"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 Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody. Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang that roped him."
Ballard was feeling less peaceable when he rode on to the next camp, and as he made the round of the northern outposts the fighting strain which had come down to him from his pioneer ancestors began to assert itself in spite of his efforts to control it. At every stopping-place Fitzpatrick's complaint was amplified. Depredations had followed each other with increasing frequency since Macpherson's death; and once, when one of the subcontractors had been provoked into resistance, arms had been used and a free fight had ensued.
Turning the matter over in his mind in growing indignation, Ballard had determined, by the time he had made the complete round of the outlying camps, upon the course he should pursue. "I'll run a sheriff's posse in here and clean up the entire outfit; that's about what I'll do!" he was saying wrathfully to himself as he galloped eastward on the stage trail late in the afternoon of the final day. "The Lord knows I don't want to make a blood-feud of it, but if they will have it——"
The interruption was a little object-lesson illustrating the grievances of the contractors. Roughly paralleling the stage trail ran the line of the proposed southern lateral canal, marked by its double row of location stakes. At a turn in the road Ballard came suddenly upon what appeared to be an impromptu game of polo.
Flap-hatted herdsmen in shaggy overalls, and swinging long clubs in lieu of polo sticks, were riding in curious zigzags over the canal course, and bending for a drive at each right and left swerve of their wiry little mounts. It took the Kentuckian a full minute to master the intricacies of the game. Then he saw what was doing. The location stakes for the ditch boundaries were set opposite and alternate, and the object of the dodging riders was to determine which of them could club the greatest number of stakes out of the ground without missing a blow or drawing rein.
Ballard singled out the leader, a handsome, well-built caballero, with the face, figure, and saddle-seat of the Cid, and rode into the thick of things, red wrath to the fore.
"Hi! you there!" he shouted. "Is your name Manuel?"
"Si, Señor," was the mild reply; and the cavalier took off his bullion-corded sombrero and bowed to the saddle-horn.
"Well, mine is Ballard, and I am the chief engineer for the Arcadia Company."
"Ha! Señor Ballar', I am ver' much delight to meet you."