Part 5 (2/2)

”Oh, I don't know,” said Bromley. ”It's not such an unusual name.”

”No; if it were, I might trace it. How long did you say the colonel had lived in Arcadia?”

”I didn't say. But it must be something over twenty years. Miss Elsa was born here.”

”And the family is Southern--from what section?”

”I don't know that--Virginia, perhaps, measuring by the colonel's accent, pride, hot-headedness, and reckless hospitality.”

The clue, if any there were, appeared to be lost; and again Ballard smoked on in silence. When the pipe burned out he refilled it, and at the match-striking instant a sing-song cry of ”Fire in the rock!”

floated down from the hill crags above the adobe, and the jar of a near-by explosion shook the air and rattled the windows.

”What was that?” he queried.

”It's our quarry gang getting out stone,” was Bromley's reply. ”We were running short of headers for the tie courses, and I put on a night-s.h.i.+ft.”

”Whereabouts is your quarry?”

”Just around the shoulder of the hill, and a hundred feet, or such a matter, above us. It is far enough to be out of range.”

A second explosion punctuated the explanation. Then there was a third and still heavier shock, a rattling of pebbles on the sheet-iron roof of the adobe, and a scant half-second later a fragment of stone the size of a man's head crashed through roof and ceiling and made kindling-wood of the light pine table at which the two men were sitting. Ballard sprang to his feet, and said something under his breath; but Bromley sat still, with a faint yellow tint discolouring the sunburn on his face.

”Which brings us back to our starting-point--the hoodoo,” he said quietly. ”To-morrow morning, when you go around the hill and see where that stone came from, you'll say that it was a sheer impossibility. Yet the impossible thing has happened. It is reaching for you now, Breckenridge; and a foot or two farther that way would have--” He stopped, swallowed hard, and rose unsteadily. ”For G.o.d's sake, old man, throw up this cursed job and get out of here, while you can do it alive!”

”Not much!” said the new chief contemptuously. And then he asked which of the two bunks in the adjoining sleeping-room was his.

VI

ELBOW CANYON

Ballard had his first appreciative view of his new field of labor before breakfast on the morning following his arrival, with Bromley as his sightsman.

Viewed in their entirety by daylight, the topographies appealed irresistibly to the technical eye; and Ballard no longer wondered that Braithwaite had overlooked or disregarded all other possible sites for the great dam.

The basin enclosed by the circling foothills and backed by the forested slopes of the main range was a natural reservoir, lacking only a comparatively short wall of masonry to block the crooked gap in the hills through which the river found its way to the lower levels of the gra.s.s-lands.

The gap itself was an invitation to the engineer. Its rock-bound slopes promised the best of anchorages for the sh.o.r.e-ends of the masonry; and at its lower extremity a jutting promontory on the right bank of the stream made a sharp angle in the chasm; the elbow which gave the outlet canyon its name.

The point or crook of the elbow, the narrowest pa.s.s in the cleft, had been chosen as the site for the dam. Through the promontory a short tunnel was driven at the river-level to provide a diverting spillway for the torrent; and by this simple expedient a dry river-bed in which to build the great wall of concrete and masonry had been secured.

”That was Braithwaite's notion, I suppose?” said Ballard, indicating the tunnel through which the stream, now at summer freshet volume, thundered on its way around the building site to plunge sullenly into its natural bed below the promontory. ”n.o.body but a Government man would have had the courage to spend so much time and money on a mere preliminary. It's a good notion, though.”

”I'm not so sure of that,” was Bromley's reply. ”Doylan, the rock-boss, tells a fairy-story about the tunnel that will interest you when you hear it. He had the contract for driving it, you know.”

”What was the story?”

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