up, and there was a
mild explosion directed at the Mexican foreman.

"Manuel, I'm suhprised--right much suhprised and humiliated, suh! I
thought it was--ah--distinctly undehstood that all this schoolboy
triflin' was to be stopped. Let me heah no more of it. And see that
these heah stakes are replaced; carefully replaced, if you please, suh."
And then to the complainant: "I'm right sorry, I assure you, Mistuh
Ballard. Let me prove it by carrying you off to dinneh with us at Castle
'Cadia. Grigsby, heah, will lead youh horse to camp, and fetch any
little necessaries you might care to send for. Indulge me, suh, and let
me make amends. My daughter speaks of you so often that I feel we ought
to be mo' friendly."

Under much less favourable conditions it is conceivable that the
Kentuckian would have overridden many barriers for the sake of finding
the open door at Castle 'Cadia. And, the tour of inspection being
completed, there was no special duty call to sound a warning.

"I shall be delighted, I'm sure," he burbled, quite like an infatuated
lover; and when the cow-boy messenger was charged with the errand to the
headquarters camp, Ballard took his place beside the company's enemy,
and the car was sent purring across to the hill-skirting stage road.

VIII

CASTLE 'CADIA

It was a ten-mile run to the bowl-shaped valley behind the foothills;
and Colonel Craigmiles, mindful, perhaps, of his late seizure, did not
speed the motor-car.

Recalling it afterward, Ballard remembered that the talk was not once
suffered to approach the conflict in which he and his host were the
principal antagonists. Miss Elsa's house-party, the matchless climate of
Arcadia, the scenery, Ballard's own recollections of his Kentucky
boyhood--all these were made to do duty; and the colonel's smile was so
winning, his deep voice so sympathetic, and his attitude so
affectionately paternal, that Ballard found his mental picture of a
fierce old frontiersman fighting for his squatter rights fading to the
vanishing point.

"Diplomacy," Mr. Pelham had suggested; and Ballard smiled inwardly. If
it came to a crossing of diplomatic weapons with this keen-eyed,
gentle-voiced patriarch, who seemed bent on regarding him as an honoured
guest, the company's cause was as good as lost.

The road over which the motor-car was silently trundling avoided the
headquarters camp at the dam by several miles, losing itself among the
hogback foothills well to t