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                             THE KING OF ARCADIA

                               BY FRANCIS LYNDE

           Author of "A Romance in Transit," "The Quickening," etc.


ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
1909

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published February, 1909

     To my daughter Dorothea,
         AMANUENSIS OF THE
  LOVING HEART AND WILLING HANDS
          IN ITS WRITING,
             THIS BOOK
    IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.




[Illustration: "You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a
single step ahead."]




CONTENTS


I THE CRYPTOGRAM

II THE TRIPPERS

III THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR

IV ARCADY

V "FIRE IN THE ROCK!"

VI ELBOW CANYON

VII THE POLO PLAYERS

VIII CASTLE 'CADIA

IX THE BRINK OF HAZARD

X HOSKINS'S GHOST

XI GUN PLAY

XII THE RUSTLERS

XIII THE LAW AND THE LADY

XIV THE MAXIM

XV _HOSPES ET HOSTIS_

XVI THE RETURN OF THE OMEN

XVII THE DERRICK FUMBLES

XVIII THE INDICTMENT

XIX IN THE LABORATORY

XX THE GEOLOGIST

XXI MR. PELHAM'S GAME-BAG

XXII A CRY IN THE NIGHT

XXIII DEEP UNTO DEEP




ILLUSTRATIONS


"You must help me," she pleaded; "I cannot see the way a single step
ahead."

"Senor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
like-a-that!"

The muscles of his face were twitching, and he was breathing hard, like
a spent runner.

"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play."




THE KING OF ARCADIA




I

THE CRYPTOGRAM


The strenuous rush of the day of suddenly changed plans was over, and
with Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology, to bid him God-speed,
Ballard had got as far as the track platform gates of the Boston &
Albany Station when Lassley's telegram, like a detaining hand stretched
forth out of the invisible, brought him to a stand.

He read it, with a little frown of perplexity sobering his strong,
enthusiastic face.

     "_S.S. Carania_,
      NEW YORK.

     "_To_ BRECKENRIDGE BALLARD,
      _Boston_.

     "You love life and crave success. Arcadia Irrigation has killed
     its originator and two chiefs of construction. It will kill
     you. Let it alone.

     "LASSLEY."

He signed the book, tipped the boy for his successful chase, and passed
the telegram on to Gardiner.

"If you were called in as an expert, what would you make of that?" he
asked.

The assistant professor adjusted his eye-glasses, read the message, and
returned it without suggestive comment.

"My field being altogether prosaic, I should make nothing of it. There
are no assassinations in geology. What does it mean?"

Ballard shook his head.

"I haven't the remotest idea. I wired Lassley this morning telling him
that I had thrown up the Cuban sugar mills construction to accept the
chief engineer's billet on Arcadia Irrigation. I didn't suppose he had
ever heard of Arcadia before my naming of it to him."

"I thought the Lassleys were in Europe," said Gardiner.

"They are sailing to-day in the _Carania_, from New York. My wire was to
wish them a safe voyage, and to give my prospective address. That
explains the date-line of this telegram."

"But it does not explain the warning. Is it true that the Colorado
irrigation scheme has blotted out three of its field officers?"

"Oh, an imaginative person might put it that way, I suppose," said
Ballard, his tone asserting that none but an imaginative person would be
so foolish. "Braithwaite, of the Geodetic Survey, was the originator of
the plan for constructing a storage reservoir in the upper Boiling Water
basin, and for transforming Arcadia Park into an irrigated agricultural
district. He interested Mr. Pelham and a few other Denver capitalists,
and they sent him out as chief engineer to stand the project on its
feet. Shortly after he had laid the foundations for the reservoir dam,
he fell into the Boiling Water and was drowned."

Gardiner's humour was as dry as his professional specialty. "One," he
said, checking off the unfortunate Braithwaite on his fingers.

"Then Billy Sanderson took it--you remember Billy, in my year? He made
the preliminary survey for an inlet railroad over the mountains, and put
a few more stones on Braithwaite's dam. As they say out on the Western
edge of things, Sanderson died with his boots on; got into trouble with
somebody about a camp-following woman and was shot."

"Two," checked the assistant in geology. "Who was the third?"

"An elderly, dyspeptic Scotchman named Macpherson. He took up the work
where Sanderson dropped it; built the railroad over the mountain and
through Arcadia Park to the headquarters at the dam, and lived to see
the dam itself something more than half completed."

"And what happened to Mr. Macpherson?" queried Gardiner.

"He was killed a few weeks ago. The derrick fell on him. The accident
provoked a warm discussion in the technical periodicals. A wire guy
cable parted--'rusted off,' the newspaper report said--and there was a
howl from the wire-rope makers, who protested that a rope made of
galvanised wire couldn't possibly 'rust off.'"

"Nevertheless, Mr. Macpherson was successfully killed," remarked the
professor dryly. "That would seem to be the persisting fact in the
discussion. Does none of these things move you?"

"Certainly not," returned the younger man. "I shall neither fall into
the river, nor stand under a derrick whose guy lines are unsafe."

Gardiner's smile was a mere eye wrinkle of good-natured cynicism. "You
carefully omit poor Sanderson's fate. One swims out of a torrent--if he
can--and an active young fellow might possibly be able to dodge a
falling derrick. But who can escape the toils of the woman 'whose hands
are as bands, and whose feet----'"

"Oh, piff!" said the Kentuckian; and then he laughed aloud. "There is,
indeed, one woman in the world, my dear _Herr_ Professor, for whose sake
I would joyfully stand up and be shot at; but she isn't in Colorado, by
a good many hundred miles."

"No? Nevertheless, Breckenridge, my son, there lies your best chance of
making the fourth in the list of sacrifices. You are a Kentuckian; an
ardent and chivalric Southerner. If the Fates really wish to interpose
in contravention of the Arcadian scheme, they will once more bait the
deadfall with the eternal feminine--always presuming, of course, that
there are any Fates, and that they have ordinary intelligence."

Ballard shook his head as if he took the prophecy seriously.

"I am in no danger on that score. Bromley--he was Sanderson's assistant,
and afterward Macpherson's, you know--wrote me that the Scotchman's
first general order was an edict banishing every woman from the
construction camps."

"Now, if he had only banished the derricks at the same time," commented
Gardiner reflectively. Then he added: "You may be sure the Fates will
find you an enchantress, Breckenridge; the oracles have spoken. What
would the most peerless Arcadia be without its shepherdess? But we are
jesting when Lassley appears to be very much in earnest. Could there be
anything more than coincidence in these fatalities?"

"How could there be?" demanded Ballard. "Two sheer accidents and one
commonplace tragedy, which last was the fault--or the misfortune--of
poor Billy's temperament, it appears; though he was a sober enough
fellow when he was here learning his trade. Let me prophesy awhile: I
shall live and I shall finish building the Arcadian dam. Now let us
side-track Lassley and his cryptogram and go back to what I was trying
to impress on your mind when he butted in; which is that you are not to
forget your promise to come out and loaf with me in August. You shall
have all the luxuries a construction camp affords, and you can geologise
to your heart's content in virgin soil."

"That sounds whettingly enticing," said the potential guest. "And,
besides, I am immensely interested in dams; and in wire cables that give
way at inopportune moments. If I were you, Breckenridge, I should make
it a point to lay that broken guy cable aside. It might make interesting
matter for an article in the _Engineer_; say, 'On the Effect of the
Atmosphere in High Altitudes upon Galvanised Wire.'"

Ballard paid the tributary laugh. "I believe you'd have your joke if you
were dying. However, I'll keep the broken cable for you, and the pool
where Braithwaite was drowned, and Sanderson's inamorata--only I suppose
Macpherson obliterated her at the earliest possible.... Say, by Jove!
that's my train he's calling. Good-by, and don't forget your promise."

After which, but for a base-runner's dash down the platform, Ballard
would have lost the reward of the strenuous day of changed plans at the
final moment.




II

THE TRIPPERS


It was on the Monday afternoon that Breckenridge Ballard made the
base-runner's dash through the station gates in the Boston terminal, and
stood in the rearmost vestibule of his outgoing train to watch for the
passing of a certain familiar suburb where, at the home of the
hospitable Lassleys, he had first met Miss Craigmiles.

On the Wednesday evening following, he was gathering his belongings in
the sleeper of a belated Chicago train preparatory to another dash
across platforms--this time in the echoing station at Council Bluffs--to
catch the waiting "Overland Flyer" for the run to Denver.

President Pelham's telegram, which had found him in Boston on the eve of
closing a contract with the sugar magnates to go and build refineries in
Cuba, was quite brief, but it bespoke haste:

     "We need a fighting man who can build railroads and dams and
     dig ditches in Arcadia. Salary satisfactory to you. Wire quick
     if you can come."

This was the wording of it; and at the evening hour of train-changing in
Council Bluffs, Ballard was sixteen hundred miles on his way, racing
definitely to a conference with the president of Arcadia Irrigation in
Denver, with the warning telegram from Lassley no more than a vague
disturbing under-thought.

What would lie beyond the conference he knew only in the large. As an
industrial captain in touch with the moving world of great projects, he
was familiar with the plan for the reclamation of the Arcadian desert. A
dam was in process of construction, the waters of a mountain torrent
were to be impounded, a system of irrigating canals opened, and a
connecting link of railway built. Much of the work, he understood, was
already done; and he was to take charge as chief of construction and
carry it to its conclusion.

So much President Pelham's summons made clear. But what was the mystery
hinted at in Lassley's telegram? And did it have any connection with
that phrase in President Pelham's wire: "We need a fighting man"?

These queries, not yet satisfactorily answered, were presenting
themselves afresh when Ballard followed the porter to the section
reserved for him in the Denver sleeper. The car was well filled; and
when he could break away from the speculative entanglement long enough
to look about him, he saw that the women passengers were numerous enough
to make it more than probable that he would be asked, later on, to give
up his lower berth to one of them.

Being masculinely selfish, and a seasoned traveller withal, he was
steeling himself to say "No" to this request what time the train was
rumbling over the great bridge spanning the Missouri. The bridge passage
was leisurely, and there was time for a determined strengthening of the
selfish defenses.

But at the Omaha station there was a fresh influx of passengers for the
Denver car, and to Ballard's dismay they appeared at the first hasty
glance to be all women.

"O good Lord!" he ejaculated; and finding his pipe retreated
precipitately in the direction of the smoking-compartment, vaguely
hoping to dodge the inevitable.

At the turn around the corner of the linen locker he glanced back. Two
or three figures in the group of late comers might have asked for
recognition if he had looked fairly at them; but he had eyes for only
one: a modish young woman in a veiled hat and a shapeless gray box
travelling-coat, who was evidently trying to explain something to the
Pullman conductor.

"Jove!" he exclaimed; "if I weren't absolutely certain that Elsa
Craigmiles is half-way across the Atlantic with the Lassleys--but she
is; and if she were not, she wouldn't be here, doing the 'personally
conducted' for that mob." And he went on to smoke.

It was a very short time afterward that an apologetic Pullman conductor
found him, and the inevitable came to pass.

"This is Mr. Ballard, I believe?"

A nod, and an uphanding of tickets.

"Thank you. I don't like to discommode you, Mr. Ballard; but--er--you
have an entire section, and----"

"I know," said Ballard crisply. "The lady got on the wrong train, or she
bought the wrong kind of ticket, or she took chances on finding the
good-natured fellow who would give up his berth and go hang himself on a
clothes-hook in the vestibule. I have been there before, but I have not
yet learned how to say 'No.' Fix it up any way you please, only don't
give me an upper over a flat-wheeled truck, if you can help it."

An hour later the dining-car dinner was announced; and Ballard, who had
been poring over a set of the Arcadian maps and profiles and a thick
packet of documents mailed to intercept him at Chicago, brought up the
rear of the outgoing group from the Denver car.

In the vestibule of the diner he found the steward wrestling suavely
with a late contingent of hungry ones, and explaining that the tables
were all temporarily full. Ballard had broad shoulders and the Kentucky
stature to match them. Looking over the heads of the others, he marked,
at the farther end of the car, a table for two, with one vacant place.

"I beg your pardon--there is only one of me," he cut in; and the steward
let him pass. When he had dodged the laden waiters and was taking the
vacant seat he found himself confronting the young woman in the veiled
hat and the gray box-coat, identified her, and discovered in a
petrifying shock of astoundment that she was not Miss Elsa Craigmiles's
fancied double, but Miss Craigmiles herself.

"Why, Mr. Ballard--of all people!" she cried, with a brow-lifting of
genuine or well-assumed surprise. And then in mock consternation: "Don't
tell me that _you_ are the good-natured gentleman I drove out of his
section in the sleeping-car."

"I sha'n't; because I don't know how many more there are of me," said
Ballard. Then, astonishment demanding its due: "Did I only dream that
you were going to Europe with the Herbert Lassleys, or----"

She made a charming little face at him.

"Do you never change your plans suddenly, Mr. Ballard? Never mind; you
needn't confess: I know you do. Well, so do I. At the last moment I
begged off, and Mrs. Lassley fairly scolded. She even went so far as to
accuse me of not knowing my own mind for two minutes at a time."

Ballard's smile was almost grim.

"You have given me that impression now and then; when I wanted to be
serious and you did not. Did you come aboard with that party at Omaha?"

"Did I not? It's my--that is, it's cousin Janet Van Bryck's party; and
we are going to do Colorado this summer. Think of that as an exchange
for England and a yachting voyage to Tromsoe!"

This time Ballard's smile was affectionately cynical.

"I didn't suppose you ever forgot yourself so far as to admit that there
was any America west of the Alleghany Mountains."

Miss Elsa's laugh was one of her most effective weapons. Ballard was
made to feel that he had laid himself open at some vulnerable point,
without knowing how or why.

"Dear me!" she protested. "How long does it take you to really get
acquainted with people?" Then with reproachful demureness: "The man has
been waiting for five full minutes to take your dinner order."

One of Ballard's gifts was pertinacity; and after he had told the waiter
what to bring, he returned to her question.

"It is taking me long enough to get acquainted with you," he ventured.
"It will be two years next Tuesday since we first met at the Herbert
Lassleys', and you have been delightfully good to me, and even chummy
with me--when you felt like it. Yet do you know you have never once gone
back of your college days in speaking of yourself? I don't know to this
blessed moment whether you ever had any girlhood; and that being the
case----"

"Oh, spare me!" she begged, in well-counterfeited dismay. "One would
think----"

"One would not think anything of you that he ought not to think," he
broke in gravely; adding: "We are a long way past the Alleghanies now,
and I am glad you are aware of an America somewhat broader than it is
long. Do I know any of your sight-seers, besides Mrs. Van Bryck?"

"I don't know; I'll list them for you," she offered. "There are Major
Blacklock, United States Engineers, retired, who always says, 'H'm--ha!'
before he contradicts you; the major's nieces, Madge and Margery
Cantrell--the idea of splitting one name for two girls in the same
family!--and the major's son, Jerry, most hopeful when he is pitted
against other young savages on the football field. All strangers, so
far?"

Ballard nodded, and she went on.

"Then there are Mrs. Van Bryck and Dosia--I am sure you have met them;
and Hetty Bigelow, their cousin, twice removed, whom you have never met,
if Cousin Janet could help it; and Hetty's brother, Lucius, who is
something or other in the Forestry Service. Let me see; how many is
that?"

"Eight," said Ballard, "counting the negligible Miss Bigelow and her
tree-nursing brother."

"Good. I merely wanted to make sure you were paying attention. Last, but
by no means least, there is Mr. Wingfield--_the_ Mr. Wingfield, who
writes plays."

Without ever having been suffered to declare himself Miss Elsa's lover,
Ballard resented the saving of the playwright for the climax; also, he
resented the respectful awe, real or assumed, with which his name was
paraded.

"Let me remember," he said, with the frown reflective. "I believe it was
Jack Forsyth the last time you confided in me. Is it Mr. Wingfield now?"

"Would you listen!" she laughed; but he made quite sure there was a
blush to go with the laugh. "Do you expect me to tell you about it here
and now?--with Mr. Wingfield sitting just three seats back of me, on the
right?"

Ballard scowled, looked as directed, and took the measure of his latest
rival.

Wingfield was at a table for four, with Mrs. Van Bryck, her daughter,
and a shock-headed young man, whom Ballard took to be the
football-playing Blacklock. In defiance of the clean-shaven custom of
the moment, or, perhaps, because he was willing to individualise
himself, the playwright wore a beard closely trimmed and pointed in the
French manner; this, the quick-grasping eyes, and a certain vulpine
showing of white teeth when he laughed, made Ballard liken him to an
unnamed singer he had once heard in the part of _Mephistopheles_.

The overlooking glance necessarily included Wingfield's table
companions: Mrs. Van Bryck's high-bred contours lost in adipose; Dosia's
cool and placid prettiness--the passionless charms of unrelieved
milk-whiteness of skin and masses of flaxen hair and baby-blue eyes; the
Blacklock boy's square shoulders, heavy jaw, and rather fine eyes--which
he kept resolutely in his plate for the better part of the time.

At the next table Ballard saw a young man with the brown of an out-door
occupation richly colouring face and hands; an old one with the
contradictory "H'm--ha!" written out large in every gesture; and two
young women who looked as if they might be the sharers of the single
Christian name. Miss Bigelow, the remaining member of the party, had
apparently been lost in the dinner seating. At all events, Ballard did
not identify her.

"Well?" said Miss Craigmiles, seeming to intimate that he had looked
long enough.

"I shall know Mr. Wingfield, if I ever see him again," remarked Ballard.
"Whose guest is he? Or are you all Mrs. Van Bryck's guests?"

"What an idea!" she scoffed. "Cousin Janet is going into the absolutely
unknown. She doesn't reach even to the Alleghanies; her America stops
short at Philadelphia. She is the chaperon; but our host isn't with us.
We are to meet him in the wilds of Colorado."

"Anybody I know?" queried Ballard.

"No. And--oh, yes, I forgot; Professor Gardiner is to join us later. I
knew there must be one more somewhere. But he was an afterthought.
I--Cousin Janet, I mean--got his acceptance by wire at Omaha."

"Gardiner is not going to join you," said Ballard, with the cool
effrontery of a proved friend. "He is going to join me."

"Where? In Cuba?"

"Oh, no; I am not going to Cuba. I am going to live the simple life;
building dams and digging ditches in Arcadia."

He was well used to her swiftly changing moods. What Miss Elsa's
critics, who were chiefly of her own sex, spoke of disapprovingly as her
flightiness, was to Ballard one of her characterizing charms. Yet he was
quite unprepared for her grave and frankly reproachful question:

"Why aren't you going to Cuba? Didn't Mr. Lassley telegraph you not to
go to Arcadia?"

"He did, indeed. But what do you know about it?--if I may venture to
ask?"

For the first time in their two years' acquaintance he saw her visibly
embarrassed. And her explanation scarcely explained.

"I--I was with the Lassleys in New York, you know; I went to the steamer
to see them off. Mr. Lassley showed me his telegram to you after he had
written it."

They had come to the little coffees, and the other members of Miss
Craigmiles's party had risen and gone rearward to the sleeping-car.
Ballard, more mystified than he had been at the Boston moment when
Lassley's wire had found him, was still too considerate to make his
companion a reluctant source of further information. Moreover, Mr.
Lester Wingfield was weighing upon him more insistently than the
mysteries. In times past Miss Craigmiles had made him the target for
certain little arrows of confidence: he gave her an opportunity to do it
again.

"Tell me about Mr. Wingfield," he suggested. "Is he truly Jack Forsyth's
successor?"

"How can you question it?" she retorted gayly. "Some time--not here or
now--I will tell you all about it."

"'Some time,'" he repeated. "Is it always going to be'some time'? You
have been calling me your friend for a good while, but there has always
been a closed door beyond which you have never let me penetrate. And it
is not my fault, as you intimated a few minutes ago. Why is it? Is it
because I'm only one of many? Or is it your attitude toward all men?"

She was knotting her veil and her eyes were downcast when she answered
him.

"A closed door? There is, indeed, my dear friend: two hands, one dead
and one still living, closed it for us. It may be opened some time"--the
phrase persisted, and she could not get away from it--"and then you will
be sorry. Let us go back to the sleeping-car. I want you to meet the
others." Then with a quick return to mockery: "Only I suppose you will
not care to meet Mr. Wingfield?"

He tried to match her mood; he was always trying to keep up with her
kaleidoscopic changes of front.

"Try me, and see," he laughed. "I guess I can stand it, if he can."

And a few minutes later he had been presented to the other members of
the sight-seeing party; had taken Mrs. Van Bryck's warm fat hand of
welcome and Dosia's cool one, and was successfully getting himself
contradicted at every other breath by the florid-faced old campaigner,
who, having been a major of engineers, was contentiously critical of
young civilians who had taken their B.S. degree otherwhere than at West
Point.




III

THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR


It was shortly after midnight when the "Overland Flyer" made its
unscheduled stop behind a freight train which was blocking the track at
the blind siding at Coyote. Always a light sleeper, Ballard was aroused
by the jar and grind of the sudden brake-clipping; and after lying awake
and listening for some time, he got up and dressed and went forward to
see what had happened.

The accident was a box-car derailment, caused by a broken truck, and the
men of both train crews were at work trying to get the disabled car back
upon the steel and the track-blocking train out of the "Flyer's" way.
Inasmuch as such problems were acutely in his line, Ballard thought of
offering to help; but since there seemed to be no special need, he sat
down on the edge of the ditch-cutting to look on.

The night was picture fine; starlit, and with the silent wideness of the
great upland plain to give it immensity. The wind, which for the first
hundred miles of the westward flight had whistled shrilly in the car
ventilators, was now lulled to a whispering zephyr, pungent with the
subtle soil essence of the grass-land spring.

Ballard found a cigar and smoked it absently. His eyes followed the
toilings of the train crews prying and heaving under the derailed car,
with the yellow torch flares to pick them out; but his thoughts were far
afield, with his dinner-table companion to beckon them.

"Companion" was the word which fitted her better than any other. Ballard
had found few men, and still fewer women, completely companionable. Some
one has said that comradeship is the true test of affinity; and the
Kentuckian remembered with a keen appreciation of the truth of this
saying a summer fortnight spent at the Herbert Lassleys' cottage on the
North Shore, with Miss Craigmiles as one of his fellow-guests.

Margaret Lassley had been kind to him on that occasion, holding the
reins of chaperonage lightly. There had been sunny afternoons on the
breezy headlands, and blood-quickening mornings in Captain Tinkham's
schooner-rigged whale-boat, when the white horses were racing across the
outer reef and the water was too rough to tempt the other members of the
house-party.

He had monopolised Elsa Craigmiles crudely during those two weeks,
glorying in her beauty, in her bright mind, in her triumphant physical
fitness. He remembered how sturdily their comradeship had grown during
the uninterrupted fortnight. He had told her all there was to tell about
himself, and in return she had alternately mocked him and pretended to
confide in him; the confidences touching such sentimental passages as
the devotion of the Toms, the Dicks, and the Harrys of her college
years.

Since he had sometimes wished to be sentimental on his own account,
Ballard had been a little impatient under these frivolous appeals for
sympathy. But there is a certain tonic for growing love even in such
bucketings of cold water as the loved one may administer in telling the
tale of the predecessor. It is a cold heart, masculine, that will not
find warmth in anything short of the ice of indifference; and whatever
her faults, Miss Elsa was never indifferent. Ballard recalled how he had
groaned under the jesting confidences. Also, he remembered that he had
never dared to repel them, choosing rather to clasp the thorns than to
relinquish the rose.

From the sentimental journey past to the present stage of the same was
but a step; but the present situation was rather perplexingly befogged.
Why had Elsa Craigmiles changed her mind so suddenly about spending the
summer in Europe? What could have induced her to substitute a summer in
Colorado, travelling under Mrs. Van Bryck's wing?

The answer to the queryings summed itself up, for the Kentuckian, in a
name--the name of a man and a playwright. He held Mr. Lester Wingfield
responsible for the changed plans, and was irritably resentful. In the
after-dinner visit with the sight-seeing party in the Pullman there had
been straws to indicate the compass-point of the wind. Elsa deferred to
Wingfield, as the other women did; only in her case Ballard was sure it
meant more. And the playwright, between his posings as a literary
oracle, assumed a quiet air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles that
was maddening.

Ballard recalled this, sitting upon the edge of the ditch-cutting in the