Chapter VIII: Part 8

Tregarvon had one small shot in reserve and the time had arrived when it must be fired.

“In that view of the case, Mr. Thaxter, I am afraid I shall have to stay out,” he said, hoping against hope that the shot might find its target.

Once more Thaxter made the sign of regretful negation. From where he was sitting the bookkeeper had a fair view of the installation activities, and Tregarvon could not help wondering if their rapid progress toward completion had anything to do with Thaxter’s immovability. While he was waiting for the bluffing shot to penetrate, if it would, Rucker came across from the new engine, carrying a piece of iron pipe with a valve attached; carrying, also, a ferocious scowl to emphasize his complaint.

“Them machinery guys over in Chattanooga is a fright!” he rapped out. “That boiler dome is tapped for inch-and-a-quarter pipe, and so’s the engine; and they’ve gone and sent us this inch-and-a-half throttle and pipe connection! Wot t’ ’ell am I goin’ to do about that, I’d like to know?”

Tregarvon grasped the new obstacle--and his own fierce impatience--firmly by the neck and refused to make a profane show of himself for Thaxter’s benefit.

“I suppose there is only one thing to do, Billy; to go down to the railroad office and wire the machinery people to make good,” he answered placably. Then to Thaxter: “We have hit so many of these knock-outs that we are beginning to learn that we must take them as they come.” And with that, he scribbled a telegram on a leaf of his note-book, tore it out, and gave it to Rucker.

“There is the message,” he said. “Tell Tryon and the men that the jig is up for to-day, and that I’ll be down a little later on to pay them off. You’d better go down yourself and send that wire. If you can persuade the railroad agent to hustle it, we may catch the machinery shop before it closes.”

Thaxter sat quite silent during the dispersal of the working gang; did not speak again until after the last of the men had disappeared in the direction of the tramhead. Then he said: “Well, you are hung up until next week safely enough now. Your wire won’t get an answer this late Saturday afternoon.”

“No, I suppose not,” Tregarvon agreed. “The order will be filled Monday, and the new throttle will get here Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, at the pleasure of the railroad people. Cheerful layout, isn’t it?”

“You certainly have bad luck enough to discourage most young men,” said the bookkeeper, as one who would not withhold sympathy where sympathy is due. “Do you know, it simply grinds me to be the one to add my bit to the aggregation. I’ve half a mind to take a chance on the thunder and lightning and ask New York for that extension of time for you. You might reasonably hope to hear from your Philadelphia attorneys by Monday or Tuesday, don’t you think?”

Tregarvon snatched at the concession avidly. “I’ll wire them to-night,” he promised, as if his decision depended entirely upon the result of the long-range consultation. But after Thaxter had driven away, excusing his haste on the plea that no time must be lost in reaching a telegraph office, Tregarvon wondered again; this time half-suspiciously. Why had Thaxter changed his tune so suddenly? Was it because he had just been given ocular proof that the test-drilling was again postponed? The more Tregarvon thought of it, the more plausible the assumption grew; and he was almost ready to call it a fact when, an hour later, Carfax put in an appearance with the motor-car.

In a few words Tregarvon told the story of the afternoon’s happenings, giving the suspicion due standing.

“It is only a guess, as usual,” he offered in conclusion. “But, in any event, the strain is off for the present. Thaxter will get the extension, and in the meantime we can take our chance to draw a comfortable breath or two. After Rucker comes back, we’ll go down the hill and get ready to enjoy an old-fashioned restful Sunday. I don’t mind confessing that the strain has been getting next to me, Poictiers. I’m going to push the whole wretched tangle into the background, for one day, at least, and try to catch up with my nerve.”

“Good medicine!” laughed the one who had no nerves; and Rucker returning a few minutes later to resume his duties as resident watchman, they climbed into the yellow car and Tregarvon took the wheel to drive to the valley.

XXII

Out of a Clear Sky

The event of the day for Coalville--the arrival of the afternoon passenger-train from Chattanooga--was in the near prospect when the yellow car rolled down the last of the grades and swept a wide circle around the coke-ovens and past the unloading platforms.

The train-time signs were always unmistakable. A little while before the hour, and always as if warned by some signal inaudible to alien ears, the loungers under Tait’s porch rose, shook their legs to settle wrinkled trousers, and filed slowly over to the railroad station. Tregarvon’s motor-car, no longer a nine days’ wonder to the army of leisure, was slowing to cross the rails of the Ocoee siding when the station agent ran out of his office to wave the motorists down with a telegram. The message was for Carfax, and the agent explained that it had been delayed in transmission by some trouble with the wire on the branch line.

While Carfax was opening the envelope, Tregarvon got out and went around to see if the brakes had been running cool in the swift drop from the summit of Pisgah. For this cause he did not hear Carfax’s, “Ye gods and little fishes!” basing itself upon a glance at the delayed telegram.

“Vance!” he called, turning in his place to see what had become of Tregarvon. But Tregarvon did not hear. A canopy-topped surrey, venerable with age and drawn by a great-boned horse of dapple gray, was turning out of the Hesterville road to cross the tracks to the station. Miss Richardia Birrell was holding the reins over the dapple gray, and in the seat beside her was an old man, erect, white-haired, handsome as an ancestral portrait.

“Jehu!” said Tregarvon under his breath. “So that is her father. If looks count for anything, he is worthy of her; which is more than I would say for any other Tennesseean I’ve met.” Then Carfax’s anxious call was repeated, and this time Tregarvon answered.

“Not lost--only mislaid,” he returned. Then he saw Carfax’s face: “Why, Poictiers!--who is dead?”

Carfax was standing up in his place, clinging to the steering-wheel with one hand and waving the telegram like a flag of distress in the other.

“Read that!” he commanded tragically, when the inspector of brakes came within passing reach.

Tregarvon glanced at the message and became, in his turn, a man stricken down without warning. The bolt was dated at Chattanooga, and it had been filed for sending at nine in the forenoon. It was addressed to Carfax, and it read:

“Here with papa and mamma, and the Pennsylvania battle-monument
dedicators. If I should run over to Coalville with Clotilde this
afternoon, will you and Vance put me up at the hotel and show me your
mine? But, of course, you will.

“ELIZABETH.”

“Oh, good heavens!” groaned Tregarvon, when the paralyzing effect of the announcement gave place to the panic of dismay; “E-Elizabeth and her maid?--coming here?”

Carfax laughed rather wildly. “Yes; coming here to stop at--at the hotel!”

Tregarvon read the message again. “She says ‘this afternoon.’ That means to-day--now--this minute; she’s on this train! Poictiers, if you are any friend of mine, you’ll climb down here and find a club and put me out of my misery!”

Carfax stopped laughing suddenly and sprang out of the car. “It’s no joke!” he snapped. “It’s up to us, you wild ass of the desert--do you hear? Stop your braying and listen to me: we’ve got to meet her over there on that platform just as if we had been watching every train for a week! There is the whistle: come along and invent your fairy-tale on the run!”

They did not crowd too eagerly to the front when the three-car train drew up to the platform. There were terms to be agreed upon; things which might be said, and things which must not be said. Thus it happened that an exceedingly handsome young woman, in a modish travelling hat and a brown coat, and followed by a French maid bearing impedimenta, was helped from the car-step by the brakeman.

“Charge!” Carfax commanded, in a hoarse whisper; but before they could do it, Miss Richardia slipped through the ranks of the platform loungers, put her arms quickly about the handsome young woman and kissed her, with an “Oh, you dear thing!” to go with the affectionate welcome.

Tregarvon saw, gasped, swallowed hard, and the smile of greeting which he had called up for the emergency turned into a shocked grin.

“Get out in the road there and chunk me!” he whispered to Carfax. And then: “Poictiers, I’m a ruined man! They were together in the Boston music factory. Elizabeth has told me a hundred times how she chummed with a charming little Southerner--without naming any names! And I’ve been writing her--oh, I tell you, I’m a dead man. All you have to do now is to get a wreath to lay on my coffin!”

“You’ll be needing the coffin if you don’t buck up and catch the step!” hissed Carfax. Wherewith he dragged his companion masterfully into the circle of welcomings.

The golden youth neither gave nor received the kiss of greeting; and he pointedly looked another way when Miss Wardwell offered her cheek for Tregarvon’s cousinly salute. Then he found himself shaking hands with Richardia’s father; realized vaguely that the judge was taxing him reproachfully for not having consented to occupy one of the many bed-rooms at Westwood House the night before, instead of returning to Highmount; realized also that Miss Wardwell was rallying Tregarvon gayly upon his discomfiture accomplished by means of the jesting telegram.

“Surely, it didn’t mislead you, too, did it, Poictiers?” she questioned, turning to Tregarvon’s accomplice. “Vance is trying to tell me that you took it harder than he did.” Then she explained to Judge Birrell: “I sent a wire to these two from Chattanooga, you know, asking them if they could put me and Clotilde up at the Coalville hotel--by the way, Cousin Vance, where _is_ the hotel?” Then again to the judge: “You see, I guessed, from what Richardia said in her last letter, that they didn’t know I was invited to Westwood House. Fancy it! they got the telegram only a few minutes ago!”

Tregarvon backed out of the group and fanned himself with his hat. There were still traces of the shocked grin to temper the mask of feverish anxiety which was slowly displacing it. Everything he had ever written to Elizabeth about Richardia--everything he had ever told Richardia about Elizabeth--clamored for instant recollection and revision in the light of the unnerving fact that the two of them were here on the Coalville platform, together, as friends of long standing.

The train had moved on, the loungers were dispersing, and Miss Birrell was leading the way to the venerable surrey.

“Mr. Carfax has promised me that he will drive you up to Westwood House to-morrow. I think you will be very sure to come, now,” she said, after Tregarvon had flogged himself into some livelier sense of the requirements of the moment. Then she added: “You may come as early as you please.”

“I think I shall be very ill to-morrow,” he returned gravely, as he handed her into the carriage. “These sudden shocks are very bad--for the heart.” Then, while Carfax was helping Miss Wardwell to the front seat with the judge: “I didn’t believe you could be so wicked!”

“I am not the wicked one,” was the quick retort. “I tried to tell you last Wednesday; that was why I asked Mr. Carfax to drive down to where you were working. But you wouldn’t let me.”

“If I am not too ill to come, you must let me see you first, before I--” Tregarvon was beginning; but Miss Richardia was not willing to be dragged even into the vicinity of things confidential.

“Hear him!” she said to Miss Wardwell; “Mr. Tregarvon is intimating that we have made him ill, between us!” Then she spoke to her father: “Judge Birrell, you will please command these two young gentlemen to report to you to-morrow at Westwood House--do you hear?”

The judge gave the invitation in due and courteous form, and Carfax accepted promptly for himself and for Tregarvon. After which the big dapple gray, mildly urged by his master, began to jog up and down and the age-worn surrey crept out of sight around the barrier rank of coke-ovens.

“We might have offered to take them up in the motor,” said Carfax, when the afterthought had been given time to come to the surface.

“_You_ might have,” Tregarvon returned moodily. “I wouldn’t trust myself to drive a wheel-barrow in the present state of things.”

Carfax was about to swing himself behind the wheel to drive the car over to its shed and he paused with a foot on the running-board.

“When it comes to wrestling with the fateful tangles, you haven’t so much the best of me as you may think you have--thanks to your little gift of letter-writing,” he remarked darkly.

Tregarvon walked across to the office-building while Carfax was housing the car, went to his room, and was visible no more until Uncle William called him to dinner. At table he ate like an ogre--a sure sign of disturbment--and refused to rise to any of the small conversational baits flung out by Carfax. But afterward, over the tobacco-jar, there were things to be said and he said them.

“Poictiers, I believe I’ll write my will to-night and let you witness it,” he began. “The easiest thing for me to do now is to go and offer myself to the chief of the bureau of tests as a candidate for the poison squad.”

“Meaning that Elizabeth is here to answer your letter in person?” queried Carfax. “There is nothing so very deadly about that, is there?”

“That remark shows how little you know women. I was perfectly frank with Elizabeth, as I told you, but of course I didn’t write as I should have written if I had known that she and Richardia were bosom friends. Now they will proceed to exchange confidences and compare notes--if they haven’t already done both in their letters to each other. And what the comparison will leave of me won’t be fit to fling to a starved puppy.”

Carfax smoked in silence for quite some time before he said: “How they may stick pins into you, to your face or behind your back, seems a very inconsiderable factor in the case to me, Vance. The deadly part of it is that you are still in love--or you think you are--with Richardia Birrell, while you are going to marry Elizabeth Wardwell.”

“No,” Tregarvon objected, staring gloomily into the fire; “that isn’t the worst of it. There is a still deeper depth: I can’t help being the one or doing the other.”

Carfax began to show signs of becoming restive.

“If Elizabeth only didn’t care so much for you....” Then he took a new tack. “You didn’t tell her all you ought to have told her in that letter, Vance; if you had, you wouldn’t be dreading the actual show-down as you are now. Which means that you still have it to do.”

“That is it, exactly,” said the dejected one. “And I’d much rather be shot full of holes.”

Carfax took another dose of his own prescription of silence. Then he said: “What is going to come of it?--after you have made her understand?”

“The only thing that can come of it. While I have insisted, and still insist, that there has never been any sentiment wasted between us, the fact remains that Elizabeth is a woman, and she isn’t going to sit down meekly and say, ‘All right, Vance, dear; never mind,’ when I make her understand that I have been trying my hardest to make love to another woman. She has plenty of spirit; she can fairly set you afire with those brown eyes of hers when the occasion demands it.”

“Well?” said Carfax.

“It will be all over but the shouting, then. She will doubtless tell me what she thinks of me and break the engagement, there and then--or try to. But that is the one thing I can’t let her do, Poictiers. She needs the Uncle Byrd legacy, and I mustn’t let her lose it.”

Carfax got up and reached for the matches and his bed-room candle. “No,” he said slowly; “you mustn’t let her lose the legacy. To a man up a tree it would seem that the money is about all she is going to salvage out of the wreck.” With which unkind daggering of the sinner whose sin had found him out, he went to bed.

XXIII

At Westwood House

The autumn Sunday afternoon figured as the flawless half of a day of perfection, with the sky a vivid blue and the hardwood forest of the mountain top, lately touched by the first sharp frosts, a riot of gorgeous coloring. On the broad veranda of the ancient manor-house of Westwood the conversation, which had been desultory at best, languished in sympathy with the reposeful spell of time and place and the peaceful surroundings.

With a gently worded phrase of apology to his daughter’s guest, the judge had pleaded an old man’s privilege, dragging his chair to the farther end of the veranda and lighting his corn-cob pipe in courteous isolation. Tregarvon marked the bit of old-fashioned chivalric deference to Elizabeth, and wondered how many men of his own generation would be as thoughtfully considerate of the small amenities.

The thought was one of a series emphasizing the gross incredibility of the theory involving Richardia’s father in the conspiracy against the Ocoee. That the white-haired, ruddy-faced Chesterfield of Westwood House might challenge an antagonist, give him the choice of weapons, and afterward kill him unflinchingly, was easily conceivable. But that he would descend to the methods of the dynamiter or the midnight assassin was momently growing more and more unbelievable.

With Elizabeth for his _vis-à-vis_ in her broad-armed veranda chair, Tregarvon was finding it increasingly difficult to fix his attention upon the Ocoeean mysteries. For some reasons--the unfamiliar surroundings, the gap of absence so suddenly and unexpectedly bridged, or because there was some subtle change in her--his cousin was singularly reticent. While the talk remained general she took her part in it; but whenever it threatened to become a dialogue, Tregarvon was instantly made to feel the raising of the barrier.

Since the guilty flee when no man pursueth, Tregarvon fancied he need be at no loss to account for Miss Wardwell’s attitude. She had doubtless received his confession letter--though no mention had been made of it--and beyond that, she and Richardia had in all probability been comparing notes. He could feel the presence of the Damoclean sword suspended above his head, and was looking forward unjoyously to the moment when chance, or design on the part of Carfax and Richardia, would give Miss Wardwell her reproachful opportunity.

The dreaded moment came when Miss Richardia, who had been discussing autumn flowers with Carfax, asked the golden youth if he would like to see her chrysanthemums and asters in the sheltered posy-patch in the rear of the manor-house. And when they were gone, Tregarvon was left alone with his responsibilities.

It was Miss Wardwell who first broke the little silence which followed the departure of the flower seekers, and her manner was distinctly at variance with her accustomed attitude of serenity and self-possession; was rather the manner of one marching reluctantly but firmly up to the mouth of a loaded cannon.

“Were you tremendously shocked yesterday afternoon when you learned that I was coming?” she asked.

“It is no use to deny it,” he confessed bravely. “It was a complete surprise--as you probably intended it to be.”

“No; I didn’t intend it--until just at the last. Richardia has been asking me to come down, and she knew a week or more ago that I was coming. I supposed, of course, she would tell you, and didn’t know that she hadn’t told you until I received her last letter, just as we were leaving.”

“You came with your father and mother?”

“Yes. Pennsylvania has been building some monuments on the old battle-fields, and papa is one of the commissioners. He and mamma didn’t particularly wish to be bothered with me, I imagine, but I had to come. Have you guessed why, Vance?”

Tregarvon thought he knew the constraining reason very well, indeed, but he was not quite courageous enough to say so. Instead, he temporized, as a man will, postponing the instant when the hair-hung sword must fall.

“I’m the poorest of mind-readers,” he protested. “I can’t even read my own, at times. But I suppose you have my letter, and you thought it ought to be answered in person.”

“I have had many letters from you: which one do you mean?”

“The one I wrote a week ago to-day in the hotel in Chattanooga.”

She shook her head slowly. “No; your last letter was written two weeks ago, and it was postmarked ‘Coalville.’ I remember you said you were writing after Poictiers had gone to bed.”

Tregarvon groaned inwardly. The thing which he thought had been safely done had not been done at all; it still remained to be done. He was bracing himself to take the plunge when she went on hurriedly:

“You were saying just now that you couldn’t read your own mind--sometimes. I wish I might read it now--this moment, Cousin Vance!” She was trying to look him fairly in the eyes and was not succeeding very well.

“Read my mind?--heaven forbid!” he gasped. Then he came to his senses and tried to repair the terrible misstep. “You know--er--you know what I mean; a man’s mind is seldom fit for a--a good woman to look into, Elizabeth.”

“Yours is, always,” she asserted loyally, and he winced as if she had struck him a blow. “I assure you I haven’t known you all my life for nothing, Vance. And it was because I had known you as no other woman ever will, that I was willing to try to make you happy.”

He was wondering dumbly how much of this he could stand when she continued, quite calmly, though the brown eyes were looking past him.

“As I have said, I had to come: there is a crisis; and with your letters before me, I couldn’t write. We agreed once, you remember, to go around the sentimental field instead of going through it; but--but you haven’t been living up to the spirit of that agreement in your letters.”

Tregarvon found his handkerchief and mopped his face. The matchless autumn afternoon had grown suddenly sweltering for him.

“You mean that I’ve been writing you love-letters? I’m a brute, Elizabeth. I----”

“Please don’t make it any harder for me than you are obliged to,” she pleaded gently. “If you stop me now, I shall never be able to go on. I have come all the way down here to say something to you; something that I couldn’t write, and a thing that every added letter of yours was making more difficult to say. But one word from you now will make it easier--if it is the right word. Tell me, Vance; hasn’t this separation proved to you that we couldn’t--that cousins ought not to marry?”

Slowly it ground its way into his brain that the worst had befallen; that Elizabeth, really and truly in love with him, now, had guessed, either from his letters or from Richardia’s, the true state of affairs; and that womanly pride and affection had brought her to the scene of action to commit martyrdom.

“Oh, by Jove!--you mustn’t, Elizabeth!” he broke out in a sudden access of contrition. “I can’t allow you to outdo me in pure generosity that way! And, besides, there is Uncle Byrd’s money.”

“I have thought of that, too,” she said, quite judicially. “But, Vance, dear, we must simply rise superior to all the mere money considerations. Richardia has been telling me about your prospects here--your mine--and your brave struggle to make something out of nothing. You will need Uncle Byrd’s money; you are needing it now. And I--if we--well, I shall not need it, anyhow,” she ended rather incoherently.

“The Lord help me, Elizabeth!” he groaned, entirely ignoring the white-haired, white-mustached figure smoking peacefully at the farther end of the veranda. “I don’t deserve----”

“I know you don’t,” she agreed instantly; “you deserve ... well, you deserve something quite different. But whatever happens, and whatever you say, I must do what I came here to do. I--I have made a discovery, Cousin Vance.”

“Of course you have,” he said desperately. “I knew you would, sooner or later, though I have tried awfully hard to make myself believe that there wasn’t any discovery to be made.”

“I know: but seriously, Vance; deep down in your heart, you don’t really care, do you?”

“Why, Elizabeth! Of course I care. And I have blamed myself straight through from the first.”

“Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” she protested quickly. “It is all my fault, or my--no, I simply _won’t_ call it a misfortune.”

“Your fault?” he queried. “You mean because you didn’t suspect it and choke it off right at the beginning. But I haven’t give you a chance to do that, have I?”

“I didn’t suspect it,” she said musingly; “I was very far from suspecting it. It came all at once, like a blow, you know; and then it was too late to ‘choke it off,’ as you say.”

The man, the true man, in him rose up in its might to buffet him into the path of uprightness and straightforwardness. “No; it is not too late, Elizabeth,” he assured her gravely.

“Yes, it is,” she objected with pathetic earnestness.

“No,” he insisted. “We must still make good. Do you know what people at home will say if our engagement is broken now? They will say that I made it impossible for you to carry out Uncle Byrd’s wishes; and that I did it deliberately, to get the money for myself.”

“But you haven’t!” she cried in wide-eyed astonishment. “_I_ am the guilty one.”

“You?”

“Yes. This is what I came all the way from Philadelphia to say to you, Vance. Do you remember, one time when we were trying to ‘galvanize,’ I think that was the word you used, ourselves into the sentimental ecstasy supposed to be the normal condition of engaged people, I told you jokingly that if I ever found any one whom I could really lo--like better----”

“_Elizabeth!_”

She nodded, soberly and looked away from him. “Yes; it is true; and I had to come and tell you. You may despise me; it is your privilege.”

Tregarvon got up and took the necessary step to the veranda end which gave him the view into the rearward flower-garden. They were there, Carfax and Richardia, bending together over the chrysanthemums. When he turned back to face his cousin he was smiling grimly.

“As our cattle-ranching cousin in the West would say, you mustn’t ‘rawhide’ yourself too severely, Elizabeth. Leaving the dollars out of it--and I’ll find a way to leave them out if I have to throw them to the birds--I’m getting about what I deserve; which is the glad hand all around the block.”

“You are bitter, and I can’t blame you,” she said, with something alarmingly like a sob at the catching of her breath. “But really, at the very bottom of it all, you don’t care so very much, do you, Vance?”

“Don’t I? I’d be a mighty good specimen of the superman if I didn’t care. Who is this fellow who, coming after me, is preferred before me?”

“I--I can’t tell you that.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because--oh, you are perfectly savage with me!--because he has had no right to speak, nor I to listen. He hasn’t spoken; he may never speak. But that doesn’t make any difference.”

“No,” said Tregarvon wearily; “nothing makes any difference now. But I told you a moment ago not to reproach yourself too bitterly. I am in precisely the same sort of a boat myself, Elizabeth--without your good hope of getting ashore.”

“You? _Vance!_”

The grim smile came again, and he said--though rather in shame than in malice: “It hurts a little, doesn’t it?--when it is the other way about. For nearly a week I have been thinking that you knew. I told you all about it, you know, in the letter I wrote last Sunday night in Chattanooga; the letter which seems to have gone astray. That is why I was so slow in getting your meaning: I was looking for you to dagger me the other way around, you know.”

Miss Wardwell was no longer embarrassed, but she was well-nigh tearful.

“I suppose it is one of those horridly pretty Southern girls in the school,” she said half-spitefully. “Have you----”

“No,” he hastened to say; “I have been almost as decent as the other fellow; the fellow you won’t name for me. I haven’t asked her to marry me.”

“And she?”

“She is going to marry a man old enough to be her father--if she doesn’t reconsider and marry a young donkey of a millionaire.”

Rucker, following an order which had been given him earlier in the day, was tooling the yellow car up the weed-grown carriage approach, coming to drive the two young men back to Coalville. Also, Carfax and Miss Birrell were returning from the posy-patch. Miss Wardwell stood up and put her hands into Tregarvon’s.

“I’m sorry and happy and miserable all in the same breath,” she said. “I shall be here for a few days. Papa and mamma are going over to the Shiloh battle-field after they leave Chattanooga, and I shall stay until they come back. You’ll come again, won’t you?”

He was able to smile down into the brown eyes of beseeching. The stabbed-vanity pain was passing--a little.

“Most certainly I shall come, as often as you can get me an invitation, and as my job on the Ocoee will permit. I don’t propose to lose my best cousin just because I happen to have lost a lot of other things.”

This was the key-note of the cheerful tone which he contrived to preserve throughout the leave-takings. But at the car boarding he let Carfax have the tonneau to himself, taking the seat beside Rucker for the better chance it offered for a needed interval in which to bind up the wounds of the pierced _amour-propre_.

XXIV

The Unknown Quantity

When the yellow motor-car, driven by Rucker with his customary disregard for speed limitations, had crossed the mountain and was approaching Highmount and the forking of the wood road leading to the old negro burying-ground, Tregarvon told the mechanician to stop and let him out. To Carfax he made plausible excuse: Tryon was watching at the drilling plant and he might have something to report. It was still only mid-afternoon, and Tregarvon added that he would walk to Coalville by way of the tramhead and the short-cut path.

After the car had gone on, Tregarvon kept the first part of his promise, covering the half-mile briskly. Tryon was at his post, killing time with the aid of strong tobacco and a railroad man’s clay pipe. He had relieved Rucker at noon, in accordance with his orders; there had been no Sunday-afternoon visitors--nothing to disturb the peace of the day of rest.

Tregarvon listened perfunctorily to the foreman’s report. His object in delaying his return to Coalville had been only half formed at the moment of car stopping, but it had nothing to do with checking up the day-watchman. The talk with Elizabeth and its astounding revelations had opened new vistas. With Elizabeth calmly proposing to marry some one else, if the some one else should ask her, a full half of the spur which had been driving him to fight the Ocoee battle to a finish was gone.

Under the changed conditions the sensible thing to do, after all, might be to close with the coal trust’s offer. But before committing himself finally to this, he was inclined to go to Hartridge with a frank plea for a word of friendly advice. From what had transpired it was evident that the professor of mathematics knew much more about the Ocoee and its mysteries than he had as yet been willing to tell; and though the episode of the steel cubes seemed to array him definitely on the side of the enemy, his later warning in the matter of bargain and sale was unquestionably disinterested, if not actively amicable.

Tregarvon was still considering the half-formed resolve to appeal to Hartridge when Tryon fished in the pocket of his overalls and brought up three small cubes of metal, the exact counterparts of the one which Carfax had taken from the pocket of the schoolmaster’s overcoat.

“I been savin’ these to show you,” said the foreman, handing the bits of metal to Tregarvon. “What-all d’you reckon they’re meant for?”

Tregarvon permitted the query to go unanswered. “Where did you find them?” he asked.

“In the pocket of an old coat that Jim Sawyer’s been wearin’ here on the job. It’s hangin’ up in the tool shanty. I run out o’ matches a little spell ago, and went to rummagin’ ’round to see if I couldn’t find some.”

“Sawyer’s coat, eh?” said Tregarvon, struck suddenly alert.

Tryon nodded soberly. “An’ that ain’t all,” he went on. “I got a file and tried ’em; they’re harder ’n flint--been tempered till you couldn’t cut ’em with anything softer ’n an emery-wheel. Rucker’d been tellin’ me how the drills went all to the bad that time when you was hung up before the old b’iler bu’sted. Sawyer’s got a tool-box in the shanty where he keeps his wrenches and little traps. It was locked, but I happened to have a key that fitted. What d’you reckon I found?”

“More of these?”

“You’ve hit it plumb centre; a tomatter can about half full of ’em.”

“Tell me all you know about Sawyer,” Tregarvon cut in concisely.

“What I know about him wouldn’t get him a job anywheres where I had the say-so. Last summer he was workin’ for the C. C. & I. at Whitlow--a strike-breaker. Before that he was doin’ time at Brushy Mountain, for some sort o’ crookedness, I dunno what. Maybe I ort to ’a’ told you this when you hired him, but I allowed you knowed what you was doin’, an’ it wasn’t none o’ my business. He’s a good drill boss.”

Tregarvon was examining the bits of steel critically. “Tryon, I’d give something to know just where these came from originally,” he said.

“Maybe I might help out a little on that, too. I served my time in the shop before I went to work for the railroad. D’you know what kind o’ steel that is?”

“No.”

“It’s some o’ that new-fangled, high-speed tool-steel that you temper by heatin’ it white-hot and coolin’ it in a fan blast. Jenkins, the Whitlow blacksmith, was showin’ me a piece of it last Sat’day night at Tait’s. Looked like it might ’a’ been cut off the same bar with these little chunks o’ Jim Sawyer’s.”

“In other words, you believe that these bits were made in the Whitlow blacksmith shop?”

“I ain’t a-sayin’ so, because I can’t prove it. But my boy, Tom, saw Thaxter, the Whitlow bookkeeper, stop his buggy in the big road two or three days ago whilst a man came out o’ the bushes to talk to him. The man was Jim Sawyer. More ’n that, there’s just natchelly only the one place in the Wehatchee where that steel _could_ come from. They’ve got it at Whitlow, an’ I don’t reckon there’s ar’ another blacksmith shop in the valley that ever heerd tell of it.”

“Tryon, you’ve done a good afternoon’s work,” said the master of Ocoee, dropping the three cubes into his pocket. “We owe all of our hard luck, excepting the blown-up boiler, which may have been due to its own rottenness, to the C. C. & I., with Thaxter pulling the strings and Sawyer doing the actual dirty work. Isn’t that the way you have it figured out?”

“That’s about the way it _ort_ to stack up,” said the foreman. “But somehow it don’t gee all the way ’round. You’d say it’s mighty near a dead cinch that Sawyer was the one that doped the drill-hole with these here slow-’em-downs; but right there the vein pinches out. Them two times that the walkin’-beam fell down, Sawyer was the man that stood the best chance o’ gettin’ his head bu’sted. Then you an’ Mr. Carfax both saw the man that put the dannymite into the old b’iler, an’ I hain’t heerd neither one of you a-sayin’ it was Sawyer. You’d ’a’ knowed him, wouldn’t you?”

“It wasn’t Sawyer,” said Tregarvon definitively. “Sawyer has a beard, and that man was smooth-faced.”

“Jes’ so,” nodded the foreman. Then he drew his own conclusion. “I been knowin’ the C. C. & I. crowd, off an’ on, ever sence they took holt here in the Wehatchee. I reckon they’d rough-house you in a holy minute if they thought that was the easiest way to get the best o’ you in some business fight. I wouldn’t even put the dannymitin’ a-past ’em. But they wouldn’t go at it in no such a bunglesome way; n’r they wouldn’t put skulls in your fire-box, n’r any such fool monkeyshines as that. Them things don’t fit in.”

Again Tregarvon bestowed the meed of praise where praise was due.

“Tryon, you have a pretty level head. I am beginning to suspect that we made a mistake in not calling you in as chief detective in this muddle. But you still think that Thaxter and Sawyer worked the drill-dulling scheme, don’t you?”

“Ez I say, that part of it proves up toler’ble plain. If there was ar’ reason, now, why they’d want to be holdin’ you back for a little spell----”

“There is a reason. They are trying to buy me out.”

“Now you’re talkin’!” said the foreman sagely. “Maybe you’ve got coal here under your feet, ’r maybe you hain’t. _You_ don’t know, yet, an’ maybe _they_ don’t know. But they’d just as soon you wouldn’t find out for sure whilst the dickerin’ ’s goin’ on. They’d like as not call it ‘good business’ to hold you up for a spell, wouldn’t they?”

“Quite likely,” Tregarvon was glancing at his watch. The call upon Hartridge had now become a necessity, if only for apologetic and explanatory reasons. True, it was still possible that the professor had been in collusion with the planter of steel cubes on the night of surprises, but these later developments seemed to exonerate him handsomely. “I must go,” he told the foreman. “Rucker will relieve you here in time for you to go to your supper. If Sawyer should happen to turn up, just keep your own counsel about what we have discovered. We’ll deal with him--and his bosses--when the time comes.”

A few minutes beyond this, Tregarvon was at Highmount, inquiring for Professor Hartridge. The young woman who answered his ring told him that the professor had gone over to the McNabb neighborhood to see a sick child. Not wishing to let his opportunity escape, Tregarvon set out to walk through the forest, taking a path leading in the general direction of the sunken mountain-top valley known locally as the “Pocket”; this on the chance of meeting Hartridge and walking back to the school with him.

Now it so chanced that Tregarvon had never visited the “Pocket,” and though he knew, from Carfax’s description of the locality, that it could not be more than a mile or two beyond Highmount, he was not aware that the path he had chosen was not the right one. Having plenty of other things to think about, he paid little attention to his surroundings until, at the end of a half-hour, he found that the path, which had been growing indistinct, had disappeared entirely, leaving him in a region of deep ravines with their slopes heavily wooded; hollows boulder-strewn, in which the old-growth timber stood thickly, with only a fallen and rotting trunk here and there to show where the tan-bark gatherers had slain some monarch of the forest for the paltry stripping of its outer skin--mute testimony to the waste of a nation.

It was not until after he had covered distance enough, as he thought, to have taken him all the way across from Highmount to the western brow of the mountain, that he saw a man--whom he took to be Hartridge--sitting upon a flat stone in the shadow of a great boulder on the opposite side of a small mountain brook. Just as he was about to call out and make his presence known, the man sprang to his feet suddenly, as if in alarm, and whipped a weapon from his pocket.

Obeying the instinct of self-preservation in pure automatism, Tregarvon dropped silently behind the nearest boulder on his own side of the stream. When he looked again he saw that the man was not Hartridge; he was a much younger man; a handsome young fellow, well-built and athletic-looking, with nothing in his appearance to connect him with the mountain and its natives. The attitude of strained anxiety into which the quick leap afoot had thrown him lasted only for a moment. While Tregarvon looked, a warbling bird whistle rose shrill and clear on the windless air. The watcher saw the young man hastily pocket the pistol and heard him whistle a reply. Almost at the same instant the figure of a woman appeared at the buried up-hill heel of the great boulder. She stood for a moment in the yellow light of the westering sun, long enough for Tregarvon to recognize her beyond any question of doubt. Then she ran, slipping and sliding, down the leaf-carpeted hazard slope, to be caught in the arms of the waiting man.

For a little time Tregarvon sat with his back to the sheltering boulder, trying to surround this latest and newest development in the maze of mysteries. Slowly it came to him that this was the explanation of Richardia’s attitude; the reason why she had slipped aside, masking the true state of affairs and rebuffing him by seeming to accept the attentions of Carfax. One by one the corroborative inferences fell into place, each fitting with exact nicety: Richardia’s piquant reticences; her half-confidences which had always stopped short of revealment; her little flights to the shelter of detachment whenever the talk threatened to lean toward sentiment; all these were signs which might have been read--which were plainly readable now in the light of the small tableau staging itself in the shadow of the great rock on the opposite hillside.

Tregarvon peeped again. It was most obviously a lovers’ meeting. The young man had drawn the judge’s daughter to a seat beside him on the flat stone, and he still had his arm about her. They were talking eagerly in low tones; Tregarvon could hear only a murmur of voices, but Richardia’s face was toward him, and in it he re-read his complete effacement. In a series of revealing flashes more of the corroborative fragments whisked into place; he had been blind not to see the pointing of certain playful allusions made now and then at the Caswells’ dinner-table and aimed at the music teacher. Doubtless, to the small world of the mountain top, these Sunday-afternoon trysts in the forest were an old story. But why were they clandestine? The answer fitted itself promptly. By all accounts Judge Birrell was a person of shrewd prejudices; quite possibly he disapproved of this young man who had stolen his daughter’s heart; and perhaps the disapproval was not entirely without reason. Tregarvon recalled the signs of perturbation and the sudden pistol drawing which had preceded Richardia’s appearance.

In deference to a prompting which took its color more from complete and hopeless chagrin than from any charitable scruples, Tregarvon squared his back against the concealing boulder and refused to look any more. While the pair across the streamlet kept their places, it was impossible for him to retreat undiscovered. The waiting interval was not unduly long. When he could no longer distinguish the murmur of voices he ventured to peep again. The flat-stone seat was empty and they were gone.

The sun had dropped behind the mountain, and Tregarvon was tramping soberly through the lengthening wood shadows toward Highmount, when the frock-coated figure of the professor of mathematics loomed suddenly in the path ahead. At Tregarvon’s call, Hartridge stopped and waited.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” said the schoolmaster, with his genial smile. “Are you walking my way?”

“Very pointedly,” said Tregarvon. “They told me at the college that you had gone to one of the McNabbs’, and I came out on the chance of meeting you.”

“That was neighborly, I’m sure,” returned the master of arts, catching the step. “Am I to infer that you are going to let me be of some service to you?”

Tregarvon’s laugh was a trifle strained. “It’s a little that way,” he confessed. “But first I wish to say that I believe we have been doing you an injustice--Carfax and I.”

“About the small cube of the metal known commercially as steel?” was the gentle inquiry.

“Precisely. I’m sorry we were not broad-minded enough to take your word in explanation.”

“Then you have discovered the real culprit?”

For answer Tregarvon briefed the story of Tryon’s findings.

“Ah!” said the listener; “then my own impression wasn’t at fault, after all. I saw the man under the drill derrick: I thought it was Sawyer, but I couldn’t be certain. I assume you don’t need to be told why he did it, or who bribed him to do it?”

“No. For some reason best known to themselves, the C. C. & I. people do not wish me to drill that test-hole in the old burying-ground. Do you know the reason, Professor Hartridge?”

It was too nearly dark for Tregarvon to see the quizzical smile which this query evoked, but he knew it was there.

“You are asking me as man to man, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“I am--just that. I have been condemning you unjustly, and you now have a most excellent chance to heap coals of fire upon my head.”

“You are making it impossible for me to hold malice,” was the genial response. “I wish I could answer your question definitely; but I cannot. I do _not_ know why Thaxter should wish to prevent you from drilling that particular test-hole.”

“You mean that I am not going to find the paying vein of coal under the old burying-ground?”

“I am practically certain that you are not.”

“Would you mind giving me your reasons?”

“They are geological--and conclusive. The strata under the glade are precisely the same as those occurring at your tramhead. Moreover, if you will take the trouble to examine the ground at the foot of the cliff below your present location you will find the coal outcrop: a single vein, not over twenty inches thick. A little lower down you will find another, still thinner.”

Tregarvon laughed mirthlessly. “I asked you for bread, and you have given me a stone,” he protested. “Am I to assume that Consolidated Coal is better informed than you are, professor?”

Hartridge’s reply was guarded. “No man is infallible, Mr. Tregarvon. I speak only of the things I know.”

“Then there is a chance that, in spite of your geological deduction, Thaxter and the men he represents have more accurate data?”

This time the professor’s rejoinder was fairly cryptic. “The earth holds many secrets. During the long interval in which the Ocoee properties were allowed to lie idle and uncared for, it was anybody’s privilege to investigate them. I am violating no confidence in saying that the people who are now trying to induce you to sell have made a number of surveys. They probably know your ground foot by foot.”

Once more Tregarvon found himself confronted by the dead wall of Hartridge’s reservations. That the professor was making reservations he did not doubt for an instant. There was still some bar to perfect frankness, and he seemed powerless to break it down. In sheer desperation he shunted the talk to the field of the obstacles.

“It seems to be conclusively proved that the drill-dulling is chargeable to Thaxter, acting through the man Sawyer,” he said. “But Tryon refuses to believe that the other harassings have been inspired by the trust.”

They had reached the Highmount boundary, and Hartridge paused with his hand on the gate latch.

“I am entirely at one with your foreman in that belief, Mr. Tregarvon,” he rejoined. “Now that we are again upon amicable terms, I may confess that I have been greatly interested in the problem which these harassments have presented--the solving of problems being one of my small recreations. Did you leave an enemy at home who would be vindictive enough to follow you here?”

Tregarvon shook his head. “So far as I know, I hadn’t an enemy in the wide world when I came here.”

“Then you have developed one _in situ_, as it were, and a very unscrupulous one. Have you formed any theory of your own?”

“None that is worth considering. At first, I suspected the McNabbs, fancying that their enmity might be a holdover on account of the old lawsuit about the land titles. That was before I knew that I had two of them working for me in the drill-gang. Later--I am ashamed to confess it--I thought that possibly Judge Birrell might have passed the word that I was to be driven out. That was a pure absurdity, of course.”

“Quite so,” said the professor. “The judge is entirely incapable of doing such a thing, bitter as some of his prejudices are. It need not be denied that he was prejudiced against you at first. One evening, when he was driving with his daughter, he visited your drilling plant and was greatly incensed at finding it in the old Westwood slave burying-ground. But now you and Mr. Carfax have met him and have eaten at his table, and this, to a man of his characteristics, salves all wounds. Besides, as a matter of fact, you owe the help which enabled you to place your new power-plant directly to the judge. It was he who sent word to the mountain-folk to turn out with their teams.”

“You surprise me!” said Tregarvon. “How did he know?”

Hartridge smiled amiably. “You are not wholly in Mr. Carfax’s confidence, it would seem. On the evening when you had the trouble with the valley farmers, he and Miss Richardia drove over to Westwood House in your car while we waited dinner for them here at the school. And the next morning, presto! you had your help.”

“You are guessing at this?”

“Not wholly. I have just been to the ‘Pocket’ to see Sill McNabb’s little daughter, who is sick--doctoring people being another of my small recreations. When I pressed him, Sill told me that the order to help you came from Judge Birrell, and that it was put upon the score of common neighborliness.”

“But the idea of helping me originated with the judge’s daughter,” Tregarvon put in soberly. “Why should she wish to return good for evil, Professor Hartridge?”

This time Hartridge’s smile was less amiable.

“Miss Richardia’s motives are not to be questioned by either of us, Mr. Tregarvon. But why should you call her interest in your affair returning good for evil?”

Tregarvon fought away from the edge of the pit into which his incorrigible ingenuousness was about to precipitate him.

“Oh, there isn’t any reason why she should consider me. Within the past hour I have had the best possible proof of that.”

Hartridge was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Mr. Tregarvon, I trust you are a gentleman in all that the much-misused word implies.”

“A man may hardly assert that of himself,” was the quick retort. “But why?”

“What you have just said implies a knowledge of a secret which has been most carefully guarded by Miss Richardia’s friends. I am not in her confidence, but I shall take it upon myself to say that whatever she does is right.”

“Who is the man?” Tregarvon asked bluntly.

“That is a question which Miss Richardia herself will doubtless answer at the proper time. Until she chooses to answer it, neither you nor I have any right to ask it.”

Tregarvon was turning away to continue his walk to Coalville. But at the leave-taking instant he faced about for a final word.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Professor Hartridge, that this is a hell of a world?” he asked gloomily.