"Hold on a second, Ballard!" he called. "I'm going with you. What you
need right now is a trained investigator, and I'm your man. Great Scott!
to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to
see it!" And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very
earnestly to dissuade him: "Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha'n't get underfoot
or be in Mr. Ballard's way; and you needn't trouble to send down for me.
I can pad home on my two feet, later on."

XVIII

THE INDICTMENT

In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block,
Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle 'Cadia and the
construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a
companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling
him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could
think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in
ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be
presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him
in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.

How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and
mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock,
who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward
at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was
merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening
to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous
stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on
his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow,
smoking Ballard's tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and
reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another
of Bromley's dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the
taxidermic art.

"Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and
the camp 'bogie' isn't happening," Ballard told the king's daughter one
morning when he came down from Bromley's hospital room at Castle 'Cadia
and found Elsa waiting for him under the portieres of the darkened
library. "For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery
of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of
simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn't half
asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or
s