bluntly; “paid it to these same Yankees you are telling us about, Mr.
Hartridge, when they were ready to lie down. It is up to me to prove
that they didn’t stick him as bad as they doubtless believed they were
sticking him when they pulled him into it.”
Carfax, who was observing the dinner-guest narrowly, saw the sign he
had been watching for flit into the pale-blue eyes of Mr. William
Wilberforce Hartridge; a half-smile of gratified derision.
“You think Vance isn’t very likely to make good on his little brag,
professor?” he put in, firing a pointblank shot at the target.
There was no indication that the shot had gone home, unless it lay in
the quick veiling of the pale-blue eyes.
“Who am I, that I should take out a license as a prophet of evil, Mr.
Carfax?” was the quiet rejoinder. “He is a brave man nowadays who has
the assurance to deny anything whatever to youth, vigor, and the spirit
of modern industry.”
“Still, you believe that Tregarvon isn’t going to win out?” persisted
the golden youth.
Hartridge laughed.
“As Miss Richardia might put it, I haven’t any think coming to me, have
I?” he parried.
Carfax gave it up. There was a point beyond which he could not press
a man who was dipping with him into the common salt-dish, and he felt
that the point had been reached.
“It is a pity you can’t stay and spend the evening with us, Mr.
Hartridge,” he said, a little further along, when Uncle William came
in to bare the table; but he added nothing to the conventional protest
when the professor declared that he must go: on the contrary, he sped
the parting guest so nimbly that Tregarvon was scarcely at his third
pipe-filling when the purring of the yellow car’s motor announced
Carfax’s return from Highmount.
“I told you so!” was the New Yorker’s first word, as he came in to take
his place before the handful of fire on the dining-room hearth. “Where
is my pipe?”
“What did you tell me?” queried Tregarvon, finding the pipe and pushing
the tobacco within reach.
“That Hartridge knows, or thinks he knows, that you are on a false
scent up yonder on the Pisgah cliffs: also, that he is deuced glad of
it.”
“You can see farther into the millstone than I can, if you can draw any
such conclusion as that,” Tregarvon remarked. “I thought he bluffed you
good and plenty.”
“He did; and then again he didn’t. I insist that there is something
doing, and that this mild-mannered gentleman who teaches mathematics
and the natural sciences is in on it. I have just had an experience
that was an eye-opener.”
“Unload it,” said Tregarvon briefly.
“Somebody tried to kill one of us a few minutes ago, and--and I’m
afraid Hartridge knew it was due to come off!”
“Nonsense--you’re joking!” Tregarvon had come out of his pipe-musings
with a bound.
“I’ll tell you just what happened, and then you shall judge for
yourself. You know that stretch of good road about two-thirds of the
way up the mountain?--the longest one there is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, just as we turned into it, going up, Hartridge twisted himself
in the seat, looked back, and made some sort of a motion with his hand.
I was talking; trying to pump him some more; and I don’t know why I
should have noticed the bit of pantomime. Neither do I know why, coming
down a few minutes later, I should have hit that piece of road at a
ten-mile-an-hour gait instead of a thirty or forty. It was mighty
lucky I wasn’t speeding. For about two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail
you stood to lose a good friend and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car.
There was a tree lying across the road at precisely the correct angle
to shoot me out into space if I had hit it.”
“Heavens!” exclaimed the listener. “Done while you were going and
coming?”
“Done while I was going and coming. And that tree was lying at the
exact spot where Hartridge turned in his seat and made the little
signal with his hand to somebody that I couldn’t see.”
“But, good Lord, Poictiers! It’s unbelievable. Why, the man wasn’t ten
minutes away from his bread-breaking with us!”
“I can’t help that. You have the facts.”
“What did you do?”
“I stopped, skirmished under the tonneau seat and found your towing
rope, and took a hitch on the obstruction. The car was good for it, and
I dragged the tree around and rolled it over the embankment. Then I
examined the place where it had stood: it had been partly undermined by
the road grading, and probably didn’t require much of a push to tip it
over.”
“Then it might have been a sheer accident?”
Carfax was shaking his head. “I thought so at first. But when I turned
the flash-light on the gap it had left in the upper bank, I saw that it
had not fallen accidentally. There are pick marks in the clay, and a
crowbar had been thrust in behind the roots to pry with.”
“You didn’t see or hear anybody?”
“Not a sign. I even went so far as to make a circuit in the woods along
the upper embankment. There wasn’t a leaf stirring.”
“But think a minute, Poictiers: whatever crazy grudge any one might
have against me or the Ocoee, it couldn’t be made to lap over on you!”
“That’s all right; it is your car, and you have usually driven it. You
are doubtless the one who had the narrow escape, and I was only your
happen-so proxy.”
For a thoughtful half-hour they sat before the dying embers of the fire
and discussed the murderous attempt in all its bearings, Tregarvon
stoutly maintaining to the last that Hartridge could not possibly have
been an accomplice. But disregarding that single slight clue, they were
left completely in the dark as to the identity or motive of the man or
men who had tried to wreck the car.
In the early stages of the discussion Tregarvon had suggested the
McNabbs; and after every other guess had been exhausted he returned to
them. But Carfax demurred at this.
“No,” he said. “As I told you yesterday, you have two of the McNabbs in
your working gang, and they have had a thousand chances to extinguish
you since you came down here. Besides, I’ve been over in the Pocket
neighborhood to-day, and have found out a lot about the clan McNabb.
They’re perfectly harmless, I should say. I ran across both Morgan and
Sill, and they took me in and fed me fat bacon and corn pone. It is all
of ten miles to their shack in the Pocket, and they would have had to
walk out to get on this side of Pisgah. Besides that, Wilmerding gave
me a lot of pointers about the McNabb tribe.”
“Who is Wilmerding?”
“He is the man who rode down the mountain with Hartridge and me, and
made the quick dash for the up-train. He is the chief of staff for
the C. C. & I. in the Wehatchee Valley; has the oversight of all the
various mines of the company. He is a fine fellow; a mining engineer
with a few German university finishing touches.”
“How did you happen to meet him?”
“I hunted him up this morning; drove down to the Cardiff Mine for
that purpose. They told me yesterday at Whitlow that he was at the
Cardiff. I found him, and we foregathered on the spot. He is having
some labor troubles, and was about to drive over the mountain to the
Swiss settlement at New Basel to see if he couldn’t pick up a little
new blood. I didn’t have to persuade very hard to get him to abandon
his horse and buckboard, and I drove him over and back.”
“He is all right, you think?”
“As straight as a string. If the C. C. & I. is crooked, he is no party
to the underhand work. Also, he told me a lot about the McNabbs. He
seems to be quite certain that they have no grudge of their own to
work off. Laster McNabb, who is the grandfather of the outfit and the
chief of the clan, has talked very freely with Wilmerding about the
Ocoee lawsuit, and if the McNabbs have it in for anybody, it is for the
lawyer who dragged them into the fight with the New Englanders.”
Tregarvon stood up to rest an elbow against the rough stone mantel.
“If your estimate of Wilmerding is correct, the C. C. & I. can’t
be held responsible; and, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be
the mountaineers. Yet we have had the accidents with the drilling
machinery, and somebody has just tried to assassinate you. You may say
it’s Hartridge, but I can’t follow you there. The motive is lacking.”
“Is the motive altogether lacking?” Carfax queried gently.
“You mean that Hartridge may be asinine enough to think that I am
trespassing on his preserves at Highmount? That is nonsense. Miss
Richardia Birrell and I are merely good friends. Besides that, I don’t
believe she has ever given the ‘bug professor’ a second thought,
sentimentally.”
“Maybe not. But a woman as a factor in any problem is always the
unknown quantity,” Carfax remarked half musingly. Then he added:
“It would be a real charity, both to you and to Professor William
Wilberforce, if some outsider would step in and marry Miss Richardia
out of the game, don’t you think?”
Tregarvon’s frown was morose. Slowly but surely the light with the
difficulties, material and mysterious, was working a change in the
young man whose chief characteristic had hitherto been finding its
principal expression in the light-hearted optimism of those who neither
toil nor spin. For the first time in his wealth-smoothed saunter he was
coming to hand-grips with the primitive, and the quick glance shot at
Carfax was almost a challenge.
“Perhaps you’d like to be the outsider, Poictiers? Is that what you had
in mind?” he threw in bluntly.
Carfax, gazing reflectively into the heart of the fire embers, took the
demand, or assumed to take it, at its face value.
“A chap might do a lot worse,” he replied, as one who weighs the pros
and cons judicially. “It’s a broken family, to be sure, as to its
fortunes, but it’s good blood. They say that the old judge is as fine
as they make ’em; a gentleman of the old Southern school, land-poor,
but as proud as Lucifer. The two McNabb boys were telling me about him
to-day. They are squatters on Birrell land, as their forefathers were
before them, and they’d fight for the old judge at the drop of the hat.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” said Tregarvon pointedly.
Carfax rose and stretched his arms over his head like a man who has put
in a full day.
“No; and I’m not going to answer it to-night. Later on, if you still
insist on needing a guardian angel, there may be a different story to
tell. Where’s my candle? I’m going to bed.”
VIII
The Stubborn Rock
By the time Rucker returned from Chattanooga with the repairs for the
broken drilling plant, the Saturday-night attempt to wreck the yellow
car on Carfax’s run down the mountain had become a past danger-signal,
and was in a fair way to be overlaid and forgotten in a fresh upturning
of the activities.
After the arrival of the new gears one day more was needed for their
installation; then the smoke plume began to wave again from the top
of the stack on lofty Pisgah, and the drill resumed its interrupted
jouncings in the sandstone. In due course, and with no added untoward
happenings to delay the work--this though the two McNabbs, identified
now and closely watched by Tregarvon, were still retained in the
gang--the drill reached the first coal seam, penetrated it, plunged
again into rock, and, a few hours later, into and through the second
and lower coal layer; net result--failure.
With the new-found fighting resolution now fully aroused, Tregarvon
did not waste a minute. In the intervals afforded by temporary pauses
in the drilling he had found time to select a location farther back on
the plateau for the next trial; and while the boiler of the portable
engine was still hot from the fire-drawing of failure, the transfer of
the plant was begun.
The second trial was a mere repetition of the first, save that the
layer of rock separating the two coal seams gained six inches in
thickness for the added distance from the original mine opening in the
cliff face at the head of the tramway. Wilmerding, the genial young
superintendent of the C. C. & I. subsidiaries was on the ground when
the sand-pump tests of this second hole were made, and he shook his
head doubtfully.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to throw cold water; it doesn’t come with very
good grace from the boss in the enemy’s camp,” he said deprecatingly.
“But I’m mightily afraid you gentlemen are chasing fireflies. You have
two distinct seams, instead of one that has been split by a horizontal
wedge of the sand-rock, and I believe a careful analysis of the coal in
the two seams will prove it. Going to move still farther back and try
again?”
“It’s the surest thing there is,” said Tregarvon, who had already set
his men at work striking the derrick. “I may be licked, but I’m too big
a fool to know it.”
“Good!” laughed Wilmerding; “I like your courage immensely. But while
you are tapping it again, send me some samples and let me analyze the
two veins for you. I have a laboratory up at Whitlow, and I’ll be glad
to help out to that extent.”
“You are an enemy, right, Mr. Wilmerding!” said Tregarvon heartily. “A
fighting friend couldn’t make a fairer offer than that. But you will
find that the two seams are one and the same. I made even canny old
Captain Duncan admit that he couldn’t detect any difference in the coal
taken from the two veins.”
Wilmerding nodded. “The captain is canny, as you say, though you can
hardly prove it by me. I don’t know him very well--haven’t been down
here long enough. Thaxter knows him from away back, however, and he has
told me a good bit about the old Scotchman, who has the reputation, by
the way, of being at the top of the heap as an analytical chemist.”
“Thaxter?” put in Carfax interrogatively. He had been an attentive
listener; his usual attitude in any three-cornered conference.
“Yes. Don’t you know Thaxter, my bookkeeper? Not to know Thaxter is to
argue yourself unknown in the Wehatchee. The rank and file at Whitlow
think I’m the boss, and that Connolly comes next. But Thaxter is the
real power behind the throne.”
Carfax made the necessary effort of memory and recalled a pursy little
man, round-faced, gray-haired and genial, who had beamed up at him
through a pair of thick-lensed spectacles on the day when he had
invaded the C. C. & I. stronghold at Whitlow.
“I remember him,” he told Wilmerding. “Reminded me of one of the
Brothers Cheeryble, and I caught myself unconsciously looking about for
the other.”
Not having read Dickens, Wilmerding lost the point of the comparison.
“Yes,” he went on. “Thaxter is It, all right enough. More than anybody
else in this neck of woods he is Consolidated Coal: has every coal
detail of this entire region down in black on white, neatly docketed
and labelled and put away for future reference. I carry him on my
pay-roll, but I couldn’t any more fire him than I could fire the
President of the United States. On the other hand, I shouldn’t be
surprised if he could have my head any minute he chose to hold up his
finger to the big guns in New York.”
“Nice kind of a bombshell to be rolling around under a man’s feet,”
Carfax commented.
“Oh, Thaxter is harmless; he doesn’t explode. He is like the assistant
secretaries of the Departments in Washington, you know; the fellows
who really have the run of the business and stay on the job while the
political chiefs come and go. They are like the cat: harmless and
necessary and full of wisdom. Which reminds me: I’ll bet my wind-broken
old nag, here, against your gas-car, Tregarvon, that Thaxter has an
analysis of these coals of yours filed away somewhere this very minute.
If he has, I’ll get it for you. It will be a lot more conclusive than
any I could make, offhand, in my laboratory.”
So offering, Wilmerding betook himself and his promise to the road
leading to Whitlow, leaving the two undismayed coal prospectors on high
Pisgah patiently removing their testing plant to a point still farther
back from the cliff face. By this time the working gang had acquired
the practice which makes perfect; and before the news of the failure
of the second attempt had spread beyond the comment of Tait’s store
the drill was churning away in the third of the testing holes, with the
lean, bristly-bearded Sawyer acting as drill-master--a post which he
had claimed and filled from the first.
“I don’t care how much other people may laugh at you; _I_ think your
perseverance is beyond praise,” said Miss Richardia, on an afternoon
when Tregarvon, scamping his job and snatching a few moments for
himself, had driven her and a group of the Highmount young women over
in the yellow car to the new location. “I am sure you deserve to
succeed--if perseverance by itself ever deserves anything.”
“Why do you say, ‘by itself’?”
“I mean sheer, dogged persistence, without any of the justifying
reasons.”
“I have the reasons; I’m obliged to succeed,” was the answer rather
gloomily given. Carfax had taken the tonneau party around to the
derrick, and the two in the driving-seat of the car had their bit of
the mountain-top world momentarily to themselves.
“You say that as if you were sorry,” laughed the music teacher. “Don’t
you want to succeed?”
“To want is to desire and need,” he explained meticulously. “Heaven
knows, I need success; need it awfully. Yet the very reason for
needing it is vicarious on one hand, and an exhibition of the meanest
sort of purse-pride on the other. But you know all about that.”
Truly, Miss Richardia did know. It was during his third evening visit
to Highmount, while Carfax was trundling the entire school in batches
up and down the cherted pike in front of the college grounds in the
auto, and Miss Richardia had been playing to him in the otherwise
deserted music-room, that Tregarvon had told her all about the family
fortunes, and Elizabeth, and his engagement, and the Uncle Byrd
millions. He did not regard it as a breach of confidence at the time;
of Elizabeth’s confidence or his own. He had merely yielded to an
attack of a purely masculine desire to tell all he knew to the nearest
woman.
“You still think it is necessary to keep Miss Wardwell waiting?” Miss
Richardia was always able to answer his unspoken thought without
apparent effort, as he had already learned.
“You wouldn’t have me do anything else, would you?” he retorted
discontentedly. “Put yourself in Elizabeth’s place: what would you
think of me if I should take advantage of your good-nature, and so
give everybody a chance to say that I didn’t need to be in love with
you--that your money was a sufficient bait?”
Miss Birrell was not at all past blushing, and she did it very prettily.
“You are so boyishly personal!” she laughed, and the fact that she did
not resent the personality was an ample measure of the degree to which
their intimacy had progressed. And then: “You promised me that you were
going to be sensible and straightforward, and all those things. You
said you were going to be entirely frank with Eliz--with Miss Wardwell,
telling her that you haven’t insisted upon her naming the day because
you think you ought to have means of your own, first. Have you done
this?”
“No, I haven’t--not yet.”
“Why haven’t you? You owe it to her, don’t you?”
“Perhaps; but I owe something to myself, too.”
Miss Richardia seized upon the admission swiftly and turned it as a
weapon against him. “You do, indeed! You owe it to Mr. Vance Tregarvon
not to keep any of the anchors in reserve. As you once said, yourself,
you are too impressionable.”
“A light o’ love,” he laughed. “I must tell Elizabeth what an eloquent
special pleader she has unconsciously acquired down here in the wilds
of Tennessee. What have I done that I ought not to have done?”
“I am not your conscience,” was the cool-voiced reply.
“But you are,” he retorted accusingly. “You tell me what I ought to do,
and I promise to go and do it. My intentions are always good.”
“I am not sure of even that much, now. You have changed very remarkably
in the past few weeks, and you must forgive me if I say that the change
hasn’t been altogether for the better. You were just a nice, cheerful
boy when you came to Tennessee, and you’re not that any more.”
“I have good reasons, and plenty of them,” he blurted out. “Do you want
to hear them?”
“Not when you talk that way,” said Miss Birrell, and her attitude
became suddenly indifferent.
“You shall hear them, whether you want to or not,” he broke in almost
roughly. “I have the whole world against me on this Ocoee proposition;
I have given my word to Elizabeth when I don’t love her as the man who
is going to marry her ought to love her; and----”
“That is quite enough,” she interposed quietly. “It only proves what
I said a minute ago. You can’t afford to hold any of your anchors in
reserve. I think we had better join Mr. Carfax and the young women.
Don’t you?”
“No. And I call that downright cruel, when we see so little of each
other, and I almost never have you to myself any more.”
“It is your saying such things as that that makes me think I ought to
be cruel. There are times when you need cruelty. Nothing milder would
do any good.”
“You may as well say the remainder of it,” he prompted.
“I shall. It is really serious. You must come to a better understanding
with Miss Wardwell; and you must stop coming so often to Highmount.”
“The first time I went to Highmount you told me that I might come as
often as I pleased. You needn’t worry about the school-girls. If you
say the word, I’ll never speak to one of them again unless she is duly
chaperoned at the moment.”
“We were speaking of Miss Wardwell,” was the rather chilling reminder.
“Well, we will speak of her, then. She isn’t losing any sleep on my
account. If you only knew Elizabeth as well as I do--but what’s the
use!”
“There appears to be no use at all, and I have already said more than
your nearest friend ought to say. Suppose we talk of something else.”
Tregarvon refused flatly to accept the invitation.
“No; I want to know about my welcome at Highmount. I have had Mrs.
Caswell’s warrant in the past. I have it yet. You can’t make me stay
away.”
Miss Richardia’s pretty chin went up a quarter of an inch.
“Then you will compel me to be disagreeable; and I don’t like to be
that. I always have plenty of work to do in the evenings; quite a
number of the young women would like to take extra music lessons, and I
have a piano in my rooms.”
Tregarvon gasped. “You don’t mean that you’d be hard-hearted enough
to shut yourself up? to refuse to see me? That would be--but I simply
can’t contemplate it. You--you don’t know what your confidence and your
clear insight have come to mean to me!”
“On the contrary, it is because I do know, or rather because I know how
you are justifying yourself, that you must----”
“But I shall not! It is just a frank, open friendship that has grown
very precious to me, Richardia. Put it upon the lowest possible
grounds; say that it amuses you and doesn’t hurt Elizabeth--I could
show you letters from her in which she actually encourages it--and add
to these that it does me a whole lot of good. Why should you freeze up
right in the midst of it, just when I am needing all the encouragement
I can get?”
Miss Birrell did not wish to laugh, but his protest, the shocked
pleading of a little boy who fears he is about to be deprived of his
customary piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, was too much for
her self-control. None the less, she would not yield a hair’s-breadth.
“You can’t convince me, and you needn’t try,” she declared. “Granting
what you say--that it amuses me and doesn’t hurt any one else--there
are still the conventions to be considered. Perhaps you think,
because you are a thousand miles from Philadelphia, that there are
no conventions. If you do, you are greatly mistaken. Highmount, for
example, has a complete equipment of them.”
“Confound the conventions!” growled Tregarvon. Carfax was leading his
following back to the car, and the end of the confidential talk was
approaching.
“No, you needn’t swear at them,” said Miss Richardia, with honey in her
tone. “More than that, you would be the last person in the world to
want to have them confounded. In your proper environment, I can picture
you as an exceedingly correct person; one who would protest most
vigorously if his sister should----”
She did not finish, because the others were within hearing distance;
but the sentence was sufficiently complete to point the comparison for
Tregarvon. He bent over the steering-wheel and pretended to be trying
the connections of the substitute battery coil. The feint permitted him
to say in low tones: “You are altogether right--as you always are. I’ll
be as decent as I can: and it will cost more than you think.”