Part 34 (2/2)
”Oh, I don't know,” said the president, easily. ”A new boat always leaks a little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a few days--or weeks.”
”That is a possibility,” granted the engineer; ”but it is scarcely one upon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of the company said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under the lower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; that settlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not be done, Mr. Pelham.”
”Why not?”
”Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before we have filled that hollow tooth would take his life in his hands.”
The president's smile was blandly genial.
”You've been having a pretty strenuous day of it, Mr. Ballard, and I can make allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a good night's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how you came to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?”
”The arm is all right,” said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort to change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog tenacity in the younger man. ”You will pardon me if I go back to the original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?”
The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.
”Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake--or Mr.
Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were you.”
”Not mention it?--to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully----”
”Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----”
Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fete champetre_.
”It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans.
You don't care to go to the foot of the pa.s.s with one of the trains, do you?”
”Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is filling, and I'm the one.”
”Of course you are,” said Bromley, cheerfully. ”I'll go with the first section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines.” Then he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: ”How did Mr. Pelham take the new grief?”
”He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you, there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish.”
Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.
”I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day,” he averred. ”I'll tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been busy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't spellbinding from some platform or other. There is something doing--something that the baa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring are doing it.”
Ballard got up and went to the door with the a.s.sistant.
”And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon,” he said, with an air of sudden and vehement conviction. ”This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's a stock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollow tooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'll never get orders to plug that tunnel!”
Bromley nodded agreement. ”I've been working my way around to that, too.
All right; so let it be. My resignation goes in to-morrow morning, and I take it yours will?”
”It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off short with Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuade you to go over the pa.s.s. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep you can.”
Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlight on the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw the twinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.
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