and, I may say, lawless, opposition; in spite of violence andpetty obstruction on the part of those who would rejoice, even to-day,in its failure; this great work has been carried on to its triumphantconclusion, and we are gathered here on this beautiful morning in thebright sunshine and under the shadow of these magnificent mountains towitness the final momentous act which shall add the finishing stone tothis grand structure; a structure which shall endure and subserve itsuseful and fructifying purpose so long as these mighty mountains reartheir snowy heads to look down in approving majesty upon a desert madefair and beautiful by the hand of man."
Hand-clappings, cheers, a stirring of the crowd,
and the upstarting ofthe brass band climaxed the rhetorical peroration, and Elsa glancedanxiously over her shoulder. She knew her father's temper and the fiercequality of it when the provocation was great enough to arouse it; but hewas sitting quietly between Dosia and Madge Cantrell, and the publiclyadministered affront seemed to have missed him.
When the blare of brass ceased, the mechanical part of the spectacleheld the stage for a few brief minutes. The completing stone wascarefully toggled in the grappling-hooks of the derrick-fall, and atBallard's signal the hoisting engine coughed sharply, besprinkling thespectators liberally with a shower of cinders, the derrick-boom swungaround, and the stone was lowered cautiously into its place.
With a final rasping of trowels, the workmen finished their task, andBallard walked out upon the abutment and laid his hand on the wheelcontrolling the drop-gate which would cut off the escape of the riverthrough the outlet tunnel. There was a moment of impressive silence, andElsa held her breath. The day, the hour, the instant which her fatherhad striven so desperately to avert had come. Would it pass without itstragedy?
She saw Ballard give the last searching glance at the gate mechanism;saw President Pelham step out to give the signal. Then there was a stirin the group behind her, and she became conscious that her father was onhis feet; that his voice was dominating the droning roar of the torrentand the muttering of the thunder on the far-distant heights.
"Mistuh-uh Pelham--and you otheh gentlemen of the Arcadia Company--youhave seen fit to affront me, suhs, in the most public manneh, befo' themembers of my family and my guests. This was youh privilege, and youhave used it acco'ding to youh gifts. Neve'theless, it shall not be saidthat I failed in my neighbo'ly duty at this crisis. Gentlemen, when youclose that gate----"
The president turned impatiently and waved his hand to Ballard. The bandstruck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," a round ball of bunting shot tothe top of the flagstaff over the band-stand and broke out in a broadflag, and Elsa saw the starting-wheel turning slowly under Ballard'shand. The clapping and cheering and the band clamour drowned all othersounds; and the colonel's daughter, rising to stand beside Wingfield,felt rather than heard the jarring shock of a near-by explosionpunctuating the plunge of the great gate as it was driven down by thegeared power-screws.
What followed passed unnoticed by the wildly cheering spectatorscrowding the canyon brink to see the foaming, churning torrent recoilupon itself and beat fiercely upon the lowered gate and the steep-slopedwall of the dam's foundation courses. But Elsa saw Ballard start as fromthe touch of a hot iron; saw Bromley run out quickly to lay hold of him.Most terrible of all, she turned swiftly to see her father coming out ofthe mine entrance with a gun in his hands--saw and understood.
It was Wingfield, seeing all that she saw and understanding quite asclearly, who came to her rescue at a moment when the bright Augustsunshine was filling with dancing black motes for her.
"Be brave!" he whispered. "See--he isn't hurt much: he has let go of thewheel, and Bromley is only steadying him a bit." And then to the others,with his habitual air of bored cheerfulness: "The show is over, goodpeople, and the water is rising to cut us off from luncheon. Sound theretreat, somebody, and let's mount and ride before we get wet feet."
A movement toward the waiting vehicles followed, and at the facing aboutElsa observed that her father hastily flung the rifle into the minetunnel-mouth; and had a fleeting glimpse of Ballard and Bromley walkingslowly arm-in-arm toward the mesa shore along the broad coping of theabutment.
At the buckboards Wingfield stood her friend again. "Send JerryBlacklock down to see how serious it is," he suggested, coming betweenher and the others; and while she was doing it, he held the group for afinal look down the canyon at the raging flood still churning andleaping at its barriers like some sentient wild thing trapped andmaddened with the first fury of restraint.
Young Blacklock made a sprinter's record on his errand and was backalmost immediately. Mr. Ballard had got his arm pinched in some way atthe gate-head, he reported: it was nothing serious, and the Kentuckiansent word that he was sorry that the feeding of the multitude kept himfrom saying so to Miss Elsa in person. Elsa did not dare to look atWingfield while Blacklock was delivering his message; and in thebuckboard-seating for the return to Castle 'Cadia, she contrived to haveBigelow for her companion.
It was only a few minutes after Jerry Blacklock had raced away up thecanyon path with his message of reassurance that Bromley, followingBallard into the office room of the adobe bungalow and locking the door,set to work deftly to dress and bandage a deep bullet-crease across themuscles of his chief's arm; a wound painful enough, but not disabling.
"Well, what do you think now, Breckenridge?" he asked, in the midst ofthe small surgical service.
"I haven't any more thinks coming to me," was the sober reply. "And itis not specially comforting to have the old ones confirmed. You are sureit was the colonel who fired at me?"
"I saw the whole thing; all but the actual trigger-pulling, you mightsay. When Mr. Pelham cut him off, he turned and stepped back into themouth of the mine. Then, while they were all standing up to see youlower the gate, I heard the shot and saw him come out with the gun inhis hands. I was cool enough that far along to take in all the littledetails: the gun was a short-barrelled Winchester--the holster-rifle ofthe cow-punchers."
"_Ouch!_" said Ballard, wincing under the bandaging. Then: "Themysteries have returned, Loudon; we were on the wrong track--all of us.Wingfield and you and I had figured out that the colonel was merelyplaying a cold-blooded game for delay. That guess comes back to us likea fish-hook with the bait gone. There was nothing, less than nothing, tobe gained by killing me to-day."
Bromley made the negative sign of assenting perplexity.
"It's miles too deep for me," he admitted. "Three nights ago, when I wasdining at Castle 'Cadia, Colonel Craigmiles spoke of you as a fathermight speak of the man whom he would like to have for a son-in-law:talked about the good old gentlemanly Kentucky stock, and all that, youknow. I can't begin to sort it out."
"I am going to sort it out, some day when I have time," declaredBallard; and the hurt being temporarily repaired, they went out tosuperintend the arrangements for feeding the visiting throng in the bigmess-tent.
After the barbecue, and more speech-making around the trestle-tables inthe mess-tent, the railroad trains were brought into requisition, andvarious tours of inspection through the park ate out the heart of theafternoon for the visitors. Bromley took charge of that part of theentertainment, leaving Ballard to nurse his sore arm and to watch theslow submersion of the dam as the rising flood crept in little lappingwaves up the sloping back-wall.
The afternoon sun beat fiercely upon the deserted construction camp, andthe heat, rarely oppressive in the mountain-girt altitudes, wasstifling. Down in the cook camp, Garou and his helpers were washingdishes by the crate and preparing the evening luncheon to be servedafter the trains returned; and the tinkling clatter of china was theonly sound to replace the year-long clamour of the industries and thehoarse roar of the river through the cut-off.
Between his occasional strolls over to the dam and the canyon brink tomark the rising of the water, Ballard sat on the bungalow porch andsmoked. From the time-killing point of view the great house in the uppervalley loomed in mirage-like proportions in the heat haze; and by threeo'clock the double line of aspens marking the river's course haddisappeared in a broad band of molten silver half encircling the knollupon which the mirage mansion swayed and shimmered.
Ballard wondered what the house-party was doing; what preparations, ifany, had been made for its dispersal. For his own satisfaction he hadcarefully run bench-levels with his instruments from the dam heightthrough the upper valley. When the water should reach the coping course,some three or four acres of the house-bearing knoll would form an islandin the middle of the reservoir lake. The house would be completely cutoff, the orchards submerged, and the nearest shore, that from which theroundabout road approached,
would be fully a half-mile distant, with thewater at least ten feet deep over the raised causeway of the roaditself.
Surely the colonel would not subject his guests to the inconvenience ofa stay at Castle 'Cadia when the house would be merely an isolatedshelter upon an island in the middle of the great lake, Ballardconcluded; and when the mirage effect cleared away to give him a betterview, he got out the field-glass and looked for some signs of theinevitable retreat.
There were no signs, so far as he could determine. With the help of theglass he could pick out the details of the summer afternoon scene on theknoll-top; could see that there were a number of people occupying thehammocks and lazy-chairs under the tree-pillared portico; could make outtwo figures, which he took to be Bigelow and one of the Cantrellsisters, strolling back and forth in a lovers' walk under the shade ofthe maples.
It was all very perplexing. The sweet-toned little French clock on itsshelf in the office room behind him had struck three, and there wereonly a few more hours of daylight left in Castle 'Cadia's last day as ahabitable dwelling. And yet, if he could trust the evidence of hissenses, the castle's garrison was making no move to escape: this thoughthe members of it must all know that the rising of another sun would seetheir retreat cut off by the impounded flood.
After he had returned the field-glass to its case on the wall of theoffice the ticking telegraph instrument on Bromley's table called him,signing "E--T," the end-of-track on the High Line Extension. It wasBromley, wiring in to give the time of the probable return of theexcursion trains for Garou's supper serving.
"How are you getting on?" clicked Ballard, when the time had been given.
"Fine," was the answer. "Everything lovely, and the goose honks high.Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs aresurrounding Mr. Pelham on the canal embankment and singing 'For he's ajolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we'reall hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."
After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of thedeserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of afurnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when thedeclining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the littlemesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.
Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flowof the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel waslaid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurityof the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newlyturned leaf in the record of the great chasm.
What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed wasmore instructive than reassuring. The great pit described by Gardinerwas still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, andthe cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent wasalarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of thestream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off inall directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, andwhich formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined andtunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a hugehollow tooth.
The extreme length of the underground passage was a scant five hundredfeet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts--possible onlyafter he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubberthigh-boots--the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to thegreat stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here theburden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or lessrunning water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leakaround the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.
"That settles it," he mused gloomily. "It is seeping through thisghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with theconcrete mixers--and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaitewas thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compostheaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."
The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched westernhorizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns.There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, andhe was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At aconservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollarsmust be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and inplugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any oneof 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 ofthe financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdlythat Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could notbe seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for thesafety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, thework must be done. Otherwise----
The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the harassed scowlwhen Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.
"The grouch is all yours," said the cheerful one, comfortingly, "and youhave a good right and title to it. It's been a hard day for you. Is thearm 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 theassistant.
"Great ghosts!--worse and more of it!" was Bromley's comment. Then headded: "I've seen a queer thing, too, Breckenridge: the colonel hasmoved out, vanished, taken to the hills."
"Out of Castle 'Cadia? You're mistaken. There is absolutely nothingdoing at the big house: I've been reconnoitring with the glass."
"No, I didn't mean that," was the qualifying rejoinder. "I mean theranch outfit down in the Park. It's gone. You know the best grazing atthis 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 asign of them. Also, the ranch itself is deserted and the corrals are allopen."
The harassed scowl would have taken on other added lines if there hadbeen 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 itlooks 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 sullenanger. "It's enough to jar a man's sanity!"
"Mine was screwed a good bit off its base a long time ago," Bromleyconfessed. Then he came back to the present and its threatenings: "I'dgive a month's pay if we had this crazy city crowd off of our hands andout of the Park."
"We'll get rid of it pretty early. I've settled that with Mr. Pelham. Toget his people back to Denver by breakfast-time to-morrow, the trainswill have to leave here between eight and eight-thirty."
"That is good news--as far as it goes. Will you tell Mr. Pelham aboutthe rotten tooth--to-night, I mean?"
"I certainly shall," was the positive rejoinder; and an hour later, whenthe evening luncheon in the big mess-tent had been served, and the crowdwas gathered on the camp mesa to wait for the fireworks, Ballard got thepresident into the bungalow office, shut the door on possibleinterruptions, and laid bare the discouraging facts.
Singularly enough, as he thought, the facts seemed to make littleimpression upon the head of Arcadia Irrigation. Mr. Pelham sat back inMacpherson's home-made easy-chair, relighted his cigar, and refused tobe disturbed or greatly interested. Assuming that he had not made thenew involvement plain enough, Ballard went over the situation again.
"Another quarter of a million will be needed," he summed up, "and weshouldn't lose a single day in beginning. As I have said, there seems tobe considerable seepage through the hill already, with less than half ofthe working head of water behind the dam. What it will be under a fullhead, no man can say."
"Oh, I don't know," said the president, easi
ly. "A new boat always leaksa little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a fewdays--or weeks."
"That is a possibility," granted the engineer; "but it is scarcely oneupon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of thecompany said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under thelower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; thatsettlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not bedone, Mr. Pelham."
"Why not?"
"Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before wehave 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 canmake allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a goodnight's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how youcame to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?"
"The arm is all right," said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort tochange the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldogtenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to theoriginal 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 morningyou may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the variouscamps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for thetime. 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 naturalanxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do agreat deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I wereyou."
"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 beexcused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----"
Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almosta shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworkssputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the fullmoon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellowsof the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president hadleft him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fetechampetre_.
"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 pass with one of the trains, doyou?"
"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake isfilling, and I'm the one."
"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the firstsection; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back fromAckerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Thenhe asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelhamtake 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 sectionof 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'lltell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has beenbusy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't spellbinding fromsome platform or other. There is something doing--something that thebaa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring aredoing it."
Ballard got up and went to the door with the assistant.
"And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon," he said, with an air of suddenand vehement conviction. "This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's astock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollowtooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'llnever 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 Itake it yours will?"
"It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off shortwith Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuadeyou to go over the pass. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep youcan."
Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlighton the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw thetwinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.
"Good-by, Mr. Howard Pelham. I shouldn't be shocked speechless if younever came back to Arcadia," he muttered, apostrophising the departingpresident of Arcadia Irrigation. Then he put away the businessentanglement and let his gaze wander in the opposite direction; towardthe great house in the upper valley.
At the first eastward glance he sprang up with an exclamation ofastonishment. The old king's palace was looming vast in the moonlight,with a broad sea of silver to take the place of the brown valley levelin the bridging of the middle distance. But the curious thing was thelights, unmistakable electrics, as aforetime, twinkling through thetree-crownings of the knoll.
The Kentuckian left the porch and went to the edge of the mesa cliff tolook down upon the flood, rising now by imperceptible gradations as theenlarging area of the reservoir lake demanded more water. The lappingtide was fully half way up the back wall of the dam, which meant thatthe colonel's power plant at the mouth of the upper canyon must besubmerged past using. Yet the lights were on at Castle 'Cadia.
While he was speculating over this new mystery, the head-lamps of anautomobile came in sight on the roundabout road below the dam, andpresently a huge tonneau car, well filled, rolled noiselessly over theplank bridge and pointed its goblin eyes up the incline leading to thecamp mesa. When it came to a stand at the cliff's edge, Ballard saw thatit held Mrs. Van Bryck, Bigelow, and one of the Cantrell girls in thetonneau; and that Elsa was sharing the driving-seat with youngBlacklock.
"Good evening, Mr. Ballard," said a voice from the shared half of thedriving-seat. And then: "We are trying out the new car--isn't it abeauty?--and we decided to make a neighbourly call. Aren't you delightedto see us? Please say you are, anyway. It is the least you can do."