Chapter IX: Part 9

“It has--many times. Won’t you stop and take pot-luck with us at the faculty table? No? Then I wish you a pleasant walk to the valley. Good night.”

XXV

The Mangling of Poictiers

Upon leaving Highmount, Tregarvon took the short-cut path down the mountain, and was only a few minutes late for the dinner for two served by Uncle William in the office dining-room at Coalville. Though he had plenty of thought material of his own to work upon, he could hardly help observing that Carfax ate abstractedly and was unusually silent. While the old negro was coming and going, the talk, what little there was of it, touched lightly upon the visit to Westwood House; but after the table was cleared Carfax got up to stand with his back to the open fire and the commonplaces were thrust aside.

“When is it to be?” he asked abruptly.

Tregarvon, who was still dallying with the black coffee, looked up with a crooked smile.

“When is what to be?” he asked.

“You know what I mean. We gave you your chance with Elizabeth--Miss Richardia and I. I hope you’re not going to tell me that you flunked it.”

The wry smile broke into a short laugh. “Oh, no; I didn’t flunk it. But it’s all over, Poictiers. I’m down and out.”

Carfax was trying to light a cigarette, but the match went black and he did not seem to realize that he had no fire.

“So your crime has found you out, has it?” he said, and the gentle tone seemed to accentuate rather than to soften the accusing assumption.

Tregarvon shook his head. “It was the other way about. Elizabeth came down here for the express purpose of asking my permission to fall in love with some other fellow--no names named.”

“_Wh-what!_”

“It is even so.”

“And--and you believed her? You didn’t have sense enough in that thick head of yours to know that she was merely trying to save your face?”

“Oh, no; you’re off on the wrong foot altogether. She didn’t get that letter I wrote her from Chattanooga, and she hadn’t given me a chance to tell her about Richardia. It was perfectly straight. She has simply found the other man--the right man--and she is honest enough to say so.”

“Do you mean to say that you didn’t tell her anything about your crookedness down here?”

“Oh, yes; we talked about that later on, though, again, there were no names named. She jumped to the conclusion that my ‘crookedness’, as you call it, was with one of the pretty undergraduates at Highmount, and I let it go at that. There was no use of making a bad matter worse by dragging Richardia’s name into it.”

Carfax took a pacing turn up and down the room, broke it to go and stand for a full minute staring out of a window at Uncle William’s cook-house, and then faced about to say, almost pleadingly: “You are _sure_ she meant it, Vance?”

“Of course she meant it. She wouldn’t tell me much about the other fellow, except to say that it was some one whom I knew, and who was too decent to try to break in while our engagement still held good.”

“And she--she really would give the--the other fellow a chance, if--if he had the nerve to ask for it?”

“It would be something better than ‘a chance’, I should say.”

Again Carfax took a pacing turn, coming back from it to drop into the chair opposite Tregarvon.

“Vance, _I_ am the ‘other fellow,’” he said softly. “You didn’t suspect it, did you? It began last summer when we were at Lake Placid together. I thought it was all on my side of the house; I didn’t dream that she wasn’t in love with you in the--in the way she ought to have been. But----”

The interruption was the entrance of a softly padding Uncle William, bearing a neatly tied packet of letters.

“Dey’s for dat lily-white missy fr’m de Norf what’s staying with Miss Dick up at de ol’ place,” he explained. “Mistoo Tait, he brung ’em over, an’ ast would you-all gemmen please to send ’em up when you had de chanst.”

Tregarvon had found the wry smile again by the time the old negro had shuffled away.

“I suppose I ought to congratulate you, Poictiers, but I can’t just now; I’m too new a widower. You’ll have to hug your happiness alone for the present. You’ll excuse me, won’t you? But, see here--how about this little side-play with Richardia? You’re not going to be allowed to play fast and loose with her--not while I’m here to prevent it.”

Carfax was absently fingering the packet of letters.

“Hold on, Vance,” he broke in, “you’ve been saying, all along, that this last attack of yours--with Richardia--was the real thing; that there was no sentiment between you and Elizabeth.”

“That’s all very well,” said the attacked one, in a fresh thrill of self-pityings; “but I’m like the little kiddie who dropped his candy to reach for another piece and lost both. Just the same, it seems that you are due to get yours, too; you’ve proposed to one woman when you were in love with another. What did Richardia say to you when you asked her to marry you? That’s what I want to know now.”

The cherubic smile which was waiting for its chance in Carfax’s eyes turned slowly into an impish grin.

“As nearly as I can recall it, she said: ‘Most certainly not. Why should I?’ Of course, you have guessed that I asked her merely to give you a chance to be decently loyal to Elizabeth. Miss Richardia took it as it was meant, and we have been very good friends, playing the game at odd moments for your benefit when you seemed to be needing a bit of help.”

“Oh, yes; you were very kind; you are all very kind. But that doesn’t mend any broken bridges for me now. Do you want me to tell you why Richardia turned you and your ridiculous fortune down so easily? I can, you know,” and with that he told the story of his chance surprising of Miss Birrell’s secret.

Carfax heard him through patiently and did not seem unduly surprised at the new development.

“That accounts for a good many things,” he commented. “I have had a feeling for some time that Miss Richardia had something on her mind--something not altogether joyous. Once or twice she has seemed on the verge of confiding in me. It’s a case of the obdurate father, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so; though Hartridge didn’t hint at anything of that sort.”

“So Hartridge knows, too, does he?”

“They all know at Highmount, I fancy. And that reminds me: I’ve done it again--talked too much, as usual. I met Hartridge after I had seen the pair of them together, and we spoke of the love affair. Hartridge said it was Richardia’s secret, and that her friends had been carefully keeping it for her. I shouldn’t have told you.”

“It is safe enough with me, as you ought to know: you will be the one to go and tell it all over the lot,” was the unkind retort. And then: “These letters of Elizabeth’s; she ought to have them, don’t you think? Do you suppose I might----?”

Tregarvon waved him away.

“The letters will be all the excuse you will need for making two calls in the same half-day. Take the car and go and do what you’re aching to do. After you have sung your little song, you may give Elizabeth my love and my blessing. No, don’t stop to talk any more; just make your little bow and vanish, before I get to thinking too pointedly of all the things you’ve done to me.”

Carfax took his cue promptly, and before Tregarvon had finished filling his pipe the roar of the yellow car’s motor told him that the golden youth had begun his flight to the mountain top. A short half-hour later, at a second filling of the pipe, the motor roar was repeated, and while the solitary smoker was wondering what had brought Carfax back so soon, the dining-room door opened to admit Wilmerding.

“You are responsible,” said the young superintendent, explaining the motor-car clamor. “You gave me the fever, flaunting that big yellow devil of yours in my face, and I was obliged to go and buy. Want to take a little spin in the new wagon to see how she handles?”

Tregarvon pushed a chair into the fire-warmed semicircle for his visitor and shook his head.

“Some other time--if you’ll be good enough to let the invitation hang over. To-night I’d rather sit here before the fire with you and have a little heart-to-heart talk, Wilmerding. Will you indulge me?”

“Sure,” was the ready response. “The joy-ride can wait. Can you find me another pipe?”

The pipe was found and filled, and at its lighting Tregarvon began without preface, giving the steel-cube facts as they had been developed by Tryon and linking them up with Thaxter’s apparently disinterested effort to promote the sale of the Ocoee to Consolidated Coal. “I’m telling you this, Wilmerding, because I know you’re not implicated,” he said in conclusion. “Also, because it seems no more than fair that you should know. I’m not specially vindictive, you understand. I suppose Thaxter and the men behind him are calling it nothing more than a bit of sharp practice on purely legitimate business lines.”

“That might do for the drill-dulling,” the superintendent conceded thoughtfully, “though I’d take pretty violent exceptions to that, if I were you. But doesn’t this one proved rascality imply the authorship of all the others?”

“No. Hartridge thinks not, and so do I. By a good, vigorous stretch of imagination you could call the drill-dulling something less than criminal. But that can’t be said of the attempt to wreck my motor-car, or of the risk taken of killing somebody by the smashing of the machinery and the planting of a dynamite cartridge in the engine-boiler.”

While the evening lengthened they discussed the various phases of the mystery in all their bearings, and in the end Wilmerding came around to the Tryon-Hartridge hypothesis, namely, that Thaxter, unscrupulous as he may have been in bribing Sawyer, was not the instigator of the more serious barbarities.

“Not that I’m excusing Thaxter or the New York office from which he has his instructions,” he added. “The ‘Big Business’ methods are all more or less crooked, and I’d give half of my salary if I didn’t have to work for an outfit that simply won’t fight in the open, as men ought to fight. Do you know, Tregarvon, I’ve been hoping against hope that you’d strike it, and strike it rich, on the Ocoee. In that case, I had made up my mind to ask you to hire me.”

“If I had a mine, you couldn’t ask anything that would please me better,” said Tregarvon, warming to this expression of friendly loyalty. “But the thing looks pretty hopeless just now. As I have said, Professor Hartridge knows more about the Ocoee than anybody else seems to--and he won’t tell all he knows. But he did assure me this afternoon that we are not going to find the big vein where we are drilling in the old burying-ground, and I have every reason to believe that he was telling the truth. That lets me out. Thaxter ’phoned me this morning that he had got the option extended until to-morrow midnight. I stand to lose a hundred thousand dollars if I take the time to move the drilling plant and try again.”

Wilmerding rose to go, returning the borrowed pipe to its place on the mantel.

“It’s a hard proposition,” he admitted. “I’m not going to advise you to throw up the chance to get the hundred thousand. But if I were in your shoes, I’d be just reckless enough to gamble another throw or two. In this talk we’ve had, you have convinced me of one thing, Tregarvon, and that is that the Ocoee has a workable vein somewhere in the property. Hartridge knows it, and Consolidated Coal knows it. And what they know, some other fellow can find out. You have twenty-four hours, and a little better, in which to think it over. I said I wouldn’t advise, but I shall: don’t close with Thaxter one minute before you are obliged to.”

Tregarvon got out of his chair to shake hands with the departing visitor.

“You’re a man, Wilmerding, and I wish I had your nerve. But a couple of things have happened to-day--things that I can’t talk about, even to so good a friend as you are--and they have knocked me out. At the end of the ends, I’m afraid I shall weaken and sell out to your hog of a trust. It was good of you to come down and let me unload on you. If anything new turns up I’ll get you on the wire. Good night, and good luck to you.”

After Wilmerding had gone, Tregarvon sat for another hour before the fire, smoking abstractedly and hardly noting the passing of time. In due course there was another flurry of gas-engine noises, and when the clamor died away, Carfax came in to fling himself into the chair where Wilmerding had been sitting.

Tregarvon broke the silence morosely.

“Well? You are not measuring up very strikingly with the commonly accepted idea of the happy lover. What’s the latest?”

Carfax had taken a cork-tipped cigarette from his case and was absently trying to set fire to the wrong end of it.

“Vance,” he said, in his gentlest tone, “you deserve to be murdered in cold blood. You told me that Elizabeth hadn’t gotten that frenzied letter you wrote her the day you were in Chattanooga. She hadn’t, but it was merely delayed; it was in that lot of forwarded mail that I took up to-night, and I--_I_ gave it to her!”

“So that’s the latest, is it? Where does the tragedy come in?”

“Don’t say another word or I shall explode! You have probably forgotten that you wrote her that I was as good as engaged to Richardia Birrell--it would be quite like you to forget. She excused herself to go and read her letters, and when she came back I knew that the heavens had fallen. Oh, no; there wasn’t any scene; she just simply wouldn’t give me a chance to get a word in edgewise, though I tried for a solid hour to make the chance. I’m ruined for life--and you, with your nimble little pen and your neat facility for telling all you know, and then some, _you_ had to be the one to mangle me!”

XXVI

Tryon’s News

Tregarvon awoke on the Monday morning with the feeling of the putative bankrupt who is facing his final day of grace. Before midnight the bargain-and-sale decision must be made; and he knew perfectly well that there would be no chance in the short interval which still remained of adding to the facts as they stood. Nevertheless, after Carfax had disappeared, walking, in the direction of Hesterville, Tregarvon plunged into the routine, entering into a wire correspondence with the Chattanooga machinery firm and trying to extort a promise that the needed valve and steam-pipe should be shipped without fail by the afternoon train.

Since Carfax did not put in an appearance for the noon meal, Tregarvon ate alone. While he was at table Tryon came in to report. Early in the morning the man Sawyer had turned up at the drilling ground with a one-horse wagon and had taken his belongings, including the working-coat, and the tool-box, containing among other things the reserve supply of steel cubes. Tryon was of the opinion that the drill boss was preparing to vanish, and suggested the taking of preventive measures. Though Sawyer would doubtless be a most unwilling witness, it might be needful to make sure that he could be found when wanted.

Tregarvon concurred mechanically, telling the foreman to spread an unofficial drag-net for Sawyer, and agreeing to swear out a warrant for the man’s arrest if he should attempt to run away. Beyond this, he sent one of the laborers up to the drilling-stand to give Rucker a chance to sleep; and, later in the afternoon, sent word to Tryon’s house directing the foreman to share the coming night-watch with the mechanician; all this also as a matter of routine, since, with the suspension of working operations, there had been no threats of further aggressions.

Just before the evening meal Carfax returned abstracted and silent, and saying nothing as to the manner in which he had spent the day. Immediately after dinner he asked Tregarvon if he might have the motor-car.

“Going up to Westwood House to try again?” queried the motor-car’s owner, not too sympathetically.

“I’m no good to you here,” was the non-committal rejoinder; and a little later Tregarvon found himself facing the approaching crisis alone and still undecided.

Thaxter had telephoned during the afternoon, calling attention once more to the terms of the offer to purchase. The message had taken the tone of a friendly warning. There was no hope of securing further delay, but the bookkeeper would give Tregarvon the benefit of all the time that remained. He would stay in his Whitlow office, or be within call, up to midnight, and he hoped that Tregarvon would be sensible and remember the old saw about the bird in the hand.

Tregarvon was remembering the canny proverb--and a good many other things--when he lighted his after-dinner pipe. Throughout the entire day he had been wavering and postponing the moment of action. One hundred thousand dollars, judiciously invested, would provide an income for his mother and sister, which, however far it might fall short of the former Tregarvon lavishnesses, would still place them securely beyond the hazard of want. On the other hand, a certain innate obstinacy, grown now to a passion which threatened to drive cool-blood reason to the wall, refused to yield.

Apart from this, there was a question of pure ethics to be considered. Quite early in the attempt to develop the Ocoee he had secretly determined, if his efforts should prove successful, to reorganize the company, taking in those who had suffered loss; in other words, to make restitution to Parker’s victims. But if the property should be sold to the trust there was an end of the generous intention, and the nail of injustice driven by Parker would be irrevocably clinched.

These were some of the perplexities, but there was another which also demanded a hearing. Carfax had been most generous and loyal, spending not only his money but himself. But now the conditions were changed--or changing. Carfax had another interest, suddenly grown imperative. Would it not be most unfair to drag him still deeper into the discouraging fight, allowing him to spend more money which might never be repaid?

At this point in the reflective probings Tregarvon began to argue that he must see and talk with Carfax again before he could decide finally and definitely; and he had no sooner reached this conclusion, and was casting about for the means to translate it into action, when Wilmerding appeared--a veritable god-in-the-machine, since he was driving his new car.

“Thaxter was telling me that you’d most likely be making him a business call this evening, and I thought I’d drive over and take you back in my car,” said the newly made motor enthusiast. “If I’m butting in, don’t scruple to chase me away.”

Tregarvon was already taking his driving-coat from its closet in the fireplace corner. “You have come precisely in the nick of time,” he returned. “Carfax has taken my car to drive to Westwood House, and I must have a few minutes’ talk with him before I fight the final round with Thaxter. Will your car climb the big hill?”

“If it won’t, I’ll scrap it and buy another,” laughed the Pittsburgher; and five minutes later the new, high-powered roadster was storming up the Pisgah grades.

Eight minutes was the time to the Highmount gates, and Tregarvon called it a beat, though he had never timed his own car over the same distance. Eight other minutes covered the cross-mountain run to the western brow; and it was not until Wilmerding had tooled the roadster up the Westwood House driveway and was parking it beside the yellow touring-car that Tregarvon began to wonder if, with Elizabeth as her guest, Richardia would not be breaking her school routine by spending her evenings at home. In that case ... but it was now too late to retreat, and, with Wilmerding at his elbow, he ran up the steps to set the old-fashioned knocker of the great door clanging its drumbeat through the echoing interiors.

When Aunt Phyllis, the solemn-faced old negress who was the sole survivor of the once numerous household retinue, opened the drawing-room doors for the two callers, the judge’s daughter was at the piano, the judge was listening luxuriously in a deep, calico-covered armchair, and Carfax was sitting with Miss Wardwell in a window-seat at the farther end of the room.

Wilmerding made his own and Tregarvon’s apologies when the judge got upon his feet to welcome the newcomers.

“We were taking a spin in my new car,” he explained, tactfully leaving Tregarvon’s errand unmentioned. “Of course, we couldn’t pass your hospitable door, Judge Birrell.”

“No, suh; most suttainly you couldn’t,” was the ready response. “The do-ahs of old Westwood House may creak a little on thei-uh hinges, suh, but they still swing wide enough to let the guest enter at his pleas-yuh. Find yo-uh places, gentlemen, if you please; my daughtuh is giving us a little music.”

Miss Wardwell had risen, with Carfax backgrounding her because he was obliged to, and Tregarvon introduced Wilmerding as a fellow Pennsylvanian from the Pittsburgh end of the State. Elizabeth was pleasantly gracious to the young superintendent of coal mines, seeming to welcome him as in some sort a saver of situations; at least, so it appeared to Tregarvon. In the readjustment the judge sank back into the depths of his armchair, and Carfax surrendered his place in the window-seat to Wilmerding and wandered to another window to stand with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets. This was Tregarvon’s opportunity to say the needed word to the golden youth, but at its offering a sudden passionate impulse seized him and he crossed quickly to the piano alcove. “I see you have my nocturne,” he whispered, bending over the pianist and indicating the Chopin on the piano-desk; “please play it for me.”

As if his masterful mood were not to be safely denied, her fingers fell upon the keys in the opening chords of the nocturne; and this was the beginning of what gradually grew to be an interval of suspended possibilities. Almost at once, Tregarvon realized that Richardia was playing only from the fingers outward--faultlessly, but mechanically; that Carfax was wandering from one window to another in a sort of aimless unrest; that Elizabeth was setting all her serene traditions at defiance by chatting eagerly, like an escaped school-girl, with Wilmerding.

A few minutes further along, when Carfax dragged a chair into the window recess and deliberately broke in upon Miss Wardwell and her companion, the spirit of disquietude seemed to seize upon the judge, also, since he wheeled his armchair to face the window group and did violence to all the Westwood House musical unities by joining in the low-toned conversation. This gave Tregarvon his excuse; and when the nocturne ran away at its close into delicate little improvisations, he spoke again in the guarded undertone.

“Hartridge may have told you that I accidentally surprised your secret yesterday afternoon. I did, you know; but I want you to be assured that it is as safe with me as it is with the professor, or with any of your friends who know it.”

If he were expecting any manifestation of surprise it was not forthcoming. So far from it, there was no break in the improvisation harmonies.

“Some day I hope it won’t be necessary to make a secret of it,” she replied evenly, matching his low tone.

“Does Elizabeth know?”

“Not yet. But I shall tell her.”

“Has she told you that our engagement is broken?”

Her nod was barely perceptible.

“I hope she told you that I didn’t break it.”

“Yes; she told me that, too.”

“You are not saying it, but deep down in your heart you are telling yourself that I have got only what was coming to me. Isn’t that true?”

The answer came from lips that were paling a little. “Ask yourself.”

“It _is_ true. And it is also true, perhaps, that I should have had this other whipping; the one I got yesterday afternoon when I was trying to meet Hartridge on his way back from the ‘Pocket.’”

She was still keeping her face averted.

“I can’t talk about that now, to any one--least of all, to you.”

He bent lower to make sure that the group at the other end of the room should not overhear.

“I want to meet the man. If I stay here on Mount Pisgah--if I don’t throw it all up and go home--I mean to do what I can to help. Once I shouldn’t have been big enough to say such a thing, Richardia; but--thank God--I’ve grown a little in the past few months. May I add that it is you who have shown me how to grow?”

She ignored the query and for the first time let him see her eyes: they were swimming, and there was a note in her voice that he had never heard before when she said: “You must not talk of giving up and going away; you are the one who can do the most to help when the time comes--if only----”

A clamorous banging of the door-knocker interrupted, and Aunt Phyllis put her turbaned head into the drawing-room to say, with her fat chin in the air and a fine scorn in her tone: “Po’ white man at de front do’, comed to ast faw Mistoo Tregarbin.”

Tregarvon obeyed the summons rather reluctantly and found Tryon on the veranda. The foreman had been running and was short of breath.

“You’d better come over--you an’ Mr. Carfax,” he broke out hurriedly. “We’ve done caught the dannymiter. He was aimin’ to blow us all to kingdom come, this time!”

“Who is it?” Tregarvon grated.

Tryon wagged his head mysteriously. “Hit ain’t Sawyer; hit’s the same skunk I been a-suspicionin’ ever sense we had that talk yisterday. You’ll see when you get thar’.”

Tregarvon went back to the drawing-room, meaning to cut Carfax out if possible without giving a general alarm. But Wilmerding overheard his whispered explanation to Carfax and so did Miss Wardwell; whereupon he spoke up quickly, briefing the story of the Ocoee troubles, and adding its latest sequel. The effect upon the master of Westwood House was instantaneous and militant.

“What’s that, suh? Tryin’ to dynamite yo-uh machinery whilst you and Mistuh Carfax are makin’ us a friendly visit heah at Westwood House?” he demanded, his deep voice rumbling in the wrath of outraged hospitality. “Richa’dia, daughtuh, get me my coat and hat; I’m goin’ oveh yondeh with these young gentlemen. No, Mistuh Tregarvon; don’t deny me that privilege, suh; yo-uh bein’ undeh my roof at the precise moment makes yo-uh quarrel _my_ quarrel, suh! You’ll give me a seat in yo-uh steam-wagon, and--daughtuh, my coat and hat, immediately, if you please. And fetch me the old shot-gun, too, my deah.”

By this time Wilmerding was declaring that he must not be left out; and in the momentary confusion Tregarvon saw that the judge’s daughter, while she was obeying her father’s commands, was pitiably agitated. Assuming that her anxiety was for her father’s safety, he ventured a word of assurance while she was holding the overcoat for the sleeves of which the judge was hastily fumbling.

“You mustn’t distress yourself--we are not going to let your father get hurt,” he protested.

“It’s--it’s not that!” she gasped; “it is something far worse.” Then, in an agonized whisper that he had to bend lower to hear: “This man they have taken; promise me that you will let him go before my--before any one else has seen him!”

Tregarvon promised blindly, striving to ignore this last of the maddening mysteries in an effort to be wholly loyal to the woman he loved. But as he committed himself the difficulties in the way of performance suddenly magnified themselves. With the judge taking part in the descent upon the scene of the capture, how was he to be kept from seeing and questioning the culprit? Tregarvon saw that he had promised that which he would most probably be unable to perform, but in the confusion of the hurried departure there was no chance to add the qualifying word, and it was left unspoken.

XXVII

Cloud-Wraiths

With Judge Birrell urging haste, the start for the burying-ground glade was made at once. Since Tregarvon’s car was large enough to hold them all, Wilmerding’s roadster was left behind. Carfax drove the touring-car, with Tryon clutching for handholds in the mechanician’s seat beside him. This arrangement left the broad tonneau seat for the other three; and the judge, with the gun between his knees, sat in the middle. When the big car shot away with its loading the master of Westwood was still calling down maledictions upon the heads of those who would besmirch the fair fame of the Southland by resorting to the methods of the assassin and the anarchist.

“Who are these scoundrels, Mistuh Tregarvon?” he demanded. “Just name me thei-uh names, suh!” And then, with the charming inconsistency of his kind: “This is a law-abiding community, suh, and you have wronged us by keeping silence so long; you have, for a fact, suh! But now we shall vindicate ou’selves. A little taste of a rope and a tree limb for this grand rascal yo-uh men have caught will make him tell us the names of his confederates and accomplices; and then, by the Lord Harry, suh, we’ll run these lawbreakuhs down with the dogs and hang them higheh than Haman!”

During the hurried cross-mountain run Tregarvon wrestled manfully with the problem thrust upon him by Richardia Birrell’s whispered appeal. How was he to prevent a meeting between the judge and the as yet unnamed man whom Tryon and Rucker had captured? The query was still unanswered when the yellow car skidded and slued around the turn into the old wood road. Despite the promise given by a fair day and a measurably clear evening, the night had suddenly thickened, with cloud wracks flying low over the mountain top to wrap the forest in mantlings of fleecy vapor silver-shot by the rays of a gibbous moon, but opposing a wall of blank opacity to the headlamps of the car. Tregarvon would have welcomed help from the chapter of accidents, but now that they were off the main road there was a fair chance that the accident might be too destructive.

“Easy, Poictiers!--you’ll scrap us if you don’t look out!” he cautioned, leaning forward to warn Carfax, who was boring into the cloud bank at reckless speed.

The words were scarcely uttered before there came a crunching of dry tree limbs under the wheels, a hiss of escaping air, and a jolting stoppage of the car as the brakes were applied.

“Punctured!” exclaimed the cautioner, and they all got out to investigate cause and consequence. The obstruction proved to be what it had seemed--the dry limb of a tree--and the result was a flat tire.

“It is dead wood, and it may have fallen of its own accord; or it may mean that your dynamiter has friends who would like to delay us,” Wilmerding offered. “On the bare chance, hadn’t we better sprint along and not wait to change tires? Your man, Rucker, may easily be having the time of his life trying to hold on to his prisoner.”

They sprinted accordingly, the judge taking the dog-trot as actively as his younger pace-setters, and stubbornly refusing to let Tregarvon relieve him of the burden of the heavy deer-gun. So running, they came in a few minutes to the site of the old burying-ground, and to the door of the tool shanty. Rucker admitted them at Tregarvon’s knock and call, and his report was brief and unenlightening. “No; nothin’ doin’ since we took him in--and the cuss won’t talk. But maybe you can make him loosen up.”

Tregarvon still saw no way of keeping the judge out of it, and he held himself absolved from his promise by the sheer impossibility of doing what Richardia had begged him to do. The captive, wrist-bound with a turn or two of cord, was sitting hunched upon the edge of Rucker’s cot-bed. It was Carfax who picked up the lantern and flashed its light into the man’s face. “By Jove!” he exclaimed; “Morgan McNabb!” and Rucker nodded.

Judge Birrell sat upon the spare coil of rope and wiped his face with his handkerchief. His hands were trembling and he was breathing hard, but the smart run from the disabled automobile might have accounted for these disturbances. When he spoke to the prisoner his tone was sternly accusing.

“So it’s you, is it, Mo’gan McNabb?--turnin’ yo-uh teeth upon the hand that’s been feedin’ you? By the Lord Harry, you make me mighty sorry that I once saved you from going to the penitentiary, where you belong! Now, then, open yo-uh mouth and tell these gentlemen why you come heah dynamitin’ thei-uh machinery!”

The mountaineer’s lips were drawn back in a doglike snarl.

“I’ll see ’em damned befo’ I’ll open my haid to ’em, now, Judge Birrell! Lookee at this yere,” and he wrenched his tied hands around so that the judge might see.

“You don’t like the rope?” said the judge evenly. “Listen to me, Mo’gan; you McNabbs have lived on Westwood land, father and son, for fo’ generations, and you’ll open yo-uh head to me, suh! What quarrel have you got with the owneh of the Ocoee property? Ansuh me, if you don’t want anotheh tu’n o’ that rope taken around yo-uh neck, suh!”

The answer was as prompt as it was disconcerting. “I allow I got thess the same sort o’ quarrel ez you have, judge. Didn’t they-all steal the Ocoee f’om you in the first place?”

“That’s neithuh heah nor there!” was the stern rejoinder. “Would you give these gentlemen to understand that _I_ am yo-uh principal in these scandalous outrages? See heah, Mo’gan, we all know that you haven’t been actin’ on yo-uh own responsibility. Who has been puttin’ you up to all these deviltries?”

“If you don’t know, I reckon _I_ ain’t a-goin’ to be the one to tell you,” said the prisoner, relapsing into his former attitude of sullenness. Then, as if upon a second thought: “You ask Miss Dick, judge; I allow _she_ knows.”

The little pause of consternation which this statement precipitated was broken by an exclamation from Rucker.

“Look out yonder! Somebody’s set the leaves afire! My God! we left the dynamite out there!”

Carfax, who was standing beside the mechanician, wheeled quickly to face the open door. Out beyond the drill derrick a thin line of fire, driven by the freshening west wind and showing orange-colored under the mist-wraiths, was sweeping down upon the clearing. “Show me where you left the stuff!” he snapped at the mechanician, but even as he spoke, a fuse squibbed and the thunder of a terrific explosion shattered the forest silences, the concussion smashing the glass in the small square window, rocking the lightly built tool-house like the heaving of an earthquake, and bombarding it an instant later with a rain of falling _débris_. The judge, sitting upon the coil of rope, was not thrown down, but the five men who were standing were flung in a heap on the floor.

Tregarvon was the first to regain his feet and to reach the open. The cloud mantlings had been thrust aside for the moment, but the stir was full of gray dust and acrid with the fumes of the explosive. Where the derrick and the new power-plant had stood there was a mass of tangled wreckage, and the burying-ground glade looked as if it had been swept by a tornado. In the wan moonlight Tregarvon caught a glimpse of something moving under the trees beyond the wreck; then the moving object erected itself into the stature of a man.

One glance at the tall, frock-coated figure was enough. With a mad yell of rage, Tregarvon snatched the gun from the judge’s hands and gave chase, calling to the frock-coated man to stand or he would shoot. There was an instant of hesitation, seemingly of indecision; then the man turned and fled. And, as if to favor him, another scudding cloud settled upon the mountain top, burying forest and glade, the tangled wreck and the two runners in its fleecy depths.

Tregarvon raced on for a breath-cutting space; guided solely by the crashing of the fugitive through the brier tangles and dry-leaf beds. Then he began to get his second wind, and again he shouted the command to halt. Since this seemed only to have the effect of hastening the thudding footsteps on ahead, he fired the gun, holding the muzzle high, as he thought and intended, but apparently not high enough, as the dreadful sequence immediately indicated. For, almost exactly coincident with the report of the gun, there was a shriek, the crash of a falling body, and silence.

At this the pursuer came down from the transporting heights of berserk rage with a shock that was sickening. “Oh, good Lord!” he gasped; “I’ve killed him!” Whereupon he flung the offending weapon afar and ran to confirm the horrifying conclusion.

He was still running in the direction from which the cry had come when the curious happening befell. As if the solid earth had been whisked away from beneath his feet he found himself whirling through empty space; falling through unfathomable depths of it, it seemed, before he collided with another world--a world of shocks and coruscating pains, of beatings and bruisings, and presently of grateful forgetfulness.

XXVIII

The Ocoee’s Answer

When Tregarvon recovered consciousness he knew at once what had happened to him. In the blind and hurried search for the body of the man he had presumptively shot he had fallen from the cliff edge; how far was still problematical, but far enough, as a painful roaring in his ears, a tightening agony in his forehead, and a bruised and stiffening ankle sufficiently testified.

His first thought was for his victim. The man might not have been killed outright; in which case he might be even now dying for the lack of timely help. The thought was insupportable and Tregarvon tried to rise. But the ankle, broken or twisted, he could not determine which, gripped him like a fanged wild beast and he fell back with a groan. None the less, in some way he must contrive to bring help. He felt in his pockets for matches. A heap of dry leaves furnished the kindling and a clear flame leaped up, hollowing out a small cavity of yellow light in the misty gloom. At this the fire-lighter saw that he was at the bottom of a deep, water-worn cleft opening back from the outer scarp of the cliff, and at right angles to it; a ravine which was little more than a crevice, save that it was large enough to have trees and shrubs growing in it.

He knew the crevice, though he had never explored it. It lay at a point almost exactly half-way between the glade and the tramhead. Knowing that the sound would not carry upward and backward over the cliff, he did not waste his breath in vain shoutings. The alternative was a fire signal. If the cloud would but lift a little, and he could gather enough of the dry leaves to make a glow, the light would guide those who must certainly, by this time, be searching for him.

This was his thought while he was nursing the handful of fire and adding more leaves to it. The blaze rose higher and the cavity in the gloom grew larger until it became a hemisphere, with the black scarp of the crevice wall for its flattened side. A thickly matted vine covered the face of the precipice, completely concealing the perpendicular surface upon which it climbed. At its roots in the crevice bottom the dry leaves were bedded a foot deep. Tregarvon was reaching painfully for the mass of fresh fuel when the fire licked out and caught it first. There was a puff of dense smoke, a fierce blaze, and then the climbing vine took fire and was brightly outlined in a network of short-lived flame.

All this was normal enough, but what followed was curiously abnormal. As the fire glowed hotter small fragments of the cliff face began to split off, and these fragments, falling into the burning leaf-bed, sprang alight with hissings and sputterings and much pungent smoke. Tregarvon, ignoring the throbbing ankle, dragged himself an agonizing foot or so nearer and secured one of the splintered fragments. _It was coal!_

Almost beside himself with excitement, he heaped more leaves upon the fire. By the light of the fresh upblaze he could make out the upper line of the great coal seam. It was at the height of a tall man’s head above the bottom of the cleft, well-defined, unmistakable; the roof shale of a vein fully six feet thick. Here, discovered in the moment of defeat, disaster, and woundings, was the Ocoee’s lavish answer to all the costly questionings.

“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so; if the heavens may be purchased with the gifts of the earth. The gifts are yours, Mr. Tregarvon; first by the right of inheritance, and now by the right of discovery.”

Tregarvon twisted himself into a sitting posture, gritting his teeth at the ankle’s protest and holding his head in his hands. At a little distance away sat the professor of mathematics, one long leg jack-knifed for a support, and the other stretched awkwardly upon a makeshift cushion of the fallen leaves.

“You?” Tregarvon cried. “Did you fall over the cliff, too?”

“I think it was I who showed you the way,” Hartridge amended. “You are a very apt pupil, Mr. Tregarvon. I was scarcely well down here before you played the part of Jill.”

“Are you--are you hurt?”

“Not by your shot-gun charge, happily; but my leg is broken. And you?”

Tregarvon winced. “I have a cracked skull, I think, and an ankle that won’t let me get up. But about that gunshot; I didn’t fire at you; I shot into the air to make you stop. Just the same, you gave me a quick fit of the horrors. When you yelled, I thought I had inadvertently killed you. What made you run?”

The professor’s smile was a little rueful, and also a little shamefaced.

“What made you chase me?” he asked.

“Because I was hot--fighting mad. I wanted to drag you to an accounting on the spot. I don’t suppose you will be foolish enough to deny that you set the leaf fire that caused the explosion?”

“Since I was near enough to be blown up myself such a denial might have the weight of circumstantial evidence to support it,” was the quiet reply. “But I do not make the denial. It was I who set the leaves afire. I shall be greatly relieved if you can tell me that nobody was injured.”

“So far as I know the dynamite didn’t kill any of us. But tell me, did you start that fire knowing that the explosion would follow?”

“By no means. I may confess that I knew the dynamite had been placed; but I supposed, as the most ordinary matter of course, that your men had taken care of it when they captured their prisoner.”

“Then why did you light the fire?”

Again the quaint smile flitted across the face of the man who had always contrived to tell less than the sum total of all he knew.

“Once again, Mr. Tregarvon, you are going into the question of motives, which is a very large field, indeed. Let us say that I wished to make a diversion of some sort. Will that satisfy you?”

“No,” was the blunt reply.

“I am sorry; I am afraid it will have to suffice for the present.”

Tregarvon’s head was throbbing so painfully that he found it next to impossible to think clearly. But he would not desist.

“Hartridge, it has come to a show-down between us. I’m giving you fair warning. Once I did you an injustice--or thought I did--but this time you’ve given yourself away. When I get up and around again, I’m going to sift this thing to the ultimate bottom and somebody will be made to sweat blood for what has been done to-night. As matters stand now, you seem to be the man the officers will want first.”

Once more the professor smiled. “And yet you can’t say that I have ever wittingly done anything to harm you,” he offered mildly.

“That remains to be proved,” was the angry retort. “Meaning to, or not meaning to, you fired that dynamite a little while back; and you certainly have never strained yourself in any effort to help me. You knew that this big vein was here--you have known it all along!”

“This time you are not my guest, Mr. Tregarvon, and I may contradict you without blame. I did not know it.”

“Then why did you carve the Greek letter _pi_ on those two oak-trees below the glade? Or do you deny that, as well?”

“It is you who have found the value of _pi_,” said the one who was under accusation. “I am ashamed to confess that it baffled me. Some three years ago, two strange surveyors acting, as I learned afterward, in the interests of Consolidated Coal, ran many lines over this property of yours, which was then practically abandoned. I had no access to their note-books, of course, so I was obliged to work out my conclusions as best I could from their stakes. One of these conclusions was that the true vein would be found somewhere in this locality. Can you believe me thus far?”

“I’m trying to,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”

“It is humiliating to have to acknowledge that, while all the line-running on the part of these strangers pointed to this immediate locality, I could never discover the outcrop. True, I never thought of looking in this particular crevice. But to preserve a record for possible future investigation, I made the marks on the two trees. The distance between the oaks, carefully measured and multiplied by _pi_, or three and the decimal one thousand, four hundred and sixteen, gives the distance around the cliff from the lower oak to the point somewhere below us where the intruding strangers drove their final stake.”

Tregarvon heaped more leaves upon the fire, which was threatening to die out.

“You are still miles beyond my comprehension,” he complained moodily. “On one hand, you stop at nothing to prevent me from finding out what you have just told me, and on the other you make what appears to be a very worthy and earnest effort to keep me from flinging myself into the maw of Consolidated Coal. How am I to reconcile such things?”

“When you are older, Mr. Tregarvon, and come to know human nature a little better, you will apprehend the truth of that worldly wise beatitude, ‘Blessed are they who expect little, for, verily, they shall not be disappointed.’ Consider a moment: you came here, the legal owner of the Ocoee, to be sure, and the innocent owner, inasmuch as your father was the unsuspecting purchaser of stolen goods. Yet you were none the less the legitimate successor of the bandit who had looted us. You wouldn’t expect much from those who had been so ruthlessly defrauded, would you?”

“Since I was not even constructively to blame, yes,” Tregarvon insisted stubbornly. “Your motive went deeper than that.”

“It did,” the professor admitted gravely. “Almost from the first I saw the slight chance of a reward, the attainment of which has been the one thing desirable in a rather drab-colored life, slipping away from me; taken away from me in sheer wantonness, as it seemed, since, I had been given to understand, you were already pledged to marry Miss Wardwell. It was not in human nature to be entirely unresentful, Mr. Tregarvon.”

“Oh; so that was it?” said Tregarvon shortly. Then: “What I saw yesterday afternoon in the forest back of Westwood House seems to prove that I am as far out of the running as you are with Judge Birrell’s daughter.”

The professor’s face became, for the moment, a study in astoundment.

“Ah--yes,” he said, stumbling over the words; and then: “I am to infer that you didn’t recognize the young man whom you saw with Miss Richardia yesterday afternoon?”

“No; he was a stranger to me. Doesn’t the judge approve of him?”

This time the professor’s smile was rather grim.

“He does not--most decidedly.”

“But Richardia loves him; and that is enough--for you and for me.”

“Assuredly she loves him--very loyally,” was the grave reply; and a moment later, as if the mention of the judge had evoked a new train of thought: “I am curious to know if my leaf-fire diversion--which had such unlooked-for and disastrous results--came soon enough. How much had Morgan McNabb confessed?”

Tregarvon ignored the brow-wrinkling of pain which accompanied the question.

“I am beginning to believe that you are a very hardened criminal, Mr. Hartridge. If you know that McNabb had a confession to make, it follows that you were his accomplice.”

The answer was a suppressed groan, for which the schoolmaster instantly apologized.

“You--you must forgive me if I say that I can’t go into the matter of culpability with you just now. This leg--of mine--grows a bit insistent. But it will be the greatest possible satisfaction to me if you will answer my question.”

“All right; you shall have it. Just before the explosion came McNabb had admitted that he was acting for somebody else.”

“But he did not name the person?”

“The judge was trying to make him do so, but he was still refusing. The last thing he said, as I remember it, was something which seemed to implicate Miss Richardia as the one who could tell if she chose. Which was absurd, of course.”

“Quite so,” was the low-voiced reply. “Shall we let the matter rest there--for the present?”

Tregarvon was holding his head in his hands again. The throbbing pain was so intense that he could only grit his teeth and endure. When speech became possible he gave his answer.

“It may rest until I am able to take hold again. Then I shall make somebody pay for this night’s work if it takes every dollar I can dig out of the Ocoee for the next ten years!”

Once more Hartridge bent in apparent agony over the broken leg. But when the paroxysm had passed he looked up with a face that was gray with a deeper suffering than that inflicted by the broken bone.

“If you do; if you strike back in the spirit of reprisal, which seems so justifiable to you now, you will carry the woundings of your own vindictiveness to your grave, Mr. Tregarvon,” he said solemnly.

Tregarvon did not comment upon the sober prophecy. He was heaping more leaves upon the fire and wondering irritably why it was taking the rescuers so long to find them. The hammering agony in his head climaxed now at shorter intervals and the recurrences were blinding, but he contrived to keep the leaf glow alive until a welcome shout from the cliff above announced the presence of the searchers.

The hauling of the two injured men out of the deep cleft proved to be a difficult undertaking, this though there were five in the rescue party, which included the freed McNabb. Once it was done, a stretcher was quickly improvised for Hartridge, with Rucker, Tryon, and McNabb to take turns as bearers; and Tregarvon made shift to help himself a little, with Wilmerding and Carfax to shoulder him on either side.

On the slow progress back to the glade Tregarvon realized vaguely that his companions were gravely silent; and as the lagging procession issued from the wood he saw the cause. Rucker, or some one, had replaced the deflated tire and the motor-car had been brought upon the scene. The white glare of its headlamps focused upon the open space in front of the tool shanty. Judge Birrell, bowed and shrunken, was sitting upon the tool-house door-step with his face hidden in his hands; and on Rucker’s cot-bed, which had been placed under the light of the headlamps, lay the body of a man covered with one of the blankets.

“Who is it?” Tregarvon muttered, leaning more heavily upon his helpers.

He thought it singular that no one answered him, and the thought swiftly became an irritation too keen to be borne.