The King of Arcadia Part 21

Bromley grinned again.

"Meaning that this cow-boy cattle-thief tangle in the lower valley has made you _persona non grata_ at Castle 'Cadia? You're off; 'way off. You don't know Colonel Adam. So far from holding malice, he has been down here twice to thank you for stopping the Carson raid. And that reminds me: there's a Castle 'Cadia note in your mail-box--came down by the hands of one of the little j.a.ps this afternoon." And he went in to get it.

It proved to be another dinner bidding for the chief engineer, to be accepted informally whenever he had time to spare. It was written and signed by the daughter, but she said that she spoke both for her father and herself when she urged him to come soon.

"You'll go?" queried Bromley, when Ballard had pa.s.sed the faintly perfumed bit of note-paper across the arm's-reach between the two lazy-chairs.

"You know I'll go," was the half morose answer.

Bromley's smile was perfunctory.

"Of course you will," he a.s.sented. "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't you?"

"Of course. I was only joking. But it isn't good for both of us to be off the job at the same time. I'll stay and keep on intimidating the hoodoo."

There was a material train coming in from Alta Vista, and when its long-drawn chime woke the canyon echoes, they both left the mesa and went down to the railroad yard. It was an hour later, and Ballard was changing his clothes in his bunk-room when he called to Bromley, who was checking the way-bills for the lately arrived material.

"Oh, I say, Loudon; has that canyon path been dug out again?--where the slide 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 be labouring with his handicap of moroseness.

The a.s.sistant did not reply, but a warm flush crept up under the sunburn as he went on checking the way-bills. Later, when Ballard swung out to go to the Craigmiles's, the man at the desk let him pa.s.s with a brief "So-long," and bent still lower over his work.

Under much less embarra.s.sing conditions, Ballard would have been prepared to find himself breathing an atmosphere of constraint when he joined the Castle 'Cadia house-party on the great tree-pillared portico of the Craigmiles mansion. But the embarra.s.sment, if any there were, was all his own. The colonel was warmly hospitable; under her outward presentment of cheerful mockery, Elsa was palpably glad to see him; Miss Cauffrey was gently reproachful because he had not let them send Otto and the car to drive him around from the canyon; and the various guests welcomed him each after his or her kind.

During the ante-dinner pause the talk was all of the engineer's prompt snuffing-out of the cattle raid, and the praiseful comment on the little _coup de main_ was not marred by any reference to the mistaken zeal which had made the raid possible. More than once Ballard found himself wondering if the colonel and Elsa, Bigelow and Blacklock, had conspired generously to keep the story of his egregious blunder from reaching the others. If they had not, there was a deal more charity in human nature than 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, who sat opposite, quite neglected Miss Van Bryck in his efforts to make an inquisitive third when Miss Cantrell insistently returned to the exciting topic of the Carson capture--which she did after each separate endeavour on Ballard's part to escape the enthusiasm.

"Your joking about it doesn't make it any less heroic, Mr. Ballard," was one of Miss Cantrell's phrasings of the song of triumph. "Just think of it--three of you against eleven desperate outlaws!"

"Three of us, a carefully planned ambush, and a Maxim rapid-fire machine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all get away a few hours later."

"And I--the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses who could have made the most of it--_I_ wasn't there to see," cut in Wingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"

"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing--for a play," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and Miss Cantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramatic quality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of the real thing. It's always inadequate."

"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene and lofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've been to 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 an entirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding an answer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafter exclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield's literary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was prepared to 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 the j.a.panese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell into pairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.

Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at the dispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece of mistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in the midst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off with genial protests.

"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it"--with a benedictory wave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uh little blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generous intervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through the machinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, I should probably have done precisely the same thing--only I'm not sure I should have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try one of these conchas, suh--unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havana has been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."

Ballard took the gold-banded cigar as one who, having taken a man's coat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to the colonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever he doubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any of the mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of the irrigation company's industrial army.

Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy with the 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 this time it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tiny coffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which the sweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to her coffee-holder:

"I am taking you at your sister's valuation and trusting you very fully, Mr. Bigelow. You are quite sure you were followed, you and Mr. Ballard, on the day before the dynamiting of the ca.n.a.l?"

"No; I merely suspected it. I wasn't sure enough to warrant me in calling Ballard's attention to the single horseman who seemed to be keeping us in view. But in the light of later events----"

"Yes; I know," she interrupted hastily. "Were you near enough to identify 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 bit of deforesting vandalism on the part of the contractors--I saw him fairly 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 of those in your father's stables; that he sat straight in the saddle; and that he was wearing some kind of a skirted coat that blew out behind him when he wheeled to face the breeze."

Miss Craigmiles sat up in the hammock and pressed her fingers upon her closed eyes. When she spoke again after the lapse of a long minute, it was to ask Bigelow to retell the story of the brief fight in the darkness at the sand arroyo on the night of the explosion.

The Forestry man went over the happenings of the night, and of the day following, circ.u.mstantially, while the growing moon tilted like a silver shallop in a sea of ebony toward the distant Elks, and the groups and pairs on the broad portico rearranged themselves choir-wise to sing hymns for which one of the Cantrell sisters went to the piano beyond the open windows of the drawing-room to play the accompaniments.

When the not too harmonious chorus began to drone upon the windless night air, Miss Craigmiles came out of her fit of abstraction and thanked Bigelow for his patience with her.

"It isn't altogether morbid curiosity on my part," she explained, half pathetically. "Some day I may be able to tell you just what it is--but not to-night. Now you may go and rescue Madge from the major, who has been 'H'm-ha-ing' her to extinction for the last half-hour. And if you're brave enough you may tell Mr. Ballard that his ba.s.s is something dreadful--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's deserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.

"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mock petulance. "Didn't you know it?"

"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known to sing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."

She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that always betokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.

"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays the violin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"

Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable p.r.i.c.king of impatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiously similar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. But he kept the impatience out of his reply.

"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since I came on the work."

"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonality which placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; but Ballard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.