Chapter II: Part 2

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?”