The King of Arcadia Part 31

"You are jesting again. You always jest when I want to be serious."

"I might retort that I learned the trick of it from you--in the blessed days that are now a part of another existence."

"Oh!" she said; and there was so much more of distress than of impatience in the little outcry that he was mollified at once.

"I'm going to crank the engines and send you home," he a.s.severated. "I'm not fit to talk to you to-day." And he started the engines of the motor-car.

She put a dainty foot on the clutch-pedal. "You'll come up and see me?"

she asked; adding: "Some time when you are fit?"

"I'll come when I am needed; yes."

He walked beside the slowly moving car as she sent it creeping down the mesa hill on the brakes. At the hill-bottom turn, where the camp street ended and the roundabout road led off to the temporary bridge, she stopped the car. The towering wall of the great dam, with its dotting of workmen silhouetted black against the blue of the Colorado sky, rose high on the left. She let her gaze climb to the summit of the huge dike.

"You are nearly through?" she asked.

"Yes. Two other weeks, with no bad luck, will see us ready to turn on the water."

She was looking straight ahead again.

"You know what that means to us at Castle 'Cadia?--but of course you do."

"I know I'd rather be a 'mucker' with a pick and shovel out yonder in the ditch than to be the boss here when the spillway gates are closed at the head of the cut-off tunnel. And that is the pure truth."

"This time I believe you without reservation, Breckenridge--my friend."

Then: "Will Mr. Pelham come out to the formal and triumphal opening of the Arcadian Irrigation District?"

"Oh, you can count on that--with all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. There is to be a demonstration in force, as Major Blacklock would say; special trains from Denver to bring the crowd, a barbecue dinner, speeches, a land-viewing excursion over the completed portion of the railroad, and fireworks in the evening while the band plays 'America.' You can trust Mr. Pelham to beat the big drum and to clash the cymbals vigorously and man-fashion at the psychological instant."

"For purely commercial reasons, of course? I could go a step further and tell you something else that will happen. There will be a good many transfers of the Arcadia Company's stock at the triumphal climax."

He was standing with one foot on the car step and his hands buried in the pockets of his short working-coat. His eyes narrowed to regard her thoughtfully.

"What do you know about such things?" he demurred. "You know altogether too much for one small bachelor maid. It's uncanny."

"I am the cow-punching princess of Arcadia, and Mr. Pelham's natural enemy, you must remember," she countered, with a laugh that sounded entirely care-free. "I could tell you more about the stock affair. Mr.

Pelham has been very liberal with his friends in the floating of this great and glorious undertaking--to borrow one of his pet phrases. He has placed considerable quant.i.ties of the Arcadia Company's stock among them at merely nominal prices, asking only that they sign a 'gentlemen's agreement' not to resell any of it, so that my father could get it. But there is a wheel within that wheel, too. Something more than half of the nominal capitalisation has been reserved as 'treasury stock.' When the enthusiasm reaches the proper height, this reserved stock will be put upon the market. People will be eager to buy it--won't they?--with the work all done, and everything in readiness to tap the stream of sudden wealth?"

"Probably: that would be the natural inference."

"I thought so. And, as the company's chief engineer, you could doubtless get in on the 'ground floor' that Mr. Pelham is always talking about, couldn't you?"

The question was one to p.r.i.c.k an honest man in his tenderest part.

Ballard was hurt, and his face advertised it.

"See here, little girl," he said, flinging the formalities to the winds; "I am the company's hired man at the present moment, but that is entirely without prejudice to my convictions, or to the fact that some day I am going to marry you. I hope that defines my att.i.tude. As matters stand, Mr. Pelham couldn't hand me out any of his stock on a silver platter!"

"And Mr. Bromley?"

"You needn't fear for Loudon; he isn't going to invest, either. You know very well that he is in precisely the same boat that I am."

"How shocking!" she exclaimed, with an embarra.s.sed little laugh. "Is Mr.

Bromley to marry your widow? Or are you to figure as the consolation prize for his widow? Doubtless you have arranged it amicably between you."

Having said the incendiary thing, he brazened it out like a man and a lover.

"It's no joke. I suppose I might sidestep, but I sha'n't. You know very well that Bromley is in love with you--up to his chin, and I'm afraid you have been too kind to him. That is a little hard on Loudon, you know--when you are going to marry some one else. But let that rest, and tell me a little more about this stock deal. Why should there be a 'gentlemen's agreement' to exclude your father? To a rank outsider like myself, Arcadia Irrigation would seem to be about the last thing in the world Colonel Adam Craigmiles would want to buy."

"Under present conditions, I think it is," she said. "_I_ shouldn't buy it now."

"What would you do, O wise virgin of the market-place?"

"I'd wait patiently while the rocket is going up; I might even clap my hands and say 'Ah-h-h!' with the admiring mult.i.tude. But afterward, when the stick comes down, I'd buy every bit of Arcadia Irrigation I could find."

Again he was regarding her through half-closed eyelids.

"As I said before, you know too much about such things--altogether too much." He said it half in raillery, but his deduction was made seriously enough. "You think your father will win his law-suit and so break the market?"

"No; on the contrary, I'm quite sure he will be beaten. I am going, now.

Don't ask me any more questions: I've said too much to the company's engineer, as it is."

"You have said nothing to the company's engineer," he denied. "You have been talking to Breckenridge Ballard, your future----"

She set the car in motion before he could complete the sentence, and he stood looking after it as it shot away up the hills. It was quite out of sight, and the sound of its drumming motor was lost in the hoa.r.s.e grumbling of the river, before he began to realise that Elsa's visit had not been for the purpose of asking him to send for Gardiner, nor yet to beg him not to be vindictive. Her real object had been to warn him not to buy Arcadia Irrigation. "Why?" came the unfailing question, shot-like; and, like all the others of its tribe, it had to go unanswered.

It was two days later when Gardiner, the a.s.sistant professor of geology, kept his appointment, was duly met at Alta Vista by Ballard's special engine and a "d.i.n.key" way-car, and was transported in state to the Arcadian fastnesses. Ballard had it in mind to run down the line on the other engine to meet the Bostonian; but Elsa forestalled him by intercepting the "special" at Ackerman's with the motor-car and whisking the guest over the roundabout road to Castle 'Cadia.

Gardiner walked down to the construction camp at Elbow Canyon bright and early the following morning to make his peace with Ballard.

"Age has its privileges which youth is obliged to concede, Breckenridge, my son," was the form his apology took. "When I learned that I might have my visit with you, and still be put up at the millionaire hostelry in the valley above, I didn't hesitate a moment. I am far beyond the point of bursting into enthusiastic raptures over a bunk shake-down in a camp shanty, steel forks, tin platters, and plum-duff, when I can live on the fat of the land and sleep on a modern mattress. How are you coming on? Am I still in time to be in at the death?"

"I hope there isn't going to be any death," was the laughing rejoinder.

"Because, in the natural sequence of things, it would have to be mine, you know."

"Ah! You are tarred a little with the superst.i.tious stick, yourself, are you? What was it you said to me about 'two sheer accidents and a commonplace tragedy'? You may remember that I warned you, and the event proves that I was a true prophet. I predicted that Arcadia would have its shepherdess, you recollect."

Thus, with dry humour, the wise man from the East. But Ballard was not prepared at the moment for a plunge into the pool of sentiment with the mildly cynical old schoolman for a bath-master, and he proposed, as the readiest alternative, a walking tour of the industries.

Gardiner was duly impressed by the industrial miracles, and by the magnitude of the irrigation scheme. Also, he found fitting words in which to express his appreciation of the thoroughness of Ballard's work, and of the admirable system under which it was pressing swiftly to its conclusion. But these matters became quickly subsidiary when he began to examine the curious geological formation of the foothill range through which the river elbowed its tumultuous course.

"These little wrinklings of the earth's crust at the foot of the great mountain systems are nature's puzzle-pieces for us," he remarked. "I foresee an extremely enjoyable vacation for me--if you have forgiven me to the extent of a snack at your mess-table now and then, and a possible night's lodging in your bungalow if I should get caught out too late to reach the millionaire luxuries of Castle 'Cadia."

"If I haven't forgiven you, Bromley will take you in," laughed Ballard.

"Make yourself one of us--when you please and as you please. The camp and everything in it belongs to you for as long as you can persuade yourself to stay."

Gardiner accepted the invitation in its largest sense, and the afternoon of the same day found him prowling studiously in the outlet canyon with hammer and specimen-bag; a curious figure of complete abstraction in brown duck and service leggings, overshadowed by an enormous cork-lined helmet-hat that had been faded and stained by the sun and rains of three continents. Ballard pa.s.sed the word among his workmen. The absent-minded stranger under the cork hat was the guest of the camp, who was to be permitted to go and come as he chose, whose questions were to be answered without reserve, and whose peculiarities, if he had any, were to pa.s.s unremarked.

With the completion of the dam so near at hand, neither of the two young men who were responsible for the great undertaking had much time to spare for extraneous things. But Gardiner asked little of his secondary hosts; and presently the thin, angular figure prowling and tapping at the rocks became a familiar sight in the busy construction camp. It was Lamoine, the camp jester, who started the story that the figure in brown canvas was a mascot, imported specially by the "boss" to hold the "hoodoo" in check until the work should be done; and thereafter the Boston professor might have chipped his specimens from the facing stones on the dam without let or hindrance.