"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."

"My notion is that he didn't have the slightest chance in the wide world," was Wingfield's comment. "Let us prove or disprove it if we can," and he opened a blade of his penknife and dug the point of it into the bullet of the cartridge first extracted from the dead man's gun. "There is my notion – and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the knife-blade.

The playwright's audience was interested now, beyond all question of doubt. If Wingfield had suddenly hypnotised the three who saw this unexpected confirmation of his theory of treachery in the Sanderson tragedy, the awed silence that fell upon the little group around the table could not have been more profound. It was Bromley who broke the spell, prefacing his exclamation with a mirthless laugh.

"Your gifts of deduction are almost uncanny, Wingfield," he asserted. "How could you reason your way around to that?" – pointing at the clay bullet.

"I didn't," was the calm reply. "Imagination can double discount pure logic in the investigative field, nine times out of ten. And in this instance it wasn't my imagination: it was another man's. I once read a story in which the author made his villain kill a man with this same little trick of sham bullets. I merely remembered the story. Now let us see how many more there are to go with this."

There were four of the cartridges capped with the dummy bullets; the remaining seven being genuine. Wingfield did the sum arithmetical aloud. "Four and five are nine, and nine and seven are sixteen. Sanderson started out that day with a full magazine, we'll assume. He fired five of these dummies – with perfect immunity for Manuel – and here are the other four. If the woman had had a little more time, when she was pretending to hide the gun, she would have pumped out all of the good cartridges. Being somewhat hurried, she exchanged only nine, which, in an even game and shot for shot, gave Manuel ten chances to Sanderson's one. It was a cinch."

Ballard sat back in his chair handling the empty rifle. Bromley's pallid face turned gray. The tragedy had touched him very sharply at the time; and this new and unexpected evidence of gross treachery revived all the horror of the day when Sanderson had been carried in and laid upon the office couch to die.

"Poor Billy!" he said. "It was a cold-blooded murder, and he knew it. That was what he was trying to tell me – and couldn't."

"That was my hypothesis from the first," Wingfield asserted promptly. "But the motive seemed to be lacking; it still seems to be lacking. Have either of you two imagination enough to help me out?"

"The motive?" queried Bromley. "Why, that remains the same, doesn't it? – more's the pity."

The playwright had lighted the long-stemmed pipe, and was thoughtfully blowing smoke rings toward the new patch in the bungalow ceiling.

"Not if my theory is to stand, Mr. Bromley. You see, I am proceeding confidently upon the supposition that Sanderson wasn't messing in Manuel's domestic affairs. I can't believe for a moment that it was a quarrel over the woman, with Manuel's jealousy to account for the killing. It's too absurdly preposterous. Settling that fact to my own complete satisfaction, I began to search for the real motive, and it is for you to say whether I am right or wrong. Tell me: was Sanderson more than casually interested in the details of Braithwaite's drowning? That story must have been pretty fresh and raw in everybody's recollection at that time."

Bromley's rejoinder was promptly affirmative. "It was; and Sanderson was interested. As Braithwaite's successor, and with the fight between the company and the colonel transferred to him, he couldn't shirk his responsibility. Now that you recall it, I remember very well that he had notions of his own about Braithwaite's taking off. He was a quiet sort; didn't talk much; but what little he did say gave me to understand that he suspected foul play of some kind. And here's your theory again, Mr. Wingfield: if a hint of what he suspected ever got wind in the camp, it would account for the superstitious twist given to the drowning by Hoskins and the others, wouldn't it?"

Wingfield smote the table with his fist.

"There is your connecting link!" he exclaimed. "We have just proved beyond doubt that Sanderson wasn't killed in a fair fight: he was murdered, and the murder was carefully planned beforehand. By the same token, Braithwaite was murdered, too! Recall the circumstances as they have been related by the eye-witnesses: when they found the Government man and took him out of the river, his skull was crushed and both arms were broken … see here!" he threw himself quickly into the attitude of one fishing from a riverbank. "Suppose somebody creeps up behind me with a club raised to brain me: I get a glimpse of him or his shadow, dodge, fling up my arms, so – and one good, smashing blow does the business. That's all; or all but one little item. Manuel's woman knows who struck that blow, and Sanderson was trying to bribe her to tell."

If the announcement had been an explosion to rock the bungalow on its foundations, the effect could scarcely have been more striking. Ballard flung the empty gun aside and sprang to his feet. The collegian sat down weakly and stared. Bromley's jaw dropped, and he glared across at Wingfield as if the clever deduction were a mortal affront to be crammed down the throat of its originator.

The playwright's smile was the eye-wrinkling of one who prides himself upon the ability to keep his head when others are panic-stricken.

"Seems to knock you fellows all in a heap," he remarked, calmly. "What have you been doing all these months that you haven't dug it out for yourselves?"

Bromley was moistening his lips.

"Go on, Mr. Wingfield, if you please. Tell us all you know – or think you know."

"There is more; a good bit more," was the cool reply. "Three months ago you had a train wreck on the railroad – two men killed. 'Rough track,' was the cause assigned, Mr. Bromley; but that was one time when your cautious chief, Macpherson, fell down. The two surviving trainmen, questioned separately by me within the past week, both say that there were at least inferential proofs of pulled spikes and a loosened rail. A little later one man was killed and two were crippled by the premature explosion of a charge of dynamite in the quarry. Carelessness, this time, on the part of the men involved; and you said it, Mr. Bromley. It was nothing of the kind. Some one had substituted a coil of quick-firing fuse for the ordinary slow-match the men had been using, and the thing went off before the cry of 'fire' could be given. How do I know?"

"Yes; how do you know?" demanded Bromley.

"By a mere fluke, and not by any process of deduction, in this instance, as it happens. One of the survivors was crafty enough to steal the coil of substituted fuse, having some vague notion of suing the company for damages for supplying poor material. Like other men of his class, he gave up the notion when he got well of his injuries; but it was revived again the other day when one of his comrades told him I was a lawyer. He made a date with me, told me his tale, and showed me the carefully preserved coil of bad fuse. I cut off a bit of it and did a little experimenting. Look at this." He took a piece of fuse from his pocket, uncoiled it upon the table, and applied a match. It went off like a flash of dry gunpowder, burning through from end to end in a fraction of a second.

"Go on," said Ballard, speaking for the first time since the playwright had begun his unravelling of the tangled threads of disaster.

"We dismiss the quarry catastrophe and come to the fall of a great boulder from the hill-crags on the farther side of the river some two weeks later. This heaven-sent projectile smashed into the dam structure, broke out a chunk of the completed masonry, killed two men outright and injured half a dozen others – correct me if I distort the details, Mr. Bromley. This time there was no investigation worthy of the name, if I have gathered my information carefully enough. Other rocks had fallen from the same slope; and after Fitzpatrick had assured himself that there were no more likely to fall, the matter was charged off to the accident account. If you and Michael Fitzpatrick had been the typical coroner's jury, Mr. Bromley, you couldn't have been more easily satisfied with purely inferential evidence. I wasn't satisfied until I had climbed painfully to the almost inaccessible ledge from which the boulder had fallen. Once there, however, the 'act of God' became very plainly the act of man. The 'heel' used as a fulcrum in levering the rock from the ledge was still in place; and the man in the case, in his haste or in his indifference to discovery, had left the iron crowbar with which he had pried the stone from its bed. The crowbar is still there."

"Is that all?" asked Bromley, wetting his lips again.

"By no manner of means," was the equable rejoinder. "I could go on indefinitely. The falling derrick may or may not have been aimed specially at Macpherson; but it committed premeditated murder, just the same – the broken guy cable was rotted in two with acid. Again you will demand to know how I know. I satisfied myself by making a few simple tests on the broken ends with chemicals filched out of Colonel Craigmiles's laboratory up yonder in the second story of his electric plant. No; I'm no chemist. But you will find, when you come to write stories and plays, that a smattering knowledge of every man's trade comes in handy. Otherwise you'll be writing yourself down as a blundering ass in every second paragraph."

Wingfield paused, but it was only to relight his pipe. When the tobacco was burning again he went on, in the same even tone.

"The falling derrick brings us down to your régime, Mr. Ballard. I pass by the incident of the hurled stone that made that awkward patch necessary in your ceiling: you yourself have admitted that the stone could not have come from the blasting in the quarry. But there was another railroad accident which deserves mention. No doubt Hoskins has told you what he saw almost on the very spot where Braithwaite's snuffing-out occurred. He thought it was Braithwaite's ghost – he still thinks so. But we are less credulous; or, at least, I was. Like Sanderson, I have been making friends – or enemies – at the Craigmiles cattle ranch. In fact, I was down there the day following Hoskins's misfortune. Curiously enough, there was another man who saw the Braithwaite ghost – one 'Scotty,' a cow-boy. He was night-herding on the ranch bunch of beef cattle on the night of the accident, and he saw the ghost, leather leggings, Norfolk shooting-jacket, and double-visored British cap all complete, riding a horse down to the river a little while before the train came around the curve. And after the hullabaloo, he saw it again, riding quietly back to the ranch."

Bromley was gripping the edge of the table and exchanging glances with Ballard. It was the Kentuckian who broke the silence which fell upon the group around the table when the playwright made an end.

"Summing it all up, what is your conclusion, Wingfield? You have reached one long before this, I take it."

The amateur Vidocq made a slow sign of assent.

"As I have told you, I went into this thing out of sheer curiosity, and partly because there were obstructions put in my way. That's human nature. But afterward it laid hold of me and held me by its own grip. I'm not sure that there have been any simon-pure accidents at all. So far as I have gone, everything that has happened has been made to happen; has been carefully planned and prepared for in advance by some one of more than ordinary intelligence – and vindictiveness. And, unhappily, the motive is only too painfully apparent. The work on this irrigation project of yours is to be hampered and delayed by all possible means, even to the sacrificing of human life."

Again there was a silence in the thick-walled office room; a silence so strained that the clickings of the stone hammers in the yard and the rasping cacophonies of the hoisting engines at the dam seemed far removed. It was Bromley who spoke first, and his question was pointedly suggestive.

"You haven't stopped with the broad generalisation, Mr. Wingfield?"

"Meaning that I have found the man who is responsible for all these desperate and deadly doings? I am afraid I have. There would seem to be only one man in the world whose personal interests are at stake. Naturally, I haven't gone very deeply into that part of it. But didn't somebody tell me there is a fight on in the courts between the Arcadia Company and Colonel Craigmiles? – a fight in which delay is the one thing needful for the colonel?"

Ballard came back to the table and stood within arm's-reach of the speaker. His square jaw had taken on the fighting angle, and his eyes were cold and hard.

"What are you going to do about it, Mr. Wingfield? Have you arrived at that conclusion, also?"

Wingfield's doubtful glance was in young Blacklock's direction, and his reply was evasive.

"That is a very natural question; but doesn't it strike you, Mr. Ballard, that this is hardly the time or place to go into it?"

"No."

"Very well… Jerry, what we are talking about now is strictly between gentlemen: do you understand?"

"Sure thing," said the collegian.

"You ask me what I am going to do, Mr. Ballard; and in return I'll ask you to put yourself in my place. Clearly, it is a law-abiding citizen's plain duty to go and lay the bald facts before the nearest prosecuting attorney and let the law take its course. On the other hand, I'm only a man like other men, and – "

"And you are Colonel Craigmiles's guest. Go on," said Ballard, straightening the path of hesitation for him.

"That's it," nodded Wingfield. "As you say, I am his guest; and – er – well, there is another reason why I should be the last person in the world to make or meddle. At first, I was brashly incredulous, as anyone would be who was mixing and mingling with the colonel in the daily amenities. Later, when the ugly fact persisted and I was obliged to admit it, the personal factor entered the equation. It's bad medicine, any way you decide to take it."

"Still you are not telling us what you mean to do, Mr. Wingfield," Bromley reminded him gently.

"No; but I don't mind telling you. I have about decided upon a weak sort of compromise. This thing will come out – it's bound to come out in the pretty immediate hence; and I don't want to be here when the sheriff arrives. I think I shall have a very urgent call to go back to New York."

Bromley laid hold of the table and pulled himself to his feet; but it was Ballard who said, slowly, as one who weighs his words and the full import of them: "Mr. Wingfield, you are more different kinds of an ass than I took you to be, and that is saying a great deal. Out of a mass of hearsay, the idle stories of a lot of workmen whose idea of humour has been to make a butt of you, you have built up this fantastic fairy tale. I am charitable enough to believe that you couldn't help it; it is a part of your equipment as a professional maker of fairy tales. But there are two things for which I shall take it upon myself to answer personally. You will not leave Castle 'Cadia until your time is out; and you'll not leave this room until you have promised the three of us that this cock-and-bull story of yours stops right here with its first telling."

"That's so," added Bromley, with a quiet menace in his tone.

It was the playwright's turn to gasp, and he did it, very realistically.

"You – you don't believe it? with all the three-sheet-poster evidence staring you in the face? Why, great Joash! you must be stark, staring mad – both of you!" he raved. And then to Blacklock: "Are you in it, too, Jerry?"

"I guess I am," returned the collegian, meaning no more than that he felt constrained to stand with the men of his chosen profession.

Wingfield drew a long breath and with it regained the impersonal heights of the unemotional observer. "Of course, it is just as you please," he said, carelessly. "I had a foolish notion I was doing you two a good turn; but if you choose to take the other view of it – well, there is no accounting for tastes. Drink your own liquor and give the house a good name. I'll dig up my day-pay later on: it's cracking good material, you know."

"That is another thing," Ballard went on, still more decisively. "If you ever put pen to paper with these crazy theories of yours for a basis, I shall make it my business to hunt you down as I would a wild beast."

"So shall I," echoed Bromley.

Wingfield rose and put the long-stemmed pipe carefully aside.

"You are a precious pair of bally idiots," he remarked, quite without heat. Then he looked at his watch and spoke pointedly to Blacklock. "You're forgetting Miss Elsa's fishing party to the upper canyon, aren't you? Suppose we drive around to Castle 'Cadia in the car. You can send Otto back after Mr. Bromley later on." And young Blacklock was so blankly dazed by the cool impudence of the suggestion that he consented and left the bungalow with the playwright.

For some little time after the stuttering purr of the motor-car had died away the two men sat as Wingfield had left them, each busy with his own thoughts. Bromley was absently fingering the cartridges from Sanderson's rifle, mute proofs of the truth of the playwright's theories, and Ballard seemed to have forgotten that he had promised Fitzpatrick to run a line for an additional side-track in the railroad yard.

"Do you blame me, Loudon?" he asked, after the silence had wrought its perfect work.

"No; there was nothing else to do. But I couldn't help being sorry for him."

"So was I," was the instant rejoinder. "Wingfield is all kinds of a decent fellow; and the way he has untangled the thing is nothing short of masterly. But I had to tie his tongue; you know I had to do that, Loudon."

"Of course, you had to."

Silence again for a little space; and then:

"There is no doubt in your mind that he has hit upon the true solution of all the little mysteries?"

Bromley shook his head slowly. "None at all, I am sorry to say. I have suspected it, in part, at least, for a good while. And I had proof positive before Wingfield gave it to us."

"How?" queried Ballard.

Bromley was still fingering the cartridges. "I hate to tell you, Breckenridge. And yet you ought to know," he added. "It concerns you vitally."

Ballard's smile was patient. "I am well past the shocking point," he averred. "After what we have pulled through in the last hour we may as well make a clean sweep of it."

"Well, then; I didn't stumble over the canyon cliff that night four weeks ago: I was knocked over."

"What!"

"It's true."

"And you know who did it?"

"I can make a pretty good guess. While I was down at the wing dam a man passed me, coming from the direction of the great house. He was a big man, and he was muffled to the ears in a rain-coat. I know, because I heard the peculiar 'mackintosh' rustle as he went by me. I knew then who it was; would have known even if I hadn't had a glimpse of his face at the passing instant. It is one of the colonel's eccentricities never to go out after nightfall – in a bone-dry country, mind you – without wearing a rain-coat."

"Well?" said Ballard.

"He didn't see me, though I thought at first that he did; he kept looking back as if he were expecting somebody to follow him. He took the path on our side of the canyon – the one I took a few minutes later. That's all; except that I would swear that I heard the 'slither' of a mackintosh just as the blow fell that knocked me down and out.

"Heavens, Loudon! It's too grossly unbelievable! Why, man, he saved your life after the fact, risking his own in a mad drive down here from Castle 'Cadia in the car to do it! You wouldn't have lived until morning if he hadn't come."

"It is unbelievable, as you say; and yet it isn't, when you have surrounded all the facts. What is the reason, the only reason, why Colonel Craigmiles should resort to all these desperate expedients?"

"Delay, of course; time to get his legal fight shaped up in the courts."

"Exactly. If he can hold us back long enough, the dam will never be completed. He knows this, and Mr. Pelham knows it, too. Unhappily for us, the colonel has found a way to ensure the delay. The work can't go on without a chief of construction."

"But, good Lord, Loudon, you're not the 'Big Boss'; and, besides, the man loves you like a son! Why should he try to kill you one minute and move heaven and earth to save your life the next?"

Bromley shook his head sorrowfully.

"That is what made me say what I did about not wanting to tell you, Breckenridge. That crack over the head wasn't meant for me; it was meant for you. If it had not been so dark under the hill that night – but it was; pocket-dark in the shadow of the pines. And he knew you'd be coming along that path on your way back to camp – knew you'd be coming, and wasn't expecting anybody else. Don't you see?"

Ballard jumped up and began to pace the floor.

"My God!" he ejaculated; "I was his guest; I had just broken bread at his table! Bromley, when he went out to lie in wait for me, he left me talking with his daughter! It's too horrible!"

Bromley had stood the eleven cartridges, false and true, in a curving row on the table. The crooking line took the shape of a huge interrogation point.

"Wingfield thought he had solved all the mysteries, but the darkest of them remains untouched," he commented. "How can the genial, kindly, magnanimous man we know, or think we know, be such a fiend incarnate?" Then he broke ground again in the old field. "Will you do now what I begged you to do at first? – throw up this cursed job and go away?"

Ballard stopped short in his tramping and his answer was an explosive "No!"

"That is half righteous anger, and half something else. What is the other half, Breckenridge?" And when Ballard did not define it: "I can guess it; it is the same thing that made you stuff Wingfield's theories down his throat a few minutes ago. You are sorry for the daughter."

Through the open door Ballard saw Fitzpatrick coming across the stone yard.

"You've guessed it, Loudon; or rather, I think you have known it all along. I love Elsa Craigmiles; I loved her long before I ever heard of Arcadia or its king. Now you know why Wingfield mustn't be allowed to talk; why I mustn't go away and give place to a new chief who might live to see Elsa's father hanged. She must be spared and defended at any cost. One other word before Fitzpatrick cuts in: When my time comes, if it does come, you and one other man will know how I passed out and why. I want your promise that you'll keep still, and that you will keep Wingfield still. Blacklock doesn't count."

"Sure," said Bromley, quietly; and then, with the big Irish contractor's shadow fairly darkening the door: "You'll do the same for me, Breckenridge, won't you? Because – oh, confound it all! – I'm in the same boat with you; without a ghost of a show, you understand."

Ballard put his back squarely to Michael Fitzpatrick scraping his feet on the puncheon-floored porch of the bungalow, and gripped Bromley's hand across the table.

"It's a bargain," he declared warmly. "We'll take the long chance and stand by her together, old man. And if she chooses the better part in the end, I'll try not to act like a jealous fool. Now you turn in and lie down a while. I've got to go with Michael."

This time it was Bromley who saved the situation. "What a pair of luminous donkeys we are!" he laughed. "She calls you 'dear friend,' and me 'little brother.' If we're right good and tractable, we may get cards to her wedding – with Wingfield."