After the Manner of Men

Books By Francis Lynde

Published By Charles Scribner’S Sons

=After the Manner of Men.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35

=The Real Man.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35

=The City of Numbered Days.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35

=The Honorable Senator Sage-brush.= 12mo _net_ $1.30

=Scientific Sprague.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.25

=The Price.= 12mo _net_ $1.30

=The Taming of Red Butte Western.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35

=The King of Arcadia.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35

=A Romance In Transit.= 16mo _net_ .75

[Illustration: “Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_?” (_Page 7._)]

After the Manner of Men

By Francis Lynde

_Illustrated By_ Arthur E. Becher

Charles Scribner’S Sons New York::::::::::1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published September, 1916

[Illustration]

To

Joseph Frater,

LOYAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS, TO WHOM MUCH OF THE MATERIAL AND ALL OF THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE STORY IS OWING

This Book

Is Affectionately Inscribed, With Grateful Acknowledgements From The Author

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Townlander 1

II. The Sow’S Ear 16

III. The Golden Youth 30

IV. In Which Carfax Enlists 47

V. Partly Sentimental 59

VI. Daddy Layne, And Others 73

VII. Company Come 82

VIII. The Stubborn Rock 96

IX. A Bad Night For Rucker 114

X. Blind Alleys 125

XI. Rosemary And Rue 148

XII. Dull Steel 164

XIII. The Burnt Child 177

XIV. The Logic Of Fact 194

XV. Mammy Ann’S Grave 207

XVI. A Friend At Need 230

XVII. An Anticlimax 248

XVIII. Evolutionary 261

XIX. The Human Equation 278

XX. Limitations 294

XXI. The Clansmen 305

XXII. Out Of A Clear Sky 323

XXIII. At Westwood House 334

XXIV. The Unknown Quantity 346

XXV. The Mangling Of Poictiers 365

XXVI. Tryon’S News 377

XXVII. Cloud-Wraiths 389

XXVIII. The Ocoee’S Answer 397

XXIX. Beyond The Gap 410

XXX. A Grounded Wire 419

XXXI. On Pisgah’S Height 436

Illustrations

“Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_?” _Frontispiece_

Facing Page

Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more 162

“Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!” 328

“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so” 400

After the Manner of Men

I

The Townlander

Coincident with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity.

“Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete----”

The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his own steadiness of nerve.

Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak, he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes, and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he fancied he could see more--the sunlight reflecting from the polished barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees.

While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it.

Harboring this distrust, he was content for the moment to make himself small behind his tree, sitting between two of the flanking root buttresses with his back against the barrier trunk, and wincing in spite of himself while other bullets, following now in rapid and measured succession, whined to right or left, or buried themselves in the solid wood. Oddly enough, the misses, though he could feel the wind of them on either side, were less disquieting than the hits. At each impact of lead against wood there was a jarring little shock quite thrillingly transmissible to quick-set nerves in sympathetic contact with the other side of the target.

“By Jove! if Elizabeth could only see me now!” he chuckled broadly; “Elizabeth, or the _mutterchen_, or even my rough-riding little sister! This fusillading miscreant of mine must be one of the McNabb outlaws, trying in his elemental fashion to settle the old feud about our title to the coal lands. By and by, I suppose-- Whew!”

The spine-tingling thrill was so real this time that he was half minded to look and see if the impacting bullet had not come all the way through the tree to bulge the bark on his side of it. But he restrained the prompting and went on talking to himself.

“By and by, I suppose, he’ll get tired of blazing away at a safe distance and come charging down upon me. Then I shall be most unhappily obliged to kill him; which will be about the crassest misfortune that could happen, next to his killing me. Confound their barbarous feuds, anyway! Why can’t these out-of-date mountain people wake up and realize that they are living in the twentieth century of civilization and Christian enlightenment? That’s what I’d like to know!”

The only reply to this very reasonable query being the vicious “ping” of another rifle-bullet, he went on discontentedly.

“As if matters were not hopeless enough without adding a scrap with these silly mountaineers about the land titles! Everything torn up at home, the family anchor pulled out by the roots in the steel merger, two women to be taken care of--with Elizabeth presently to make a third--and nothing to make good on but this failure of a Cumberland Mountain coal mine! And now, before I’ve had time to turn around, the spirit moves this rifle-popping moonshine-maker to turn his grouch loose until I feel it in my bones that I shall have to kill him to make him quit!”

Then, the _zip-zip_ of the bullets beginning again after a momentary pause, the soliloquy went on: “That’s right; keep it up, you pin-headed barbarian! I’ve got you for an excuse to commit manslaughter--that’s the surest thing there is. Which brings on more talk. I wonder how it feels to kill a man? I’d give all my old shoes if I didn’t have to find out experimentally. Then there is Elizabeth: it is two completed generations back to her Quaker forepeople, but she is quite capable of flatly refusing to marry what they would have stigmatized as ‘a man of blood.’ Say, you bloodthirsty assassin--that was an uncomfortably near one!”

After the glancing shot, which had flicked a handful of bark chips into Tregarvon’s lap, the firing ceased. Assuring himself that the battling moment at short range was approaching, the young man from the North sat tight, gripping the house pistol in nervous anticipation, and listening tensely for the sound of advancing footfalls.

The suspense was short. Some one, several persons, as it presently appeared, were pushing through the tangle of low-hanging undergrowth toward the oak-tree. Tregarvon wondered that there should be no attempt cautionary on the part of the enemy; wondered again, this time with nettle pricklings of foolishness, when a voice, cheerfully exultant and unmistakably feminine, cried out close at hand.

“Oh, you people--come here and see! I _did_ hit it--_lots_ of times; not that trifling little sheet of paper, of course”--scornfully--“but the tree, I mean. Just come and-- _Ee-e-ow!_”

The shrill little scream of surprise and alarm was for Mr. Vance Tregarvon, issuing cautiously from behind the bulwark oak, still mystified, and still absently gripping the pistol.

The Philadelphian found himself confronting a young woman gowned in stone-blue linen, and wearing an embroidery hat to match, the hat shading a face too unaffectedly winsome to be called beautiful, perhaps, but yet the most piquant and expressive face he had ever looked upon. This young woman was carrying a target-rifle; and pinned upon the bullet-punctured side of the oak was the square of white paper at which she had evidently been shooting.

There were others coming up to join the pretty markswoman: a lean-faced, mild-eyed, spectacled gentleman of middle age, whose coat suggested the church or the schoolroom; a vivacious lady in black, with strongly marked eyebrows and eloquent hands and shoulders; a young woman who wore an artist’s smock over her walking-gown; and another who was girlish enough to wear a red tarn, and to be the prettier for it. But by preference Tregarvon made his stammering apologies to the blue embroidery hat.

“Ah--er--please don’t mind me,” he begged, acutely conscious that his abrupt and pistol-bearing entrance was handicapping him prodigiously. “I thought--that is--er--you see, I really couldn’t know that it was merely a peaceful target practice, and I----”

“Of all things!” gasped the young woman, her slate-blue eyes emphasizing her shocked amazement. “Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_? But, of course, you must have! How perfectly dreadful!”

Tregarvon was trying ineffectually to hide the ornamental revolver in his coat pocket when the others closed in.

“You are sure you are not hurt?” the mild-eyed escort made haste to inquire, and Tregarvon grinned sheepishly.

“Only in my self-esteem,” he confessed. “I was silly enough to think that somebody was trying to mark me down, though I might have known better after the first shot or two.”

“But how could you know when you were behind the tree and couldn’t see us?” protested the one who had been doing the shooting. “I’m sure it speaks libraries for your self-control that you didn’t retaliate in kind! Don’t you think so, Madame Fortier?” and she appealed to the lady with the Gallic eyebrows and the eloquent shoulders.

“_Ciel!_ but the _sangfroid_--what you call the cold blood--of these American zhentlemen is of a grandeur the moz’ magnificent!” exclaimed madame. “Mees Richardia she is shoot a hondred time at zis zhentleman, and he is say he is injure’ onlee in hees _amour-propre_!”

It was at this point that the humor of the situation overtook the chief offender, and she laughed, the sweetest and most delectable laugh that ever gladdened the ears of a young man keenly sensitive to the charms of heavenly slate-blue eyes, a piquant face, and a voice remindful of wood-thrushes and song-sparrows and golden-throated warblers.

“After this, there is nothing left for us but to declare ourselves,” she submitted ruefully, turning to the spectacled escort. “It is the least we can do to save the gentleman the trouble of describing us if he wishes to have us taken before Squire Prigmore.”

But now Tregarvon was regaining some measure of equanimity.

“Let me be the one to begin the identifying process,” he amended. “My name is Vance Tregarvon, and I have the misfortune to be the present owner of the valueless piece of property known as the Ocoee Mine. You are more than welcome to make a rifle-range of my landscape any time you wish. I am quite certain it is the only useful purpose it has ever subserved.”

The gentleman whose coat was either clerical or schoolmasterish, bowed gravely and took his turn, prefacing it with a question.

“Have you ever heard of Highmount College for Young Women, Mr. Tregarvon?”

Tregarvon, in deference to piquancies and slate-blue eyes and the like, was tempted to quibble and say that, of course, every one knew of Highmount College. But the heavenly eyes were holding him, and they promised intolerance of anything but the pellucid truth. So he shook his head regretfully.

“Such is fame--the fame of an old, a great, and a noble institution of learning!” said the spectacled one, in mock deprecation. “With a foundation laid over half a century in the past, with the most healthful and charming location on the entire Cumberland Mountain for its site; with a corps of instructors second only to those of the richly endowed colleges of the North--correct me, Miss Richardia, if I am not quoting the prospectus accurately--with all these splendid advantages, and with a student body drawn from the oldest and most distinguished families of the South.... Mr. Tregarvon, can it be possible----”

“Spare me!” laughed the victim. “You must remember that I am only a poor, ignorant provincial from Philadelphia, less than a fortnight out of the shell.”

“We are merely trying to impress you properly so that you will think twice before having us arrested for trespass and attempted assassination,” broke in the laughing markswoman. “We may not look it, but we are a majority of the faculty of Highmount College for Young Women. Let me present you to Madame Fortier, Modern Languages; to Miss Longstreet, Art; to Miss Farron, Assistant Mathematics; and to Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt, Higher Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.”

Tregarvon bowed in turn to the Gallic eyebrows, to the artist’s smock, to the red tam-o’-shanter, and shook hands cordially with the M.A., Vanderbilt.

“This is fine, you know; it’s like Robinson Crusoe’s meeting with his rescuers,” he asserted joyously. “This is my first real hearing of the English tongue since I began doing time down yonder in Coalville, with my old ruin of an office-building for a dungeon, and Mrs. Matt Tryon for my jail matron. Is it very far to Highmount College? And may I hope sometime to----”

The three younger women laughed at this, and Madame Fortier hastened to be hospitable.

“We shall be moz’ charm’, Monsieur Tregarvong. I will spik for President Caswell and hees good madame.” But Tregarvon waited for Miss Richardia’s confirmation, which was given unhesitatingly.

“Certainly, you must come, if you can spare the time,” she affirmed. “We were speaking of you, and of the Ocoee prospects, at dinner the other evening, and Doctor Caswell was even then threatening to look you up. I think he said he had met your father in years gone by.”

“I am sure that was exceedingly kind and hospitable--to think of taking the stranger up before he had made himself known,” said Tregarvon, with the hearth-warmed exile’s glow at his heart. They were moving over to the rifle-rest, and he had fallen a step or two behind with Miss Richardia. “You would have to be a castaway in a strange land yourself to know how good it feels to be counted in.”

“I have been both--the castaway and the counted-in,” she returned. “I was four years in Boston; two of them without knowing a single soul outside of a limited little Conservatory circle.”

“Ah,” he said, with the air of one who pats himself on the back for his own perspicacity. “You didn’t introduce yourself a moment ago, as you may remember, but I was sure you were Music.”

“Why were you?” she asked.

“Because you look it.”

“Harmony or discord?” she queried, with the bright little laugh remindful of the bird songs.

“How can you ask! Celestial harmony--no less!” It was only a matter of a hundred yards, between the oak-tree target and the firing-stand, but they were getting on very well, indeed.

“Following that line of reasoning, you might say that Miss Longstreet looks picturesque, I suppose? And Miss Farron----”

“Miss Farron is far too charming to warrant any allusion to figures, mathematical or other,” he retorted lightly.

“And how about Professor Billy?”

Tregarvon chuckled. “Is that what you call him? I’m glad I have a Christian name that can’t very well be nicked entirely out of all resemblance to the original. Which reminds me: have I got to call you ‘Miss Richardia’? It sounds awfully formal--don’t you think?--in the mouth of a man who has been familiarly shot at by its possessor.”

“You had better,” she replied calmly. “I am ‘Miss Dick’ in the classrooms; but that is the student body’s privilege. Other people have to earn it.”

“Consider me an employee from this moment, if you please. I’m good at earning things.”

“Have you earned the Ocoee property?” she asked, altogether, as it appeared, by way of making conversation.

“No; but my father did--very bitterly, as it turned out. May I ask what you know about the Ocoee?”

“Only what every one knows: that it brings sorrow and ruin to everybody who has anything to do with it.”

They had reached the rifle-stand, and Hartridge was reloading the target-gun for Miss Farron. There was still a little isolation for Tregarvon and his companion, and the young man made the most of it.

“Your words imply a lot more than they say,” he suggested. “I shall take an early opportunity to make my Highmount call, and when I do, perhaps you will tell me some of the things I need to know.”

“Professor Hartridge or President Caswell can tell you better than I can,” she demurred, as one dismissing an unpleasant subject. “I only know that the mine has always been a wretched failure; first a thing of broken promises, and afterward a cunningly devised pitfall for the unwary.”

If Tregarvon had for his major weakness the love of women, he was not lacking such other qualities as may go with broad shoulders, good gray eyes set wide apart, a clean-cut face, and a resolute jaw. The squareness of the jaw was emphasized when he said: “This is the time when the Ocoee quits being a failure, Miss Richardia. It is up to me to make it a success, and I mean to do it.”

It was at this conjuncture that Miss Farron, trying vainly to sight the rifle over the fallen-tree firing-stand, broke in upon the _tête-à-tête_.

“Dickie, dear, do come here and hold your hand over my left eye,” she called plaintively. “It just persists in coming open to see what the other one is trying to do.”

II

The Sow’s Ear

The rough-hewn world of mountain and valley had taken on a distinctly cheerful aspect for the young man from Philadelphia when, late in the afternoon, he reluctantly separated himself from the rifle-shooting party and turned his steps valleyward to keep an appointment made two days earlier with one Angus Duncan, an old Scotch mining expert, upon whom the great Southern title company, unlimited, had long since conferred the brevet of “captain.”

Whatever the Tregarvon gray eyes and resolute jaw promised in the way of decisive action and stubborn determination, their possessor was never born to be a contented anchorite. Not even the matchless beauties of nature, arrayed in all the glories of a Tennessee mountain September, could atone for the solitude imposed by the dead-alive hamlet of Coalville, and the newly opened prospect of an occasional escape to the congenial social atmosphere of the mountain-top school was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

Tregarvon was planning the first of these escapes, and forecasting the time which would be consumed in freighting his motor-car down from Philadelphia, when the forest path ended and let him out among the deserted slope-foot buildings and empty coke-ovens of the Ocoee. He glanced at his watch. The up-train on the branch railroad was due; it had doubtless announced its approach by some distant crossing whistle, since the little squad of village idlers had left its cantonments under the porch of Tait’s store to straggle across to the station platform.

Tregarvon remained on his own side of the railroad-tracks and waited. He knew that Captain Duncan’s visit would be discussed in all its possible bearings in the idlers’ caucus at Tait’s, and he was willing to disappoint the country-store gossips when it came in his way.

There were but few passengers to get on or off at Coalville when the branch-line train rolled up to the platform, and Tregarvon had no difficulty in identifying his man; the stocky, ruddy-faced, shrewd-eyed mining engineer who had been named to him as the foremost coal expert in the Tennessee field. He cut Duncan out of the group of loungers at the instant of hand-shaking, and took him across to the dilapidated building which had once been the superintendent’s office and the commissary of the Ocoee Company, seeking, and securing, as he imagined, ear-shot privacy for the business conference.

But privacy in a Southern country hamlet, where gossip is as the breath of life to the isolated few, is only to be bought with a price. From his post of observation in Tait’s doorway, a lank, bristly-bearded man in grimy jeans that had once been butternut, marked the direction of the retreat across the railroad-tracks, made a dodging détour around the engine of the standing train, and was safely hidden behind a thick clump of althea bushes at the corner of the office-building when Tregarvon and the Scotchman came leisurely to sit on the door-stone.

“Ye’re paying me for an expert opeenion, Mr. Tregarvon, and that’s what I’m bound to gie ye,” the engineer was saying. “I’ve known the Ocoee ever since the first pick was piked intil it, and ye’ll be wasting your time and money if you try to develop it. That’s what I told your father, and it’s what I’m telling his son.”

“Poor coal? Or not enough of it?” Tregarvon’s manner was that of a man desirous of knowing the exact facts.

“Good coal--fine! It makes a coke that would run everything this side of Pocahontas, or maybe Connellsville, out o’ the market. And there is enough of it if the two veins could be worked as one. But there’s the bogie, Mr. Tregarvon; two well-defined veins, each a foot and a half thick, one above the other, and with six foot of solid rock between. If you had twenty such veins it wouldn’t pay to work them in this part of the country.”

“You mean that the digging out of the rock between the two coal seams would eat up all the profits?”

“Just that.”

Tregarvon was pulling ineffectually at his short pipe. When he stooped to pluck a spear of grass for a stem-cleaner he said: “Wasn’t it the notion of the earliest promoters that the two veins would merge into one, farther back in the mountain?”

The expert waved his hand toward the long and costly inclined tramway running straight up the steep slope of the mountain to the two black openings at the foot of the cliff-line.

“Ye’d think they believed in it--wouldn’t ye now--to build that tramway on the strength of it? Two hunner’ thousand and better they put in here, first and last; on the tramway and the coke-ovens, the miners’ houses, and this fine office-building that’s crum’ling down behind our backs! And with every practical coal man in the country telling them that such a thing as two veins--two separate veins, mind ye--coming into one was a geological impossibeelity. Parker--the man who set the trap and caught everybody--he knew, I’m thinking; but Judge Birrell and all the rest of ’em were crazy--fair crazy!”

“But is it a geological impossibility, Captain Duncan? That is one of the questions I got you up here to answer for me,” Tregarvon put in.

The Scotch engineer was too cautious to be definitely oracular.

“It’s never been h’ard of yet,” he replied shrewdly, “and there’s a many to tell ye that the day o’ merricles is past. But that isn’t all, Mr. Tregarvon. Besides being a sow’s ear that ye canna hope to make into a silk purse, the Ocoee has another handicap. If ye had your coal in profitable shape and quantity, ye’d never be allowed to mine and coke and market it; never in this warld.”

“Who would stop me?”

“The C. C. & I. Company, which is another name in this part o’ the warld for Consolidated Coal--the trust. The combine owns all the producing mines hereabouts; they’ve got one in full blast at Whitlow, five miles above this. If you should develop into anything worth while, it would be another case of the lion and the lamb lying down in peace together--with the Ocoee lamb inside of the trust lion. They couldn’t afford to lat ye operate. Your coke, for as much of it as ye could make, would drive theirs out o’ the market.”

“Well?” said the Philadelphian.

“They’d buy ye, if they could haggle ye down to sell at a bargain; and, failing in that, they’d break ye. I’m not questioning your resources, ye unnerstand; that part of it was none of my business after I’d had your check for my fee safely in my pocket,” he threw in cannily. “But tell me, now: if ye had your four or five or even six foot of coal, are ye big enough in the way o’ backing and capital to fight Consolidated Coal wi’ any hope of coming out alive?”

“That is as it may be,” said Tregarvon, wishing neither to deny nor to affirm publicly. Then he asked casually if the engineer could give chapter and page proving the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company’s policy of extermination.

“Can I no?” said the Scotchman, with a snap of the shrewd eyes. “I can show ye wrecked mines by the handfu’ in a day’s ride up and down this same Wehatchee Valley we’re sitting in. ’Tis the power o’ money, Mr. Tregarvon. When ye get between the jaws o’ that crusher, ye’re like this”--picking up a bit of friable sandstone and crumbling it in his palm.

The younger man smoked on thoughtfully for a time. Then he said: “Two of the points upon which I wished to have your opinion have been covered pretty conclusively, it would seem. But there is a third. What about this trouble with the McNabbs over the land title?”

The Scotchman waved the third point away as if it had been a buzzing fly.

“The McNabbs are just a whiskey-making lot of poor bodies living back in the Pocket beyond Highmount. An unscrupulous lawyer-scamp got hold of them when the second Ocoee Company was fair rolling in money, and showed them how they could trump up a claim to a wedge-like slip o’ land on the top o’ the mountain which, if the claim could be made good, would cut off the mine a hundred feet or so back from the cliff. There was neither sense nor justice in it, and the courts said so. Ye’ll be having no trouble wi’ the McNabbs, unless one o’ them might be taking a pop at ye wi’ his squirrel-gun some fine day.”

Tregarvon smiled, recalling his sensations while Miss Richardia’s bullets were snipping bark souvenirs from his sheltering oak.

“One wouldn’t be scared out by a little thing like that,” he remarked half humorously. Then he asked, quite abruptly, another question--the chief question for an answer to which he had paid the expert’s fee.

“I have been told, Captain Duncan, that you have made an analysis of the Ocoee coals. Also, I have been given to understand that no two veins in these Tennessee coal-measures have exactly the same characteristics; that the quality of the coal varies with its distance from the original surface, though the depth difference between any two deposits may be very slight. If you didn’t know of the existence of the six-foot layer of stone lying between my two coal seams, would you, or would you not, say that they were one and the same?”

Duncan took time to consider before answering the crucial question.

“I see what ye’re driving at, now,” he said at length. “Ye’ve paid me for a true answer, Mr. Tregarvon, and much as I’ll hate to see your father’s son banging his head against a stone wall, I’ll give it ye. I’ve made half a dozen analyses: so far as they prove anything, the coal in the two seams is the same.”

“Thank you,” returned Tregarvon, drawing a free breath as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders by the answer. And then, as a quavering whistle blast announced the approach of the down freight train on the branch: “There is your return train, Captain Duncan. If I had any hospitality to offer you, you shouldn’t go back to Hesterville to-night. As it is, I know you’ll be glad you don’t have to stop over in Coalville. Even the name is a misnomer, it would seem.”

The grizzled Scotchman had discharged his duty and earned his fee. But the cravings of a purely Caledonian curiosity were still unsatisfied.

“And what’ll ye be doing, think ye, Mr. Tregarvon?” he asked inquisitively.

Tregarvon’s answer was pointedly and purposefully indifferent. “Oh, I don’t know definitely yet. I may take a notion to butt my head against the stone wall, and I may not. If I should, you’ll doubtless hear of it. Good-by; it was mighty good of you to take the trouble to come and talk with me when you might have put me off with a letter.”

Though the leave-taking at the door of the office-building was a fact accomplished, Tregarvon prolonged it a little by walking across to the station with Duncan. Thereby he missed a possible chance of seeing the retreat of the man who had been crouching behind the althea bushes, the dodging run, first to the shelter of the row of coke-ovens, and later to the lower fringe of the Mount Pisgah forest, darkening now in the early valley twilight.

Late that night, in his room in the cobwebbed and dismantled office-building, Tregarvon wrote two letters. The first was to a certain golden youth in New York, a young man rejoicing in the ancient and honorable name of Poictiers Carfax, and whose father had left him more money than he knew what to do with. Upon Carfax Tregarvon leaned as upon a brother, having shared rooms with the golden one in the university at a period in which the Tregarvon family check could also have been drawn for seven figures.

“You are always howling and taking on about living the simple life,” was the opening phrase in the letter to Carfax. “I wish you could be with me to-night and have a taste of what it really is--ten thousand miles from the Great White Way or a decent beefsteak. I’d describe it for you if this were anything but a begging letter--which it isn’t.

“First, I wish you’d send your machinist over to Philadelphia and have him ship my car to me here. Tell him to put in extras of everything, from spark-plugs to tires, just the same as if he were sending it to a man in Darkest Africa.

“Next (and this is of more importance to me, and perhaps less to you), I am going into a scheme here which promises to leave me stony broke before I shall have pulled half-way through the experimental stage, and will possibly bankrupt even the Carfax strong box when it fairly gets its second wind. I may have to sell you some stock, later on, and to that end I’ll be glad if you’ll keep in touch--so that you may be ‘touched’--or at least keep yourself within reach of a wire.

“This is all I’m going to write, for the time being, except to say that I’ve thought of you about five times a minute during the past week, and have tried to picture you in Coalville, hesitating between suicide and a lingering death from disgust. Come down and try it. I’ll go bail it will give you an entirely new set of sensations. What do you say?”

The second letter was to Miss Elizabeth Wardwell, and it was a masterpiece in its way--the way of a man who writes as he would talk, and who talks when he would much better hold his tongue.

“The adventures began to-day,” so ran the words of unwisdom. “While I was clambering around on the mountain above the Ocoee opening, _zip!_ came a bullet--yes, an indubitable leaden bullet fired from a gun--near enough to make me dodge. What will you think of me when I write it down in muddy black ink on white paper that I hid behind a tree! I did, you know, and immediately had plenty of reasons for being thankful that the tree was big enough to cover me, and thick enough through to stop a rifle-bullet.

“For fifteen minutes, or such a matter--though it seemed a moderately long lifetime--my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth, and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man. Would you?

“When it was all over, my assassins--it turned out that there was a bunch of them--proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount College shooting at a mark, which the same--though I hadn’t seen it, and didn’t remotely suspect its existence--was affixed to the farther side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my face, I suppose.

“They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh. It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell, I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing about and looking on and listening in?

“I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I shall--later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go.

“Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of your letters--how much they mean to me.”

III

The Golden Youth

It was on the day following Captain Angus Duncan’s visit that the hamlet of Coalville, nestling at the foot of Mount Pisgah, took a fresh start as an industrial centre. Word went out from Tait’s store, which served as a general intelligence exchange for the country roundabout, that Tregarvon wanted laborers and would pay good wages.

The men came; some from the half-tilled valley farms, a few from the C. C. & I. mines farther up the railroad, and two or three mountaineers. Two of the mountain dwellers, long-haired, unshaven backwoodsmen, gave their names as Morgan and Sill, suppressing, for some reason best known to themselves, their surname of McNabb. Also there came the lean, bristly-bearded man who had squatted behind the althea bushes at the corner of the office-building during Tregarvon’s talk with Captain Duncan; James Sawyer, by name. Tregarvon knew nothing of this man’s antecedents; of the forehistory of any of them, for that matter. What he demanded was work, and he went about securing it in the best of all possible ways: by stripping off his coat and acting as his own foreman.

In strenuous toilings fled the first two weeks, during which period the old machinery was overhauled, the tramway up the mountain repaired and put in running order, and the _débris_ of disuse cleared away. For the aggressive campaign a deep-well drilling plant was secured in Chattanooga, and upon its arrival all things were made ready for transporting it to the top of the plateau mountain.

Tregarvon’s plan, which he thought was original with him, was to go back on the level mountain top with his test-drill, and to sink a series of holes down to the coal-measures. If the first test should show the two veins still separated by the stubborn ledge of intervening rock, he would move the machinery farther back and try again--and yet again, if need be; though of all this he said no more to his workmen than was necessary to enable them to help intelligently.

At the beginning of the second week the drilling machinery was hauled up the mountain, and two days later, Uncle William, a solemn-faced old negro with a narrow fringe of white wool ringing his otherwise perfectly bald head, made his appearance at Coalville.

He was waiting for Tregarvon on the Thursday morning when the Philadelphian turned out to go up the mountain with his working gang; waiting to doff his battered hat and scrape his foot, and to announce in honeyed tones that he had come “ter tek cha’ge of de young marsteh.”

Quite naturally, Tregarvon thought there must be some mistake, and said so; but the old man persisted with the velvety sort of pertinacity which refuses to be denied, vaunting himself as a body-servant of “the quality,” and acquiring, or seeming to acquire, a curious hardness of hearing when Tregarvon questioned him as to where he had come from and who had sent him.

“Yas, suh--yas, suh; cayn’t hear ve’y good on dat side o’ my haid--no, suh. But I’se suttin sho’ gwine tek mighty good keer o’ you-all; I is dat, marsteh.”

“But a body-servant is the last thing on earth that I am needing here, uncle!” protested Tregarvon, firing his final shot of objection. “If I could find a good cook now, that would be more to the point.”

“Dat’s it--dat’s it, suh. You-all jes’ go ’long up de mounting and boss dem po’ white trash, and lef’ ol’ Unc’ Wilyum ter fix up dat cook-house. He gwine show you what quality cookin’ is; yas, suh; he will dat!”

Tregarvon left the old man bowing and scraping and backing away to take possession of the deserted office-building and its detached cook-shanty; and when he came back to the valley in the evening he gasped to remember how near he had come to incurring the penalty imposed upon those who refuse to entertain angels in disguise.

The old office-building was swept and garnished, above and below. Out of the lumber-room in the basement Uncle William had rescued a dining-table, chairs, napery of a sort, and dishes; and in the rear room, which had once been the office of the Ocoee superintendent, a supper was spread, hot, smoking, and appetizing enough to tempt a sick man. Even the napkins, improvised for the moment out of pieces of a flour-sack washed to snowy whiteness, were not lacking; and when the master would sit down, Uncle William was behind him to whisk the chair away and to replace it, with all the deftness of a trained butler.

Tregarvon ate and drank in grateful and heartfelt silence down to the black coffee, which was served, for the want of the proper crockery, in an egg-cup, with a small fruit dish for a saucer. Then he made the amende honorable.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, Uncle William, but I owe you an apology, none the less,” he said. “Consider that I belong to you for as long as you care to keep me--at your own price.”

“Yas, suh; dat’s it--dat’s jes’ de way de quality talk to ol’ Unc’ Wilyum, eve’y time--_hyuh! hyuh!_ ’Long erbout an hour o’ sun, white woman comed ercross f’om dat white-niggah cabin turrer side de big road, and she say: ‘I gwine fix up Mistoo Tregarbin’s suppeh.’ _I_ say, ‘Mistoo Tregarbin ’sents his compliments an’ say t’ank you kin’ly, but he done got he own body-sarvant!’ Yas, suh; dat’s what I done tol’ _huh_.”

Tregarvon’s eyes twinkled.

“You’ll be getting yourself disliked, Uncle William, if you put on your quality manners with Mrs. Tryon and her kind. They tell me that this county was Republican during the war.” Then he added: “Are you ready to tell me now who sent you here?”

The old man was clearing the supper-table, and he seemed to have entirely misunderstood the query.

“Dat ol’ cook-house? Yas, suh; it sholy did try me for to git dat ol’ chimley ter mek de fiah bu’n for de supper-fixin’s. Ter-morrer I gwine chink him up some; yas, suh, I sholy is.”

After Uncle William’s mysterious advent the work on the mountain progressed the more rapidly by precisely the difference between a well-fed leader and an ill-fed. Tregarvon and his pick-up crew wrought manfully, and on the eighteenth day--the day of fresh surprises--the drilling machinery had been safely transported to the plateau, had been set up, and was ready to be started on the test upon which the Tregarvon hopes were building airy structures of future affluence.

At quitting-time on this eighteenth day of preparatory toil Tregarvon came down in a tram-car with his men and, after the dispersal at the mountain foot, stood for a moment on the office-building porch to let the quiet grandeur of the perfect autumn evening soak in and wash the work-weariness out of his jaded brain and muscles.

The sun had gone behind the mountain for all the lower reaches of the valley, but its level rays were still pouring in a flood of yellow light across the flat-topped promontory crowned by the buildings of Highmount College. Pisgah, densely forested on slope and summit, loomed vast as the early shadows rose like silently drawn curtains to soften its rugged detail, and on the sky-line Tregarvon’s gaze sought and found the derrick skeleton of his drilling plant struck out in rigid lines of black against the hazy blue. Just above him the tramway cut its steeply ascending gash through the forest of the slope, and in his mind’s eye he could see the cars descending, each with its load of the reopened mine’s largesse, to be dumped upon the receiving-platform beside the row of coke-ovens.

From the outlined derrick to the sun-illumined college buildings was an airy leap of a mile or more. Tregarvon had not as yet used his invitation, though the French teacher’s giving of it had been promptly confirmed by a cordial note from the president’s wife. The social hunger rose strong in the expatriated townlander as he let his eyes make the leap from the industries, typified by the derrick skeleton, to the possible relaxations harboring on Highmount. He meant to go; he promised himself afresh that he would go, the moment his motor-car should arrive and be put into commission to make the five-mile climb up the mountain pike from Coalville something less than an added weariness after a hard day’s work.

He was still looking longingly up to the sun-shot heights and wondering why he had heard nothing from Poictiers Carfax, when a sound, breeze-blown up the valley, made him start and listen. When he heard it again it was nearer; the unmistakable roar of an automobile’s engines with the muffler cut out. To confirm the witness of the ear, a big yellow car presently topped the rise in the valley road below the village and came bounding over the roughnesses of the country wagon track toward the railroad crossing.

Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet.

Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated. And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to Tregarvon’s door.

“Hit do beat the Dutch--what-all gits up in the big woods when you ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the eye-glasses--he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big ones--he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello, Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’--’r some sech name as that--‘did you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back, lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.”

“President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the listeners.

“President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’ some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller _totin’ the carpet-bags_!”

“I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had ’em--called ’em val-lays.”

“I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn nugget of plug tobacco.

“He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,” volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless. “He’s got two of ’em in his gang now--Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they don’t git him afore he gits the coal----”

“Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,” laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way.

Thus ran the leisurely comment in the gray of the evening, working its way from man to man among the loungers on Tait’s porch. But in the dilapidated office-building across the railroad-tracks there was consternation.

“Why, Poictiers, old man, you can’t endure it for twenty-four hours!” Tregarvon was protesting anxiously. “Look at this place--a dusty, cobwebby ruin that a self-respecting tramp wouldn’t lodge in! Heavens, man! couldn’t you see a joke when it was written out plain with a pen and ink? I would have as soon invited Elizabeth--meaning it!”

Carfax had slipped out of his dust-coat and goggles, the valet assisting, and stood revealed as a handsome young fellow, a shade too well-groomed, perhaps, but with smiling good-nature atoning for the Carfax millions in every line of his beardless and almost effeminate face.

“Now that is what I call downright inhospitable,” he laughed, with the faintest suspicion of a lisp on the sibilants, “after you had written me to come. Your letter is out in the go-cart, if Merkley didn’t forget to put it in my letter-case. Also, after I’ve driven that unspeakable car of yours over a thousand miles of the worst roads the rain ever rained on----”

“Oh, good Lord, Poictiers--you’re welcome; as welcome as the sunshine! Don’t rub it into me that way. But the place; the--the----”

Carfax’s smile was cherubic; or rather it would have been if the womanish lines of his face had not made it seraphic.

“No apologies, you inexpressible old coal-digger. I knew you were only joking when you asked me--or rather dared me--to come down. But the notion seized me, and here I am. Here, likewise, is Rucker, the machinist, who will happily shift for himself; and what is more serious, perhaps, here also is Merkley. In all human probability I shall bleat like a sheep at the corn-pones and the hardtack, and all that; but Merkley was once in the service of the Duke of Marlford and his agonies----”

Tregarvon laughed, and the stresses came off.

“Luckily, I have acquired Uncle William, or, perhaps I should say, he has acquired me, since I wrote you, and you won’t starve, whatever happens to Merkley. Find your way up-stairs and take possession, while I tell the old uncle what he is up against in the way of supper-getting. You’ll find a bath, with ice-cold mountain spring water--my one luxury--at the end of the upper corridor.”

Considering his resources, which were few and strictly limited, Uncle William shed a lustre all his own upon the dinner for two, which was served in the makeshift dining-room as soon as Carfax came down.

“I’m sure you needn’t find fault with your table,” was the guest’s comment, when the snowy biscuits and the egg-bread, the fried chicken and the riced potatoes had passed in review. “I only wish I could induce an Uncle William to adopt me.”

Thus the master; but the London-bred man was not faring so well. It was Uncle William’s effort to orient the valet--an effort vocalizing itself through the screened windows of Tregarvon’s dining-room--that reopened the question of the practicabilities.

“Is you-all dat gemman’s white niggah?” was the blunt demand, made when Merkley, dinner-inclined, ventured into the sacred precincts of Uncle William’s detached cook-house.

“H-I am Mr. Carfax’s man, and h-I’ll trouble you to serve my dinner,” was the lofty reply, returned in Merkley’s best tone of aloofness.

“I’s askin’ ef you is dat gemman’s white niggah!”--scornfully. “Ef you is, you jes’ sots youse’f down on dat door-step an’ waits, same as any turrer niggah. When de quality folks gets t’rough, an’ _I_ gets t’rough, den you kin have what’s lef’.”

Carfax waved a shapely hand toward the open window.

“The irrepressible conflict has begun,” he remarked. “What do you do in such cases in--er--Coalville?”

“We go down on our knees, metaphorically speaking, and plead with an outraged and righteously indignant Uncle William,” Tregarvon laughed; and when the old negro made his next appearance in the dining-room, the Philadelphian did it so skilfully that Merkley was provided for at a side table in the hall; not of grace, as certain mumblings from the cook-house proved, but because the master desired it.

“That settles our status,” said Carfax, with the cherubic smile, “at least down to Rucker, the mechanician. I wonder what has become of him?”

“If he is the same mechanical barbarian you had last year, he’ll not go hungry,” Tregarvon ventured; and then, with the assurance of a tried friend: “Whatever possessed you to come down here _en suite_, Poictiers? Did I give you the impression that the Ocoee headquarters was a summer-resort hotel?”

Carfax laughed joyously. “You certainly did not. But I was tired of Lenox, and it was too early for the shooting. Moreover, you said you wanted your car, and the fit took me to drive it. That accounts for Rucker; and I suppose I account for poor Merkley. He is due to have the time of his gay young life--don’t you think?--with Uncle William and the elemental environment? But tell me more about your affair. What have you been letting yourself in for, down here in the Southern backwoods?”

Uncle William had removed the cloth, and had put a tobacco-jar and two pipes on the table.

“It is the best we can do, even for you,” said Tregarvon, indicating the tobacco aftermath apologetically. “Nobody has ever seen a bottle of wine in Coalville, and the whiskey of the country isn’t fit to drink.” Then he plunged abruptly into the story of the Ocoee, so far as he knew it, giving the last-resort reasons why he was trying to make a family windbreak of it, and Carfax heard him through patiently.

“Then it sums itself up about like this: You haven’t anything at present, and if you succeed in getting anything, the other fellows will nab it,” he said, when Tregarvon had finished. “Is that about the size of it?”

“You have surrounded it completely. Only I am eliminating the ‘if.’ I mean to get something, and I don’t mean to let the other fellows get away with it.”

“Any move made yet?” queried Carfax, between delicate little puffs at the pipe of hospitality.

“Not visibly. The trust people will scarcely move in the matter until after I have proved my first proposition, which is that the two veins of coal become one farther back in the mountain. But the McNabbs may not wait that long.”

“Who are the McNabbs?”

Tregarvon explained again, at some length, not omitting mention of a mysterious leaf fire which had threatened to destroy a tramway trestle, and other small accidents which had somewhat impeded the work of the past fortnight, and which were blankly unaccountable save upon a theory of somebody’s malice.

“Why don’t you buy ’em off?” said Carfax casually. Money was his cure-all for most human ills.

“For one reason, they haven’t given me a chance. For another, I don’t propose to be held up and robbed. They haven’t any title to the land; they have never had a shadow of a title.” Then he broke off suddenly, glanced at his watch, and changed the subject. “How much too tired are you to take a five-mile spin with me up the mountain in the car, Poictiers?” he asked.

Carfax’s eyebrows went up in mild surprise. Nevertheless, he said: “Call it a go--if you can find Rucker.”

“Never mind Rucker; I’ll drive you myself,” said Tregarvon, and a few minutes later the big car, with its dazzling headlamps picking out the way, was storming up the steep grades of the Pisgah pike to Highmount.

IV

In Which Carfax Enlists

On the broad veranda of the administration building at Highmount, which looked down sidewise upon the twinkling light or two of Coalville and faced on even terms an opposing shoulder of the mountain where the newly erected drill derrick stood, Carfax was holding Miss Farron and four privileged members of the senior class at bay, while Tregarvon contentedly monopolized Miss Richardia Birrell.

The two thus comfortably isolated had quickly exhausted the commonplaces. Tregarvon was made to know thus early that one of Miss Richardia’s charms was her ability to plunge at once into the heart of things; and the talk had turned upon Carfax, distance and the hubbub of the others sanctioning personalities.

“Oh, you don’t know him yet,” Tregarvon protested, in refutation of a remark of Miss Birrell’s based upon Carfax’s apparent satisfaction with his present besetment. “He is anything but a butterfly, in the meaning you imply; and I say this in spite of his pretty face and airy gabble, and the lisp and his bad habit of slipping instinctively, as you might say, into the easiest chair in sight. I’ve summered him and wintered him, and I know.”

“I like loyalty,” said Miss Richardia, with the air of one to whom abstractions are as daily bread. “Are you going to winter him in Coalville?”

“No such good luck as that for me, I’m afraid. After the shooting begins, I don’t imagine he has a week untaken. You may not believe it, but Poictiers is in demand--where he is known and appreciated.”

“I am sure we shall appreciate him,” was the half-mocking rejoinder. “Young men who come to Highmount driving their own tonneau cars are not so plentiful.”

Tregarvon’s laugh was not more than decently boastful.

“This particular tonneau car happens to be mine,” he explained. “Besides, Carfax might discount your praise. His latest purchase is an imported Dumont-Sillery, I believe. It probably cost three times as much as mine; and on the other side of the water, at that.”

“How easily and familiarly you talk of imported luxuries and ‘the other side’,” she commented, still in the mocking vein. And then, with an exactly proportioned touch of wistfulness: “I wish I might have a glimpse into your world; the world you have turned your back upon--temporarily.”

Tregarvon slid into this little pitfall without realizing that it had been digged especially for him, thus proving that social hunger may be as blind as any of the other appetites. So far from suspecting pitfalls, he was thinking that there were many less enjoyable diversions than sitting in a moderately secluded corner of a dimly lighted veranda in the company of a young woman who was kind enough to evince an interest in a chance visitor’s proper sphere.

“It is not such a very high-planed world, the one I’ve left behind, Miss Richardia; not nearly as human as this of Coalville and Mount Pisgah,” he returned. “I believe I have seen more real human nature in the past three weeks than I had ever seen before.”

“You mean that the other world is artificial?”

“It is; without intending to be, especially. We are not elemental any more; not even in our passions. We do things in a certain well-defined way because that is the way other people do them. We are afraid, or at least disinclined, to strike out on new lines.”

“You have struck out on a new line, haven’t you?” she asked.

“I have been pushed out, in this Ocoee matter. There is enough of the elemental surviving in me to make me break with traditions and become a hustler when it is a question of bread and meat for my mother and sister. But apart from that, I suppose I am quite as hidebound as other men of my world.”

“And Mr. Carfax?” she queried. “Is he a slave to conventions, too?”

“Poictiers is a law unto himself in a good many ways; but on the whole, he’s tarred with the same stick. You will remark his regalia: I couldn’t have pulled him up here to-night with a three-inch hawser if he hadn’t happened to have evening clothes in his kit. And he has brought his man; a typical Cockney valet, knee-smalls, Oxford ties, and all.”

Miss Richardia’s quiet laugh fitted the incongruity. But when she spoke again it was of the business affair.

“You are at work on the Ocoee?” she inquired.

“Yes, indeed! I am going to make a spoon or spoil a perfectly good horn. You must all come over and see my test-drilling outfit when we get it going.”

“Is it your machine that we can see over beyond the glen? I wonder if you could make me understand what you are going to do?” she said, with interest real or so skilfully feigned that Tregarvon could not distinguish the difference.

He expressed himself as being very willing to try; did try at some considerable length. And Miss Birrell, notwithstanding an air of abstraction that seemed to come and go, appeared to grasp the mechanical details.

“You have no doubt that you will succeed? It will be fine to prove to everybody that all that was needed was for some one to come from the other world--your world--to show them how to do it.”

Tregarvon winced, seeing now the pitfall into which he had suffered himself to be led.

“Is that the impression I’ve been giving you?” he asked. “Do I advertise myself as such a blooming bounder as that would signify?”

“Forgive me,” she said, with a little laugh which might have meant anything from veiled ridicule to a keen appreciation of a palpable hit. “I suspect it is the way of your world to be austerely sufficient unto itself. You may contradict me if I am wrong.”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed generously. “You are as much of my world as I am.”

“Oh, no!” she objected: “we are only poor outlanders. I was called that once, in Boston; not spitefully, of course, but rather as an excuse for my shortcomings, I fancy.”

“Whoever said it was a snob,” he exploded. “Boston is horribly provincial, at times, you know.”

“And Philadelphia never is?”

“I shouldn’t dare to make the claim too broad. But I am sure we recognize the fact that there is an America west of the Alleghenies--and south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

“That is charitable, at least,” she conceded. “Still, you think it is left for you to demonstrate success where others have failed--in the Ocoee undertaking.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” he answered, with due modesty. “Indeed, I know little or nothing about the early history of the mine. My father became interested in it some years before he died, and I think he always regarded it as a dead loss. But he bought the stock, or rather, I should say, had it forced upon him, when it was pretty cheap, and----”

“Yes,” she interrupted, a little forbiddingly, he thought; and then she began to speak of other things as if groping for a more congenial common ground. It was found when Tregarvon confessed to an amiable weakness for good music.

“I’ll play for you if you wish,” she said almost abruptly; and it was an hour later when Carfax entered the music-room to break the spell which Miss Richardia had woven about her single listener.

“You must do this again, but not too often,” was Tregarvon’s half-jesting warning to his entertainer at the moment of leave-taking; a moment snatched while Carfax was giving the privileged seniors a spin around the campus drive in the yellow car.

“Why not often?--or as often as you care to come?” the musician asked indifferently.

“Because I am much too impressionable. You could very easily make me forget some things that it is up to me to remember.”

“For example?” she prompted.

“It’s a long story, and Poictiers won’t give me time to tell it now. But some other evening, if I may come?”

“Why shouldn’t you come when you feel like it? I hope you won’t go away underestimating your welcome--you and Mr. Carfax. You owe it to us to come frequently, so that the novelty will wear off--for the student body. I’ll venture to assert that Miss Longstreet has been having the time of her life keeping order in the dormitories this evening. Good night; and give my love to Uncle William.”

“To Uncle William? Then you know him?”

She laughed and showed him that Carfax was waiting for him. “Uncle William will know who sent the message if you say ‘Miss Dick’,” she explained; and he was obliged to accept this as an answer to his eager question.

The road down the mountain was a speeding track only in spots, and between stretches the big car crept at a snail’s pace on the brakes, and so permitted conversation.

Carfax began it in genial raillery, congratulating Tregarvon upon the accessibility of Highmount and the very evident heartiness of his welcome.

“You can’t desiccate entirely down here, Vance, with such a well-spring of youth and beauty as that within shouting distance,” he remarked.

But Tregarvon was thinking pointedly of Miss Richardia when he rejoined: “She is a puzzle to me, Poictiers; nothing less.”

“The charming music teacher, you mean? Peaches-and-cream, I’d call her, if she’d let me.”

“You’re blind; blind as a mole!” retorted Tregarvon. “Why, man! she is anything but that--or those.”

“Doubtless,” Carfax laughed. “They are all ‘anything but that’ when you get down under the pose. But ‘peaches-and-cream’ is Miss Birrell’s pose, just the same; not the conventional kind they serve you at the Waldorf or Ritz-Carlton, of course, but the sort you get when the cream comes thick and rich from your own dairy, and the peaches are picked, sun-warm, in your own orchard. You may tell her that, if you like, and palm it off as original with you. Strikes me it’s rather neat.”

“Oh, you go hang!” said Tregarvon. “I don’t have to work in your compliments, second-hand. I can turn ’em myself, at a pinch.”

At this point a half-mile of good road beckoned for speed, and the talk was interrupted. When it was resumed at the next curving hazard in the pike, Carfax had somewhat to say about the Ocoee.

“What do you know about the ancient history of your mine, Vance?” he asked, when the topic was fairly launched.

“Nothing much, in detail. Why?”

“I was asking for information. President Caswell was speaking of it while you were in the music-room with Miss Birrell. He came out and sat with us for half an hour or so. There is a mystery of some sort connected with the Ocoee.”

“Sure!” said Tregarvon. “The mystery is six feet thick, and it consists of a layer of good solid sandstone. I’m about to penetrate it with a test-drill.”

“No; I didn’t mean that,” Carfax objected. “It is another kind of mystery. I’ll tell you what Doctor Caswell said, and you may draw your own conclusions. We had been talking about superstitions and their hold upon humanity. I was scoffing, as usual, but the president seemed inclined to a belief that Providence or fate, or whatever you wish to call it, does interfere sometimes; and that these interferences form a basis for some of the convictions we call superstitions.”

“All of which would seem to be a good many miles from a pair of coal seams made profitless by a stone ‘horse’ between them,” suggested Tregarvon mildly.

“I’m coming to that; the distance isn’t so great as it may seem. The doctor rode his notion as if it were a hobby. He spoke of the well-grounded belief in the saying that ‘murder will out,’ and insisted that the facts proved the truth of this saying; facts which were often mysterious. Then he referred to that other pet notion of the bulk of mankind: that misfortune pursues the possessor of ill-gotten gains. To my astonishment, he pointed to your Ocoee property as an example.”

“The dickens he did!” exclaimed Tregarvon, with interest suddenly awakened. “How did he make the Ocoee fit in?”

“That is the peculiar part of it. When I betrayed my complete ignorance of matters Ocoeean by beginning to ask questions, he shut up like a clam. All I could get out of him was an assertion that misfortunes had accompanied every succeeding attempt to open the mine, and that they would doubtless continue to follow until justice was done.”

“But justice to whom?” queried Tregarvon. “You didn’t let it rest at that, I hope.”

“I tried not to, but he gave me a dignified cold shoulder and referred me to you; said you doubtless knew all the circumstances, and would, he hoped, take proper steps toward removing the curse.”

The descent of Pisgah was accomplished, and Tregarvon steered the yellow car into an empty warehouse which was to be its garage.

Later, when he was showing his guest to the sleeping-room made ready for him by Uncle William, he said: “I don’t wish to pull you into this thing with me blindfolded, Poictiers. If there is a skeleton in the Ocoee closet, I’ll have it out and give it decent Christian burial before I ask you to back me.”

But at this, Carfax appeared at his multi-millionaire best.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, old man. You will find me some old clothes to-morrow morning and we’ll go up and set your test-drill at work. Further along, when more money is needed, I’ll go somewhere to a bank and turn the fortunate spigot. We’ve got to make a go of your mine now, if only to show Doctor Caswell that the superstitions can’t prove up on this particular homestead.”

V

Partly Sentimental

Carfax’s promise to stay and see the Ocoee experiment fairly on its feet was made in good faith, as the idlers at Tait’s store, and more than these, a London-bred and disconsolate Merkley, were shortly given to understand. Moreover, the golden youth’s threat of wearing old clothes and dipping into the crude mechanical processes of the experiment was also carried out; which not only deepened Merkley’s conviction that he had attached himself to a mild-mannered lunatic of a peculiarly American type, but left him without an occupation--a mere fragment of urban flotsam eddying in the backlash of a rude current of bucolic unfamiliarity.

Unlike Rucker, the mechanician, who promptly donned overalls and jumper, pulled his tight-fitting burglar’s cap down to his ears, and put himself at the head of Tregarvon’s drilling squad on the mountain top, Merkley took to drink and the company of the loungers on Tait’s porch. Here he became (though unhappily without knowing it) a target for the shrewd wit of the idlers, and, what he was even further from suspecting, the gossip circle’s chief source of information touching the daily progress of the latest attempt to make a silk purse out of the Ocoee sow’s ear.

At first there was little for Merkley to tell, and the army of leisure, smoking its corn-cob pipes and whittling the corners of the packing-boxes on Tait’s porch, looked on and amused itself by slyly baiting the disconsolate Londoner.

Day by day, Tregarvon, Carfax, and the promoted chauffeur turned out early in the morning, took their places with the native laborers in the tram-car, and were lifted to the scene of their labors on high Pisgah. At sunset they came down, ate much, smoked a little, talked less, and, save for an occasional evening when Tregarvon and his guest got out the yellow automobile and drove to Highmount College, went early to bed as those who had earned their rest by good, honest muscle-weariness.

But when the smoke plume streaming bravely from the stack of the mountain-top drilling plant announced the actual beginning of the experiment, Merkley brought news to Tait’s. Something had gone wrong on the mountain summit; something was continually going wrong. The two young men inhabiting the tumble-down office-building across the railroad-track no longer went to bed immediately after their evening meal. Instead, there were prolonged conferences behind the closed door of the dining-room in the rear.

In addition to this, Rucker, characterized by Merkley as a despised, greasy-handed mechanic, whose burglarish aspect would earn him the attentions of a plain-clothes policeman in any properly Scotland-Yarded city of the world, was sometimes called in to these dining-room conferences, while he, Merkley, once the confidential and trusted valet of his Grace the Duke of Marlford, was excluded. At this point in his narrative, Merkley, being the worse for two or three tiltings of Jeff Walters’s or old man Layne’s jug of corn whiskey, would become tearful and despondent.

These Merklean hints of a changed condition of affairs on Mount Pisgah were well buttressed by sundry discouraging facts. During the making-ready of the drilling plant everything had gone on fairly well. But dating from the hour when Rucker had first sent live steam whistling into the cylinder of the small portable engine which furnished the power, a stream of disaster had trickled discouragingly and persistently upon the experiment.

First the drills went dull and refused to cut the fine-grained sandstone of the plateau; and when Rucker had retempered them, the engine worked water and started a cylinder-head. After the cylinder was repaired, one of the natives who was firing the boiler let the water get too low--to the loosening of some of the boiler-flues, and to the imminent risk of an explosion.

Rucker, handiest of mechanics, calked an entire day on the loosened flues, and the machinery was started again. Two hours later the pivot-bolt of the big timber walking-beam which imparted the up-and-down motion to the drill worked loose, and the walking-beam came down, one end of it narrowly missing Tregarvon, and the other wrecking the machinery to the tune of a hundred dollars and an indefinite interval of waiting for renewals.

It was after this last and most disheartening of the disasters, the only one thus far that Rucker had not been able to repair on the spot, that the two young men once more shut the door of the back-office dining-room upon a disappointed London serving-man.

“By George! I’m beginning to come around to your view of it, Poictiers,” said Tregarvon, cramming his pipe with dry tobacco from the jar set out by Uncle William. “These setbacks are knocking us too regularly to fit decently into any chapter of accidents. I’m beginning to believe they are inspired.”

“That is precisely what I have been trying to tell you and Rucker all along, but neither of you would have it that way,” rejoined Carfax coolly.

“Well, carry your theory to a conclusion; who’s doing it?”

“Ah! now you are getting out to a place where the water is over my head,” Carfax admitted, toying delicately with a pipeful of strong “natural-leaf” tobacco. “According to Captain Duncan’s prophecy, you have two possible ill-wishers--haven’t you?--the C. C. & I. people and the McNabbs.”

“Yes; but it is rather incredible on both counts, don’t you think? You can hardly imagine a great corporation getting down on its hands and knees to chuck pebbles into the wheels of our little mechanism up on Pisgah.”

Carfax nodded. Then he said: “How about the McNabbs?”

“It seems rather more in their line, you’d say. And yet I haven’t a shadow of right to accuse them. So far, they are entirely mythological; a mere name mentioned by Captain Duncan and a few others. So far as I am aware, I have not yet seen a McNabb.”

“Whoever it is who is setting these little traps for us is deucedly clever,” remarked Carfax, who was still toying half-heartedly with his long-stemmed pipe. “Rucker is fooled, all right; he still insists that it is mere hard luck.”

“Yes, and that is another argument against the McNabb hypothesis,” Tregarvon put in. “It would take a pretty skilful mechanic to fool Rucker; and from what I can hear, these title-claimants are ignorant mountaineers whose mechanical gifts most probably don’t rise beyond the lock action of an old-fashioned squirrel-rifle or the simple intricacies of a ten-quart whiskey-still.”

“Which brings us back to the original proposition--the C. C. & I.,” suggested Carfax reflectively, and, after a pause: “How long is this last smash going to hang us up?”

“Three or four days. If Rucker gets back from Chattanooga with the new gears by Monday, he will be doing well.”

“All right. To-morrow morning I shall ask you to lend me your yellow chug-wagon. I have a premonition that the spirit will move me to go and run this little mystery of yours into a corner.”

Tregarvon laughed good-naturedly. “You’d much better go back to your own stamping-ground and begin to take up your shooting engagements. You can’t afford to stay down here monkeying with this last-resort hustle of mine.”

The golden youth was looking shrewdly over the smoke wreaths at his companion.

“Is it a last resort, Vance?” he asked quietly, adding: “You have never told me much about the family smash.”

“It was complete, Poictiers; an up-to-date, finished product of modern high-finance methods. The Vanderburg crowd got father against the wall in the steel merger, and--well, you’ll know how bad it was when I tell you that it killed him. The doctors said pneumonia, but it was really a Wall Street sand-bagging. He didn’t leave a will; and when we gathered up the fragments afterward, we knew why he didn’t; there wasn’t enough to make it worth while. So, you see, the Ocoee _is_ a last resort, for me.”

Carfax was musing again.

“Yet you are going to many a comfortable little gold mine,” he said, after a time.

“Uncle Byrd’s Colorado millions?--yes. And I am rather sorry; for Elizabeth’s sake, not less than for my own. We were engaged before Uncle Byrd died, and he knew it. It was entirely unnecessary--not to say cruel--for him to leave his fortune to Elizabeth on the condition that she shouldn’t change her mind and marry somebody else, and to me in case she did.”

Carfax did not comment upon the cruelty. He was perfectly familiar with the terms of Mr. Byrd Tregarvon’s will. Instead, he said: “You hear from Elizabeth regularly, I suppose?”

“Oh, certainly. Duty is always written out in large capitals for Elizabeth.”

“And you think she writes to you from a sense of duty?”

“We needn’t put it just that way. But I have no doubt she conceives it to be her duty to a man she has promised to marry.”

“You shouldn’t say such things as that, Vance, not even to me,” corrected the other man quickly.

“I know I shouldn’t. It is only one of the many ways in which Uncle Byrd’s millions corrode things. Without meaning to, the old uncle stood matters upon an entirely different, and most difficult, footing for us two. We meant to marry: we had passed our word to the various members of the clan that we were going to marry; and the clan was glad because it had always counted upon that outcome for us. So far as a man up a tree might discern, it was a perfectly free choice for both of us.”

“Go on,” said Carfax, when Tregarvon stopped to refill his pipe.

“Then one day, out of a clear sky, _zip!_ comes Uncle Byrd with his will and his millions. After which, of course, Elizabeth can’t throw me over without impoverishing herself; and it is equally out of the question for me to let her do it. Moreover, it is imperatively up to me to make good before I marry her. If I don’t, uncharitable people will say that I let go of the business end of things because I knew that my wife’s money would stop all the holes to keep the wind away. There you have it--sermon length.”

Carfax smoked in sober silence for quite a few minutes. Then he said mildly: “Do you know, Vance, I don’t more than half like your attitude--as you’ve just expressed it?”

Tregarvon’s smile was a grin.

“Tell me what there is about it that you don’t like, and I’ll change it, Poictiers. You are by long odds the best friend I have in the world, and I’d change a dozen attitudes for you, any day in the week.”

“It isn’t lover-like,” Carfax objected.

“You mean that it is too purely cousinly? I can’t very well help that phase of it, you know; we _are_ cousins, and we have been trotting around together, more or less, ever since Noah walked out of the ark. Nothing like that for killing sentiment.”

“But sentiment shouldn’t be killed, if you are going to marry Elizabeth,” insisted the purist.

“We have threshed all that out, time and again, down to the final spear of straw, Elizabeth and I,” Tregarvon explained carelessly. “At first we did try to galvanize ourselves into some of the sentimental throes, but it was such a ridiculous little comedy that Elizabeth herself called it off. We are sufficiently fond of each other; Uncle Byrd’s will is mandatory, and we shall be able to live together without quarrelling. What more could you ask?”

“I don’t know,” said Carfax thoughtfully. “Your summary fits in pretty accurately with the way of the world. Yet, if I had to change places with either of you, I fancy I should ask a good bit more.”

“If you were Elizabeth Wardwell, you wouldn’t ask any more; and if you were Vance Tregarvon, you couldn’t. So there you are.”

Again there was a smoke-beclouded silence, and into the thick of it Carfax launched a pointed query:

“Have you told Elizabeth anything at all about the girls’ school on the mountain--Highmount?”

“Oh, sure; and about the bewitching Miss Birrell, as well. I always tell Elizabeth everything; I haven’t sense enough not to.”

“And her comment?” asked the golden one half-absently.

“On Miss Birrell, you mean? To tell the brazen truth, I expected a wigging; not anything like a jealous outbreak, you understand--Elizabeth is miles above that--but some nicely worded, cool-lipped advice about not pitching the conventions out at the window just because I happen to be living a thousand miles from real civilization--Philadelphia civilization.”

“And you didn’t get it?”

“No, indeed. She didn’t say a word about Miss Birrell, specifically, but she wrote me a good cousinly letter in which she told me how glad she was that I needn’t deny myself all of the social mitigations, and urging me not to let my job on the Ocoee make a one-sided hermit of me. That letter came nearer to making me sentimental over her than anything else she has ever said or done. It did, for a fact.”

Carfax did not vote Aye or No on this. He appeared content to let the sentimental matter rest, since he went back to the business difficulties.

“About this last-resort tussle of yours, Vance, I see now why it is mighty necessary for you to make it win, and I wish you had a little better assurance that you are not up against a brace game; that Old Pisgah hasn’t stacked the cards on you.”

“I can’t very well afford to think of that possibility,” said Tregarvon grimly.

“No, I suppose you can’t. Yet if the genially cynical attitude of the native bystander counts for anything----”

“The loafers over at Tait’s, you mean? They’d scoff at anything that smelled of good, honest work.”

“I wasn’t thinking of them particularly, though they help swell the grand total. But the entire countryside seems to think that you are barking up an empty tree. President Caswell says you are wasting time and money; and that mild-eyed, clerical-looking professor of sciences, Hartridge, fairly chortled when I told him what we were doing. You may remember that he strolled over from Highmount the day we started the drill.”

“What did he say?” Tregarvon demanded.

“He very pointedly said nothing. But there was a look in his skim-milk eyes that recalled the villain in a play.”

Tregarvon was laughing appreciatively. “You have an eye for the dramatic possibilities, always, haven’t you, Poictiers? Why should Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge have it in for me?”

“I can only make a crude guess. Even a mild-eyed professor of sciences may turn, like the trodden worm. You umpire him out of the game pretty ruthlessly when we spend an evening at Highmount.”

“With Miss Richardia? Pshaw! you don’t suppose that dried-up old stick of a pedagogue--why, it would be Beauty and the Beast!”

Carfax’s smile was truly angelic, but it betrayed a wisdom far beyond his years.

“Yes,” he rejoined reflectively, “Hartridge may be all of ten years your senior--possibly fifteen. No doubt he ought to be quietly chloroformed and carried behind the scenes. But, as I say, he chortled--with his eyes--when I told him that you were planning to drill a series of test-holes, continuing the series until you find the place where your two coal seams come together as one. He is a geologist, among other things, and they tell me he knows this region like a book. I believe I’d cultivate him a little, if I were you; even if it did cost me an occasional _tête-à-tête_ with Miss Richardia Birrell.”

Tregarvon scoffed hardily at the suggestion, and the scorn was not thrown away upon his companion. Perhaps that was the reason why Carfax, going to bed a little later, without the ministrations of a lachrymose and whiskey-breathing Merkley, opened the back of his watch to gaze long and earnestly at a picture therein, closing the case finally with a little sigh. Millions are good things in their way, but there be pearls, trampled thoughtlessly underfoot by the millionless, which millions cannot buy.

VI

Daddy Layne, and Others

On the morning after the crash of the walking-beam and the consequent halting of the mountain-top activities, Carfax took the yellow car out of its warehouse garage; and after driving for a half-hour or so up and down the valley road with a tonneauful of speechless but highly delighted children picked up at Tryon’s and Jeff Walters’s, he pulled up in front of Tait’s and went in, ostensibly to buy smoking tobacco, but really to make friends with the country-store idlers.

Cursory observers from an alien North, penetrating now and then to unhackneyed regions in the Cumberlands or the Great Smokies, are apt to find the country folk, either valley or mountain bred, reticent by nature and notably shy of strangers. But there was no resisting the genial and childlike affability of the young man who had been giving the village children joy-rides, who recklessly bought a box of Tait’s best two-for-a-nickel cigars and distributed them generously as one among friends, and who presently had the hood lifted from the yellow car’s motor installation and was explaining, in words of one syllable, the workings of the driving mechanism to a group of curious and deeply interested onlookers.

The small lecture explanatory gave Carfax a chance to pick his man, and the choice fell upon the elder Layne. Would Mr. Layne like to take a little ride up the road in the car?--just to see how much more easily manageable it was than a horse-drawn vehicle?

Daddy Layne was overwhelmed with embarrassment, and was also secretly puffed up with pride, though he did not yield too easily, a disposition to haggle and make terms being a ruling passion in the Layne nature.

“I ’low I warn’t thinkin’ none o’ takin’ a trip this mornin’,” he mused reflectively. “Man ortn’t to go projeckin’ ’round on his’n travels when thar’s sech a heap o’ work to be done on the place. But then, thar’s my married daughter Malviny--her man’s coal-diggin’ for the C. C. & I., up yander at Whitlow; ef ye could git me thar an’ back----”

Carfax assured him that there was nothing easier, and by dint of holding the big car down to its slowest speed on the five-mile run to Whitlow he accomplished his purpose, which was to beguile Layne into telling him all that the countryside knew about the C. C. & I., its methods, its local managers, and whether or not the report was true that it made industrial war upon the smaller companies and individual mine owners.

Layne gave him the countryside point of view, which was, of course, inimical to the corporation--to any corporation. The C. C. & I. paid its men next to nothing for digging the coal and then sold it for fabulous prices to the people in the cities; it ran company stores and the miner who refused to buy his supplies thereat was likely to find himself out of a job; when a coal-digger was hurt or killed in an accident, the company’s long purse defeated the ends of justice in the damage suit; and so on to the end of the accusative category.

Pinned down to the particulars about the Whitlow, Layne admitted that the young engineer in charge as superintendent was a “squar’” man; but Connolly, the local manager under this superintendent, was, in Layne’s description, a man-killer. As to the company’s policy toward its competitors, Layne could say nothing definite, the countryside point of view not being penetrative of hidden corporation methods. But it was true that the only mines in operation in the valley belonged to the C. C. & I. Company. Others had been opened from time to time, but they were usually short-lived.

This drawing of Daddy Layne on the drive to Whitlow, and, later, an interview with Connolly, a hard-mouthed Irishman whose crass brutality apparently justified Layne’s descriptive epithet of “the man-killer,” gave Carfax a clue which he followed patiently until it was time to take Layne back to Coalville; a clue which led to a scraped acquaintance with the local leaders of the Amalgamated Mine Workers, to affable and seemingly pointless talks with all who dared to talk, and finally to a friendly conference with the miner Dockery, Layne’s son-in-law.

“The kindling-wood for your obstruction fire is all cut and stacked at Whitlow, Vance,” was his dinner-table announcement to Tregarvon at the close of this day of investigation. “I have discovered a number of things. First, that the C. C. & I. methods of benevolent assimilation as directed toward possible competitors have varied from instigating all sorts of trouble in the mines to be squelched up to swallowing them whole in forced sales of stock.”

“That sounds cheerful,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”

“Next, they leave it to the local managers to nip any new venture in the bud as effectually and quietly as possible, without bothering the trust headquarters. I took a long chance on Connolly, the assistant superintendent at Whitlow, and got that much of it pretty straight.”

“You don’t mean to say that he admitted any such thing as that to you, when it is known all up and down the valley that you are interested here with me!” exclaimed Tregarvon, wholly incredulous.

Carfax’s smile would have made a blushing debutante envious.

“In Mr. Connolly’s office, I was a lost lamb of the flock, looking most pathetically for somebody to lead me home,” he rejoined. “A fellow named Tregarvon had got me down here from New York with a view to pulling my financial leg as an investor in some coal property a few miles down the valley--at Coalville, in fact. I enlarged somewhat upon this part of it; kept it up until I was reasonably sure that I had convinced Connolly that I am a woolly sheep, merely waiting for somebody to come along with a pair of sharp shears.”

“Good--ripping good!” Tregarvon chuckled. “You’ve missed your calling, Poictiers, by all the distance lying between Riverside Drive and the city detective department down-town. But, as you say, you took a long chance; unless Connolly is a bigger fool than he looks to be.”

“Didn’t I? But Connolly is simply an abysmal brute; a man-driver without any of the little gifts of perspicacity. He took me under his wing like a stepfather-in-law; advised me bluntly to put my money into Consolidated Coal at one-forty rather than to go gunning on my own hook, or yours, or anybody’s, in Consolidated Coal’s intimate back yard. Pressed a little harder, he hinted that you wouldn’t be allowed to dig any real coal out of the Ocoee, providing there were any worth digging--which there wasn’t.”

“‘Wouldn’t be allowed, Mr. Connolly?’ said I, as lamb-like as possible. ‘How could Tregarvon be prevented?’”

“‘There’s manny a way, Misther Carfax,’ he scowled up at me; and then he let the cat out of the pillow-case: ‘These young min widout practical experience--’tis manny a blunder they’ll be making, and they’re soon discouraged entirely. I’m hearing that this same Misther Tregarvin is having throuble to beat the band, and him not fair at the beginning of it yet.’”

Tregarvon was absently spilling a spoonful of sugar into his after-dinner coffee--a sufficient measure of his interest in Carfax’s story.

“From all of which you have argued that there is a C. C. & I. spy in our camp, haven’t you, Poictiers?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the remedy?”

“Is to find and fire him.”

“The firing part of it will be easy; but the finding is a horse of another color. All of my squad save one or two, I believe, have worked at odd times for the C. C. & I. Every able-bodied man in this region digs coal a little now and then; ‘huckleberry miners,’ the regulars call them.”

“We’ll simply have to watch and sift; that’s all,” said Carfax.

“Well, you’ve done a good day’s work, anyway,” was Tregarvon’s summing-up of the amateur detective’s report. “Candidly, I didn’t think you had it in you, Poictiers. You don’t look it, you know--to the naked eye.”

The angelic smile came and sat upon the clean-shaven, womanish face of the golden youth.

“Don’t you know, Vance,” he drawled lispingly, “I believe that is my strong point: not looking the ready-made, hand-me-down villain. It is foolishly easy to make people take me for a harmless, good-natured scrap-bag into which they can tuck any old thing they don’t happen to be needing at the moment. Why, even old Daddy Layne confided in me. Coming home, he told me all about the feud of the family of one of his sons-in-law with the McNabbs. By the way, that reminds me: did you know that you have two of the McNabb cousins in your working gang?--the fellows who call themselves Morgan and Sill?”

Tregarvon had not known it; and a new field of conjecture as to the disasters was promptly opened. Why charge the coal trust with the campaign of obstruction when two of the avowed enemies of Ocoee progress were right on the ground day by day?

Carfax rather sheepishly confessed that his brain had not been capacious enough to entertain two ideas at once. Having fixed upon the coal trust as the trouble source to be investigated, he had completely overlooked the McNabb alternative.

“I’ll do time for it, though,” he promised. “To-morrow will be Saturday; and if you’ll lend me the car again, I’ll find out something more about those moonshiners in the Pocket.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” Tregarvon objected joyously. “It is going to be my Saturday off, too--and a holiday at Highmount. I’ll go with you, as far as the college, anyway.”

VII

Company Come

On the day following Carfax’s journey of investigation to Whitlow, Tregarvon did not keep his promise to accompany the amateur Vidocq. There were still some repairs to be made on the tramway, and since a working squad of the laborers turned up to round out the week, Tregarvon stayed with his men and became a track foreman again.

Carfax, too, had apparently changed his mind overnight. Instead of driving off up the mountain after breakfast, he headed the yellow car down the valley road and was gone all day. When he returned, late in the afternoon, it was evident that he had discovered some other way of ascending Pisgah. The committee of leisure, sitting, as usual, on Tait’s porch, and amusing itself, also as usual, at the expense of an expatriated London serving-man, marked the yellow car returning by way of the mountain pike; observed, further, that Carfax was accompanied by two men, one of whom sprang from the car at the turn in the road nearest to the railway and ran to catch a northbound train of coal-empties, so escaping unidentified by the idlers. Carfax’s other passenger, well-known to Coalville as “The Bug Professor” at Highmount, descended from the auto more deliberately and went across to the coke-ovens to shake hands with Tregarvon.

“Comp’ny come, over yander,” Daddy Layne remarked to Merkley. “Better hump yo’self acrost the track an’ git ready to curl yo’ boss’s ha’r, hadn’t ye, English?”

Merkley adjourned himself accordingly, reaching the office-building in time to be sent to show Hartridge the way to the bath-room on the second floor. Carfax made no explanation to Tregarvon about the guest-bringing other than to say that he had captured the professor on the mountain, and had brought him down to take pot-luck of Uncle William’s preparing.

“We can eat him all right,” said the young mine owner hospitably; “but if we have to sleep him as well----”

“We shan’t,” Carfax asserted. “I have promised to drive him back to Highmount in the car after dinner.”

“Oh, that’s better. Who was the other fellow?--the one who jumped out and sprinted for the up freight?”

“Wait,” said Carfax mysteriously; “wait and you’ll find out.” And Tregarvon, having no alternative, had to wait.

The dinner for three in the back-office dining-room followed in due course, and Tregarvon, who brought a working-man’s appetite to the table, let the other two do most of the talking. Carfax proved to be at his captivating best; solicitous for the guest’s entertainment, ingenuous, eager to be informed. Wouldn’t Mr. Hartridge have some more of the--er--rabbit, he thought it must be? And was it really a fact that the entire Cumberland region was underlaid by a vast sheet of bituminous coal?

Tregarvon ate and listened, and presently became aware of two things: that Carfax was persistently threshing the talk around to the coal-measures, and that the professor seemed equally determined to escape from them. A little later, he observed that in this verbal ball-passing Carfax was proving himself the better player. Hartridge was coerced inch by inch; first into talking about the Southern coal-fields in the abstract, and finally into relating the ancient history of the Ocoee; which was the purpose for which Carfax had baited and set the dinner trap.

“I suspect Mr. Tregarvon can tell you more about the history of the Ocoee than I can,” Hartridge demurred modestly, after Carfax had fairly pushed him over the brink; and upon Tregarvon’s monosyllabic disclaimer, he went on reflectively: “Let me see; I believe it was about ten years ago that the first company was formed--to the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, as you might say.”

“A promoter’s scheme?” queried Carfax, alertly inquisitive now.

“Yes. A man from New York--Parker was his name--launched the enterprise; bought a little land, obtained free-will donations of a great deal more, and, as a favor to the benighted natives who had contributed the land, consented to part with about forty-five per cent of the stock of his company at half-price, payable in money.”

“Dear, dear; what a world this is!” sighed Carfax gently. “Sold them their own land back again, did he? And then what?”

Hartridge’s smile was genially cynical.

“I think it took the able Mr. Parker all of four months, or possibly a little longer, to squeeze the local stockholders--the only investors who had contributed any real values--out of his scheme; after which he sold the reorganized Ocoee to a New England syndicate. The Yankees--pardon me; the word is no longer a term of reproach with us--the Yankees meant honestly by the Ocoee; though, of course, they were under no obligation to recognize the frozen-out natives. They spent money liberally in development and on a costly equipment. But it proved to be a bad investment for them--as it had for the natives.”

“Ah,” murmured Carfax. “Now I am better able to understand President Caswell’s attitude. In strict justice, he would say, the mine belongs to those earliest investors who contributed the land and bought the stock; or at least these early people should have an equity in it. These later--er--Yankees had no ethical rights; hence their venture was bound to be ill-starred. By Jove, Tregarvon,”--and here Carfax’s lisp became quite apparent--“that puts the black mark on you, too, doesn’t it?”

If Carfax had any diplomatic designs on the dinner-guest, Tregarvon was not a party to them.

“I only know that my father paid good money for the Ocoee,” he said bluntly; “paid it to these same Yankees you are telling us about, Mr. Hartridge, when they were ready to lie down. It is up to me to prove that they didn’t stick him as bad as they doubtless believed they were sticking him when they pulled him into it.”

Carfax, who was observing the dinner-guest narrowly, saw the sign he had been watching for flit into the pale-blue eyes of Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge; a half-smile of gratified derision.

“You think Vance isn’t very likely to make good on his little brag, professor?” he put in, firing a pointblank shot at the target.

There was no indication that the shot had gone home, unless it lay in the quick veiling of the pale-blue eyes.

“Who am I, that I should take out a license as a prophet of evil, Mr. Carfax?” was the quiet rejoinder. “He is a brave man nowadays who has the assurance to deny anything whatever to youth, vigor, and the spirit of modern industry.”

“Still, you believe that Tregarvon isn’t going to win out?” persisted the golden youth.

Hartridge laughed.

“As Miss Richardia might put it, I haven’t any think coming to me, have I?” he parried.

Carfax gave it up. There was a point beyond which he could not press a man who was dipping with him into the common salt-dish, and he felt that the point had been reached.

“It is a pity you can’t stay and spend the evening with us, Mr. Hartridge,” he said, a little further along, when Uncle William came in to bare the table; but he added nothing to the conventional protest when the professor declared that he must go: on the contrary, he sped the parting guest so nimbly that Tregarvon was scarcely at his third pipe-filling when the purring of the yellow car’s motor announced Carfax’s return from Highmount.

“I told you so!” was the New Yorker’s first word, as he came in to take his place before the handful of fire on the dining-room hearth. “Where is my pipe?”

“What did you tell me?” queried Tregarvon, finding the pipe and pushing the tobacco within reach.

“That Hartridge knows, or thinks he knows, that you are on a false scent up yonder on the Pisgah cliffs: also, that he is deuced glad of it.”

“You can see farther into the millstone than I can, if you can draw any such conclusion as that,” Tregarvon remarked. “I thought he bluffed you good and plenty.”

“He did; and then again he didn’t. I insist that there is something doing, and that this mild-mannered gentleman who teaches mathematics and the natural sciences is in on it. I have just had an experience that was an eye-opener.”

“Unload it,” said Tregarvon briefly.

“Somebody tried to kill one of us a few minutes ago, and--and I’m afraid Hartridge knew it was due to come off!”

“Nonsense--you’re joking!” Tregarvon had come out of his pipe-musings with a bound.

“I’ll tell you just what happened, and then you shall judge for yourself. You know that stretch of good road about two-thirds of the way up the mountain?--the longest one there is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, just as we turned into it, going up, Hartridge twisted himself in the seat, looked back, and made some sort of a motion with his hand. I was talking; trying to pump him some more; and I don’t know why I should have noticed the bit of pantomime. Neither do I know why, coming down a few minutes later, I should have hit that piece of road at a ten-mile-an-hour gait instead of a thirty or forty. It was mighty lucky I wasn’t speeding. For about two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail you stood to lose a good friend and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. There was a tree lying across the road at precisely the correct angle to shoot me out into space if I had hit it.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed the listener. “Done while you were going and coming?”

“Done while I was going and coming. And that tree was lying at the exact spot where Hartridge turned in his seat and made the little signal with his hand to somebody that I couldn’t see.”

“But, good Lord, Poictiers! It’s unbelievable. Why, the man wasn’t ten minutes away from his bread-breaking with us!”

“I can’t help that. You have the facts.”

“What did you do?”

“I stopped, skirmished under the tonneau seat and found your towing rope, and took a hitch on the obstruction. The car was good for it, and I dragged the tree around and rolled it over the embankment. Then I examined the place where it had stood: it had been partly undermined by the road grading, and probably didn’t require much of a push to tip it over.”

“Then it might have been a sheer accident?”

Carfax was shaking his head. “I thought so at first. But when I turned the flash-light on the gap it had left in the upper bank, I saw that it had not fallen accidentally. There are pick marks in the clay, and a crowbar had been thrust in behind the roots to pry with.”

“You didn’t see or hear anybody?”

“Not a sign. I even went so far as to make a circuit in the woods along the upper embankment. There wasn’t a leaf stirring.”

“But think a minute, Poictiers: whatever crazy grudge any one might have against me or the Ocoee, it couldn’t be made to lap over on you!”

“That’s all right; it is your car, and you have usually driven it. You are doubtless the one who had the narrow escape, and I was only your happen-so proxy.”

For a thoughtful half-hour they sat before the dying embers of the fire and discussed the murderous attempt in all its bearings, Tregarvon stoutly maintaining to the last that Hartridge could not possibly have been an accomplice. But disregarding that single slight clue, they were left completely in the dark as to the identity or motive of the man or men who had tried to wreck the car.

In the early stages of the discussion Tregarvon had suggested the McNabbs; and after every other guess had been exhausted he returned to them. But Carfax demurred at this.

“No,” he said. “As I told you yesterday, you have two of the McNabbs in your working gang, and they have had a thousand chances to extinguish you since you came down here. Besides, I’ve been over in the Pocket neighborhood to-day, and have found out a lot about the clan McNabb. They’re perfectly harmless, I should say. I ran across both Morgan and Sill, and they took me in and fed me fat bacon and corn pone. It is all of ten miles to their shack in the Pocket, and they would have had to walk out to get on this side of Pisgah. Besides that, Wilmerding gave me a lot of pointers about the McNabb tribe.”

“Who is Wilmerding?”

“He is the man who rode down the mountain with Hartridge and me, and made the quick dash for the up-train. He is the chief of staff for the C. C. & I. in the Wehatchee Valley; has the oversight of all the various mines of the company. He is a fine fellow; a mining engineer with a few German university finishing touches.”

“How did you happen to meet him?”

“I hunted him up this morning; drove down to the Cardiff Mine for that purpose. They told me yesterday at Whitlow that he was at the Cardiff. I found him, and we foregathered on the spot. He is having some labor troubles, and was about to drive over the mountain to the Swiss settlement at New Basel to see if he couldn’t pick up a little new blood. I didn’t have to persuade very hard to get him to abandon his horse and buckboard, and I drove him over and back.”

“He is all right, you think?”

“As straight as a string. If the C. C. & I. is crooked, he is no party to the underhand work. Also, he told me a lot about the McNabbs. He seems to be quite certain that they have no grudge of their own to work off. Laster McNabb, who is the grandfather of the outfit and the chief of the clan, has talked very freely with Wilmerding about the Ocoee lawsuit, and if the McNabbs have it in for anybody, it is for the lawyer who dragged them into the fight with the New Englanders.”

Tregarvon stood up to rest an elbow against the rough stone mantel. “If your estimate of Wilmerding is correct, the C. C. & I. can’t be held responsible; and, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be the mountaineers. Yet we have had the accidents with the drilling machinery, and somebody has just tried to assassinate you. You may say it’s Hartridge, but I can’t follow you there. The motive is lacking.”

“Is the motive altogether lacking?” Carfax queried gently.

“You mean that Hartridge may be asinine enough to think that I am trespassing on his preserves at Highmount? That is nonsense. Miss Richardia Birrell and I are merely good friends. Besides that, I don’t believe she has ever given the ‘bug professor’ a second thought, sentimentally.”

“Maybe not. But a woman as a factor in any problem is always the unknown quantity,” Carfax remarked half musingly. Then he added: “It would be a real charity, both to you and to Professor William Wilberforce, if some outsider would step in and marry Miss Richardia out of the game, don’t you think?”

Tregarvon’s frown was morose. Slowly but surely the light with the difficulties, material and mysterious, was working a change in the young man whose chief characteristic had hitherto been finding its principal expression in the light-hearted optimism of those who neither toil nor spin. For the first time in his wealth-smoothed saunter he was coming to hand-grips with the primitive, and the quick glance shot at Carfax was almost a challenge.

“Perhaps you’d like to be the outsider, Poictiers? Is that what you had in mind?” he threw in bluntly.

Carfax, gazing reflectively into the heart of the fire embers, took the demand, or assumed to take it, at its face value.

“A chap might do a lot worse,” he replied, as one who weighs the pros and cons judicially. “It’s a broken family, to be sure, as to its fortunes, but it’s good blood. They say that the old judge is as fine as they make ’em; a gentleman of the old Southern school, land-poor, but as proud as Lucifer. The two McNabb boys were telling me about him to-day. They are squatters on Birrell land, as their forefathers were before them, and they’d fight for the old judge at the drop of the hat.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” said Tregarvon pointedly.

Carfax rose and stretched his arms over his head like a man who has put in a full day.

“No; and I’m not going to answer it to-night. Later on, if you still insist on needing a guardian angel, there may be a different story to tell. Where’s my candle? I’m going to bed.”

VIII

The Stubborn Rock

By the time Rucker returned from Chattanooga with the repairs for the broken drilling plant, the Saturday-night attempt to wreck the yellow car on Carfax’s run down the mountain had become a past danger-signal, and was in a fair way to be overlaid and forgotten in a fresh upturning of the activities.

After the arrival of the new gears one day more was needed for their installation; then the smoke plume began to wave again from the top of the stack on lofty Pisgah, and the drill resumed its interrupted jouncings in the sandstone. In due course, and with no added untoward happenings to delay the work--this though the two McNabbs, identified now and closely watched by Tregarvon, were still retained in the gang--the drill reached the first coal seam, penetrated it, plunged again into rock, and, a few hours later, into and through the second and lower coal layer; net result--failure.

With the new-found fighting resolution now fully aroused, Tregarvon did not waste a minute. In the intervals afforded by temporary pauses in the drilling he had found time to select a location farther back on the plateau for the next trial; and while the boiler of the portable engine was still hot from the fire-drawing of failure, the transfer of the plant was begun.

The second trial was a mere repetition of the first, save that the layer of rock separating the two coal seams gained six inches in thickness for the added distance from the original mine opening in the cliff face at the head of the tramway. Wilmerding, the genial young superintendent of the C. C. & I. subsidiaries was on the ground when the sand-pump tests of this second hole were made, and he shook his head doubtfully.

“I suppose I oughtn’t to throw cold water; it doesn’t come with very good grace from the boss in the enemy’s camp,” he said deprecatingly. “But I’m mightily afraid you gentlemen are chasing fireflies. You have two distinct seams, instead of one that has been split by a horizontal wedge of the sand-rock, and I believe a careful analysis of the coal in the two seams will prove it. Going to move still farther back and try again?”

“It’s the surest thing there is,” said Tregarvon, who had already set his men at work striking the derrick. “I may be licked, but I’m too big a fool to know it.”

“Good!” laughed Wilmerding; “I like your courage immensely. But while you are tapping it again, send me some samples and let me analyze the two veins for you. I have a laboratory up at Whitlow, and I’ll be glad to help out to that extent.”

“You are an enemy, right, Mr. Wilmerding!” said Tregarvon heartily. “A fighting friend couldn’t make a fairer offer than that. But you will find that the two seams are one and the same. I made even canny old Captain Duncan admit that he couldn’t detect any difference in the coal taken from the two veins.”

Wilmerding nodded. “The captain is canny, as you say, though you can hardly prove it by me. I don’t know him very well--haven’t been down here long enough. Thaxter knows him from away back, however, and he has told me a good bit about the old Scotchman, who has the reputation, by the way, of being at the top of the heap as an analytical chemist.”

“Thaxter?” put in Carfax interrogatively. He had been an attentive listener; his usual attitude in any three-cornered conference.

“Yes. Don’t you know Thaxter, my bookkeeper? Not to know Thaxter is to argue yourself unknown in the Wehatchee. The rank and file at Whitlow think I’m the boss, and that Connolly comes next. But Thaxter is the real power behind the throne.”

Carfax made the necessary effort of memory and recalled a pursy little man, round-faced, gray-haired and genial, who had beamed up at him through a pair of thick-lensed spectacles on the day when he had invaded the C. C. & I. stronghold at Whitlow.

“I remember him,” he told Wilmerding. “Reminded me of one of the Brothers Cheeryble, and I caught myself unconsciously looking about for the other.”

Not having read Dickens, Wilmerding lost the point of the comparison.

“Yes,” he went on. “Thaxter is It, all right enough. More than anybody else in this neck of woods he is Consolidated Coal: has every coal detail of this entire region down in black on white, neatly docketed and labelled and put away for future reference. I carry him on my pay-roll, but I couldn’t any more fire him than I could fire the President of the United States. On the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprised if he could have my head any minute he chose to hold up his finger to the big guns in New York.”

“Nice kind of a bombshell to be rolling around under a man’s feet,” Carfax commented.

“Oh, Thaxter is harmless; he doesn’t explode. He is like the assistant secretaries of the Departments in Washington, you know; the fellows who really have the run of the business and stay on the job while the political chiefs come and go. They are like the cat: harmless and necessary and full of wisdom. Which reminds me: I’ll bet my wind-broken old nag, here, against your gas-car, Tregarvon, that Thaxter has an analysis of these coals of yours filed away somewhere this very minute. If he has, I’ll get it for you. It will be a lot more conclusive than any I could make, offhand, in my laboratory.”

So offering, Wilmerding betook himself and his promise to the road leading to Whitlow, leaving the two undismayed coal prospectors on high Pisgah patiently removing their testing plant to a point still farther back from the cliff face. By this time the working gang had acquired the practice which makes perfect; and before the news of the failure of the second attempt had spread beyond the comment of Tait’s store the drill was churning away in the third of the testing holes, with the lean, bristly-bearded Sawyer acting as drill-master--a post which he had claimed and filled from the first.

“I don’t care how much other people may laugh at you; _I_ think your perseverance is beyond praise,” said Miss Richardia, on an afternoon when Tregarvon, scamping his job and snatching a few moments for himself, had driven her and a group of the Highmount young women over in the yellow car to the new location. “I am sure you deserve to succeed--if perseverance by itself ever deserves anything.”

“Why do you say, ‘by itself’?”

“I mean sheer, dogged persistence, without any of the justifying reasons.”

“I have the reasons; I’m obliged to succeed,” was the answer rather gloomily given. Carfax had taken the tonneau party around to the derrick, and the two in the driving-seat of the car had their bit of the mountain-top world momentarily to themselves.

“You say that as if you were sorry,” laughed the music teacher. “Don’t you want to succeed?”

“To want is to desire and need,” he explained meticulously. “Heaven knows, I need success; need it awfully. Yet the very reason for needing it is vicarious on one hand, and an exhibition of the meanest sort of purse-pride on the other. But you know all about that.”

Truly, Miss Richardia did know. It was during his third evening visit to Highmount, while Carfax was trundling the entire school in batches up and down the cherted pike in front of the college grounds in the auto, and Miss Richardia had been playing to him in the otherwise deserted music-room, that Tregarvon had told her all about the family fortunes, and Elizabeth, and his engagement, and the Uncle Byrd millions. He did not regard it as a breach of confidence at the time; of Elizabeth’s confidence or his own. He had merely yielded to an attack of a purely masculine desire to tell all he knew to the nearest woman.

“You still think it is necessary to keep Miss Wardwell waiting?” Miss Richardia was always able to answer his unspoken thought without apparent effort, as he had already learned.

“You wouldn’t have me do anything else, would you?” he retorted discontentedly. “Put yourself in Elizabeth’s place: what would you think of me if I should take advantage of your good-nature, and so give everybody a chance to say that I didn’t need to be in love with you--that your money was a sufficient bait?”

Miss Birrell was not at all past blushing, and she did it very prettily.

“You are so boyishly personal!” she laughed, and the fact that she did not resent the personality was an ample measure of the degree to which their intimacy had progressed. And then: “You promised me that you were going to be sensible and straightforward, and all those things. You said you were going to be entirely frank with Eliz--with Miss Wardwell, telling her that you haven’t insisted upon her naming the day because you think you ought to have means of your own, first. Have you done this?”

“No, I haven’t--not yet.”

“Why haven’t you? You owe it to her, don’t you?”

“Perhaps; but I owe something to myself, too.”

Miss Richardia seized upon the admission swiftly and turned it as a weapon against him. “You do, indeed! You owe it to Mr. Vance Tregarvon not to keep any of the anchors in reserve. As you once said, yourself, you are too impressionable.”

“A light o’ love,” he laughed. “I must tell Elizabeth what an eloquent special pleader she has unconsciously acquired down here in the wilds of Tennessee. What have I done that I ought not to have done?”

“I am not your conscience,” was the cool-voiced reply.

“But you are,” he retorted accusingly. “You tell me what I ought to do, and I promise to go and do it. My intentions are always good.”

“I am not sure of even that much, now. You have changed very remarkably in the past few weeks, and you must forgive me if I say that the change hasn’t been altogether for the better. You were just a nice, cheerful boy when you came to Tennessee, and you’re not that any more.”

“I have good reasons, and plenty of them,” he blurted out. “Do you want to hear them?”

“Not when you talk that way,” said Miss Birrell, and her attitude became suddenly indifferent.

“You shall hear them, whether you want to or not,” he broke in almost roughly. “I have the whole world against me on this Ocoee proposition; I have given my word to Elizabeth when I don’t love her as the man who is going to marry her ought to love her; and----”

“That is quite enough,” she interposed quietly. “It only proves what I said a minute ago. You can’t afford to hold any of your anchors in reserve. I think we had better join Mr. Carfax and the young women. Don’t you?”

“No. And I call that downright cruel, when we see so little of each other, and I almost never have you to myself any more.”

“It is your saying such things as that that makes me think I ought to be cruel. There are times when you need cruelty. Nothing milder would do any good.”

“You may as well say the remainder of it,” he prompted.

“I shall. It is really serious. You must come to a better understanding with Miss Wardwell; and you must stop coming so often to Highmount.”

“The first time I went to Highmount you told me that I might come as often as I pleased. You needn’t worry about the school-girls. If you say the word, I’ll never speak to one of them again unless she is duly chaperoned at the moment.”

“We were speaking of Miss Wardwell,” was the rather chilling reminder.

“Well, we will speak of her, then. She isn’t losing any sleep on my account. If you only knew Elizabeth as well as I do--but what’s the use!”

“There appears to be no use at all, and I have already said more than your nearest friend ought to say. Suppose we talk of something else.”

Tregarvon refused flatly to accept the invitation.

“No; I want to know about my welcome at Highmount. I have had Mrs. Caswell’s warrant in the past. I have it yet. You can’t make me stay away.”

Miss Richardia’s pretty chin went up a quarter of an inch.

“Then you will compel me to be disagreeable; and I don’t like to be that. I always have plenty of work to do in the evenings; quite a number of the young women would like to take extra music lessons, and I have a piano in my rooms.”

Tregarvon gasped. “You don’t mean that you’d be hard-hearted enough to shut yourself up? to refuse to see me? That would be--but I simply can’t contemplate it. You--you don’t know what your confidence and your clear insight have come to mean to me!”

“On the contrary, it is because I do know, or rather because I know how you are justifying yourself, that you must----”

“But I shall not! It is just a frank, open friendship that has grown very precious to me, Richardia. Put it upon the lowest possible grounds; say that it amuses you and doesn’t hurt Elizabeth--I could show you letters from her in which she actually encourages it--and add to these that it does me a whole lot of good. Why should you freeze up right in the midst of it, just when I am needing all the encouragement I can get?”

Miss Birrell did not wish to laugh, but his protest, the shocked pleading of a little boy who fears he is about to be deprived of his customary piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, was too much for her self-control. None the less, she would not yield a hair’s-breadth.

“You can’t convince me, and you needn’t try,” she declared. “Granting what you say--that it amuses me and doesn’t hurt any one else--there are still the conventions to be considered. Perhaps you think, because you are a thousand miles from Philadelphia, that there are no conventions. If you do, you are greatly mistaken. Highmount, for example, has a complete equipment of them.”

“Confound the conventions!” growled Tregarvon. Carfax was leading his following back to the car, and the end of the confidential talk was approaching.

“No, you needn’t swear at them,” said Miss Richardia, with honey in her tone. “More than that, you would be the last person in the world to want to have them confounded. In your proper environment, I can picture you as an exceedingly correct person; one who would protest most vigorously if his sister should----”

She did not finish, because the others were within hearing distance; but the sentence was sufficiently complete to point the comparison for Tregarvon. He bent over the steering-wheel and pretended to be trying the connections of the substitute battery coil. The feint permitted him to say in low tones: “You are altogether right--as you always are. I’ll be as decent as I can: and it will cost more than you think.”

After which he descended from the driving-seat and shifted the responsibility of the return of the party to Highmount over to Carfax, saying that since the drill was doubtless nearing the coal depth, he would better stay on the job.

He was late getting down the mountain that evening, having worked his crew overtime to settle a disputed point with Rucker. The dispute, or rather its outcome, was sufficiently explained in his announcement to Carfax when he tramped into the office dining-room and dropped wearily into a chair before the fire.

“One more slap in the face, Poictiers. We found the coal about two hours ago, and a little later the drill landed upon the sandstone layer again. I’m too tired to know whether it’s discouragement or just plain leg-weariness and back-ache, but I feel as if something had gone out of me.”

Carfax rose to the occasion with his customary cheerful alacrity.

“We’re not going to say die, yet a while, Vance, old man. It merely means another try. If you are running low in the ammunition-chest----”

“No, it isn’t that; it isn’t costing so terribly much. But to tell the blank truth, I don’t know where to go with the drill for another try. We are a good quarter of a mile back from the tramway head now; an almost impracticable distance, even if we had found the big vein.”

“Well, what is the matter with swinging around the circle a bit? You have latitude as well as longitude, haven’t you?” said Carfax the comforter.

“Oh, yes; there is Ocoee land enough. And I guess that is about the last hope.”

“Which way had you thought of moving, north or south?”

“Whichever way you say,” was the spiritless reply.

Carfax took a coin from his pocket and balanced it upon his thumb. “Heads, Highmount way; tails, toward Whitlow,” he called, and flipped the coin.

It fell heads uppermost, deciding for the Highmount direction; and when Tregarvon would have picked the coin up to return it, Carfax stopped him.

“Let it alone; I’m superstitious to-night. Uncle William will be in with your warmed-over dinner in a minute: let him pick it up and keep it--for good luck.” And a little while afterward, when the old negro shuffled in with the covered tray: “There is a dollar on the floor which we are both afraid to touch, Uncle William. Don’t you want it?”

The old man scraped a foot and said: “Sarvent, suh,” but he arranged the table to the final nicety before going around to look at the money on the floor.

“Now, Marsteh Poictiers, whut-all is de marter wid dat dollah?” he asked, bending, hands on knees, to eye it suspiciously.

“There is nothing the matter with the dollar, uncle; the trouble is with us. We are afraid of it.”

“Sho’ now! Is you? Dat look lak a mighty rightchus dollah to me. Dat ain’t no debbil’s money, is it?”

“You’ll have to settle that for yourself. Since the dollar came out of my pocket a few minutes ago, I shall be justified in refusing to answer so personal a question as that relating to its righteousness.”

“_Hyuh! hyuh!_ It comed out of yo’ pocket, an’ yit you is skeered of it? Dat look mighty cur’is to me. Look lak you-all is tryin’ to play trick on de ol’ man, Marsteh Poictiers. I ain’t seed no white folks’ money yit dat I’s skeered of,” and he bent cautiously to pick it up.

“Look out, Uncle William; it might burn you!” said Carfax suddenly; and quite as suddenly the old negro dropped the coin and started back.

“Bless gresshus! but dat _wuz_ hot!” he exclaimed, blowing upon his fingers. And then: “Des you keep yo’ eye on dat dollah, ef you please, suh, twell I come back, an’ I’ll fix ’im,” and a little later he returned from the cook-house with a small tin pan which he turned down over the piece of money.

“Ef dat won’t be in you gemmans’ way, an’ you-all ’ll des leab ’im dah, I gwine come back bimeby an’ tek de cunjer off ’im. I ain’ gwine lef de ol’ debbil hab dat dollah, not ef it _is_ his’n.”

The little diversion did for Tregarvon what Carfax had hoped it might; and after the belated meal was eaten and the pipes were lighted, the atmosphere of disheartenment was changed somewhat for the better.

“There is one thing we have to be thankful for,” the disappointed one volunteered, when his reflections began to mellow in the tobacco smoke. “We haven’t heard from the enemy since the attempt was made to ditch the car, and there haven’t been any more of the unaccountable accidents to the machinery.”

“That is so,” said Carfax. “And I have been trying to guess, all along, why he--or they--stopped so abruptly.”

“There wasn’t any good reason why he--or they--should have begun,” said Tregarvon musingly.

“Somebody evidently thought there was a reason, and afterward changed his mind. Why should he change his mind? That is the question that has been puzzling me.”

“Perhaps he has found out what a good fellow I really am, and is no longer bloodthirsty,” put in Tregarvon, who was too tired to make any very heavy drafts upon his mentality.

“You haven’t any notion that the fight, if there is one, is personal to you, have you?--excluding Professor Hartridge, of course.”

“Oh, no; I was only joking. And we’ll always exclude Hartridge, if you please; I’m still refusing to believe it of him. It was probably somebody’s intention to drown the blind kitten of an Ocoee before it had time to get its eyes open; but the somebody couldn’t, by any stretch of imagination, be Hartridge.”

“But why has the somebody--who isn’t Hartridge--called the fight off so suddenly? By Jove, Vance--I have an idea! It has dawned upon the enemy, whoever he is, that it wasn’t worth while to efface us at a time when we were perseveringly going the right way about it to efface ourselves! I’d like to make a bet with you: when we begin drilling in the right place--if there is any right place--the trouble will blossom out again. What do you think?”

“I haven’t a thought left that isn’t too leg-weary to keep up with you,” Tregarvon confessed; whereat he fell to talking of Miss Richardia Birrell, dribbling on until Carfax, groaning in spirit, got up to light the bed-room candles.

IX

A Bad Night for Rucker

After the drilling plant had been moved to the chance-chosen, fourth trial site a short half-mile south of the original line of prospect holes, the work of reinstallation was begun. At its completion, it was at Rucker’s suggestion that the small tool-house was fitted with a single-sashed window and a folding cot-bed, and that the duties of night-watchman were added to his daytime oversight of the drilling machinery.

Just why the plant, which had been left unguarded since the first week of the campaign, and had been unmolested, should now need a night-watchman, the mechanician did not attempt to explain. His reasons for wishing to transfer his lodgings from the valley to the mountain top were entirely personal. He had been taken as a boarder at the Tryons’, and to wear out the dull evenings after working hours, he had been drawn first into the lounging circle at Tait’s store, and later into the smaller circle of the Layne household on the lower valley road.

The loadstone at Layne’s was a granddaughter of the patriarch’s, a black-eyed, red-lipped girl of primal passions and impulses; and in the beginning Rucker had been given a fair field and no questions asked as to his eligible state and standing. Evening strolls on the country roads with Nancy Layne for a companion were not to be compared with a night off on Broadway under the bright lights; but such diversions were made to suffice until a day when Daddy Layne, abruptly pointing to the long-barrelled squirrel-rifle resting on its pegs over the kitchen fireplace, assumed the aggressive. “Git yo’ license an’ yo’ preachuh, ’r let Nan alone an’ quit projec’in’ round this yer valley o’ nights,” was the old man’s ultimatum; and Rucker, having a wholesome fear of consequences, and the best of reasons for not applying for a marriage license, asked permission to sleep at the drilling plant.

The first night on the mountain was frankly harrowing to the city-bred mechanic, whose burglarish aspect did not insure him against the still alarms of the forest intensified by moon-flung shadows of solemn trees, by scurryings of fallen leaves rattling like dry bones under the autumn night-wind, and, more than all, by a sense of complete and lonely isolation.

Each unfamiliar sound brought Rucker out of his cot-bed blankets with a bound and sent him groping to the square window. First it was a little screech-owl, perching on the walking-beam of the drill, and chattering out its blood-curdling cry. Next it was a slow and measured crashing in the undergrowth, sound mysterious and unnerving to a degree until the night-prowling cow responsible for it lowed gently and crossed the clearing to snuff suspiciously at the boiler and machinery.

The tension once more relieved, Rucker tumbled into the blankets again, calling himself shop names and swearing by all the gods of the metalworkers that nothing short of a forest-fire or an earthquake should make him lose any more sleep. Yet, while he was still only eye-deep in his first doze a new alarm brought him leaping to his feet and sent him, blinking and breathing hard, to the square of moonlight framed by the small window.

What he heard this time sounded like the measured hoof-beats of a horse. Rucker had a pocket flash-light, and he turned it upon the face of his watch. He had gone early to bed, and it was still early, barely ten o’clock. A by-road, the one by which the drilling plant had been brought in, ran through the wood a little distance to the left of the glade. Staring wide-eyed, Rucker made out the shadowy bulk of a wheeled vehicle standing in this road, with a white horse, seemingly of incredible size, looming gigantic between the thills.

The mechanician got his breath, and his heart began to pump in steadier rhythm. A horse and buggy betokened the presence of humankind, and Rucker was not a coward of men. Moreover, the ball-peen machinist’s hammer, lying within easy reach, was no mean weapon of defense in the grasp of a man who knew how to swing it.

Obsessed by the idea that he might shortly have to resort to the hammer, the mechanician was wholly unprepared for what followed. Slowly, and as if they were materializing out of the shadows of the wood, two figures glided into the watcher’s field of vision: a man, tall, stately, wearing the long coat and the wide-brimmed soft hat which even an unobservant Rucker knew to be the garmentings of the old-fashioned Southern gentleman. And, hanging on the man’s arm, a woman, small and trimly clad.

They came only to the edge of the open glade. The woman’s hat left her face in shadow, so that even if the light had been better, Rucker could not have seen what she looked like. The man’s back was turned to him, and here, again, he was at fault. Nevertheless, he was presently able to postulate the man’s gestures as those of anger, and to understand that the woman was pleading with him. It was etched out wholly in pantomime; Rucker could hear nothing. Twice or thrice the man made an inclusive motion with his free hand as if indicating the glade as the subject of whatever he was saying; and finally he balled his hand into a fist and shook it wrathfully at the unoffending drill derrick.

This went on for some moments, the woman, Rucker fancied, trying to end it and draw the man away. Whether as the result of her efforts, or for some other reason, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun. The two figures turned and faded into the wood shadows as mysteriously as they had come out of them; and while Rucker was still straining his eyes to keep them in sight, the horse and buggy vanished to a soft thudding of hoofs on the sandy road.

After this apparition had disappeared, the machinist filled his black cutty pipe, opened the door of the tool-house, and sat upon the step to smoke and ruminate and strive for a better collecting of things into their normal groupings. Later, he strolled out to the by-road to see if the hoof and wheel marks were really there; to satisfy himself beyond question that he had not been dreaming. The ocular demonstration convinced him that he was sane, sober, and awake. The hoof-prints were there, though they were by no means so gigantic as he had expected to find them; and so were the wheel ruts.

“I guess I needn’t be botherin’ my head about who they was,” he muttered to himself as he went back to his seat on the tool-house door-step. “Th’ bosses’ll know that, all right, all right. But if there’s goin’ to be a whole lot of this ghost business up here, it’s me for the downstairs, even if I do have to duck every time I see old man Layne comin’ up th’ road. These moonlight picture-shows get next to my gizzard-nerve. I ain’t no ghost-killer--not me.”

His pipe was smoked out and, knocking the ash from the bowl, he got up, having fresh designs upon the tool-house bed-room and the blanketed cot. But he was scarcely afoot before the sounds of wheels and hoofs came again, this time from the opposite direction.

“My gosh!” he complained, “are they comin’ back? Or is it a torchlight procession of ’em? No, by jing! it’s somebody else: that horse is a black one!”

More to be out of harm’s way than for any spying purpose, he slipped into the tool-house and softly closed and fastened the door. When he tiptoed to the window two other figures had entered the glade; two men, and both of them with burdens.

Their movements were even more mysterious than those of the earlier visitors. The shorter of the two carried a square box, handling it by a buckled strap which encircled it, and the other had a shoulder load which Rucker could liken only to a small bundle of poles. Both burdens were quickly put down; and at Rucker’s final glimpse, obtained just as the moon was passing behind a cloud, the shorter man had gone down on his knees beside the box, and was apparently opening it.

Everything turned to a blurred gray for the watcher at the square window while the cloud obscured the direct rays of the moon; and when a better light came, the taller of the two men had disappeared, and the other was standing motionless under a great oak, whose spreading branches were sadly obstructing Rucker’s line of sight.

“Now, what the devil is he doin’?” was Rucker’s demand, whispered to the inner darknesses. “And where has t’ other guy skipped to, all of a sudden. By jinks! I b’lieve the short one’s sightin’ a gun; no, it ain’t a gun, either; it’s a kodak. No, I’m off again, and I hain’t got any more guesses. Now, what t’ ’ell’s the sawed-off doin’, wavin’ his arms up and down that way? By gollies, this whole mountain’s gone bug-house, ’r else I have!”

Rucker watched the arm-waving for a full minute before it dawned upon him that the short man who seemed to be sighting something was making signals. The small square window of espial commanded nothing but the glade. The watcher crept cautiously to the end of the room facing toward the near-by brow of the mountain. The moonlight helped him to find the knot-hole he was looking for, but for a time the contracted field of vision revealed nothing but a forest tangle of moon-spattered shadows.

Rucker had the patience of his craft, and the practical reasoning power that goes with it. The man under the oak was evidently signalling to some one to the eastward of his position at the edge of the glade: Rucker’s knot-hole in the planking at the end of the tool-house covered the same field: hence the eye at the knot-hole should be able to descry what was apparently visible to the eyes under the spreading oak.

The mechanician stuck to his hypothesis until finally the fact proved it to be the true one. Far down among the trees, almost at the cliff’s edge, Rucker thought, a dancing light, such as might be made by a flaring pine torch, flashed up, flickered, and disappeared. The general aspect of the mystery remained as impenetrable as before, but one point became clear. The man under the tree was waving to the man with the torch, and some purpose, quite well understood by both, was getting itself forwarded.

Rucker stayed at his peep-hole until the torch reappeared, flared steadily in one place for a few seconds, and then went out as suddenly as if a gust of wind had extinguished it. After which he tiptoed back to his window, and was there, looking on curiously, when the torch-bearer came tramping up from the eastward. There was a little delay when the upcomer joined the man under the oak. The watcher saw them taking the sighting mechanism, whatever it might be, apart and depositing some portion of it carefully in the square box; saw the two men resume their respective burdens and thread their way rapidly among the trees to the waiting vehicle. Then came the grinding protest of buggy wheels cramped short to turn in the narrow by-road, the _shough_ of a horse, minishing hoof-beats, and silence.

By this time Rucker was beginning to stand somewhat less in awe of a forest wilderness which seemed, after all, to be anything but an uninhabited solitude. A fresh filling of the short black pipe was the preliminary to a careful scrutiny of the ground under the spreading oak-tree. There was but a thin layer of sandy top-soil overlying the rock through which the drill was to be churned on the morrow, but it sufficed to reveal what Rucker was looking for--three conical indentations made by the sharply pointed ends of a tripod, the stand of the sighting mechanism, level, transit, or telescope, used by the shorter of the two men.

This much proved, Rucker went back to the tool shanty, found and lighted a lantern, and with it steered a course between the trees to the eastward point where the torch-bearer had stood. It took him several minutes to discover the exact spot; but when it was found and identified by the remains of the extinguished pine-knot torch, he whittled a small stake and with a stone for a hammer drove it to mark the place.

“There, by heck!” he said, when he was once more sitting on the tool-house door-step to finish his pipe. “If I hain’t got funny business enough to keep the bosses guessin’ f’r a week ’r so, I’ll sit up a few minutes longer and pull down some more.”

It was far past midnight when he found himself nodding over the smoking lantern, and got up to go and tumble sleepily into his bed. And this time neither the shrilling of the katydids and tree-toads nor the screeching of the little owl that came once more to perch upon the drill walking-beam, kept him awake.

X

Blind Alleys

There was a council of war, held without preliminaries, to follow Rucker’s report made to his two employers on the morning after the night of mysterious alarms. The small tool shanty served as the council-chamber, and the councillors were only two, Rucker having been heard and dismissed to take his place as chief mechanician in the drilling squad.

“Talk about fourteen-fifteen puzzles and the fourth dimension: this masquerade puts the kibosh on them all,” remarked Carfax, opening his pocket-case of freshly imported cigarettes. “Or are you wiping the slate clean by charging Billy Rucker with a bad supper or a drink or so too many?”

Tregarvon shook his head.

“It is too circumstantial to be a nightmare. Besides, there are the two sets of wheel tracks in the road, and the marks of the tripod under the oak; likewise the burnt pine torch and Rucker’s stake to mark the place of it. It’s no pipe-dream--more’s the pity.”

“Then what the deuce is it?--or they?--since there seem to have been two distinct sets of phenomena.”

Again the owner of the Ocoee shook his head.

“I think we may safely assume that Rucker saw two acts in the same play. But what the play may have been is beyond my wildest guess. Rucker’s suggestion that we’ve dropped down into a neighborhood of crazy people seems to fit better than anything else.”

Carfax was sitting on the cot with his hands locked over one knee. “It is rather pointedly our job to chase the shy guess into a corner, don’t you think? There is mischief in it. One’s bosom friends would hardly come here at night to shake their fists at things, or to run surveyors’ lines by moonlight.”

Tregarvon got up to tramp the floor, but there was no room in the cluttered tool shanty and he sat down again upon a coil of rope.

“Damn this crazy Southern mining country!” he rapped out. “Rucker is right: I believe it’s peopled with escaped lunatics fresh from Bedlam! You’ve got a theory, Poictiers; I can see it in your eye. Put it in words. Whom do you suspect?”

“Small minds suspect: larger ones reason calmly,” said the golden youth in mild irony. “The thing for us to do first is to establish a few identities, if we can. Who were these late-in-the-evening visitors? Let’s take them in their natural order; first come, first served. Rucker seems to have had a fair eye-shot at the man in a soft hat and long-tailed coat. Doesn’t his description of the man’s clothes and figure throw at least a suggestion into you?”

Tregarvon frowned. “You’ve got Hartridge on the brain,” he retorted. “You can travel anywhere in the South and still find plenty of men who wear soft hats and full-skirted Prince Alberts.”

“Yes; quite so. But we have met only one on Mount Pisgah, thus far, and his name is William Wilberforce Hartridge. And if we take Mr. Hartridge for the fist-shaking gentleman, the next step--the identity of the lady--is simplified.”

“I don’t see it,” Tregarvon objected sourly.

“You mean you won’t see it. What woman, from Highmount, would be most likely to be Mr. Hartridge’s companion on a moonlight evening drive? Don’t let your prejudices, or rather your prepossessions, make a blind mule of you, Vance.”

“I suppose you mean that the woman was Richardia Birrell. It doesn’t necessarily follow, and I don’t believe it.”

“It isn’t so dreadfully hard to believe. There is no reason why she shouldn’t go driving with the professor of mathematics, if she feels like it. Neither is there anything especially culpable in the fact that she walked down here with him when he came to shake his professorial fist at your drilling-machine. When you have cooled down sufficiently, we’ll go and see if my little primary guess won’t prove out.”

“I’m cool enough,” was the answer to this; and together they went to seek the proof.

The buggy tracks in the damp sand of the little-used road were not hard to trace, and there were places where the hoof-prints of the horse which had been driven toward Highmount were clean-cut and distinct. Carfax was a spoiled son of fortune only in his affectations. Beneath the carefully cultivated fopperies there was a keen, active mentality which rarely missed its mark and never fumbled. He made pencil sketches of the hoof-prints on the back of an old letter in passing, and it was he, and not Tregarvon, who noted the single peculiarity in the horse’s shoeing; a missing corner from the toe-calk on the left hind foot.

As the New Yorker’s hypothesis had assumed, the buggy tracks led directly to Highmount; or at least the assumption seemed a fair one. The two investigators did not follow the vehicle trail all the way to the college gates; could not, since the trail-recording wood road came out into the hard-metalled mountain pike a few hundred yards below the Highmount grounds, and the wheel marks were no longer visible. But there seemed to be no reasonable doubt of the correctness of Carfax’s guess; and Tregarvon admitted as much on the way back to the starting-point.

“Mind you, I’m not admitting that Richardia was a party to anything underhanded or crooked,” he added in qualification. “She may have been driving with Hartridge; as you say, there isn’t any particular reason why she shouldn’t go buggy-riding with him if she wishes to; and she may have walked down to the glade with him. I don’t say that she didn’t; but I do say that she isn’t tangled up in any of the disreputable mysteries, knowingly.”

“Oh, no; I’d be as loath to admit that as you are,” said Carfax gently. “In fact, it is barely possible that I have the better right to defend her. We’ll put it all up to Hartridge. The next thing is to find out, if we can, where Hartridge got his two surveyors on such short notice, and what it was that could be proved or disproved by a transit sight taken in the moonlight under conditions which must have barred anything like mathematical accuracy. Where are your blue-prints of the Ocoee property?--down below, or up here?”

The map copies were in the tool-house, one set of them; and when they were found, Carfax spread them out on the cot and pored over them thoughtfully.

“You are not trespassing on somebody else’s land, at all events,” was the verdict, rendered after he had verified the position of the glade in which the fourth test-hole was being driven. “It is all Ocoee in every direction; your land covers all this part of the mountain. By the way, what is this name, ‘Westwood,’ written across these mountain-top plats?”

Tregarvon did not know, and he said so; adding that he supposed it might be the name of the original owner of the land.

“Who is he? Ever hear of him?”

“I don’t recall that I have. But that is not singular. I haven’t had occasion, or the time, to dig very deeply into ancient history.”

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything very illuminating about these blue-prints, save that they establish your perfect right to bore holes almost anywhere you please,” said Carfax. “Suppose we go now and take up the trail of the two surveyors.”

The track of the second buggy proved to be a short scent soon lost. Within a hundred yards of its turning-point opposite the glade the buggy had left the wood road, the tracks swerving to the right in a direction opposite to that taken by the earlier vehicle; and neither the wheels nor the hoofs of the horse had left any impress on the thick carpeting of fallen leaves under the trees; or none that amateur trailers could see and follow.

They were returning down the by-road when a crash and a hoarse roar of escaping steam notified them that once more something had gone wrong with the machinery. Carfax threw up his head like a thoroughbred starting in a race.

“We have been hunting for causes,” he snapped: “there is effect number one, right now! I can outrun you to the home plate!”

They came upon the scene, neck and neck, just after Rucker had stopped the engine and opened his fire-door. The walking-beam had fallen again, carrying down a portion of the derrick framework; and the mountaineer whose name on the pay-roll appeared as “Morgan,” and who had been drill-turning in Sawyer’s place at the moment, was caught and held under the wreckage.

Happily, the man was neither killed nor very severely injured. A few minutes’ quick work, to which everybody lent a hand, sufficed to extricate him from the mass of broken timbers; and a rather ugly scalp wound, which Carfax proceeded deftly to wash and dress and bandage, figured as the worst of his hurts.

Tregarvon sent the man home in charge of the other masquerading McNabb; and then came the reckoning with the smashed drilling plant.

“What are we in for th