Part 25 (1/2)

”Hold on a second, Ballard!” he called. ”I'm going with you. What you need right now is a trained investigator, and I'm your man. Great Scott!

to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to see it!” And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very earnestly to dissuade him: ”Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha'n't get underfoot or be in Mr. Ballard's way; and you needn't trouble to send down for me.

I can pad home on my two feet, later on.”

XVIII

THE INDICTMENT

In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block, Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle 'Cadia and the construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.

How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock, who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow, smoking Ballard's tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another of Bromley's dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the taxidermic art.

”Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and the camp 'bogie' isn't happening,” Ballard told the king's daughter one morning when he came down from Bromley's hospital room at Castle 'Cadia and found Elsa waiting for him under the portieres of the darkened library. ”For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn't half asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or stone-cutters, he is reading straight through Bromley's shelf of bird-books. He may be absorbing 'local color,' but if he is, he is letting the environment do all the work. I don't believe he has had a consciously active idea since he began loafing with us.”

”You are mistaken--greatly mistaken,” was all she would say; and in the fulness of time a day came when the event proved how far a woman's intuition may outrun a man's reasoning.

It was the occasion of Bromley's first return to the camp at Elbow Canyon, four full weeks after the night of stumbling on the steep path.

Young Blacklock had driven him by the roundabout road in the little motor-car; and the camp industries paused while the men gave the ”Little Boss” an enthusiastic ovation. Afterward, the convalescent was glad enough to lie down on the makes.h.i.+ft lounge in the office bungalow; but when Jerry would have driven him back in time for luncheon at Castle 'Cadia, as his strict orders from Miss Elsa ran, Bromley begged to be allowed to put his feet under the office mess-table with his chief and his volunteer chauffeur.

To the three, doing justice to the best that Garou could find in the camp commissary stores, came Mr. Lester Wingfield, to drag up a stool and to make himself companionably at home at the engineers' mess, as his custom had come to be. Until the meal was ended and the pipes were filled, he was silent and abstracted to the edge of rudeness. But when Ballard made a move to go down to the railroad yard with Fitzpatrick, the spell was broken.

”Hold up a minute; don't rush off so frantically,” he cut in abruptly.

”I have been waiting for many days to get you and Bromley together for a little confidential confab about matters and things, and the time has come. Sit down.”

Ballard resumed his seat at the table with an air of predetermined patience, and the playwright nodded approval. ”That's right,” he went on, ”brace yourself to take it as it comes; but you needn't write your reluctance so plainly in your face. It's understood.”

”I don't know what you mean,” objected Ballard, not quite truthfully.

Wingfield laughed.

”You didn't want me to come down here at first; and since I've been coming you haven't been too excitedly glad to see me. But that's all right, too. It's what the public benefactor usually gets for b.u.t.ting in.

Just the same, there is a thing to be done, and I've got to do it. I may bore you both in the process, but I have reached a point where a pow-wow is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I've unearthed the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a mare's nest of fairly heroic proportions.”

By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table.

Blacklock got up to stand behind the a.s.sistant's chair. Ballard thrust his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles's sake, and he was pulling himself together for the battle.

”I know beforehand about what you are going to say,” he interjected; ”but let's have your version of it.”

”You shall have it hot and hot,” promised the playwright. ”For quite a little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the a.s.sumption that there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn't exactly creative in the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr.

Ballard, that your workmen are superst.i.tious fools, and that their mental att.i.tude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that the fact--the cause-fact--existed before the superst.i.tion; was the legitimate ancestor of the superst.i.tion. Don't you believe it?”

Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. ”I've always believed it,” he admitted.

”There isn't the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it _must_ antedate the diseased mental condition,” resumed the theorist, oracularly. ”I don't know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite's drowning will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive driver, said to me: 'They can say what they like, but _I_ ain't believing that the river stove him all up as if he'd been stomped on in a cattle pen.' There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into the field of the unaccountable.”

It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.

”You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain, unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the superst.i.tious twist.”