The King of Arcadia Part 38

They all saw the Mexican when he slipped out of the rain-coat, eluded Blacklock, and broke away, to dart across the chasm on the white pathway of the dam's coping course. He was half-way over to the sh.o.r.e of escape when his nerve failed. To the spouting fountain in the gulch below and the sucking whirlpool in the Elbow above was added a second tidal wave from the cloud-burst sources; a mere ripple compared with the first, but yet great enough to make a maelstrom of the gurgling whirlpool, and to send its crest of spray flying over the narrow causeway. When the barrier was bared again the Mexican was seen clinging limpet-like to the rocks, his courage gone and his death-warrant signed. For while he clung, the great wall lost its perfect alignment, sagged, swayed outward under the irresistible pressure from above, crumbled, and was gone in a thunder-burst of sound that stunned the watchers and shook the solid earth of the mesa where they stood.

"Are you quite sure it wasn't all a frightful dream?" asked the young woman in a charming house gown and pointed Turkish slippers of the young man with his left arm in a sling; the pair waiting the breakfast call in the hammock-bridged corner of the great portico at Castle 'Cadia.

It was a Colorado mountain morning of the sort called "Italian" by enthusiastic tourists. The air was soft and balmy; a rare blue haze lay in the gulches; and the patches of yellowing aspens on the mountain shoulders added the needed touch of colour to relieve the dun-browns and grays of the balds and the heavy greens of the forested slopes. Save for the summer-dried gra.s.s, lodged and levelled in great swaths by the sudden freeing of the waters, the foreground of the scene was unchanged.

Through the bowl-shaped valley the Boiling Water, once more an August-dwindled mountain stream, flowed murmurously as before; and a mile away in the foothill gap of the Elbow, the huge steel-beamed derrick lined itself against the farther distances.

"No, it wasn't a dream," said Ballard. "The thirty-mile, nerve-trying drive home in the car, with the half-wrecked railroad bridge for a river crossing, ought to have convinced you of the realities."

"Nothing convinces me any more," she confessed, with the air of one who has seen chaos and cosmos succeed each other in dizzying alternations; and when Ballard would have gone into the particulars of that with her, the King of Arcadia came up from his morning walk around the homestead knoll.

"Ah, you youngstehs!" he said, with the note of fatherly indulgence in the mellow voice. "Out yondeh undeh the maples, I run across the Bigelow boy and Madge Cantrell;--'Looking to see what damage the water had done,' they said, as innocent as a pair of turtle-doves! Oveh in the orcha'd I stumble upon Mistuh Wingfield and Dosia. I didn't make them lie to me, and I'm not going to make you two. But I should greatly appreciate a word with you, Mistuh Ballard."

Elsa got up to go in, but Ballard sat in the hammock and drew her down beside him again. "With your permission, which I was going to ask immediately after breakfast, Colonel Craigmiles, we two are one," he said, with the frank, boyish smile that even his critics found hard to resist. "Will you so regard us?"

The colonel's answering laugh had no hint of obstacles in it.

"It was merely a little matteh of business," he explained. "Will youh shot-up arm sanction a day's travel, Mistuh Ballard?"

"Surely. This sling is wholly Miss Elsa's idea and invention. I don't need it."

"Well, then; heah's the programme: Afteh breakfast, Otto will drive you oveh to Alta Vista in the light car. From there you will take the train to Denver. When you arrive, you will find the tree of the Arcadia Company pretty well shaken by the news of the catastrophe to the dam. Am I safe in a.s.suming so much?"

"More than safe: every stockholder in the outfit will be ducking to cover."

"Ve'y good. Quietly, then, and without much--ah--ostentation, as youh own good sense would dictate, you will pick up, in youh name or mine, a safe majority of the stock. Do I make myself cleah?"

"Perfectly, so far."

"Then you will come back to Arcadia, reorganise youh force--you and Mistuh Bromley--and build you anotheh dam; this time in the location below the Elbow, where it should have been built befo'. Am I still cleah?"

"Why, clear enough, certainly. But I thought--I've been given to understand that you were fighting the irrigation scheme on its merits; that you didn't want your kingdom of Arcadia turned into a farming community. I don't blame you, you know."

The old cattle king's gaze went afar, through the gap to the foothills and beyond to the billowing gra.s.s-lands of Arcadia Park, and the shrewd old eyes lost something of their militant fire when he said:

"I reckon I was right selfish about that, in the beginning, Mistuh Ballard. It's a mighty fine range, suh, and I was greedy for the isolation--as some otheh men are greedy for money and the power it brings. But this heah little girl of mine she went out into the world, and came back to shame me, suh. Here was land and a living, independence and happiness, for hundreds of the world's po' strugglers, and I was making a cattle paschuh of it! Right then and thah was bo'n the idea, suh, of making a sure-enough kingdom of Arcadia, and it was my laying of the foundations that attracted Mr. Pelham and his money-hungry crowd."

"Your idea!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Ballard. "Then Pelham and his people were interlopers?"

"You can put it that way; yes, suh. Thei-uh idea was wrapped up in a coin-sack; you could fai'ly heah it clink! Thei-uh proposal was to sell the land, and to make the water an eve'lasting tax upon it; mine was to make the water free. We hitched on that, and then they proposed to _me_--to _me_, suh--to make a stock-selling swindle of it. When I told them they were a pack of d.a.m.ned scoundrels, they elected to fight me, suh; and last night, please G.o.d, we saw the beginning of the end that is to be--the righteous end. But come on in to breakfast; you can't live on sentiment for always, Mistuh Ballard."

They went in together behind him, the two for whom Arcadia had suddenly been transformed into paradise, and on the way the Elsa whom Ballard had first known and learned to love in the far-distant world beyond the barrier mountains rea.s.serted herself.

"What do you suppose Mr. Pelham will say when he hears that you have really made love to the cow-punching princess?" she asked, flippantly.

"Do you usually boast of such things in advance, Mr. Ballard?"

But his answer ignored the little pin-p.r.i.c.k of mockery.

"I'm thinking altogether of Colonel Adam Craigmiles, my dear; and of the honour he does you by being your father. He is a king, every inch of him, Elsa, girl! I'm telling you right now that we'll have to put in the high speed, and keep it in, to live up to him."

And afterward, when the house-party guests had gathered, in good old Kentucky fashion, around the early breakfast-table, and the story of the night had been threshed out, and word was brought that Otto and the car were waiting, he stood up with his hand on the back of Elsa's chair and lifted his claret cla.s.s with the loyal thought still uppermost. "A toast with me, good friends--my stirrup-cup: I drink to our host, the Knight Commander of Castle 'Cadia, and the reigning monarch of the Land of Heart's Delight--Long live the King of Arcadia!"

And they drank it standing.

THE END