"Hold on a second, Ballard!" he called. "I"m going with you. What you need right now is a trained investigator, and I"m your man. Great Scott!
to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to see it!" And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very earnestly to dissuade him: "Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha"n"t get underfoot or be in Mr. Ballard"s way; and you needn"t trouble to send down for me.
I can pad home on my two feet, later on."
XVIII
THE INDICTMENT
In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block, Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle "Cadia and the construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.
How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock, who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow, smoking Ballard"s tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another of Bromley"s dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the taxidermic art.
"Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and the camp "bogie" isn"t happening," Ballard told the king"s daughter one morning when he came down from Bromley"s hospital room at Castle "Cadia and found Elsa waiting for him under the portieres of the darkened library. "For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn"t half asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or stone-cutters, he is reading straight through Bromley"s shelf of bird-books. He may be absorbing "local color," but if he is, he is letting the environment do all the work. I don"t believe he has had a consciously active idea since he began loafing with us."
"You are mistaken--greatly mistaken," was all she would say; and in the fulness of time a day came when the event proved how far a woman"s intuition may outrun a man"s reasoning.
It was the occasion of Bromley"s first return to the camp at Elbow Canyon, four full weeks after the night of stumbling on the steep path.
Young Blacklock had driven him by the roundabout road in the little motor-car; and the camp industries paused while the men gave the "Little Boss" an enthusiastic ovation. Afterward, the convalescent was glad enough to lie down on the makeshift lounge in the office bungalow; but when Jerry would have driven him back in time for luncheon at Castle "Cadia, as his strict orders from Miss Elsa ran, Bromley begged to be allowed to put his feet under the office mess-table with his chief and his volunteer chauffeur.
To the three, doing justice to the best that Garou could find in the camp commissary stores, came Mr. Lester Wingfield, to drag up a stool and to make himself companionably at home at the engineers" mess, as his custom had come to be. Until the meal was ended and the pipes were filled, he was silent and abstracted to the edge of rudeness. But when Ballard made a move to go down to the railroad yard with Fitzpatrick, the spell was broken.
"Hold up a minute; don"t rush off so frantically," he cut in abruptly.
"I have been waiting for many days to get you and Bromley together for a little confidential confab about matters and things, and the time has come. Sit down."
Ballard resumed his seat at the table with an air of predetermined patience, and the playwright nodded approval. "That"s right," he went on, "brace yourself to take it as it comes; but you needn"t write your reluctance so plainly in your face. It"s understood."
"I don"t know what you mean," objected Ballard, not quite truthfully.
Wingfield laughed.
"You didn"t want me to come down here at first; and since I"ve been coming you haven"t been too excitedly glad to see me. But that"s all right, too. It"s what the public benefactor usually gets for b.u.t.ting in.
Just the same, there is a thing to be done, and I"ve got to do it. I may bore you both in the process, but I have reached a point where a pow-wow is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I"ve unearthed the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a mare"s nest of fairly heroic proportions."
By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table.
Blacklock got up to stand behind the a.s.sistant"s chair. Ballard thrust his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles"s sake, and he was pulling himself together for the battle.
"I know beforehand about what you are going to say," he interjected; "but let"s have your version of it."
"You shall have it hot and hot," promised the playwright. "For quite a little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the a.s.sumption that there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn"t exactly creative in the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr.
Ballard, that your workmen are superst.i.tious fools, and that their mental att.i.tude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that the fact--the cause-fact--existed before the superst.i.tion; was the legitimate ancestor of the superst.i.tion. Don"t you believe it?"
Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. "I"ve always believed it," he admitted.
"There isn"t the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it _must_ antedate the diseased mental condition," resumed the theorist, oracularly. "I don"t know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite"s drowning will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive driver, said to me: "They can say what they like, but _I_ ain"t believing that the river stove him all up as if he"d been stomped on in a cattle pen." There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into the field of the unaccountable."
It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.
"You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain, unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the superst.i.tious twist."
"The sequence in this particular instance is immaterial--quite immaterial," argued the playwright, with obstinate a.s.surance. "The fact stays with us that there _was_ something partly unaccountable in this first tragedy to which the thought of Hoskins--the thoughts of all those who knew the circ.u.mstances--could revert."
"Well?" said Ballard.
"It is on this hypothesis that I have constructed my theory. Casting out all the accidents chargeable to carelessness, to disobedience of orders, or to temporary aberration on the part of the workmen, there still remains a goodly number of them carrying this disturbing atom of mystery. Take Sanderson"s case: he came here, I"m told, with a decent record; he was not in any sense of the words a moral degenerate. Yet in a very short time he was killed in a quarrel over a woman at whom the average man wouldn"t look twice. Blacklock, here, has seen this woman; but I"d like to ask if either of you two have?"--this to Ballard and the a.s.sistant.
Ballard shook his head, and Bromley confessed that he had not.
"Well, Jerry and I have the advantage of you--we have seen her," said Wingfield, scoring the point with a self-satisfied smile. "She is a gray-haired Mexican crone, apparently old enough, and certainly hideous enough, to be the Mexican foreman"s mother. I"ll venture the a.s.sertion that Sanderson never thought of her as a feminine possibility at all."
"Hold on; I shall be obliged to spoil your theory there," interrupted Bromley. "Billy unquestionably put himself in Manuel"s hands. He used to go down to the ranch two or three times a week, and he spent money, a good bit of it, on the woman. I know it, because he borrowed from me.
And along toward the last, he never rode in that direction without slinging his Winchester under the stirrup-leather."
"Looking for trouble with Manuel, you would say?" interjected Wingfield.
"No doubt of it. And when the thing finally came to a focus, the Mexican gave Billy a fair show; there were witnesses to that part of it. Manuel told Sanderson to take his gun, which the woman was trying to hide, get on his horse, and ride to the north corner of the corral, where he was to wheel and begin shooting--or be shot in the back. The programme was carried out to the letter. Manuel walked his own horse to the south corner, and the two men wheeled and began to shoot. Three or four shots were fired by each before Billy was. .h.i.t."
"Um!" said the playwright thoughtfully. "There were witnesses, you say?
Some of the Craigmiles cow-boys, I suppose. You took their word for these little details?"
Bromley made a sorrowful face. "No; it was Billy"s own story. The poor fellow lived long enough to tell me what I"ve been pa.s.sing on to you. He tried to tell me something else, something about Manuel and the woman, but there wasn"t time enough."
Wingfield had found the long-stemmed pipe and was filling it from the jar of tobacco on the table. "Was that all?" he inquired.
"All but the finish--which was rather heart-breaking. When he could no longer speak he kept pointing to me and to his rifle, which had been brought in with him. I understood he was trying to tell me that I should keep the gun."
"You did keep it?"
"Yes; I have it yet."
"Let me have a look at it, will you?"
The weapon was found, and Wingfield examined it curiously. "Is it loaded?" he asked.
Bromley nodded. "I guess it is. It hasn"t been out of its case or that cupboard since the day of the killing."
The playwright worked the lever cautiously, and an empty cartridge sh.e.l.l flipped out and fell to the floor. "William Sanderson"s last shot," he remarked reflectively, and went on slowly pumping the lever until eleven loaded cartridges lay in an orderly row on the table. "You were wrong in your count of the number of shots fired, or else the magazine was not full when Sanderson began," he commented. Then, as Blacklock was about to pick up one of the cartridges: "Hold on, Jerry; don"t disturb them, if you please."
Blacklock laughed nervously. "Mr. Wingfield"s got a notion," he said.
"He"s always getting "em."
"I have," was the quiet reply. "But first let me ask you, Bromley: What sort of a rifle marksman was Sanderson?"
"One of the best I ever knew. I have seen him drill a silver dollar three times out of five at a hundred yards when he was feeling well.
There is your element of mystery again: I could never understand how he missed the Mexican three or four times in succession at less than seventy-five yards--unless Manuel"s first shot was the one that hit him.
That might have been it. Billy was all sand; the kind of man to go on shooting after he was killed."