Part 1 (2/2)
”And what happened to Mr. Macpherson?” queried Gardiner.
”He was killed a few weeks ago. The derrick fell on him. The accident provoked a warm discussion in the technical periodicals. A wire guy cable parted--'rusted off,' the newspaper report said--and there was a howl from the wire-rope makers, who protested that a rope made of galvanised wire couldn't possibly 'rust off.'”
”Nevertheless, Mr. Macpherson was successfully killed,” remarked the professor dryly. ”That would seem to be the persisting fact in the discussion. Does none of these things move you?”
”Certainly not,” returned the younger man. ”I shall neither fall into the river, nor stand under a derrick whose guy lines are unsafe.”
Gardiner's smile was a mere eye wrinkle of good-natured cynicism. ”You carefully omit poor Sanderson's fate. One swims out of a torrent--if he can--and an active young fellow might possibly be able to dodge a falling derrick. But who can escape the toils of the woman 'whose hands are as bands, and whose feet----'”
”Oh, piff!” said the Kentuckian; and then he laughed aloud. ”There is, indeed, one woman in the world, my dear _Herr_ Professor, for whose sake I would joyfully stand up and be shot at; but she isn't in Colorado, by a good many hundred miles.”
”No? Nevertheless, Breckenridge, my son, there lies your best chance of making the fourth in the list of sacrifices. You are a Kentuckian; an ardent and chivalric Southerner. If the Fates really wish to interpose in contravention of the Arcadian scheme, they will once more bait the deadfall with the eternal feminine--always presuming, of course, that there are any Fates, and that they have ordinary intelligence.”
Ballard shook his head as if he took the prophecy seriously.
”I am in no danger on that score. Bromley--he was Sanderson's a.s.sistant, and afterward Macpherson's, you know--wrote me that the Scotchman's first general order was an edict banis.h.i.+ng every woman from the construction camps.”
”Now, if he had only banished the derricks at the same time,” commented Gardiner reflectively. Then he added: ”You may be sure the Fates will find you an enchantress, Breckenridge; the oracles have spoken. What would the most peerless Arcadia be without its shepherdess? But we are jesting when La.s.sley appears to be very much in earnest. Could there be anything more than coincidence in these fatalities?”
”How could there be?” demanded Ballard. ”Two sheer accidents and one commonplace tragedy, which last was the fault--or the misfortune--of poor Billy's temperament, it appears; though he was a sober enough fellow when he was here learning his trade. Let me prophesy awhile: I shall live and I shall finish building the Arcadian dam. Now let us side-track La.s.sley and his cryptogram and go back to what I was trying to impress on your mind when he b.u.t.ted in; which is that you are not to forget your promise to come out and loaf with me in August. You shall have all the luxuries a construction camp affords, and you can geologise to your heart's content in virgin soil.”
”That sounds whettingly enticing,” said the potential guest. ”And, besides, I am immensely interested in dams; and in wire cables that give way at inopportune moments. If I were you, Breckenridge, I should make it a point to lay that broken guy cable aside. It might make interesting matter for an article in the _Engineer_; say, 'On the Effect of the Atmosphere in High Alt.i.tudes upon Galvanised Wire.'”
Ballard paid the tributary laugh. ”I believe you'd have your joke if you were dying. However, I'll keep the broken cable for you, and the pool where Braithwaite was drowned, and Sanderson's inamorata--only I suppose Macpherson obliterated her at the earliest possible.... Say, by Jove!
that's my train he's calling. Good-by, and don't forget your promise.”
After which, but for a base-runner's dash down the platform, Ballard would have lost the reward of the strenuous day of changed plans at the final moment.
II
THE TRIPPERS
It was on the Monday afternoon that Breckenridge Ballard made the base-runner's dash through the station gates in the Boston terminal, and stood in the rearmost vestibule of his outgoing train to watch for the pa.s.sing of a certain familiar suburb where, at the home of the hospitable La.s.sleys, he had first met Miss Craigmiles.
On the Wednesday evening following, he was gathering his belongings in the sleeper of a belated Chicago train preparatory to another dash across platforms--this time in the echoing station at Council Bluffs--to catch the waiting ”Overland Flyer” for the run to Denver.
President Pelham's telegram, which had found him in Boston on the eve of closing a contract with the sugar magnates to go and build refineries in Cuba, was quite brief, but it bespoke haste:
”We need a fighting man who can build railroads and dams and dig ditches in Arcadia. Salary satisfactory to you. Wire quick if you can come.”
This was the wording of it; and at the evening hour of train-changing in Council Bluffs, Ballard was sixteen hundred miles on his way, racing definitely to a conference with the president of Arcadia Irrigation in Denver, with the warning telegram from La.s.sley no more than a vague disturbing under-thought.
What would lie beyond the conference he knew only in the large. As an industrial captain in touch with the moving world of great projects, he was familiar with the plan for the reclamation of the Arcadian desert. A dam was in process of construction, the waters of a mountain torrent were to be impounded, a system of irrigating ca.n.a.ls opened, and a connecting link of railway built. Much of the work, he understood, was already done; and he was to take charge as chief of construction and carry it to its conclusion.
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