The King of Arcadia

"Carson'll need persuading," he commented. "'Tis well ye've got the artillery moving. What's next?"

"The next thing is to get out the best team you have, the one that will make the best time, and send it to the end of track to meet Bromley's special. How far is it – six miles, or thereabouts?"

"Seven, or maybe a little worse. I'll go with the team myself, and push on the reins. Do I bring the gun here?"

Ballard thought a moment. "No; since we're to handle this thing by ourselves, there is no need of making talk in the camps. Do you know a little sand creek in the hogback called Dry Valley?"

"Sure, I do."

"Good. Make a straight line for the head of that arroyo, and we'll meet you there, Blacklock and I, with an extra saddle-horse."

Fitzpatrick was getting a duck driving-coat out of a locker.

"What's your notion, Mr. Ballard? – if a man might be asking?"

"Wait, and you'll see," was the crisp reply. "It will work; you'll see it work like a charm, Bourke. But you must burn the miles with that team of broncos. We'll be down and out if you don't make connections with the Maxim. And say; toss a coil of that quarter-inch rope into your wagon as you go. We'll need that, too."

When the contractor was gone, Ballard called the collegian into the pay office and put him in touch with the pressing facts. A raid was to be made on Colonel Craigmiles's cattle by a band of cattle thieves; the raid was to be prevented; means to the preventing end – three men and a Maxim automatic rapid-fire gun. Would Blacklock be one of the three?

"Would a hungry little dog eat his supper, Mr. Ballard? By Jove! but you're a good angel in disguise – to let me in for the fun! And you've pressed the right button, too, by George! There's a Maxim in the military kit at college, and I can work her to the queen's taste."

"Then you may consider yourself chief of the artillery," was the prompt rejoinder. "I suppose I don't need to ask if you can ride a range pony?"

Blacklock's laugh was an excited chuckle.

"Now you're shouting. What I don't know about cow-ponies would make the biggest book you ever saw. But I'd ride a striped zebra rather than be left out of this. Do we hike out now? – right away?"

"There is no rush; you can smoke a pipe or two – as I'm going to. Fitzpatrick has to drive fourteen miles to work off his handicap."

Ballard filled his pipe and lighting it sat down to let the mental polishing wheels grind upon the details of his plan. Blacklock tried hard to assume the manly attitude of nonchalance; tried and failed utterly. Once for every five minutes of the waiting he had to jump up and make a trip to the front of the commissary to ease off the excess pressure; and at the eleventh return Ballard was knocking the ash out of his pipe.

"Getting on your nerves, Jerry?" he asked. "All right: we'll go and bore a couple of holes into the night, if that's what you're anxious to be doing."

The start was made without advertisement. Fitzpatrick's horse-keeper was smoking cigarettes on the little porch platform, and at a word from Ballard he disappeared in the direction of the horse-rope. Giving him the necessary saddling time, the two made their way around the card-playing groups at the plaza fire, and at the back of the darkened mess-tent found the man waiting with three saddled broncos, all with rifle holsters under the stirrup leathers. Ballard asked a single question at the mounting moment.

"You haven't seen young Carson in the last hour or so, have you, Patsy?"

"Niver a hair av him: 'tis all day long he's been gone, wid Misther Bourke swearing thremenjous about the cayuse he took."

Ballard took the bridle of the led horse and the ride down the line of the canal, with Fitzpatrick's "piece of a moon" to silver the darkness, was begun as a part of the day's work by the engineer, but with some little trepidation by the young collegian, whose saddle-strivings hitherto had been confined to the well-behaved cobs in his father's stables.

At the end of the first mile Blacklock found himself growing painfully conscious of every start of the wiry little steed between his knees, and was fain to seek comfort.

"Say, Mr. Ballard; what do you do when a horse bucks under you?" he asked, wedging the inquiry between the jolts of the racking gallop.

"You don't do anything," replied Ballard, taking the pronoun in the generic sense. "The bronco usually does it all."

"I – believe this brute's – getting ready to – buck," gasped the tyro. "He's working – my knee-holds loose – with his confounded sh – shoulder-blades."

"Freeze to him," laughed Ballard. Then he added the word of heartening: "He can't buck while you keep him on the run. Here's a smooth bit of prairie: let him out a few notches."

That was the beginning of a mad race that swept them down the canal line, past Riley's camp and out to the sand-floored cleft in the foothills far ahead of the planned meeting with Fitzpatrick. But this time the waiting interval was not wasted. Picketing the three horses, and arming themselves with a pair of the short-barrelled rifles, the advance guard of two made a careful study of the ground, pushing the reconnaissance down to the mouth of the dry valley, and a little way along the main river trail in both directions.

"Right here," said Ballard, indicating a point on the river trail just below the intersecting valley mouth, "is where you will be posted with the Maxim. If you take this boulder for a shield, you can command the gulch and the upper trail for a hundred yards or more, and still be out of range of their Winchesters. They'll probably shoot at you, but you won't mind that, with six or eight feet of granite for a breastwork, will you, Jerry?"

"Well, I should say not! Just you watch me burn 'em up when you give the word, Mr. Ballard. I believe I could hold a hundred of 'em from this rock."

"That is exactly what I want you to do – to hold them. It would be cold-blooded murder to turn the Maxim loose on them from this short range unless they force you to it. Don't forget that, Jerry."

"I sha'n't," promised the collegian; and after some further study of the topographies, they went back to the horses.

Thereupon ensued a tedious wait of an hour or more, with no sight or sound of the expected waggon, and with anxiety growing like a juggler's rose during the slowly passing minutes. Anyone of a dozen things might have happened to delay Fitzpatrick, or even to make his errand a fruitless one. The construction track was rough, and the hurrying engine might have jumped the rails. The rustlers might have got wind of the gun dash and ditched the locomotive. Failing that, some of their round-up men might have stumbled upon the contractor and halted and overpowered him. Ballard and Blacklock listened anxiously for the drumming of wheels. But when the silence was broken it was not by waggon noises; the sound was in the air – a distant lowing of a herd in motion, and the shuffling murmur of many hoofs. The inference was plain.

"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars are coming down-valley with the cattle, and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick!"

That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hasty command to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo, with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.

"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're less than a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beef herd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"

With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting of the precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men, horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting of the terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder on the main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harness animals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan briskly to his two subordinates.

"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man or two ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," he predicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which we must turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sand gulch where we came in. Later on – "

A rattling clatter of horse-shoes on stone rose above the muffled lowing and milling of the oncoming drove, and there was no time for further explanations. As Ballard and his companions drew back among the tree shadows in the small inner valley, a single horseman galloped down the canyon trail, wheeling abruptly in the gulch mouth to head off the cattle if they should try to turn back by way of the hogback valley. Before the echo of his shrill whistle had died away among the canyon crags, three men rose up out of the darkness, and with business-like celerity the trail guard was jerked from his saddle, bound, gagged, and tossed into the bed of an empty waggon.

"Now for the cut-out!" shouted Ballard; and the advance stragglers of the stolen herd were already in the mouth of the little valley when the three amateur line-riders dashed at them and strove to turn the drive at right angles up the dry gulch.

For a sweating minute or two the battle with brute bewilderment hung in the balance. Wheel and shout and flog as they would, they seemed able only to mass the bellowing drove in the narrow mouth of the turn-out. But at the critical instant, when the milling tangle threatened to become a jam that must crowd itself from the trail into the near-by torrent of the Boiling Water, a few of the leaders found the open way to freedom up the hogback valley, and in another throat-parching minute there was only a cloud of dust hanging between the gulch heads to show where the battle had been raging.

This was the situation a little later when the main body of the rustlers, ten men strong, ambled unsuspectingly into the valley-mouth trap: dust in the air, a withdrawing thunder of hoof-beats, and apparent desertion of the point of hazard. Carson was the first to grasp the meaning of the dust cloud and the vanishing murmur of hoof-tramplings.

"Hell!" he rasped. "Billings has let 'em cut back up the gulch! That's on you, Buck Cummin's: I told you ye'd better hike along 'ith Billings."

"You always was one o' them 'I-told-ye-so' kind of liars," was the pessimistic retort of the man called Cummings; and Carson's right hand was flicking toward the ready pistol butt when a voice out of the shadows under the western cliff shaped a command clear-cut and incisive.

"Hands up out there – every man of you!" Then, by way of charitable explanation: "You're covered – with a rapid-fire Maxim."

There were doubters among the ten; desperate men whose lawless days and nights were filled with hair's-breadth chance-takings. From these came a scattering volley of pistol shots spitting viciously at the cliff shadows.

"Show 'em, Jerry," said the voice, curtly; and from the shelter of a great boulder at the side of the main trail leaped a sheet of flame with a roar comparable to nothing on earth save its ear-splitting, nerve-shattering self. Blacklock had swept the machine-gun in a short arc over the heads of the cattle thieves, and from the cliff face and ledges above them a dropping rain of clipped pine branches and splintered rock chippings fell upon the trapped ten.

It is the new and untried that terrifies. In the group of rustlers there were men who would have wheeled horse and run a gauntlet of spitting Winchesters without a moment's hesitation. But this hidden murder-machine belching whole regiment volleys out of the shadows… "Sojers, by cripes!" muttered Carson, under his breath. Then aloud: "All right, Cap'n; what you say goes as it lays."

"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the pale moonlight pricked out the cattle-lifters in the attitude of submission: "First man on the right – knee your horse into the clump of trees straight ahead of you."

It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed, wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones as Ballard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pine grove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through the neutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on the seventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawn upon them.

"Sufferin' Jehu!" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust and humiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man called Cummings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of the cattle thieves laughed like a good loser.

"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?" he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor in sight.

"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly. "And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head. D'ye see?"

They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to his saddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actors in the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.

"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, when Fitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulder redoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-wound Billings.

"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up – for us easy-marks, Cap'n Ballard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.

"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.

"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chief rustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right – if you feel called to take up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mud you turn over in th' big valley."

Fitzpatrick was leading the way up the hoof-trampled bed of the dry valley with the waggon team, and Blacklock was marshalling the line of prisoners to follow in single file when Ballard wheeled his bronco to mount.

"I fight my own battles, Carson," he said, quietly. "You set a deadfall for me, and I tumbled in like a tenderfoot. That put it up to me to knock out your raid. Incidentally, you and your gang will get what is coming to you for blowing a few thousand yards of earth into our canal. That's all. Line up there with the others; you've shot your string and lost."

The return route led the straggling cavalcade through the arroyo mouth, and among the low hills back of Riley's camp to a junction with the canal line grade half way to Fitzpatrick's headquarters. Approaching the big camp, Ballard held a conference with the contractor, as a result of which the waggon mules were headed to the left in a semicircular detour around the sleeping camp, the string of prisoners following as the knotted trail ropes steered it.

Another hour of easting saw the crescent moon poising over the black sky-line of the Elks, and it brought captors and captured to the end of track of the railroad where there was a siding, with a half-dozen empty material cars and Bromley's artillery special, the engine hissing softly and the men asleep on the cab cushions.

Ballard cut his prisoners foot-free, dismounted them, and locked them into an empty box-car. This done, the engine crew was aroused, the Maxim was reloaded upon the tender, and the chief gave the trainmen their instructions.

"Take the gun, and that locked box-car, back to Elbow Canyon," he directed. "Mr. Bromley will give you orders from there."

"Carload o' hosses?" said the engineman, noting the position of the box-car opposite a temporary chute built for debarking a consignment of Fitzpatrick's scraper teams.

"No; jackasses," was Ballard's correction; and when the engine was clattering away to the eastward with its one-car train, the waggon was headed westward, with Blacklock sharing the seat beside Fitzpatrick, Ballard lying full-length on his back in the deep box-bed, and the long string of saddle animals towing from the tailboard.

At the headquarters commissary Blacklock tumbled into the handiest bunk and was asleep when he did it. But Ballard roused himself sufficiently to send a message over the wire to Bromley directing the disposal of the captured cattle thieves, who were to be transported by way of Alta Vista and the D. & U. P. to the county seat.

After that he remembered nothing until he awoke to blink at the sun shining into the little bunk room at the back of the pay office; awoke with a start to find Fitzpatrick handing him a telegram scrawled upon a bit of wrapping-paper.

"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor, grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:

"D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and corn whiskey.

"Bromley."

XV

HOSPES ET HOSTIS

It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid before Ballard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley's laugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.

"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn't it, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over the interval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peace pipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. I tried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair of sheep, of course."

"Assume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it go at that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up on you long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused – even at a poor joke on me."

"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since you went down-valley. And I've been wondering why."

"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead and buried, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."

Bromley grinned again.

"Meaning that this cow-boy cattle-thief tangle in the lower valley has made you persona non grata at Castle 'Cadia? You're off; 'way off. You don't know Colonel Adam. So far from holding malice, he has been down here twice to thank you for stopping the Carson raid. And that reminds me: there's a Castle 'Cadia note in your mail-box – came down by the hands of one of the little Japs this afternoon." And he went in to get it.

It proved to be another dinner bidding for the chief engineer, to be accepted informally whenever he had time to spare. It was written and signed by the daughter, but she said that she spoke both for her father and herself when she urged him to come soon.

"You'll go?" queried Bromley, when Ballard had passed the faintly perfumed bit of note-paper across the arm's-reach between the two lazy-chairs.

"You know I'll go," was the half morose answer.

Bromley's smile was perfunctory.

"Of course you will," he assented. "To-night?"

"As well one time as another. Won't you go along?"

"Miss Elsa's invitation does not include me," was the gentle reminder.

"Bosh! You've had the open door, first, last, and all the time, haven't you?"

"Of course. I was only joking. But it isn't good for both of us to be off the job at the same time. I'll stay and keep on intimidating the hoodoo."

There was a material train coming in from Alta Vista, and when its long-drawn chime woke the canyon echoes, they both left the mesa and went down to the railroad yard. It was an hour later, and Ballard was changing his clothes in his bunk-room when he called to Bromley, who was checking the way-bills for the lately arrived material.

"Oh, I say, Loudon; has that canyon path been dug out again? – where the slide was?"

"Sure," said Bromley, without looking up. Then: "You're going to walk?"

"How else would I get there?" returned Ballard, who still seemed to be labouring with his handicap of moroseness.

The assistant did not reply, but a warm flush crept up under the sunburn as he went on checking the way-bills. Later, when Ballard swung out to go to the Craigmiles's, the man at the desk let him pass with a brief "So-long," and bent still lower over his work.

Under much less embarrassing conditions, Ballard would have been prepared to find himself breathing an atmosphere of constraint when he joined the Castle 'Cadia house-party on the great tree-pillared portico of the Craigmiles mansion. But the embarrassment, if any there were, was all his own. The colonel was warmly hospitable; under her outward presentment of cheerful mockery, Elsa was palpably glad to see him; Miss Cauffrey was gently reproachful because he had not let them send Otto and the car to drive him around from the canyon; and the various guests welcomed him each after his or her kind.

During the ante-dinner pause the talk was all of the engineer's prompt snuffing-out of the cattle raid, and the praiseful comment on the little coup de main was not marred by any reference to the mistaken zeal which had made the raid possible. More than once Ballard found himself wondering if the colonel and Elsa, Bigelow and Blacklock, had conspired generously to keep the story of his egregious blunder from reaching the others. If they had not, there was a deal more charity in human nature than the most cheerful optimist ever postulated, he concluded.

At the dinner-table the enthusiastic rapport was evenly sustained. Ballard took in the elder of the Cantrell sisters; and Wingfield, who sat opposite, quite neglected Miss Van Bryck in his efforts to make an inquisitive third when Miss Cantrell insistently returned to the exciting topic of the Carson capture – which she did after each separate endeavour on Ballard's part to escape the enthusiasm.

"Your joking about it doesn't make it any less heroic, Mr. Ballard," was one of Miss Cantrell's phrasings of the song of triumph. "Just think of it – three of you against eleven desperate outlaws!"

"Three of us, a carefully planned ambush, and a Maxim rapid-fire machine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all get away a few hours later."

"And I – the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses who could have made the most of it —I wasn't there to see," cut in Wingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"

"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing – for a play," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and Miss Cantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramatic quality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of the real thing. It's always inadequate."

"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene and lofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've been to your camp, and what I didn't find out about that hoodoo of yours – "

It was Miss Elsa, sitting at Wingfield's right, who broke in with an entirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding an answer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafter exclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield's literary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was prepared to draw its teeth when the time should come.

As on the occasion of the engineer's former visit to Castle 'Cadia, there was an after-dinner adjournment to the big portico, where the Japanese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell into pairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.

Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at the dispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece of mistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in the midst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off with genial protests.

"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it" – with a benedictory wave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uh little blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generous intervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through the machinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, I should probably have done precisely the same thing – only I'm not sure I should have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try one of these conchas, suh – unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havana has been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."