Kitabı oku: «The King of Arcadia», sayfa 5

IX
THE BRINK OF HAZARD

The summer night was perfect, and the after-dinner gathering under the great portico became rather a dispersal. The company fell apart into couples and groups when the coffee was served; and while Miss Craigmiles and the playwright were still fraying the worn threads of the dramatic unities, Ballard consoled himself with the older of the Cantrell girls, talking commonplace nothings until his heart ached.

Later on, when young Bigelow had relieved him, and he had given up all hope of breaking into the dramatic duet, he rose to go and make his parting acknowledgments to Miss Cauffrey and the colonel. It was at that moment that Miss Elsa confronted him.

"You are not leaving?" she said. "The evening is still young – even for country folk."

"Measuring by the hours I've been neglected, the evening is old, very old," he retorted reproachfully.

"Which is another way of saying that we have bored you until you are sleepy?" she countered. "But you mustn't go yet – I want to talk to you." And she wheeled a great wicker lounging-chair into a quiet corner, and beat up the pillows in a near-by hammock, and bade him smoke his pipe if he preferred it to the Castle 'Cadia cigars.

"I don't care to smoke anything if you will stay and talk to me," he said, love quickly blotting out the disappointments foregone.

"For this one time you may have both – your pipe and me. Are you obliged to go back to your camp to-night?"

"Yes, indeed. I ran away, as it was. Bromley will have it in for me for dodging him this way."

"Is Mr. Bromley your boss?"

"He is something much better – he is my friend."

Her hammock was swung diagonally across the quiet corner, and she arranged her pillows so that the shadow of a spreading potted palm came between her eyes and the nearest electric globe.

"Am I not your friend, too?" she asked.

Jerry Blacklock and the younger Miss Cantrell were pacing a slow sentry march up and down the open space in front of the lounging-chairs; and Ballard waited until they had made the turn and were safely out of ear-shot before he said: "There are times when I have to admit it, reluctantly."

"How ridiculous!" she scoffed. "What is finer than true friendship?"

"Love," he said simply.

"Cousin Janet will hear you," she warned. Then she mocked him, as was her custom. "Does that mean that you would like to have me tell you about Mr. Wingfield?"

He played trumps again.

"Yes. When is it to be?"

"How crudely elemental you are to-night! Suppose you ask him?"

"He hasn't given me the right."

"Oh. And I have?"

"You are trying to give it to me, aren't you?"

She was swinging gently in the hammock, one daintily booted foot touching the floor.

"You are so painfully direct at times," she complained. "It's like a cold shower-bath; invigorating, but shivery. Do you think Mr. Wingfield really cares anything for me? I don't. I think he regards me merely as so much literary material. He lives from moment to moment in the hope of discovering 'situations.'"

"Well," – assentingly. "I am sure he has chosen a most promising subject – and surroundings. The kingdom of Arcadia reeks with dramatic possibilities, I should say."

Her face was still in the shadow of the branching palm, but the changed tone betrayed her changed mood.

"I have often accused you of having no insight – no intuition," she said musingly. "Yet you have a way of groping blindly to the very heart of things. How could you know that it has come to be the chief object of my life to keep Mr. Wingfield from becoming interested in what you flippantly call 'the dramatic possibilities'?"

"I didn't know it," he returned.

"Of course you didn't. Yet it is true. It is one of the reasons why I gave up going with the Herbert Lassleys after my passage was actually booked on the Carania. Cousin Janet's party was made up. Dosia and Jerry Blacklock came down to the steamer to see us off. Dosia told me that Mr. Wingfield was included. You have often said that I have the courage of a man – I hadn't, then. I was horribly afraid."

"Of what?" he queried.

"Of many things. You would not understand if I should try to explain them."

"I do understand," he hastened to say. "But you have nothing to fear. Castle 'Cadia will merely gain an ally when Wingfield hears the story of the little war. Besides, I was not including your father's controversy with the Arcadia Company in the dramatic material; I was thinking more particularly of the curious and unaccountable happenings that are continually occurring on the work – the accidents."

"There is no connection between the two – in your mind?" she asked. She was looking away from him, and he could not see her face. But the question was eager, almost pathetically eager.

"Assuredly not," he denied promptly. "Otherwise – "

"Otherwise you wouldn't be here to-night as my father's guest, you would say. But others are not as charitable. Mr. Macpherson was one of them. He charged all the trouble to us, though he could prove nothing. He said that if all the circumstances were made public – " She faced him quickly, and he saw that the beautiful eyes were full of trouble. "Can't you see what would happen – what is likely to happen if Mr. Wingfield sees fit to make literary material out of all these mysteries?"

The Kentuckian nodded. "The unthinking, newspaper-reading public would probably make one morsel of the accidents and your father's known antagonism to the company. But Wingfield would be something less than a man and a lover if he could bring himself to the point of making literary capital out of anything that might remotely involve you or your father."

She shook her head doubtfully.

"You don't understand the artistic temperament. It's a passion. I once heard Mr. Wingfield say that a true artist would make copy out of his grandmother."

Ballard scowled. It was quite credible that the Lester Wingfields were lost to all sense of the common decencies, but that Elsa Craigmiles should be in love with the sheik of the caddish tribe was quite beyond belief.

"I'll choke him off for you," he said; and his tone took its colour from the contemptuous under-thought. "But I'm afraid I've already made a mess of it. To tell the truth, I suggested to Miss Van Bryck at dinner that our camp might be a good hunting-ground for Wingfield."

"You said that to Dosia?" There was something like suppressed horror in the low-spoken query.

"Not knowing any better, I did. She was speaking of Wingfield, and of the literary barrenness of house-parties in general. I mentioned the camp as an alternative – told her to bring him down, and I'd – Good heavens! what have I done?"

Even in the softened light of the electric globes he saw that her face had become a pallid mask of terror; that she was swaying in the hammock. He was beside her instantly; and when she hid her face in her hands, his arm went about her for her comforting – this, though Wingfield was chatting amiably with Mrs. Van Bryck no more than three chairs away.

"Don't!" he begged. "I'll get out of it some way – lie out of it, fight out of it, if needful. I didn't know it meant anything to you. If I had – Elsa, dear, I love you; you've known it from the first. You can make believe with other men as you please, but in the end I shall claim you. Now tell me what it is that you want me to do."

Impulsively she caught at the caressing hand on her shoulder, kissed it, and pushed him away with resolute strength.

"You must never forget yourself again, dear friend – or make me forget," she said steadily. "And you must help me as you can. There is trouble – deeper trouble than you know or suspect. I tried to keep you out of it – away from it; and now you are here in Arcadia, to make it worse, infinitely worse. You have seen me laugh and talk with the others, playing the part of the woman you know. Yet there is never a waking moment when the burden of anxiety is lifted."

He mistook her meaning.

"You needn't be anxious about Wingfield's material hunt," he interposed. "If Miss Dosia takes him to the camp, I'll see to it that he doesn't hear any of the ghost stories."

"That is only one of the anxieties," she went on hurriedly. "The greatest of them is – for you."

"For me? Because – "

"Because your way to Arcadia lay over three graves. That means nothing to you – does it also mean nothing that your life was imperilled within an hour of your arrival at your camp?"

He drew the big chair nearer to the hammock and sat down again.

"Now you are letting Bromley's imagination run away with yours. That rock came from our quarry. There was a night gang getting out stone for the dam."

She laid her hand softly on his knee.

"Do you want to know how much I trust you? That stone was thrown by a man who was standing upon the high bluff back of your headquarters. He thought you were alone in the office, and he meant to kill you. Don't ask me who it was, or how I know – I do know."

Ballard started involuntarily. It was not in human nature to take such an announcement calmly.

"Do you mean to say that I was coolly ambushed before I could – "

She silenced him with a quick little gesture. Blacklock and Miss Cantrell were still pacing their sentry beat, and the major's "H'm – ha!" rose in irascible contradiction above the hum of voices.

"I have said all that I dare to say; more than I should have said if you were not so rashly determined to make light of things you do not understand," she rejoined evenly.

"They are things which I should understand – which I must understand if I am to deal intelligently with them," he insisted. "I have been calling them one part accident and three parts superstition or imagination. But if there is design – "

Again she stopped him with the imperative little gesture.

"I did not say there was design," she denied.

It was an impasse, and the silence which followed emphasised it. When he rose to take his leave, love prompted an offer of service, and he made it.

"I cannot help believing that you are mistaken," he qualified. "But I respect your anxiety so much that I would willingly share it if I could. What do you want me to do?"

She turned to look away down the maple-shadowed avenue and her answer had tears in it.

"I want you to be watchful – always watchful. I wish you to believe that your life is in peril, and to act accordingly. And, lastly, I beg you to help me to keep Mr. Wingfield away from Elbow Canyon."

"I shall be heedful," he promised. "And if Mr. Wingfield comes material-hunting, I shall be as inhospitable as possible. May I come again to Castle 'Cadia?"

The invitation was given instantly, almost eagerly.

"Yes; come as often as you can spare the time. Must you go now? Shall I have Otto bring the car and drive you around to your camp?"

Ballard promptly refused to put the chauffeur to the trouble. It was only a little more than a mile in the direct line from the house on the knoll to the point where the river broke through the foothill hogback, and the night was fine and starlit. After the day of hard riding he should enjoy the walk.

Elsa did not go with him when he went to say good-night to Miss Cauffrey and to his host. He left her sitting in the hammock, and found her still there a few minutes later when he came back to say that he must make his acknowledgments to her father through her. "I can't find him, and no one seems to know where he is," he explained.

She rose quickly and went to the end of the portico to look down a second tree-shadowed avenue skirting the mountainward slope of the knoll.

"He must have gone to the laboratory; the lights are on," she said; and then with a smile that thrilled him ecstatically: "You see what your footing is to be at Castle 'Cadia. Father will not make company of you; he expects you to come and go as one of us."

With this heart-warming word for his leave-taking Ballard sought out the path to which she directed him and swung off down the hill to find the trail, half bridle-path and half waggon road, which led by way of the river's windings to the outlet canyon and the camp on the outer mesa.

When he was but a little distance from the house he heard the pad pad of soft footfalls behind him, and presently a great dog of the St. Bernard breed overtook him and walked sedately at his side. Ballard loved a good dog only less than he loved a good horse, and he stopped to pat the St. Bernard, talking to it as he might have talked to a human being.

Afterward, when he went on, the dog kept even pace with him, and would not go back, though Ballard tried to send him, coaxing first and then commanding. To the blandishments the big retriever made his return in kind, wagging his tail and thrusting his huge head between Ballard's knees in token of affection and loyal fealty. To the commands he was entirely deaf, and when Ballard desisted, the dog took his place at one side and one step in advance, as if half impatient at his temporary master's waste of time.

At the foot-bridge crossing the river the dog ran ahead and came back again, much as if he were a scout pioneering the way; and at Ballard's "Good dog! Fine old fellow!" he padded along with still graver dignity, once more catching the step in advance and looking neither to right nor left.

At another time Ballard might have wondered why the great St. Bernard, most sagacious of his tribe, should thus attach himself to a stranger and refuse to be shaken off. But at the moment the young man had a heartful of other and more insistent queryings. Gained ground with the loved one is always the lover's most heady cup of intoxication; but the lees at the bottom of the present cup were sharply tonic, if not bitter.

What was the mystery so evidently enshrouding the tragedies at Elbow Canyon? That they were tragedies rather than accidents there seemed no longer any reasonable doubt. But with the doubt removed the mystery cloud grew instantly thicker and more impenetrable. If the tragedies were growing out of the fight for the possession of Arcadia Park, what manner of man could Colonel Craigmiles be to play the kindly, courteous host at one moment and the backer and instigator of murderers at the next? And if the charge against the colonel be allowed to stand, it immediately dragged in a sequent which was clearly inadmissible: the unavoidable inference being that Elsa Craigmiles was in no uncertain sense her father's accessory.

Ballard was a man and a lover; and his first definition of love was unquestioning loyalty. He was prepared to doubt the evidence of his senses, if need be, but not the perfections of the ideal he had set up in the inner chamber of his heart, naming it Elsa Craigmiles.

These communings and queryings, leading always into the same metaphysical labyrinth, brought the young engineer far on the down-river trail; were still with him when the trail narrowed to a steep one-man path and began to climb the hogback, with one side buttressed by a low cliff and the other falling sheer into the Boiling Water on the left. On this narrow ledge the dog went soberly ahead; and at one of the turns in the path Ballard came upon him standing solidly across the way and effectually blocking it.

"What is it, old boy?" was the man's query; and the dog's answer was a wag of the tail and a low whine. "Go on, old fellow," said Ballard; but the big St. Bernard merely braced himself and whined again. It was quite dark on the high ledge, a fringe of scrub pines on the upper side of the cutting blotting out a fair half of the starlight. Ballard struck a match and looked beyond the dog; looked and drew back with a startled exclamation. Where the continuation of the path should have been there was a gaping chasm pitching steeply down into the Boiling Water.

More lighted matches served to show the extent of the hazard and the trap-like peril of it. A considerable section of the path had slid away in a land- or rock-slide, and Ballard saw how he might easily have walked into the gulf if the dog had not stopped on the brink of it.

"I owe you one, good old boy," he said, stooping to pat the words out on the St. Bernard's head. "I'll pay it when I can; to you, to your mistress, or possibly even to your master. Come on, old fellow, and we'll find another way with less risk in it," and he turned back to climb over the mesa hill under the stone quarries, approaching the headquarters camp from the rear.

When the hill was surmounted and the electric mast lights of the camp lay below, the great dog stopped, sniffing the air suspiciously.

"Don't like the looks of it, do you?" said Ballard. "Well, I guess you'd better go back home. It isn't a very comfortable place down there for little dogs – or big ones. Good-night, old fellow." And, quite as if he understood, the St. Bernard faced about and trotted away toward Castle 'Cadia.

There was a light in the adobe shack when Ballard descended the hill, and he found Bromley sitting up for him. The first assistant engineer was killing time by working on the current estimate for the quarry subcontractor, and he looked up quizzically when his chief came in.

"Been bearding the lion in his den, have you?" he said, cheerfully. "That's right; there's nothing like being neighbourly, even with our friend the enemy. Didn't you find him all the things I said he was – and then some?"

"Yes," returned Ballard, gravely. Then, abruptly: "Loudon, who uses the path that goes up on our side of the canyon and over into the Castle 'Cadia valley?"

"Who? – why, anybody having occasion to. It's the easiest way to reach the wing dam that Sanderson built at the canyon inlet to turn the current against the right bank. Fitzpatrick sends a man over now and then to clear the driftwood from the dam."

"Anybody been over to-day?"

"No."

"How about the cow-puncher – Grigsby – who brought my horse over and got my bag?"

"He was riding, and he came and went by way of our bridge below the dam. You couldn't ride a horse over that hill path."

"You certainly could not," said Ballard grimly. "There is a chunk about the size of this shack gone out of it – dropped into the river, I suppose."

Bromley was frowning reflectively.

"More accidents?" he suggested.

"One more – apparently."

Bromley jumped up, sudden realization grappling him.

"Why, Breckenridge! – you've just come over that path – alone, and in the dark!"

"Part way over it, and in the dark, yes; but not alone, luckily. The Craigmiles's dog – the big St. Bernard – was with me, and he stopped on the edge of the break. Otherwise I might have walked into it – most probably should have walked into it."

Bromley began to tramp the floor with his hands in his pockets.

"I can't remember," he said; and again, "I can't remember. I was over there yesterday, or the day before. It was all right then. It was a good trail. Why, Breckenridge" – with sudden emphasis – "it would have taken a charge of dynamite to blow it down!"

Ballard dropped lazily into a chair and locked his hands at the back of his head. "And you say that the hoodoo hasn't got around to using high explosives yet, eh? By the way, have there been any more visitations since I went out on the line last Tuesday?"

Bromley was shaking his head in the negative when the door opened with a jerk and Bessinger, the telegraph operator whose wire was in the railroad yard office, tumbled in, white faced.

"Hoskins and the Two!" he gasped. "They're piled up under a material train three miles down the track! Fitzpatrick is turning out a wrecking crew from the bunk shanties, and he sent me up to call you!"

Bromley's quick glance aside for Ballard was acutely significant.

"I guess I'd better change that 'No' of mine to a qualified 'Yes,'" he corrected. "The visitation seems to have come." Then to Bessinger: "Get your breath, Billy, and then chase back to Fitzpatrick. Tell him we'll be with him as soon as Mr. Ballard can change his clothes."

X
HOSKINS'S GHOST

The wreck in the rocky hills west of the Elbow Canyon railroad yard proved to be less calamitous than Bessinger's report, handed on from the excited alarm brought in by a demoralized train flagman, had pictured it. When Ballard and Bromley, hastening to the rescue on Fitzpatrick's relief train, reached the scene of the accident, they found Hoskins's engine and fifteen cars in the ditch, and the second flagman with a broken arm; but Hoskins himself was unhurt, as were the remaining members of the train crew.

Turning the work of track clearing over to Bromley and the relief crew, Ballard began at once to pry irritably into causes; irritably since wrecks meant delays, and President Pelham's letters were already cracking the whip for greater expedition.

It was a singular derailment, and at first none of the trainmen seemed to be able to account for it. The point of disaster was on a sharp curve where the narrow-gauge track bent like a strained bow around one of the rocky hills. As the débris lay, the train seemed to have broken in two on the knuckle of the curve, and here the singularity was emphasised. The overturned cars were not merely derailed; they were locked and crushed together, and heaped up and strewn abroad, in a fashion to indicate a collision rather than a simple jumping of the track.

Ballard used Galliford, the train conductor, for the first heel of his pry.

"I guess you and Hoskins both need about thirty days," was the way he opened upon Galliford. "How long had your train been broken in two before the two sections came in collision?"

"If we was broke in two, nobody knew it. I was in the caboose 'lookout' myself, and I saw the Two's gauge-light track around the curve. Next I knew, I was smashin' the glass in the 'lookout' with my head, and the train was chasin' out on the prairie. I'll take the thirty days, all right, and I won't sue the company for the cuts on my head. But I'll be danged if I'll take the blame, Mr. Ballard." The conductor spoke as a man.

"Somebody's got to take it," snapped the chief. "If you didn't break in two, what did happen?"

"Now you've got me guessing, and I hain't got any more guesses left. At first I thought Hoskins had hit something 'round on the far side o' the curve. That's what it felt like. Then, for a second or two, I could have sworn he had the Two in the reverse, backing his end of the train up against my end and out into the sage-brush."

"What does Hoskins say? Where is he?" demanded Ballard; and together they picked their way around to the other end of the wreck, looking for the engineman.

Hoskins, however, was not to be found. Fitzpatrick had seen him groping about in the cab of his overturned engine; and Bromley, when the inquiry reached him, explained that he had sent Hoskins up to camp on a hand-car which was going back for tools.

"He was pretty badly shaken up, and I told him he'd better hunt the bunk shanty and rest his nerves awhile. We didn't need him," said the assistant, accounting for the engine-man's disappearance.

Ballard let the investigation rest for the moment, but later, when Bromley was working the contractor's gang on the track obstructions farther along, he lighted a flare torch at the fire some of the men had made out of the wreck kindling wood, and began a critical examination of the derailed and débris-covered locomotive.

It was a Baldwin ten-wheel type, with the boiler extending rather more than half-way through the cab, and since it had rolled over on the right-hand side, the controlling levers were under the crushed wreckage of the cab. None the less, Ballard saw what he was looking for; afterward making assurance doubly sure by prying at the engine's brake-shoes and thrusting the pinch-bar of inquiry into various mechanisms under the trucks and driving-wheels.

It was an hour past midnight when Bromley reported the track clear, and asked if the volunteer wrecking crew should go on and try to pick up the cripples.

"Not to-night," was Ballard's decision. "We'll get Williams and his track-layers in from the front to-morrow and let them tackle it. Williams used to be Upham's wrecking boss over on the D. & U. P. main line, and he'll make short work of this little pile-up, engine and all."

Accordingly, the whistle of the relief train's engine was blown to recall Fitzpatrick's men, and a little later the string of flats, men-laden, trailed away among the up-river hills, leaving the scene of the disaster with only the dull red glow of the workmen's night fire to illuminate it.

When the rumble of the receding relief train was no longer audible, the figure of a man, dimly outlined in the dusky glow of the fire, materialised out of the shadows of the nearest arroyo. First making sure that no watchman had been left to guard the point of hazard, the man groped purposefully under the fallen locomotive and drew forth a stout steel bar which had evidently been hidden for this later finding. With this bar for a lever, the lone wrecker fell fiercely at work under the broken cab, prying and heaving until the sweat started in great drops under the visor of his workman's cap and ran down to make rivulets of gray in the grime on his face.

Whatever he was trying to do seemed difficult of accomplishment, if not impossible. Again and again he strove at his task, pausing now and then to take breath or to rub his moist hands in the dry sand for the better gripping of the smooth steel. Finally – it was when the embers of the fire on the hill slope were flickering to their extinction – the bar slipped and let him down heavily. The fall must have partly stunned him, since it was some little time before he staggered to his feet, flung the bar into the wreck with a morose oath, and limped away up the track toward the headquarters camp, turning once and again to shake his fist at the capsized locomotive in the ditch at the curve.

It was in the afternoon of the day following the wreck that Ballard made the laboratory test for blame; the office room in the adobe shack serving as the "sweat-box."

First came the flagmen, one at a time, their stories agreeing well enough, and both corroborating Galliford's account. Next came Hoskins's fireman, a green boy from the Alta Vista mines, who had been making his first trip over the road. He knew nothing save that he had looked up between shovelfuls to see Hoskins fighting with his levers, and had judged the time to be ripe for the life-saving jump.

Last of all came Hoskins, hanging his head and looking as if he had been caught stealing sheep.

"Tell it straight," was Ballard's curt caution; and the engineman stumbled through a recital in which haziness and inconsistency struggled for first place. He had seen something on the track or he thought he had, and had tried to stop. Before he could bring the train under control he had heard the crashing of the wreck in the rear. He admitted that he had jumped while the engine was still in motion.

"Which way was she running when you jumped, John? – forward or backward?" asked Ballard, quietly.

Bromley, who was making pencil notes of the evidence, looked up quickly and saw the big engine-man's jaw drop.

"How could she be runnin' any way but forrards?" he returned, sullenly.

Ballard was smoking, and he shifted his cigar to say: "I didn't know." Then, with sudden heat:

"But I mean to know, Hoskins; I mean to go quite to the bottom of this, here and now! You've been garbling the facts; purposely, or because you are still too badly rattled to know what you are talking about. I can tell you what you did: for some reason you made an emergency stop; you did make it, either with the brakes or without them. Then you put your engine in the reverse motion and backed; you were backing when you jumped, and the engine was still backing when it left the rails."

Hoskins put his shoulders against the wall and passed from sullenness to deep dejection. "I've got a wife and two kids back in Alta Vista, and I'm all in," he said. "What is there about it that you don't know, Mr. Ballard?"

"There are two or three other things that I do know, and one that I don't. You didn't come up to the camp on the hand-car last night; and after we left the wreck, somebody dug around in the Two's cab trying to fix things so that they would look a little better for John Hoskins. So much I found out this morning. But I don't care particularly about that: what I want to know is the first cause. What made you lose your head?"

"I told you; there was something on the track."

"What was it?"

"It was – well, it was what once was a man."

Ballard bit hard on his cigar, and all the phrases presenting themselves were profane. But a glance from Bromley enabled him to say, with decent self-control: "Go on; tell us about it."

"There ain't much to tell, and I reckon you won't believe a thing 'at I say," Hoskins began monotonously. "Did you or Mr. Bromley notice what bend o' the river that curve is at?"

Ballard said "No," and Bromley shook his head. The engineman went on.

"It's where he fell in and got drownded – Mr. Braithwaite, I mean. I reckon it sounds mighty foolish to you-all, sittin' here in the good old daylight, with nothin' happening: but I saw him. When the Two's headlight jerked around the curve and picked him up, he was standing between the rails, sideways, and lookin' off toward the river. He had the same little old two-peaked cap on that he always wore, and he had his fishin'-rod over his shoulder. I didn't have three car lengths to the good when I saw him; and – and – well, I reckon I went plumb crazy." Hoskins was a large man and muscular rather than fat; but he was sweating again, and could not hold his hands still.

Ballard got up and walked to the window which looked out upon the stone yard. When he turned again it was to ask Hoskins, quite mildly, if he believed in ghosts.

"I never allowed to, before this, Mr. Ballard."

"Yet you have often thought of Braithwaite's drowning, when you have been rounding that particular curve? I remember you pointed out the place to me."

Hoskins nodded. "I reckon I never have run by there since without thinking of it."

Ballard sat down again and tilted his chair to the reflective angle.