Chapter X: Part 10

“What the devil is the matter with you all?” he rasped, with a curious idea that he had to shout to make his voice heard above the deafening thunder of many cataracts in his brain. Then, as in a dream, he seemed to hear Wilmerding saying to Carfax, almost savagely: “Ease him down and we’ll carry him. Can’t you see he’s gone off his head?”

XXIX

Beyond the Gap

It was a full fortnight before the Hesterville physician, driven at breakneck speed to Coalville in Wilmerding’s roadster on the night of woundings, pronounced Tregarvon out of danger and in a fair way to recover from the broken head.

Whatever the lapse of time may have meant for others, it had little significance for the man who tossed and rolled in his bed in an upper room of the Ocoee office-building. Dim pictures there were of people coming and going; of grotesque attendants lifting him about, these sometimes parading as liveried Merkleys with Uncle William heads, or the reverse; of faces, affectionately sorrowful, hanging over him, now hopefully, and again with sharp anxiety in eyes which were never completely recognizable.

But for the greater interval, what with thundering brain cataracts to attend to, and a thousand dancing lights which had to be wheeled in vanishing spirals, checked, stopped, and wheeled the other way around precisely three hundred twirls a minute, he was so pressed for time as not to be aware of the lapse of it. Hence, when he finally opened eyes of full consciousness upon the walls and ceiling of the familiar room, he was sadly out of touch, his latest clear recollection being of a cloud-banked night, of a glade in the mountain-top forest, and of two great white eyes of artificial light staring down upon a cot-bed bier supporting a blanketed body.

At first he thought he was alone in the bare-walled upper room, but at his earliest conscious stirring Carfax came to stand beside the bed.

“That’s better--much better!” said the golden one, noting the turning-point improvement at once. “You certainly had us guessing, old man. Our only comfort has been in the fact that you could eat and didn’t seem to be losing too much flesh. Have the wheels stopped buzzing?”

“They weren’t wheels; they were lights and waterfalls,” said the sick man meticulously.

“All right; call ’em anything you like, so long as they’re gone. We had one doctor, a specialist from Nashville, who gave us a fit of seasickness; said you’d live, and be all right physically, but that you would most probably never recover your reason. Nice cheerful prospect for the friends and relatives, wasn’t it?”

“How long have I been knocked out, Poictiers?”

“Two solid weeks.”

“My mother and sister--has anybody written them?”

“Sure! Elizabeth has been writing them every day or so. They wanted to come down, of course, but we decided that it wasn’t best. You were getting all the care you could stand.”

“Then Elizabeth hasn’t gone home?”

“Not yet. Her father and mother have gone to Florida, and she has been staying on at Westwood House--what time she hasn’t been down here coddling you. She’s an angel, Vance; one of the kind you read about. But I mustn’t let you talk too much.”

“If I can’t talk, you’ll have to. Have you made it up with Elizabeth--about that silly side-play of yours with Richardia?”

Carfax’s smile began on the cherubic lines but it ended in a mere face-wrinkling of soberness.

“We have had too much else to think about; too many little diversions, as you might say. But I’m hoping she isn’t going to insist upon making a horrible example of me for my apparent fickleness.”

“‘Too many little diversions’,” Tregarvon echoed. “That reminds me: I can remember you and the others pulling us out of the crevice--Hartridge and me--and after that, a stretcher was made for Hartridge and we used up an age or so getting back to the glade. Am I right, so far?”

“It was something like that; yes.”

“And when we came into the old burying-ground the motor-car had been run down opposite the tool-house, and its headlamps made everything look ghastly. The judge was sitting on the door-step with his face hidden in his hands, and Rucker’s cot was standing in the open under the lights with a blanketed corpse lying upon it. Who was the dead man, Poictiers?”

Carfax shook his head. “Call it a bad dream,” he said soothingly. “The cracked skull was beginning to get in its work. You didn’t see any dead man.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes wearily. “It’s passing strange how a little knock on the head can mix things. I could swear that I saw the judge and the dead man and the car just as I have described them. Let it go, and tell me about Richardia.”

Carfax seemed suddenly embarrassed. “I--I don’t know as there is much to tell,” he stammered. “She--she is well, I believe.”

Tregarvon raised himself on an elbow.

“You’re keeping something back,” he protested. “Is she--is she--married?”

“Oh, no; nothing of that sort,” was the hasty reply. “She has been here to see you--she and her father--quite often; that is, as often as possible. I have fetched them in the car, you know. They have left nothing undone that could be done.”

Tregarvon still felt the presence of a reservation; of many of them; but he was too weak to fight for the clearer explication.

“How is Hartridge getting along?” he asked, sinking back upon the pillows.

“Rather slowly. It was a bad fracture. But the doctor says he won’t be a cripple.”

“That’s good. I want him to get well so that I can drag him into court. He set the leaf fire that blew us up. Did you know that?”

The golden youth nodded gravely. “I know a good many things that I didn’t know before you got your knockout.”

“Bring me down to date,” said the sick man impatiently. “What have you done about the mine?”

Carfax seemed to welcome the change to the more material field.

“Any number of things,” he answered cheerfully. “In the first place we--the judge and I--swore everybody to secrecy on that Monday night of smashing catastrophes, and the secret has been kept from the world at large, and from Consolidated Coal in particular. The wrecked drilling plant has been left just as it was; your laboring force has been discharged; and the impression has been given that if you ever recovered your wits, you’d go straight away back to Philadelphia, a sadder and much wiser young man.”

“Fine!” approved the listener. “But that isn’t all?”

“Not by a jugful. Two days after you were hurt, Wilmerding resigned from the C. C. & I. service and disappeared. He has been North buying machinery and material and shipping it in as far as Hesterville by littles. The explanation given and accepted is that a new company has been formed to develop some coal lands in the Hesterville vicinity, and the C. C. & I. people are running around in circles and uttering loud cries in their effort to find out where the lands are and who is going to develop them.”

“Good!--ripping good!” the sick man applauded.

“We have been only waiting for you to get upon your feet, and we didn’t wish to give Thaxter and his backers any chance to tangle things for you in the meantime. The moment you are able to take hold you will find everything in train--material and machinery where you can rush it in with motor-trucks, labor all engaged, coke-burners from Pennsylvania ready to take the first train south, and all that.”

Tregarvon doubled the pillows under his head and his eyes were flashing. “Poictiers, you’re a miracle!” he declared.

The professional idler smiled his denial. “I didn’t do any of it. I merely stood aside and told the others to go ahead and we’d pay the bills. Wilmerding was fully competent to take charge of the business part of it, and I have retained old Captain Duncan for the engineering. All you have to do now is to rise up and say the word, and you’ll have a mine that will make the Whitlow proposition compare accurately with a last year’s almanac.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes again and kept them closed so long as to give the impression that he had fallen asleep. But when Carfax was about to tiptoe away the heavy-lidded eyes opened.

“I’ll build upon the foundation you have laid, Poictiers; you and Wilmerding and Duncan. There are three things that I mean to do before I quit and go West to look for another job: to stand the Ocoee upon its feet as a paying proposition, to make provision for my mother and sister with a part of the property and to divide the remainder equitably among those who were frozen out in the Parker robbery, and after this is done to turn heaven and earth over until I have found and punished the man or men who have tried so hard to smash me. When I’ve squared up I’ll vanish.”

Carfax laid a hand as slender and shapely as a woman’s upon the hot forehead. “I’ve let you talk too much and you are getting the ‘wheels’ again,” he said gently. “You mustn’t be vindictive; and there is no reason on earth why you should talk of throwing things up and running away.”

“There are good reasons for both,” was the stubborn insistence. “I owe it to common justice, no less than to myself, to dig up the criminal or criminals and bring them to book. If they should prove to be Thaxter and his backers, after all, the world needs the example; and if it was pure outlawry on the part of the McNabbs and Hartridge and some other scoundrel that McNabb wouldn’t name there is all the more reason why I should send for the best detectives the country affords and run the outlaws down. And as to running away after it is all over, that says itself, Poictiers. I couldn’t stay on here after Richardia is married to another man. It isn’t in human nature. Now go away and let me sleep. I want to hurry and get well, so that I can stand up and straighten things out.”

XXX

A Grounded Wire

The small world of Coalville, centring socially under Tait’s store porch, had its vivifying shock when it awoke one morning to find that in a single night, as one might say, the entire face of nature had changed for the sleepy little hamlet at the foot of old Pisgah. In the instant of transformation the Ocoee of many disappointments had suddenly leaped into the foreground as a coal discovery of unlimited possibilities; an army of workmen was massing to shift the old tramway to the new opening; motor-trucks, piled high with material, were trundling over the valley pike from Hesterville; carpenters were rushing up new buildings at top speed; and at the centre of all these stirring activities, directing and driving them, was the young man whom rumor had been bulletining as dead or dying in his room on the second floor of the old office-building, or at best destined to pass the remainder of his life in an asylum.

Taking one thing with another, the gossips at Tait’s found it difficult to recognize the convalescent Tregarvon. The brief period of his illness had seemed to mature him curiously; to make him a man of a single idea--the idea being to turn the Ocoee into a producing industry in the shortest possible time. Also, they missed the genial and mollifying influence of the young New York millionaire, who, though still nominally an inmate of the Ocoee headquarters building, spent most of his time on the mountain, presumably as a guest of the Caswells.

As it chanced, the store-porch gossips were not the only persons who were finding a changed Tregarvon sitting at the desk of overlordship in the hastily remodelled Ocoee office-building. There were others, among them Barnby, travelling freight agent for the railroad, who had come all the way from his own headquarters to find out why the Ocoee was hauling its new material from Hesterville in motor-trucks.

“You will find the reason in the correspondence files of your general office,” was the curt reply of the Ocoee organizer. “I asked for a rate from Hesterville to Coalville on the material and was told that the shortage of cars would make it impossible for your road to handle the freight save as it might be transported a little at a time by the daily way-train. I don’t propose to be held up by a railroad company, the policy of which seems to be dictated by the C. C. & I., Mr. Barnby.”

Barnby was a fleshy young man with an easy smile, and he gave the smile its blandishing opportunity.

“You will have to ship your product out over our road when you get in operation, won’t you?” he asked mildly.

“Not necessarily. We have all the capital we need, and if you don’t give us an equal show with the C. C. & I. we shall build a ten-mile industrial track, for which we have already secured a right of way, to a connection with the South Central at Midvale. It’s up to your people. Talk it over with them when you go back to headquarters. Glad to have met you. Drop in again when you are going over the line. Good morning.”

Touching this intimation that the coal trust had already begun a new series of impeding activities, speculation was rife. Some said that the C. C. & I. would buy the new mine, lock, stock, and barrel, and close it; others hinted that the trust would put the price of coke so low that the new company would be bankrupted in short order; still others suggested that Consolidated Coal would conspire with the railroad and call Tregarvon’s bluff to build the industrial cut-off.

Wilmerding or Duncan, or both of them, brought these rumors to Tregarvon, and were amazed to find that he refused to be either disturbed or greatly interested. In many ways the superintendent and the old Scotch engineer were discovering daily that they had to do with a man who had developed suddenly into a master of himself and others. The light-hearted young fellow who had thrown himself so joyously into the fray at the beginning had given place to a modern captain of industry, alert, strong-willed, a bit dictatorial, perhaps, but entirely capable.

“Never mind what the C. C. & I. is doing, or will try to do,” he told his oddly assorted lieutenants. “Our job is to get the mine open and the ovens fired. Consolidated Coal will neither buy us nor break us, nor force us to build a railroad to Midvale. I’ll take care of all those details at the proper time.”

It was on the day when the first tram loads of Ocoee coal were coming down the mountain to be dumped into the oven-filling hoppers that another caller discovered the new Tregarvon. Late in the afternoon a neat, rubber-tired buggy, drawn by a black Hambletonian, stopped in front of the Ocoee office-building, and a round-bodied little man descended and hitched the horse.

Somewhat to his chagrin, it may be supposed, Mr. Onias Thaxter was allowed to cool his heels for a full quarter of an hour in the outer office before he was admitted to the presence of the new overlord; and the waiting was doubtless the harder to endure since he came bearing the olive-branch of peace. Tregarvon sat back in his chair and listened coldly while the peace branch was getting itself waved to an accompaniment of placative speech.

“There is no such thing as personal vindictiveness in business, Mr. Tregarvon,” was the summing-up of the Thaxter argument. “Without admitting it as a fact, let us assume, for the moment, that the man Sawyer was employed as a sort of scout for our people. This is a thing that is done every day; it’s business, and good business. You might do it yourself, if you had a competitor. We are hearing it asserted here and there and everywhere that you are charging us with a lot of outlawry with which we had nothing to do, and that you are going to press the charges in the courts. Will you pardon me if I say that that isn’t playing the game?”

“You may say anything you wish to say, if you will only make it sufficiently brief,” was the discouraging rejoinder.

“I have already made my suggestion. It must be evident to you that a consolidation of interests with us is by far the most sensible plan you can adopt. You can hardly hope to do business here, as an independent coal operator, in the heart of a region which we have developed. There would be constant friction; in the market, with your labor, with the transportation companies. I am not authorized to make a definite proposal, but if you will organize your new company on a conservative basis with a modest capitalization, I feel sure that our people would take you in as a subsidiary, share for share at par value.”

“Are you quite through?” asked the new Tregarvon, when the emissary paused to take breath. “If you are, you may have my answer in one word--No.”

“I am sure you are deciding too hastily, and because you haven’t given the plan sufficient thought. As I have pointed out, there is no such thing as vindictiveness in business; but when you deliberately set up that standard for yourself, you mustn’t expect the other fellow to lie down and let you run the truck-wheels over him.”

“By which you mean that if I refuse to let you swallow me peaceably, you will do it the other way?”

“That is your own deduction--not mine,” said the bookkeeper in the tone of one trying to soothe a wayward child.

“Then listen to me, Mr. Thaxter. Some scoundrels--possibly you and your people--have harried me like a lot of pirates. Nothing has been left undone in the effort either to swindle me out of my property on the one hand, or to force me out of it on the other. But now the shoe is on the other foot”--he was leaning across the corner of the desk and emphasizing the words with a clenched fist beating softly upon the oak--“we have Sawyer where we can make him talk. We know that he can implicate you, individually, in one of the criminalities; and perhaps he can tell us something about the others. Mr. Thaxter, I am going to sift these bushwhackings to the bottom, and you know best whether or not you or the combination you represent can afford to heap more fuel on the fire now by fighting me in the manner you have suggested. That is all I have to say, I believe, and I shall have to ask you to excuse me. This is my busy day.”

In the early evening of the fourth day after Thaxter’s visit, Carfax made one of his infrequent descents of the mountain, driving a ridiculously high-priced car, the purchasing of which had been his latest extravagance. The coke-ovens in the long rank were aglow with the fires of the initial charging, and the air of the valley was murky with the smoke of the new industry. Wilmerding and Duncan were at the mine, and Tregarvon had just finished his dinner when Carfax entered the dining-room.

“You do turn up once in a while, don’t you?” said the solitary diner not too hospitably. “You’re late for dinner, but doubtless Uncle William can find you something. You will have to eat alone. I have some work to do.”

Carfax followed the worker into the front office and, when the lights were turned on, dropped into a chair.

“I don’t want any dinner,” he said. “Or rather I should say, I’m due to show up at Mrs. Caswell’s at the proper dinner-hour.”

Tregarvon had a telegraph pad under his hand and he took time to write a brief message before he said, half-absently: “We keep working-men’s hours here.”

“Which is a delicate way of intimating that I’d better go chase myself and quit bothering you?” put in the intruder with a gentle chuckle. “All right; I’ll vanish presently. But first I’d like to ask if you are still clinging to your fantastic idea of making somebody suffer for the dynamiting?”

“I am; and I don’t see anything fantastic about it. A number of crimes have been committed, and I have no notion of compounding a felony by letting the perpetrators get away. Morgan McNabb is the key to the situation, and I have never understood why you and Judge Birrell turned him loose and gave him a chance to disappear. It has cost me a pretty penny to trace him, but I’ve got him now. He is under arrest in Dallas, Texas.”

“And you are going to have him brought back and given the third degree?”

“Precisely. I have just written the telegram.”

Carfax was feeling in his pockets for his cigarette-case, going about it leisurely as one who would gain time.

“McNabb is only a poor devil of a mountaineer, too ignorant to be held fully accountable, don’t you think?” he ventured at the match-lighting.

“That may be. But he knows the real criminal or criminals who employed him. I’ve been an easy mark all my life, Poictiers, but that is a thing of the past now. I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

The golden youth was blowing delicate little smoke rings at the ceiling.

“So you have, and the new leaf isn’t as pleasant reading as some of the old ones, Vance,” he commented, speaking slowly and without a trace of the lisp. “Some of the things you are writing down on it are rather sordid, don’t you think? You are a bigger man in some ways, and a much smaller one in some others.”

“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” quoted the one under criticism with a short laugh. “Suppose you elucidate.”

“I will. Up to the time of your father’s death you were as much of a _flâneur_ as I’ve always been. You didn’t have to ask for your blessings; you merely reached out and took them--if they didn’t happen to be handed you on a silver platter. During the past few months you’ve been chucked up against life as it really is for the greater part of mankind; a fight, a frantic scramble for a foothold. You’ve made the fight, because you have the good old Cornish fighting blood in you; but while you have been growing on one side you have been shrinking on the other.”

“Go on.”

“Real magnanimity was one of the strongest and most lovable qualities of the man you’ve put off; you’ve lost it completely. Cheerful optimism was one of the other good points, and you’ve dropped it. Just now you are planning first to get square with your enemies, and next to shirk your responsibilities by effacing yourself. What have you done about the new incorporation?”

“I have done exactly what I told you I should. The new company is formed, and the papers for the division of the capital stock are prepared. I am looking for Peters, the family lawyer, on every train, and when he comes the deal will be closed.”

“You tried to tell me the other day what the property arrangement is to be, but I didn’t get it very clearly fixed in my mind,” Carfax offered.

“It is simple. Since you say you don’t want any of the stock, you will be reimbursed for your cash advances out of the first money earned by the mine. The stock is to be divided, sixty per cent to my mother and sister and forty to Judge Birrell for distribution among the original minority stockholders who were swindled out of their holdings by Parker.”

“Parker,” said Carfax musingly. “He will never swindle any more. Did I tell you? I read an item in the New York _Times_. Parker was found dead at his desk in his Broad Street office one day last week.” Then he came back to the matter in hand. “Where do you come in, in the property distribution?”

“I don’t come in; I go out. Wilmerding and Duncan can operate the mine, and I shan’t be needed. I shall go West and try for an engineering job in one of the gold camps.”

“But not before you have had your revenge upon the dynamiters?”

“No; I shall stay long enough to see that part of it through to a finish.”

“You are proving my contention very handsomely, don’t you think?” said the critic quietly; “that you are bigger in some ways and smaller in others? You are telling yourself that this generous thing you are going to do is perfectly magnanimous, and that you are merely raising the magnanimity to the _nth_ power by conserving the ends of pure justice in the prosecution part of it, and by obliterating yourself afterward. But, really, at the bottom of it all there are two rather dismal motives. You want your revenge, and you wish to show the woman in the case that you can turn your back upon her without half trying. Isn’t that true?”

Tregarvon’s grin bordered upon the saturnine. “It’s next to impossible to resent anything you choose to say, Poictiers; that is your one little gift--to be able to flay your friends without getting yourself disliked. Let’s talk of something else. How long is Elizabeth going to stay at Judge Birrell’s?”

This time the golden youth was able to call up the cherubic smile in all its glory.

“Not very much longer now. She, too, is going West.”

“What? Elizabeth? You don’t know her as well as I do. Her ‘West’ begins and ends at the summit of the Alleghenies.”

“Nevertheless, she is planning to make the grand tour--in a private car.”

Tregarvon reached suddenly across the corner of the table-desk and grasped the hand of many helpings.

“There is enough of the old Vance Tregarvon left in me to wish you all the joy there is in the world, Poictiers!” he exclaimed, with some touch of the old-time heartiness. “You two were made for each other; I can see it now.”

“You are quite sure there aren’t any inward daggerings behind that, Vance?” said the successful one half wistfully.

“Not in the least. I’m glad. If you or Elizabeth had only told me at first who the other fellow was ... but it is all right now. How did you contrive to persuade her to overlook your bit of play-acting with Richardia?”

The persuader shook his head. “That part of it was pretty serious. It was one of the things that couldn’t very well be explained in cold words. I think Miss Richardia has helped out some. She knew well enough what I did it for.”

“You didn’t do it for me,” Tregarvon interposed bluntly.

“Not at all,” was the quiet rejoinder. “As I have said before, I assumed most naturally that Elizabeth’s happiness was involved, and I didn’t propose to stand by and see you make ducks and drakes of it if I could help it.”

“Never mind; it’s all over now, and you two at least are in a fair way to get what is coming to you. How is Hartridge getting along by this time?”

“Quite well. He is walking with a crutch, and is able to hear his classes.” So much Carfax said in the matter-of-fact manner of one who answers a commonplace categorically. Then he sat up suddenly and snapped his fingers, and the lisping drawl had returned when he went on: “By Jove! that reminds me, don’t you know. Hartridge would like to see you.”

“Why does he wish to see me?”

Carfax spread his hands. “My dear boy, I’m no mind-reader. But I’m sure it’s rather urgent. Will you go?”

Tregarvon sat frowning down upon the papers on the desk for a full half-minute before he looked up to say: “I can’t go, Poictiers. I don’t care especially to meet Hartridge, or to listen to the begging-off plea which he is probably going to make. He as good as told me that he was jealous, and was trying to get square. Besides, I haven’t seen Richardia since this mad-work whirl began, and--and it will be easier for me if I don’t see her again.”

Carfax had his answer ready. “You’ll not meet Richardia at Highmount. Elizabeth is staying with the Caswells for a few days, and Richardia went home to Westwood House at three o’clock. I know, because I drove her in my car. Hartridge has his rooms in the laboratory building, and you needn’t show up at the president’s house at all if you don’t wish to.”

Tregarvon hesitated a moment and then glanced at his watch.

“I’ll go--a little later,” he decided abruptly. “I don’t know that I owe the professor anything but an action at law for helping to destroy my drilling plant, but I’ll give him a chance to say what he has to say. Now run along and keep your dinner engagement. I can drive up in my own car when I am ready.”

“About what time will that be?” queried Carfax, hanging upon the threshold of the door of leave-takings. “I ought to let Hartridge know when to expect you.”

Again Tregarvon looked at his watch. “Say eight o’clock. Will that do?”

“Perfectly, I should think.” It was the golden youth’s cue to disappear, but still he lingered. “That telegram you have just written, Vance; are you going to send it to-night?”

Tregarvon answered without looking up. “Certainly. And to-morrow I shall notify the sheriff to send a deputy after McNabb.”

Carfax went out, closing the door softly behind him. But when the big expensive motor-car had cut its half-circle to head toward the mountain pike it was brought to a stand at the railroad station, and the driver left it for a minute or two while he had speech through the ticket-window with Orcutt, the night telegraph operator. Daddy Layne, with nothing better to do, was warming his shins at the waiting-room stove, and though he listened, after the manner of his kind, he caught only one sentence of the low-toned talk. That was Orcutt’s, spoken after Layne’s keen old eyes had glimpsed the passing of something that looked like a yellow-backed bank-note through the window. “It’ll be as much as my job’s worth, Mr. Carfax, but I’ll do it.”

A half-hour later, while Layne was dozing in a corner of the superheated waiting-room, Tregarvon came in with his message to the Dallas chief of police. This time there was no effort made to keep the talk from being overheard.

“I’m mighty sorry, Mr. Tregarvon, but I can’t get it off to-night,” was the operator’s deprecatory protest when the message was handed in. “The commercial wires are grounded--been that way all the evening. Mighty sorry, but these things will happen once in a while. Yes; sure! first thing in the morning, if I have to put it through the despatcher’s office. Good night.”

XXXI

On Pisgah’s Height

Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge was reading before the cheerful grate fire in his sitting-room when his visitor was brought up by the old negro janitor.

“Come in, Mr. Tregarvon, and be at home,” he said, rising, with the aid of his crutch, for the welcoming, and making difficult work of it. “Draw your chair to the fire and be comfortable. It was kind of you to----”

“Carfax brought me your message,” Tregarvon interrupted, rather more brusquely than he meant to. “In a certain sense I suppose I am responsible for your present condition, and since you wished to see me----”

“Ah, yes; but I didn’t wish to give myself the opportunity of reproaching you for the accident, I assure you,” was the deprecatory rejoinder. “You were not even constructively to blame for my cowardly legs.” Then he added, with a touch of naïve humor: “I trust they have sufficiently learned their lesson.”

“You are having a pretty long siege of it,” Tregarvon offered, finding himself sympathizing where he had meant to be coldly self-contained.

“Old bones,” returned the schoolmaster, with his quaint smile. “They haven’t knitted quite as rapidly as they might. But let us hope that there is nothing worse than broken bones in store for any of us. May I be very frank with you, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“I shall set you the example. I can conceive of only one reason why you should wish to see me, Mr. Hartridge. You have been told that I am still determined to exact an eye for an eye in the matter of bringing certain criminals to justice, and you would like to forestall your arrest as an accessory. Am I right?”

At this the quaint smile became quizzical. “Partly; but only partly. Have you taken any steps as yet?”

“I have. After a good bit of trouble and expense I have at last succeeded in tracing the man Morgan McNabb. He is under arrest in Dallas, Texas, and I shall have him brought back as soon as the necessary papers can be obtained.”

“And your object in bringing him back?”

“Is to make him give the name of the man who hired him to put the dynamite under my drilling plant. That man is going to the penitentiary, Mr. Hartridge, if any effort of mine can send him there.”

The schoolmaster removed his spectacles to polish them, and for a time sat staring with unshielded eyes into the heart of the coal fire in the grate.

“You have all the precedents on your side,” he admitted at length. “It is your right to prosecute if you choose to do so. Yet I venture to predict that you will be exceedingly sorry if you bring Morgan McNabb to Tennessee and extort his confession--a confession which will necessarily be made public. Besides, there is a much easier way in which you can apprehend his principal.”

“Are you willing to indicate the way?” snapped Tregarvon.

“Not altogether willing; no. You are at heart a much flintier young man than you appeared to be when we first met, Mr. Tregarvon. It is an inheritance from some one of your Cornish forebears, I imagine. But I have allowed myself to be overpersuaded. You have your car here?”

“Yes.”

“I shall ask you to drive me. Will you trust me that far?”

Tregarvon rose, smiling grimly. “I shall have you for my hostage. If you are about to have me ambushed, I shall make you share my risk. Do we go at once?”

Hartridge limped to a closet and found his overcoat, and Tregarvon helped him to put it on. Then he gave the temporary cripple an arm through the laboratory corridor and down the stair. At the steps he lifted Hartridge bodily into the mechanician’s seat of the car. As yet there had been no hint given of their destination, but when he took his place behind the wheel Tregarvon asked for driving directions.

“Westward, on the cross-mountain road,” was the brief reply, and no other word was exchanged until the swiftly driven machine was approaching the intersection of the cross-road with the west-brow pike. Then Hartridge said: “To your left,” and Tregarvon had a sudden sinking of the heart. A mile away he could see the lights of Westwood House, and a great fear rose up to unsteady his hand as he made the turn out of the cross-road.

Tregarvon’s fear was realized in some measure when, at Hartridge’s direction, the car made a second left-hand turn into the Westwood grounds and was brought to a stand before the door of the old mansion. “I have obeyed you blindly thus far,” he said, as he was lifting Hartridge out of the car. “But now you must tell me. Is it Judge Birrell?”

“Wait,” said the schoolmaster, and Tregarvon helped the lame man up the steps and steadied him while he groped for the knocker. Before he could knock, the door opened silently under the hand of the judge’s daughter, and Tregarvon again gave Hartridge an arm to help him over the threshold.

Though the hall was but dimly lighted he saw at once that there had been a pitiful change in Richardia. There was the shadow of a deep grief in her eyes when she greeted him, and the hand that she gave him was nerveless and cold. He had never seen her in black before, and that, and the chill of the great hall and the grave silence of his car companion, made him feel as if he had entered a house of mourning.

Without a word in explanation the changed Richardia led him to the stair and signed to him to precede her. Tregarvon hesitated only long enough to see that the professor was hobbling away toward the lighted library. Then he stood aside and slipped an arm under Richardia’s. “They hadn’t told me you had been ill,” he said reproachfully; and as they went up together the nearness of her set his blood afire and for the moment he forgot the scene in the deep wood timing itself in the Sunday afternoon of revealment.

At the stairhead a door stood ajar, with the flickering light of an open fire in the room beyond shining through the narrow opening. With a quick premonition that a tragedy was about to be revealed, Tregarvon followed his guide into the room. It was a huge chamber, spacious enough to belittle the few pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, and in the great four-poster bed lay a young man with an arm in a sling and his bandaged head propped high among the pillows. Though the face of the sick man was haggard and emaciated, Tregarvon recognized it instantly. It was the face of the handsome young fellow who had kept the Sunday afternoon tryst with Richardia.

It was only natural that he should be checked by a sudden feeling of antagonism, but before it could find expression it was swallowed up in an astoundment too great to be measured. Richardia had led him to the bedside and she was saying quietly: “Mr. Tregarvon has come, brother. Shall I leave him alone with you?”

The sick man roused himself with an effort that was plainly distressful. “Yes,” he said shortly. And after Richardia had gone: “I’m the man you’re looking for.”

Tregarvon dragged a chair to the bedside and sat down. In the rush of conflicting emotions one exultant fact was hammering itself into his brain and dominating all others: Richardia’s secret had not been her lover’s secret; it was her _brother’s_. In the turmoil of readjustment, it was inevitable that the generous impulses of former days--the days before the _débâcle_--should come swiftly to the surface.

“I’m glad to be here, Mr. Birrell; and that is entirely apart from anything you may be going to tell me,” he said quickly. “Are you quite sure you are able to talk?”

“I’ve got to talk; it’s up to me now. Sister told me a little while ago that you had caught Morgan McNabb; that you’re going to have him brought back here so that you can give him the third degree. I’m the man you want. Morgan did only what I made him do.”

Tregarvon was beginning to understand a little. “Perhaps you’d better tell it all, if you feel equal to it,” he suggested soberly. Then he added: “I’m not going to be your judge, Mr. Birrell.”

The sick man rocked his head on the pillows.

“You won’t understand; I couldn’t make anybody understand. But it’s got to be told. Do you know what that crook Parker did to my father?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Yes; all of it.”

“Well, it made a devil of me. I was only a kid then, but it seemed as if I grew to be a man between two days. I tried to kill Parker. Maybe you know that, too.”

“Yes; I have heard about it.”

“He didn’t die; and he spent his money like water until he got me indicted. Then I broke my father’s heart by showing the yellow streak--running away. I’ve been hid out down in Arizona ever since, but I always meant to come back and stand the gaff some day.”

“Go on,” said Tregarvon gravely.

“I didn’t come back by the railroad. The yellow streak showed up again, and I dodged the sheriff by walking in over the mountain from Piketown. The McNabbs hid me out in the ‘Pocket.’ They told me you were Parker’s man, and that you had come to finish what he’d begun. Afterward they told me you were making love to my sister, and that settled it.”

“I see,” said Tregarvon. Then: “Why didn’t you come out in the open like a man and find out a few things for yourself?”

“I couldn’t. The indictment was still hanging over me; as it is yet. And I was crazy mad. I swore I’d run you out of the country or kill you if you didn’t go. I made Morgan McNabb help me. He’d been mixed up in a feud years ago and had ambushed a man, and I was the only one who knew it. I told him I’d give him away if he didn’t help me run you off.”

“Your sister knew you had come back?”

“Yes; but she didn’t know anything else. She thought I was afraid to show myself on account of the old trouble--as I was. She was trying to fix things so that I could come back here to my father and Westwood House. I did come, but they brought me on a stretcher. Somebody set the leaves afire that night in the old negro burying-ground, and the dynamite went off and caught me while I was trying to stamp the fire out. The jig’s up now. All you’ve got to do is to send for the sheriff.”

Tregarvon saw that it was time to intervene. The sick man’s breath was coming in gasps and his face was livid.

“You mustn’t try to talk any more now,” he said, rising and taking the thin hand that was so much like Richardia’s in his own. “For a good many reasons you have nothing to fear from me. Of course, you know now that I am in no sense Parker’s representative. So far from it, the papers are already drawn which will restore to your father and his friends the property that Parker stole from them. I meant to do that from the first, if I should be lucky enough to find the coal.”

The grip of the thin fingers tightened upon the hand of reassurance. “My God!” breathed the prodigal, “and I’ve been trying to kill you! Mr. Tregarvon, can you go one step farther and--and turn Morgan McNabb loose? That’s what made me frame it up with sister and Hartridge and Mr. Carfax to bring you here to-night.”

“McNabb will not be brought back; I promise you that. Shall I send your sister up to you?”

“Not--not right now; tell her to play something; something low and soft that’ll make the devil let me alone. I want to think. I--I reckon I’m willing to go to the convict camps now for trying to square up with Parker; I reckon I _ought_ to go!”

Tregarvon went out softly, closing the door behind him and groping his way down the stair. Richardia was waiting for him in the hall below, as he hoped she would be, and she led him across to the drawing-room where there were lights and a wood-fire purring and crackling in the big stone fireplace.

“Tell me,” she entreated.

“There is nothing to tell--nothing that you haven’t already guessed. I am completely disarmed, as you knew I would be. I have assured your brother that he has nothing to fear from me.”

“It has been very dreadful,” she said, moving aside to hold her hands out to the fire.

“How badly was he hurt in the explosion?”

“So badly that it is only within the past few days that we have dared to hope. Mr. Carfax hasn’t told you?”

“Not a word. Your secret has been guarded very carefully.”

“But now it is a secret no longer. If he gets well it will only be to face a trial for the attempt upon Mr. Parker’s life.”

“Nothing will come of that,” Tregarvon predicted confidently. “Parker is dead; he died suddenly in his New York office a few days ago. And no twelve Tennesseeans could ever be found who would convict your brother for trying to avenge his father’s wrongs.”

“We are your poor debtors--all of us,” she went on. “You are heaping coals of fire on our heads, and--and they _burn_! Of course, you know now that I was my brother’s accomplice?”

“I know nothing of the sort; of course, you were not!”

“But I was--in a way. All along, I feared that it was he who was making, or at least planning, all the trouble you were having. He was _so_ bitter!”

Tregarvon nodded complete comprehension. “I knew you were anxious about somebody; I thought, at first, that it was Hartridge, and later that it was your father. You have had a heavy burden to carry; and I have been doing what I could to make it heavier.”

“You have,” she said quite frankly.

He did not affect to misunderstand.

“You knew all the time that Poictiers and Elizabeth were held apart only by Elizabeth’s engagement to me?”

“I guessed it. But that didn’t excuse you for--for----”

“For making love to you? I know it didn’t. But I had my punishment the Sunday afternoon when you met your brother in the wood above the ‘Pocket.’ I had gone out to meet Hartridge, and I saw you two together. I took it for granted that the man was your lover who, for some reason, couldn’t come here to Westwood House to meet you.”

“Others took it for granted, too, and I did not deny it--for Richard’s sake.”

“Is his name Richard?”

“Yes; Richard and Richardia. My father named us so, after a brother and sister of his own who were twins.”

Tregarvon glanced at his watch. There were other things to be said--many of them, but a suddenly recrudescent sense of the fitness of things told him that the moment was unauspicious.

“I suppose I’ll have to consider Hartridge and take him back to Highmount,” he offered. Then he added quite irrelevantly: “He’s in love with you, too. Speaking of accomplices, how much or how little did he have to do with the bushwhacking?”

“Nothing at all. It was only on the day of the explosion that he learned that Richard had come back, and was hiding with the McNabbs in the ‘Pocket,’ and heard, through Sill McNabb, that something was going to happen that night at your drilling plant. He suspected Richard at once, and went over to try to prevent the happening. Then your men caught Morgan McNabb, and Professor Billy hardly knew what to do. He guessed that Tryon had come over here after you and Mr. Carfax, and when you took father back with you he was afraid Morgan would be made to confess, and so make a bad matter infinitely worse. His idea in lighting the leaf fire was to give Morgan McNabb a chance to escape. Of course, he supposed the dynamite had been removed.”

“It has been a tragedy of errors from the beginning,” said Tregarvon soberly. “But I am going to expiate my part of it. Has Poictiers told you anything about my plans?”

“No.”

“I made them while I was lying in bed in the old office-building at Coalville, trying to get well enough to crawl out and take hold with my hands. It came to me then what an egregious ass I had made of myself, all the way round. I had blundered in ahead of Poictiers and didn’t have sense enough even to suspect it; and I had deliberately killed any little regard you might have had for me by showing myself up as a man who would make love to one woman while he was engaged to another. I was eaten up with shame, Richardia, and I am yet.”

“It hurt me; I think you will never know how much it hurt,” she said slowly. “A man asks utter and absolute loyalty of the woman he loves.”

“And the woman can ask no less of the man, you would say. That is true. I am no defender of the double standard; still less an apologist for my sex. I have only one excuse, Richardia; it wasn’t merely propinquity--as you and Poictiers seemed to think. I had never known what love was until I met you. Elizabeth is going to marry Poictiers, and you must believe me when I say that I think just as much of her--and in the same way--as I did before. But let that pass. I had found my coal mine, and had lost pretty nearly everything else, including my own self-respect. You were lost to me; doubly lost, as I thought then; so it seemed that the only thing for me to do was to set the Ocoee house in order, and after that was done to go away and try to forget.”

“You are still meaning to go away?”

“Yes. I meant to stay long enough to make somebody suffer for the bushwhackings, but that is past. I have sent for Peters, our family lawyer, and when he comes we shall settle the property affair. Three-fifths of the stock in the mine will go to my mother and sister, and the remainder will be turned over to your father to be distributed among the Parker victims. This is what I have been meaning to do all along, if I should be fortunate enough to discover the coal.”

She shook her head. “You are reckoning without my father. He won’t take the money.”

“He must be made to take it. It is only just and fair. When it comes to that, you must help me, Richardia; for his sake and for your brother’s.”

“Poor Dick!” she murmured. “He needs a friend much more than he needs the money; some one who would care enough for him to stand by and hold him up to the best there is in him. There _is_ good in him; you may not believe it now, but there is, really--lots of it.”

“I can very readily believe it, since he is your brother and the son of your father. And he has proved it to-night by climbing into the breach for McNabb. He will have his chance on the Ocoee, and Wilmerding will be his friend.”

“Then you are determined to go away?”

“Yes. I owe it to you and to everybody else, not less than to myself. But some day, Richardia, after I have done penance for the sin of loving you before I had a right to I am coming back. But I had forgotten; your brother wished me to ask you to play for him; something that would drive the devil away. He said he wanted to think.”

She went to the piano at once. Alone among the old-fashioned house furnishings it was modern; an artist’s instrument, full-toned and responsive. Tregarvon sank into an armchair before the blazing logs and gave himself up to the quiet ecstasies of the music-lover. From the first her playing had stirred him as no other chamber-music ever had. For a time he knew that she was improvising; then there were gentle themes from Mendelssohn, shading one into another so deftly that he could never mark the changes. And at the last there was the Chopin nocturne.

While the closing chords of the night-song were still lingering in the air she came to sit in a chair at the opposite corner of the hearth.

“You played the Chopin for me; was that your way of telling me that I might come back some day, Richardia?” he asked quite humbly.

Her hands were clasped over one knee and her gaze was fixed upon the blue and yellow flames in the great fireplace, when she said softly: “You are very human--and very blind; so blind that you haven’t seen that I have had to fight for two--for myself no less than for you. And there have been times when--when I almost _hated_ Elizabeth!”

The Tregarvon blood was not sluggish; at least, he had never found it so before; but for the moment he was like a man stricken suddenly dumb. Then the gift of speech came back, laboring as it could in the turmoil of new ecstasies.

“_You had to fight for two_; God help me, Richardia--if I had known that----”

She rose quickly and came to stand beside his chair.

“If you had known it, you would have been the strong one, Vance, dear. I know it; I knew it all the time; but I--was afraid--to trust--myself. You are not going away, now, are you?”

There was the sound of an opening and closing door and the stumping of the professor’s crutch on the bare floor of the hall. Tregarvon sprang up and took the small black-gowned figure in his arms.