Part 21 (1/2)
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 j.a.ps 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sented. ”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.
”Bos.h.!.+ 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.s with a brief ”So-long,” and bent still lower over his work.
Under much less embarra.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment, 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.