Chapter III: Part 3

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

“He is all right, you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

The Stubborn Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you say, ‘by itself’?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I haven’t--not yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tregarvon refused flatly to accept the invitation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carfax rose to the occasion with his customary cheerful alacrity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

A Bad Night for Rucker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

Blind Alleys

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

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

Tregarvon shook his head.

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

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

Again the owner of the Ocoee shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is he? Ever hear of him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are we in for this time, Rucker?” was the owner’s question, put after the machinist had measured the damage with a critical eye.

“Mostly a couple o’ days’ hang-up, I guess. Leave me a man or two to help me blacksmith, and I’ll see what I can do. But what’s eatin’ me is, what done it?”

There seemed to be no categorical answer to this, the cause of the breakdown being as yet well hidden in the _débris_ of the effect. Tregarvon was willing to charge it to the chapter of accidents, but Carfax was less easily satisfied.

“If it were the first,” he demurred; “but it isn’t. There is an entire series behind it. And, coming right on the heels of the little mysteries of last night ... I’m of the opinion that this is the beginning of more hostilities, Vance.” Then to Rucker: “How far did you get the hole down, Billy?”

“Not more than a couple o’ feet.”

“Drilling hard?” asked Tregarvon.

“Um-m-m; middlin’ hard; ’bout like the one we put down over yonder at the head of the tramway--the first one we drilled.”

Tregarvon told off three of the laborers to help Rucker, and sent the remaining three back to Coalville to report to Tryon, who, with another small squad, was replacing rotted cross-ties on the lower end of the tramway. After this, he beckoned to Carfax, and they went together down the shallow glade ravine to the spot where Rucker had found the burnt pine-knot torch and had driven his marking stake.

Out of hearing of the four men left at the drilling-stand, Tregarvon said: “Well, the McNabbs are eliminated, definitely. It is fair to assume that a man wouldn’t be so careless as to get caught in a trap of his own setting.”

“You would think not,” was Carfax’s rejoinder; but he did not say that it was impossible.

On the ground where the torch-bearer of the previous night had stood they searched carefully for something that might give a working clue to the mystery of the moonlight survey. There was nothing, unless an oak-tree, with a half-overgrown “blaze” and some ancient markings cut in it, might be called a clue.

Two or three hundred feet below the scarred oak lay the cliff edge, at this point something less than a precipice. Tregarvon stood on the brink, looking down over the rough, broken talus. A hundred yards below his perch the gray ribbon of the mountain pike leading to Coalville wound in and out among the trees and huge boulders. Farther around to the left, and almost on a level with the broken talus, he could see the head of the Ocoee tramway. At once he called Carfax’s attention to the favoring topographies.

“If we should find our big vein anywhere between here and the tramhead, it would be almost as accessible as the old opening,” he said. “The track could be continued on an easy curve and grade, and there is drop enough to give us the gravity haul. I wonder if any one has ever looked along here for the outcrop?”

Viewed from the summit, the rough declivity, rocky, wooded, and thickly-covered with a matted tangle of brier, laurel, and undergrowth, looked as if it had never been trodden by the foot of man. Carfax, leaning against a tree which grew on the extreme edge of the cliff, gave it as his opinion that the rocky slope had never felt the prospector’s pick.

“They have to dig trenches or holes or something, in prospecting for coal, don’t they?” he asked; and when Tregarvon confirmed the surmise: “I should say that this toboggan-slide is just as old Madam Nature left it, shouldn’t you? Can we get from here to the tramhead without going back and around and over the mountain?”

“Easily,” said Tregarvon, and he swung out and dropped over the low cliff to lead the way along the broken ledges.

It was while Carfax was lowering himself with more care than Tregarvon had taken, with the leaning tree to help, that he made a small discovery and called Tregarvon back. On its outer or valley-facing side the leaning tree carried a “blazed” scar with markings similar to those on the white-oak half-way between the cliff and the glade. Like the other scar, this one was old, and the bark had long since healed around the edges of the ax-wound. But the markings, which were cut into the heart-wood, were still quite distinct.

“Well?” said Tregarvon, after they had examined the scar together, “what do you make of it?”

Carfax was pencilling the mark on the back of the letter upon which he had sketched the damp-sand hoof-prints.

“I don’t know. It looks something like the Greek letter ‘_pi_’, a capital ‘T’ with two stems, don’t you think? But, of course, that is only a coincidence.”

“Is it, though?” queried Tregarvon thoughtfully.

“It must be. What woodsman in this part of the world would ever mark a tree with a Greek letter?”

“No woodsman, perhaps; but a schoolmaster might. Poictiers, I am slowly coming around to your point of view. Hartridge is at the bottom of all these smash-ups and mysteries. I hate to believe it of him, but everything leans in his direction.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it? But the admission of the fact doesn’t clear up the mysteries. Say that, for some reason, sentimental or other, Hartridge wishes to drive you out--make you quit. That might explain the smash-ups and the hindrances; but it doesn’t begin to explain why we should find these marks of his--if they are his--made on these two trees years and years ago; or why he should send a pair of surveyors up here to make monkey motions in the moonlight.”

Tregarvon was leading the way along the ledge toward the tramhead.

“We shall probably find out more about all these things before we are much older on the job,” he replied; and then, vengefully: “If I can catch him at it, I promise you I’ll make him sorry!”