Chapter VI: Part 6

“Don’t harp on that part of it any more than you have to,” was the morose interruption.

“I was going to say that the arrest of Morgan McNabb, just at this critical turn in the tide of affairs, might make it embarrassing for the judge; only you wouldn’t let me finish,” said Carfax, with great meekness.

“You are going to call on him?” demanded Tregarvon.

“Since he is Richardia’s father, I don’t see how I can well avoid it. To-morrow--or, I should say, to-day--is Friday, and I thought I’d ask Richardia to let me drive her over to Westwood House--if you’ll lend me the motor-wagon after Rucker gets back.”

Tregarvon rose and stood half-menacingly over the friend of his youth.

“If I thought you were only playing with her,” he grated; but instead of saying what he would do in that case, he turned abruptly and went into the tool-house to fling himself down upon the cot, leaving Carfax to continue the night-watch or to abandon it, as he might choose.

XVI

A Friend at Need

With the object-lessons of the night of visitations to emphasize the need for vigilance, the two young men, discussing the situation in the gray dawn, agreed that the drilling plant must not be left unguarded during the Friday of enforced idleness, or at any other time. Accordingly, soon after sunrise, Carfax set out to walk down the mountain for the purpose of sending Tryon and a man or two of the track gang up to relieve Tregarvon.

This arrangement left the owner of the Ocoee to do sentry duty alone until Tryon should come--a duty which he scamped ingloriously by sitting upon the door-step of the tool-shack and promptly falling asleep.

It was a brusque “Hello!” that awakened him, and he sprang up with a start to find a round-faced, pursy little man in pepper-and-salt garmentings and mouse-colored driving-gloves standing before him. A horse and buggy motionless in the edge of the glade accounted for the manner of the visitor’s coming, but not for its object. Tregarvon took a good look at the stranger before he committed himself, even to a greeting. The round face, with its twinkling eyes, double chin, and the little patches of closely cropped side-whisker, was altogether reassuring; it not only beamed good-nature, it fairly shone with an irresistible kindliness. Tregarvon, gathering his scattered wits as he could, said: “Good morning; it’s a fine morning for a drive through the woods.”

The little man added another layer of geniality to his smile.

“It’s a fine morning, also, for a nap in the sunshine,” he reciprocated. “Do you belong to the out-of-door sleepers--the ‘simple-lifers’--Mr. Tregarvon?”

“Not permanently,” laughed Tregarvon; “though I must confess that I am so simple as not to be able to recall your name.”

“Good, dev’lish good!” chuckled the visitor. “Couldn’t have turned it more neatly myself, ’pon my word! I’m Thaxter; Wilmerding’s bookkeeper at Whitlow. One of my fads is to take a drive before breakfast. Excellent habit, Mr. Tregarvon; I can recommend it most highly. Gives you an appetite like a coal-heaver. Speaking of coal--how are you getting along taking soundings on the old Ocoee? Have you hit it yet?”

“Not yet,” Tregarvon admitted, warming to the little man’s friendly interest. “But I am still living in hopes.”

Mr. Thaxter pursed his lips in a way to make them match the general effect of rotundity.

“Mighty mean thing to say to a man before breakfast--you haven’t breakfasted yet, I dare say--but you are butting your head against a stone wall, Mr. Tregarvon. Haven’t they told you that?”

“If your ‘they’ refers to the Coalville gossips, I have been duly warned. They told me, with all the variations, before I’d had time to climb the mountain on my first exploring expedition.”

“Just so; but not specifically, I suppose. You should have come to me. While I am an employee of the C. C. & I. Company, my pay-roll connection wouldn’t have kept me from doing you a good turn. And I could have given you chapter, page, and verse.”

For the moment Tregarvon lost sight of the fact that Wilmerding had reported his bookkeeper totally barren of Ocoee information. So he said: “Possibly you will do it now, Mr. Thaxter. We are mere babes in the wood, Carfax and I, needing a guardian angel pretty severely, if we are to believe what other people say of us.”

“You have certainly been needing a little friendly counsel from some one who was in a position to know what he was talking about. You’ll never find your coal up here, Mr. Tregarvon.”

“That is what they all say; but they don’t tell us precisely why we shan’t.”

“Ah,” said the kindly one, shaking his head in deprecation. “Human nature is the same everywhere. Tait could have told you, or Tryon, or Walters; all of them who have lived here long enough. But you had money and were willing to spend it. It would have been killing the golden-egged goose to have driven you away.”

Tregarvon grinned. “Thank you for trying to break it gently to me, Mr. Thaxter; but I am braced for it now. Hurl it in.”

“They could have told you that this test-boring experiment of yours has been tried before, all over the mountain top. I presume I could show you a dozen holes, if they are not all filled up with wash and hidden under the leaves.”

Tregarvon was thinking hard.

“Does Captain Duncan know this?” he asked.

“I should suppose so; he ought to know it. The testing was done by the New Ocoee Coal Company, and it may have timed itself during the summer that Duncan spent in the West. Come to think, I believe it did. You advised with him, of course; surely he didn’t encourage you to spend money on the property, did he?”

“No; I am obliged to confess that he did not. On the contrary, he advised me not to.”

The little man’s smile became benignantly tolerant. “You young men are like Mr. Kipling’s puppy at times; you _will_ chew soap, knowing perfectly well that it is soap.”

Tregarvon’s answering laugh admitted the justness of the charge.

“Possibly some of us like the flavor of soap,” he retorted. “There is no accounting for the depravity of some tastes, you know.”

“Oh, well,” said the visitor, with the air of one who is far too wise to combat the vagaries of youth, “go on and have your fling. It is harmless enough. If you can afford to buy a little amusement in this way, why shouldn’t you do it? It won’t hurt you, and it is a Godsend to Tait and the poor devils on your pay-roll while it lasts.”

“But if I can’t afford it?” suggested Tregarvon.

“Ah; that is another matter. From what Wilmerding has let fall, I have been assuming that you and Mr. Carfax desired the experience and the fun of it rather than any possible money gain.”

“The money side of it may not appeal to Carfax; but it does to me, very forcibly.”

“Still, you are throwing good money after bad in putting down these test-holes.”

Tregarvon shrugged his shoulders. “What would you?” he asked. “I inherited the Ocoee, and it is up to me to make something out of it, if I can.”

The round-bodied bookkeeper laughed until he shook like a bowl of jelly.

“It is very evident, Mr. Tregarvon, that you were born in the purple. If you wish to make money out of the Ocoee, why don’t you sell it?”

“Because I should first have to find a purchaser, and before I could find a purchaser--I should think--it would be a condition precedent that I should find the coal. It resolves itself into the vicious circle, as you see.”

Mr. Thaxter smote his gloved hands together softly and appeared to be debating a nice point with himself. When he spoke again his manner had lost the touch of brisk impersonality.

“Pardon me if I seem to crowd the mourners,” he apologized, “but it strikes me that this is a matter in which the good-natured bystander may quite properly take a hand. Is it possible that you haven’t been told of the offer made by our people to your father?”

“It is more than possible; it is a fact.”

“I am truly astonished! Your lawyers must know of it.”

“There has never been any mention of it made to me. What was the offer?”

“If I remember correctly, it was one hundred thousand dollars for all the titles.”

“Thank you!” exclaimed Tregarvon triumphantly. “That is the best news I’ve heard in many a day. If your company ever made any such an offer as that, it proves conclusively that there is coal in the property, somewhere.”

The bookkeeper shook his round head in evident dismay.

“Dear, dear!” he lamented; “I was afraid you might jump at some such conclusion as that, and it puts me in a rather awkward position. As I have said, I am only a pay-roll man in Consolidated Coal; I’m not even one of its many superintendents. Yet, as man to man, perhaps I may venture to tell you just why the C. C. & I. might still be willing to pay you the price named, though in telling you I may be betraying an official secret. You probably know that your property line on the north abuts on the Whitlow lands about an eighth of a mile from your tramway?”

Tregarvon nodded.

“Very good. Now we have a vein of coal quite near this joint boundary; not a very thick vein, but one which could be made to pay for working if we could send the coal down over your tramway, and coke it in your old ovens at Coalville, but which would not pay if we should be obliged to build a new tramway to get at it. That is the whole thing in a nutshell.”

“You say that this offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee was once made to my father? It’s odd that I had never heard of it. Was it in any sense a standing offer?”

“It was at the time, and I think it still is, though there has been no talk of it latterly, so far as I know. But since the reasons for making it still exist, I should imagine that you would stand a good chance of reviving it if you should care to do so.”

“If I only had a little breakfast in me!” Tregarvon protested half-jokingly. “I’m too hungry to talk hundred-thousand-dollar deals with you with any assurance that an empty stomach isn’t making me flighty, Mr. Thaxter.”

The bookkeeper laughed pleasantly.

“There are your men coming over from the tramhead,” he said. “Give them your orders, and then let me drive you down to Coalville to your breakfast. Perhaps you’ll be willing to give me a bite, too, and in that case I shall have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carfax again. I didn’t more than half get acquainted with him the day he drove up to Whitlow.”

“You are certainly the jolliest lot of commercial pirates a man ever had to fight--you people up at the C. C. & I.,” said Tregarvon, after he had climbed into the buggy with Thaxter and the spirited black horse was flinging the soft sand of the wood road from his hoofs. “First, Wilmerding comes to the rescue; and now you are trying to give us a lift. It’s heart-warming.”

Thaxter’s rejoinder had just the requisite touch of friendly solicitude in it.

“Then you meant what you said a few moments ago, about the financial aspect of the--of your experiment? A hundred thousand dollars would be worth considering?”

“That amount would look as big as a hundred thousand cart-wheels to me, just now,” Tregarvon confided. “My father is dead, as I suppose you know, and there have been family misfortunes big enough to sink a ship. A hundred thousand would give us a fresh start in the world.”

“Then we must certainly try to get it for you,” was the affable rejoinder; and from this on, the spirited horse demanded Thaxter’s undivided attention, so pointedly that the bookkeeper did not even seem to see Professor Hartridge when the buggy whirled past that gentleman as he was returning from his morning walk down the pike.

Carfax was waiting breakfast on Tregarvon when the black horse came to a stand at the door of the Ocoee office-building. The young millionaire remembered Thaxter perfectly, and seemed to be glad to renew his acquaintance with the “Brother Cheeryble.” Yet it was Carfax’s judicious applying of the brakes at the breakfast-table conference of three that kept Tregarvon from committing himself too definitely in the matter of bargain and sale.

Nevertheless, the talk over the ham and eggs pushed the business affair considerably farther along on the road to a tentative conclusion. Before he took his leave to continue his return drive to Whitlow, Thaxter was authorized to communicate by wire with the New York headquarters of Consolidated Coal, and, without betraying any confidences, to ascertain if the offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the Ocoee properties still held good.

After Thaxter had taken his departure, and the two young experimenters had threshed the new prospect out to its final straw, the wakeful night came in for its revenges, and they slept through the forenoon. Rucker did not return from Whitlow with the car and the repointed drills until long after the noon meal; and when he came he found his two employers waiting impatiently for him--or rather for the car. The reason for the impatience was a note from Miss Richardia sent down by the college mail-carrier early in the afternoon; a brief message addressed to both, begging them to come to Highmount at the earliest possible moment: urgency only; no hint of what had happened or was due to happen.

They made the ascent of the mountain as rapidly as the big touring-car could measure the distance, and were met at the door of the administration building of the college, not by Miss Birrell, but by Professor Hartridge, who led them into the visitors’ parlor and calmly informed them that Miss Richardia had driven to Westwood House with her father shortly after luncheon.

“By Jove, now!” lisped Carfax; “that’s rather curious, don’t you know!” And Tregarvon was quite speechless.

“Curious that Miss Birrell should ask you to come up here, and then run away?” said Hartridge. “It was a little ruse of mine, and Miss Richardia is altogether blameless. I wished very much to see you both, and I was afraid you might be foolish enough to disregard an invitation bearing my name. So I took Miss Richardia into my confidence, and she very obligingly wrote the note which, I assume, has brought you here.”

Carfax snapped his fingers and laughed softly.

“Upon what footing do we stand with you, Mr. Hartridge?--upon that of yesterday at dinner-time or upon that of a later hour, when I had the pleasure of helping you on with your overcoat?”

“I shouldn’t presume to say, Mr. Carfax; you must make your own attitude. But if that attitude should be inimical, I must still beg you to believe that I have decoyed you up here to do you a kindness.”

Carfax was still smiling affably. “Is it Virgil who puts it into the mouth of one of his characters to say that we should beware of the Greeks bringing gifts, professor? You will pardon us if we seem a bit suspicious, won’t you? But this”--he held up the small cube of hardened steel which he happened to have in his pocket--“this is so completely convincing, you know.”

The mild-eyed mathematician waved the evidence aside as a thing of small moment.

“Now that you have had time to consider, I am sure you absolve me from the charge of having tampered with your drill-hole,” he deprecated.

“We do,” said Carfax. “All you did was to cover the retreat of the man who really did the tampering. But that is sufficient to make us--er--a bit cautious, as you might say.”

Hartridge smiled in his turn. “You are basing your caution upon a small specimen of the metal commercially known as steel which you chanced to find in my pocket,” he remarked. “Let us disregard the bit of steel for the time being, if you please. If you should happen to lose it, it could be very easily replaced; but”--he turned short upon Tregarvon--“you can’t replace the Ocoee if you allow Mr. Thaxter to persuade you to sell it to Consolidated Coal, Mr. Tregarvon.”

“What’s that?” exclaimed the Ocoee owner, starting from his chair; and Carfax fell back upon his strongest expletive, “By Jove!”

Hartridge appeared to be entirely at ease now. He seated himself and crossed his long legs comfortably.

“You are puzzled to account for my friendly interest?--after last night?” he inquired. “I don’t blame you, and I am only sorry that I cannot explain more fully. But I may say this: if you part with the Ocoee properties for any such sum as Mr. Thaxter has doubtless offered you, you will regret it as long as you live.”

Carfax got his breath sufficiently after a time to say: “May--may we venture to ask how you know what Mr. Thaxter has offered?”

“Certainly. The offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the lands, titles, and mineral rights of the property is no secret--or at least it was not during Mr. Tregarvon’s father’s lifetime. I am merely assuming that Thaxter has not increased it; and I am also assuming that a renewal of the offer was the reason for his early morning drive with Mr. Tregarvon.”

“And you say Vance will be sorry if he accepts the offer?”

“I do; most decidedly.”

Carfax leaned forward and held up an accusing finger.

“Then you know, of your own knowledge, that there is a workable vein of coal on the property, Mr. Hartridge,” he snapped.

“That, my dear sir, is an assumption which I must decline to confirm.”

“Nevertheless, it is true. And here is another to go with it: _you know where that vein can be found!_”

Hartridge smiled again.

“You are, constructively at least, my guest, Mr. Carfax; I should be unpardonably rude if I were to contradict you.”

Carfax glanced aside at Tregarvon, and Tregarvon returned the glance as one who sees the shore from the crest of a tossing wave, but has no hope of reaching it. After a little pause Carfax renewed the attack.

“This is a most extraordinary situation, don’t you think, Mr. Hartridge?” he began mildly. “Would a definite quantity of the thing known commercially as money tend to relieve it in any way?”

The professor’s answer was prompt and decisive. “You are assuming that I have information to sell? I have not.”

Carfax countered, quickly.

“Then why have you just given us this pointer on Consolidated Coal? You profess to be willing to help us and you refuse to help us in one and the same breath.”

“Oh, if you are going into motives, my dear sir, that is, indeed, a very deep subject. It would hardly be profitable to discuss it, even academically. Life, the really human variety of life, is full of paradoxes. You are wondering why the man from whom, a few hours ago, you took that small cube of steel, is now apparently trying to save you from loss. Call it one of the human paradoxes, if you will; only don’t sell to Consolidated Coal for a paltry hundred thousand dollars a property upon which more than three or four times that amount has been spent. This is what I enticed you up here to say to you; and having said it----”

“Hold on,” Carfax interposed. “We have met some curious varieties of the genus enemy in this forgotten corner of the world, and you will pardon me if I say that you are not the least remarkable specimen, Mr. Hartridge. We are thankful for the pointer, and much more thankful for the assurance you have given us that we are not fishing in a barren pond. We----”

The professor had risen and was moving toward the door.

“I have given you no such specific assurance,” he denied.

“No,” said Tregarvon, getting upon his feet and putting in a word for himself. “You may congratulate yourself upon your discretion. None the less, we shall continue to work on our problem, Mr. Hartridge, until we have found the value of ‘_pi_’.”

It was a centre shot, visibly and palpably piercing the bull’s-eye. A blow would scarcely have disconcerted the schoolmaster more effectively. Yet he recovered instantly, had blandly excused himself upon the plea of pressing laboratory work, and was bowing himself out at the door, when he fired the return shot.

“You have set yourselves an impossible task, gentlemen,” he offered mildly. “You forget that the value of ‘_pi_’ has never yet been exactly ascertained.”

“Well, what do you make of it all?” Tregarvon asked, when the yellow car was rolling smoothly down the mountain pike on the return to Coalville.

“Nothing; except a disappointment for Mr. Thaxter,” was Carfax’s reply.

“Thaxter; yes. Do you know, Poictiers, I’m beginning to smell brimstone in _his_ clothes, now. Wilmerding told us definitely, if you remember, that Thaxter gave him to understand that he didn’t have any data on the Ocoee; didn’t know anything remotely concerning it. There is a lie out, somewhere.”

“Which doesn’t matter now, thanks to Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge, the man of mixed motives,” said Carfax definitively.

“You think, on the strength of Hartridge’s warning, that I shouldn’t sell to Consolidated Coal?”

Carfax was driving the car and he let the brakes out until the machine was dropping down the grade like a stone falling from a height.

“Not in a thousand years!” he said.

XVII

An Anticlimax

Bright and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching, already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting, and there were no disturbances to report.

“Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up. I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and everything was all shipshape this mornin’.”

Soon after this the drilling was resumed, not, however, until after the hole had been carefully washed and swabbed out. Tregarvon did not take any of his men into his confidence to the extent of explaining the reason for the extra care, but during the swabbing process he stood aside and looked on, watchful to detect any sign of guilty knowledge on the part of his helpers. Particularly he studied the face of the younger McNabb, the one who had been hurt still being absent. The effort went for nothing. If isolation has been sparing of gifts to the native of the southern Appalachians, it has at least given him a face that no man can read. The bushy-bearded Sawyer, the head driller, was the only one who commented upon the hole-cleaning.

“Hit don’t look t’ me like thar was anything more ’n the drill dust to be warshed out,” he grumbled, when the swab came up clean; and to prove it he rubbed some of the powdered rock cuttings between his thumb and finger.

“It’s better to be sure than sorry,” said Tregarvon. “If we know that the hole is clean to begin with, we’re that much ahead.”

In due course of time the engine was started, the drill lowered, and the churning was resumed. Very shortly it became evident that the steel was cutting again at the usual rate, and Tregarvon’s spirits rose accordingly.

“Do you know, Poictiers, I believe we are going to ‘prove up’ right here on this spot?” he predicted, after the work was well under way and they had gone to sit on the tool-house step. “The indications all point for us. Here is where the most determined fight has been made to stop us; here is where we find Hartridge’s hieroglyphics on the trees; and right here, if you’ll remark it, is where Mr. Onias Thaxter hunts me up to make me a blanket offer for my landholdings.”

“A little more time will tell the story,” Carfax suggested. “By noon, if it doesn’t strike any more bones, the drill ought to be down to the coal, if there is any coal here.”

With hope trotting cheerfully on ahead, the forenoon became a period of exciting suspense. Each time the drill was withdrawn the cuttings were examined eagerly. The rock was showing all the characteristics of the former borings: fine sandstone, coarse sandstone, some little conglomerate, and, just before the noon hour, the shales which commonly overlie the coal in the Cumberland region.

“We’re coming to it!” Tregarvon exulted, when the washings which came up in the churning began to show black. “Eighteen inches more, and we’ll know whether we live or die!” And he carefully made a chalk-mark on the drill so that they might determine when the critical depth was reached.

As in the previous tests, the steel sank rapidly in the vein of coal. At a foot of additional depth the washings were still coming up black. At sixteen inches there was no change. Sighting across a derrick brace, Tregarvon watched the chalk-mark with the blood racing in his veins. With each plunge of the heavy steel drill his hopes rose higher. Already he was anticipating a future which, if it should lack some of the ecstasies, would still have a sufficiency of the great emollient--money. With a fortune of his own, the impossible situation which had grown out of the Uncle Byrd legacy would be alleviated, and he saw himself deeding his half of the legacy irrevocably over to Elizabeth. The pride wound thus healed, the broken bones of sentiment might be allowed to knit as they would. Doubtless, in time, the knitting process would accomplish itself, and possibly without leaving him a hopeless cripple. Judging from the past, Elizabeth would not expect much; and even if he should be obliged to limp a little she would probably never notice it.

“Eighteen inches!” he called out to Carfax, “and she’s still bringing up the black-diamond dust! Get ready to blow the hewgag and beat the tom-tom. We’re in it, this time!”

“Easy!” Carfax cautioned. “Don’t let your hopes soar too high. Maybe the top vein runs a little thicker at this point than it did in the others. Call it that, anyway, until you’re cocksure.”

As he spoke the power went off. Tregarvon jerked his watch from his pocket and stifled a hard word. It was noon, and the men were knocking off work on the dot, quite as nonchalantly as if the fate of empires were not hanging upon the result of a few more turns of the machinery. Tregarvon tramped across to the tool-house with Carfax, a sudden weariness making his feet heavy as lead.

“That’s the workman of it!” he gritted. “If the world were coming to an end in the next five minutes, they’d stop to eat!”

Carfax permitted himself a subdued chuckle.

“You are beautifully on edge,” he asserted. “A few inches more may mean a lot to you, but it’s all in the day’s work for the men. They’re not going to get rich out of your coal mine.”

They had brought some of Uncle William’s biscuits and cold chicken for the midday snack, and Carfax went to the motor-car, which had been left standing in the wood road, for the basket. When he returned, Tregarvon was pacing back and forth impatiently before the tool-house door, and Rucker was sitting on the step, eating his luncheon. Carfax carried the basket inside, and they made a table of the coil of rope. While they were picking the chicken bones, the mechanician spoke again of a matter that he had mentioned once or twice before.

“I’m beefin’ ag’in about that boiler, Mr. Tregarvon,” he began, between workman mouthfuls of Mrs. Tryon’s corn bread. “She ain’t much, just as I told you at first; and draggin’ her ’round over this mountain hain’t helped her none. She’s leakin’ like a sieve at the fire-box end of her flues, right now.”

“Here’s hoping that this is the last hole we’ll have to drill with it, Billy,” said Tregarvon cheerfully. “I bought it second-hand, and the Chattanooga junk man put one over on me.”

“He sure did,” Rucker returned with a grin. “She’s rotten. Every time the pop-valve goes off it makes me jump. One o’ these days----”

The interruption was a blatant roar from the boiler in question. Rucker had prudently shut the drafts and had left the fire-door open, or he thought he had, but still the pressure had crept up, until now the safety-valve was relieving it. Through the open door of the tool-shack the two at the rope-coil table could see the plant, with the plume of escaping steam rising to the height of the tree-tops. As usual during the noon hour, there was not a man of the gang in sight. Tregarvon had early learned that a part of the country laborer’s reticence expressed itself in a dislike to eat under the boss’s eye. At the stopping of the machinery the drill-gang would scatter in the wood, each man to his fallen log.

The roar of the safety-valve continuing, and seeming to increase in stridency rather than to diminish, Tregarvon leaned forward to shout in Rucker’s ear:

“Are you sure you left the fire-box door open, Billy?”

The mechanician struggled to his feet. “I thought I was, but I’ll go see. She’s howlin’ a little bit too loud to suit me.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the earthquake crash came. With a sound that was oddly like the tearing of a hundred saws through dry timber, followed by a reverberating thunderclap, the boiler and engine vanished in a thick cloud of steam, and the air was filled with flying missiles. One piece of the boiler tore the heart out of the sheltering oak-tree; another fragment ripped a corner from the tool-house; a third mowed a swath through a thicket of young pines.

Tregarvon and Carfax were both up and out before the nimbus cloud of steam had blown aside, and their first thought was for their men. Rucker had escaped only by a hair’s-breadth. The twisted fire-box sheet which had knocked a corner out of the small building had passed so close that the wind of it had bowled him over. Tregarvon left Carfax to help the machinist to his feet, and ran shouting across the glade. The drill gang answered and came hurrying in, a man at a time. When all were accounted for, the material loss was inventoried. It was total, so far as it went. The engine and boiler were reduced to a tangled heap of scrap; one end of the drill beam was shattered, and one leg of the derrick had suffered loss.

For the moment Tregarvon was torn by conflicting emotions; a huge thankfulness that no life had been lost and bitter disappointment that the catastrophe had come at the instant when all the doubts as to the value of the Ocoee were to be either confirmed or swept away. He held himself together long enough to tell the men that they might go home--that there would be nothing more done until a new power-plant could be bought; but when Rucker had gone out to the wood road to see if the yellow car had been hit, and the disappointed one was left alone with Carfax, the flood-gates gave way.

“Isn’t it enough to make an angel out of the blue heavens swear himself black in the face, Poictiers?” he raged. “Just on the very edge of things--just as we were going to find out, once for all, what this cursed mountain is going to do to us----”

“One thing at a time,” Carfax broke in soothingly. “The wrecked engine isn’t fatal--not by many parasangs: it came just in the nick of time, when I was wondering what under the sun I should do with the dividend draft that I got in the mail yesterday. Take a fresh grip on yourself and remember that you have a good bit to be thankful for. If your men had been sitting around on the job to eat their dinners, as laborers do up North, there’d be another story to tell.”

“Yes, I know; but think of it--it will be days and maybe weeks before we can get a new power-plant installed, and all that time we’ll be hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth; won’t know any more than we do now.”

Rucker had come back to report that the motor-car had escaped as by a miracle. A square yard of the boiler shell had been hurled over it to fall accurately in the middle of the road a rod or two farther on. While he was telling about it, a goodly portion of the faculty of Highmount College, followed by a bevy of young women, came upon the scene. Doctor Caswell was heading the column of reconnaissance, and Hartridge also was with it.

“Dear me!” exclaimed the president, coming up breathless; “we are all so glad to find you alive! What has happened?”

Tregarvon pointed to the tangled mass of wreckage. “Our boiler blew up. It was old, and I suppose we were carrying too much pressure. Luckily, it happened while the men were eating, and there was no one near enough to be hurt. I thought of you people at once. It must have made racket enough to make you think the end of the world was coming.”

“It was frightful!” said Miss Farron. “The windows rattled and--” but here her voice was lost in the chorus of excited exclamations pitching themselves in many keys as the young women picked their way over to the wreck and viewed the remains.

“It is well, sometimes, to be born both lucky and rich,” Hartridge commented gravely, when his turn came. “The material loss is serious enough, of course; but you ought to be thankful that no lives were lost. Were you near enough at the time to see the explosion?”

“We were sitting in the tool-house eating our luncheon,” Carfax explained, “and Rucker was just outside. We had been speaking of the boiler a moment before. We were all three looking at it, I think, when it went up.”

Doctor Caswell had taken his wife over to assist in the sight-seeing, but Hartridge lingered behind.

“Happening in broad daylight, this way, with three of you looking on, I suppose you are well assured that it was a pure accident?” he suggested quietly.

Tregarvon left the answer to Carfax, who made it promptly.

“As you say, we are not able, this time, to blame any one but ourselves. The boiler was old, and our mechanic had told us that it was not altogether safe.”

“You have been drilling to-day?”

Carfax nodded.

“May I ask if you found anything?”

Tregarvon turned away and busied himself examining the rent in the corner of the tool shanty. Carfax called up the cherubic smile for the inquiring professor and said: “What if I should tell you that we have found our bonanza, Mr. Hartridge?”

Hartridge glanced at the drill, which was still standing in the test-hole, and shook his head. “I should say that you are merely talking for effect,” he smiled back.

“But we have found the coal,” Carfax persisted.

“You have found the upper measure, the same as you have in all the other trials. Beneath it, you will find your sandstone dike again.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Quite sure.”

“But we have already reached a depth of more than eighteen inches, and the drill was still in coal when we shut down for the noon stop.”

“That is quite immaterial,” was the cool-voiced reply. “The measures vary in thickness, though not greatly. Geology is one of my small side-lines, Mr. Carfax, and I have made a study of this particular region, largely as a pastime.”

The sight-seers were straggling back, and Tregarvon was explaining to a group of breathless maidens just where he had been sitting with Carfax at the moment of catastrophes, and how Rucker had been knocked down by the wind of the fragment which had struck the corner of the tool-shed. Carfax saw his opportunity preparing to take its leave and he smiled, level-eyed, at Hartridge.

“You are still on the obstructive hand, aren’t you?” he threw in. “Even now, you would like to discourage us if you could.”

The professor of mathematics and other things was turning away to join the others, but he paused for a low-toned rejoinder.

“I neither deny nor affirm, Mr. Carfax. But I may say this much: if I were in your shoes, or Mr. Tregarvon’s, I shouldn’t call to-day’s disaster a pure accident--until I could prove it.”

And with that he turned his back and began to talk to the art teacher.

XVIII

Evolutionary

Intent upon the swift purchase of another power-plant, Tregarvon caught an afternoon freight on the branch railroad, made a late train on the main line, and was obliged to spend the Sunday in Chattanooga, with little to console him save the thought that he would be on hand to transact business with the machinery merchants bright and early Monday morning.

It was a sad Sunday, weatherwise, with a chill autumn rain sweeping the streets of the battle-field city, and the crest of Lookout Mountain veiled in cloud. Tregarvon had made a few business acquaintances in town on previous purchasing expeditions, but there were no familiar faces in the hotel; nothing to lighten the monotony of a dreary day of enforced idleness.

In such circumstances impatience becomes a rat to gnaw the vitals. The suspense, the tormenting uncertainty which he had left behind him in the unfinished test-hole on the summit of Mount Pisgah, would have been hard to endure even in a whirlwind of work; and upon a day when he could neither work nor play he was in despair.

After the noon meal, which figured as “Luncheon” on the hotel bill of fare, and was, in point of fact, a heavy and dispiriting midday dinner, he braved the elements and went in a closed sight-seeing car to the Chickamauga battle-field. The drive proved to be a damp test of endurance, and he brought nothing back from it better than a memory of rain-sodden fields and forest; of endless colonnades of gray, ghostly monuments, a majority of them assuring the beholder in letters of granite that here the Ohio troops fought nobly; of parkings of ancient cannon, the guns pointing in so many different directions that no human being could guess which way the battle had run; of the droning singsong of the chauffeur pouring his explanation patter into the reversed megaphone for the benefit of his few fares.

The return to the hotel was merely a change from outdoor dreariness to indoor. The lobby was a gathering-ground for a scattering of disgruntled tourists, who had used their battle-field stop-over privilege only to find themselves marooned by the weather. Tregarvon smoked in solitary misery for what remained of the afternoon, and past the evening meal, begged some of the hotel stationery, and wrote a letter to Elizabeth Wardwell.

“It is a sin and a shame to write you after such a day as I’ve been wearing out here,” he began, “but you know my weakness for afflicting other people--for unloading my woes upon the nearest pair of sympathetic shoulders. Your shoulders have always been that; and sometimes I wonder that you can still stand up straight and queenly, as you do, after having carried so many of my burdens.” Here followed an account of the events of the exciting Saturday forenoon, and he tried, as well as the written words would serve, to transmit some picture of the boiler explosion, tagged with an attempt to portray the tenterhooks of suspense upon which the disaster had impaled him.

“You see where it leaves me,” he went on; “still in the air as to whether the Ocoee is something or nothing. For a few little minutes, after the drill had passed the eighteen-inch dead-line, I saw rose-colored, saw my chance to provide for the home-folks, and to ignore forever and a day, the Uncle Byrd legacy. But now I am no better assured than I was before we began drilling; and, to make it more interesting, Hartridge happened along after the explosion--the whole college turned out and came tramping over through the wood to see what had broken loose--and he says the sandstone dike is still under us. We shan’t know positively, of course, until we can get a new engine, and haul it by inches up the mountain, and drag it into place and set it going; and by that time I shall be a raving maniac.

“In all this new trouble, Poictiers has been all that you’d expect him to be; a friend to tie to. He doesn’t lend me money; he simply tosses me his purse. I have his last dividend check in my pocket at this present moment, and I’m to cash it to-morrow morning to pay for the new engine. I suppose I needn’t say that I should have been out of the fight down here long ago if he hadn’t joined me and given me a checking account. He is pure gold, Elizabeth; and yet----

* * * * *

“The gap represents a good half-hour, my dear cousin, in which I have been sitting here at this dinky little table in the hotel writing-room, trying to screw my courage to the sticking-place. What I have to tell you concerns four people, and you are one of the four. I’ve written you a lot about Richardia Birrell--she’s another one of the four--in the past few weeks, and I have been assuring myself all along that I have been telling you all there was to tell.

“That isn’t strictly true, Elizabeth. There was a thing that I wouldn’t admit, even to myself; but I had to admit it three days ago when Poictiers told me that he had asked Richardia to be his wife. I knew then what Richardia had done to me, and for a bad half-hour I--well, I’m not going into details; it is enough to say that I’m not fit to be your door-mat, Betha, dear--nor Poictiers Carfax’s, for that matter.

“What can I say for myself more than I have said a hundred times in the past? Nothing, I imagine; I’m simply hopeless where the eternal feminine is concerned. You’ve known it ever since we went to school together, and you’ve promised to marry me in spite of the knowledge. I shall not be a faithless husband, my dear--I know I shan’t be that; and this last and most humiliating lapse could never have amounted to anything, anyway, even if Poictiers had not slammed the door in my face. But it is your right to know about it; to know that for some few days or hours or minutes, as the case may be, I was daffy, foolish, a simpleton from the idiotic wards, with a slant toward depravity.

“You see now what an incredible friend Poictiers is. I’ve never thought of him as a marrying man, and I could swear, even now, that he isn’t in love with Richardia--though I don’t quite see how any free man with live blood in him could help being. Let that go: Poictiers has killed my temptation for me. He has asked Richardia to marry him, and he and she are good enough for each other--which is the highest praise I can offer to either. Poictiers will get a wife who could make any man happy; and Richardia will be able to restore the Birrell fortunes, which, as you have doubtless gathered from my earlier letters, are pretty sadly in need of a rich marriage.

“This leaves us two to face things as they are as best we can, Elizabeth. After what I have written down in this letter, can you still care enough for me, and for the conventions and the wishes of the families on both sides, to--not to forgive me; I’m not going to ask that--but to take me just as I am, and let things go on as before? I shan’t blame you in the least if you can’t, you know; but if it must come to a break between us, you must let me be the one to make the break. By all right and reason the Uncle Byrd legacy is yours; and whatever happens, I promise you I shall never touch a penny of it.

“Good night, my dear. My love for you is precisely the same as it has always been. The madness which Richardia Birrell was stirring up in me was something entirely different, and no doubt everybody would say it was worlds less worthy.”

Tregarvon had a bad habit of not reading his letters after they were written and signed, and he did not break the habit now. Folding, sealing, and addressing his confession, he went to the lobby to mail it. Thanks to the rainy Sunday, the hotel mail-box was stuffed to repletion with week-end missives, and Tregarvon, after trying in vain to wedge his own through the slit, exemplified his careless habit by leaving it on top of the box with the newspapers.

Later in the evening there were other additions made to the overflow newspaper mail, and some one, still more careless than the Philadelphian, displaced the letter, which fell, unnoted, to the floor. Here, during the small hours, one of the sweepers found it; and since some muddy boot heel had defaced the postage-stamp, and all but obliterated the address, the sweeper passed his find on to the night clerk. At this point another phase of Tregarvon’s heedlessness came to the fore. He had neglected to put his own name and address in the corner of the envelope, hence the clerk had no means of identifying the sender. Being a young man of resource, he enclosed the letter, just as it was, in a larger envelope, copying, or trying to copy, the address. But the marring boot heel had done its work too thoroughly. The Philadelphia street number was entirely effaced; and “Miss Elizabeth Wardwell” became, in the night clerk’s transcription, “Miss Eliza Bell Woodwell.”

Tregarvon was astir early on the Monday morning, was fortunate enough to be able to purchase the new power-plant without waiting to have it shipped in from some Northern supply house, hustled busily until he had seen his purchase entrained for Coalville, and took the afternoon local for his return. As often happened, the local was late, and he found Carfax waiting dinner for him when he dropped off on the office-building side of the train at the home station.

Over Uncle William’s chicken gumbo the talk ran easily upon the business affair. Tregarvon had driven a rather good bargain on the new engine, and was inclined to expatiate upon it. In reality, however, he was trying to postpone the moment when Carfax should begin to talk of the more intimate things. That moment came with the pipe-filling before the cheerful wood-fire, after Uncle William had cleared the table and disappeared.

“After you left, Saturday, I took Hartridge’s hint and went into the explosion details a little deeper,” said Carfax. “Rucker stayed with me and lent me his mechanical wit.”

“What is the verdict?”

“It is the Scotch verdict: ‘Not proven,’” was the thoughtful rejoinder. “Knowing, as we do, that at least one attempt was made to dynamite the boiler, I may have been oversuspicious. In such circumstances the judicial frame of mind is hard to attain. Rucker swears he left the furnace-door open when we stopped at noon. When we found the front sheet of the boiler three or four hundred yards away in the woods, the door was shut and latched.”

“That proves nothing,” Tregarvon said.

“No; anything might happen to a door, or to anything else, in a hurry trip of that kind. On the other hand, it would have been a very easy matter for some one to have sneaked up on the farther side of the engine while we were eating. And Rucker insists that only the closed door could have accounted for the sudden rise in pressure which caused the explosion.”

“We’ll never know,” was Tregarvon’s comment. “But why Hartridge should shield our obstacle-thrower at one time, and try to set us on to him at another, is beyond me.”

Carfax smiled soberly. “Mr. William W. Hartridge appears to be a unique. I had the pleasure of meeting him again, socially, no longer ago than yesterday.”

“You spent the Sunday at Highmount?”

“No; I did better than that. Wilmerding was down from Whitlow, and I found that he knows Judge Birrell familiarly and well. I took my courage in my hand, borrowed your beast of a car, and Wilmerding and I drove to Westwood House in the rain.”

“So you have met Richardia’s father?”

“I have; and a finer old citizen doesn’t exist. That suspicion of yours that he may be inspiring the fight on us is all bosh. He isn’t at all the kind of man to knife an enemy in the dark. He is a poem on the Old South, Vance; a whole heart-breaking epic. His manners would put a Chesterfield to shame; and you can see at once where Richardia gets her keen little mind. The judge was disposed to place me in the Parker class at first--quite naturally; I could see that plainly enough--that, and his prejudice against all things Northern. But I was there as the friend of his friend Wilmerding, and that settled it. A Bedouin chief couldn’t have been more hospitable.”

“You told him you were going to marry Richardia?”

“Oh, dear, no; you mustn’t hurry things that way!” laughed the golden one. “You simply _can’t_ hurry them, you know, with a man like Judge Birrell. But I flatter myself that I made good in the try-out. Hartridge was there, with Miss Farron--though I can’t imagine how they got over from Highmount in the rain--so there was quite a house-party of us. At dinner-time it was raining harder than ever, and the judge wouldn’t hear to our going, though I had the top up on the car, and, of course, offered to take Hartridge and Miss Farron back to the college. So we all stayed to dinner. That dinner would have broken your heart, Vance.”

“Why?”

“Because it showed in a thousand little ways what the family has been, and what it has now come to. The china was Sèvres, but much of it was chipped and broken, and hardly any two pieces were alike. The table-cloth had once been somebody’s pride, but it had been laundered and darned until it was like a piece of old lace. The silver was evidently an heirloom, and it was so worn with much polishing that you could scarcely make out the engraving. We had chicken--I imagine nobody in the South ever gets so poor that he can’t have chicken--but the luxuries were conspicuous by their absence. Do you know what I think, Vance? I believe that the Westwood House cash assets are measured exactly by the size of Richardia’s Highmount salary.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Tregarvon, keenly sympathetic. “Richardia has given me to understand that there is a lot of mountain land, which is practically valueless now that the tan-bark timber has all been cut off; but there is nothing to bring an income.”

“Wilmerding has told me something of the judge’s involvement with the original Ocoee promoters, and the struggle he made to keep his name good after he and his friends had been frozen out,” Carfax resumed. “He had recommended the scheme to a good many others, and when the smash came, he stripped himself bare to make good the losses of his friends, withholding nothing but a little money he had put aside for Richardia’s musical education.”

Tregarvon nodded. “That explains something that Richardia said to me one time when we were talking about people marrying and settling down; she said, in that perfectly straightforward way of hers, that she would like to marry, but that she was in debt, and couldn’t marry until after she had earned enough money to pay herself out.”