suggested Carfax reflectively, and, after a pause: “How long is this
last smash going to hang us up?”
“Three or four days. If Rucker gets back from Chattanooga with the new
gears by Monday, he will be doing well.”
“All right. To-morrow morning I shall ask you to lend me your yellow
chug-wagon. I have a premonition that the spirit will move me to go and
run this little mystery of yours into a corner.”
Tregarvon laughed good-naturedly. “You’d much better go back to your
own stamping-ground and begin to take up your shooting engagements. You
can’t afford to stay down here monkeying with this last-resort hustle
of mine.”
The golden youth was looking shrewdly over the smoke wreaths at his
companion.
“Is it a last resort, Vance?” he asked quietly, adding: “You have never
told me much about the family smash.”
“It was complete, Poictiers; an up-to-date, finished product of modern
high-finance methods. The Vanderburg crowd got father against the wall
in the steel merger, and--well, you’ll know how bad it was when I tell
you that it killed him. The doctors said pneumonia, but it was really a
Wall Street sand-bagging. He didn’t leave a will; and when we gathered
up the fragments afterward, we knew why he didn’t; there wasn’t enough
to make it worth while. So, you see, the Ocoee _is_ a last resort, for
me.”
Carfax was musing again.
“Yet you are going to many a comfortable little gold mine,” he said,
after a time.
“Uncle Byrd’s Colorado millions?--yes. And I am rather sorry; for
Elizabeth’s sake, not less than for my own. We were engaged before
Uncle Byrd died, and he knew it. It was entirely unnecessary--not to
say cruel--for him to leave his fortune to Elizabeth on the condition
that she shouldn’t change her mind and marry somebody else, and to me
in case she did.”
Carfax did not comment upon the cruelty. He was perfectly familiar with
the terms of Mr. Byrd Tregarvon’s will. Instead, he said: “You hear
from Elizabeth regularly, I suppose?”
“Oh, certainly. Duty is always written out in large capitals for
Elizabeth.”
“And you think she writes to you from a sense of duty?”
“We needn’t put it just that way. But I have no doubt she conceives it
to be her duty to a man she has promised to marry.”
“You shouldn’t say such things as that, Vance, not even to me,”
corrected the other man quickly.
“I know I shouldn’t. It is only one of the many ways in which Uncle
Byrd’s millions corrode things. Without meaning to, the old uncle stood
matters upon an entirely different, and most difficult, footing for us
two. We meant to marry: we had passed our word to the various members
of the clan that we were going to marry; and the clan was glad because
it had always counted upon that outcome for us. So far as a man up a
tree might discern, it was a perfectly free choice for both of us.”
“Go on,” said Carfax, when Tregarvon stopped to refill his pipe.
“Then one day, out of a clear sky, _zip!_ comes Uncle Byrd with his
will and his millions. After which, of course, Elizabeth can’t throw
me over without impoverishing herself; and it is equally out of the
question for me to let her do it. Moreover, it is imperatively up to me
to make good before I marry her. If I don’t, uncharitable people will
say that I let go of the business end of things because I knew that my
wife’s money would stop all the holes to keep the wind away. There you
have it--sermon length.”
Carfax smoked in sober silence for quite a few minutes. Then he
said mildly: “Do you know, Vance, I don’t more than half like your
attitude--as you’ve just expressed it?”
Tregarvon’s smile was a grin.
“Tell me what there is about it that you don’t like, and I’ll change
it, Poictiers. You are by long odds the best friend I have in the
world, and I’d change a dozen attitudes for you, any day in the week.”
“It isn’t lover-like,” Carfax objected.
“You mean that it is too purely cousinly? I can’t very well help that
phase of it, you know; we _are_ cousins, and we have been trotting
around together, more or less, ever since Noah walked out of the ark.
Nothing like that for killing sentiment.”
“But sentiment shouldn’t be killed, if you are going to marry
Elizabeth,” insisted the purist.
“We have threshed all that out, time and again, down to the final
spear of straw, Elizabeth and I,” Tregarvon explained carelessly. “At
first we did try to galvanize ourselves into some of the sentimental
throes, but it was such a ridiculous little comedy that Elizabeth
herself called it off. We are sufficiently fond of each other; Uncle
Byrd’s will is mandatory, and we shall be able to live together without
quarrelling. What more could you ask?”
“I don’t know,” said Carfax thoughtfully. “Your summary fits in pretty
accurately with the way of the world. Yet, if I had to change places
with either of you, I fancy I should ask a good bit more.”
“If you were Elizabeth Wardwell, you wouldn’t ask any more; and if you
were Vance Tregarvon, you couldn’t. So there you are.”
Again there was a smoke-beclouded silence, and into the thick of it
Carfax launched a pointed query:
“Have you told Elizabeth anything at all about the girls’ school on the
mountain--Highmount?”
“Oh, sure; and about the bewitching Miss Birrell, as well. I always
tell Elizabeth everything; I haven’t sense enough not to.”
“And her comment?” asked the golden one half-absently.
“On Miss Birrell, you mean? To tell the brazen truth, I
expected a wigging; not anything like a jealous outbreak, you
understand--Elizabeth is miles above that--but some nicely worded,
cool-lipped advice about not pitching the conventions out at the
window just because I happen to be living a thousand miles from real
civilization--Philadelphia civilization.”
“And you didn’t get it?”
“No, indeed. She didn’t say a word about Miss Birrell, specifically,
but she wrote me a good cousinly letter in which she told me how glad
she was that I needn’t deny myself all of the social mitigations, and
urging me not to let my job on the Ocoee make a one-sided hermit of me.
That letter came nearer to making me sentimental over her than anything
else she has ever said or done. It did, for a fact.”
Carfax did not vote Aye or No on this. He appeared content to let
the sentimental matter rest, since he went back to the business
difficulties.
“About this last-resort tussle of yours, Vance, I see now why it is
mighty necessary for you to make it win, and I wish you had a little
better assurance that you are not up against a brace game; that Old
Pisgah hasn’t stacked the cards on you.”
“I can’t very well afford to think of that possibility,” said Tregarvon
grimly.
“No, I suppose you can’t. Yet if the genially cynical attitude of the
native bystander counts for anything----”
“The loafers over at Tait’s, you mean? They’d scoff at anything that
smelled of good, honest work.”
“I wasn’t thinking of them particularly, though they help swell the
grand total. But the entire countryside seems to think that you are
barking up an empty tree. President Caswell says you are wasting time
and money; and that mild-eyed, clerical-looking professor of sciences,
Hartridge, fairly chortled when I told him what we were doing. You may
remember that he strolled over from Highmount the day we started the
drill.”
“What did he say?” Tregarvon demanded.
“He very pointedly said nothing. But there was a look in his skim-milk
eyes that recalled the villain in a play.”
Tregarvon was laughing appreciatively. “You have an eye for the
dramatic possibilities, always, haven’t you, Poictiers? Why should Mr.
William Wilberforce Hartridge have it in for me?”
“I can only make a crude guess. Even a mild-eyed professor of sciences
may turn, like the trodden worm. You umpire him out of the game pretty
ruthlessly when we spend an evening at Highmount.”
“With Miss Richardia? Pshaw! you don’t suppose that dried-up old stick
of a pedagogue--why, it would be Beauty and the Beast!”
Carfax’s smile was truly angelic, but it betrayed a wisdom far beyond
his years.
“Yes,” he rejoined reflectively, “Hartridge may be all of ten years
your senior--possibly fifteen. No doubt he ought to be quietly
chloroformed and carried behind the scenes. But, as I say, he
chortled--with his eyes--when I told him that you were planning to
drill a series of test-holes, continuing the series until you find
the place where your two coal seams come together as one. He is a
geologist, among other things, and they tell me he knows this region
like a book. I believe I’d cultivate him a little, if I were you; even
if it did cost me an occasional _tête-à-tête_ with Miss Richardia
Birrell.”
Tregarvon scoffed hardily at the suggestion, and the scorn was not
thrown away upon his companion. Perhaps that was the reason why Carfax,
going to bed a little later, without the ministrations of a lachrymose
and whiskey-breathing Merkley, opened the back of his watch to gaze
long and earnestly at a picture therein, closing the case finally
with a little sigh. Millions are good things in their way, but there
be pearls, trampled thoughtlessly underfoot by the millionless, which
millions cannot buy.
VI
Daddy Layne, and Others
On the morning after the crash of the walking-beam and the consequent
halting of the mountain-top activities, Carfax took the yellow car out
of its warehouse garage; and after driving for a half-hour or so up
and down the valley road with a tonneauful of speechless but highly
delighted children picked up at Tryon’s and Jeff Walters’s, he pulled
up in front of Tait’s and went in, ostensibly to buy smoking tobacco,
but really to make friends with the country-store idlers.
Cursory observers from an alien North, penetrating now and then to
unhackneyed regions in the Cumberlands or the Great Smokies, are apt
to find the country folk, either valley or mountain bred, reticent by
nature and notably shy of strangers. But there was no resisting the
genial and childlike affability of the young man who had been giving
the village children joy-rides, who recklessly bought a box of Tait’s
best two-for-a-nickel cigars and distributed them generously as one
among friends, and who presently had the hood lifted from the yellow
car’s motor installation and was explaining, in words of one syllable,
the workings of the driving mechanism to a group of curious and deeply
interested onlookers.
The small lecture explanatory gave Carfax a chance to pick his man, and
the choice fell upon the elder Layne. Would Mr. Layne like to take a
little ride up the road in the car?--just to see how much more easily
manageable it was than a horse-drawn vehicle?
Daddy Layne was overwhelmed with embarrassment, and was also secretly
puffed up with pride, though he did not yield too easily, a disposition
to haggle and make terms being a ruling passion in the Layne nature.
“I ’low I warn’t thinkin’ none o’ takin’ a trip this mornin’,” he mused
reflectively. “Man ortn’t to go projeckin’ ’round on his’n travels when
thar’s sech a heap o’ work to be done on the place. But then, thar’s my
married daughter Malviny--her man’s coal-diggin’ for the C. C. & I., up
yander at Whitlow; ef ye could git me thar an’ back----”
Carfax assured him that there was nothing easier, and by dint of
holding the big car down to its slowest speed on the five-mile run to
Whitlow he accomplished his purpose, which was to beguile Layne into
telling him all that the countryside knew about the C. C. & I., its
methods, its local managers, and whether or not the report was true
that it made industrial war upon the smaller companies and individual
mine owners.
Layne gave him the countryside point of view, which was, of course,
inimical to the corporation--to any corporation. The C. C. & I. paid
its men next to nothing for digging the coal and then sold it for
fabulous prices to the people in the cities; it ran company stores
and the miner who refused to buy his supplies thereat was likely to
find himself out of a job; when a coal-digger was hurt or killed in an
accident, the company’s long purse defeated the ends of justice in the
damage suit; and so on to the end of the accusative category.
Pinned down to the particulars about the Whitlow, Layne admitted that
the young engineer in charge as superintendent was a “squar’” man; but
Connolly, the local manager under this superintendent, was, in Layne’s
description, a man-killer. As to the company’s policy toward its
competitors, Layne could say nothing definite, the countryside point
of view not being penetrative of hidden corporation methods. But it
was true that the only mines in operation in the valley belonged to the
C. C. & I. Company. Others had been opened from time to time, but they
were usually short-lived.
This drawing of Daddy Layne on the drive to Whitlow, and, later,
an interview with Connolly, a hard-mouthed Irishman whose crass
brutality apparently justified Layne’s descriptive epithet of “the
man-killer,” gave Carfax a clue which he followed patiently until it
was time to take Layne back to Coalville; a clue which led to a scraped
acquaintance with the local leaders of the Amalgamated Mine Workers,
to affable and seemingly pointless talks with all who dared to talk,
and finally to a friendly conference with the miner Dockery, Layne’s
son-in-law.
“The kindling-wood for your obstruction fire is all cut and stacked
at Whitlow, Vance,” was his dinner-table announcement to Tregarvon at
the close of this day of investigation. “I have discovered a number of
things. First, that the C. C. & I. methods of benevolent assimilation
as directed toward possible competitors have varied from instigating
all sorts of trouble in the mines to be squelched up to swallowing them
whole in forced sales of stock.”
“That sounds cheerful,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”
“Next, they leave it to the local managers to nip any new venture in
the bud as effectually and quietly as possible, without bothering the
trust headquarters. I took a long chance on Connolly, the assistant
superintendent at Whitlow, and got that much of it pretty straight.”
“You don’t mean to say that he admitted any such thing as that to you,
when it is known all up and down the valley that you are interested
here with me!” exclaimed Tregarvon, wholly incredulous.
Carfax’s smile would have made a blushing debutante envious.
“In Mr. Connolly’s office, I was a lost lamb of the flock, looking
most pathetically for somebody to lead me home,” he rejoined. “A
fellow named Tregarvon had got me down here from New York with a view
to pulling my financial leg as an investor in some coal property a
few miles down the valley--at Coalville, in fact. I enlarged somewhat
upon this part of it; kept it up until I was reasonably sure that I
had convinced Connolly that I am a woolly sheep, merely waiting for
somebody to come along with a pair of sharp shears.”
“Good--ripping good!” Tregarvon chuckled. “You’ve missed your calling,
Poictiers, by all the distance lying between Riverside Drive and the
city detective department down-town. But, as you say, you took a long
chance; unless Connolly is a bigger fool than he looks to be.”
“Didn’t I? But Connolly is simply an abysmal brute; a man-driver
without any of the little gifts of perspicacity. He took me under his
wing like a stepfather-in-law; advised me bluntly to put my money into
Consolidated Coal at one-forty rather than to go gunning on my own
hook, or yours, or anybody’s, in Consolidated Coal’s intimate back
yard. Pressed a little harder, he hinted that you wouldn’t be allowed
to dig any real coal out of the Ocoee, providing there were any worth
digging--which there wasn’t.”
“‘Wouldn’t be allowed, Mr. Connolly?’ said I, as lamb-like as possible.
‘How could Tregarvon be prevented?’”
“‘There’s manny a way, Misther Carfax,’ he scowled up at me; and
then he let the cat out of the pillow-case: ‘These young min widout
practical experience--’tis manny a blunder they’ll be making, and
they’re soon discouraged entirely. I’m hearing that this same Misther
Tregarvin is having throuble to beat the band, and him not fair at the
beginning of it yet.’”
Tregarvon was absently spilling a spoonful of sugar into his
after-dinner coffee--a sufficient measure of his interest in Carfax’s
story.
“From all of which you have argued that there is a C. C. & I. spy in
our camp, haven’t you, Poictiers?” he said.
“Yes.”
“And the remedy?”
“Is to find and fire him.”
“The firing part of it will be easy; but the finding is a horse of
another color. All of my squad save one or two, I believe, have worked
at odd times for the C. C. & I. Every able-bodied man in this region
digs coal a little now and then; ‘huckleberry miners,’ the regulars
call them.”
“We’ll simply have to watch and sift; that’s all,” said Carfax.
“Well, you’ve done a good day’s work, anyway,” was Tregarvon’s
summing-up of the amateur detective’s report. “Candidly, I didn’t think
you had it in you, Poictiers. You don’t look it, you know--to the naked
eye.”
The angelic smile came and sat upon the clean-shaven, womanish face of
the golden youth.
“Don’t you know, Vance,” he drawled lispingly, “I believe that is my
strong point: not looking the ready-made, hand-me-down villain. It
is foolishly easy to make people take me for a harmless, good-natured
scrap-bag into which they can tuck any old thing they don’t happen to
be needing at the moment. Why, even old Daddy Layne confided in me.
Coming home, he told me all about the feud of the family of one of his
sons-in-law with the McNabbs. By the way, that reminds me: did you know
that you have two of the McNabb cousins in your working gang?--the
fellows who call themselves Morgan and Sill?”
Tregarvon had not known it; and a new field of conjecture as to the
disasters was promptly opened. Why charge the coal trust with the
campaign of obstruction when two of the avowed enemies of Ocoee
progress were right on the ground day by day?
Carfax rather sheepishly confessed that his brain had not been
capacious enough to entertain two ideas at once. Having fixed upon the
coal trust as the trouble source to be investigated, he had completely
overlooked the McNabb alternative.
“I’ll do time for it, though,” he promised. “To-morrow will be
Saturday; and if you’ll lend me the car again, I’ll find out something
more about those moonshiners in the Pocket.”
“Not alone, you won’t,” Tregarvon objected joyously. “It is going to be
my Saturday off, too--and a holiday at Highmount. I’ll go with you, as
far as the college, anyway.”
VII
Company Come
On the day following Carfax’s journey of investigation to Whitlow,
Tregarvon did not keep his promise to accompany the amateur Vidocq.
There were still some repairs to be made on the tramway, and since
a working squad of the laborers turned up to round out the week,
Tregarvon stayed with his men and became a track foreman again.
Carfax, too, had apparently changed his mind overnight. Instead of
driving off up the mountain after breakfast, he headed the yellow car
down the valley road and was gone all day. When he returned, late in
the afternoon, it was evident that he had discovered some other way
of ascending Pisgah. The committee of leisure, sitting, as usual, on
Tait’s porch, and amusing itself, also as usual, at the expense of an
expatriated London serving-man, marked the yellow car returning by way
of the mountain pike; observed, further, that Carfax was accompanied
by two men, one of whom sprang from the car at the turn in the
road nearest to the railway and ran to catch a northbound train of
coal-empties, so escaping unidentified by the idlers. Carfax’s other
passenger, well-known to Coalville as “The Bug Professor” at Highmount,
descended from the auto more deliberately and went across to the
coke-ovens to shake hands with Tregarvon.
“Comp’ny come, over yander,” Daddy Layne remarked to Merkley. “Better
hump yo’self acrost the track an’ git ready to curl yo’ boss’s ha’r,
hadn’t ye, English?”
Merkley adjourned himself accordingly, reaching the office-building
in time to be sent to show Hartridge the way to the bath-room on
the second floor. Carfax made no explanation to Tregarvon about the
guest-bringing other than to say that he had captured the professor
on the mountain, and had brought him down to take pot-luck of Uncle
William’s preparing.
“We can eat him all right,” said the young mine owner hospitably; “but
if we have to sleep him as well----”
“We shan’t,” Carfax asserted. “I have promised to drive him back to
Highmount in the car after dinner.”
“Oh, that’s better. Who was the other fellow?--the one who jumped out
and sprinted for the up freight?”
“Wait,” said Carfax mysteriously; “wait and you’ll find out.” And
Tregarvon, having no alternative, had to wait.
The dinner for three in the back-office dining-room followed in due
course, and Tregarvon, who brought a working-man’s appetite to the
table, let the other two do most of the talking. Carfax proved to be
at his captivating best; solicitous for the guest’s entertainment,
ingenuous, eager to be informed. Wouldn’t Mr. Hartridge have some more
of the--er--rabbit, he thought it must be? And was it really a fact
that the entire Cumberland region was underlaid by a vast sheet of
bituminous coal?
Tregarvon ate and listened, and presently became aware of two
things: that Carfax was persistently threshing the talk around to
the coal-measures, and that the professor seemed equally determined
to escape from them. A little later, he observed that in this verbal
ball-passing Carfax was proving himself the better player. Hartridge
was coerced inch by inch; first into talking about the Southern
coal-fields in the abstract, and finally into relating the ancient
history of the Ocoee; which was the purpose for which Carfax had
baited and set the dinner trap.
“I suspect Mr. Tregarvon can tell you more about the history of the
Ocoee than I can,” Hartridge demurred modestly, after Carfax had
fairly pushed him over the brink; and upon Tregarvon’s monosyllabic
disclaimer, he went on reflectively: “Let me see; I believe it was
about ten years ago that the first company was formed--to the sound of
the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, as you might
say.”
“A promoter’s scheme?” queried Carfax, alertly inquisitive now.
“Yes. A man from New York--Parker was his name--launched the
enterprise; bought a little land, obtained free-will donations of a
great deal more, and, as a favor to the benighted natives who had
contributed the land, consented to part with about forty-five per cent
of the stock of his company at half-price, payable in money.”
“Dear, dear; what a world this is!” sighed Carfax gently. “Sold them
their own land back again, did he? And then what?”
Hartridge’s smile was genially cynical.
“I think it took the able Mr. Parker all of four months, or possibly
a little longer, to squeeze the local stockholders--the only
investors who had contributed any real values--out of his scheme;
after which he sold the reorganized Ocoee to a New England syndicate.
The Yankees--pardon me; the word is no longer a term of reproach with
us--the Yankees meant honestly by the Ocoee; though, of course, they
were under no obligation to recognize the frozen-out natives. They
spent money liberally in development and on a costly equipment. But it
proved to be a bad investment for them--as it had for the natives.”
“Ah,” murmured Carfax. “Now I am better able to understand President
Caswell’s attitude. In strict justice, he would say, the mine belongs
to those earliest investors who contributed the land and bought the
stock; or at least these early people should have an equity in it.
These later--er--Yankees had no ethical rights; hence their venture was
bound to be ill-starred. By Jove, Tregarvon,”--and here Carfax’s lisp
became quite apparent--“that puts the black mark on you, too, doesn’t
it?”
If Carfax had any diplomatic designs on the dinner-guest, Tregarvon was
not a party to them.