comment, when the snowy biscuits and the egg-bread, the fried chicken
and the riced potatoes had passed in review. “I only wish I could
induce an Uncle William to adopt me.”
Thus the master; but the London-bred man was not faring so well. It was
Uncle William’s effort to orient the valet--an effort vocalizing itself
through the screened windows of Tregarvon’s dining-room--that reopened
the question of the practicabilities.
“Is you-all dat gemman’s white niggah?” was the blunt demand, made when
Merkley, dinner-inclined, ventured into the sacred precincts of Uncle
William’s detached cook-house.
“H-I am Mr. Carfax’s man, and h-I’ll trouble you to serve my dinner,”
was the lofty reply, returned in Merkley’s best tone of aloofness.
“I’s askin’ ef you is dat gemman’s white niggah!”--scornfully. “Ef you
is, you jes’ sots youse’f down on dat door-step an’ waits, same as
any turrer niggah. When de quality folks gets t’rough, an’ _I_ gets
t’rough, den you kin have what’s lef’.”
Carfax waved a shapely hand toward the open window.
“The irrepressible conflict has begun,” he remarked. “What do you do in
such cases in--er--Coalville?”
“We go down on our knees, metaphorically speaking, and plead with an
outraged and righteously indignant Uncle William,” Tregarvon laughed;
and when the old negro made his next appearance in the dining-room,
the Philadelphian did it so skilfully that Merkley was provided for at
a side table in the hall; not of grace, as certain mumblings from the
cook-house proved, but because the master desired it.
“That settles our status,” said Carfax, with the cherubic smile, “at
least down to Rucker, the mechanician. I wonder what has become of him?”
“If he is the same mechanical barbarian you had last year, he’ll not
go hungry,” Tregarvon ventured; and then, with the assurance of a
tried friend: “Whatever possessed you to come down here _en suite_,
Poictiers? Did I give you the impression that the Ocoee headquarters
was a summer-resort hotel?”
Carfax laughed joyously. “You certainly did not. But I was tired of
Lenox, and it was too early for the shooting. Moreover, you said you
wanted your car, and the fit took me to drive it. That accounts for
Rucker; and I suppose I account for poor Merkley. He is due to have
the time of his gay young life--don’t you think?--with Uncle William
and the elemental environment? But tell me more about your affair.
What have you been letting yourself in for, down here in the Southern
backwoods?”
Uncle William had removed the cloth, and had put a tobacco-jar and two
pipes on the table.
“It is the best we can do, even for you,” said Tregarvon, indicating
the tobacco aftermath apologetically. “Nobody has ever seen a bottle of
wine in Coalville, and the whiskey of the country isn’t fit to drink.”
Then he plunged abruptly into the story of the Ocoee, so far as he knew
it, giving the last-resort reasons why he was trying to make a family
windbreak of it, and Carfax heard him through patiently.
“Then it sums itself up about like this: You haven’t anything at
present, and if you succeed in getting anything, the other fellows will
nab it,” he said, when Tregarvon had finished. “Is that about the size
of it?”
“You have surrounded it completely. Only I am eliminating the ‘if.’ I
mean to get something, and I don’t mean to let the other fellows get
away with it.”
“Any move made yet?” queried Carfax, between delicate little puffs at
the pipe of hospitality.
“Not visibly. The trust people will scarcely move in the matter until
after I have proved my first proposition, which is that the two veins
of coal become one farther back in the mountain. But the McNabbs may
not wait that long.”
“Who are the McNabbs?”
Tregarvon explained again, at some length, not omitting mention of a
mysterious leaf fire which had threatened to destroy a tramway trestle,
and other small accidents which had somewhat impeded the work of the
past fortnight, and which were blankly unaccountable save upon a theory
of somebody’s malice.
“Why don’t you buy ’em off?” said Carfax casually. Money was his
cure-all for most human ills.
“For one reason, they haven’t given me a chance. For another, I don’t
propose to be held up and robbed. They haven’t any title to the land;
they have never had a shadow of a title.” Then he broke off suddenly,
glanced at his watch, and changed the subject. “How much too tired
are you to take a five-mile spin with me up the mountain in the car,
Poictiers?” he asked.
Carfax’s eyebrows went up in mild surprise. Nevertheless, he said:
“Call it a go--if you can find Rucker.”
“Never mind Rucker; I’ll drive you myself,” said Tregarvon, and a few
minutes later the big car, with its dazzling headlamps picking out the
way, was storming up the steep grades of the Pisgah pike to Highmount.
IV
In Which Carfax Enlists
On the broad veranda of the administration building at Highmount, which
looked down sidewise upon the twinkling light or two of Coalville and
faced on even terms an opposing shoulder of the mountain where the
newly erected drill derrick stood, Carfax was holding Miss Farron and
four privileged members of the senior class at bay, while Tregarvon
contentedly monopolized Miss Richardia Birrell.
The two thus comfortably isolated had quickly exhausted the
commonplaces. Tregarvon was made to know thus early that one of Miss
Richardia’s charms was her ability to plunge at once into the heart of
things; and the talk had turned upon Carfax, distance and the hubbub of
the others sanctioning personalities.
“Oh, you don’t know him yet,” Tregarvon protested, in refutation of a
remark of Miss Birrell’s based upon Carfax’s apparent satisfaction with
his present besetment. “He is anything but a butterfly, in the meaning
you imply; and I say this in spite of his pretty face and airy gabble,
and the lisp and his bad habit of slipping instinctively, as you might
say, into the easiest chair in sight. I’ve summered him and wintered
him, and I know.”
“I like loyalty,” said Miss Richardia, with the air of one to whom
abstractions are as daily bread. “Are you going to winter him in
Coalville?”
“No such good luck as that for me, I’m afraid. After the shooting
begins, I don’t imagine he has a week untaken. You may not believe it,
but Poictiers is in demand--where he is known and appreciated.”
“I am sure we shall appreciate him,” was the half-mocking rejoinder.
“Young men who come to Highmount driving their own tonneau cars are not
so plentiful.”
Tregarvon’s laugh was not more than decently boastful.
“This particular tonneau car happens to be mine,” he explained.
“Besides, Carfax might discount your praise. His latest purchase is an
imported Dumont-Sillery, I believe. It probably cost three times as
much as mine; and on the other side of the water, at that.”
“How easily and familiarly you talk of imported luxuries and ‘the
other side’,” she commented, still in the mocking vein. And then,
with an exactly proportioned touch of wistfulness: “I wish I might
have a glimpse into your world; the world you have turned your back
upon--temporarily.”
Tregarvon slid into this little pitfall without realizing that it had
been digged especially for him, thus proving that social hunger may
be as blind as any of the other appetites. So far from suspecting
pitfalls, he was thinking that there were many less enjoyable
diversions than sitting in a moderately secluded corner of a dimly
lighted veranda in the company of a young woman who was kind enough to
evince an interest in a chance visitor’s proper sphere.
“It is not such a very high-planed world, the one I’ve left behind,
Miss Richardia; not nearly as human as this of Coalville and Mount
Pisgah,” he returned. “I believe I have seen more real human nature in
the past three weeks than I had ever seen before.”
“You mean that the other world is artificial?”
“It is; without intending to be, especially. We are not elemental any
more; not even in our passions. We do things in a certain well-defined
way because that is the way other people do them. We are afraid, or at
least disinclined, to strike out on new lines.”
“You have struck out on a new line, haven’t you?” she asked.
“I have been pushed out, in this Ocoee matter. There is enough of the
elemental surviving in me to make me break with traditions and become
a hustler when it is a question of bread and meat for my mother and
sister. But apart from that, I suppose I am quite as hidebound as other
men of my world.”
“And Mr. Carfax?” she queried. “Is he a slave to conventions, too?”
“Poictiers is a law unto himself in a good many ways; but on the
whole, he’s tarred with the same stick. You will remark his regalia:
I couldn’t have pulled him up here to-night with a three-inch hawser
if he hadn’t happened to have evening clothes in his kit. And he has
brought his man; a typical Cockney valet, knee-smalls, Oxford ties, and
all.”
Miss Richardia’s quiet laugh fitted the incongruity. But when she spoke
again it was of the business affair.
“You are at work on the Ocoee?” she inquired.
“Yes, indeed! I am going to make a spoon or spoil a perfectly good
horn. You must all come over and see my test-drilling outfit when we
get it going.”
“Is it your machine that we can see over beyond the glen? I wonder
if you could make me understand what you are going to do?” she said,
with interest real or so skilfully feigned that Tregarvon could not
distinguish the difference.
He expressed himself as being very willing to try; did try at some
considerable length. And Miss Birrell, notwithstanding an air of
abstraction that seemed to come and go, appeared to grasp the
mechanical details.
“You have no doubt that you will succeed? It will be fine to prove to
everybody that all that was needed was for some one to come from the
other world--your world--to show them how to do it.”
Tregarvon winced, seeing now the pitfall into which he had suffered
himself to be led.
“Is that the impression I’ve been giving you?” he asked. “Do I
advertise myself as such a blooming bounder as that would signify?”
“Forgive me,” she said, with a little laugh which might have meant
anything from veiled ridicule to a keen appreciation of a palpable
hit. “I suspect it is the way of your world to be austerely sufficient
unto itself. You may contradict me if I am wrong.”
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed generously. “You are as much of my world as I
am.”
“Oh, no!” she objected: “we are only poor outlanders. I was called that
once, in Boston; not spitefully, of course, but rather as an excuse for
my shortcomings, I fancy.”
“Whoever said it was a snob,” he exploded. “Boston is horribly
provincial, at times, you know.”
“And Philadelphia never is?”
“I shouldn’t dare to make the claim too broad. But I am sure
we recognize the fact that there is an America west of the
Alleghenies--and south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”
“That is charitable, at least,” she conceded. “Still, you think it is
left for you to demonstrate success where others have failed--in the
Ocoee undertaking.”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” he answered, with due modesty.
“Indeed, I know little or nothing about the early history of the mine.
My father became interested in it some years before he died, and I
think he always regarded it as a dead loss. But he bought the stock,
or rather, I should say, had it forced upon him, when it was pretty
cheap, and----”
“Yes,” she interrupted, a little forbiddingly, he thought; and then
she began to speak of other things as if groping for a more congenial
common ground. It was found when Tregarvon confessed to an amiable
weakness for good music.
“I’ll play for you if you wish,” she said almost abruptly; and it was
an hour later when Carfax entered the music-room to break the spell
which Miss Richardia had woven about her single listener.
“You must do this again, but not too often,” was Tregarvon’s
half-jesting warning to his entertainer at the moment of leave-taking;
a moment snatched while Carfax was giving the privileged seniors a spin
around the campus drive in the yellow car.
“Why not often?--or as often as you care to come?” the musician asked
indifferently.
“Because I am much too impressionable. You could very easily make me
forget some things that it is up to me to remember.”
“For example?” she prompted.
“It’s a long story, and Poictiers won’t give me time to tell it now.
But some other evening, if I may come?”
“Why shouldn’t you come when you feel like it? I hope you won’t go away
underestimating your welcome--you and Mr. Carfax. You owe it to us to
come frequently, so that the novelty will wear off--for the student
body. I’ll venture to assert that Miss Longstreet has been having the
time of her life keeping order in the dormitories this evening. Good
night; and give my love to Uncle William.”
“To Uncle William? Then you know him?”
She laughed and showed him that Carfax was waiting for him. “Uncle
William will know who sent the message if you say ‘Miss Dick’,” she
explained; and he was obliged to accept this as an answer to his eager
question.
The road down the mountain was a speeding track only in spots, and
between stretches the big car crept at a snail’s pace on the brakes,
and so permitted conversation.
Carfax began it in genial raillery, congratulating Tregarvon upon the
accessibility of Highmount and the very evident heartiness of his
welcome.
“You can’t desiccate entirely down here, Vance, with such a well-spring
of youth and beauty as that within shouting distance,” he remarked.
But Tregarvon was thinking pointedly of Miss Richardia when he
rejoined: “She is a puzzle to me, Poictiers; nothing less.”
“The charming music teacher, you mean? Peaches-and-cream, I’d call her,
if she’d let me.”
“You’re blind; blind as a mole!” retorted Tregarvon. “Why, man! she is
anything but that--or those.”
“Doubtless,” Carfax laughed. “They are all ‘anything but that’ when
you get down under the pose. But ‘peaches-and-cream’ is Miss Birrell’s
pose, just the same; not the conventional kind they serve you at the
Waldorf or Ritz-Carlton, of course, but the sort you get when the cream
comes thick and rich from your own dairy, and the peaches are picked,
sun-warm, in your own orchard. You may tell her that, if you like, and
palm it off as original with you. Strikes me it’s rather neat.”
“Oh, you go hang!” said Tregarvon. “I don’t have to work in your
compliments, second-hand. I can turn ’em myself, at a pinch.”
At this point a half-mile of good road beckoned for speed, and the talk
was interrupted. When it was resumed at the next curving hazard in the
pike, Carfax had somewhat to say about the Ocoee.
“What do you know about the ancient history of your mine, Vance?” he
asked, when the topic was fairly launched.
“Nothing much, in detail. Why?”
“I was asking for information. President Caswell was speaking of it
while you were in the music-room with Miss Birrell. He came out and
sat with us for half an hour or so. There is a mystery of some sort
connected with the Ocoee.”
“Sure!” said Tregarvon. “The mystery is six feet thick, and it consists
of a layer of good solid sandstone. I’m about to penetrate it with a
test-drill.”
“No; I didn’t mean that,” Carfax objected. “It is another kind of
mystery. I’ll tell you what Doctor Caswell said, and you may draw your
own conclusions. We had been talking about superstitions and their
hold upon humanity. I was scoffing, as usual, but the president seemed
inclined to a belief that Providence or fate, or whatever you wish to
call it, does interfere sometimes; and that these interferences form a
basis for some of the convictions we call superstitions.”
“All of which would seem to be a good many miles from a pair of coal
seams made profitless by a stone ‘horse’ between them,” suggested
Tregarvon mildly.
“I’m coming to that; the distance isn’t so great as it may seem.
The doctor rode his notion as if it were a hobby. He spoke of the
well-grounded belief in the saying that ‘murder will out,’ and insisted
that the facts proved the truth of this saying; facts which were often
mysterious. Then he referred to that other pet notion of the bulk of
mankind: that misfortune pursues the possessor of ill-gotten gains. To
my astonishment, he pointed to your Ocoee property as an example.”
“The dickens he did!” exclaimed Tregarvon, with interest suddenly
awakened. “How did he make the Ocoee fit in?”
“That is the peculiar part of it. When I betrayed my complete ignorance
of matters Ocoeean by beginning to ask questions, he shut up like a
clam. All I could get out of him was an assertion that misfortunes had
accompanied every succeeding attempt to open the mine, and that they
would doubtless continue to follow until justice was done.”
“But justice to whom?” queried Tregarvon. “You didn’t let it rest at
that, I hope.”
“I tried not to, but he gave me a dignified cold shoulder and referred
me to you; said you doubtless knew all the circumstances, and would,
he hoped, take proper steps toward removing the curse.”
The descent of Pisgah was accomplished, and Tregarvon steered the
yellow car into an empty warehouse which was to be its garage.
Later, when he was showing his guest to the sleeping-room made ready
for him by Uncle William, he said: “I don’t wish to pull you into this
thing with me blindfolded, Poictiers. If there is a skeleton in the
Ocoee closet, I’ll have it out and give it decent Christian burial
before I ask you to back me.”
But at this, Carfax appeared at his multi-millionaire best.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort, old man. You will find me some old
clothes to-morrow morning and we’ll go up and set your test-drill at
work. Further along, when more money is needed, I’ll go somewhere to a
bank and turn the fortunate spigot. We’ve got to make a go of your mine
now, if only to show Doctor Caswell that the superstitions can’t prove
up on this particular homestead.”
V
Partly Sentimental
Carfax’s promise to stay and see the Ocoee experiment fairly on its
feet was made in good faith, as the idlers at Tait’s store, and more
than these, a London-bred and disconsolate Merkley, were shortly
given to understand. Moreover, the golden youth’s threat of wearing
old clothes and dipping into the crude mechanical processes of the
experiment was also carried out; which not only deepened Merkley’s
conviction that he had attached himself to a mild-mannered lunatic of
a peculiarly American type, but left him without an occupation--a mere
fragment of urban flotsam eddying in the backlash of a rude current of
bucolic unfamiliarity.
Unlike Rucker, the mechanician, who promptly donned overalls and
jumper, pulled his tight-fitting burglar’s cap down to his ears, and
put himself at the head of Tregarvon’s drilling squad on the mountain
top, Merkley took to drink and the company of the loungers on Tait’s
porch. Here he became (though unhappily without knowing it) a target
for the shrewd wit of the idlers, and, what he was even further from
suspecting, the gossip circle’s chief source of information touching
the daily progress of the latest attempt to make a silk purse out of
the Ocoee sow’s ear.
At first there was little for Merkley to tell, and the army of
leisure, smoking its corn-cob pipes and whittling the corners of the
packing-boxes on Tait’s porch, looked on and amused itself by slyly
baiting the disconsolate Londoner.
Day by day, Tregarvon, Carfax, and the promoted chauffeur turned out
early in the morning, took their places with the native laborers in the
tram-car, and were lifted to the scene of their labors on high Pisgah.
At sunset they came down, ate much, smoked a little, talked less, and,
save for an occasional evening when Tregarvon and his guest got out the
yellow automobile and drove to Highmount College, went early to bed as
those who had earned their rest by good, honest muscle-weariness.
But when the smoke plume streaming bravely from the stack of the
mountain-top drilling plant announced the actual beginning of the
experiment, Merkley brought news to Tait’s. Something had gone wrong
on the mountain summit; something was continually going wrong. The
two young men inhabiting the tumble-down office-building across the
railroad-track no longer went to bed immediately after their evening
meal. Instead, there were prolonged conferences behind the closed door
of the dining-room in the rear.
In addition to this, Rucker, characterized by Merkley as a despised,
greasy-handed mechanic, whose burglarish aspect would earn him the
attentions of a plain-clothes policeman in any properly Scotland-Yarded
city of the world, was sometimes called in to these dining-room
conferences, while he, Merkley, once the confidential and trusted valet
of his Grace the Duke of Marlford, was excluded. At this point in his
narrative, Merkley, being the worse for two or three tiltings of Jeff
Walters’s or old man Layne’s jug of corn whiskey, would become tearful
and despondent.
These Merklean hints of a changed condition of affairs on Mount
Pisgah were well buttressed by sundry discouraging facts. During the
making-ready of the drilling plant everything had gone on fairly
well. But dating from the hour when Rucker had first sent live steam
whistling into the cylinder of the small portable engine which
furnished the power, a stream of disaster had trickled discouragingly
and persistently upon the experiment.
First the drills went dull and refused to cut the fine-grained
sandstone of the plateau; and when Rucker had retempered them, the
engine worked water and started a cylinder-head. After the cylinder was
repaired, one of the natives who was firing the boiler let the water
get too low--to the loosening of some of the boiler-flues, and to the
imminent risk of an explosion.
Rucker, handiest of mechanics, calked an entire day on the loosened
flues, and the machinery was started again. Two hours later the
pivot-bolt of the big timber walking-beam which imparted the
up-and-down motion to the drill worked loose, and the walking-beam came
down, one end of it narrowly missing Tregarvon, and the other wrecking
the machinery to the tune of a hundred dollars and an indefinite
interval of waiting for renewals.
It was after this last and most disheartening of the disasters, the
only one thus far that Rucker had not been able to repair on the spot,
that the two young men once more shut the door of the back-office
dining-room upon a disappointed London serving-man.
“By George! I’m beginning to come around to your view of it,
Poictiers,” said Tregarvon, cramming his pipe with dry tobacco from
the jar set out by Uncle William. “These setbacks are knocking us too
regularly to fit decently into any chapter of accidents. I’m beginning
to believe they are inspired.”
“That is precisely what I have been trying to tell you and Rucker all
along, but neither of you would have it that way,” rejoined Carfax
coolly.
“Well, carry your theory to a conclusion; who’s doing it?”
“Ah! now you are getting out to a place where the water is over my
head,” Carfax admitted, toying delicately with a pipeful of strong
“natural-leaf” tobacco. “According to Captain Duncan’s prophecy, you
have two possible ill-wishers--haven’t you?--the C. C. & I. people and
the McNabbs.”
“Yes; but it is rather incredible on both counts, don’t you think? You
can hardly imagine a great corporation getting down on its hands and
knees to chuck pebbles into the wheels of our little mechanism up on
Pisgah.”
Carfax nodded. Then he said: “How about the McNabbs?”
“It seems rather more in their line, you’d say. And yet I haven’t a
shadow of right to accuse them. So far, they are entirely mythological;
a mere name mentioned by Captain Duncan and a few others. So far as I
am aware, I have not yet seen a McNabb.”
“Whoever it is who is setting these little traps for us is deucedly
clever,” remarked Carfax, who was still toying half-heartedly with his
long-stemmed pipe. “Rucker is fooled, all right; he still insists that
it is mere hard luck.”
“Yes, and that is another argument against the McNabb hypothesis,”
Tregarvon put in. “It would take a pretty skilful mechanic to fool
Rucker; and from what I can hear, these title-claimants are ignorant
mountaineers whose mechanical gifts most probably don’t rise beyond
the lock action of an old-fashioned squirrel-rifle or the simple
intricacies of a ten-quart whiskey-still.”