responsibility of the return of the party to Highmount over to Carfax,
saying that since the drill was doubtless nearing the coal depth, he
would better stay on the job.
He was late getting down the mountain that evening, having worked his
crew overtime to settle a disputed point with Rucker. The dispute, or
rather its outcome, was sufficiently explained in his announcement to
Carfax when he tramped into the office dining-room and dropped wearily
into a chair before the fire.
“One more slap in the face, Poictiers. We found the coal about two
hours ago, and a little later the drill landed upon the sandstone layer
again. I’m too tired to know whether it’s discouragement or just plain
leg-weariness and back-ache, but I feel as if something had gone out of
me.”
Carfax rose to the occasion with his customary cheerful alacrity.
“We’re not going to say die, yet a while, Vance, old man. It merely
means another try. If you are running low in the ammunition-chest----”
“No, it isn’t that; it isn’t costing so terribly much. But to tell the
blank truth, I don’t know where to go with the drill for another try.
We are a good quarter of a mile back from the tramway head now; an
almost impracticable distance, even if we had found the big vein.”
“Well, what is the matter with swinging around the circle a bit? You
have latitude as well as longitude, haven’t you?” said Carfax the
comforter.
“Oh, yes; there is Ocoee land enough. And I guess that is about the
last hope.”
“Which way had you thought of moving, north or south?”
“Whichever way you say,” was the spiritless reply.
Carfax took a coin from his pocket and balanced it upon his thumb.
“Heads, Highmount way; tails, toward Whitlow,” he called, and flipped
the coin.
It fell heads uppermost, deciding for the Highmount direction; and when
Tregarvon would have picked the coin up to return it, Carfax stopped
him.
“Let it alone; I’m superstitious to-night. Uncle William will be in
with your warmed-over dinner in a minute: let him pick it up and keep
it--for good luck.” And a little while afterward, when the old negro
shuffled in with the covered tray: “There is a dollar on the floor
which we are both afraid to touch, Uncle William. Don’t you want it?”
The old man scraped a foot and said: “Sarvent, suh,” but he arranged
the table to the final nicety before going around to look at the money
on the floor.
“Now, Marsteh Poictiers, whut-all is de marter wid dat dollah?” he
asked, bending, hands on knees, to eye it suspiciously.
“There is nothing the matter with the dollar, uncle; the trouble is
with us. We are afraid of it.”
“Sho’ now! Is you? Dat look lak a mighty rightchus dollah to me. Dat
ain’t no debbil’s money, is it?”
“You’ll have to settle that for yourself. Since the dollar came out of
my pocket a few minutes ago, I shall be justified in refusing to answer
so personal a question as that relating to its righteousness.”
“_Hyuh! hyuh!_ It comed out of yo’ pocket, an’ yit you is skeered of
it? Dat look mighty cur’is to me. Look lak you-all is tryin’ to play
trick on de ol’ man, Marsteh Poictiers. I ain’t seed no white folks’
money yit dat I’s skeered of,” and he bent cautiously to pick it up.
“Look out, Uncle William; it might burn you!” said Carfax suddenly; and
quite as suddenly the old negro dropped the coin and started back.
“Bless gresshus! but dat _wuz_ hot!” he exclaimed, blowing upon his
fingers. And then: “Des you keep yo’ eye on dat dollah, ef you please,
suh, twell I come back, an’ I’ll fix ’im,” and a little later he
returned from the cook-house with a small tin pan which he turned down
over the piece of money.
“Ef dat won’t be in you gemmans’ way, an’ you-all ’ll des leab ’im dah,
I gwine come back bimeby an’ tek de cunjer off ’im. I ain’ gwine lef de
ol’ debbil hab dat dollah, not ef it _is_ his’n.”
The little diversion did for Tregarvon what Carfax had hoped it might;
and after the belated meal was eaten and the pipes were lighted, the
atmosphere of disheartenment was changed somewhat for the better.
“There is one thing we have to be thankful for,” the disappointed one
volunteered, when his reflections began to mellow in the tobacco smoke.
“We haven’t heard from the enemy since the attempt was made to ditch
the car, and there haven’t been any more of the unaccountable accidents
to the machinery.”
“That is so,” said Carfax. “And I have been trying to guess, all along,
why he--or they--stopped so abruptly.”
“There wasn’t any good reason why he--or they--should have begun,” said
Tregarvon musingly.
“Somebody evidently thought there was a reason, and afterward changed
his mind. Why should he change his mind? That is the question that has
been puzzling me.”
“Perhaps he has found out what a good fellow I really am, and is no
longer bloodthirsty,” put in Tregarvon, who was too tired to make any
very heavy drafts upon his mentality.
“You haven’t any notion that the fight, if there is one, is personal
to you, have you?--excluding Professor Hartridge, of course.”
“Oh, no; I was only joking. And we’ll always exclude Hartridge, if
you please; I’m still refusing to believe it of him. It was probably
somebody’s intention to drown the blind kitten of an Ocoee before
it had time to get its eyes open; but the somebody couldn’t, by any
stretch of imagination, be Hartridge.”
“But why has the somebody--who isn’t Hartridge--called the fight off so
suddenly? By Jove, Vance--I have an idea! It has dawned upon the enemy,
whoever he is, that it wasn’t worth while to efface us at a time when
we were perseveringly going the right way about it to efface ourselves!
I’d like to make a bet with you: when we begin drilling in the right
place--if there is any right place--the trouble will blossom out again.
What do you think?”
“I haven’t a thought left that isn’t too leg-weary to keep up with
you,” Tregarvon confessed; whereat he fell to talking of Miss Richardia
Birrell, dribbling on until Carfax, groaning in spirit, got up to light
the bed-room candles.
IX
A Bad Night for Rucker
After the drilling plant had been moved to the chance-chosen, fourth
trial site a short half-mile south of the original line of prospect
holes, the work of reinstallation was begun. At its completion, it
was at Rucker’s suggestion that the small tool-house was fitted with
a single-sashed window and a folding cot-bed, and that the duties of
night-watchman were added to his daytime oversight of the drilling
machinery.
Just why the plant, which had been left unguarded since the first
week of the campaign, and had been unmolested, should now need a
night-watchman, the mechanician did not attempt to explain. His reasons
for wishing to transfer his lodgings from the valley to the mountain
top were entirely personal. He had been taken as a boarder at the
Tryons’, and to wear out the dull evenings after working hours, he had
been drawn first into the lounging circle at Tait’s store, and later
into the smaller circle of the Layne household on the lower valley road.
The loadstone at Layne’s was a granddaughter of the patriarch’s, a
black-eyed, red-lipped girl of primal passions and impulses; and in the
beginning Rucker had been given a fair field and no questions asked
as to his eligible state and standing. Evening strolls on the country
roads with Nancy Layne for a companion were not to be compared with
a night off on Broadway under the bright lights; but such diversions
were made to suffice until a day when Daddy Layne, abruptly pointing to
the long-barrelled squirrel-rifle resting on its pegs over the kitchen
fireplace, assumed the aggressive. “Git yo’ license an’ yo’ preachuh,
’r let Nan alone an’ quit projec’in’ round this yer valley o’ nights,”
was the old man’s ultimatum; and Rucker, having a wholesome fear of
consequences, and the best of reasons for not applying for a marriage
license, asked permission to sleep at the drilling plant.
The first night on the mountain was frankly harrowing to the city-bred
mechanic, whose burglarish aspect did not insure him against the still
alarms of the forest intensified by moon-flung shadows of solemn trees,
by scurryings of fallen leaves rattling like dry bones under the autumn
night-wind, and, more than all, by a sense of complete and lonely
isolation.
Each unfamiliar sound brought Rucker out of his cot-bed blankets
with a bound and sent him groping to the square window. First it was
a little screech-owl, perching on the walking-beam of the drill, and
chattering out its blood-curdling cry. Next it was a slow and measured
crashing in the undergrowth, sound mysterious and unnerving to a degree
until the night-prowling cow responsible for it lowed gently and
crossed the clearing to snuff suspiciously at the boiler and machinery.
The tension once more relieved, Rucker tumbled into the blankets
again, calling himself shop names and swearing by all the gods of the
metalworkers that nothing short of a forest-fire or an earthquake
should make him lose any more sleep. Yet, while he was still only
eye-deep in his first doze a new alarm brought him leaping to his feet
and sent him, blinking and breathing hard, to the square of moonlight
framed by the small window.
What he heard this time sounded like the measured hoof-beats of a
horse. Rucker had a pocket flash-light, and he turned it upon the face
of his watch. He had gone early to bed, and it was still early, barely
ten o’clock. A by-road, the one by which the drilling plant had been
brought in, ran through the wood a little distance to the left of
the glade. Staring wide-eyed, Rucker made out the shadowy bulk of a
wheeled vehicle standing in this road, with a white horse, seemingly of
incredible size, looming gigantic between the thills.
The mechanician got his breath, and his heart began to pump in steadier
rhythm. A horse and buggy betokened the presence of humankind, and
Rucker was not a coward of men. Moreover, the ball-peen machinist’s
hammer, lying within easy reach, was no mean weapon of defense in the
grasp of a man who knew how to swing it.
Obsessed by the idea that he might shortly have to resort to the
hammer, the mechanician was wholly unprepared for what followed.
Slowly, and as if they were materializing out of the shadows of the
wood, two figures glided into the watcher’s field of vision: a man,
tall, stately, wearing the long coat and the wide-brimmed soft hat
which even an unobservant Rucker knew to be the garmentings of the
old-fashioned Southern gentleman. And, hanging on the man’s arm, a
woman, small and trimly clad.
They came only to the edge of the open glade. The woman’s hat left her
face in shadow, so that even if the light had been better, Rucker could
not have seen what she looked like. The man’s back was turned to him,
and here, again, he was at fault. Nevertheless, he was presently able
to postulate the man’s gestures as those of anger, and to understand
that the woman was pleading with him. It was etched out wholly in
pantomime; Rucker could hear nothing. Twice or thrice the man made an
inclusive motion with his free hand as if indicating the glade as the
subject of whatever he was saying; and finally he balled his hand into
a fist and shook it wrathfully at the unoffending drill derrick.
This went on for some moments, the woman, Rucker fancied, trying to end
it and draw the man away. Whether as the result of her efforts, or for
some other reason, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun. The two
figures turned and faded into the wood shadows as mysteriously as they
had come out of them; and while Rucker was still straining his eyes to
keep them in sight, the horse and buggy vanished to a soft thudding of
hoofs on the sandy road.
After this apparition had disappeared, the machinist filled his black
cutty pipe, opened the door of the tool-house, and sat upon the step
to smoke and ruminate and strive for a better collecting of things
into their normal groupings. Later, he strolled out to the by-road to
see if the hoof and wheel marks were really there; to satisfy himself
beyond question that he had not been dreaming. The ocular demonstration
convinced him that he was sane, sober, and awake. The hoof-prints were
there, though they were by no means so gigantic as he had expected to
find them; and so were the wheel ruts.
“I guess I needn’t be botherin’ my head about who they was,” he
muttered to himself as he went back to his seat on the tool-house
door-step. “Th’ bosses’ll know that, all right, all right. But if
there’s goin’ to be a whole lot of this ghost business up here, it’s me
for the downstairs, even if I do have to duck every time I see old man
Layne comin’ up th’ road. These moonlight picture-shows get next to my
gizzard-nerve. I ain’t no ghost-killer--not me.”
His pipe was smoked out and, knocking the ash from the bowl, he got up,
having fresh designs upon the tool-house bed-room and the blanketed
cot. But he was scarcely afoot before the sounds of wheels and hoofs
came again, this time from the opposite direction.
“My gosh!” he complained, “are they comin’ back? Or is it a torchlight
procession of ’em? No, by jing! it’s somebody else: that horse is a
black one!”
More to be out of harm’s way than for any spying purpose, he slipped
into the tool-house and softly closed and fastened the door. When he
tiptoed to the window two other figures had entered the glade; two men,
and both of them with burdens.
Their movements were even more mysterious than those of the earlier
visitors. The shorter of the two carried a square box, handling it by
a buckled strap which encircled it, and the other had a shoulder load
which Rucker could liken only to a small bundle of poles. Both burdens
were quickly put down; and at Rucker’s final glimpse, obtained just as
the moon was passing behind a cloud, the shorter man had gone down on
his knees beside the box, and was apparently opening it.
Everything turned to a blurred gray for the watcher at the square
window while the cloud obscured the direct rays of the moon; and when
a better light came, the taller of the two men had disappeared, and
the other was standing motionless under a great oak, whose spreading
branches were sadly obstructing Rucker’s line of sight.
“Now, what the devil is he doin’?” was Rucker’s demand, whispered to
the inner darknesses. “And where has t’ other guy skipped to, all of
a sudden. By jinks! I b’lieve the short one’s sightin’ a gun; no, it
ain’t a gun, either; it’s a kodak. No, I’m off again, and I hain’t
got any more guesses. Now, what t’ ’ell’s the sawed-off doin’, wavin’
his arms up and down that way? By gollies, this whole mountain’s gone
bug-house, ’r else I have!”
Rucker watched the arm-waving for a full minute before it dawned upon
him that the short man who seemed to be sighting something was making
signals. The small square window of espial commanded nothing but the
glade. The watcher crept cautiously to the end of the room facing
toward the near-by brow of the mountain. The moonlight helped him to
find the knot-hole he was looking for, but for a time the contracted
field of vision revealed nothing but a forest tangle of moon-spattered
shadows.
Rucker had the patience of his craft, and the practical reasoning power
that goes with it. The man under the oak was evidently signalling to
some one to the eastward of his position at the edge of the glade:
Rucker’s knot-hole in the planking at the end of the tool-house covered
the same field: hence the eye at the knot-hole should be able to descry
what was apparently visible to the eyes under the spreading oak.
The mechanician stuck to his hypothesis until finally the fact proved
it to be the true one. Far down among the trees, almost at the cliff’s
edge, Rucker thought, a dancing light, such as might be made by a
flaring pine torch, flashed up, flickered, and disappeared. The general
aspect of the mystery remained as impenetrable as before, but one point
became clear. The man under the tree was waving to the man with the
torch, and some purpose, quite well understood by both, was getting
itself forwarded.
Rucker stayed at his peep-hole until the torch reappeared, flared
steadily in one place for a few seconds, and then went out as suddenly
as if a gust of wind had extinguished it. After which he tiptoed
back to his window, and was there, looking on curiously, when the
torch-bearer came tramping up from the eastward. There was a little
delay when the upcomer joined the man under the oak. The watcher saw
them taking the sighting mechanism, whatever it might be, apart and
depositing some portion of it carefully in the square box; saw the two
men resume their respective burdens and thread their way rapidly among
the trees to the waiting vehicle. Then came the grinding protest of
buggy wheels cramped short to turn in the narrow by-road, the _shough_
of a horse, minishing hoof-beats, and silence.
By this time Rucker was beginning to stand somewhat less in awe of
a forest wilderness which seemed, after all, to be anything but an
uninhabited solitude. A fresh filling of the short black pipe was the
preliminary to a careful scrutiny of the ground under the spreading
oak-tree. There was but a thin layer of sandy top-soil overlying the
rock through which the drill was to be churned on the morrow, but
it sufficed to reveal what Rucker was looking for--three conical
indentations made by the sharply pointed ends of a tripod, the stand
of the sighting mechanism, level, transit, or telescope, used by the
shorter of the two men.
This much proved, Rucker went back to the tool shanty, found and
lighted a lantern, and with it steered a course between the trees
to the eastward point where the torch-bearer had stood. It took him
several minutes to discover the exact spot; but when it was found and
identified by the remains of the extinguished pine-knot torch, he
whittled a small stake and with a stone for a hammer drove it to mark
the place.
“There, by heck!” he said, when he was once more sitting on the
tool-house door-step to finish his pipe. “If I hain’t got funny
business enough to keep the bosses guessin’ f’r a week ’r so, I’ll sit
up a few minutes longer and pull down some more.”
It was far past midnight when he found himself nodding over the smoking
lantern, and got up to go and tumble sleepily into his bed. And this
time neither the shrilling of the katydids and tree-toads nor the
screeching of the little owl that came once more to perch upon the
drill walking-beam, kept him awake.
X
Blind Alleys
There was a council of war, held without preliminaries, to follow
Rucker’s report made to his two employers on the morning after the
night of mysterious alarms. The small tool shanty served as the
council-chamber, and the councillors were only two, Rucker having been
heard and dismissed to take his place as chief mechanician in the
drilling squad.
“Talk about fourteen-fifteen puzzles and the fourth dimension: this
masquerade puts the kibosh on them all,” remarked Carfax, opening his
pocket-case of freshly imported cigarettes. “Or are you wiping the
slate clean by charging Billy Rucker with a bad supper or a drink or so
too many?”
Tregarvon shook his head.
“It is too circumstantial to be a nightmare. Besides, there are the two
sets of wheel tracks in the road, and the marks of the tripod under the
oak; likewise the burnt pine torch and Rucker’s stake to mark the place
of it. It’s no pipe-dream--more’s the pity.”
“Then what the deuce is it?--or they?--since there seem to have been
two distinct sets of phenomena.”
Again the owner of the Ocoee shook his head.
“I think we may safely assume that Rucker saw two acts in the same
play. But what the play may have been is beyond my wildest guess.
Rucker’s suggestion that we’ve dropped down into a neighborhood of
crazy people seems to fit better than anything else.”
Carfax was sitting on the cot with his hands locked over one knee. “It
is rather pointedly our job to chase the shy guess into a corner, don’t
you think? There is mischief in it. One’s bosom friends would hardly
come here at night to shake their fists at things, or to run surveyors’
lines by moonlight.”
Tregarvon got up to tramp the floor, but there was no room in the
cluttered tool shanty and he sat down again upon a coil of rope.
“Damn this crazy Southern mining country!” he rapped out. “Rucker is
right: I believe it’s peopled with escaped lunatics fresh from Bedlam!
You’ve got a theory, Poictiers; I can see it in your eye. Put it in
words. Whom do you suspect?”
“Small minds suspect: larger ones reason calmly,” said the golden
youth in mild irony. “The thing for us to do first is to establish a
few identities, if we can. Who were these late-in-the-evening visitors?
Let’s take them in their natural order; first come, first served.
Rucker seems to have had a fair eye-shot at the man in a soft hat and
long-tailed coat. Doesn’t his description of the man’s clothes and
figure throw at least a suggestion into you?”
Tregarvon frowned. “You’ve got Hartridge on the brain,” he retorted.
“You can travel anywhere in the South and still find plenty of men who
wear soft hats and full-skirted Prince Alberts.”
“Yes; quite so. But we have met only one on Mount Pisgah, thus far, and
his name is William Wilberforce Hartridge. And if we take Mr. Hartridge
for the fist-shaking gentleman, the next step--the identity of the
lady--is simplified.”
“I don’t see it,” Tregarvon objected sourly.
“You mean you won’t see it. What woman, from Highmount, would be most
likely to be Mr. Hartridge’s companion on a moonlight evening drive?
Don’t let your prejudices, or rather your prepossessions, make a blind
mule of you, Vance.”
“I suppose you mean that the woman was Richardia Birrell. It doesn’t
necessarily follow, and I don’t believe it.”
“It isn’t so dreadfully hard to believe. There is no reason why she
shouldn’t go driving with the professor of mathematics, if she feels
like it. Neither is there anything especially culpable in the fact that
she walked down here with him when he came to shake his professorial
fist at your drilling-machine. When you have cooled down sufficiently,
we’ll go and see if my little primary guess won’t prove out.”
“I’m cool enough,” was the answer to this; and together they went to
seek the proof.
The buggy tracks in the damp sand of the little-used road were not hard
to trace, and there were places where the hoof-prints of the horse
which had been driven toward Highmount were clean-cut and distinct.
Carfax was a spoiled son of fortune only in his affectations. Beneath
the carefully cultivated fopperies there was a keen, active mentality
which rarely missed its mark and never fumbled. He made pencil sketches
of the hoof-prints on the back of an old letter in passing, and it was
he, and not Tregarvon, who noted the single peculiarity in the horse’s
shoeing; a missing corner from the toe-calk on the left hind foot.
As the New Yorker’s hypothesis had assumed, the buggy tracks led
directly to Highmount; or at least the assumption seemed a fair one.
The two investigators did not follow the vehicle trail all the way to
the college gates; could not, since the trail-recording wood road came
out into the hard-metalled mountain pike a few hundred yards below
the Highmount grounds, and the wheel marks were no longer visible.
But there seemed to be no reasonable doubt of the correctness of
Carfax’s guess; and Tregarvon admitted as much on the way back to the
starting-point.
“Mind you, I’m not admitting that Richardia was a party to anything
underhanded or crooked,” he added in qualification. “She may have
been driving with Hartridge; as you say, there isn’t any particular
reason why she shouldn’t go buggy-riding with him if she wishes to;
and she may have walked down to the glade with him. I don’t say that
she didn’t; but I do say that she isn’t tangled up in any of the
disreputable mysteries, knowingly.”
“Oh, no; I’d be as loath to admit that as you are,” said Carfax gently.
“In fact, it is barely possible that I have the better right to defend
her. We’ll put it all up to Hartridge. The next thing is to find out,
if we can, where Hartridge got his two surveyors on such short notice,
and what it was that could be proved or disproved by a transit sight
taken in the moonlight under conditions which must have barred anything
like mathematical accuracy. Where are your blue-prints of the Ocoee
property?--down below, or up here?”