e obscured it.

It was on these scouting gallops to the outlying camps that Ballard
defined the limits of the "hoodoo." Its influence, he found, diminished
proportionately as the square of the distance from the headquarters camp
at Elbow Canyon. But in the wider field there were hindrances of another
and more tangible sort.

Bourke Fitzpatrick, the younger of the brothers in the contracting firm,
was in charge of the ditch digging; and he had irritating tales to tell
of the lawless doings of Colonel Craigmiles's herdsmen.

"I'm telling you, Mr. Ballard, there isn't anything them devils won't be
up to," he complained, not without bitterness. "One night they'll
uncouple every wagon on the job and throw the coupling-pins away; and
the next, maybe, they'll be stampeding the mules. Two weeks ago, on Dan
Moriarty's section, they came with men and horses in the dead of night,
hitched up the scrapers, and put a thousand yards of earth back into the
ditch."

"Wear it out good-naturedly, if you can, Bourke; it is only horse-play,"
was Ballard's advice. That grown men should seriously hope to defeat the
designs of a great corporation by any such puerile means was
inconceivable.

"Horse-play, is it?" snapped Fitzpatrick. "Don't you believe it, Mr.
Ballard. I can take a joke with any man living; but this is no joke. It
comes mighty near being war--with the scrapping all on one side."

"A night guard?" suggested Ballard.

Fitzpatrick shook his head.

"We've tried that; and you'll not get a man to patrol the work since
Denny Flaherty took his medicine. The cow-punchers roped him and skidded
him 'round over the prairie till it took one of the men a whole blessed
day to dig the cactus thorns out of him. And me paying both of them
overtime. Would you call that a joke?"

Ballard's reply revealed some latent doubt as to the justification for
Bromley's defense of Colonel Craigmiles's fighting methods.

"If it isn't merely rough horse-play, it is guerrilla warfare, as you
say, Bourke. Have you seen anything to make you believe that these
fellows have a tip from the big house in the upper valley?"

The contractor shook his head.

"The colonel doesn't figure in the details of the cow business at all,
as far as anybody can see. He turns it all over to Manuel, his Mexican
foreman; and Manuel is in this guerrilla deviltry as big as anybody.
Flaherty says he'll take his oath that the foreman was with the gang
that roped him."

Bal