were found, Carfax spread them out on the cot and pored over them
thoughtfully.
“You are not trespassing on somebody else’s land, at all events,” was
the verdict, rendered after he had verified the position of the glade
in which the fourth test-hole was being driven. “It is all Ocoee in
every direction; your land covers all this part of the mountain. By the
way, what is this name, ‘Westwood,’ written across these mountain-top
plats?”
Tregarvon did not know, and he said so; adding that he supposed it
might be the name of the original owner of the land.
“Who is he? Ever hear of him?”
“I don’t recall that I have. But that is not singular. I haven’t had
occasion, or the time, to dig very deeply into ancient history.”
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything very illuminating about these
blue-prints, save that they establish your perfect right to bore holes
almost anywhere you please,” said Carfax. “Suppose we go now and take
up the trail of the two surveyors.”
The track of the second buggy proved to be a short scent soon lost.
Within a hundred yards of its turning-point opposite the glade the
buggy had left the wood road, the tracks swerving to the right in a
direction opposite to that taken by the earlier vehicle; and neither
the wheels nor the hoofs of the horse had left any impress on the
thick carpeting of fallen leaves under the trees; or none that amateur
trailers could see and follow.
They were returning down the by-road when a crash and a hoarse roar
of escaping steam notified them that once more something had gone
wrong with the machinery. Carfax threw up his head like a thoroughbred
starting in a race.
“We have been hunting for causes,” he snapped: “there is effect number
one, right now! I can outrun you to the home plate!”
They came upon the scene, neck and neck, just after Rucker had stopped
the engine and opened his fire-door. The walking-beam had fallen again,
carrying down a portion of the derrick framework; and the mountaineer
whose name on the pay-roll appeared as “Morgan,” and who had been
drill-turning in Sawyer’s place at the moment, was caught and held
under the wreckage.
Happily, the man was neither killed nor very severely injured. A few
minutes’ quick work, to which everybody lent a hand, sufficed to
extricate him from the mass of broken timbers; and a rather ugly scalp
wound, which Carfax proceeded deftly to wash and dress and bandage,
figured as the worst of his hurts.
Tregarvon sent the man home in charge of the other masquerading McNabb;
and then came the reckoning with the smashed drilling plant.
“What are we in for this time, Rucker?” was the owner’s question, put
after the machinist had measured the damage with a critical eye.
“Mostly a couple o’ days’ hang-up, I guess. Leave me a man or two to
help me blacksmith, and I’ll see what I can do. But what’s eatin’ me
is, what done it?”
There seemed to be no categorical answer to this, the cause of the
breakdown being as yet well hidden in the _débris_ of the effect.
Tregarvon was willing to charge it to the chapter of accidents, but
Carfax was less easily satisfied.
“If it were the first,” he demurred; “but it isn’t. There is an
entire series behind it. And, coming right on the heels of the little
mysteries of last night ... I’m of the opinion that this is the
beginning of more hostilities, Vance.” Then to Rucker: “How far did you
get the hole down, Billy?”
“Not more than a couple o’ feet.”
“Drilling hard?” asked Tregarvon.
“Um-m-m; middlin’ hard; ’bout like the one we put down over yonder at
the head of the tramway--the first one we drilled.”
Tregarvon told off three of the laborers to help Rucker, and sent the
remaining three back to Coalville to report to Tryon, who, with another
small squad, was replacing rotted cross-ties on the lower end of the
tramway. After this, he beckoned to Carfax, and they went together down
the shallow glade ravine to the spot where Rucker had found the burnt
pine-knot torch and had driven his marking stake.
Out of hearing of the four men left at the drilling-stand, Tregarvon
said: “Well, the McNabbs are eliminated, definitely. It is fair to
assume that a man wouldn’t be so careless as to get caught in a trap of
his own setting.”
“You would think not,” was Carfax’s rejoinder; but he did not say that
it was impossible.
On the ground where the torch-bearer of the previous night had stood
they searched carefully for something that might give a working clue
to the mystery of the moonlight survey. There was nothing, unless an
oak-tree, with a half-overgrown “blaze” and some ancient markings cut
in it, might be called a clue.
Two or three hundred feet below the scarred oak lay the cliff edge,
at this point something less than a precipice. Tregarvon stood on the
brink, looking down over the rough, broken talus. A hundred yards below
his perch the gray ribbon of the mountain pike leading to Coalville
wound in and out among the trees and huge boulders. Farther around to
the left, and almost on a level with the broken talus, he could see the
head of the Ocoee tramway. At once he called Carfax’s attention to the
favoring topographies.
“If we should find our big vein anywhere between here and the tramhead,
it would be almost as accessible as the old opening,” he said. “The
track could be continued on an easy curve and grade, and there is drop
enough to give us the gravity haul. I wonder if any one has ever looked
along here for the outcrop?”
Viewed from the summit, the rough declivity, rocky, wooded, and
thickly-covered with a matted tangle of brier, laurel, and
undergrowth, looked as if it had never been trodden by the foot of man.
Carfax, leaning against a tree which grew on the extreme edge of the
cliff, gave it as his opinion that the rocky slope had never felt the
prospector’s pick.
“They have to dig trenches or holes or something, in prospecting for
coal, don’t they?” he asked; and when Tregarvon confirmed the surmise:
“I should say that this toboggan-slide is just as old Madam Nature left
it, shouldn’t you? Can we get from here to the tramhead without going
back and around and over the mountain?”
“Easily,” said Tregarvon, and he swung out and dropped over the low
cliff to lead the way along the broken ledges.
It was while Carfax was lowering himself with more care than Tregarvon
had taken, with the leaning tree to help, that he made a small
discovery and called Tregarvon back. On its outer or valley-facing side
the leaning tree carried a “blazed” scar with markings similar to those
on the white-oak half-way between the cliff and the glade. Like the
other scar, this one was old, and the bark had long since healed around
the edges of the ax-wound. But the markings, which were cut into the
heart-wood, were still quite distinct.
“Well?” said Tregarvon, after they had examined the scar together,
“what do you make of it?”
Carfax was pencilling the mark on the back of the letter upon which he
had sketched the damp-sand hoof-prints.
“I don’t know. It looks something like the Greek letter ‘_pi_’, a
capital ‘T’ with two stems, don’t you think? But, of course, that is
only a coincidence.”
“Is it, though?” queried Tregarvon thoughtfully.
“It must be. What woodsman in this part of the world would ever mark a
tree with a Greek letter?”
“No woodsman, perhaps; but a schoolmaster might. Poictiers, I am slowly
coming around to your point of view. Hartridge is at the bottom of
all these smash-ups and mysteries. I hate to believe it of him, but
everything leans in his direction.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? But the admission of the fact doesn’t
clear up the mysteries. Say that, for some reason, sentimental or
other, Hartridge wishes to drive you out--make you quit. That might
explain the smash-ups and the hindrances; but it doesn’t begin to
explain why we should find these marks of his--if they are his--made on
these two trees years and years ago; or why he should send a pair of
surveyors up here to make monkey motions in the moonlight.”
Tregarvon was leading the way along the ledge toward the tramhead.
“We shall probably find out more about all these things before we are
much older on the job,” he replied; and then, vengefully: “If I can
catch him at it, I promise you I’ll make him sorry!”
After they reached the head of the inclined track and had signalled to
Tryon at the foot to let them down in the tip-car, Tregarvon outlined
his plan for the broken day.
“We’ll go down and get out the auto and my engineering instruments,
motor back to the drilling plant, and do a little surveying on our own
account. Beyond that, you may take the car and kill time with it as you
please. I’ll stay and help Rucker.”
The programme was carried out in due course. By ten o’clock they were
back on the mountain top with the surveying instruments. Placing the
transit upon the tripod marks under the tree on the edge of the glade,
Tregarvon took a forward sight to the eastward, with Carfax holding
the target-staff on the spot where the burnt torch was found. Then,
without changing the position of the instrument, Tregarvon signalled
Carfax to go back, halting him at the cliff edge, and moving him
to right and left until the target was once more in line with the
cross-hairs of the telescope.
“What developments?” he inquired, when the staff-bearer came up.
“Nothing startling. Your line of sight merely picked up the second of
the two marked trees, whatever significance that may have.”
“You may be sure it has some significance, if we were shrewd enough
to figure it out,” Tregarvon asserted. Then: “What will you do with
yourself until dinner-time?”
“Oh, I don’t know; chase around in the car awhile, maybe, if you can’t
use me here. Perhaps I may be able to pick up a clue or so--if I can
find anybody to talk to.”
Tregarvon stripped off his coat and went to work with Rucker and the
helpers, and in this manner the better part of the day was accounted
for. Late in the afternoon, when the blacksmithing of new irons left
him without an occupation, he yielded to a prompting which had been
urging him all day, and went for a long tramp which took him over the
route covered by the drilling plant in its several removals.
The sun had gone behind the mountain when he finally came out at the
tramhead and signalled for the cable-car to take him down. Tryon
answered the signal and started the machinery, and in a few minutes
Tregarvon was landed at the Coalville level, where he found Carfax
waiting for him on the porch of the office-building.
“I beat you to it,” said the golden youth; and then, whimsically: “What
do you know now more than you knew before you knew so little as you
know now?”
Tregarvon cast himself down upon the porch-step. “I’ll tell you, after
a bit. Did you find out anything new?”
“Nothing very conclusive. Item number one is that there are only two
horses in the Highmount stables; neither of them white, and neither
with a broken toe-calk on the left hind foot.”
Tregarvon smiled wearily. “More negative information; it’s always
negative.”
“Yes; and you may put into the same basket the item that no one of
the half-dozen people I asked knew of any white horse owned on the
mountain. But I picked up one little pointer that belongs in the other
basket--the positive. I had luncheon at Highmount--upon Mrs. Caswell’s
very pressing invitation. At table, Miss Richardia wanted to know how
you came to plant your drilling-machine right in the middle of the old
burying-ground.”
“What’s that?” said Tregarvon. “You don’t mean to say that the glade is
a graveyard!”
“It seems that it used to be, many years ago--for the slaves. You
will remember that you remarked the sunken spots in the only bit of
soft earth there is, and wondered what made them. They are graves. Do
you suppose Rucker would sleep any better to-night than he did last
night if he knew that? If he had known it last night, perhaps it might
have accounted for some of his restlessness. But I’m drifting from
the point, which is that Miss Richardia’s question betrayed her: she
was the young woman who drove with the man behind the white horse;
otherwise she would not have known about the location of the drilling
plant in the glade.”
“That doesn’t follow,” Tregarvon objected. “Some one might have told
her. But let that part of it go. Did you discover anything else?”
“Yes. After school hours I took Miss Farron, Miss Longstreet, and the
French teacher out for a spin in the car. Miss Richardia said she
couldn’t go because she had another engagement. We made a rather long
round to the south and came back to Highmount by a road which parallels
the western brow of the mountain. Are you paying attention?”
“Breathless attention,” said Tregarvon ironically. “Joy-ride stories
always make me sit up. Go on.”
“Over on the west-brow road we passed a place which looked as if it
might be--or might some time have been--a gentleman’s country house.
It is walled in from the road, with a magnificently groved lawn,
a box-bordered, weed-grown carriage drive, and a great, rambling,
porticoed mansion needing the repair-man pretty savagely. Still sitting
up and taking notice?”
“Yes.”
“Just as were rolling up to pass the stone-pillared lodge-gates a horse
and buggy came out, with a young woman driving. The horse was old and
countrified, and he didn’t take kindly to the auto. So I stopped and
got out to lead him past the machine. You won’t want to believe it,
but the young woman driver was Miss Richardia; and the horse--well, no
horseman would call it white, to be sure. It was a dapple-gray, light
enough to pass for white in the moonlight, and with a mechanician like
Rucker for the color expert.”
Tregarvon came out of his listless mood with a snap.
“Let it be said, once for all, Poictiers, that I won’t stand for any
theory that involves Richardia Birrell in the crooked part of it,” he
declared firmly. “I’d trust her with anything I own; with my life, if
she cared to borrow it. That dapple-gray suggestion of yours makes my
back ache! It isn’t worthy of you. Rucker said ‘white,’ and white isn’t
gray; not by a long shot!”
“Wait,” said Carfax, evenly. “After I had led the horse safely past the
car, I made sure. ‘Hold on a minute, Miss Richardia,’ said I, ‘let me
see if your horse hasn’t a pebble in his shoe.’ That gave me an excuse
to lift his near hind foot. There wasn’t any pebble, of course, but the
shoe was badly worn, _and the toe-calk had a piece broken out of it_!”
Tregarvon maintained a stubborn silence for a full minute. Then he
denied again, with more heat than the occasion seemed to demand.
“I don’t care what evidence you bring. I’ll believe nothing against
Richardia; _nothing_, you understand? And, after all, what does it
amount to? We agreed this morning that she might blamelessly take an
evening drive with Hartridge. The fact that they were driving behind
her father’s horse cuts no especial figure that I can see.”
“She might have been driving with Hartridge blamelessly; we agree on
that. Or even still more blamelessly with--her father.”
“Put it in words,” snapped Tregarvon.
“Two or three people to whom I have spoken saw them together behind the
dapple-gray, her and her father.”
“I won’t stand for it!” was the angry retort. “You are hinting that her
father is behind these bushwhackings, and that she is a party to them.
That doesn’t go!”
“That was spoken very much like a lover,” said Carfax slowly. And then:
“You mustn’t let your major weakness get away with you, Vance.”
“And what do you call my ‘major weakness’?” Tregarvon inquired, with a
rasp to the words that made them sound like a challenge.
Carfax did not mince matters. “The inability to be off with the old
love before you are on with the new,” he said crisply. “Elizabeth has
some rights which you ought to respect, don’t you think?”
“Go on,” Tregarvon jerked out. “You haven’t said it all.”
“No, I haven’t; but I shall say it all. You are a changed man, Vance.
Either this coal-mine fight or your infatuation for this young woman,
or both, are bringing out the worst there is in you. Don’t you realize
it?”
“I realize that this is a devil of a world!” was the gritting
rejoinder. “First Richardia puts the knife into me and twists it
around, and now you’re doing it. I suppose it will be Elizabeth’s turn,
next!”
“You deserve all that is coming to you, I venture to say,” suggested
the mentor evenly. “You are engaged to one woman, and you come here and
make love openly to another.”
Tregarvon was lost now to all sense of proportion. “I shall do as I
please!” he retorted hotly. “If you want to write to Elizabeth, it’s
your privilege. If you do, I shall tell her that you’ve had Richardia
out in the car twice to my once!”
Carfax’s mentor mood slipped away, and he laughed softly.
“Miss Richardia is a dear girl, and worthy of the best that any man can
give her, Vance,” he said gently. “Somebody ought to save her from the
machinations of a William Wilberforce Hartridge, don’t you think? You
can’t, you know; and sometimes I’ve wondered if that doesn’t put it
pretty squarely up to me.”
Tregarvon rose and stood over his friend, and for an instant there
were black passions to blaze in the wide-set gray eyes. But there was
manhood enough underlying the tumult to enable him to throttle the
worst of the impulses.
“I--I guess I’m just a jealous dog in the manger, Poictiers,” he
confessed gratingly. “I’ve had a hunch that it was going that way, and
I’ve been resenting it--like the damned scoundrel I’m coming to be. But
it’s all over now, and--and I wish you joy. Can I say more than that?”
Carfax looked up with a quaint twinkle in his eye.
“I’m thinking you might say a good bit more, only you are too
charitable to turn the whole menagerie loose. Shall we go in and get
ready to eat? Uncle William will be calling us in a minute or so.”
It was not until after the dinner had been eaten, and they were smoking
bedtime pipes before the dining-room fire, that Tregarvon went back to
the discoveries of the day.
“About the time you were going for your drive this afternoon, I took
a walk,” he said, by way of prefacing the story of the last of the
discoveries. “I went over the ground we have been covering with the
drill, examining every inch of it as if I had lost the set out of a
diamond ring. I know now why we have been permitted to go on drilling
holes in the rock without interference.”
Carfax nodded. “I’ve had a hint of my own: I wonder if you are not
going to confirm it.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, I found that somebody else had been over
precisely the same ground with a test-drill a good while ago. I located
five holes in all, each of them filled to the top, of course, with sand
and washings. One of these holes isn’t twenty feet from the last one we
drilled before we moved to the present location in the graveyard glade.”
“Um,” said Carfax, absently rolling a cigarette between his palms.
“That was my guess, based upon a word that Hartridge let drop the day
I drove him down here to eat with us. I suppose the corollary to that
is----”
“That the accident that smashed things this morning was ‘assisted,’ as
the others have been. So long as we went on drilling in dead ground
it wasn’t worth while to interfere. But now that we are trying a new
wrinkle----”
Carfax got up and returned the softened cigarette to its place in his
pocket-case.
“I think we’d better sleep on that corollary of yours, Vance,” he
suggested mildly. “If it looks as plausible in daylight as it does now,
I don’t know but we had better call out the militia and give Rucker
more help in the night-watching. Anyway, we’ll see how it stacks up in
the morning.”
XI
Rosemary and Rue
The better impulses had been all to the fore when Tregarvon had wished
his friend a fair field and no favor at Highmount. But between a burst
of generosity on the spur of a repentant moment and a day-by-day
renouncing of a pearl of price there is apt to lie a _via dolorosa_
plentifully bestrewn with stone bruises for misguided feet. On the day
following the evening of plain speech Tregarvon toiled manfully with
Rucker and the laborers in the repairing of the damaged machinery; but
he did it without prejudice to a good many sharp-pointed reflections
basing themselves upon Carfax’s blunt accusation, upon the golden
youth’s calm interference, and upon the fact that, late in the
forenoon, Carfax, apparently tired of looking on and doing nothing at
the scene of the repairing activities, had strolled away through the
forest in the direction of Highmount.
There was more than one disturbing string to the bow of reflection. At
first, Miss Birrell had openly made a good-natured mock of Carfax,
with his small affectations to point her gibings; but Tregarvon was now
impecunious enough himself to appreciate the potency of money. Miss
Richardia had told him a little about the Birrell fortunes--or the lack
of them; of the vanishing of the family possessions in the aftermath of
the Civil War; of the fact that her father, once the leading jurist of
the Cumberland counties--Miss Richardia did not say this, but Tregarvon
easily inferred it--had found himself out of touch with the later and
more pushing spirit of the New South, and had withdrawn more and more
until he had become almost a hermit. The Carfax millions were enough
to tempt any young woman; and Carfax himself--Tregarvon admitted it
without bitterness--was a man to whom most women were attracted and
whom all women trusted.
But was Carfax really in love with Judge Birrell’s daughter? Tregarvon
boasted that he had summered and wintered the golden youth; yet there
were depths in him that the Philadelphian suspected no one had ever
fully plumbed. In Tregarvon’s knowing of him he had always been, or
appeared to be, immune to sentiment; his attitude had been that of
a gentle-natured soul who was willing to be used, or even abused,
without detriment to an impartial affection for the entire sex. Would
such a man be able to make Richardia as happy as she deserved to be? In
the intimacy which Tregarvon had pressed to its ultimate limits he had
come to know that behind the cool, slate-blue eyes and the lips that
lent themselves so readily to playful mockery there was a passionate
soul which would give all and demand all; which would starve on a diet
of mere affection, however kindly and indulgent. Would the Carfax
millions outweigh this demand? It was an irritating question, refusing
to be answered.
Tregarvon, driving bolts into the patched derrick frame, strove
dejectedly to put his own huge misfortune aside as a matter definitely
settled. He admitted, with pricklings of shame, the truth, or at least
the half-truth, of Carfax’s accusation--the charge of fickleness. In a
light-hearted way he had been devoted to many women, for the moment,
and the nearest woman had always been the loadstone. He excused the
weakness by saying that it was common to all men--thereby touching a
truth larger than he knew; excused it further by laying down the broad
principle that Richardia Birrell, though numerically the last, was
really the first woman who had ever broken through to the inner depths
of him.
Just here he had a saving glimpse of the workings of the normal
masculine mind, and it jogged his sense of humor. Was not the latest
charmer always the pearl of great price; the one altogether lovely?
Perhaps; but in this case, he told himself, it was different. The
Richardias are few and far between; and he had discovered one of the
precious few only to realize that he was bound in honor to relinquish
her without a murmur to a Carfax, or even to a Hartridge. It was a part
of the irrefrangible vanity of the male to regard the relinquishment
as a voluntary virtue on his part. In all the gnawings of the worm of
reflection, girdings at his hard lot, questionings as to Richardia’s
future happiness, gratulatory back-pattings at his own magnanimity in
leaving the field to Carfax, it did not occur to him that Richardia,
herself, might have had something to say to his own suit--if he had
been able, as a man of honor, to press it. Like many other men, he
comforted himself with the cheerful assumption that, in the absence of
the abnormal obstacles, any man may win any woman, if he shall only put
his mind to it; a doctrine, it may be said, which is still lacking
proof in certain isolated instances.