Bigelow's grave smile came and went like the momentary glow from some inner light of prescience.
"Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are a man of very strong convictions, Mr. Ballard," he ventured to say.
"Think so? I don't know. A fair knowledge of my trade, a few opinions, and a certain pig-headed stubbornness that doesn't know when it is beaten: shake these up together and you have the compound which has misled you. I'm afraid I don't often wait for convincement--of the purely philosophical brand."
They were riding together down the line of the northern lateral canal, with Bourke Fitzpatrick's new headquarters in the field for the prospective night's bivouac. The contractor's camp, a disorderly blot of shanties and well-weathered tents on the fair grass-land landscape, came in sight just as the sun was sinking below the Elks, and Ballard quickened the pace.
"You'll be ready to quit for the day when we get in, won't you?" he said to Bigelow, when the broncos came neck and neck in the scurry for the hay racks.
"Oh, I'm fit enough, by now," was the ready rejoinder. "It was only the first day that got on my nerves."
There was a rough-and-ready welcome awaiting the chief engineer and his guest when they drew rein before Fitzpatrick's commissary; and a supper of the void-filling sort was quickly set before them in the back room of the contractor's quarters. But there was trouble in the air. Ballard saw that Fitzpatrick was cruelly hampered by the presence of Bigelow; and when the meal was finished he gave the contractor his chance in the privacy of the little cramped pay-office.
"What is it, Bourke?" he asked, when the closed door cut them off from the Forest Service man.
Fitzpatrick was shaking his head. "It's a blood feud now, Mr. Ballard. Gallagher's gang--all Irishmen--went up against four of the colonel's men early this morning. The b'ys took shelter in the ditch, and the cow-punchers tried to run 'em out. Some of our teamsters were armed, and one of the Craigmiles men was killed or wounded--we don't know which: the others picked him up and carried him off."
Ballard's eyes narrowed under his thoughtful frown.
"I've been afraid it would come to that, sooner or later," he said slowly. Then he added: "We ought to be able to stop it. The colonel seems to deprecate the scrapping part of it as much as we do."