to me. Did you embroider it for her? or did she put in
the little hemstitchings for me?"

Ballard laughed.

"I am sorry if I have spoiled it for you. But you couldn't make a
dramatic situation out of a careless quarryman's overloading of a
shot-hole."

"Oh, no," said the playwright, apparently giving it up. And he smoked
his pipe out in silence.

Ballard thought the incident was comfortably dead and buried, but he did
not know his man. Long after Wingfield might be supposed to have
forgotten all about the stone catapulting, he sat up suddenly and broke
out again.

"Say! you explained to Miss Dosia that the stone couldn't possibly have
come from the quarry without knocking the science of artillery into a
cocked hat. She made a point of that."

"Oh, hold on!" protested the Kentuckian. "You mustn't hold me
responsible for a bit of dinner-table talk with a very charming young
woman. Perhaps Miss Dosia wished to be mystified. I put it to you as man
to man; would you have disappointed her?"

The playwright's laugh showed his fine teeth.

"They tell me you are at the top of the heap in your profession, Mr.
Ballard, and I can easily believe it. But I have a specialty, too, and
I'm no slouch in it. My little stunt is prying into the inner
consciousness of things. Obviously, there is a mystery--a real
mystery--about this stone-throwing episode, and for some reason you are
trying to keep me from dipping into it. Conversely, I'd like to get to
the bottom of it. Tell me frankly, is there any good reason why I
shouldn't?"

Ballard's salvation for this time personified itself in the figure of
Contractor Fitzpatrick darkening the door of the office to ask a
"question of information," as he phrased it. Hence there was an excuse
for a break and a return to the sun-kissed stone yard.

The engineer purposefully prolonged the talk with Fitzpatrick until the
scattered sight-seers had gathered for a descent, under Jerry
Blacklock's lead, to the great ravine below the dam where the river
thundered out of the cut-off tunnel. But when he saw that Miss
Craigmiles had elected to stay behind, and that Wingfield had attached
himself to the younger Miss Cantrell, he gave the contractor his
information boiled down into a curt sentence or two, and hastened to
join the stay-behind.

"You'll melt, out here in the sun," he said, overtaking her as she stood
looking down into the whirling vortex made by the torrent's plunge into
the entrance