Chapter V: Part 5

She had turned farther away, as if to conceal emotions too profound to be shared. At first he thought she was crying, and wondered why. Then it was borne in upon him that she was laughing, and he became instantly and hotly resentful.

“If you are laughing at me and my little lunacy, it is all right,” he exploded. “But if it’s at Poictiers----”

When she let him see her face again it was perfectly straight, but there were twin imps of mockery dancing in the eyes of desire.

“Between you and Mr. Carfax it is hard for a poor country mouse to find breathing space,” she asserted. “Am I to understand that you are trying to congratulate me?”

Tregarvon frowned heavily. “No; Poictiers is the one to be congratulated--if you were not laughing at him.”

“I wasn’t,” she denied promptly. “He is much too splendid to be laughed at. Don’t criticise the word; it is the only one that fits him.”

“Then you were laughing at me?”

“No.”

“At what I said, then? that is just as cruel.”

“Why will you insist upon being so quarrelsome? I was laughing because I couldn’t help it. Let us talk about something else; about your mine. Have you been having any more of the mysterious trouble?”

“Yes; it is one thing after another. You heard what Poictiers was telling at the table this evening. He made it sound like hard luck, but it isn’t luck; it’s design. Some one is making the trouble for us.”

“Who would do such a thing as that?”

“For a long time we were totally in the dark. But now we know the man.”

Miss Richardia had the translucent complexion that harmonizes perfectly with cloudy blue eyes and masses of light-brown hair brightened by touches of warmer tints; hence there was no telltale pink to vanish at the command of sudden emotion. Yet Tregarvon saw she was startled, and that the exciting cause was quick-springing anxiety.

“You have seen him?” she asked.

“Rucker, the machinist, has.” Tregarvon was always making good resolutions about not talking too much, and always breaking them. It had been no part of his intention to refer to the incriminating incident in which Richardia herself figured as one of the two actors, but the inexpedient thing was said and he could only hope that Richardia would not ask for more.

She was looking away again when she said: “Now that you know, I suppose you will defend your rights?”

“Take legal steps, you mean? I don’t wish to do that, if it can be avoided.”

“No; anything but that!” she pleaded in low tones. “You must remember the provocation.”

“I didn’t give the provocation.”

“No; but you are associated, in a way, with those who did. You have inherited a legacy of ill will.”

“I might be able to understand that, if the man who is making the trouble were one of the ignorant natives. But he is not.”

“No,” she agreed half-absently; “he is not.”

“Then you know who it is?” said Tregarvon, again permitting himself to say one of the things which might better have been left unsaid.

She nodded slowly. “I--I am afraid I do. And I am going to plead for him, if you will let me. There are mitigating circumstances--prejudices against all Northerners _as_ Northerners. You can’t understand that, because the North didn’t suffer as the South did in the war between the States--at least, not in the same way. And the South has suffered bitterly since the war; from such men as Mr. Parker. There was a disposition on our part to let bygones be bygones, after the great struggle; but a few unprincipled promoters have done much to keep the old sectional animosities alive.”

Tregarvon was regarding her thoughtfully.

“You are wise beyond your years and your sex,” he said soberly. “What do you think I ought to do to this anachronistic gentleman who is visiting the sins of other people upon my poor head?”

“I can only beg of you to be broad-minded and charitable and slow to anger for the sake of all concerned--for my sake, if you must put it upon narrower ground.”

At this appeal, the earnestness of which could not be questioned, Tregarvon was frankly puzzled. A little earlier in the adventure he would not have been surprised to find Richardia Birrell pleading for Hartridge; but now, with Carfax apparently elbowing the professor aside in the sentimental field, there seemed to be less reason for the plea, unless pure friendship might account for it.

“I shall put it wholly upon ‘narrower ground,’ as you call it,” he maintained. “If you tell me that you care enough for the man you are pleading for to ask me to spare him for your sake----”

“Care enough?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “I should be singularly inhuman if I didn’t care!”

As in a flash of revealing lightning Tregarvon saw and thought he understood. It was not Hartridge for whom she was interceding; the professor of mathematics was not the man who had driven with her to the glade on the night of strange happenings--who had stood with her in the shadow of the drill derrick, shaking his fist at the inanimate symbol of the renewed Ocoee activities. The moving spirit in all the enmities and antagonisms was her father!

For a moment the thing seemed unbelievable. That a man who had formerly been a judge and a champion of the law should become a feudist, carrying his vindictiveness over from those who had defrauded him to the defrauders’ innocent successor, appeared blankly incredible. Yet Tregarvon remembered that the South still held many archaic well-springs of thought and action--he had to fight anachronisms daily in his laborers--and that the older generation was not to be judged by the standards of the new. Judge Birrell had felt the heel of the invader, not only in the great conflict between the States, but afterward, when the invader came as a friend and robbed him in the name of business.

Tregarvon had little time in which to determine what he ought to say; time for nothing but a sudden and loyal resolve not to fail Richardia in her moment of need. Voices in the hall warned him that Carfax and the Caswells were returning, and at the same moment he heard the honk of the motor announcing Rucker’s approach. He was upon his feet when he said: “You have told me something that I didn’t know--didn’t suspect. I can scarcely believe it yet. But you need have no fears for anything that I shall do. You mustn’t worry for a single moment. It will all come out right in the end.”

He had his reward in a quick little grasp of the hand, in eyes filling this time with real tears, and in a low-toned outpouring of gratitude.

“I knew you would say that,” she avouched. “It is what you have taught me to expect of you. I am doing all I can to--to bring about a better understanding, and if you will only be patient and wait a little while----”

Carfax and the two Caswells were entering the music-room, and Tregarvon turned quickly and made a pretense of rearranging the music on the piano desk. The small diversion gave him a chance for another whispered word of assurance. “I’ve been advertising myself to you as all kinds of a graceless wretch, but now I’ll show you that I can rise to the occasion. Don’t be afraid: there will be no scandal--no tragedy, so far as you and yours are concerned.”

She caught instantly at the qualification. “Then there are others?” she queried.

“One other, at least. And after what you have just told me I am quite sure he is acting entirely upon his own responsibility. I’ll tell you more about him some other time.”

Carfax was already taking leave, and Tregarvon joined him. The host and hostess went no farther than the door with the departing guests, and Miss Richardia remained in the music-room. At the veranda steps there was a little delay while Rucker was doing something to the motor. In the waiting interval Tregarvon found himself answering a question of Hartridge’s about the progress of the test-drilling, the professor having outstayed his art-teacher companion in their retreat to the open air.

“No,” said Tregarvon, “we are not getting along as well as we might. There seems to be a curious obstructive fatality dogging us. If you were in the chair of psychology instead of that of mathematics, we might give you a very handsome little problem to work on, Mr. Hartridge. I wonder if you would attack it?”

The mild-eyed professor’s smile was blandly incommunicative.

“You mustn’t expect any sympathy from me,” he returned genially. “The proverb tells us specifically that the burnt child dreads the fire; but it doesn’t add the corollary, which is equally true, and as old as human nature--namely, that the burnt child experiences an unholy joy when his playmate attempts to pick up the same hot nail.”

“Ah?” said Tregarvon. And then: “I had forgotten, if, indeed, I ever knew. You were one of the original stockholders in the Ocoee?”

“To the extent of my entire savings account; which was a mere drop in the promoter’s bucket, after all. Nevertheless, I can still be magnanimous enough to wish you all success.” Then, abruptly: “You have a delightful night for your drive to Coalville. I could almost envy you.”

Tregarvon did not undeceive him about the destination of the drive; for good and sufficient reasons it did not seem necessary to tell Hartridge that the drilling plant would have two watchers that night, instead of none. With a word of leave-taking he joined Carfax in the tonneau seat, and the yellow car rolled away down the drive, with Rucker at the wheel.

It was less than an eighth of a mile from the college gates to the point where the glade road turned to the left out of the downward pike, and when Rucker would have taken the left-hand road, Tregarvon made him stop the car.

“We can walk in from here, Billy,” he explained, and the two volunteer watchers got out to do it while the car, lightened of two-thirds of its load, coasted noiselessly on down the steep mountain road and out of sight around the first curve.

On the short walk over to the drilling plant Tregarvon spoke but once, and that was to say: “Your guess about Hartridge was right, Poictiers. He was one of the native crowd which was pinched out in the first reorganization of the Ocoee.”

“Did Richardia tell you that?”

“No; he told me himself, just as we were leaving. And he is still sore about it, though he tried to turn it off as a joke.”

“Um,” said Carfax reflectively. “If he is the man who is putting a finger into your pie, we’ll be likely to see him within the next half-hour or so, don’t you think? He supposes we are on the road to Coalville, and he knows that Rucker is driving. Which presumably leaves the plant unguarded. What will you do if we should happen to catch him red-handed?”

“That remains to be seen,” said Tregarvon moodily. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” And for the remainder of the walk he was silent; it being no part of his intention to tell Carfax that Richardia’s father was the one who, arguing from conclusions which seemed to be well-founded in inference, if not in fact, was most likely to be caught red-handed.

XIV

The Logic of Fact

Upon their arrival at the drilling plant the two young men who had been Mrs. Caswell’s dinner-guests made a dressing-room of the small tool shanty and changed quickly to their working clothes; after which they sat upon the door-step to smoke in sober silence, each busy with his own thoughts.

For Tregarvon the talk with Richardia had wrenched the point of view violently aside, adding new perplexities and fresh discouragement. Richardia’s apparent fear that her father was responsible for the obstacles which had been thrown in the way of the test-drilling was a thing to be believed only because Richardia’s plea could apparently have no other meaning. Being alien to the South and a townlander, the Philadelphian found it difficult to understand the attitude of a man who would make a personal matter of an ancient business defeat, carrying his animosity over from the real offender to an innocent third party. But seemingly--since Richardia’s word was not to be doubted--the fact remained.

Tregarvon saw at once that the Ocoee experiment was made vastly less hopeful by the discovery to which Richardia had led him. Though he had never met Judge Birrell, Coalville gossip had done the fiery old recluse ample justice. For the loungers at Tait’s store the judge figured as a venerable survival of the _ancien régime_; of the good old times when the great landed proprietors ruled their small kingdoms with an iron rod; and were coincidentally and in the meliorating sense of the word, kindly and generous tyrants to all and sundry. Tregarvon had heard enough to assure him that the sentiment of the entire countryside would be with Judge Birrell in any cause he might see fit to champion; but apart from this, the one insurmountable bar to any defensive reprisals on his own part lay in Richardia’s appeal. Tregarvon felt that the appeal, and his yielding thereto, had effectually tied his hands, and he was still sufficiently infatuated to be glad. Carfax might marry Richardia and endow her with his millions; but her greatest debt would still be to the man who had refused to defend himself at her father’s expense.

Back of the dismaying discovery which had changed the point of view, there was other food for reflection. When he had ventured to hope that Carfax might make her happy, why had Richardia laughed? The query led to the recognition of another impression, given often when he was with her, and as often slurred over and dismissed when it came to be analyzed. Not the least of her charms for him was her crystal-clear straightforwardness. Nevertheless, there had been times when he had been made to feel that behind the frankness there were reservations; times when he had been given fleeting glimpses of an inner Richardia hiding behind the slate-blue eyes and whimsically mocking him.

“I hope the good Mrs. Caswell’s dinner is not disagreeing with you,” Carfax broke in, in the midst of the analyzing abstraction; and Tregarvon came back to things present with a jerk.

“Not at all,” he denied. “I was just thinking.”

“Better not think too much after a hearty meal. It’s bad for the digestion,” was the gentle rejoinder.

Tregarvon grunted. “You didn’t leave out anything but the name. I can’t help thinking of her, Poictiers. It’s no disloyalty to you, or to Elizabeth. You had no business to leave me alone with her when Doctor Caswell asked you to go and look over the gymnasium things.”

Carfax chuckled softly.

“You are a wild ass of the plains, Vance. It is borne in upon me that I shall have to marry her out of hand to bring you to your senses.”

“The quicker the better,” said Tregarvon gloomily. “There is no use in prolonging the agony.”

“Then you’ll admit that it is an agony?”

“I can’t joke about it, Poictiers. I have made the one crowning blunder that spoils a man’s life. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not going to be either a fool or a scoundrel. I shall marry Elizabeth and try to make her as happy as I can; but it will be without prejudice to the fact that I didn’t know what love was when I promised her. I can imagine just how brutal that sounds to you, but it’s the truth.”

“The truth is always rather brutal, isn’t it?” Then the golden youth permitted himself a word that he rarely used. “I’m damned sorry for Elizabeth.”

“As I told you once before, you needn’t be,” Tregarvon snapped back. “There is absolutely no question of sentiment between us, and there has never been. You’d appreciate that if you should read her letters to me; letters in answer to my babblings about Richardia. If Elizabeth had a spark of sentiment in her she would have sent me packing long ago. I’ve told her pretty nearly everything there was to tell.”

“I suppose you have. That is one of your amiable weaknesses--to tell some woman, any woman who happens to be within reach, a lot of things that no woman ought to be told. You deserve all that is coming to you, Vance.”

“I suppose I do,” Tregarvon admitted; and beyond this the silence came to its own again. After a time, Carfax suggested quizzically that the ghosts might be too bashful to come out while there were two able-bodied watchers in sight; and at that they went inside to find seats on a coil of rope opposite the open door. Before long, the interior darkness began to make Tregarvon sleepy and he had quite lost himself when a touch of Carfax’s hand aroused him.

“Look steadily at the big oak just beyond the engine--the one where we found the tripod marks,” was the whispered injunction. “Do you see anything?”

Tregarvon rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stared hard at the oak. “Nothing doing,” he said.

“Yes, there is,” Carfax asserted. “There is a man behind that tree. I saw him just before I shook you awake.”

“Piffle!” said Tregarvon. “That oak isn’t big enough to hide a man.”

“Just the same, he is there!” retorted Carfax, still in a whisper. Then: “I suppose it didn’t occur to you that we might need something more persuasive than our bare hands up here to-night, did it?”

“No; and we shan’t.” Tregarvon was suddenly reminded of his promise to Richardia that there should be no tragedies. “What we can’t handle peaceably, we’ll let go.”

“All right; you’re the doctor,” said the golden youth mildly. “Nevertheless, if I had a gun I’d go out and capture that fellow who is hiding behind the tree.”

“Still nervous, are you?” Tregarvon put in. “You are dreaming, Poictiers. There isn’t any one there.”

“All right, again,” was the serene reply. “Have it that way, if you like. Only don’t forget to keep your eye on the tree.”

That was the beginning of a patient watch which was maintained for a full quarter of an hour. The night was perfectly still; there was not wind enough to rustle the browning leaves of the oaks or to whisper in the pines. Afar off, the little screech-owl whose haunts had been invaded by the drilling plant lifted up his voice in shrill chatterings, but there were no other sounds to break the silence. Once during the watchful vigil Tregarvon thought he saw something stirring among the trees on the farther side of the glade, and his fingers closed upon Carfax’s arm. But when he looked again the shadows were undisturbed.

“This is tremendously exciting,” Carfax commented finally, in gentle irony. “If I weren’t morally certain that I saw a man dodge behind that tree a little while ago, I’d fall asleep.”

“Do it anyway,” Tregarvon suggested. “I’ll stand watch, and call you when your turn comes. Take Rucker’s cot.”

“Do you really mean it?”

“Sure I do. Turn in and take your forty winks. If anything seems likely to happen, I’ll let you know.”

“Then I believe I’ll take you at your word. I haven’t been so sleepy since the year before Noah built the ark of gopherwood. If Mrs. Caswell wasn’t as far above suspicion as the angels of light, I might suspect her of having put something into the black coffee.”

Five minutes later Tregarvon was sitting alone on the rope coil, rubbing his eyes and wishing that he might decently follow Carfax’s example. The very act of staring at the moonlit glade hypnotized him, the more since there was nothing unusual to be seen. With the view through the open door becoming hazy and startlingly distinct by turns, he struggled manfully against the rising tide of somnolence, nodding, and recovering himself with a jerk when he realized that the tide was submerging him. But out of one of the nodding moments he came with a violent start that instantly banished all thoughts of sleep. The little screech-owl had ceased complaining, and the arousing sound had been the distinct clink of metal upon stone.

When he looked he saw that the time for action had come. Standing fairly in the midst of the small clearing, the drill derrick was struck out boldly in the white moonlight, with every outline and detail sharply distinguishable. In the square of cleaned rock surface marked off by the four legs of the derrick frame Tregarvon saw a man crouching. The clinking noise was repeated and the watcher at the door faced about and felt his way in the inner darkness to the bed in the corner of the tool-room.

“Wake up, Poictiers!” he called in low tones; “the play has begun!”

Carfax sat up promptly and asked but a moment for the finding of himself. “I’m all here,” he said. “What’s doing?”

For answer Tregarvon led him to the door and pointed to the square of bared bed-rock under the derrick frame. There was a man there, without doubt, but now he was standing up and was apparently examining something which lay in the palm of his hand. The sudden rush of the two from the tool shanty was quite evidently a surprise for the intruder, but he made no attempt to escape. So far from it, he lifted his soft hat politely and said: “Good evening again, gentlemen. You took me completely by surprise--as perhaps you meant to. I was quite sure that you were both safely in bed in Coalville by this time.”

“No,” said Carfax very gently. “We have not been in Coalville at all: we have been here, waiting, quite patiently for--you, Mr. Hartridge.”

“That was kind,” said Hartridge affably. “And, now that your patient waiting has been duly rewarded?----”

“Now that we have caught you we shall ask you to solve that little problem in psychology for us,” put in Tregarvon. “We’d like to know what it is that you have just been dropping into that drill-hole.”

“And if I assure you that I have been putting nothing into your drill-hole, what then, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“In that case I shall ask Carfax to see that you don’t run away while I ascertain for myself,” was the firm rejoinder; and a careful dip of the long cleaning spoon into the test-hole brought up a half-dozen small metallic objects; cubes cut from a bar of tool-steel they appeared to be.

Tregarvon handled the cubes and passed them on to Carfax.

“We owe you something for a day lost and four drill points all but ruined, Mr. Hartridge,” he said rather grimly, adding: “But we’ll credit your account with this present failure to make us do it all over again to-morrow. Would you mind telling us in so many words what your object has been--or still is, perhaps?”

The professor’s smile was imperturbably bland.

“I am sure you wouldn’t be so harsh as to put me on the witness-stand in my own defense,” he said, still amiable. “Especially since you have no evidence of anything worse than a neighborly call at, perhaps, a somewhat unseasonable hour.”

At this Carfax came quite close and he forgot to lisp when he said: “Mr. Hartridge, may I ask you to remove your overcoat for a moment? The night is a bit chilly, I know, but----”

The tone of the request was gentle enough but there was a quality in it that made the suggestion a demand. The professor slipped out of the coat, quaintly quoting Scripture for the ready compliance. “‘If any man ... take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak, also.’ Anything to oblige a friend, Mr. Carfax.”

Carfax took the surrendered coat and, feeling in the right-hand pocket, drew out one of the little steel cubes; quite evidently the one which Hartridge had had in his hand at the moment of surprises.

“Thank you; that is all,” said the searcher, returning the coat, or rather holding it thoughtfully while Hartridge put it on. And then: “You will hardly deny that we have sufficient evidence now, I take it?”

The professor of mathematics spread his hands as one who has done his best and is only regretful that he can do no more.

“Let us assume that the case has gone to the jury: what is the verdict, gentlemen?”

“You are asking what we mean to do?” Tregarvon demanded.

“That is it, precisely. What can you do?--drag me before the nearest justice of the peace on a charge of malicious mischief? You would scarcely wish to disturb the tranquillity of an old and honored institution of learning like Highmount College by such a proceeding as that, would you?”

Tregarvon could not help smiling at the audacity of the man, and the New Yorker laughed outright.

“You have a most excellent quality of nerve, Mr. Hartridge,” was Carfax’s tribute to the audacity. “As you suggest, our field is rather limited. You are perfectly well aware of the fact that Highmount and its hospitality stand as the only barrier between us and social starvation. Let us try to discover a _modus vivendi_. The verdict is: ‘Guilty, with a recommendation to mercy.’ We are willing to give any man’s sense of humor a chance to redeem itself. You quoted Scripture at me a moment ago, let me return the compliment: ‘Go in peace, and sin no more.’”

The professor drew himself up, smiling genially and lifting his hat.

“I thank you, gentlemen; you are very considerate,” he returned in gentle irony. After which he walked away, pausing at the edge of the glade to lift his hat again.

Carfax drew a long breath when the tall, black-coated figure was lost under the tree shadows. Then he turned upon his companion:

“I’m not going to say, ‘I told you so,’ Vance, because I think you came around to my point of view some little time ago. What is the motive--Hartridge’s motive? Is it merely impish humor? Or does it go deeper than that?”

Tregarvon was busily engaged in putting two and two together to make the inevitable four. The schoolmaster was in love with Richardia Birrell; the Philadelphian’s first visit to Highmount had made this perfectly plain: could it be possible that Hartridge was acting as Judge Birrell’s agent in the obstacle-raising? And, if so, did Richardia know it?

“Stay here a few minutes, Poictiers,” he directed. “I’m going to follow him and see if he goes straight back to Highmount.”

“Joy go with you,” said Carfax; and when he was left alone he went to sit on the step of the tool-house to smoke while he waited.

XV

Mammy Ann’s Grave

Carfax was smoking his third cigarette when Tregarvon returned from spying upon the retreating professor and sat down in sober silence upon the door-step.

The smoker waited patiently for some little time before he said suggestively: “I hope you didn’t have your walk for nothing.”

“I saw all I needed to see.”

“Hartridge went to the college?”

“I suppose so; he was headed that way when I turned back.”

Carfax waited again, and when nothing further was forthcoming: “It’s a remarkably beautiful night, isn’t it? Did you ever see a handsomer moon?”

“Don’t make me talk!” was the irritable rejoinder. “You’ll be sorry for it if you do.”

“Try me and see.”

“Well, then--if you will have it: there was a witness to our little comedy out there under the derrick.”

“Some one who came with Hartridge?”

“I guess so. Some one who went back with him, at any rate.”

“Who was it?”

“I hate to tell you, Poictiers. It was--it was the woman you are going to marry; Richardia Birrell.”

Carfax laughed softly.

“I don’t see why you need be so desperately gloomy because it happened to be Richardia. As I remarked a moment ago, the night is jewel fine, and I don’t wonder that she found it hard to stay indoors. And as to my rights in the matter, I am far from denying her the privilege of walking abroad with so old a friend as Mr. William W. Hartridge.”

“You are trying to make a jest of it, as you do of everything,” was the crabbed retort. “Don’t you see what it means?”

“I must confess that I don’t see anything especially catastrophic about it.”

“You don’t? Why, good heavens, man! it means that Richardia knows what Hartridge has been doing. I won’t admit yet that she is a party to it; but she _knows_!”

“_Place aux dames_,” said Carfax cheerfully. “We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; it’s our clear duty--or, at least, it is mine.”

“No, I’ll be hanged if we do!” Tregarvon growled. “There isn’t even a doubt where she is concerned!”

Carfax threw the half-burnt cigarette away and lighted another.

“Your tone is that of the still deeply infatuated lover. Must we again come back to that phase of it?” he inquired, in the tone of the long-suffering but still amiable bystander.

The man beside him took plenty of time to consider. But when he opened the flood-gates there was a torrent of self-accusings to pour out.

“I’m a beast, a cad, the cheapest of cheap skates, Poictiers!--anything you like to call me. It hasn’t touched Richardia, but it has gone all sorts of despicable distances with me. When you told me the other night that you had proposed to her, I could have murdered you. And just now, when I saw her walking arm in arm with Hartridge, I wanted to run amuck and destroy him. I’m not trying to excuse myself when I say that I didn’t go down without a struggle. I did make some kind of a fight at first: I even went so far as to tell Richardia all about Elizabeth. But it didn’t do any good.”

Carfax’s smile was out of the depths of wisdom, and it was not visible above the horizon for the penitent.

“That was great,” he said, referring to the forlorn-hope confession of the engagement. “I don’t believe I could have done that.”

“Oh, there is nothing coming to me on that score,” Tregarvon objected, carrying self-abnegation to the limit. “I couldn’t help telling her; not because it was the honest thing to do, but because I should have burst into inconsequent little shards long ago if I hadn’t told her everything I knew.”

“And she has been encouraging this little idiosyncrasy of yours?” Carfax asked tentatively.

“Not on your life! She has been doing everything that an angel out of heaven could do to smash me back into my place; to show me how many different kinds of an idiot I was making of myself. No longer ago than this evening, when you went off with the Caswells and left me in the lurch, the first thing she did was to ask me when I was going home to marry Elizabeth.”

For the first time in Tregarvon’s knowing of him, Carfax appeared to be losing his temper.

“‘A beast, a cad, and the cheapest of cheap skates,’” he repeated carefully. “They are your own words, and they will all apply to you if you don’t tell Elizabeth all and more than you have just told me.”

“There is the millstone grind of it!” groaned the sinner. “If I should tell her how far it has gone with me, it would be tantamount to asking her to make me a present of myself, with the Uncle Byrd millions thrown in for a _lagniappe_. I suppose I’ve got it to do, now, but I’d cheerfully accept the alternative of walking into old Brother Daniel’s den of lions.”

“Y-e-s, I should think you would,” was the drawling comment. “Any man who would make a football of the happiness of such a woman as Elizabeth Wardwell----”

“Hold on,” Tregarvon cut in, sobering suddenly. “Get up and walk on me, if that is what you think is coming to me; but don’t mangle me with a cold iron. I’m out of it all around. If Richardia doesn’t marry you, she’ll marry Hartridge; and when I tell Elizabeth, as I’ve got to, that will be the end of things with her. You mustn’t hit a man when he is down. It’s wicked.”

“Everything goes--between friends,” said Carfax, who could never take the trouble to put his displeasure into any permanent form. “It does look as if you were up against it, before and behind. Far be it from me to break the bruised reed, or to quench the smoking flax.”

“Oh, confound you for a Job’s comforter!” rasped Tregarvon, breaking out afresh. “I’ve got to believe in people--I’m built that way; and if I could think for a moment that Richardia is Hartridge’s accomplice in this contemptible trickery of his----”

“Well, if you could?” prompted the comforter, after the pause had grown overlong.

“If I could, I’d lose faith in my own good intentions,” finished Tregarvon, whose stock of comparisons was running low. “Still,” he went on, talking now because he was started and could not stop, “still it’s against me, Poictiers; the whole world is against me. In that same talk in the music-room this evening--while you were away with the Caswells--Richardia was anxious about these happenings of ours; afraid somebody would get hurt; in fact, she made me promise not to hurt anybody.”

“Meaning Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt?”

“No; er--that is, I don’t think she meant him.” Tregarvon was not yet ready to tell Carfax that he was well assured that her fear was for her father; though she had not bound him to secrecy, he felt that what she had said had been spoken in confidence.

Carfax got up from his cramped sitting on the door-step, stretched, yawned, and looked at his watch, holding the dial up to the moonlight.

“Ten minutes past eleven,” he announced. “Do we turn in and sleep a few lines? Or is it to be a continuous performance--like those that the vaudeville people advertise?”

“Go inside and finish your nap,” Tregarvon directed, filling and lighting his pipe. “I’m not sleepy now; don’t know as I ever shall be again.”

“You think the curtain has been rung down for to-night?”

“You’d say so, wouldn’t you? The star has gone home and has probably gone to bed. If he should get up and walk in his sleep, I’ll call you.”

Carfax hung upon the threshold. “Better call me, anyhow, after I’ve had another forty winks or so, so you can take your turn. People have to sleep, you know--even after a funeral.”

“You go to bed!” was the gruff command; and Tregarvon began a monotonous sentry beat up and down before the tool-house. But a minute later he thrust his face in at the little square window to say: “Asleep yet?”

“My Heavens, no!” returned a querulous voice in the inner darkness. “Do you take me for an auto-hypnotist?”

“I have just developed a notion, and it is beginning to gnaw me,” explained the sentinel on duty. “What if the man who was on his knees at the test-hole when I went to waken you wasn’t Hartridge, after all?”

“Oh, good Lord!” complained the voice. “Are you trying to drag somebody else into it?--when the character cast is already full and running over, and all the supernumeraries have been tagged and labelled? Turn the notion out of doors; tread on it; break its back with a stick! We caught Hartridge with the goods on him, didn’t we?”

“Yes; but----”

“But what?”

“Nothing much: only now that I come to think of it, I seem to remember that the man I saw dropping things into the hole wasn’t wearing Hartridge’s kind of a hat.”

“Oh, granny! Go on and do your little sentry go. Your head is muddled and you want to pass the muddle on to me. I’m asleep, I tell you--sound asleep! I don’t hear a word you are saying.”

Tregarvon gave it up; not the lately developed notion, which grew rather more insistent the longer he thought about it, but the attempt to interest Carfax. During the lonely two-hour watch which followed he had time to go reflectively over the events of the night, to set them in orderly array, and to let the unconsidered minor happenings fit into their places and weigh as they would.

The process straightened out a few of the tangles, or it seemed to. Richardia’s concern, expressed by her fear that violence might grow out of the antagonisms, was undoubtedly for her father. Also, it was plain that up to the moment of confidences she had not suspected Hartridge of being her father’s agent; it being a fair presumption that she would have spoken of the professor if she had. Having got that far, Tregarvon began to ask himself if Hartridge was the only one actively involved. In at least two instances the schoolmaster might fairly be held exempt. It was still incredible that the man who had come to the Coalville headquarters as a guest had deliberately plotted to have his host’s motor-car wrecked on its return from Highmount. By the same token, it was difficult to imagine the professor of mathematics in the rôle of the sardonic practical joker who had shocked Rucker with a resin-filled skull, dug, doubtless, out of the old burying-ground.

On the other hand, the murderous attempt at wrecking the car and the grim joke on Rucker fitted the mountain-baron-henchman hypothesis most accurately; as did the fact, if it were a fact, that there were two persons concerned in the recent episode of the hardened steel cubes. There had been time, during the arousing of Carfax, for one man to disappear and for another to take his place; in which case it seemed evident that Hartridge had stood his ground merely to cover the retreat of the other man.

The puzzle promised to give a coherent hint pointing to its solution while Tregarvon was thinking it out and fitting the pieces together; and so long as the mental effort continued to feed the fire of wakefulness he was all that an alert sentinel should be. But after the various suppositions had been properly labelled and docketed and pigeonholed the physical reaction came, and drowsiness sat upon his shoulders, riding him like an Old Man of the Sea.

For a time he fought manfully, keeping up the struggle until he had exhausted every device he could think of and yielding only when he found himself actually falling asleep as he walked. The alternative to leaving the plant without a watchman was to call Carfax, and this he finally concluded to do. Groping his way blindly into the dark interior of the tool-shack, he stumbled over the spare coil of rope, sat down upon it for a momentary rest, and in the flitting of a bat’s wing was past help.

When he opened his eyes again the high-riding moon had swung far into the west, the glade was bathed in a ghostly flood of gray shadow, and Carfax was shaking him gently.

“Another act on,” whispered the impromptu call-boy; “no speaking parts out, as yet--only pantomime. But it is worth sitting up to see.”

Tregarvon, still sodden with sleep, suffered Carfax to lead him to the outlook window. In the gray shadows he presently made out the figure of another intruder. Within the area of the sunken graves a man, old and black, if the uncertain light could be trusted, was squatting on the ground and rocking himself back and forth, his swaying body keeping time with the measure of a weird, crooning melody. From time to time, he would stop the swaying movement to take a small white object from a basket at his side. These objects he appeared to be arranging in some sort of a figure on the ground to the accompaniment of the droning incantation.

“How long has he been there?” Tregarvon asked.

“Just a little while,” was the low-toned reply. “I awoke about half an hour ago, and when I looked out, the moon was going over to the other edge of the world, and everything was quiet. A little later the basket man came; just appeared, you know, as if he had materialized out of the shadows. When I first noticed him he was doing his little song and dance, as you see him now.”

“But what _is_ the ‘song and dance,’ as you call it?”

“Write your guess on one side of a sheet of paper and send it to the puzzle editor,” chuckled Carfax, adding: “If we had begun doing that at first, the editor would have a choice collection by this time, don’t you think?”

“I have been making a few more guesses,” Tregarvon offered. “I was coming in to unload them on you when my eyes went shut. What time is it?”

“About two o’clock--the real witching hour. I want to go home.”

“Go out and tell the old conjurer yonder; perhaps he may have a magic square of carpet in his basket,” suggested Tregarvon. Then: “Doesn’t the wild and weird atmosphere of this heritage of mine get on your nerves to the queen’s taste? Something doing all the time. I’m going to put a notice on the derrick frame: ‘Don’t shoot the stunt-setter; he is doing the best he can.’”

“’Sh! what is the old ‘ghost doctor’ up to now?”

The droning chant had ceased and the old negro was crouching or kneeling at one end of the oblong figure traced by the enclosing row of white objects. The silence was profound; so complete that the snapping of a twig coming suddenly shattered it like the report of a pistol. Both of the watchers started at the sound, but the kneeling negro seemed not to have heard it.

“What was that?” whispered Carfax.

“I’m guessing once more: the obi-devil, possibly, coming in answer to the old medicine-man’s prayers.”

“Guess again!” Carfax thrust in excitedly. “Look this way--get a line on the corner of the derrick frame and follow it over into the woods. Do you see him?”

Tregarvon said “Yes,” and began to grope for a weapon. A man, hatless and with a handkerchief bound about his head, was edging his way cautiously out of the undergrowth. In the hollow of his left arm he carried a gun, and his advance was like that of the deer-stalking hunter. With the derrick frame intervening it was to be inferred that he did not see the negro.

“Somebody pot-hunting for us, this time?” queried Carfax, under his breath; but Tregarvon pressed his arm for silence. The cautious approach was not in the direction of the tool shanty; it was toward the engine of the drilling installation.

“That is the fellow we want to surround,” Tregarvon whispered. “If he had a hat on, I’d swear he was the man I saw kneeling under the derrick--before he made his drop-out and left Hartridge to throw dust for him! By Jove! he acts as if he were scared!”

The exclamation was not unwarranted. The man with the gun was creeping toward the portable engine, watchful and alert, starting at every whisper of the night air in the pines and exhibiting all the outward signs of an inward tension which was ready to snap and recoil in panic.

When he passed out of sight behind the derrick, Carfax would have led the charge; but Tregarvon restrained him. “Hold on,” he advised. “We may as well wait and find out what he means to do.”

The man was creeping on hands and knees when he came in sight again, and the gun had been left behind. When he stood up he was at the smoke-stack end of the engine-boiler; and a moment further along the two watchers made out that he was unscrewing the fastenings of the iron door which gave access to the smoke-box and the flues. They waited until he had the door unfastened; saw him swing it open by slow inchings; saw him thrust an arm into the sooty depths of the smoke-box.

“_Now!_” Tregarvon commanded, setting the pace for the charge; but panic was before them. Just as the man was withdrawing his arm a deep groan shuddered upon the stillness. With a cry that was like the snarl of a cornered animal, the man leaped up and flung out his arms as if to ward a blow. At that the huddled figure kneeling among the sunken graves groaned again, following the groan with a terrified, “_Oh_, my Lordy!” when he saw the man at the boiler head.

That was sufficient. At the spot where the man with a handkerchief about his head had stood clutching the air there was a sudden void, and the noise of his crashing retreat through the undergrowth had died away before Tregarvon and Carfax could give chase.

They captured the “ghost doctor,” however, and were not greatly surprised when the old negro turned out to be Uncle William. His night wandering to the mountain top was sufficiently explained when he pointed to the sunken grave ringed about with bits of broken china.

“Dah’s whah my ol’ ’ooman is, marstehs; yas, suh; right dah’s whah dey bury huh. Dat triflin’ niggah, Sam, from de ol’ place, come erlong down de mounting day befo’ yistidday, an’ he say you-all gemman is a-trompin’ ’round an’ mashin’ up t’ings in de ol’ buryin’-ground. I know dat ain’ so, but I says to mahse’f, ‘Willyum, yo’ gwine right up dah and put dem li’l grabestones you been a-savin’ ’round Mammy Ann; den Marsteh Tregarbin ain’ gwine ’sturb nuffin’ belongin’ ter you.’”

“No,” said Tregarvon soberly. “You may be sure we shan’t disturb your wife’s grave--or any of the others, if we can help it. I didn’t know, until after we had begun work here, that this open place was a burying-ground. Now tell me; do you know who that man was who stood there by the engine and made motions at you?”

“I ’spec’ dat wuz de ol’ debbil, hese’f, marsteh. Couldn’t a-been nobody else; no, suh.”

“What makes you think it was the devil, Uncle William?” Carfax wanted to know.

“’Cause he go off, _bing!_ in a puff o’ yaller smoke when I say ‘_Oh_, my Lordy!’”

Tregarvon had been groping purposefully in the old man’s explanation to determine if it held any of the missing puzzle pieces.

“You say Sam, from the ‘old place’ told you we were working here, Uncle William; who is Sam, and where is the ‘old place’?”

“Sam, he’s dat triflin’ no-’count niggah what Marsteh Judge keep for stable niggah--when dey ain’ nuffin in de stable ’ceppin’ de ol’ dapple-gray dat’s a heap older’n what I is, _hyuh, hyuh!_ But de ol’ Marsteh Judge ain’ gwine tu’n nobody off’n de ol’ place whilst dar’s a rind o’ bacon lef’ in de gre’t house; no, suh; he ain’ gwine do dat!”

It was at this point that Tregarvon sprang his small trap.

“Why did he turn you off, Uncle William?”

“Who, me? No, suh--I--Miss Dick, she----”

“It’s all right; never mind, Uncle William,” Tregarvon hastened to say. “Now we’ll undertake to keep the devil away while you go on setting your tombstones. I’m sorry we had to break in.”

“Dey’s all sot, yas, suh; dat’s de bes’ I kin do for ol’ Mammy Ann. I’s gwine tromp off down de mounting ag’in, now. Mus’ be gettin’ might’ nigh de ol’ man’s bedtime; yas, suh; it sholy am dat. I’s sayin’ good night to you-all; an’ t’ank yo’ kin’ly, marstehs.”

After the old negro had shuffled away on a short-cut through the wood in the direction of the pike, the two young men took up the affair of the moment, which was to ascertain what the man with the bandaged head had been doing to the engine of the drilling plant. The smoke-box door was standing open, as he had left it, and Tregarvon struck a match and held it in the small sooty cavern. What he saw made him withdraw the match suddenly and blow it out.

“Did it bite you?” asked Carfax, genially quizzical.

Tregarvon’s rejoinder was not in words. Thrusting an arm into the smoke-box he drew out a paper-wrapped cylinder with a capped fuse buried in one end of it, passing the find to Carfax with the remark: “I fancy we can stay awake until daybreak on the strength of that, don’t you think, Poictiers?”

“Dynamite!” gasped Carfax, holding the cartridge gingerly between thumb and finger and at arm’s length.

“Yes, dynamite. It was poked into one of the flues with the business end toward the fire-box, and it made no account of Rucker, who would be the one to fire up the boiler before breakfast the day after to-morrow.”

“Say, by Jove, Vance! this thing is getting serious!” exclaimed the golden youth, forgetting even the slight hint of a lisp. “We’ll have to ‘take measures,’ as my father used to say. Come on over to the shanty and we’ll get busy. I am in the same condition you said you were, a while back: I’m not sleepy now--don’t know as I ever shall be again.”

The talk on the door-step of the tool-house was prolonged far past Tregarvon’s recounting of the suppositions pieced together in the period of his lonely sentry go. But it came back to the suppositions in the end, with Carfax checking off the probabilities on his finger-tips.

“So it figures out about this way,” he said, not too cheerfully. “We have Judge Birrell as Lord High Executioner to a couple of receivers of stolen goods--always without his daughter’s approval or consent, as a matter of course--and Professor Hartridge as his able deputy in the field. Then there is this skulking rascal of a dynamite-planter, who acts under orders, or possibly exceeds them now and then; and he seems to be the only one of the lot that we can satisfactorily pinch--when we shall be lucky enough to catch him. Uncle William isn’t in it, is he?”

Tregarvon shook his head gloomily.

“I have been wrestling with that,” he confessed. “He seems more than trustworthy. But he is evidently an old house servant of the judge’s, and he was sent straight to me from Westwood. That is beyond question.”

“As a spy?--perish the thought!” ranted Carfax, carefully concealing his earnestness with an overlaying of extravagance, as his habit was. “With the memory of Uncle William’s unapproachable dinners in my mind--or mouth--I’ll defend him to the last gasp.”

“He is negligible,” said Tregarvon briefly. “But this dynamiting emissary of Hartridge’s, or the judge’s, isn’t. We must contrive to trap him in some way. If we don’t, he will fool around until he hurts somebody.”

“Yea, verily,” Carfax laughed. “Any guesses coming to you?--as to who he is?”

“One small one; and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it didn’t fit in with some of the others. You saw that he was bareheaded?”

“Yes.”

“And that he was wearing a handkerchief or a bandage of some sort instead of a hat?”

“Another ‘yes’.”

“Well, the day before yesterday the man we’ve been calling ‘Morgan’ was hurt by the falling walking-beam and had to have his head wrapped up in about the same way.”

“All right; but Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t stop with that.”

“Neither do I. Tryon told me a little tale two days ago that possibly forges the connecting link. We know that both Morgan and Sill are McNabbs, and that for some reason of their own they dropped the surname when they hired out to me.”

“Good!” Carfax approved. “The plot thickens. Can’t you stir in a little more stiffening?”

“With the help of Tryon’s story, I can. It seems that these men are, or have been, moonshiners--breakers of the revenue laws. Some years ago the revenue officers raided their secret still, which was hidden somewhere in the Pocket, and arrested these two, with a number of others. Morgan McNabb and his brother were booked for the penitentiary; would have gone there if Judge Birrell hadn’t come out of his retirement and fought for them.”

Carfax was slowly filling the short pipe he had borrowed from his companion. “I begin to see daylight,” he said. “What was the judge’s motive?”

“A sort of clan loyalty, Tryon says. The McNabbs live on his land; they are ‘his people’.”

“Um,” was the thoughtful comment. “And because the judge defends them, they take up the cudgels for him. We have to-morrow--or rather to-day--before us, with nothing especial to do; since Rucker will hardly be back with the drills before afternoon. Shall we telegraph to Hesterville for the sheriff, borrow Tait’s team, and make a party call upon the man with the bandaged head?”

“That would be rather too summary, wouldn’t it?” Tregarvon objected. “We may be well convinced, ourselves, but we have no direct evidence. Neither of us could go on the stand and swear that the man we saw at the boiler-head was Morgan McNabb.”

“No; that is so. Past that, since I have asked the judge’s daughter to consider me as a possible husband--” Carfax had called up the cherubic smile, but it had the opposite of a mollifying effect upon the objector.