a
heart-mellowing degree.

One thing only sounded a jarring note in the soothing theme. That was
young Blacklock's very palpable anxiety and restlessness. When the
collegian had placed the big car, and had stopped its motor and
extinguished its lights, he had betaken himself to the desert of stone
chips, rambling therein aimlessly, but never, as Ballard observed,
wandering out of eye-reach of the great gray wall of masonry, of the
growing lake in the crooking elbow of the canyon, and the path-girted
hillside of the opposite shore. Blacklock's too ostentatious
time-killing was the latest of the small mysteries; and when the
Kentuckian came to earth long enough to remark it, he fancied that Jerry
was waiting for a cue of some kind--waiting and quite obviously
watching.

It was some time after Mrs. Van Bryck, plaintively protesting against
being kept out so late, had begun to doze in her chair, and Bigelow had
fetched wraps from the car wherewith to cloak a shuddery Miss Cantrell,
that Ballard's companion said, guardedly: "Don't you think it would be
in the nature of a charity to these two behind us if we were to share
Jerry's wanderings for a while?"

"I'm not sharing with Jerry--or any other man--just now," Ballard
objected. None the less, he rose and strolled with her across the stone
yard; and at the foot of the great derrick he pulled out one of the
cutter's benches for a seat. "This is better than the porch step," he
was saying, when Blacklock got up from behind a rejected thorough-stone
a few yards away and called to him.

"Just a minute, Mr. Ballard: I've got a corking big rattler under this
rock. Bring a stick, if you can find one."

Ballard found a stick and went to the help of the snake-catcher.

"Don't give him a chance at you, Jerry," he warned. "Where is he?"

The collegian drew him around to the farther side of the great
thorough-block.

"It was only a leg-pull," was the low-toned explanation. "I've been
trying all evening to get a word with you, and I had to invent the
snake. Wingfield says we're all off wrong on the mystery chase--'way
off. You're to watch the dam--that's what he told me to tell you; watch
it close till he comes down here from Castle 'Cadia."

"Watch the dam?" queried the engineer. "What am I to look for?"

"I don't know another blessed thing about it. But there's something
doing; something bigger than--'sh! Miss Elsa's asking about the snake.
Cut it out--cut it all out!"

"