"Three of us, a carefully planned ambush, and a Maxim rapid-fire machine-gun," corrected Ballard. "And you forget that I let them all get away a few hours later."
"And I—the one person in all this valleyful of possible witnesses who could have made the most of it—I wasn't there to see," cut in Wingfield, gloomily. "It is simply catastrophic, Mr. Ballard!"
"Oh, I am sure you could imagine a much more exciting thing—for a play," laughed the engineer. "Indeed, it's your imagination, and Miss Cantrell's, that is making a bit of the day's work take on the dramatic quality. If I were a writing person I should always fight shy of the real thing. It's always inadequate."
"Much you know about it," grumbled the playwright, from the serene and lofty heights of craftsman superiority. "And that reminds me: I've been to your camp, and what I didn't find out about that hoodoo of yours——"
It was Miss Elsa, sitting at Wingfield's right, who broke in with an entirely irrelevant remark about a Sudermann play; a remark demanding an answer; and Ballard took his cue and devoted himself thereafter exclusively to the elder Miss Cantrell. The menace of Wingfield's literary curiosity was still a menace, he inferred; and he was prepared to draw its teeth when the time should come.
As on the occasion of the engineer's former visit to Castle 'Cadia, there was an after-dinner adjournment to the big portico, where the Japanese butler served the little coffees, and the house-party fell into pairs and groups in the hammocks and lazy-chairs.
Not to leave a manifest duty undone, Ballard cornered his host at the dispersal and made, or tried to make, honourable amends for the piece of mistaken zeal which had led to the attempted cattle-lifting. But in the midst of the first self-reproachful phrase the colonel cut him off with genial protests.
"Not anotheh word, my dear suh; don't mention it"—with a benedictory wave of the shapely hands. "We ratheh enjoyed it. The boys had thei-uh little blow-out at the county seat; and, thanks to youh generous intervention, we didn't lose hoof, hide nor ho'n through the machinations of ouh common enemy. In youh place, Mistuh Ballard, I should probably have done precisely the same thing—only I'm not sure I should have saved the old cattleman's property afte' the fact. Try one of these conchas, suh—unless youh prefer youh pipe. One man in Havana has been making them for me for the past ten yeahs."
Ballard took the gold-banded cigar as one who, having taken a man's coat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to the colonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever he doubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any of the mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of the irrigation company's industrial army.
Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy with the colonel had cost him a possible chance of a tête-à-tête with Elsa. She was swinging gently in her own particular corner hammock; but this time it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tiny coffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which the sweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to her coffee-holder: