Ballard gave the Saturday, his first day in the new field, to Bromley and the work on the dam, inspecting, criticising, suggesting changes, and otherwise adjusting the wheels of the complicated constructing mechanism at the Elbow Canyon nerve centre to run efficiently and smoothly, and at accelerated speed.

"That's about all there is to say," he summed up to his admiring assistant, at the close of his first administrative day. "You're keyed up to concert pitch all right, here, and the tempo is not so bad. But 'drive' is the word, Loudon. Wherever you see a chance to cut a corner, cut it. The Fitzpatricks are a little inclined to be slow and sure: crowd the idea into old Brian's head that bonuses are earned by being swift and sure."

"Which means that you're not going to stay here and drive the stone and concrete gangs yourself?" queried Bromley.

"That is what it means, for the present," replied the new chief; and at daybreak Monday morning he was off, bronco-back, to put in a busy fortnight quartering the field in all directions and getting in touch with the various subcontractors at the many subsidiary camps of ditch diggers and railroad builders scattered over the length and breadth of the Kingdom of Arcadia.

On one of the few nights when he was able to return to the headquarters camp for supper and lodging, Bromley proposed a visit to Castle 'Cadia. Ballard's refusal was prompt and decided.

"No, Loudon; not for me, yet a while. I'm too tired to be anybody's good company," was the form the refusal took. "Go gossiping, if you feel like it, but leave me out of the social game until I get a little better grip on the working details. Later on, perhaps, I'll go with you and pay my respects to Colonel Craigmiles – but not to-night."

Bromley went alone and found that Ballard's guess based upon his glimpse of the loaded buckboards en route was borne out by the facts. Castle 'Cadia was comfortably filled with a summer house-party; and Miss Craigmiles had given up her European yachting voyage to come home and play the hostess to her father's guests.

Also, Bromley discovered that the colonel's daughter drew her own conclusions from Ballard's refusal to present himself, the discovery developing upon Miss Elsa's frank statement of her convictions.

"I know your new tyrant," she laughed; "I have known him for ages. He won't come to Castle 'Cadia; he is afraid we might make him disloyal to his Arcadia Irrigation salt. You may tell him I said so, if you happen to remember it."

Bromley did remember it, but it was late when he returned to the camp at the canyon, and Ballard was asleep. And the next morning the diligent new chief was mounted and gone as usual long before the "turn-out" whistle blew; for which cause Miss Elsa's challenge remained undelivered; was allowed to lie until the dust of intervening busy days had quite obscured it.

It was on these scouting gallops to the outlying camps that Ballard defined the limits of the "hoodoo." Its influence, he found, diminished proportionately as the square of the distance from the headquarters camp at Elbow Canyon. But in the wider field there were hindrances of another and more tangible sort.

Bourke Fitzpatrick, the younger of the brothers in the contracting firm, was in charge of the ditch digging; and he had irritating tales to tell of the lawless doings of Colonel Craigmiles's herdsmen.

"I'm telling you, Mr. Ballard, there isn't anything them devils won't be up to," he complained, not without bitterness. "One night they'll uncouple every wagon on the job and throw the coupling-pins away; and the next, maybe, they'll be stampeding the mules. Two weeks ago, on Dan Moriarty's section, they came with men and horses in the dead of night, hitched up the scrapers, and put a thousand yards of earth back into the ditch."

"Wear it out good-naturedly, if you can, Bourke; it is only horse-play," was Ballard's advice. That grown men should seriously hope to defeat the designs of a great corporation by any such puerile means was inconceivable.

"Horse-play, is it?" snapped Fitzpatrick. "Don't you believe it, Mr. Ballard. I can take a joke with any man living; but this is no joke. It comes mighty near being war – with the scrapping all on one side."

"A night guard?" suggested Ballard.

Fitzpatrick shook his head.

"We've tried that; and you'll not get a man to patrol the work since Denny Flaherty took his medicine. The cow-punchers roped him and skidded him 'round over the prairie till it took one of the men a whole blessed day to dig the cactus thorns out of him. And me paying both of them overtime. Would you call that a joke?"

Ballard's reply revealed some latent doubt as to the justification for Bromley's defense of Colonel Craigmiles's fighting methods.

"If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"

The contractor shook his head.

"The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all, as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican foreman; and Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody. Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang that roped him."

Ballard was feeling less peaceable when he rode on to the next camp, and as he made the round of the northern outposts the fighting strain which had come down to him from his pioneer ancestors began to assert itself in spite of his efforts to control it. At every stopping-place Fitzpatrick's complaint was amplified. Depredations had followed each other with increasing frequency since Macpherson's death; and once, when one of the subcontractors had been provoked into resistance, arms had been used and a free fight had ensued.

Turning the matter over in his mind in growing indignation, Ballard had determined, by the time he had made the complete round of the outlying camps, upon the course he should pursue. "I'll run a sheriff's posse in here and clean up the entire outfit; that's about what I'll do!" he was saying wrathfully to himself as he galloped eastward on the stage trail late in the afternoon of the final day. "The Lord knows I don't want to make a blood-feud of it, but if they will have it – "

The interruption was a little object-lesson illustrating the grievances of the contractors. Roughly paralleling the stage trail ran the line of the proposed southern lateral canal, marked by its double row of location stakes. At a turn in the road Ballard came suddenly upon what appeared to be an impromptu game of polo.

Flap-hatted herdsmen in shaggy overalls, and swinging long clubs in lieu of polo sticks, were riding in curious zigzags over the canal course, and bending for a drive at each right and left swerve of their wiry little mounts. It took the Kentuckian a full minute to master the intricacies of the game. Then he saw what was doing. The location stakes for the ditch boundaries were set opposite and alternate, and the object of the dodging riders was to determine which of them could club the greatest number of stakes out of the ground without missing a blow or drawing rein.

Ballard singled out the leader, a handsome, well-built caballero, with the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of things, red wrath to the fore.

"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"

"Si, Señor," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.

"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia Company."

"Ha! Señor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."

"Never mind that; the pleasure isn't mutual, by a damned sight. You tell your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes back where they found them." Ballard was hot.

"You give-a the h-order in this valley, señor?" asked the Mexican softly.

"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"

"Señor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me like-a that!"

"Have you?" snorted Ballard contemptuously. "Well, you won't kill me. Call your men off, I say!"

There was no need. The makeshift polo game had paused, and the riders were gathering about the quarrelling two.

"Bat your left eye once, and we'll rope him for you, Manuel," said one.

"Wonder if I c'd knock a two-bagger with that hat o' his'n without mussin' his hair?" said another.

"Say, you fellers, wait a minute till I make that bronc' o' his'n do a cake-walk!" interposed a third, casting the loop of his riata on the ground so that Ballard's horse would be thrown if he lifted hoof.

It was an awkward crisis, and the engineer stood to come off with little credit. He was armed, but even in the unfettered cattle country one cannot pistol a laughing jeer. It was the saving sense of humour that came to his aid, banishing red wrath. There was no malice in the jeers.

"Sail in when you're ready, boys," he laughed. "I fight for my brand the same as you'd fight for yours. Those pegs have got to go back in the ground where you found them."

One of the flap-hatted riders dropped his reins, drummed with his elbows, and crowed lustily. The foreman backed his horse deftly out of the enclosing ring; and the man nearest to Ballard on the right made a little cast of his looped rope, designed to whip Ballard's pistol out of its holster. If the engineer had been the tenderfoot they took him for, the trouble would have culminated quickly.

With the laugh still on his lips, the Kentuckian was watching every move of the Mexican. There was bloodthirst, waiting only for the shadow of an excuse, glooming in the handsome black eyes. Ballard remembered Sanderson's fate, and a quick thrill of racial sympathy for the dead man tuned him to the fighting pitch. He knew he was confronting a treacherous bully of the type known to the West as a "killer"; a man whose regard for human life could be accurately and exactly measured by his chance for escaping the penalty for its taking.

It was at this climaxing moment, while Ballard was tightening his eye-hold upon the one dangerous antagonist, and foiling with his free hand the attempts of the playful "Scotty" at his right to disarm him, that the diversion came. A cloud of dust on the near-by stage trail resolved itself into a fiery-red, purring motor-car with a single occupant; and a moment later the car had left the road and was heading across the grassy interspace.

Manuel's left hand was hovering above his pistol-butt; and Ballard took his eyes from the menace long enough to glance aside at the approaching motorist. He was a kingly figure of a man well on in years, white-haired, ruddy of face, with huge military mustaches and a goatee. He brought the car with a skilful turn into the midst of things; and Ballard, confident now that the Mexican foreman no longer needed watching, saw a singular happening.

While one might count two, the old man in the motor-car stared hard at him, rose in his place behind the steering-wheel, staggered, groped with his hands as the blind grope, and then fell back into the driving-seat with a groan.

Ballard was off his horse instantly, tendering his pocket-flask. But the old man's indisposition seemed to pass as suddenly as it had come.

"Thank you, suh," he said in a voice that boomed for its very depth and sweetness; "I reckon I've been driving a little too fast. Youh – youh name is Ballard – Breckenridge Ballard, isn't it?" he inquired courteously, completely ignoring the dissolving ring of practical jokers.

"It is. And you are Colonel Craigmiles?"

"At youh service, suh; entiahly at youh service. I should have known you anywhere for a Ballard. Youh mother was a Hardaway, but you don't take after that side. No, suh" – with calm deliberation – "you are youh father's son, Mistah Ballard." Then, as one coming at a bound from the remote past to the present: "Was thah any – ah – little discussion going on between you and – ah – Manuel, Mistuh Ballard?"

Five minutes earlier the engineer had been angry enough to prefer spiteful charges against the polo players all and singular. But the booming of the deep voice had a curiously mollifying effect.

"It is hardly worth mentioning," he found himself replying. "I was protesting to your foreman because the boys were having a little game of polo at our expense – knocking our location stakes out of the ground."

The kingly old man in the motor-car drew himself up, and there was a mild explosion directed at the Mexican foreman.

"Manuel, I'm suhprised – right much suhprised and humiliated, suh! I thought it was – ah – distinctly undehstood that all this schoolboy triflin' was to be stopped. Let me heah no more of it. And see that these heah stakes are replaced; carefully replaced, if you please, suh." And then to the complainant: "I'm right sorry, I assure you, Mistuh Ballard. Let me prove it by carrying you off to dinneh with us at Castle 'Cadia. Grigsby, heah, will lead youh horse to camp, and fetch any little necessaries you might care to send for. Indulge me, suh, and let me make amends. My daughter speaks of you so often that I feel we ought to be mo' friendly."

Under much less favourable conditions it is conceivable that the Kentuckian would have overridden many barriers for the sake of finding the open door at Castle 'Cadia. And, the tour of inspection being completed, there was no special duty call to sound a warning.

"I shall be delighted, I'm sure," he burbled, quite like an infatuated lover; and when the cow-boy messenger was charged with the errand to the headquarters camp, Ballard took his place beside the company's enemy, and the car was sent purring across to the hill-skirting stage road.

VIII
CASTLE 'CADIA

It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills; and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not speed the motor-car.

Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the principal antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky boyhood – all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his attitude so affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the vanishing point.

"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed, gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.

The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the hogback foothills well to the southward, and approaching the inner valley at right angles to the course of the river and the railway.

The sun had sunk behind the western mountain barrier and the dusk was gathering when the colonel quickened the pace, and the car topped the last of the hills in a staccato rush. Ballard heard the low thunder of the Boiling Water in its upper canyon, and had glimpses of weird shapes of eroded sandstone looming in huge pillars and fantastic mushroom figures in the growing darkness.

Then the lights of Castle 'Cadia twinkled in their tree-setting at the top of the little knoll; the drought-hardened road became a gravelled carriage-drive under the pneumatic tires; and a final burst of speed sent the car rocketing to the summit of the knoll through a maple-shadowed avenue.

The great tree-trunk-pillared portico of the country house was deserted when the colonel cut out the motor-battery switch at the carriage step. But a moment later a white-gowned figure appeared in the open doorway, and the colonel's daughter came to the step, to laugh gayly, and to say:

"Why, Mr. Ballard, I'm astounded! Have you really decided that it is quite safe to trust yourself in the camp of the enemy?"

Ballard had seen Castle 'Cadia at field-glass range; and he had Bromley's enthusiastic description of the house of marvels to push anticipation some little distance along the way to meet the artistic reality. None the less, the reality came with the shock of the unexpected.

In the softened light of the shaded electric pendants, the massive pillars of the portico appeared as single trees standing as they had grown in the mountain forest. Underfoot the floor was of hewn tree-trunks; but the house walls, like the pillars, were of logs in the rough, cunningly matched and fitted to conceal the carpentry.

A man had come to take the automobile, and the colonel paused to call attention to a needed adjustment of the motor. Ballard made use of the isolated moment.

"I have accounted for you at last," he said, prolonging the greeting hand-clasp to the ultimate limit. "I know now what has made you what you are."

"Really?" she questioned lightly. "And all these years I have been vainly imagining that I had acquired the manner of the civilized East! Isn't it pathetic?"

"Very," he agreed quite gravely. "But the pathos is all on my side."

"Meaning that I might let you go and dress for dinner? I shall. Enter the house of the enemy, Mr. Ballard. A cow-punching princess bids you welcome."

She was looking him fairly in the eyes when she said it, and he acquitted her doubtfully of the charge of intention. But her repetition, accidental or incidental, of his own phrase was sufficiently disconcerting to make him awkwardly silent while she led the way into the spacious reception-hall.

Here the spell of the enchantments laid fresh hold on him. The rustic exterior of the great house was only the artistically designed contrast – within were richness, refinement, and luxury unbounded. The floors were of polished wood, and the rugs were costly Daghestans. Beyond portières of curious Indian bead-work, there were vistas of harmonious interiors; carved furnishings, beamed and panelled ceilings, book-lined walls. The light everywhere came from the softly tinted electric globes. There was a great stone fireplace in the hall, but radiators flanked the openings, giving an added touch of modernity.

Ballard pulled himself together and strove to recall the fifty-mile, sky-reaching mountain barrier lying between all this twentieth-century country-house luxury and the nearest outpost of urban civilisation. It asked for a tremendous effort; and the realising anchor dragged again when Miss Craigmiles summoned a Japanese servant and gave him in charge.

"Show Mr. Ballard to the red room, Tagawi," she directed. And then to the guest: "We dine at seven – as informally as you please. You will find your bag in your room, and Tagawi will serve you. As you once told me when I teased you in your Boston workshop – 'If you don't see what you want, ask for it.'"

The Kentuckian followed his guide up the broad stair and through a second-floor corridor which abated no jot of the down-stair magnificence. Neither did his room, for that matter. Hangings of Pompeian red gave it its name; and it was spacious and high-studded, and critically up to date in its appointments.

The little brown serving-man deftly opened the bag brought by the colonel's messenger from Ballard's quarters at the Elbow Canyon camp, and laid out the guest's belongings. That done, he opened the door of the bath. "The honourable excellency will observe the hot water; also cold. Are the orders other for me?"

Ballard shook his head, dismissed the smiling little man, and turned on the water.

"I reckon I'd better take it cold," he said to himself; "then I'll know certainly whether I'm awake or dreaming. By Jove! but this place is a poem! I don't wonder that the colonel is fighting Berserk to save it alive. And Mr. Pelham and his millionaires come calmly up to the counter and offer to buy it – with mere money!"

He filled the porcelain bath with a crystal-clear flood that, measured by its icy temperature, might have been newly distilled glacier drip; and the cold plunge did something toward establishing the reality of things. But the incredibilities promptly reasserted themselves when he went down a little in advance of the house-party guests, and met Elsa, and was presented to a low-voiced lady with silvery hair and the face of a chastened saint, named to him as Miss Cauffrey, but addressed by Elsa as "Aunt June."

"I hope you find yourself somewhat refreshed, Mr. Ballard," said the sweet-voiced châtelaine. "Elsa tells me you have been in the tropics, and our high altitudes must be almost distressing at first; I know I found them so."

"Really, I hadn't noticed the change," returned Ballard rather vaguely. Then he bestirred himself, and tried to live up to the singularly out-of-place social requirements. "I'm not altogether new to the altitudes, though I haven't been in the West for the past year or two. For that matter, I can't quite realise that I am in the West at this moment – at least in the uncitied part."

Miss Cauffrey smiled, and the king's daughter laughed softly.

"It does me so much good!" she declared, mocking him. "All through that dining-car dinner on the 'Overland Flyer' you were trying to reconcile me with the Western barbarities. Didn't you say something about being hopeful because I was aware of the existence of an America west of the Alleghanies?"

"Please let me down as easily as you can," pleaded the engineer. "You must remember that I am only a plain workingman."

"You are come to take poor Mr. Macpherson's place?" queried Miss Cauffrey; which was Ballard's first intimation that the Arcadian promotion scheme was not taboo by the entire house-hold of Castle 'Cadia.

"That is what I supposed I was doing, up to this evening. But it seems that I have stumbled into fairyland instead."

"No," said the house-daughter, laughing at him again – "only into the least Arcadian part of Arcadia. And after dinner you will be free to go where you are impatient to be at this very moment."

"I don't know about that," was Ballard's rejoinder. "I was just now wondering if I could be heroic enough to go contentedly from all this to my adobe shack in the construction camp."

Miss Craigmiles mocked him again.

"My window in the Alta Vista sleeper chanced to be open that night while the train was standing in the Denver station. Didn't I hear Mr. Pelham say that the watchword – your watchword – was to be 'drive,' for every man, minute, and dollar there was in it?"

Ballard said, "Oh, good Lord!" under his breath, and a hot flush rose to humiliate him, in spite of his efforts to keep it down. Now it was quite certain that her word of welcome was not a mere coincidence. She had overheard that brutal and uncalled-for boast of his about making love to "the cow-punching princesses"; and this was his punishment.

It was a moment for free speech of the explanatory sort, but Miss Cauffrey's presence forbade it. So he could only say, in a voice that might have melted a heart of stone: "I am wholly at your mercy – and I am your guest. You shouldn't step on a man when he's down. It isn't Christian."

Whether she would have stepped on him or not was left a matter indeterminate, since the members of the house-party were coming down by twos and threes, and shortly afterward dinner was announced.

By this time Ballard was growing a little hardened to the surprises; and the exquisitely appointed dining-room evoked only a left-over thrill. And at dinner, in the intervals allowed him by Miss Dosia Van Bryck, who was his table companion, there were other things to think of. For example, he was curious to know if Wingfield's air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles would persist under Colonel Craigmiles's own roof.

Apparently it did persist. Before the first course was removed Ballard's curiosity was in the way of being amply satisfied; and he was saying "Yes" and "No" like a well-adjusted automaton to Miss Van Bryck.

In the seating he had Major Blacklock and one of the Cantrell girls for his opposites; and Lucius Bigelow and the other sharer of the common Cantrell Christian name widened the gap. But the centrepiece in the middle of the great mahogany was low; and Ballard could see over it only too well.

Wingfield and Elsa were discussing playmaking and the playmaker's art; or, rather, Wingfield was talking shop with cheerful dogmatism, and Miss Craigmiles was listening; and if the rapt expression of her face meant anything… Ballard lost himself in gloomy abstraction, and the colours of the electric spectrum suddenly merged for him into a greenish-gray.

"I should think your profession would be perfectly grand, Mr. Ballard. Don't you find it so?" Thus Miss Dosia, who, being quite void of subjective enthusiasm, felt constrained to try to evoke it in others.

"Very," said Ballard, hearing nothing save the upward inflection which demanded a reply.

Miss Van Bryck seemed mildly surprised; but after a time she tried again.

"Has any one told you that Mr. Wingfield is making the studies for a new play?" she asked.

Again Ballard marked the rising inflection; said "Yes," at a venture; and was straightway humiliated, as he deserved to be.

"It seems so odd that he should come out here for his material," Miss Van Bryck went on evenly. "I don't begin to understand how there can be any dramatic possibilities in a wilderness house-party, with positively no social setting whatever."

"Ah, no; of course not," stammered Ballard, realising now that he was fairly at sea. And then, to make matters as bad as they could be: "You were speaking of Mr. Wingfield?"

Miss Van Bryck's large blue eyes mirrored reproachful astonishment; but she was too placid and too good-natured to be genuinely piqued.

"I fear you must have had a hard day, Mr. Ballard. All this is very wearisome to you, isn't it?" she said, letting him have a glimpse of the real kindness underlying the inanities.

"My day has been rather strenuous," he confessed. "But you make me ashamed. Won't you be merciful and try me again?" And this time he knew what he was saying, and meant it.

"It is hardly worth repeating," she qualified – nevertheless, she did repeat it.

Ballard, listening now, found the little note of distress in the protest against play-building in the wilderness; and his heart warmed to Miss Dosia. In the sentimental field, disappointment for one commonly implies disappointment for two; and he became suddenly conscious of a fellow-feeling for the heiress of the Van Bryck millions.

"There is plenty of dramatic material in Arcadia for Mr. Wingfield, if he knows where to look for it," he submitted. "For example, our camp at the dam furnishes a 'situation' every now and then." And here he told the story of the catapulted stone, adding the little dash of mystery to give it the dramatic flavour.

Miss Dosia's interest was as eager as her limitations would permit. "May I tell Mr. Wingfield?" she asked, with such innocent craft that Ballard could scarcely restrain a smile.

"Certainly. And if Mr. Wingfield is open to suggestion on that side, you may bring him down, and I'll put him on the trail of a lot more of the mysteries."

"Thank you so much. And may I call it my discovery?"

Again her obviousness touched the secret spring of laughter in him. It was very evident that Miss Van Bryck would do anything in reason to bring about a solution of continuity in the sympathetic intimacy growing up between the pair on the opposite side of the table.

"It is yours, absolutely," he made haste to say. "I should never have thought of the dramatic utility if you hadn't suggested it."

"H'm! – ha!" broke in the major. "What are you two young people plotting about over there?"

Ballard turned the edge of the query; blunted it permanently by attacking a piece of government engineering in which, as he happened to know, the major had figured in an advisory capacity. This carrying of the war into Africa brought on a battle technical which ran on unbroken to the ices and beyond; to the moment when Colonel Craigmiles proposed an adjournment to the portico for the coffee and the tobacco. Ballard came off second-best, but he had accomplished his object, which was to make the shrewd-eyed old major forget if he had overheard too much; and Miss Van Bryck gave him his meed of praise.

"You are a very brave man, Mr. Ballard," she said, as he drew the portières aside for her. "Everybody else is afraid of the major."

"I've met him before," laughed the Kentuckian; "in one or another of his various incarnations. And I didn't learn my trade at West Point, you remember."