Part 17

"It was only a leg-pull," was the low-toned explanation. "I've been trying all evening to get a word with you, and I had to invent the snake. Wingfield says we're all off wrong on the mystery chase--'way off. You're to watch the dam--that's what he told me to tell you; watch it close till he comes down here from Castle 'Cadia."

"Watch the dam?" queried the engineer. "What am I to look for?"

"I don't know another blessed thing about it. But there's something doing; something bigger than--'sh! Miss Elsa's asking about the snake. Cut it out--cut it all out!"

"It was a false alarm," Ballard explained, when he rejoined his companion at the derrick's foot. "Jerry has an aggravated attack of imaginationitis. You were saying----?"

"I wasn't saying anything; but I shall begin now--if you'll sit down. You must be dying to know why we came down here to-night, of all the nights that ever were; and why we are staying so long past our welcome."

"I never felt less like dying since the world began; and you couldn't outstay your welcome if you should try," he answered, out of a full heart. "My opportunities to sit quietly in blissful nearness to you haven't been so frequent that I can afford to spoil this one with foolish queryings about the whys and wherefores."

"Hush!" she broke in imperatively. "You are saying light things again in the very thick of the miseries! Have you forgotten that to-day--a few hours ago--another attempt was made upon your life?"

"No; I haven't forgotten," he admitted.

"Be honest with me," she insisted. "You are not as indifferent as you would like to have me believe. Do you know who made the attempt?"

"Yes." He answered without realising that the single word levelled all the carefully raised barriers of concealment; and when the realisation came, he could have bitten his tongue for its incautious slip.

"Then you doubtless know who is responsible for all the terrible happenings; the--the _crimes_?"

Denial was useless now, and he said "Yes," again.

"How long have you known this?"

"I have suspected it almost from the first."

She turned upon him like some wild creature at bay.

"Why are you waiting? Why haven't you had him arrested and tried and condemned, like any other common murderer?"

He regarded her gravely, as the hard, white moonlight permitted. No man ever plumbs a woman's heart in its ultimate depths; least of all the heart of the woman he knows best and loves most.

"You seem to overlook the fact that I am his daughter's lover," he said, as if the simple fact settled the matter beyond question.

"And you have never sought for an explanation?--beyond the one which would stamp him as the vilest, the most inhuman of criminals?" she went on, ignoring his reason for condoning the crimes.

"I have; though quite without success, I think--until to-day."

"But to-day?" she questioned, anxiously, eagerly.

He hesitated, picking and choosing among the words. And in the end he merely begged her to help him. "To-day, hope led me over into the valley of a great shadow. Tell me, Elsa, dear: is your father always fully accountable for his actions?"

Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and there were tense lines of suffering about the sweet mouth.

"You have guessed the secret--my secret," she said, with the heart-break in her tone. And then: "Oh, you don't know, you can't imagine, what terrible agonies I have endured: and alone, always alone!"

"Tell me," he commanded lovingly. "I have a good right to know."

"The best right of all: the right of a patient and loving friend." She stopped, and then went on in the monotone of despair: "It is in the blood--a dreadful heritage. Do you--do you know how your father died, Breckenridge?"

"Not circumstantially; in an illness, I have been told. I was too young to know anything more than I was told; too young to feel the loss. Did some one tell me it was a fever?"

"It was not a fever," she said sorrowfully. "He was poisoned--by a horrible mistake. My father and his brother Abner were practising physicians in Lexington, your old home and ours; both of them young, ardent and enthusiastic in their profession. Uncle Abner was called to prescribe for your father--his life-long friend--in a trivial sickness. By some frightful mistake, the wrong drug was given and your father died. Poor Uncle Abner paid for it with his reason, and, a few months later, with his own life. And a little while after his brother's death in the asylum, Father threw up his practice and his profession, and came here to bury himself in Arcadia."

The Kentuckian remembered Colonel Craigmiles's sudden seizure at his first sight of the dead Ballard's son, and saw the pointing of it. Nevertheless, he said, soberly: "That proves nothing, you know."

"Nothing of itself, perhaps. But it explains all the fearful things I have seen with my own eyes. Two years ago, after the trouble with Mr. Braithwaite, father seemed to change. He became bitterly vindictive against the Arcadia Company, and at times seemed to put his whole soul into the fight against it. Then the accidents began to happen, and--oh, I can't tell you the dreadful things I have seen, or the more dreadful ones I have suspected! I have watched him--followed him--when he did not suspect it. After dinner, the night you arrived, he left us all on the portico at Castle 'Cadia, telling me that he was obliged to come down here to the mine. Are you listening?"

"You needn't ask that: please go on."

"I thought it very strange; that he would let even a business errand take him away from us on our first evening; and so I--I made an excuse to the others and followed him. Breckenridge, I saw him throw the stone from the top of that cliff--the stone that came so near killing you or Mr. Bromley, or both of you."

There had been a time when he would have tried to convince her that she must doubt the evidence of her own senses; but now it was too late: that milestone had been passed in the first broken sentence of her pitiful confession.

"There was no harm done, that time," he said, groping loyally for the available word of comforting.

"It was God's mercy," she asserted. "But listen again: that other night, when Mr. Bromley was hurt ... After you had gone with the man who came for you, I hurried to find my father, meaning to ask him to send Otto in the little car to see if there was anything we could do. Aunt June said that father was lying down in the library: he was not there. I ran up-stairs. His coat and waistcoat were on the bed, and his mackintosh--the one he always wears when he goes out after sundown--was gone. After a little while he came in, hurriedly, secretly, and he would not believe me when I told him Mr. Bromley was hurt; he seemed to be sure it must be some one else. Then I knew. He had gone out to waylay you on your walk back to the camp, and by some means had mistaken Mr. Bromley for you."

She was in the full flood-tide of the heart-broken confession now, and in sheer pity he tried to stop her.

"Let it all go," he counselled tenderly. "What is done, is done; and now that the work here is also done, there will be no more trouble for you."

"No; I must go on," she insisted. "Since others, who have no right to know, have found out, I must tell you."

"Others?" he queried.

"Yes: Mr. Wingfield, for one. Unlike you, he has not tried to be charitable. He believes----"

"He doesn't love you as I do," Ballard interrupted quickly.

"He doesn't love me at all--that way; it's Dosia. Hadn't you suspected? That was why he joined Aunt Janet's party--to be with Dosia."

"Thus vanishes the final shadow: there is nothing to come between us now," he exulted; and his unhurt arm drew her close.

"Don't!" she shuddered, shrinking away from him. "That is the bitterest drop in the cup of misery. You refuse to think of the awful heritage I should bring you; but I think of it--day and night. When your telegram came from Boston to Mr. Lassley at New York, I was going with the Lassleys--not to Norway, but to Paris, to try to persuade Doctor Perard, the great alienist, to come over and be our guest at Castle 'Cadia. It seemed to be the only remaining hope. But when you telegraphed your changed plans, I knew I couldn't go; I knew I must come home. And in spite of all, he has tried three times to kill you. You know he must be insane; tell me you know it," she pleaded.

"Since it lifts a burden too heavy to be borne, I am very willing to believe it," he rejoined gravely. "I understand quite fully now. And it makes no difference--between us, I mean. You must not let it make a difference. Let the past be past, and let us come back to the present. Where is your father now?"

"After dinner he went with Mr. Wingfield and Otto to the upper canyon. There is a breakwater at the canyon portal which they hoped might save the power-house and laboratory from being undermined by the river, and they were going to strengthen it with bags of sand. I was afraid of what might come afterward--that you might be here alone and unsuspecting. So I persuaded Cousin Janet and the others to make up the car-party."

From where they were sitting at the derrick's foot, the great boom leaned out like a giant's arm uplifted above the canyon lake. With the moon sweeping toward the zenith, the shadow of the huge iron beam was clearly cut on the surface of the water. Ballard's eye had been mechanically marking the line of shadow and its changing position as the water level rose in the Elbow.

"The reservoir is filling a great deal faster than I supposed it would," he said, bearing his companion resolutely away from the painful things.

"There have been storms on the main range all day," was the reply. "Father has a series of electrical signal stations all along the upper canyon. He said at the dinner-table that the rise to-night promises to be greater than any we have ever seen."

Ballard came alive upon the professional side of him with a sudden quickening of the workaday faculties. With the utmost confidence in that part of the great retaining-wall for which he was personally responsible--the superstructure--he had still been hoping that the huge reservoir lake would fill normally; that the dam would not be called upon to take its enormous stresses like an engine starting under a full load. It was for this reason that he had been glad to time the closing of the spillway in August, when the flow of the river was at its minimum. But fate, the persistent ill-fortune which had dogged the Arcadian enterprise from the beginning, seemed to be gathering its forces for a final blow.

"Cloud-bursts?" he questioned. "Are they frequent in the head basin of the Boiling Water?"

"Not frequent, but very terrible when they do occur. I have seen the Elbow toss its spray to the top of this cliff--once, when I was quite small; and on that day the lower part of our valley was, for a few hours, a vast flood lake."

"Was that before or after the opening of your father's mine over yonder?" queried Ballard.

"It was after. I suppose the mine was flooded, and I remember there was no work done in it for a long time. When it was reopened, a few years ago, father had that immense bulkhead and heavy, water-tight door put in to guard against another possible flood."

Ballard made the sign of comprehension. Here was one of the mysteries very naturally accounted for. The bulkhead and iron-bound door of the zirconium mine were, indeed, fortifications; but the enemy to be repulsed was nature--not man.

"And the electric signal service system in the upper canyon is a part of the defence for the mine?" he predicated.

"Yes. It has served on two or three occasions to give timely warning so that the miners could come up and seal the door in the bulkhead. But it has been a long time since a cloud-burst flood has risen high enough in the Elbow to threaten the mine."

Silence supervened; the silence of the flooding moonlight, the stark hills and the gently lapping waters. Ballard's brain was busy with the newly developed responsibilities. There was a little space for action, but what could be done? In all probability the newly completed dam was about to be subjected to the supreme test, violently and suddenly applied. The alternative was to open the spillway gate, using the cut-off tunnel as a sort of safety-valve when the coming flood water should reach the Elbow.

But there were an objection and an obstacle. Now that he knew the condition of the honeycombed tunnel, Ballard hesitated to make it the raceway for the tremendously augmented torrent. And for the obstacle there was a mechanical difficulty: with the weight of the deepening lake upon it, the stop-gate could be raised only by the power-screws; and the fires were out in the engine that must furnish the power.

The Kentuckian was afoot and alert when he said: "You know the probabilities better than any of us: how much time have we before these flood tides will come down?"

She had risen to stand with him, steadying herself by the hook of the derrick-fall. "I don't know," she began; and at that instant a great slice of the zirconium mine dump slid off and settled into the eddying depths with a splash.

"It is nothing but a few more cubic yards of the waste," he said, when she started and caught her breath with a little gasp.

"Not that--but the door!" she faltered, pointing across the chasm. "It was shut when we came out here--I am positive!"

The heavy, iron-studded door in the bulkhead was open now, at all events, as they could both plainly see; and presently she went on in a frightened whisper: "Look! there is something moving--this side of the door--among the loose timbers!"

The moving object defined itself clearly in the next half-minute; for the two at the derrick-heel, and for another--young Blacklock, who was crouching behind his rejected thorough-stone directly opposite the mine entrance. It took shape as the figure of a man, slouch-hatted and muffled in a long coat, creeping on hands and knees toward the farther dam-head; creeping by inches and dragging what appeared to be a six-foot length of iron pipe. The king's daughter spoke again, and this time her whisper was full of sharp agony.

"_Breckenridge!_ it is my father--just as I have seen him before! That thing he is dragging after him: isn't it a--merciful Heaven! he is going to blow up the dam! Oh, for pity's sake can't you think of some way to stop him?"

There are crises when the mind, acting like a piece of automatic machinery, flies from suggestion to conclusion with such facile rapidity that all the intermediate steps are slurred and effaced. Ballard marked the inching advance, realised its object and saw that he would not have time to intervene by crossing the dam, all in the same instant. Another click of the mental mechanism and the alternative suggested itself, was grasped, weighed, accepted and transmuted into action.

It was a gymnast's trick, neatly done. The looped-up derrick-fall was a double wire cable, running through a heavy iron sheave which carried the hook and grappling chains. Released from its rope lashings at the mast-heel, it would swing out and across the canyon like a monster pendulum. Ballard forgot his bandaged arm when he laid hold of the sheave-hook and slashed at the yarn seizings with his pocket-knife; was still oblivious to it when the released pendulum surged free and swept him out over the chasm.

XXIII

DEEP UNTO DEEP

Mechanically as such things are done, Ballard remembered afterward that he was keenly alive to all that was passing. He heard Elsa's half-stifled cry of horror, Blacklock's shout of encouragement from some point higher up on the mesa, and mingled with these the quick _pad-pad_ of footfalls as of men running. In mid-air he had a glimpse of the running men; two of them racing down the canyon on the side toward which his swinging bridge was projecting him. Then the derrick-fall swept him on, reached the extreme of its arc, and at the reversing pause he dropped, all fingers to clutch and tensely strung muscles to hold, fairly upon the crouching man in the muffling rain-coat.

For Blacklock, charging in upon the battle-field by way of the dam, the happenings of the next half-minute resolved themselves into a fierce hand-to-hand struggle between the two men for the possession of the piece of iron pipe. At the pendulum-swinging instant, the collegian had seen the sputtering flare of a match in the dynamiter's hands; and in the dash across the dam he had a whiff of burning gunpowder.

When the two rose up out of the dust of the grapple, Ballard was the victor. He had wrested the ignited pipe-bomb from his antagonist, and turning quickly he hurled it in a mighty javelin-cast far up the Elbow. There was a splash, a smothered explosion, and a geyser-like column of water shot up from the plunging-point, spouting high to fall in sheets of silver spray upon the two upcoming runners who were alertly springing from foothold to foothold across the dissolving mine dump.

So much young Blacklock noted at the moment of uprushing. In the next breath he had wrapped the mackintoshed bomb-firer in a wrestler's hug from behind, and the knife raised to be driven into Ballard's back clattered upon the stones of the path. There was a gasping oath in a strange tongue, a fierce struggle on the part of the garroted one to turn and face his new assailant, and then the collegian, with his chin burrowing between the shoulder-blades of his man, heard swift footsteps approaching and a deep-toned, musical voice booming out a sharp command: "Manuel! you grand scoundrel!--drop that thah gun, suh!"

Something else, also metallic, and weightier than the knife, clicked upon the stones; whereupon Blacklock loosed his strangler's grip and stepped back. Ballard stooped to pick up the knife and the pistol. Wingfield, who had been the colonel's second in the race along the hazardous mine path, drew aside; and master and man were left facing each other.

The Mexican straightened up and folded his arms. He was breathing hard from the effect of Blacklock's gripping hug, but his dark face was as impassive as an Indian's. The white-haired King of Arcadia turned to Ballard, and the mellow voice broke a little.

"Mistuh-uh Ballard, you, suh, are a Kentuckian, of a race that knows to the fullest extent the meaning of henchman loyalty. You shall say what is to be done with this po' villain of mine. By his own confession, made to me this afte'noon, he is a cutthroat and an assassin. Undeh a mistaken idea of loyalty to me"--the deep voice grew more tremulous at this--"undeh a mistaken idea of loyalty to me, suh, he has been fighting in his own peculiah fashion what he conceived to be my battle with the Arcadia Company. Without compunction, without remo'se, he has taken nearly a score of human lives since the day when he killed the man Braithwaite and flung his body into the riveh. Am I making it cleah to you, Mistuh Ballard?"

How he managed to convey his sense of entire comprehension, Ballard scarcely knew. One thought was submerging all others under a mounting wave of triumphant joy: Colonel Adam, the father of the princess of heart's delight, was neither a devil in human guise nor a homicidal madman. Elsa's trouble was a phantom appeased; it had vanished like the dew on a summer morning.

"I thank you, suh," was the courtly acknowledgment; and then the deep voice continued, with an added note of emotion. "I am not pleading for the murderer, but for my po' liegeman who knew no law of God or man higheh than what he mistakenly took to be his masteh's desiah. How long all this would have continued, if I hadn't suhprised him in the ve'y act of trying to kill you as you were lowering that thah stop-gate to-day, we shall neveh know. But the entiah matteh lies heavy on my conscience, suh. I ought to have suspected the true sou'ce of all the mysterious tragedies long ago; I should have suspected it if I hadn't been chin-deep myself, suh, in a similah pool of animosity against Mr. Pelham and his fellow-robbehs. What will you do with this po' scoundrel of mine, Mistuh Ballard?"

"Nothing, at present," said Ballard, gravely, "or nothing more than to ask him a question or two." He turned upon the Mexican, who was still standing statue-like with his back to the low cliff of the path ledge. "Did you kill Macpherson?--as well as Braithwaite and Sanderson?"

"I kill-a dem all," was the cool reply. "You say--he all say--'I make-a da dam.' I'll say: '_Caramba!_ You _no_ make-a da dam w'at da Colonel no want for you to make.' Dass all."

"So it was you who hit Bromley on the head and knocked him into the canyon?"

The statuesque foreman showed his teeth. "Dat was one bad _mees_take. I'll been try for knock _you_ on da haid, dat time, for sure, Senor Ballar'."

"And you were wearing that rain-coat when you did it?"

The Mexican nodded. "I'll wear heem h-always w'en da sun gone down--same like-a da Colonel."

"Also, you were wearing it that other night, when you heaved a stone down on my office roof?"

Another nod.

"But on the night when you scared Hoskins and made him double up his train on Dead Man's Curve, you didn't wear it; you wore a shooting-coat and a cap like the one Braithwaite used to wear."

The posing statue laughed hardily. "Dat was one--w'at you call heem?--one beeg joke. I'll been like to make dat 'Oskins break hees h'own neck, _si_: hees talk too much 'bout da man w'at drown' heself."

"And the Carson business: you were mixed up in that, too?"

"Dat was one _mees_take, al-so; one ver' beeg _mees_take. I'll hire dat dam'-fool Carson to shoot da ditch. I t'ink you and da beeg h-Irishman take-a da trail and Carson keel you. Carson, he'll take-a da money, and make for leetle scheme to steal cattle. Som' day I keel heem for dat."

"Not in this world," cut in Ballard, briefly. "You're out of the game, from this on." And then, determined to be at the bottom of the final mystery: "You played the spy on Mr. Wingfield, Bromley, Blacklock and me one afternoon when we were talking about these deviltries. Afterward, you went up to Castle 'Cadia. That evening Mr. Wingfield nearly lost his life. Did you have a hand in that?"

Again the Mexican laughed. "Senor Wingfiel' he is know too moch. Som' day he is make me ver' sorry for myself. So I'll hide be'ind dat fornace, and give heem one leetle push, so"--with the appropriate gesture.

"That is all," said Ballard, curtly. And then to the colonel: "I think we'd better be moving over to the other side. The ladies will be anxious. Jerry, take that fellow on ahead of you, and see that he doesn't get away. I'm sorry for you, Colonel Craigmiles; and that is no empty form of words. As you have said, I am a Kentuckian, and I do know what loyalty--even mistaken loyalty--is worth. My own grudge is nothing; I haven't any. But there are other lives to answer for. Am I right?"

"You are quite right, suh; quite right," was the sober rejoinder; and then Blacklock said "_Vamos!_" to his prisoner, airing his one word of Spanish, and in single file the five men crossed on the dam to the mesa side of the rising lake where Bigelow, with Elsa and Miss Cantrell and a lately awakened Mrs. Van Bryck, were waiting. At the reassembling, Ballard cut the colonel's daughter out of the storm of eager questionings swiftly, masterfully.

"You were wrong--we were all wrong," he whispered joyously. "The man whom you saw, the man who has done it all in your father's absolute and utter ignorance of what was going on, is Manuel. He has confessed; first to his master, and just now to all of us. Your father is as sane as he is blameless. There is no obstacle now for either of us. I shall resign to-morrow morning, and----"

It was the colonel's call that interrupted.

"One moment, Mistuh Ballard, if you please, suh. Are there any of youh ditch camps at present in the riveh valley below heah?"