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."
