Part 13 (1/2)
”Yes,” was the reply; ”I grant you the drill-holes. I guess I have 'got 'em,' as you say. But the bang wouldn't count. Quinlan let off half a dozen blasts in the quarry at quitting time yesterday, and one jar more or less just at that time wouldn't have been noticed.”
Ballard put his arm across the theorist's shoulders and faced him about to front the down-canyon industries.
”You mustn't let this mystery-smoke get into your nostrils, Loudon, boy,” he said. ”Whatever happens, there must always be two cool heads and two sets of steady nerves on this job--yours and mine. Now let's go down the railroad on the push-car and see how Williams is getting along with his pick-up stunt. He ought to have the Two standing on her feet by this time.”
XI
GUN PLAY
Three days after the wreck in the Lava Hills, Ballard was again making the round of the outpost camps in the western end of the valley, verifying grade lines, re-establis.h.i.+ng data stakes lost, or destroyed by the Craigmiles range riders, hustling the ditch diggers, and, incidentally, playing host to young Lucius Bigelow, the Forestry Service member of Miss Elsa's house-party.
Bigelow's inclusion as a guest on the inspection gallop had been planned, not by his temporary host, but by Miss Elsa herself. Mr.
Bigelow's time was his own, she had explained in her note to Ballard, but he was sufficiently an enthusiast in his chosen profession to wish to combine a field study of the Arcadian watersheds with the pleasures of a summer outing. If Mr. Ballard would be so kind ... and all the other fitting phrases in which my lady begs the boon she may strictly require at the hands of the man who has said the talismanic words, ”I love you.”
As he was constrained to be, Ballard was punctiliously hospitable to the quiet, self-contained young man who rode an entire day at his pace-setter's side without uttering a dozen words on his own initiative.
The hospitality was purely dutiful at first; but later Bigelow earned it fairly. Making no advances on his own part, the guest responded generously when Ballard drew him out; and behind the mask of thoughtful reticence the Kentuckian discovered a man of stature, gentle of speech, simple of heart, and a past-master of the wood- and plains-craft that a constructing engineer, however broad-minded, can acquire only as his work demands it.
”You gentlemen of the tree bureau can certainly give us points on ordinary common sense, Mr. Bigelow,” Ballard admitted on this, the third day out, when the student of natural conditions had called attention to the recklessness of the contractors in cutting down an entire forest of slope-protecting young pines to make trestle-bents for a gulch flume. ”I am afraid I should have done precisely what Richards has done here: taken the first and most convenient timber I could lay hands on.”
”That is the point of view the Forestry Service is trying to modify,”
rejoined Bigelow, mildly. ”To the average American, educated or ignorant, wood seems the cheapest material in a world of plenty. Yet I venture to say that in this present instance your company could better have afforded almost any other material for those trestle-bents. That slope will make you pay high for its stripping before you can grow another forest to check the flood wash.”
”Of course it will; that says itself, now that you have pointed it out,”
Ballard agreed. ”Luckily, the present plans of the company don't call for much flume timber; I say 'luckily,' because I don't like to do violence to my convictions, when I'm happy enough to have any.”
Bigelow's grave smile came and went like the momentary glow from some inner light of prescience.
”Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are a man of very strong convictions, Mr. Ballard,” he ventured to say.
”Think so? I don't know. A fair knowledge of my trade, a few opinions, and a certain pig-headed stubbornness that doesn't know when it is beaten: shake these up together and you have the compound which has misled you. I'm afraid I don't often wait for convincement--of the purely philosophical brand.”
They were riding together down the line of the northern lateral ca.n.a.l, with Bourke Fitzpatrick's new headquarters in the field for the prospective night's bivouac. The contractor's camp, a disorderly blot of shanties and well-weathered tents on the fair gra.s.s-land landscape, came in sight just as the sun was sinking below the Elks, and Ballard quickened the pace.
”You'll be ready to quit for the day when we get in, won't you?” he said to Bigelow, when the broncos came neck and neck in the scurry for the hay racks.
”Oh, I'm fit enough, by now,” was the ready rejoinder. ”It was only the first day that got on my nerves.”
There was a rough-and-ready welcome awaiting the chief engineer and his guest when they drew rein before Fitzpatrick's commissary; and a supper of the void-filling sort was quickly set before them in the back room of the contractor's quarters. But there was trouble in the air. Ballard saw that Fitzpatrick was cruelly hampered by the presence of Bigelow; and when the meal was finished he gave the contractor his chance in the privacy of the little cramped pay-office.
”What is it, Bourke?” he asked, when the closed door cut them off from the Forest Service man.
Fitzpatrick was shaking his head. ”It's a blood feud now, Mr. Ballard.
Gallagher's gang--all Irishmen--went up against four of the colonel's men early this morning. The b'ys took shelter in the ditch, and the cow-punchers tried to run 'em out. Some of our teamsters were armed, and one of the Craigmiles men was killed or wounded--we don't know which: the others picked him up and carried him off.”
Ballard's eyes narrowed under his thoughtful frown.