AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
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[Illustration: “Did you really think that some one was shooting at
_you_?” (_Page 7._)]
After the Manner
of Men
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
_ILLUSTRATED BY_
ARTHUR E. BECHER
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK::::::::::1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1916
[Illustration]
TO
JOSEPH FRATER,
LOYAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS,
TO WHOM MUCH OF THE MATERIAL AND ALL OF THE
ATMOSPHERE OF THE STORY IS OWING
THIS BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
WITH GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FROM
THE AUTHOR
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE TOWNLANDER 1
II. THE SOW’S EAR 16
III. THE GOLDEN YOUTH 30
IV. IN WHICH CARFAX ENLISTS 47
V. PARTLY SENTIMENTAL 59
VI. DADDY LAYNE, AND OTHERS 73
VII. COMPANY COME 82
VIII. THE STUBBORN ROCK 96
IX. A BAD NIGHT FOR RUCKER 114
X. BLIND ALLEYS 125
XI. ROSEMARY AND RUE 148
XII. DULL STEEL 164
XIII. THE BURNT CHILD 177
XIV. THE LOGIC OF FACT 194
XV. MAMMY ANN’S GRAVE 207
XVI. A FRIEND AT NEED 230
XVII. AN ANTICLIMAX 248
XVIII. EVOLUTIONARY 261
XIX. THE HUMAN EQUATION 278
XX. LIMITATIONS 294
XXI. THE CLANSMEN 305
XXII. OUT OF A CLEAR SKY 323
XXIII. AT WESTWOOD HOUSE 334
XXIV. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 346
XXV. THE MANGLING OF POICTIERS 365
XXVI. TRYON’S NEWS 377
XXVII. CLOUD-WRAITHS 389
XXVIII. THE OCOEE’S ANSWER 397
XXIX. BEYOND THE GAP 410
XXX. A GROUNDED WIRE 419
XXXI. ON PISGAH’S HEIGHT 436
ILLUSTRATIONS
“Did you really think that some one was shooting at
_you_?” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more 162
“Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!” 328
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently
at his elbow, said: “Quite so” 400
After the Manner of Men
I
The Townlander
Coincident with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon
silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage,
leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s
reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product
of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial
ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster,
could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or
dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity.
“Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the
pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his
impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it
would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee
mountains; “Great Pete----”
The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock
of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled
the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were
filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time
the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into
position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his
weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his
own steadiness of nerve.
Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak,
he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes,
and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he
fancied he could see more--the sunlight reflecting from the polished
barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative
screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees.
While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the
screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the
click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he
reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well
beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against
a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The
target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he
especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house
weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it.
Harboring this distrust, he was content for the moment to make
himself small behind his tree, sitting between two of the flanking
root buttresses with his back against the barrier trunk, and wincing
in spite of himself while other bullets, following now in rapid and
measured succession, whined to right or left, or buried themselves in
the solid wood. Oddly enough, the misses, though he could feel the wind
of them on either side, were less disquieting than the hits. At each
impact of lead against wood there was a jarring little shock quite
thrillingly transmissible to quick-set nerves in sympathetic contact
with the other side of the target.
“By Jove! if Elizabeth could only see me now!” he chuckled broadly;
“Elizabeth, or the _mutterchen_, or even my rough-riding little sister!
This fusillading miscreant of mine must be one of the McNabb outlaws,
trying in his elemental fashion to settle the old feud about our title
to the coal lands. By and by, I suppose-- Whew!”
The spine-tingling thrill was so real this time that he was half
minded to look and see if the impacting bullet had not come all the way
through the tree to bulge the bark on his side of it. But he restrained
the prompting and went on talking to himself.
“By and by, I suppose, he’ll get tired of blazing away at a safe
distance and come charging down upon me. Then I shall be most unhappily
obliged to kill him; which will be about the crassest misfortune that
could happen, next to his killing me. Confound their barbarous feuds,
anyway! Why can’t these out-of-date mountain people wake up and realize
that they are living in the twentieth century of civilization and
Christian enlightenment? That’s what I’d like to know!”
The only reply to this very reasonable query being the vicious “ping”
of another rifle-bullet, he went on discontentedly.
“As if matters were not hopeless enough without adding a scrap with
these silly mountaineers about the land titles! Everything torn up at
home, the family anchor pulled out by the roots in the steel merger,
two women to be taken care of--with Elizabeth presently to make a
third--and nothing to make good on but this failure of a Cumberland
Mountain coal mine! And now, before I’ve had time to turn around, the
spirit moves this rifle-popping moonshine-maker to turn his grouch
loose until I feel it in my bones that I shall have to kill him to make
him quit!”
Then, the _zip-zip_ of the bullets beginning again after a momentary
pause, the soliloquy went on: “That’s right; keep it up, you pin-headed
barbarian! I’ve got you for an excuse to commit manslaughter--that’s
the surest thing there is. Which brings on more talk. I wonder how it
feels to kill a man? I’d give all my old shoes if I didn’t have to
find out experimentally. Then there is Elizabeth: it is two completed
generations back to her Quaker forepeople, but she is quite capable of
flatly refusing to marry what they would have stigmatized as ‘a man of
blood.’ Say, you bloodthirsty assassin--that was an uncomfortably near
one!”
After the glancing shot, which had flicked a handful of bark chips into
Tregarvon’s lap, the firing ceased. Assuring himself that the battling
moment at short range was approaching, the young man from the North sat
tight, gripping the house pistol in nervous anticipation, and listening
tensely for the sound of advancing footfalls.
The suspense was short. Some one, several persons, as it presently
appeared, were pushing through the tangle of low-hanging undergrowth
toward the oak-tree. Tregarvon wondered that there should be no attempt
cautionary on the part of the enemy; wondered again, this time with
nettle pricklings of foolishness, when a voice, cheerfully exultant and
unmistakably feminine, cried out close at hand.
“Oh, you people--come here and see! I _did_ hit it--_lots_ of times;
not that trifling little sheet of paper, of course”--scornfully--“but
the tree, I mean. Just come and-- _Ee-e-ow!_”
The shrill little scream of surprise and alarm was for Mr. Vance
Tregarvon, issuing cautiously from behind the bulwark oak, still
mystified, and still absently gripping the pistol.
The Philadelphian found himself confronting a young woman gowned
in stone-blue linen, and wearing an embroidery hat to match, the
hat shading a face too unaffectedly winsome to be called beautiful,
perhaps, but yet the most piquant and expressive face he had ever
looked upon. This young woman was carrying a target-rifle; and pinned
upon the bullet-punctured side of the oak was the square of white paper
at which she had evidently been shooting.
There were others coming up to join the pretty markswoman: a
lean-faced, mild-eyed, spectacled gentleman of middle age, whose coat
suggested the church or the schoolroom; a vivacious lady in black, with
strongly marked eyebrows and eloquent hands and shoulders; a young
woman who wore an artist’s smock over her walking-gown; and another who
was girlish enough to wear a red tarn, and to be the prettier for it.
But by preference Tregarvon made his stammering apologies to the blue
embroidery hat.
“Ah--er--please don’t mind me,” he begged, acutely conscious that his
abrupt and pistol-bearing entrance was handicapping him prodigiously.
“I thought--that is--er--you see, I really couldn’t know that it was
merely a peaceful target practice, and I----”
“Of all things!” gasped the young woman, her slate-blue eyes
emphasizing her shocked amazement. “Did you really think that some one
was shooting at _you_? But, of course, you must have! How perfectly
dreadful!”
Tregarvon was trying ineffectually to hide the ornamental revolver in
his coat pocket when the others closed in.
“You are sure you are not hurt?” the mild-eyed escort made haste to
inquire, and Tregarvon grinned sheepishly.
“Only in my self-esteem,” he confessed. “I was silly enough to think
that somebody was trying to mark me down, though I might have known
better after the first shot or two.”
“But how could you know when you were behind the tree and couldn’t see
us?” protested the one who had been doing the shooting. “I’m sure it
speaks libraries for your self-control that you didn’t retaliate in
kind! Don’t you think so, Madame Fortier?” and she appealed to the lady
with the Gallic eyebrows and the eloquent shoulders.
“_Ciel!_ but the _sangfroid_--what you call the cold blood--of these
American zhentlemen is of a grandeur the moz’ magnificent!” exclaimed
madame. “Mees Richardia she is shoot a hondred time at zis zhentleman,
and he is say he is injure’ onlee in hees _amour-propre_!”
It was at this point that the humor of the situation overtook the chief
offender, and she laughed, the sweetest and most delectable laugh that
ever gladdened the ears of a young man keenly sensitive to the charms
of heavenly slate-blue eyes, a piquant face, and a voice remindful of
wood-thrushes and song-sparrows and golden-throated warblers.
“After this, there is nothing left for us but to declare ourselves,”
she submitted ruefully, turning to the spectacled escort. “It is the
least we can do to save the gentleman the trouble of describing us if
he wishes to have us taken before Squire Prigmore.”
But now Tregarvon was regaining some measure of equanimity.
“Let me be the one to begin the identifying process,” he amended. “My
name is Vance Tregarvon, and I have the misfortune to be the present
owner of the valueless piece of property known as the Ocoee Mine. You
are more than welcome to make a rifle-range of my landscape any time
you wish. I am quite certain it is the only useful purpose it has ever
subserved.”
The gentleman whose coat was either clerical or schoolmasterish, bowed
gravely and took his turn, prefacing it with a question.
“Have you ever heard of Highmount College for Young Women, Mr.
Tregarvon?”
Tregarvon, in deference to piquancies and slate-blue eyes and the
like, was tempted to quibble and say that, of course, every one knew
of Highmount College. But the heavenly eyes were holding him, and they
promised intolerance of anything but the pellucid truth. So he shook
his head regretfully.
“Such is fame--the fame of an old, a great, and a noble institution
of learning!” said the spectacled one, in mock deprecation. “With
a foundation laid over half a century in the past, with the most
healthful and charming location on the entire Cumberland Mountain for
its site; with a corps of instructors second only to those of the
richly endowed colleges of the North--correct me, Miss Richardia, if
I am not quoting the prospectus accurately--with all these splendid
advantages, and with a student body drawn from the oldest and most
distinguished families of the South.... Mr. Tregarvon, can it be
possible----”
“Spare me!” laughed the victim. “You must remember that I am only a
poor, ignorant provincial from Philadelphia, less than a fortnight out
of the shell.”
“We are merely trying to impress you properly so that you will
think twice before having us arrested for trespass and attempted
assassination,” broke in the laughing markswoman. “We may not look
it, but we are a majority of the faculty of Highmount College for
Young Women. Let me present you to Madame Fortier, Modern Languages;
to Miss Longstreet, Art; to Miss Farron, Assistant Mathematics; and
to Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt, Higher
Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.”
Tregarvon bowed in turn to the Gallic eyebrows, to the artist’s smock,
to the red tam-o’-shanter, and shook hands cordially with the M.A.,
Vanderbilt.
“This is fine, you know; it’s like Robinson Crusoe’s meeting with his
rescuers,” he asserted joyously. “This is my first real hearing of the
English tongue since I began doing time down yonder in Coalville, with
my old ruin of an office-building for a dungeon, and Mrs. Matt Tryon
for my jail matron. Is it very far to Highmount College? And may I hope
sometime to----”
The three younger women laughed at this, and Madame Fortier hastened to
be hospitable.
“We shall be moz’ charm’, Monsieur Tregarvong. I will spik for
President Caswell and hees good madame.” But Tregarvon waited for Miss
Richardia’s confirmation, which was given unhesitatingly.
“Certainly, you must come, if you can spare the time,” she affirmed.
“We were speaking of you, and of the Ocoee prospects, at dinner the
other evening, and Doctor Caswell was even then threatening to look
you up. I think he said he had met your father in years gone by.”
“I am sure that was exceedingly kind and hospitable--to think of taking
the stranger up before he had made himself known,” said Tregarvon, with
the hearth-warmed exile’s glow at his heart. They were moving over
to the rifle-rest, and he had fallen a step or two behind with Miss
Richardia. “You would have to be a castaway in a strange land yourself
to know how good it feels to be counted in.”
“I have been both--the castaway and the counted-in,” she returned. “I
was four years in Boston; two of them without knowing a single soul
outside of a limited little Conservatory circle.”
“Ah,” he said, with the air of one who pats himself on the back for his
own perspicacity. “You didn’t introduce yourself a moment ago, as you
may remember, but I was sure you were Music.”
“Why were you?” she asked.
“Because you look it.”
“Harmony or discord?” she queried, with the bright little laugh
remindful of the bird songs.
“How can you ask! Celestial harmony--no less!” It was only a matter of
a hundred yards, between the oak-tree target and the firing-stand, but
they were getting on very well, indeed.
“Following that line of reasoning, you might say that Miss Longstreet
looks picturesque, I suppose? And Miss Farron----”
“Miss Farron is far too charming to warrant any allusion to figures,
mathematical or other,” he retorted lightly.
“And how about Professor Billy?”
Tregarvon chuckled. “Is that what you call him? I’m glad I have a
Christian name that can’t very well be nicked entirely out of all
resemblance to the original. Which reminds me: have I got to call you
‘Miss Richardia’? It sounds awfully formal--don’t you think?--in the
mouth of a man who has been familiarly shot at by its possessor.”
“You had better,” she replied calmly. “I am ‘Miss Dick’ in the
classrooms; but that is the student body’s privilege. Other people have
to earn it.”
“Consider me an employee from this moment, if you please. I’m good at
earning things.”
“Have you earned the Ocoee property?” she asked, altogether, as it
appeared, by way of making conversation.
“No; but my father did--very bitterly, as it turned out. May I ask
what you know about the Ocoee?”
“Only what every one knows: that it brings sorrow and ruin to everybody
who has anything to do with it.”
They had reached the rifle-stand, and Hartridge was reloading the
target-gun for Miss Farron. There was still a little isolation for
Tregarvon and his companion, and the young man made the most of it.
“Your words imply a lot more than they say,” he suggested. “I shall
take an early opportunity to make my Highmount call, and when I do,
perhaps you will tell me some of the things I need to know.”
“Professor Hartridge or President Caswell can tell you better than I
can,” she demurred, as one dismissing an unpleasant subject. “I only
know that the mine has always been a wretched failure; first a thing
of broken promises, and afterward a cunningly devised pitfall for the
unwary.”
If Tregarvon had for his major weakness the love of women, he was not
lacking such other qualities as may go with broad shoulders, good
gray eyes set wide apart, a clean-cut face, and a resolute jaw. The
squareness of the jaw was emphasized when he said: “This is the time
when the Ocoee quits being a failure, Miss Richardia. It is up to me
to make it a success, and I mean to do it.”
It was at this conjuncture that Miss Farron, trying vainly to sight
the rifle over the fallen-tree firing-stand, broke in upon the
_tête-à-tête_.
“Dickie, dear, do come here and hold your hand over my left eye,” she
called plaintively. “It just persists in coming open to see what the
other one is trying to do.”
II
The Sow’s Ear
The rough-hewn world of mountain and valley had taken on a distinctly
cheerful aspect for the young man from Philadelphia when, late in the
afternoon, he reluctantly separated himself from the rifle-shooting
party and turned his steps valleyward to keep an appointment made
two days earlier with one Angus Duncan, an old Scotch mining expert,
upon whom the great Southern title company, unlimited, had long since
conferred the brevet of “captain.”
Whatever the Tregarvon gray eyes and resolute jaw promised in the
way of decisive action and stubborn determination, their possessor
was never born to be a contented anchorite. Not even the matchless
beauties of nature, arrayed in all the glories of a Tennessee mountain
September, could atone for the solitude imposed by the dead-alive
hamlet of Coalville, and the newly opened prospect of an occasional
escape to the congenial social atmosphere of the mountain-top school
was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.
Tregarvon was planning the first of these escapes, and forecasting the
time which would be consumed in freighting his motor-car down from
Philadelphia, when the forest path ended and let him out among the
deserted slope-foot buildings and empty coke-ovens of the Ocoee. He
glanced at his watch. The up-train on the branch railroad was due; it
had doubtless announced its approach by some distant crossing whistle,
since the little squad of village idlers had left its cantonments under
the porch of Tait’s store to straggle across to the station platform.
Tregarvon remained on his own side of the railroad-tracks and waited.
He knew that Captain Duncan’s visit would be discussed in all its
possible bearings in the idlers’ caucus at Tait’s, and he was willing
to disappoint the country-store gossips when it came in his way.
There were but few passengers to get on or off at Coalville when the
branch-line train rolled up to the platform, and Tregarvon had no
difficulty in identifying his man; the stocky, ruddy-faced, shrewd-eyed
mining engineer who had been named to him as the foremost coal expert
in the Tennessee field. He cut Duncan out of the group of loungers at
the instant of hand-shaking, and took him across to the dilapidated
building which had once been the superintendent’s office and the
commissary of the Ocoee Company, seeking, and securing, as he imagined,
ear-shot privacy for the business conference.
But privacy in a Southern country hamlet, where gossip is as the breath
of life to the isolated few, is only to be bought with a price. From
his post of observation in Tait’s doorway, a lank, bristly-bearded man
in grimy jeans that had once been butternut, marked the direction of
the retreat across the railroad-tracks, made a dodging détour around
the engine of the standing train, and was safely hidden behind a thick
clump of althea bushes at the corner of the office-building when
Tregarvon and the Scotchman came leisurely to sit on the door-stone.
“Ye’re paying me for an expert opeenion, Mr. Tregarvon, and that’s what
I’m bound to gie ye,” the engineer was saying. “I’ve known the Ocoee
ever since the first pick was piked intil it, and ye’ll be wasting
your time and money if you try to develop it. That’s what I told your
father, and it’s what I’m telling his son.”
“Poor coal? Or not enough of it?” Tregarvon’s manner was that of a man
desirous of knowing the exact facts.
“Good coal--fine! It makes a coke that would run everything this side
of Pocahontas, or maybe Connellsville, out o’ the market. And there is
enough of it if the two veins could be worked as one. But there’s the
bogie, Mr. Tregarvon; two well-defined veins, each a foot and a half
thick, one above the other, and with six foot of solid rock between. If
you had twenty such veins it wouldn’t pay to work them in this part of
the country.”
“You mean that the digging out of the rock between the two coal seams
would eat up all the profits?”
“Just that.”
Tregarvon was pulling ineffectually at his short pipe. When he stooped
to pluck a spear of grass for a stem-cleaner he said: “Wasn’t it the
notion of the earliest promoters that the two veins would merge into
one, farther back in the mountain?”
The expert waved his hand toward the long and costly inclined tramway
running straight up the steep slope of the mountain to the two black
openings at the foot of the cliff-line.
“Ye’d think they believed in it--wouldn’t ye now--to build that tramway
on the strength of it? Two hunner’ thousand and better they put in
here, first and last; on the tramway and the coke-ovens, the miners’
houses, and this fine office-building that’s crum’ling down behind our
backs! And with every practical coal man in the country telling them
that such a thing as two veins--two separate veins, mind ye--coming
into one was a geological impossibeelity. Parker--the man who set the
trap and caught everybody--he knew, I’m thinking; but Judge Birrell and
all the rest of ’em were crazy--fair crazy!”
“But is it a geological impossibility, Captain Duncan? That is one of
the questions I got you up here to answer for me,” Tregarvon put in.
The Scotch engineer was too cautious to be definitely oracular.
“It’s never been h’ard of yet,” he replied shrewdly, “and there’s a
many to tell ye that the day o’ merricles is past. But that isn’t all,
Mr. Tregarvon. Besides being a sow’s ear that ye canna hope to make
into a silk purse, the Ocoee has another handicap. If ye had your coal
in profitable shape and quantity, ye’d never be allowed to mine and
coke and market it; never in this warld.”
“Who would stop me?”
“The C. C. & I. Company, which is another name in this part o’ the
warld for Consolidated Coal--the trust. The combine owns all the
producing mines hereabouts; they’ve got one in full blast at Whitlow,
five miles above this. If you should develop into anything worth while,
it would be another case of the lion and the lamb lying down in peace
together--with the Ocoee lamb inside of the trust lion. They couldn’t
afford to lat ye operate. Your coke, for as much of it as ye could
make, would drive theirs out o’ the market.”
“Well?” said the Philadelphian.
“They’d buy ye, if they could haggle ye down to sell at a bargain; and,
failing in that, they’d break ye. I’m not questioning your resources,
ye unnerstand; that part of it was none of my business after I’d had
your check for my fee safely in my pocket,” he threw in cannily. “But
tell me, now: if ye had your four or five or even six foot of coal, are
ye big enough in the way o’ backing and capital to fight Consolidated
Coal wi’ any hope of coming out alive?”
“That is as it may be,” said Tregarvon, wishing neither to deny nor
to affirm publicly. Then he asked casually if the engineer could give
chapter and page proving the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company’s policy
of extermination.
“Can I no?” said the Scotchman, with a snap of the shrewd eyes. “I can
show ye wrecked mines by the handfu’ in a day’s ride up and down this
same Wehatchee Valley we’re sitting in. ’Tis the power o’ money, Mr.
Tregarvon. When ye get between the jaws o’ that crusher, ye’re like
this”--picking up a bit of friable sandstone and crumbling it in his
palm.
The younger man smoked on thoughtfully for a time. Then he said: “Two
of the points upon which I wished to have your opinion have been
covered pretty conclusively, it would seem. But there is a third. What
about this trouble with the McNabbs over the land title?”
The Scotchman waved the third point away as if it had been a buzzing
fly.
“The McNabbs are just a whiskey-making lot of poor bodies living back
in the Pocket beyond Highmount. An unscrupulous lawyer-scamp got hold
of them when the second Ocoee Company was fair rolling in money, and
showed them how they could trump up a claim to a wedge-like slip o’
land on the top o’ the mountain which, if the claim could be made good,
would cut off the mine a hundred feet or so back from the cliff. There
was neither sense nor justice in it, and the courts said so. Ye’ll be
having no trouble wi’ the McNabbs, unless one o’ them might be taking a
pop at ye wi’ his squirrel-gun some fine day.”
Tregarvon smiled, recalling his sensations while Miss Richardia’s
bullets were snipping bark souvenirs from his sheltering oak.
“One wouldn’t be scared out by a little thing like that,” he remarked
half humorously. Then he asked, quite abruptly, another question--the
chief question for an answer to which he had paid the expert’s fee.
“I have been told, Captain Duncan, that you have made an analysis
of the Ocoee coals. Also, I have been given to understand that no
two veins in these Tennessee coal-measures have exactly the same
characteristics; that the quality of the coal varies with its distance
from the original surface, though the depth difference between any two
deposits may be very slight. If you didn’t know of the existence of the
six-foot layer of stone lying between my two coal seams, would you, or
would you not, say that they were one and the same?”
Duncan took time to consider before answering the crucial question.
“I see what ye’re driving at, now,” he said at length. “Ye’ve paid me
for a true answer, Mr. Tregarvon, and much as I’ll hate to see your
father’s son banging his head against a stone wall, I’ll give it ye.
I’ve made half a dozen analyses: so far as they prove anything, the
coal in the two seams is the same.”
“Thank you,” returned Tregarvon, drawing a free breath as if a burden
had been lifted from his shoulders by the answer. And then, as a
quavering whistle blast announced the approach of the down freight
train on the branch: “There is your return train, Captain Duncan. If I
had any hospitality to offer you, you shouldn’t go back to Hesterville
to-night. As it is, I know you’ll be glad you don’t have to stop over
in Coalville. Even the name is a misnomer, it would seem.”
The grizzled Scotchman had discharged his duty and earned his fee. But
the cravings of a purely Caledonian curiosity were still unsatisfied.
“And what’ll ye be doing, think ye, Mr. Tregarvon?” he asked
inquisitively.
Tregarvon’s answer was pointedly and purposefully indifferent. “Oh, I
don’t know definitely yet. I may take a notion to butt my head against
the stone wall, and I may not. If I should, you’ll doubtless hear of
it. Good-by; it was mighty good of you to take the trouble to come and
talk with me when you might have put me off with a letter.”
Though the leave-taking at the door of the office-building was a fact
accomplished, Tregarvon prolonged it a little by walking across to the
station with Duncan. Thereby he missed a possible chance of seeing the
retreat of the man who had been crouching behind the althea bushes, the
dodging run, first to the shelter of the row of coke-ovens, and later
to the lower fringe of the Mount Pisgah forest, darkening now in the
early valley twilight.
Late that night, in his room in the cobwebbed and dismantled
office-building, Tregarvon wrote two letters. The first was to a
certain golden youth in New York, a young man rejoicing in the ancient
and honorable name of Poictiers Carfax, and whose father had left him
more money than he knew what to do with. Upon Carfax Tregarvon leaned
as upon a brother, having shared rooms with the golden one in the
university at a period in which the Tregarvon family check could also
have been drawn for seven figures.
“You are always howling and taking on about living the simple life,”
was the opening phrase in the letter to Carfax. “I wish you could be
with me to-night and have a taste of what it really is--ten thousand
miles from the Great White Way or a decent beefsteak. I’d describe it
for you if this were anything but a begging letter--which it isn’t.
“First, I wish you’d send your machinist over to Philadelphia and have
him ship my car to me here. Tell him to put in extras of everything,
from spark-plugs to tires, just the same as if he were sending it to a
man in Darkest Africa.
“Next (and this is of more importance to me, and perhaps less to you),
I am going into a scheme here which promises to leave me stony broke
before I shall have pulled half-way through the experimental stage,
and will possibly bankrupt even the Carfax strong box when it fairly
gets its second wind. I may have to sell you some stock, later on, and
to that end I’ll be glad if you’ll keep in touch--so that you may be
‘touched’--or at least keep yourself within reach of a wire.
“This is all I’m going to write, for the time being, except to say that
I’ve thought of you about five times a minute during the past week, and
have tried to picture you in Coalville, hesitating between suicide and
a lingering death from disgust. Come down and try it. I’ll go bail it
will give you an entirely new set of sensations. What do you say?”
The second letter was to Miss Elizabeth Wardwell, and it was a
masterpiece in its way--the way of a man who writes as he would talk,
and who talks when he would much better hold his tongue.
“The adventures began to-day,” so ran the words of unwisdom. “While I
was clambering around on the mountain above the Ocoee opening, _zip!_
came a bullet--yes, an indubitable leaden bullet fired from a gun--near
enough to make me dodge. What will you think of me when I write it down
in muddy black ink on white paper that I hid behind a tree! I did, you
know, and immediately had plenty of reasons for being thankful that the
tree was big enough to cover me, and thick enough through to stop a
rifle-bullet.
“For fifteen minutes, or such a matter--though it seemed a moderately
long lifetime--my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I
could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet
into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth,
and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with
the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man.
Would you?
“When it was all over, my assassins--it turned out that there was a
bunch of them--proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount
College shooting at a mark, which the same--though I hadn’t seen it,
and didn’t remotely suspect its existence--was affixed to the farther
side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive
young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged
professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were
explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked
revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my
face, I suppose.
“They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had
been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh.
It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern
voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole
insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell,
I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing
about and looking on and listening in?
“I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I
shall--later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours
and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people
properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one
little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are
likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go.
“Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of
your letters--how much they mean to me.”
III
The Golden Youth
It was on the day following Captain Angus Duncan’s visit that the
hamlet of Coalville, nestling at the foot of Mount Pisgah, took a fresh
start as an industrial centre. Word went out from Tait’s store, which
served as a general intelligence exchange for the country roundabout,
that Tregarvon wanted laborers and would pay good wages.
The men came; some from the half-tilled valley farms, a few from the C.
C. & I. mines farther up the railroad, and two or three mountaineers.
Two of the mountain dwellers, long-haired, unshaven backwoodsmen, gave
their names as Morgan and Sill, suppressing, for some reason best known
to themselves, their surname of McNabb. Also there came the lean,
bristly-bearded man who had squatted behind the althea bushes at the
corner of the office-building during Tregarvon’s talk with Captain
Duncan; James Sawyer, by name. Tregarvon knew nothing of this man’s
antecedents; of the forehistory of any of them, for that matter. What
he demanded was work, and he went about securing it in the best of all
possible ways: by stripping off his coat and acting as his own foreman.
In strenuous toilings fled the first two weeks, during which period
the old machinery was overhauled, the tramway up the mountain repaired
and put in running order, and the _débris_ of disuse cleared away.
For the aggressive campaign a deep-well drilling plant was secured
in Chattanooga, and upon its arrival all things were made ready for
transporting it to the top of the plateau mountain.
Tregarvon’s plan, which he thought was original with him, was to go
back on the level mountain top with his test-drill, and to sink a
series of holes down to the coal-measures. If the first test should
show the two veins still separated by the stubborn ledge of intervening
rock, he would move the machinery farther back and try again--and yet
again, if need be; though of all this he said no more to his workmen
than was necessary to enable them to help intelligently.
At the beginning of the second week the drilling machinery was hauled
up the mountain, and two days later, Uncle William, a solemn-faced
old negro with a narrow fringe of white wool ringing his otherwise
perfectly bald head, made his appearance at Coalville.
He was waiting for Tregarvon on the Thursday morning when the
Philadelphian turned out to go up the mountain with his working gang;
waiting to doff his battered hat and scrape his foot, and to announce
in honeyed tones that he had come “ter tek cha’ge of de young marsteh.”
Quite naturally, Tregarvon thought there must be some mistake, and said
so; but the old man persisted with the velvety sort of pertinacity
which refuses to be denied, vaunting himself as a body-servant of “the
quality,” and acquiring, or seeming to acquire, a curious hardness of
hearing when Tregarvon questioned him as to where he had come from and
who had sent him.
“Yas, suh--yas, suh; cayn’t hear ve’y good on dat side o’ my haid--no,
suh. But I’se suttin sho’ gwine tek mighty good keer o’ you-all; I is
dat, marsteh.”
“But a body-servant is the last thing on earth that I am needing here,
uncle!” protested Tregarvon, firing his final shot of objection. “If I
could find a good cook now, that would be more to the point.”
“Dat’s it--dat’s it, suh. You-all jes’ go ’long up de mounting and
boss dem po’ white trash, and lef’ ol’ Unc’ Wilyum ter fix up dat
cook-house. He gwine show you what quality cookin’ is; yas, suh; he
will dat!”
Tregarvon left the old man bowing and scraping and backing away to
take possession of the deserted office-building and its detached
cook-shanty; and when he came back to the valley in the evening he
gasped to remember how near he had come to incurring the penalty
imposed upon those who refuse to entertain angels in disguise.
The old office-building was swept and garnished, above and below.
Out of the lumber-room in the basement Uncle William had rescued a
dining-table, chairs, napery of a sort, and dishes; and in the rear
room, which had once been the office of the Ocoee superintendent, a
supper was spread, hot, smoking, and appetizing enough to tempt a sick
man. Even the napkins, improvised for the moment out of pieces of a
flour-sack washed to snowy whiteness, were not lacking; and when the
master would sit down, Uncle William was behind him to whisk the chair
away and to replace it, with all the deftness of a trained butler.
Tregarvon ate and drank in grateful and heartfelt silence down to the
black coffee, which was served, for the want of the proper crockery,
in an egg-cup, with a small fruit dish for a saucer. Then he made the
amende honorable.
“I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, Uncle William, but I
owe you an apology, none the less,” he said. “Consider that I belong to
you for as long as you care to keep me--at your own price.”
“Yas, suh; dat’s it--dat’s jes’ de way de quality talk to ol’ Unc’
Wilyum, eve’y time--_hyuh! hyuh!_ ’Long erbout an hour o’ sun, white
woman comed ercross f’om dat white-niggah cabin turrer side de big
road, and she say: ‘I gwine fix up Mistoo Tregarbin’s suppeh.’ _I_ say,
‘Mistoo Tregarbin ’sents his compliments an’ say t’ank you kin’ly, but
he done got he own body-sarvant!’ Yas, suh; dat’s what I done tol’
_huh_.”
Tregarvon’s eyes twinkled.
“You’ll be getting yourself disliked, Uncle William, if you put on your
quality manners with Mrs. Tryon and her kind. They tell me that this
county was Republican during the war.” Then he added: “Are you ready to
tell me now who sent you here?”
The old man was clearing the supper-table, and he seemed to have
entirely misunderstood the query.
“Dat ol’ cook-house? Yas, suh; it sholy did try me for to git dat ol’
chimley ter mek de fiah bu’n for de supper-fixin’s. Ter-morrer I gwine
chink him up some; yas, suh, I sholy is.”
After Uncle William’s mysterious advent the work on the mountain
progressed the more rapidly by precisely the difference between a
well-fed leader and an ill-fed. Tregarvon and his pick-up crew wrought
manfully, and on the eighteenth day--the day of fresh surprises--the
drilling machinery had been safely transported to the plateau, had
been set up, and was ready to be started on the test upon which the
Tregarvon hopes were building airy structures of future affluence.
At quitting-time on this eighteenth day of preparatory toil Tregarvon
came down in a tram-car with his men and, after the dispersal at the
mountain foot, stood for a moment on the office-building porch to let
the quiet grandeur of the perfect autumn evening soak in and wash the
work-weariness out of his jaded brain and muscles.
The sun had gone behind the mountain for all the lower reaches of the
valley, but its level rays were still pouring in a flood of yellow
light across the flat-topped promontory crowned by the buildings of
Highmount College. Pisgah, densely forested on slope and summit, loomed
vast as the early shadows rose like silently drawn curtains to soften
its rugged detail, and on the sky-line Tregarvon’s gaze sought and
found the derrick skeleton of his drilling plant struck out in rigid
lines of black against the hazy blue. Just above him the tramway cut
its steeply ascending gash through the forest of the slope, and in his
mind’s eye he could see the cars descending, each with its load of the
reopened mine’s largesse, to be dumped upon the receiving-platform
beside the row of coke-ovens.
From the outlined derrick to the sun-illumined college buildings was
an airy leap of a mile or more. Tregarvon had not as yet used his
invitation, though the French teacher’s giving of it had been promptly
confirmed by a cordial note from the president’s wife. The social
hunger rose strong in the expatriated townlander as he let his eyes
make the leap from the industries, typified by the derrick skeleton,
to the possible relaxations harboring on Highmount. He meant to go;
he promised himself afresh that he would go, the moment his motor-car
should arrive and be put into commission to make the five-mile climb up
the mountain pike from Coalville something less than an added weariness
after a hard day’s work.
He was still looking longingly up to the sun-shot heights and
wondering why he had heard nothing from Poictiers Carfax, when a
sound, breeze-blown up the valley, made him start and listen. When he
heard it again it was nearer; the unmistakable roar of an automobile’s
engines with the muffler cut out. To confirm the witness of the ear, a
big yellow car presently topped the rise in the valley road below the
village and came bounding over the roughnesses of the country wagon
track toward the railroad crossing.
Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous
thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man
in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the
square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap
beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt
upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was
Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet.
Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly
striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated.
And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention
of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made
himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little
beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon
the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to
Tregarvon’s door.
“Hit do beat the Dutch--what-all gits up in the big woods when you
ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he
returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the
eye-glasses--he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big
ones--he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello,
Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the
dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort
o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’--’r some sech name as that--‘did
you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I
did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was
a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back,
lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything
was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.”
“President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the
listeners.
“President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought
Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’
some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then
he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller
_totin’ the carpet-bags_!”
“I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of
the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had
’em--called ’em val-lays.”
“I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused
Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn
nugget of plug tobacco.
“He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,”
volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless.
“He’s got two of ’em in his gang now--Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they
don’t git him afore he gits the coal----”
“Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,”
laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way.
Thus ran the leisurely comment in the gray of the evening, working
its way from man to man among the loungers on Tait’s porch. But in
the dilapidated office-building across the railroad-tracks there was
consternation.
“Why, Poictiers, old man, you can’t endure it for twenty-four hours!”
Tregarvon was protesting anxiously. “Look at this place--a dusty,
cobwebby ruin that a self-respecting tramp wouldn’t lodge in! Heavens,
man! couldn’t you see a joke when it was written out plain with a pen
and ink? I would have as soon invited Elizabeth--meaning it!”
Carfax had slipped out of his dust-coat and goggles, the valet
assisting, and stood revealed as a handsome young fellow, a shade too
well-groomed, perhaps, but with smiling good-nature atoning for the
Carfax millions in every line of his beardless and almost effeminate
face.
“Now that is what I call downright inhospitable,” he laughed, with the
faintest suspicion of a lisp on the sibilants, “after you had written
me to come. Your letter is out in the go-cart, if Merkley didn’t forget
to put it in my letter-case. Also, after I’ve driven that unspeakable
car of yours over a thousand miles of the worst roads the rain ever
rained on----”
“Oh, good Lord, Poictiers--you’re welcome; as welcome as the sunshine!
Don’t rub it into me that way. But the place; the--the----”
Carfax’s smile was cherubic; or rather it would have been if the
womanish lines of his face had not made it seraphic.
“No apologies, you inexpressible old coal-digger. I knew you were
only joking when you asked me--or rather dared me--to come down.
But the notion seized me, and here I am. Here, likewise, is Rucker,
the machinist, who will happily shift for himself; and what is more
serious, perhaps, here also is Merkley. In all human probability I
shall bleat like a sheep at the corn-pones and the hardtack, and all
that; but Merkley was once in the service of the Duke of Marlford and
his agonies----”
Tregarvon laughed, and the stresses came off.
“Luckily, I have acquired Uncle William, or, perhaps I should say, he
has acquired me, since I wrote you, and you won’t starve, whatever
happens to Merkley. Find your way up-stairs and take possession,
while I tell the old uncle what he is up against in the way of
supper-getting. You’ll find a bath, with ice-cold mountain spring
water--my one luxury--at the end of the upper corridor.”
Considering his resources, which were few and strictly limited, Uncle
William shed a lustre all his own upon the dinner for two, which was
served in the makeshift dining-room as soon as Carfax came down.