"That's the brave wor-rd. The min do be sittin' up in th' bunk-shanties to hear ut. 'Twas all through the camp the minut' they brought him in. There isn't a man av thim that wouldn't go t'rough fire and wather f'r Misther Bromley—and that's no joke. Is there annything I can do?"
"Nothing, thank you. Tell the yard watchman to stay within call, and I'll send for you if you're needed."
With this provision for the possible need, the young chief kept the vigil alone, sitting where he could see the face of the still unconscious victim of fate, or tramping three steps and a turn in the adjoining office room when sleep threatened to overpower him.
It was a time for calm second thought; for a reflective weighing of the singular and ominous conditions partly revealed in the week agone talk with Elsa Craigmiles. That she knew more than she was willing to tell had been plainly evident in that first evening on the tree-pillared portico at Castle 'Cadia; but beyond this assumption the unanswerable questions clustered quickly, opening door after door of speculative conjecture in the background.
What was the motive behind the hurled stone which had so nearly bred a tragedy on his first evening at Elbow Canyon? He reflected that he had always been too busy to make personal enemies; therefore, the attempt upon his life must have been impersonal—must have been directed at the chief engineer of the Arcadia Company. Assuming this, the chain of inference linked itself rapidly. Was Macpherson's death purely accidental?—or Braithwaite's? If not, who was the murderer?—and why was the colonel's daughter so evidently determined to shield him?
The answer, the purely logical answer, pointed to one man—her father—and thereupon became a thing to be scoffed at. It was more than incredible; it was blankly unthinkable.
The young Kentuckian, descendant of pioneers who had hewn their beginnings out of the primitive wilderness, taking life as they found it, was practical before all things else. Villains of the Borgian strain no longer existed, save in the unreal world of the novelist or the playwriter. And if, by any stretch of imagination, they might still be supposed to exist....
Ballard brushed the supposition impatiently aside when he thought of the woman he loved.
"Anything but that!" he exclaimed, breaking the silence of the four bare walls for the sake of hearing the sound of his own voice. "And, besides, the colonel himself is a living, breathing refutation of any such idiotic notion. All the same, if it is not her father she is trying to shield, who, in the name of all that is good, can it be? And why should Colonel Craigmiles, or anyone else, be so insanely vindictive as to imagine that the killing of a few chiefs of construction will cut any figure with the company which hires them?"
These perplexing questions were still unanswered when the graying dawn found him dozing in his chair, with the camp whistles sounding the early turn-out, and Bromley conscious and begging feebly for a drink of water.