ections, brokenly, and with a curious thickening of the deep-toned,
mellifluous voice: "Tell Otto to bring the small car around at--at once,
and fetch me my coat. Of cou'se, my deah, I shall go myself"--this in
response to her swift protest. "I'm quite well and able; just a
little--a little sho'tness of breath. Fetch me my coat and the
doctor-box, thah's a good girl. But--but I assure you it can't
be--Bromley!"

XVI

THE RETURN OF THE OMEN

Loudon Bromley's principal wounding was a pretty seriously broken head,
got, so said Luigi, the Tuscan river-watchman who had found and brought
him in, by the fall from the steep hill path into the rocky canyon.

Ballard reached the camp at the heels of the Irish newsbearer shortly
after the unconscious assistant had been carried up to the adobe
headquarters; and being, like most engineers with field experience, a
rough-and-ready amateur surgeon, he cleared the room of the throng of
sympathising and utterly useless stone "buckies," and fell to work. But
beyond cleansing the wound and telegraphing by way of Denver to Aspen
for skilled help, there was little he could do.

The telegraphing promised nothing. Cutting out all the probable delays,
and assuming the Aspen physician's willingness to undertake a perilous
night gallop over a barely passable mountain trail, twelve hours at the
very shortest must go to the covering of the forty miles.

Ballard counted the slow beats of the fluttering pulse and shook his
head despairingly. Since he had lived thus long after the accident,
Bromley might live a few hours longer. But it seemed much more likely
that the flickering candle of life might go out with the next breath.
Ballard was unashamed when the lights in the little bunk-room grew dim
to his sight, and a lump came in his throat. Jealousy, if the sullen
self-centring in the sentimental affair had grown to that, was quenched
in the upwelling tide of honest grief. For back of the sex-selfishness,
and far more deeply rooted, was the strong passion of brother-loyalty,
reawakened now and eager to make amends--to be given a chance to make
amends--for the momentary lapse into egoism.

To the Kentuckian in this hour of keen misery came an angel of comfort
in the guise of his late host, the master of Castle 'Cadia. There was
the stuttering staccato of a motor-car breasting the steep grade of the
mesa hill, the drumming of the released engines at the door of the
adobe, and the colone