Chapter IV: Part 4

After they reached the head of the inclined track and had signalled to Tryon at the foot to let them down in the tip-car, Tregarvon outlined his plan for the broken day.

“We’ll go down and get out the auto and my engineering instruments, motor back to the drilling plant, and do a little surveying on our own account. Beyond that, you may take the car and kill time with it as you please. I’ll stay and help Rucker.”

The programme was carried out in due course. By ten o’clock they were back on the mountain top with the surveying instruments. Placing the transit upon the tripod marks under the tree on the edge of the glade, Tregarvon took a forward sight to the eastward, with Carfax holding the target-staff on the spot where the burnt torch was found. Then, without changing the position of the instrument, Tregarvon signalled Carfax to go back, halting him at the cliff edge, and moving him to right and left until the target was once more in line with the cross-hairs of the telescope.

“What developments?” he inquired, when the staff-bearer came up.

“Nothing startling. Your line of sight merely picked up the second of the two marked trees, whatever significance that may have.”

“You may be sure it has some significance, if we were shrewd enough to figure it out,” Tregarvon asserted. Then: “What will you do with yourself until dinner-time?”

“Oh, I don’t know; chase around in the car awhile, maybe, if you can’t use me here. Perhaps I may be able to pick up a clue or so--if I can find anybody to talk to.”

Tregarvon stripped off his coat and went to work with Rucker and the helpers, and in this manner the better part of the day was accounted for. Late in the afternoon, when the blacksmithing of new irons left him without an occupation, he yielded to a prompting which had been urging him all day, and went for a long tramp which took him over the route covered by the drilling plant in its several removals.

The sun had gone behind the mountain when he finally came out at the tramhead and signalled for the cable-car to take him down. Tryon answered the signal and started the machinery, and in a few minutes Tregarvon was landed at the Coalville level, where he found Carfax waiting for him on the porch of the office-building.

“I beat you to it,” said the golden youth; and then, whimsically: “What do you know now more than you knew before you knew so little as you know now?”

Tregarvon cast himself down upon the porch-step. “I’ll tell you, after a bit. Did you find out anything new?”

“Nothing very conclusive. Item number one is that there are only two horses in the Highmount stables; neither of them white, and neither with a broken toe-calk on the left hind foot.”

Tregarvon smiled wearily. “More negative information; it’s always negative.”

“Yes; and you may put into the same basket the item that no one of the half-dozen people I asked knew of any white horse owned on the mountain. But I picked up one little pointer that belongs in the other basket--the positive. I had luncheon at Highmount--upon Mrs. Caswell’s very pressing invitation. At table, Miss Richardia wanted to know how you came to plant your drilling-machine right in the middle of the old burying-ground.”

“What’s that?” said Tregarvon. “You don’t mean to say that the glade is a graveyard!”

“It seems that it used to be, many years ago--for the slaves. You will remember that you remarked the sunken spots in the only bit of soft earth there is, and wondered what made them. They are graves. Do you suppose Rucker would sleep any better to-night than he did last night if he knew that? If he had known it last night, perhaps it might have accounted for some of his restlessness. But I’m drifting from the point, which is that Miss Richardia’s question betrayed her: she was the young woman who drove with the man behind the white horse; otherwise she would not have known about the location of the drilling plant in the glade.”

“That doesn’t follow,” Tregarvon objected. “Some one might have told her. But let that part of it go. Did you discover anything else?”

“Yes. After school hours I took Miss Farron, Miss Longstreet, and the French teacher out for a spin in the car. Miss Richardia said she couldn’t go because she had another engagement. We made a rather long round to the south and came back to Highmount by a road which parallels the western brow of the mountain. Are you paying attention?”

“Breathless attention,” said Tregarvon ironically. “Joy-ride stories always make me sit up. Go on.”

“Over on the west-brow road we passed a place which looked as if it might be--or might some time have been--a gentleman’s country house. It is walled in from the road, with a magnificently groved lawn, a box-bordered, weed-grown carriage drive, and a great, rambling, porticoed mansion needing the repair-man pretty savagely. Still sitting up and taking notice?”

“Yes.”

“Just as were rolling up to pass the stone-pillared lodge-gates a horse and buggy came out, with a young woman driving. The horse was old and countrified, and he didn’t take kindly to the auto. So I stopped and got out to lead him past the machine. You won’t want to believe it, but the young woman driver was Miss Richardia; and the horse--well, no horseman would call it white, to be sure. It was a dapple-gray, light enough to pass for white in the moonlight, and with a mechanician like Rucker for the color expert.”

Tregarvon came out of his listless mood with a snap.

“Let it be said, once for all, Poictiers, that I won’t stand for any theory that involves Richardia Birrell in the crooked part of it,” he declared firmly. “I’d trust her with anything I own; with my life, if she cared to borrow it. That dapple-gray suggestion of yours makes my back ache! It isn’t worthy of you. Rucker said ‘white,’ and white isn’t gray; not by a long shot!”

“Wait,” said Carfax, evenly. “After I had led the horse safely past the car, I made sure. ‘Hold on a minute, Miss Richardia,’ said I, ‘let me see if your horse hasn’t a pebble in his shoe.’ That gave me an excuse to lift his near hind foot. There wasn’t any pebble, of course, but the shoe was badly worn, _and the toe-calk had a piece broken out of it_!”

Tregarvon maintained a stubborn silence for a full minute. Then he denied again, with more heat than the occasion seemed to demand.

“I don’t care what evidence you bring. I’ll believe nothing against Richardia; _nothing_, you understand? And, after all, what does it amount to? We agreed this morning that she might blamelessly take an evening drive with Hartridge. The fact that they were driving behind her father’s horse cuts no especial figure that I can see.”

“She might have been driving with Hartridge blamelessly; we agree on that. Or even still more blamelessly with--her father.”

“Put it in words,” snapped Tregarvon.

“Two or three people to whom I have spoken saw them together behind the dapple-gray, her and her father.”

“I won’t stand for it!” was the angry retort. “You are hinting that her father is behind these bushwhackings, and that she is a party to them. That doesn’t go!”

“That was spoken very much like a lover,” said Carfax slowly. And then: “You mustn’t let your major weakness get away with you, Vance.”

“And what do you call my ‘major weakness’?” Tregarvon inquired, with a rasp to the words that made them sound like a challenge.

Carfax did not mince matters. “The inability to be off with the old love before you are on with the new,” he said crisply. “Elizabeth has some rights which you ought to respect, don’t you think?”

“Go on,” Tregarvon jerked out. “You haven’t said it all.”

“No, I haven’t; but I shall say it all. You are a changed man, Vance. Either this coal-mine fight or your infatuation for this young woman, or both, are bringing out the worst there is in you. Don’t you realize it?”

“I realize that this is a devil of a world!” was the gritting rejoinder. “First Richardia puts the knife into me and twists it around, and now you’re doing it. I suppose it will be Elizabeth’s turn, next!”

“You deserve all that is coming to you, I venture to say,” suggested the mentor evenly. “You are engaged to one woman, and you come here and make love openly to another.”

Tregarvon was lost now to all sense of proportion. “I shall do as I please!” he retorted hotly. “If you want to write to Elizabeth, it’s your privilege. If you do, I shall tell her that you’ve had Richardia out in the car twice to my once!”

Carfax’s mentor mood slipped away, and he laughed softly.

“Miss Richardia is a dear girl, and worthy of the best that any man can give her, Vance,” he said gently. “Somebody ought to save her from the machinations of a William Wilberforce Hartridge, don’t you think? You can’t, you know; and sometimes I’ve wondered if that doesn’t put it pretty squarely up to me.”

Tregarvon rose and stood over his friend, and for an instant there were black passions to blaze in the wide-set gray eyes. But there was manhood enough underlying the tumult to enable him to throttle the worst of the impulses.

“I--I guess I’m just a jealous dog in the manger, Poictiers,” he confessed gratingly. “I’ve had a hunch that it was going that way, and I’ve been resenting it--like the damned scoundrel I’m coming to be. But it’s all over now, and--and I wish you joy. Can I say more than that?”

Carfax looked up with a quaint twinkle in his eye.

“I’m thinking you might say a good bit more, only you are too charitable to turn the whole menagerie loose. Shall we go in and get ready to eat? Uncle William will be calling us in a minute or so.”

It was not until after the dinner had been eaten, and they were smoking bedtime pipes before the dining-room fire, that Tregarvon went back to the discoveries of the day.

“About the time you were going for your drive this afternoon, I took a walk,” he said, by way of prefacing the story of the last of the discoveries. “I went over the ground we have been covering with the drill, examining every inch of it as if I had lost the set out of a diamond ring. I know now why we have been permitted to go on drilling holes in the rock without interference.”

Carfax nodded. “I’ve had a hint of my own: I wonder if you are not going to confirm it.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, I found that somebody else had been over precisely the same ground with a test-drill a good while ago. I located five holes in all, each of them filled to the top, of course, with sand and washings. One of these holes isn’t twenty feet from the last one we drilled before we moved to the present location in the graveyard glade.”

“Um,” said Carfax, absently rolling a cigarette between his palms. “That was my guess, based upon a word that Hartridge let drop the day I drove him down here to eat with us. I suppose the corollary to that is----”

“That the accident that smashed things this morning was ‘assisted,’ as the others have been. So long as we went on drilling in dead ground it wasn’t worth while to interfere. But now that we are trying a new wrinkle----”

Carfax got up and returned the softened cigarette to its place in his pocket-case.

“I think we’d better sleep on that corollary of yours, Vance,” he suggested mildly. “If it looks as plausible in daylight as it does now, I don’t know but we had better call out the militia and give Rucker more help in the night-watching. Anyway, we’ll see how it stacks up in the morning.”

XI

Rosemary and Rue

The better impulses had been all to the fore when Tregarvon had wished his friend a fair field and no favor at Highmount. But between a burst of generosity on the spur of a repentant moment and a day-by-day renouncing of a pearl of price there is apt to lie a _via dolorosa_ plentifully bestrewn with stone bruises for misguided feet. On the day following the evening of plain speech Tregarvon toiled manfully with Rucker and the laborers in the repairing of the damaged machinery; but he did it without prejudice to a good many sharp-pointed reflections basing themselves upon Carfax’s blunt accusation, upon the golden youth’s calm interference, and upon the fact that, late in the forenoon, Carfax, apparently tired of looking on and doing nothing at the scene of the repairing activities, had strolled away through the forest in the direction of Highmount.

There was more than one disturbing string to the bow of reflection. At first, Miss Birrell had openly made a good-natured mock of Carfax, with his small affectations to point her gibings; but Tregarvon was now impecunious enough himself to appreciate the potency of money. Miss Richardia had told him a little about the Birrell fortunes--or the lack of them; of the vanishing of the family possessions in the aftermath of the Civil War; of the fact that her father, once the leading jurist of the Cumberland counties--Miss Richardia did not say this, but Tregarvon easily inferred it--had found himself out of touch with the later and more pushing spirit of the New South, and had withdrawn more and more until he had become almost a hermit. The Carfax millions were enough to tempt any young woman; and Carfax himself--Tregarvon admitted it without bitterness--was a man to whom most women were attracted and whom all women trusted.

But was Carfax really in love with Judge Birrell’s daughter? Tregarvon boasted that he had summered and wintered the golden youth; yet there were depths in him that the Philadelphian suspected no one had ever fully plumbed. In Tregarvon’s knowing of him he had always been, or appeared to be, immune to sentiment; his attitude had been that of a gentle-natured soul who was willing to be used, or even abused, without detriment to an impartial affection for the entire sex. Would such a man be able to make Richardia as happy as she deserved to be? In the intimacy which Tregarvon had pressed to its ultimate limits he had come to know that behind the cool, slate-blue eyes and the lips that lent themselves so readily to playful mockery there was a passionate soul which would give all and demand all; which would starve on a diet of mere affection, however kindly and indulgent. Would the Carfax millions outweigh this demand? It was an irritating question, refusing to be answered.

Tregarvon, driving bolts into the patched derrick frame, strove dejectedly to put his own huge misfortune aside as a matter definitely settled. He admitted, with pricklings of shame, the truth, or at least the half-truth, of Carfax’s accusation--the charge of fickleness. In a light-hearted way he had been devoted to many women, for the moment, and the nearest woman had always been the loadstone. He excused the weakness by saying that it was common to all men--thereby touching a truth larger than he knew; excused it further by laying down the broad principle that Richardia Birrell, though numerically the last, was really the first woman who had ever broken through to the inner depths of him.

Just here he had a saving glimpse of the workings of the normal masculine mind, and it jogged his sense of humor. Was not the latest charmer always the pearl of great price; the one altogether lovely? Perhaps; but in this case, he told himself, it was different. The Richardias are few and far between; and he had discovered one of the precious few only to realize that he was bound in honor to relinquish her without a murmur to a Carfax, or even to a Hartridge. It was a part of the irrefrangible vanity of the male to regard the relinquishment as a voluntary virtue on his part. In all the gnawings of the worm of reflection, girdings at his hard lot, questionings as to Richardia’s future happiness, gratulatory back-pattings at his own magnanimity in leaving the field to Carfax, it did not occur to him that Richardia, herself, might have had something to say to his own suit--if he had been able, as a man of honor, to press it. Like many other men, he comforted himself with the cheerful assumption that, in the absence of the abnormal obstacles, any man may win any woman, if he shall only put his mind to it; a doctrine, it may be said, which is still lacking proof in certain isolated instances.

Thus giving himself over to the bitterness--and the self-glorification--of the afterthought, Tregarvon wore out the day, deferring to Rucker as boss of the repairing job, and trying not to speculate too pointedly upon the doings of the absent Carfax. That the golden youth was once more a drop-in guest at the near-by school was not to be doubted; and the caviller at an unkind fate steeled himself against another disloyalty--a temptation to rail at the New Yorker for making such unseemly haste. The ill-natured thought would have likened Carfax’s haste to that which prompts the heir-at-law to open and read the will while the testator is as yet merely in the throes of the death-agony--only Tregarvon would not yield to the temptation.

If the murmurer against fate could have seen beyond the half-mile of forest which intervened between the old slave burying-ground and Highmount, he would have concluded sorrowfully that Carfax’s haste was well on the way to its reward. Miss Richardia’s duty hours in the afternoon were short, and at three o’clock she was free to join the golden one, who, as Tregarvon’s prefiguring had assumed, had been Mrs. Caswell’s luncheon guest, and was now making himself at home on the broad veranda of the administration building. For a time the talk rambled through Boston byways and was reminiscent of Miss Richardia’s sojourn as a Conservatory student and of Carfax’s quickly abandoned attempt to take a postgraduate course in the School of Naval Architecture.

“You see, I didn’t have the spur,” was Carfax’s excuse for the abandoned attempt. Then, in an apparent burst of enthusiasm: “Vance is the lucky fellow! He is obliged to work. He thinks it is pretty hard lines, but he doesn’t know how jolly good it is for his soul. It is precisely what he is needing, don’t you think?”

“Work? yes; but the many disappointments: are they also good for the soul?”

Carfax’s smile was entirely amiable. “In due proportion, they are, I should say. Vance has been like a bit of soft steel, needing the forge fire and the tempering brine bath. I presume you know that he is engaged to be married?”

Miss Richardia’s smile was of the sort that no mere man may interpret.

“I think he has told me all there was to tell. Are you acquainted with Miss Wardwell?”

“Very well acquainted, indeed. She is all that any man could ask--and more,” said Carfax, with more warmth than he usually permitted himself. “Last summer she was a member of a Lake Placid outing-party in which I had the good fortune also to be included. We became quite chummy. She swims, you know.”

Again Miss Birrell’s smile was a charming little mask of impenetrability.

“These athletic young women!” she sighed. “It is their day.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that Eliz--that Miss Wardwell is offensively athletic. I wouldn’t have you think that. She--she is musical and all the other things that a young woman ought to be; but she enjoys the outdoor things, too. And so do I.”

“And Mr. Tregarvon doesn’t enjoy them?”

“Just in a way,” was the qualifying rejoinder. “Vance’s misfortune has been, that, until quite recently, he has never wanted anything that he couldn’t simply reach out and take; he has never been obliged to throw himself whole-heartedly into anything. He is doing it now, though.”

“Into the Ocoee, you mean? I am afraid there is nothing but disappointment for him there.”

Carfax was silent for a moment. Then he said: “There are times, Miss Richardia, when I have the feeling that every one who knows what he is trying to do wishes him to be disappointed.”

“Including us here at Highmount?” she laughed.

“Well, yes.”

“Perhaps you would be willing to make it even more definite. Do you include me with Mr. Tregarvon’s ill-wishers?”

“Sometimes I’ve been tempted to.”

“I’m sure I don’t know why you should say that.”

“I have said it,” Carfax returned, with the gentle doggedness which he could assume when the need was sufficiently pressing. “I shall be delighted to be assured that I am mistaken.”

Now came Miss Richardia’s opportunity to fall silent, and she improved it. When she spoke again the playful mockery was laid aside.

“My father was one of the sorriest of the losers in the Ocoee in the promoting period,” she began soberly. “This entire mountain top was once a part of the Birrell estate; my grandfather gave the site for this school. When Mr. Parker was promoting the Ocoee, father went into the plan, heart and soul, giving a large part of the land, and putting all the money he could rake and scrape into the stock of Mr. Parker’s company. Worse than that, he was so firmly convinced of the future success of the undertaking that he persuaded his friends to invest. You mustn’t expect us to be very enthusiastic now, Mr. Carfax. It isn’t in human nature to rejoice when others are preparing to reap where we have sown.”

Carfax’s smile was angel-compassionate.

“Poor Vance isn’t reaping very successfully as yet,” he pointed out. Then he added: “I hope your good father doesn’t feel vindictive toward him. I think we may safely say that Vance is the innocent third party in the transaction--if there ever is such a thing.”

“You don’t know my father; if you did, you would hardly accuse him of vindictiveness, even in your thoughts.”

“Can you say as much for yourself?” asked the accuser gently.

“Indeed, I can!”

“You wouldn’t put a straw in Vance’s way, if you could?”

“I wish you would listen!” she laughed. “Do I look like a--a subterranean plotter, Mr. Carfax?”

“You always look charming. But you don’t want Vance to succeed.”

“I am sure I don’t know why you should think such a thing. Perhaps you don’t think it. I can never tell when you are really in earnest.”

“Strange that you should have noticed that. Others have said it of me, too, at times. But I am very much in earnest this afternoon. It lies in your hands to make Vance fail most conspicuously, you know.”

“You are fond of riddles, and I am not. I wish you would be more explicit.”

Carfax stole a glance aside at his veranda companion and it was borne in upon him that he would have to choose his words carefully. The slate-blue eyes had grown a trifle hard, and Miss Richardia’s tone was no longer sympathetic.

“Vance can’t mix business and sentiment very well,” he ventured. “He has been spending a good bit of time here at Highmount, forgetting some things that he ought to remember. Surely you have discovered his one weakness by this time, haven’t you?” he went on, gravely pleading. “Not that it isn’t tremendously excusable in the present instance, you know. You--er--you are enough to turn any man’s head, Miss Richardia; you are, indeed.”

Her little shriek of laughter was sufficient to break any thin skim of ice which may have been congealing between them.

“You can be quite as absurd as Mr. Vance, himself, when you try!” she mocked. Then, with the frankness which was all her own: “Are you trying to tell me that I have been playing the part of a modern Delilah, Mr. Carfax!”

“Oh, dear, no! But”--he swallowed hard once or twice, and then took the plunge--“but Vance simply couldn’t help falling in love with you. Er--hardly any man could. And it’s--it’s smashing him to perfection. I don’t say that he is admitting the--the little lapse, even to himself; he is too honorable to do that, after he has given his word to Eliz--to Miss Wardwell. But the fact remains.”

Miss Richardia laughed again, but now the laugh scarcely rang true.

“You are making me out a poor, miserable sinner; though I am a most innocent one, I do assure you,” she protested, not without a suggestion of sarcasm. “What is it you wish me to do?”

Carfax needed no one to tell him that he was wading in deep waters, and that another step might put him in over his head. Yet he could not retreat; he had gone too far.

“I have been trying to hammer a little common sense into Vance; perhaps I have said more than even a good friend has a right to say. Hitherto it hasn’t done much good; but last night I had a perfectly brilliant inspiration. I wonder if you could be induced to help me carry it out?--just in the interests of a--of a square deal all around, you know.”

“Another absurdity?” she queried, half scornfully.

“Yes, just that; a--a most ridiculous absurdity. Will you--er--will you marry me, Miss Richardia?”

“Most certainly not,” she returned, with a strained little laugh. “Why should I?”

“There isn’t any reason at all, of course,” he hastened to say. “But if you would make your answer not quite so--er--so positive: if you would be so generous as to--er--to seem to take it under consideration; just until Vance can get on his feet again----”

This time her laughter was wholly mirthful; an abandonment of all hamperings.

“Of all preposterous askings!” she gasped. “Are there many more like you, Mr. Carfax--in New York?”

“Plenty of them,” he assured her, not too seriously. Then: “It wouldn’t be such a dreadful thing, would it? I can make love very nicely, you know; honestly, I can. And we shouldn’t have to do anything more than to keep up appearances.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not going to humor you far enough to even pretend to take you seriously,” she declared.

“Not even for Vance’s sake? Of course, I know you don’t care for him, particularly, but I do; he has been like a brother to me, Miss Richardia; really he has. And we ought to make him realize what he is about; it’s--er--it’s a sort of duty, don’t you think?”

“If I should tell you what I think I am afraid it might sound dreadfully unkind, Mr. Carfax. You seem to have had very little experience with women.”

“Oh, but I have, you know,” he burst out. “I--I’m in love, myself--with--with some one I can’t possibly marry. That ought to make you feel sorry for me, and I’m sure it does. Perhaps you are in a similar situation yourself; in love with some one else, I mean. In that case----”

Miss Richardia had risen, and the mocking mood was once more firmly intrenched behind her laughing eyes.

“You have given me a most delicious half-hour, Mr. Carfax, and in the days to come, when I feel particularly blue, I shall always have it to look back to and remember. You are not expecting me to say any more than that, are you? I can’t, you know, because I have an appointment with a pupil, and I shall have to go and keep it.”

Carfax had risen with her. “I’m perfectly delighted to be your laughing-stock,” he asserted gently. “You’ll let me come and be it again? Thanks, awfully.” And when she was gone he sat down like a man who has been through a pass perilous, and smoked three of the imported cigarettes in rapid succession.

That evening, returning from the hard day’s work on the repairs, the owner of the Ocoee found Carfax awaiting him in the office headquarters at the foot of Pisgah. Uncle William’s dinner, served as soon as Tregarvon had taken his bath, was not provocative of conversation; and even afterward the talk, revolving around the repairs and the mystery, was only desultory. It was not until Tregarvon was smoking his bedtime pipe that he dug the one important thing out of his mind and flung it at his companion.

“You spent the day at Highmount, I suppose?”

“Oh, dear, no; not quite so bad as that. I’ve been down here since half-past four or such a matter.”

“But you went to the college after you left us?”

“Yes; and Mrs. Caswell was good enough to give me something to eat at the proper time. She makes one believe all the old-time stories of Southern hospitality. Which reminds me: we are both invited there to dinner to-morrow evening.”

Tregarvon refused to be turned aside.

“You didn’t go to Highmount to visit with Mrs. Caswell,” he suggested sourly.

“Not altogether; no.”

“Did you see Richardia?”

Carfax had lighted his candle and was preparing to beat a hasty retreat, did retreat as far as the door before he turned to say: “Yes, I saw I Miss Richardia. You wished me joy, last night, Vance, and I hope you are going to do it again. I’ve asked her to marry me, you know.”

“_What!_” shouted Tregarvon, springing from his chair. And then, with a mighty effort to keep the words from choking him: “What did she say?”

Carfax smiled like a winning angel. “She--well, it seemed to strike her as being a bit sudden, as you might say, and----”

Tregarvon had dropped into a chair beside the table, and was hiding his face in the crook of an elbow. Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more; and when he closed the door behind him it was done so gently that the latch made no sound.

XII

Dull Steel

Rucker proved as good as his word in the matter of estimating the delay, two days sufficing for the work of restoration. Having made a test run in the evening after Tregarvon had gone down the mountain, the mechanician had the machinery whirling merrily to the _chug chug_ of the drill by the time his two bosses came on the ground the following morning.

Among his better qualities Tregarvon was able to number a certain degree of resilience which, given time to take the full impact of a blow, could recover and rebound and make the best of the inevitable. Whatever might have come of the intimacy with Richardia Birrell--and he told himself that nothing could have come of it in any event--it was now an episode ended; and after a night of very much mingled emotions, he had risen up with the determination to play the man, for Carfax’s sake if not for his own, and to let the industrial battle fill all the horizons for one Vance Tregarvon. With this determination firmly seated in the saddle, he had constrained himself to meet Carfax at breakfast without bitterness; to motor with him up the mountain in terms of good-fellowship; and, upon their arrival, to shout cheerfully to Rucker.

“Got her going all right again, have you, Billy? Any more puzzle people come to see you last night?”

Rucker grinned sheepishly.

“I ain’t goin’ to lie about it, Mr. Tregarvon. What with pushin’ the job so bloomin’ hard yesterday, and losin’ so much sleep between whiles, I guess they might’ve come and lugged me off bodily without my knowin’ it.”

“And you didn’t find anything wrong this morning?”

“Well, no; not to say just wrong; only sort o’ spookerish.” Then, in a tone that the men at the drill might not hear: “There was somebody here again last night--humans ’r ghosts. I had a fit o’ the jumps a while back that everlastin’ly swiped my appetite for breakfast.”

“How was that?” asked Tregarvon, looking up from his inspection of the yellow car’s motor; and Carfax said: “It must have been something pretty fierce, Billy, if it crippled your pneumogastric nerve.”

“It was this way,” Rucker explained. “Last night, after we got the derrick rigged again, I starts and runs the engine for a little while, just to make sure everything is in workin’ order. When I shuts down, I banks the fire under the boiler so it’ll keep overnight. ’Long about sunrise this mornin’ I hikes over to stir her up for business, and when I yanks the fire-box door open, it’s me for throwin’ that fit o’ the jumps. There was the yallerist, cockiest-lookin’ skull you ever see, settin’ on top o’ the banked fire, ready to pull a grin on me when I opens the door.”

“A skull?--a human skull?” exclaimed Tregarvon incredulously.

“Yep; a yaller one; all teeth and eye-holes, and with a sort of greasy black smoke comin’ out o’ the place where its nose ought to ’a’ been.”

“How did it get there?” Carfax asked the question and then answered it himself by adding: “But, of course, you don’t know.”

Rucker was wiping his face with a piece of cotton waste--the machinist’s handkerchief. The autumn morning was cool and bracing on the mountain top, yet the perspiration stood in fine little beads on his forehead.

“No, I don’t know; and if you was to search me all day, you’d never get it out o’ me where it come from, ’r who put it there,” he said. “I ain’t what you’d call jumpy, but after it was all over, I didn’t want no breakfast.”

“What did you do with it?” Tregarvon asked.

“Me? I jammed it back into the coals with the clinker hook, and put the blower on, quick! Says I, ‘All right, my bucko! You make me throw a fit, and I’ll make you make steam!’”

“Heavens! You burned it?” Tregarvon was still conventional enough to be half horrified, and Carfax shuddered in sympathy.

“I certain’y did. But he got back at me, right now! In less ’n five minutes by the watch that old boiler was red-hot and blowin’ off steam to beat the band. She was sweatin’ black smoke at every joint; and when I chases ’round to open the fire-door--Well, you needn’t believe me if you don’t want to, but them grate-bars was drippin’ something ’r other that looked like burnin’ blood!”

There is a point beyond which the thread of sympathetic horror snaps, and the ball rebounds into the field of the ridiculous.

“That will do for you, Billy,” Tregarvon laughed. “We’ll allow you the skull, but you needn’t embroider it for us. Somebody played a grisly joke on you--with no particular object, that I can see. Just the same, it has its significance. Some prowler was sneaking around here while you were asleep. Are you sure the drill is working all right?”

“You can see for yourself,” said Rucker, not unboastfully. “She’s jumpin’ up and down to the old tune of forty to the minute, same as I promised you she’d be this mornin’.”

But a closer inspection proved that Rucker’s boast was loyal to the eye but a traitor to the fact. The drill was merely “jumping up and down.” It was hardly cutting its own clearance; had gained in depth less than half an inch in half an hour, according to the report of Sawyer, who was at his customary post, “churning and turning” at the hole.

Rucker looked on critically for a few minutes and then laid a listening ear to the steel, bowing and recovering in unison with the stroke.

“She’s hit a bone o’ some kind,” was his verdict; and he stopped the churning machinery and threw in the hoist by means of which the heavy cutting-bar was lifted from the hole.

An examination of the drill point amply verified the mechanician’s guess that something much harder than the fine-gritted sandstone of the mountain top had been encountered in the bottom of the test-hole. The cutting edges of the drill burr were completely gone, broken down and gnawed smooth until the steel cutter-bar was no more than a blunt-ended ram.

Tregarvon swore painstakingly, anathematizing the demon of ill luck by bell, book, and candle, thereby further emphasizing the distance he had travelled on the road toward things elemental.

“Scrap it,” he snapped, meaning the ruined drill point. “How many more have you?”

“Three.”

“All right; put another one in and drive it!”

Rucker got out a fresh point, mounted and lowered it, and the churning was resumed. Three hours of steady thumping showed a gain of less than two inches in the depth of the hole, and at the end of that time the second drill burr was worn as smooth as the first.

This went on until the last of the four cutters was put in service. For a wasted day of patient churning the hole had gone down only a few inches, and Rucker was in despair.

“When this cutter goes, we’re hung up for more ’n any day ’r two,” he announced. “I can sharpen these points all right enough, but it’ll take scads o’ time with the tools we’ve got here on the job. You two bosses hain’t made up your minds what t’ ’ell it is we’re tryin’ to chew through down yonder, have you?”

Tregarvon had taken an engineering course in the university, but he was no geologist; and Carfax’s equipment was even less hopeful. It was a case for a specialist; and the specialist turned up at the opportune moment in the person of Mr. Guy Wilmerding, who had ridden over from Whitlow to see how the Ocoee experiment was progressing.

His coming was hailed with acclamations by the two amateurs.

“By Jove, Wilmerding, you’re just in time to save us from strait-jackets and a padded cell!” Tregarvon exclaimed. “What kind of rock do you have in this region that will make a drill point look like that?” showing the C. C. & I. superintendent one of the blunted cutters.

Wilmerding scrutinized the dulled point carefully.

“None of the native rock ought to do that,” he demurred. “This is a poor piece of steel, isn’t it?”

“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began. Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole now with only a few more minutes to live.”

“That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the sand pump.”

The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings between his thumb and finger.

“Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the sandstone--‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,” he added reflectively.

“You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?”

“There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s no worse.”

Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again.

“That means Rucker to go to Chattanooga with the cutter points, and more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.”

“I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you going.”

Tregarvon’s ill temper vanished like the dew on a summer morning. “You are certainly an enemy of a hitherto unsuspected variety!” he declared. “We’ve been having a good bit of trouble, first and last; some of it bearing all the earmarks of design on somebody’s part. Do you know for a while I thought you might be inspiring it? That was before Carfax discovered you personally, of course.”

Wilmerding’s laugh was good-naturedly derisive.

“I hope you didn’t think so small of Consolidated Coal as to suspect it of popping at you with a boy’s whip!” he retorted. “By and by, when you find your coal and meet us in the open market, we may have to buy you or smash you. But it will be done in the good, old-fashioned commercial way.”

“We shall be there when you put up the large come-off-the-perch bluff,” Carfax thrust in gently. “But in the meantime, somebody _is_ popping at us with the boy’s whip.”

“Who?--for a guess?” asked the Whitlow superintendent.

“Ah!” said Carfax, in the same gentle tone, “I have a thousand dollars somewhere about my belongings that would be delighted to blow itself against the real answer to that question.”

“And you have no clue?”

Carfax smiled. “A dozen of them, more or less. But they all have a way of coming out by the roots when we begin to pull on them ever so cautiously.”

“You are calling me the enemy, but that doesn’t count until the real fight opens up,” said Wilmerding. “If any suggestion of mine will help while you are clawing for a foothold.... By the way, that reminds me: I made an analysis of your coals the other day. Thaxter didn’t have one, didn’t seem to know anything definite about the Ocoee.”

“Well?” queried Tregarvon. “Do you agree with Captain Duncan?”

“If your two veins are not one and the same, they ought to be. I couldn’t sift out the slightest difference between the two specimens.”

There was some further talk about the characteristics, analytical and otherwise, of the Ocoee coal, and Wilmerding stayed long enough to see the fourth and last drill point withdrawn from the hole. The cutter, like its predecessors, was a mechanical ruin; and Wilmerding again made the proffer of the Whitlow repair-plant. Tregarvon promised to send Rucker and the burrs up from Coalville in the morning, and the young superintendent climbed upon his nag and rode away.

“Tools up, men!” Tregarvon called to the drilling squad, when Wilmerding had disappeared among the trees. “We’ll call it a day; and to-morrow you may all go on the track-repairing with Tryon.”

Rucker was busying himself about the machinery after the laborers had gone, and as yet he had said nothing about wishing to be relieved from the night-watching. But it was clear that a man who put in full time during the day could scarcely be expected to sleep with one eye open at night. Moreover, if Rucker were to start in the morning for Whitlow with the drills, it would be necessary for him to sleep at Coalville.

“What is your programme for to-night?” asked Carfax, as he walked with Tregarvon to the tool-house. “I suppose you’ll send Rucker down for the early start to Whitlow. You’ll hardly care to leave things up here without a watchman, will you?”

“Not at the present stage of the game,” was the prompt reply. “You may go down in the car with Rucker, and I’ll stay here for the night. I’d like to see some of these queer happenings for myself.”

“I can beat that plan,” Carfax put in. “You’ve forgotten that we have an invitation to Highmount for dinner this evening. Mrs. Caswell gave it, and I accepted for both of us. We’ll go down and dress, and come back in the car, leaving Rucker to stand watch here while we do the social act. Later, Rucker can come for us, trundling us over here, first, and himself and the drills to Coalville afterward. How will that answer?”

Tregarvon demurred upon two counts. “You mean that you’ll sit up with me? You don’t have to play night-watchman to this sick project of mine, Poictiers. Besides, I don’t care to go to the Highmount faculty dinner. More than that, you ought to be the last man in the world to put me in for it. I’ve already wasted too much time in that way, and you know it.”

“In the present instance I’ve promised for you, and I guess you’ll have to go,” said Carfax quietly. “And as for my sitting up with you afterward, that’s a part of the game. I’m immensely interested in skulls and things.”

And thus, without further argument, it was decided.

XIII

The Burnt Child

The dinner in the president’s dining-room at Highmount College was anything but formal. By this time the two young men from the North were on a footing which lacked little of the household relation, Mrs. Caswell having said hospitably, more than once, that their plates were always laid at the faculty table.

Quite naturally, the Ocoee experiment came in for a share of the table-talk, and in this field Tregarvon let Carfax do most of the ploughing. For one reason, Miss Richardia had changed her place and was sitting on the other side of the golden one; and for another, his own companion was the French teacher, who persisted in talking, and making him talk, of things trans-atlantic and Parisian.

Later, however, he was tempted--and fell. The night was too cool for the veranda, and the after-dinner dispersal was to the music-room. Richardia played, and for a time Tregarvon sat beside Miss Farron and said “Yes” and “No,” as the occasion demanded, coming always afterward to a rapt and regretful contemplation of the pearl of great price on the piano-bench.

Being an artist to her finger-tips, Miss Birrell at the piano became a breaker of hearts by just so much more as the mask of self-consciousness fell away, leaving the true art soul free to express itself in the musician’s ecstasy of detachment. In such moments Tregarvon saw her as the embodied spirit of all that was most desirable in the world of women; gazed spellbound, sinned, repented, and sinned again; calling himself hard names in one breath, and rhapsodizing deliriously over the supernal charm of her in the next.

Again and again he told himself in caustic self-derision that his infatuation was merely the result of propinquity--the nearness of Richardia coupled with the remoteness of Elizabeth. But as often as he pleaded this excuse, the merciless inner and final court of appeals assured him that the evasion was but the adding of self-deception to unfaithfulness, and insisted upon a restatement of the humiliating facts: that he had promised to marry a woman whom he did not love, when he knew he did not love her; and that he was now adding to this baseness by admitting his love for another.

This restatement of the case was dinning itself into his ears for the hundredth time while he was saying “Yes” and “No” to the pretty assistant in mathematics, and praying in his more lucid intervals that Rucker might come early with the motor-car and so forestall any chance of deeper mirings. But Rucker was apparently in no hurry. Miss Richardia played until she was tired; Madame Fortier and Miss Farron excused themselves and went to their duties in the dormitories; Hartridge and Miss Longstreet went to brave the chill of the evening in a pacing constitutional on the veranda; and the group in the music-room was cut down to the Caswells, their guests, and Miss Birrell.

At this conjuncture Tregarvon saw that Carfax was about to add insult to injury by leaving him alone with Richardia. The president was talking about some improvements he wished to make in the school gymnasium: would Mr. Carfax be good enough to look the plans over and give a country schoolmaster the benefit of his advice? Tregarvon turned to the nearest window to watch for the headlamps of the expected auto. They were not yet in sight; and when the silence behind him gave token that Carfax and the Caswells had gone, he knew that he had been basely deserted.

Miss Richardia was still at the piano, letting her fingers run in delicate little harmonies up and down the keyboard. Tregarvon meant to keep his distance, but she drew him so irresistibly that he was beside her before he realized that he was once more breaking all the good resolutions.

“Don’t go just yet,” he pleaded, when she looked around, saw that the others were gone, and made as if she would rise. Then he added: “It isn’t my fault this time: I didn’t wish to come, but Poictiers had accepted for me. You mustn’t punish me when I don’t deserve it.”

She looked up at him with the air of detachment which he had always found more trying than her sharpest accusations.

“Why should I punish you at all? Hasn’t your conscience been doing that much for you?”

“Don’t!” he begged again. “Now that it is all over, I am going to tell you that I have been a liar and a hypocrite.”

She stopped him with a quick little gesture of dismay.

“Please don’t spoil it all now--just because we happen to be alone together for a minute or two. When are you going home to marry Miss Wardwell?”

“You are perfectly merciless,” he complained. “Must we talk about Elizabeth?”

“Ask your conscience,” she retorted.

“My conscience is busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed. One would think you had been born and bred in New England!”

“I wasn’t; I was born on this mountain.”

He sat down in the nearest chair and tried to remember that he was talking to the woman who was as good as promised to Poictiers Carfax.

“I know,” he offered; “in a rambling old house with a groved lawn. It has a box-bordered carriage drive, and a big, pillared veranda fronting the west.”

“Yes; when have you ever seen Westwood House?”

“Perhaps I haven’t seen it; perhaps I am only imagining how it ought to look. But the name ‘Westwood’ is familiar enough. It is written all over the Ocoee maps.”

Her smile, on any other lips, would have had more than a hint of bitterness in it.

“I suppose we ought to be proud of the distinction. The printing of the home name on the maps was the only return my father ever had for what he did for Mr. Parker. But, of course, you know all about that.”

“Not so much as I’d like to know. I have understood that your father was a heavy investor in the original Ocoee company, and that Parker contrived to give him the hot end of things in the reorganization.”

“It is all true.”

“It makes me feel as if I had been caught stealing sheep,” he volunteered. “Ethically, I suppose the Ocoee doesn’t belong to me at all, though I hope it is clear to everybody that neither I nor my father had any part in the crookedness. So far as that goes, my father never knew anything about the early history of the mine; and neither did I before I came down here. How does your father feel about it?”

It did not strike him at the moment as being particularly significant that she did not answer the question categorically.

“Those things are all past and gone,” she said half-absently. And then: “I wish you might meet my father; you and Mr. Carfax.”

The mention of Carfax’s name was as salt to a fresh wound.

“You’ve changed your mind about Poictiers, haven’t you?” he said, and he tried to make the saying of it entirely judicial. “You made fun of him at first, you know.”

“Not of him, but of some of the things that he said and did,” she corrected quickly. “And that was only because I didn’t know him; because I was so stupid as not to recognize the real man under the transparent little mask of affectation that he delights in holding up between himself and all the rest of the world.”

Tregarvon made a loud call upon his magnanimity, and concurred heartily.

“He is the finest there is, Richardia. I--I hope he will be able to make you as happy as you deserve to be.”

For the moment he was puzzled. Sheer maiden modesty might have accounted for the blush, but why should the slate-blue eyes grow suspiciously bright, as with tears?

“Then he has told you?” She had turned away from him and there was a little catch in her voice.

“Yes. It broke my heart, Richardia--which shows you how far I had gone on the road to depravity. Poictiers said to me once that I was playing the dog in the manger, and so I was. There was no excuse, of course; there never is an excuse for dishonor. But you were heart and soul and conscience to me, and I seemed to need you so much more than anybody else ever could. I can say all this without blame now, can’t I? You are going to marry Poictiers, and I am going to marry Elizabeth.”