"Good-by, Mr. Howard Pelham. I shouldn"t be shocked speechless if you never came back to Arcadia," he muttered, apostrophising the departing president of Arcadia Irrigation. Then he put away the business entanglement and let his gaze wander in the opposite direction; toward the great house in the upper valley.
At the first eastward glance he sprang up with an exclamation of astonishment. The old king"s palace was looming vast in the moonlight, with a broad sea of silver to take the place of the brown valley level in the bridging of the middle distance. But the curious thing was the lights, unmistakable electrics, as aforetime, twinkling through the tree-crownings of the knoll.
The Kentuckian left the porch and went to the edge of the mesa cliff to look down upon the flood, rising now by imperceptible gradations as the enlarging area of the reservoir lake demanded more water. The lapping tide was fully half way up the back wall of the dam, which meant that the colonel"s power plant at the mouth of the upper canyon must be submerged past using. Yet the lights were on at Castle "Cadia.
While he was speculating over this new mystery, the head-lamps of an automobile came in sight on the roundabout road below the dam, and presently a huge tonneau car, well filled, rolled noiselessly over the plank bridge and pointed its goblin eyes up the incline leading to the camp mesa. When it came to a stand at the cliff"s edge, Ballard saw that it held Mrs. Van Bryck, Bigelow, and one of the Cantrell girls in the tonneau; and that Elsa was sharing the driving-seat with young Blacklock.
"Good evening, Mr. Ballard," said a voice from the shared half of the driving-seat. And then: "We are trying out the new car--isn"t it a beauty?--and we decided to make a neighbourly call. Aren"t you delighted to see us? Please say you are, anyway. It is the least you can do."
XXII
A CRY IN THE NIGHT
The little French office clock--Bromley"s testimonial from his enthusiastic and admiring cla.s.smates of the _ecole Polytechnique_--had chimed the hour of ten; the August moon rose high in a firmament of infinite depths above the deserted bunk shanties and the silent machinery on the camp mesa; the big touring car, long since cooled from its racing climb over the hills of the roundabout road, cast a grotesque and fore-shortened shadow like that of a dwarfed band-wagon on the stone-chip whiteness of the cutting yard; and still the members of the auto party lingered on the porch of the adobe bungalow.
For Ballard, though he was playing the part of the unprepared host, the prolonged stay of the Castle-"Cadians was an unalloyed joy. When he had established Mrs. Van Bryck in the big easy-chair, reminiscent of Engineer Macpherson and his canny skill with carpenter"s tools, and had dragged out the blanket-covered divan for Miss Cantrell and Bigelow, he was free. And freedom, at that moment, meant the privilege of sitting a little apart on the porch step with Elsa Craigmiles.
For the first time in weeks the Kentuckian was able to invite his soul and to think and speak in terms of comfortable unembarra.s.sment. The long strain of the industrial battle was off, and Mr. Pelham"s triumphal beating of drums had been accomplished without loss of life, and with no more serious consequences than a lamed arm for the man who was best able to keep his own counsel. Having definitely determined to send in his resignation in the morning, and thus to avoid any possible entanglement which might arise when the instability of the great dam"s foundations should become generally known, the burden of responsibility was immeasurably lightened. And to cap the ecstatic climax in its sentimental part, Elsa"s mood was not mocking; it was sympathetic to a heart-mellowing degree.
One thing only sounded a jarring note in the soothing theme. That was young Blacklock"s very palpable anxiety and restlessness. When the collegian had placed the big car, and had stopped its motor and extinguished its lights, he had betaken himself to the desert of stone chips, rambling therein aimlessly, but never, as Ballard observed, wandering out of eye-reach of the great gray wall of masonry, of the growing lake in the crooking elbow of the canyon, and the path-girted hillside of the opposite sh.o.r.e. Blacklock"s too ostentatious time-killing was the latest of the small mysteries; and when the Kentuckian came to earth long enough to remark it, he fancied that Jerry was waiting for a cue of some kind--waiting and quite obviously watching.
It was some time after Mrs. Van Bryck, plaintively protesting against being kept out so late, had begun to doze in her chair, and Bigelow had fetched wraps from the car wherewith to cloak a shuddery Miss Cantrell, that Ballard"s companion said, guardedly: "Don"t you think it would be in the nature of a charity to these two behind us if we were to share Jerry"s wanderings for a while?"
"I"m not sharing with Jerry--or any other man--just now," Ballard objected. None the less, he rose and strolled with her across the stone yard; and at the foot of the great derrick he pulled out one of the cutter"s benches for a seat. "This is better than the porch step," he was saying, when Blacklock got up from behind a rejected thorough-stone a few yards away and called to him.
"Just a minute, Mr. Ballard: I"ve got a corking big rattler under this rock. Bring a stick, if you can find one."
Ballard found a stick and went to the help of the snake-catcher.
"Don"t give him a chance at you, Jerry," he warned. "Where is he?"
The collegian drew him around to the farther side of the great thorough-block.
"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 circ.u.mstantially; 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."