Part 17 (1/2)
”You still believe there is no hope of a compromise?” he began. ”What the sheriff said a few minutes ago is quite true, you know. The cow-boys will be back in a day or two, and it will make bad blood.”
”Excuse me,” said Ballard, irritably; ”you are an onlooker, Mr. Bigelow, and you can afford to pose as a peacemaker. But I've had all I can stand. If Colonel Craigmiles can't control his flap-hatted bullies, we'll try to help him. There is a week's work for half a hundred men and teams lying in that ditch over yonder,” pointing with his quirt toward the dynamited cutting. ”Do you think I'm going to lie down and let these cattle-punchers ride rough-shod over me and the company I represent? Not to-day, or any other day, I a.s.sure you.”
”Then you entirely disregard the little type-written note?”
”In justice to my employers, I am bound to call Colonel Craigmiles's bluff, whatever form it takes.”
Bigelow rode in silence for the next hundred yards. Then he began again.
”It doesn't seem like the colonel: to go at you indirectly that way.”
”He was in that automobile: I saw him. The notice could scarcely have been posted without his knowledge.”
”No,” Bigelow agreed, slowly. But immediately afterward he added: ”There were others in the car.”
”I know it--four or five of them. But that doesn't let the colonel out.”
Again Bigelow relapsed into silence, and the camp-fires of Fitzpatrick's headquarters were in sight when he said:
”You confessed to me a few hours ago that one of your weaknesses was the inability to stay angry. Will you pardon me if I say that it seems to have its compensation in the law of recurrences?”
Ballard's laugh was frankly apologetic. ”You may go farther and say that I am ill-mannered enough to quarrel with a good friend who cheerfully gets himself shot up in my behalf. Overlook it, Mr. Bigelow; and I'll try to remember that I am a partisan, while you are only a good-natured non-combatant. This little affair is a fact accomplished, so far as we are concerned. The colonel's cow-men dynamited our ditch; Sheriff Beckwith will do his duty; and the company's attorney will see to it that somebody pays the penalty. Let's drop it--as between us two.”
Being thus estopped, Bigelow held his peace; and a little later they were dismounting before the door of Fitzpatrick's commissary. When the contractor had welcomed and fed them, Ballard rolled into the nearest bunk and went to sleep to make up the arrearages, leaving his guest to smoke alone. Bigelow took his desertion good-naturedly, and sat for an hour or more on a bench in front of the storeroom, puffing quietly at his pipe, and taking an onlooker's part in the ditch-diggers' games of dice-throwing and card-playing going on around the great fire in the plaza.
When the pipe went out after its second filling, he got up and strolled a little way beyond the camp limits. The night was fine and mild for the alt.i.tudes, and he had walked a circling mile before he found himself again at the camp confines. It was here, at the back of the mule drove, that he became once more an onlooker; this time a thoroughly mystified one.
The little drama, at which the Forestry expert was the single spectator, was chiefly pantomimic, but it lacked nothing in eloquent action. Flat upon the ground, and almost among the legs of the grazing mules, lay a diminutive figure, face down, digging fingers and toes into the hoof-cut earth, and sobbing out a strange jargon of oaths and childish ragings.
Before Bigelow could speak, the figure rose to its knees, its face disfigured with pa.s.sion, and its small fists clenching themselves at the invisible. It was d.i.c.k Carson; and the words which Bigelow heard seemed to be shaken by some unseen force out of the thin, stoop-shouldered little body: ”Oh, my Lordy! ef it could on'y be somebody else! But ther'
ain't n.o.body else; an' I'll go to h.e.l.l if I don't do it!”
Now, at all events, Bigelow would have cut in, but the action of the drama was too quick for him. Like a flash the water-boy disappeared among the legs of the grazing animals; and a few minutes afterward the night gave back the sound of galloping hoofs racing away to the eastward.
Bigelow marked the direction of the water-boy's flight. Since it was toward the valley head and Castle 'Cadia, he guessed that young Carson's errand concerned itself in some way with the sheriff's raid upon the Craigmiles ranch outfit. Here, however, conjecture tripped itself and fell down. Both parties in whatever conflict the sheriff's visit might provoke were the boy's natural enemies.
Bigelow was wrestling with this fresh bit of mystery when he went to find his bunk in the commissary; it got into his dreams and was still present when the early morning call of the camp was sounded. But neither at the candle-lighted breakfast, nor later, when Ballard asked him if he were fit for a leisurely ride to the southern watershed for the day's outwearing, did he speak of young Carson's desertion.
Fitzpatrick spoke of it, though, when the chief and his companion were mounting for the watershed ride.
”You brought my water-boy back with you last night, didn't you, Mr.
Ballard?” he asked.
”Certainly; he came in with us. Why? Have you lost him?”
”Him and one of the saddle broncos. And I don't much like the look of it.”
”Oh, I guess he'll turn up all right,” said Ballard easily.
It was Bigelow's time to speak, but something restrained him, and the contractor's inquiry died a natural death when Ballard gathered the reins and pointed the way to the southward hills.