Part 13

"No; but I don't mind telling you. I have about decided upon a weak sort of compromise. This thing will come out--it's bound to come out in the pretty immediate hence; and I don't want to be here when the sheriff arrives. I think I shall have a very urgent call to go back to New York."

Bromley laid hold of the table and pulled himself to his feet; but it was Ballard who said, slowly, as one who weighs his words and the full import of them: "Mr. Wingfield, you are more different kinds of an ass than I took you to be, and that is saying a great deal. Out of a mass of hearsay, the idle stories of a lot of workmen whose idea of humour has been to make a butt of you, you have built up this fantastic fairy tale. I am charitable enough to believe that you couldn't help it; it is a part of your equipment as a professional maker of fairy tales. But there are two things for which I shall take it upon myself to answer personally. You will not leave Castle 'Cadia until your time is out; and you'll not leave this room until you have promised the three of us that this cock-and-bull story of yours stops right here with its first telling."

"That's so," added Bromley, with a quiet menace in his tone.

It was the playwright's turn to gasp, and he did it, very realistically.

"You--you don't believe it? with all the three-sheet-poster evidence staring you in the face? Why, great Joash! you must be stark, staring mad--both of you!" he raved. And then to Blacklock: "Are you in it, too, Jerry?"

"I guess I am," returned the collegian, meaning no more than that he felt constrained to stand with the men of his chosen profession.

Wingfield drew a long breath and with it regained the impersonal heights of the unemotional observer. "Of course, it is just as you please," he said, carelessly. "I had a foolish notion I was doing you two a good turn; but if you choose to take the other view of it--well, there is no accounting for tastes. Drink your own liquor and give the house a good name. I'll dig up my day-pay later on: it's cracking good material, you know."

"That is another thing," Ballard went on, still more decisively. "If you ever put pen to paper with these crazy theories of yours for a basis, I shall make it my business to hunt you down as I would a wild beast."

"So shall I," echoed Bromley.

Wingfield rose and put the long-stemmed pipe carefully aside.

"You are a precious pair of bally idiots," he remarked, quite without heat. Then he looked at his watch and spoke pointedly to Blacklock. "You're forgetting Miss Elsa's fishing party to the upper canyon, aren't you? Suppose we drive around to Castle 'Cadia in the car. You can send Otto back after Mr. Bromley later on." And young Blacklock was so blankly dazed by the cool impudence of the suggestion that he consented and left the bungalow with the playwright.

For some little time after the stuttering purr of the motor-car had died away the two men sat as Wingfield had left them, each busy with his own thoughts. Bromley was absently fingering the cartridges from Sanderson's rifle, mute proofs of the truth of the playwright's theories, and Ballard seemed to have forgotten that he had promised Fitzpatrick to run a line for an additional side-track in the railroad yard.

"Do you blame me, Loudon?" he asked, after the silence had wrought its perfect work.

"No; there was nothing else to do. But I couldn't help being sorry for him."

"So was I," was the instant rejoinder. "Wingfield is all kinds of a decent fellow; and the way he has untangled the thing is nothing short of masterly. But I had to tie his tongue; you know I had to do that, Loudon."

"Of course, you had to."

Silence again for a little space; and then:

"There is no doubt in your mind that he has hit upon the true solution of all the little mysteries?"

Bromley shook his head slowly. "None at all, I am sorry to say. I have suspected it, in part, at least, for a good while. And I had proof positive before Wingfield gave it to us."

"How?" queried Ballard.

Bromley was still fingering the cartridges. "I hate to tell you, Breckenridge. And yet you ought to know," he added. "It concerns you vitally."

Ballard's smile was patient. "I am well past the shocking point," he averred. "After what we have pulled through in the last hour we may as well make a clean sweep of it."

"Well, then; I didn't stumble over the canyon cliff that night four weeks ago: I was knocked over."

"What!"

"It's true."

"And you know who did it?"

"I can make a pretty good guess. While I was down at the wing dam a man passed me, coming from the direction of the great house. He was a big man, and he was muffled to the ears in a rain-coat. I know, because I heard the peculiar 'mackintosh' rustle as he went by me. I knew then who it was; would have known even if I hadn't had a glimpse of his face at the passing instant. It is one of the colonel's eccentricities never to go out after nightfall--in a bone-dry country, mind you--without wearing a rain-coat."

"Well?" said Ballard.

"He didn't see me, though I thought at first that he did; he kept looking back as if he were expecting somebody to follow him. He took the path on our side of the canyon--the one I took a few minutes later. That's all; except that I would swear that I heard the 'slither' of a mackintosh just as the blow fell that knocked me down and out.

"Heavens, Loudon! It's too grossly unbelievable! Why, man, he saved your life after the fact, risking his own in a mad drive down here from Castle 'Cadia in the car to do it! You wouldn't have lived until morning if he hadn't come."

"It is unbelievable, as you say; and yet it isn't, when you have surrounded all the facts. What is the reason, the only reason, why Colonel Craigmiles should resort to all these desperate expedients?"

"Delay, of course; time to get his legal fight shaped up in the courts."

"Exactly. If he can hold us back long enough, the dam will never be completed. He knows this, and Mr. Pelham knows it, too. Unhappily for us, the colonel has found a way to ensure the delay. The work can't go on without a chief of construction."

"But, good Lord, Loudon, you're not the 'Big Boss'; and, besides, the man loves you like a son! Why should he try to kill you one minute and move heaven and earth to save your life the next?"

Bromley shook his head sorrowfully.

"That is what made me say what I did about not wanting to tell you, Breckenridge. That crack over the head wasn't meant for me; it was meant for you. If it had not been so dark under the hill that night--but it was; pocket-dark in the shadow of the pines. And he knew you'd be coming along that path on your way back to camp--knew you'd be coming, and wasn't expecting anybody else. Don't you see?"

Ballard jumped up and began to pace the floor.

"My God!" he ejaculated; "I was his guest; I had just broken bread at his table! Bromley, when he went out to lie in wait for me, he left me talking with his daughter! It's too horrible!"

Bromley had stood the eleven cartridges, false and true, in a curving row on the table. The crooking line took the shape of a huge interrogation point.

"Wingfield thought he had solved all the mysteries, but the darkest of them remains untouched," he commented. "How can the genial, kindly, magnanimous man we know, or think we know, be such a fiend incarnate?" Then he broke ground again in the old field. "Will you do now what I begged you to do at first?--throw up this cursed job and go away?"

Ballard stopped short in his tramping and his answer was an explosive "No!"

"That is half righteous anger, and half something else. What is the other half, Breckenridge?" And when Ballard did not define it: "I can guess it; it is the same thing that made you stuff Wingfield's theories down his throat a few minutes ago. You are sorry for the daughter."

Through the open door Ballard saw Fitzpatrick coming across the stone yard.

"You've guessed it, Loudon; or rather, I think you have known it all along. I love Elsa Craigmiles; I loved her long before I ever heard of Arcadia or its king. Now you know why Wingfield mustn't be allowed to talk; why I mustn't go away and give place to a new chief who might live to see Elsa's father hanged. She must be spared and defended at any cost. One other word before Fitzpatrick cuts in: When my time comes, if it does come, you and one other man will know how I passed out and why. I want your promise that you'll keep still, and that you will keep Wingfield still. Blacklock doesn't count."

"Sure," said Bromley, quietly; and then, with the big Irish contractor's shadow fairly darkening the door: "You'll do the same for me, Breckenridge, won't you? Because--oh, confound it all!--I'm in the same boat with you; without a ghost of a show, you understand."

Ballard put his back squarely to Michael Fitzpatrick scraping his feet on the puncheon-floored porch of the bungalow, and gripped Bromley's hand across the table.

"It's a bargain," he declared warmly. "We'll take the long chance and stand by her together, old man. And if she chooses the better part in the end, I'll try not to act like a jealous fool. Now you turn in and lie down a while. I've got to go with Michael."

This time it was Bromley who saved the situation. "What a pair of luminous donkeys we are!" he laughed. "She calls you 'dear friend,' and me 'little brother.' If we're right good and tractable, we may get cards to her wedding--with Wingfield."

XIX

IN THE LABORATORY

Ballard had a small shock while he was crossing the stone yard with Fitzpatrick. It turned upon the sight of the handsome figure of the Craigmiles ranch foreman calmly rolling a cigarette in the shade of one of 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 off the riservation?"

"Around the office, you say?" Ballard cut himself instantly out of the contractor's company and crossed briskly to the shed where the Mexican was lounging. "You are waiting to see me?" he asked shortly, ignoring the foreman's courtly bow and sombrero-sweep.

"I wait to h-ask for the 'ealth of Senor Bromley. It is report' to me that 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 is som'where on da camp?"

"No; he has gone back to the upper valley. You have been waiting some time? You must have seen him go."

For the third time the Mexican removed his hat. "I'll have been here one, two, t'ree little minute, Senor Ballar'," he lied smoothly. "And now I make to myself the honour of saying to you, _Adios_."

Ballard let him go because there was nothing else to do. His presence in the construction camp, and the ready lie about the length of his stay, were both sufficiently ominous. What if he had overheard the talk in the office? It was easily possible that he had. The windows were open, and the adobe was only a few steps withdrawn from the busy cutting yard. The eavesdropper might have sat unremarked upon the office porch, if he had cared to.

The Kentuckian was deep in the labyrinth of reflection when he rejoined Fitzpatrick; and the laying-out of the new side-track afterward was purely mechanical. When the work was done, Ballard returned to the bungalow, to find Bromley sleeping the sleep of pure exhaustion on the blanket-covered couch. Obeying a sudden impulse, the Kentuckian took a field-glass from its case on the wall, and went out, tip-toeing to avoid waking Bromley. If Manuel had overheard, it was comparatively easy to prefigure his next step.

"Which way did the Mexican go?" Ballard asked of a cutter in the stone-yard.

"The last I saw of him he was loungin' off towards the Elbow. That was just after you was talkin' to him," said the man, lifting his cap to scratch his head with one finger.

"Did he come here horseback?"

"Not up here on the mesa. Might 'a' left his nag down below; but he wa'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 its crest there was a comprehensive view of the upper valley, with the river winding through it, with Castle 'Cadia crowning the island-like knoll in its centre, with the densely forested background range billowing green and grey in the afternoon sunlight.

Throwing himself flat on the brown hilltop, Ballard trained his glass first on the inner valley reaches of a bridle-path leading over the southern hogback. There was no living thing in sight in that field, though sufficient time had elapsed to enable the Mexican to ride across the 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 habit of 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 the entrance to the colonel's mysterious mine was in plain view, and for the first time in Ballard's observings of it the massive, iron-bound door was open. Bringing the glass to bear on the tunnel-mouth square of shadow, Ballard made out the figures of two men standing just within the entrance and far enough withdrawn to be hidden from prying eyes on the camp plateau. With the help of the glass, the young engineer could distinguish the shape of a huge white sombrero, and under the sombrero the red spark of a cigarette. Wherefore he rolled quickly to a less exposed position and awaited developments.

The suspense was short. In a few minutes the Mexican foreman emerged from the gloom of the mine-mouth, and with a single swift backward glance for the industries at the canyon portal, walked rapidly up the path toward the inner valley. Ballard sat up and trained the field-glass again. Why had Manuel gone out of his way to stop at the mine? The answer, or at least one possible answer, was under the foreman's arm, taking the shape of a short-barrelled rifle of the type carried by express messengers on Western railways.

Ballard screwed the glass into its smallest compass, dropped it into his pocket, and made his way down to the camp mesa. The gun meant nothing more than that the Mexican had not deemed it advisable to appear in the construction camp armed. But, on the other hand, Ballard was fully convinced that he was on his way to Colonel Craigmiles as the bearer of news.

It was an hour later when Otto, the colonel's chauffeur, kicked out the clutch of the buzzing runabout before the door of the office bungalow and announced that he had come to take the convalescent back to Castle 'Cadia. Bromley was still asleep; hence there had been no opportunity for a joint discussion of the latest development in the little war. But when Ballard was helping him into the mechanician's seat, and Otto had gone for a bucket of water to cool the hissing radiator, there was time for a hurried word or two.

"More trouble, Loudon--it turned up while you were asleep. Manuel was here, in the camp, while we were hammering it out with Wingfield. It is measurably certain that he overheard all or part of the talk. What he knows, the colonel doubtless knows, too, by this time, and----"

"Oh, good Lord!" groaned Bromley. "It was bad enough as it stood, but this drags Wingfield into it, neck and heels! What will they do to him?"

Ballard knitted his brows. "As Manuel could very easily make it appear in his tale-bearing, anything that might happen to Wingfield would be a pretty clear case of self-defence for Colonel Craigmiles. Wingfield knows 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 and spared. It's up to us to get Wingfield away from Castle 'Cadia and out of the country--before anything does happen to him."

"If I were only half a man again!" Bromley lamented. "But I know just how it will be; I sha'n't have a shadow of chance at Wingfield this evening. As soon as I show up, Miss Cauffrey and the others will scold me for overstaying my leave, and chase me off to bed."

"That's so; and it's right," mused Ballard. "You've no business to be out of bed this minute; you're not fit to be facing a ten-mile drive in this jig-wagon. By Jove: that's our way out of it! You climb down and let me go in your place. I'll tell them we let you overdo yourself; that you were too tired to stand the motor trip--which is the fact, if you'd only admit it. That will give me a chance at Wingfield; the chance you wouldn't have if you were to go. What do you say?"

"I've already said it," was the convalescent's reply; and he let Ballard help him out of the mechanic's seat and into the bungalow.

This is how it chanced that the chauffeur, coming back from Garou's kitchen barrel with the second bucket of water, found his fares changed and the chief engineer waiting to be his passenger over the ten miles of roundabout road. It was all one to the Berliner. He listened to Ballard's brief explanation with true German impassiveness, cranked the motor, pulled himself in behind the pilot-wheel, and sent the little car bounding down the mesa hill to the Boiling Water bridge what time the hoister whistles were blowing the six-o'clock quitting signal. The Kentuckian looked at his watch mechanically, as one will at some familiar reminder of the time. Seven o'clock was the Castle 'Cadia dinner hour: thirty minutes should suffice for the covering of the ten miles of country road, and with the fates propitious there would be an empty half-hour for the cajoling or compelling of Wingfield, imperilled in his character of overcurious delver into other people's affairs.

So ran the reasonable prefiguring; but plans and prefigurings based upon the performance of a gasolene motor call for a generous factor of safety. Five miles from a tool-box in either direction, the engines of the runabout set up an ominous knocking. A stop was made, and Ballard filled and lighted his pipe while the chauffeur opened the bonnet and tapped and pried and screwed and adjusted. Ten minutes were lost in the testing and trying, and then the German named the trouble, with an emphatic "_Himmel!_" for a foreword. A broken bolt-head had dropped into the crank-case, and it would be necessary to take the engines to pieces to get it out. Ballard consulted his watch again. It lacked only a quarter of an hour of the Castle 'Cadia dinner-time; and a five-mile tramp over the hills would consume at least an hour. Whatever danger might be threatening the playwright (and the farther Ballard got away from the revelations of the early afternoon, the more the entire fabric of accusation threatened to crumble into the stuff nightmares are made of), 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 passenger stayed with him and became a very efficient mechanic's helper.

This, as we have seen, was at a quarter before seven. At a quarter before 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 we did 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 twenty minutes should be enough. And in fifteen minutes or less the little car was racing up the maple-shaded avenue to the Castle 'Cadia carriage entrance.

Ballard felt trouble in the air before he descended from the car. The great portico was deserted, the piano was silent, and the lights were on in the upper rooms of the house. At the mounting of the steps, the Forestry man met him and drew him aside into the library, which was as empty as the portico.

"I heard the car and thought it would be Mr. Bromley," Bigelow explained; adding: "I'm glad he didn't come. There has been an accident."

"To--to Wingfield?"

"Yes. How did you know? It was just after dinner. The colonel had some experimental mixture cooking in his electric furnace, and he invited us all down to the laboratory to see the result. Wingfield tangled himself in the wires in some unaccountable way and got a terrible shock. For a few minutes we all thought he was killed, but the colonel would not give up, 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 laboriously pumped out, only to be overwhelmed by a sudden and irresistible return of 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 necessity of saying something, and realising at the same instant the futility of putting the horror of it into words for one who knew nothing of the true state of affairs.

"Bad enough, certainly. You can imagine how it harrowed all of us, and especially the women. Cousin Janet fainted and had to be carried up to the house; and Miss Elsa was the only one of the young women who wasn't perfectly helpless. Colonel Craigmiles was our stand-by; he knew just what 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." Ballard suffered so much of his thought to set itself in words. To minimise the temptation to say more he turned his back upon the accident and accounted for himself and his presence at Castle 'Cadia.

"Bromley was pretty well tired out when Otto came down with the car, and I offered to ride around and make his excuses. We broke an engine bolt on the road: otherwise I should have been here two hours earlier. You say Wingfield is recovering? I wonder if I could see him for a few minutes, before I go back to camp?"

Bigelow offered to go up-stairs and find out; and Ballard waited in the silence of the deserted library for what seemed like a long time. And when the waiting came to an end it was not Bigelow who parted the portieres and came silently to stand before his chair; it was the king's daughter.

"You have heard?" she asked, and her voice seemed to come from some immeasurable 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 the cause of the delay. She heard him through without comment, but there was doubt and keen distress and a great fear in the gray eyes when he was permitted to look into their troubled depths.

"If you are telling me the truth, you are not telling me all of it," she said, sinking wearily into one of the deepest of the easy-chairs and shading 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 allay it," he returned gently.

"It is past alleviation; you know it. Mr. Wingfield was with you again to-day, and when he came home I knew that the thing I had been dreading had come to pass."

"How could you know it? Not from anything Wingfield said or did, I'm sure."

"No; but Jerry Blacklock was with him--and Jerry's face is an open book for any one who cares to read it. Won't you please tell me the worst, Breckenridge?"