e summer at home. When we stopped at
Ackerman's to take water this evening, I saw three loaded buckboards
driving in this direction."

"That doesn't prove anything," asserted Bromley. "The old colonel has a
house-party every little while. He's no anchorite, if he does live in
the desert."

Ballard was musing again. "Adam Craigmiles," he said, thoughtfully. "I
wonder what there is in that name to set some sort of bee buzzing in my
head. If I believed in transmigration, I should say that I had known
that name, and known it well, in some other existence."

"Oh, I don't know," said Bromley. "It's not such an unusual name."

"No; if it were, I might trace it. How long did you say the colonel had
lived in Arcadia?"

"I didn't say. But it must be something over twenty years. Miss Elsa was
born here."

"And the family is Southern--from what section?"

"I don't know that--Virginia, perhaps, measuring by the colonel's
accent, pride, hot-headedness, and reckless hospitality."

The clue, if any there were, appeared to be lost; and again Ballard
smoked on in silence. When the pipe burned out he refilled it, and at
the match-striking instant a sing-song cry of "Fire in the rock!"
floated down from the hill crags above the adobe, and the jar of a
near-by explosion shook the air and rattled the windows.

"What was that?" he queried.

"It's our quarry gang getting out stone," was Bromley's reply. "We were
running short of headers for the tie courses, and I put on a
night-shift."

"Whereabouts is your quarry?"

"Just around the shoulder of the hill, and a hundred feet, or such a
matter, above us. It is far enough to be out of range."

A second explosion punctuated the explanation. Then there was a third
and still heavier shock, a rattling of pebbles on the sheet-iron roof of
the adobe, and a scant half-second later a fragment of stone the size of
a man's head crashed through roof and ceiling and made kindling-wood of
the light pine table at which the two men were sitting. Ballard sprang
to his feet, and said something under his breath; but Bromley sat still,
with a faint yellow tint discolouring the sunburn on his face.

"Which brings us back to our starting-point--the hoodoo," he said
quietly. "To-morrow morning, when you go around the hill and see where
that stone came from, you'll say that it was a sheer impossibility. Yet
the impossible thing has happened. It is reaching for you now,
Breckenridge; and a foot or two