LITMIR.BIZ

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across the ravine to an iron-bound door closing a tunnel entrance in the opposite hillside – "is his advanced battery. That is the mine I was telling you about."

      "H'm," said the new chief, measuring the distance with his eyes. "If that mining-claim is the regulation size, it doesn't leave us much elbow room over there."

      "It doesn't leave us any – as I told you last night, the dam itself stands upon a portion of the claim. In equity, if there were any equity in a law fight against a corporation, the colonel could enjoin us right now. He hasn't done it; he has contented himself with marking out that dead-line you can see over there just above our spillway. The colonel staked that out in Billy Sanderson's time, and courteously informed us that trespassers would be potted from behind that barricade; that there was a machine-gun mounted just inside of that door which commanded the approaches. Just to see if he meant what he said, some of the boys rigged up a scarecrow dummy, and carefully pushed it over the line one evening after supper. I wasn't here, but Fitzpatrick says the colonel's Mexican garrison in the tunnel fairly set the air afire with a volley from the machine-gun."

      Ballard said "H'm" again, and was silent what time they were climbing the hill to the quarries on their own side of the ravine. When he spoke, it was not of the stone the night shift had been getting out.

      "Loudon, has it ever occurred to you that the colonel's mine play is a very large-sized trump card? We can submerge the house, the grounds, and his improvements up yonder in the upper canyon and know approximately how much it is going to cost the company to pay the bill. But when the water backs up into that tunnel, we are stuck for whatever damages he cares to claim."

      "Sure thing," said Bromley. "No one on earth will ever know whether we've swamped a five-million-dollar mine or a twenty-five-cent hole in the ground."

      "That being the case, I mean to see the inside of that tunnel," Ballard went on doggedly. "I am sorry I allowed Mr. Pelham to let me in for this; but in justice to the people who pay my salary, I must know what we are up against over there."

      "I don't believe you will make any bad breaks in that direction," Bromley suggested. "If you try it by main strength and awkwardness, as Macpherson did, you'll get what he very narrowly escaped – a young lead mine started inside of you by one of the colonel's Mexican bandits. If you try it any other way, the colonel will be sure to spot you; and you go out of his good books and Miss Elsa's – no invitations to the big house, no social alleviations, no ice-cream and cake, no heavenly summer nights when you can sit out on the Greek-pillared portico with a pretty girl, and forget for the moment that you are a buccaneering bully of labouring men, marooned, with a lot of dry-land pirates like yourself, in the Arcadia desert. No, my dear Breckenridge; I think it is safe to prophesy that you won't do anything you say you will."

      "Won't I?" growled the new chief, looking at his watch. Then: "Let's go down to breakfast." And, with a sour glance at the hill over which the roof-smashing rock of the previous night must have been hurled: "Don't forget to tell Quinlan to be a little more sparing with his powder up here. Impress it on his mind that he is getting out building stone – not shooting the hill down for concrete."

      VII

      THE POLO PLAYERS

      Ballard gave the Saturday, his first day in the new field, to Bromley and the work on the dam, inspecting, criticising, suggesting changes, and otherwise adjusting the wheels of the complicated constructing mechanism at the Elbow Canyon nerve centre to run efficiently and smoothly, and at accelerated speed.

      "That's about all there is to say," he summed up to his admiring assistant, at the close of his first administrative day. "You're keyed up to concert pitch all right, here, and the tempo is not so bad. But 'drive' is the word, Loudon. Wherever you see a chance to cut a corner, cut it. The Fitzpatricks are a little inclined to be slow and sure: crowd the idea into old Brian's head that bonuses are earned by being swift and sure."

      "Which means that you're not going to stay here and drive the stone and concrete gangs yourself?" queried Bromley.

      "That is what it means, for the present," replied the new chief; and at daybreak Monday morning he was off, bronco-back, to put in a busy fortnight quartering the field in all directions and getting in touch with the various subcontractors at the many subsidiary camps of ditch diggers and railroad builders scattered over the length and breadth of the Kingdom of Arcadia.

      On one of the few nights when he was able to return to the headquarters camp for supper and lodging, Bromley proposed a visit to Castle 'Cadia. Ballard's refusal was prompt and decided.

      "No, Loudon; not for me, yet a while. I'm too tired to be anybody's good company," was the form the refusal took. "Go gossiping, if you feel like it, but leave me out of the social game until I get a little better grip on the working details. Later on, perhaps, I'll go with you and pay my respects to Colonel Craigmiles – but not to-night."

      Bromley went alone and found that Ballard's guess based upon his glimpse of the loaded buckboards en route was borne out by the facts. Castle 'Cadia was comfortably filled with a summer house-party; and Miss Craigmiles had given up her European yachting voyage to come home and play the hostess to her father's guests.

      Also, Bromley discovered that the colonel's daughter drew her own conclusions from Ballard's refusal to present himself, the discovery developing upon Miss Elsa's frank statement of her convictions.

      "I know your new tyrant," she laughed; "I have known him for ages. He won't come to Castle 'Cadia; he is afraid we might make him disloyal to his Arcadia Irrigation salt. You may tell him I said so, if you happen to remember it."

      Bromley did remember it, but it was late when he returned to the camp at the canyon, and Ballard was asleep. And the next morning the diligent new chief was mounted and gone as usual long before the "turn-out" whistle blew; for which cause Miss Elsa's challenge remained undelivered; was allowed to lie until the dust of intervening busy days had quite obscured it.

      It was on these scouting gallops to the outlying camps that Ballard defined the limits of the "hoodoo." Its influence, he found, diminished proportionately as the square of the distance from the headquarters camp at Elbow Canyon. But in the wider field there were hindrances of another and more tangible sort.

      Bourke Fitzpatrick, the younger of the brothers in the contracting firm, was in charge of the ditch digging; and he had irritating tales to tell of the lawless doings of Colonel Craigmiles's herdsmen.

      "I'm telling you, Mr. Ballard, there isn't anything them devils won't be up to," he complained, not without bitterness. "One night they'll uncouple every wagon on the job and throw the coupling-pins away; and the next, maybe, they'll be stampeding the mules. Two weeks ago, on Dan Moriarty's section, they came with men and horses in the dead of night, hitched up the scrapers, and put a thousand yards of earth back into the ditch."

      "Wear it out good-naturedly, if you can, Bourke; it is only horse-play," was Ballard's advice. That grown men should seriously hope to defeat the designs of a great corporation by any such puerile means was inconceivable.

      "Horse-play, is it?" snapped Fitzpatrick. "Don't you believe it, Mr. Ballard. I can take a joke with any man living; but this is no joke. It comes mighty near being war – with the scrapping all on one side."

      "A night guard?" suggested Ballard.

      Fitzpatrick shook his head.

      "We've tried that; and you'll not get a man to patrol the work since Denny Flaherty took his medicine. The cow-punchers roped him and skidded him 'round over the prairie till it took one of the men a whole blessed day to dig the cactus thorns out of him. And me paying both of them overtime. Would you call that a joke?"

      Ballard's reply revealed some latent doubt as to the justification for Bromley's defense of Colonel Craigmiles's fighting methods.

      "If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"

      The contractor shook his head.

      "The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all, as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican foreman; and

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