"You still believe there is no hope of a compromise?" he began. "What the sheriff said a few minutes ago is quite true, you know. The cow-boys will be back in a day or two, and it will make bad blood."
"Excuse me," said Ballard, irritably; "you are an onlooker, Mr. Bigelow, and you can afford to pose as a peacemaker. But I"ve had all I can stand. If Colonel Craigmiles can"t control his flap-hatted bullies, we"ll try to help him. There is a week"s work for half a hundred men and teams lying in that ditch over yonder," pointing with his quirt toward the dynamited cutting. "Do you think I"m going to lie down and let these cattle-punchers ride rough-shod over me and the company I represent? Not to-day, or any other day, I a.s.sure you."
"Then you entirely disregard the little type-written note?"
"In justice to my employers, I am bound to call Colonel Craigmiles"s bluff, whatever form it takes."
Bigelow rode in silence for the next hundred yards. Then he began again.
"It doesn"t seem like the colonel: to go at you indirectly that way."
"He was in that automobile: I saw him. The notice could scarcely have been posted without his knowledge."
"No," Bigelow agreed, slowly. But immediately afterward he added: "There were others in the car."
"I know it--four or five of them. But that doesn"t let the colonel out."
Again Bigelow relapsed into silence, and the camp-fires of Fitzpatrick"s headquarters were in sight when he said:
"You confessed to me a few hours ago that one of your weaknesses was the inability to stay angry. Will you pardon me if I say that it seems to have its compensation in the law of recurrences?"
Ballard"s laugh was frankly apologetic. "You may go farther and say that I am ill-mannered enough to quarrel with a good friend who cheerfully gets himself shot up in my behalf. Overlook it, Mr. Bigelow; and I"ll try to remember that I am a partisan, while you are only a good-natured non-combatant. This little affair is a fact accomplished, so far as we are concerned. The colonel"s cow-men dynamited our ditch; Sheriff Beckwith will do his duty; and the company"s attorney will see to it that somebody pays the penalty. Let"s drop it--as between us two."
Being thus estopped, Bigelow held his peace; and a little later they were dismounting before the door of Fitzpatrick"s commissary. When the contractor had welcomed and fed them, Ballard rolled into the nearest bunk and went to sleep to make up the arrearages, leaving his guest to smoke alone. Bigelow took his desertion good-naturedly, and sat for an hour or more on a bench in front of the storeroom, puffing quietly at his pipe, and taking an onlooker"s part in the ditch-diggers" games of dice-throwing and card-playing going on around the great fire in the plaza.
When the pipe went out after its second filling, he got up and strolled a little way beyond the camp limits. The night was fine and mild for the alt.i.tudes, and he had walked a circling mile before he found himself again at the camp confines. It was here, at the back of the mule drove, that he became once more an onlooker; this time a thoroughly mystified one.
The little drama, at which the Forestry expert was the single spectator, was chiefly pantomimic, but it lacked nothing in eloquent action. Flat upon the ground, and almost among the legs of the grazing mules, lay a diminutive figure, face down, digging fingers and toes into the hoof-cut earth, and sobbing out a strange jargon of oaths and childish ragings.
Before Bigelow could speak, the figure rose to its knees, its face disfigured with pa.s.sion, and its small fists clenching themselves at the invisible. It was d.i.c.k Carson; and the words which Bigelow heard seemed to be shaken by some unseen force out of the thin, stoop-shouldered little body: "Oh, my Lordy! ef it could on"y be somebody else! But ther"
ain"t n.o.body else; an" I"ll go to h.e.l.l if I don"t do it!"
Now, at all events, Bigelow would have cut in, but the action of the drama was too quick for him. Like a flash the water-boy disappeared among the legs of the grazing animals; and a few minutes afterward the night gave back the sound of galloping hoofs racing away to the eastward.
Bigelow marked the direction of the water-boy"s flight. Since it was toward the valley head and Castle "Cadia, he guessed that young Carson"s errand concerned itself in some way with the sheriff"s raid upon the Craigmiles ranch outfit. Here, however, conjecture tripped itself and fell down. Both parties in whatever conflict the sheriff"s visit might provoke were the boy"s natural enemies.
Bigelow was wrestling with this fresh bit of mystery when he went to find his bunk in the commissary; it got into his dreams and was still present when the early morning call of the camp was sounded. But neither at the candle-lighted breakfast, nor later, when Ballard asked him if he were fit for a leisurely ride to the southern watershed for the day"s outwearing, did he speak of young Carson"s desertion.
Fitzpatrick spoke of it, though, when the chief and his companion were mounting for the watershed ride.
"You brought my water-boy back with you last night, didn"t you, Mr.
Ballard?" he asked.
"Certainly; he came in with us. Why? Have you lost him?"
"Him and one of the saddle broncos. And I don"t much like the look of it."
"Oh, I guess he"ll turn up all right," said Ballard easily.
It was Bigelow"s time to speak, but something restrained him, and the contractor"s inquiry died a natural death when Ballard gathered the reins and pointed the way to the southward hills.
By nine o"clock the two riders were among the foothills of the southern Elks, and the chief engineer of the Arcadia Company was making a very practical use of his guest. Bigelow was an authority on watersheds, stream-basins, the conservation of moisture by forested slopes, and kindred subjects of vital importance to the construction chief of an irrigation scheme; and the talk held steadily to the technical problems, with the Forestry expert as the lecturer.
Only once was there a break and a lapse into the humanities. It was when the horses had climbed one of the bald hills from the summit of which the great valley, with its dottings of camps and its streaking of ca.n.a.l gradings, was spread out map-like beneath them. On the distant river road, progressing by perspective inches toward the lower end of the valley, trotted a mixed mob of hors.e.m.e.n, something more than doubling in numbers the sheriff"s posse that had ridden over the same road in the opposite direction the previous evening.
"Beckwith with his game-bag?" queried Bigelow, gravely; and Ballard said: "I guess so," and immediately switched the talk back to the watershed technicalities.
It was within an hour of the grading-camp supper-time when the two investigators of moisture-beds and auxiliary reservoirs rode into Fitzpatrick"s headquarters and found a surprise awaiting them. The Castle "Cadia runabout was drawn up before the commissary; and young Blacklock, in cap and gloves and dust-coat, was tinkering with the motor.
"The same to you, gentlemen," he said, jocosely, when he took his head out of the bonnet. "I was just getting ready to go and chase you some more. We"ve been waiting a solid hour, I should say."
""We"?" questioned Ballard.
"Yes; Miss Elsa and I. We"ve been hunting you in every place a set of rubber tires wouldn"t balk at, all afternoon. Say; you don"t happen to have an extra spark-plug about your clothes, either of you, do you? One of these is cracked in the porcelain, and she skips like a dog on three legs."
Ballard ignored the motor disability completely.
"You brought Miss Craigmiles here? Where is she now?" he demanded.
The collegian laughed.
"She"s in the grand _salon_, and Fitzpatrick the gallant is making her a cup of commissary tea. Wouldn"t that jar you?"
Ballard swung out of his saddle and vanished through the open door of the commissary, leaving Bigelow and the motor-maniac to their own devices. In the littered storeroom he found Miss Craigmiles, sitting upon a coil of rope and calmly drinking her tea from a new tin can.
"At last!" she sighed, smiling up at him; and then: "Mercy me! how savage you look! We are trespa.s.sers; I admit it. But you"ll be lenient with us, won"t you? Jerry says there is a broken spark-plug, or something; but I am sure we can move on if we"re told to. You have come to tell us to move on, Mr. Ballard?"
His frown was only the outward and visible sign of the inward attempt to grapple with the possibilities; but it made his words sound something less than solicitous.
"This is no place for you," he began; but she would not let him go on.
"I have been finding it quite a pleasant place, I a.s.sure you. Mr.
Fitzpatrick is an Irish gentleman. No one could have been kinder. You"ve no idea of the horrible things he promised to do to the cook if this tea wasn"t just right."
If she were trying to make him smile, she succeeded. Fitzpatrick"s picturesque language to his men was the one spectacular feature of the headquarters camp.
"That proves what I said--that this is no place for you," he rejoined, still deprecating the camp crudities. "And you"ve been here an hour, Blacklock says."
"An hour and twelve minutes, to be exact," she admitted, tilting the tiny watch pinned upon the lapel of her driving-coat. "But you left us no alternative. We have driven uncounted miles this afternoon, looking for you and Mr. Bigelow."
Ballard flushed uncomfortably under the tan and sunburn. Miss Craigmiles could have but one object in seeking him, he decided; and he would have given worlds to be able to set the business affair and the sentimental on opposite sides of an impa.s.sable chasm. Since it was not to be, he said what he was constrained to say with characteristic abruptness.
"It is too late. The matter is out of my hands, now. The provocation was very great; and in common loyalty to my employers I was obliged to strike back. Your father----"
She stopped him with a gesture that brought the blood to his face again.
"I know there has been provocation," she qualified. "But it has not been all on one side. Your men have told you how our range-riders have annoyed them: probably they have not told you how they have given blow for blow, killing cattle on the railroad, supplying themselves with fresh meat from our herd, filling up or draining the water-holes. And two days ago, at this very camp.... I don"t know the merits of the case; but I do know that one of our men was shot through the shoulder, and is lying critically near to death."
He nodded gloomily. "That was bad," he admitted, adding: "And it promptly brought on more violence. On the night of the same day your cow-men returned and dynamited the ca.n.a.l."