ailroad on the push-car and see how Williams is getting along
with his pick-up stunt. He ought to have the Two standing on her feet by
this time."

XI

GUN PLAY

Three days after the wreck in the Lava Hills, Ballard was again making
the round of the outpost camps in the western end of the valley,
verifying grade lines, re-establishing data stakes lost, or destroyed by
the Craigmiles range riders, hustling the ditch diggers, and,
incidentally, playing host to young Lucius Bigelow, the Forestry Service
member of Miss Elsa's house-party.

Bigelow's inclusion as a guest on the inspection gallop had been
planned, not by his temporary host, but by Miss Elsa herself. Mr.
Bigelow's time was his own, she had explained in her note to Ballard,
but he was sufficiently an enthusiast in his chosen profession to wish
to combine a field study of the Arcadian watersheds with the pleasures
of a summer outing. If Mr. Ballard would be so kind ... and all the
other fitting phrases in which my lady begs the boon she may strictly
require at the hands of the man who has said the talismanic words, "I
love you."

As he was constrained to be, Ballard was punctiliously hospitable to the
quiet, self-contained young man who rode an entire day at his
pace-setter's side without uttering a dozen words on his own initiative.
The hospitality was purely dutiful at first; but later Bigelow earned it
fairly. Making no advances on his own part, the guest responded
generously when Ballard drew him out; and behind the mask of thoughtful
reticence the Kentuckian discovered a man of stature, gentle of speech,
simple of heart, and a past-master of the wood- and plains-craft that a
constructing engineer, however broad-minded, can acquire only as his
work demands it.

"You gentlemen of the tree bureau can certainly give us points on
ordinary common sense, Mr. Bigelow," Ballard admitted on this, the third
day out, when the student of natural conditions had called attention to
the recklessness of the contractors in cutting down an entire forest of
slope-protecting young pines to make trestle-bents for a gulch flume. "I
am afraid I should have done precisely what Richards has done here:
taken the first and most convenient timber I could lay hands on."

"That is the point of view the Forestry Service is trying to modify,"
rejoined Bigelow, mildly. "To the average American, educated or
ignorant, wood seems the cheapest material in a world of plenty. Yet