"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor, grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:
"D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and corn whiskey.
"Bromley."
XV
HOSPES ET HOSTIS
It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid before Ballard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley's laugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.
"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn't it, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over the interval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peace pipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. I tried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair of sheep, of course."
"Assume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it go at that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up on you long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused—even at a poor joke on me."
"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since you went down-valley. And I've been wondering why."
"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead and buried, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."