self-glorification--of the afterthought, Tregarvon wore out the day,
deferring to Rucker as boss of the repairing job, and trying not to
speculate too pointedly upon the doings of the absent Carfax. That the
golden youth was once more a drop-in guest at the near-by school was
not to be doubted; and the caviller at an unkind fate steeled himself
against another disloyalty--a temptation to rail at the New Yorker for
making such unseemly haste. The ill-natured thought would have likened
Carfax’s haste to that which prompts the heir-at-law to open and read
the will while the testator is as yet merely in the throes of the
death-agony--only Tregarvon would not yield to the temptation.
If the murmurer against fate could have seen beyond the half-mile
of forest which intervened between the old slave burying-ground and
Highmount, he would have concluded sorrowfully that Carfax’s haste
was well on the way to its reward. Miss Richardia’s duty hours in
the afternoon were short, and at three o’clock she was free to join
the golden one, who, as Tregarvon’s prefiguring had assumed, had
been Mrs. Caswell’s luncheon guest, and was now making himself at
home on the broad veranda of the administration building. For a time
the talk rambled through Boston byways and was reminiscent of Miss
Richardia’s sojourn as a Conservatory student and of Carfax’s quickly
abandoned attempt to take a postgraduate course in the School of Naval
Architecture.
“You see, I didn’t have the spur,” was Carfax’s excuse for the
abandoned attempt. Then, in an apparent burst of enthusiasm: “Vance is
the lucky fellow! He is obliged to work. He thinks it is pretty hard
lines, but he doesn’t know how jolly good it is for his soul. It is
precisely what he is needing, don’t you think?”
“Work? yes; but the many disappointments: are they also good for the
soul?”
Carfax’s smile was entirely amiable. “In due proportion, they are,
I should say. Vance has been like a bit of soft steel, needing the
forge fire and the tempering brine bath. I presume you know that he is
engaged to be married?”
Miss Richardia’s smile was of the sort that no mere man may interpret.
“I think he has told me all there was to tell. Are you acquainted with
Miss Wardwell?”
“Very well acquainted, indeed. She is all that any man could ask--and
more,” said Carfax, with more warmth than he usually permitted himself.
“Last summer she was a member of a Lake Placid outing-party in which I
had the good fortune also to be included. We became quite chummy. She
swims, you know.”
Again Miss Birrell’s smile was a charming little mask of
impenetrability.
“These athletic young women!” she sighed. “It is their day.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that Eliz--that Miss Wardwell is offensively
athletic. I wouldn’t have you think that. She--she is musical and all
the other things that a young woman ought to be; but she enjoys the
outdoor things, too. And so do I.”
“And Mr. Tregarvon doesn’t enjoy them?”
“Just in a way,” was the qualifying rejoinder. “Vance’s misfortune has
been, that, until quite recently, he has never wanted anything that he
couldn’t simply reach out and take; he has never been obliged to throw
himself whole-heartedly into anything. He is doing it now, though.”
“Into the Ocoee, you mean? I am afraid there is nothing but
disappointment for him there.”
Carfax was silent for a moment. Then he said: “There are times, Miss
Richardia, when I have the feeling that every one who knows what he is
trying to do wishes him to be disappointed.”
“Including us here at Highmount?” she laughed.
“Well, yes.”
“Perhaps you would be willing to make it even more definite. Do you
include me with Mr. Tregarvon’s ill-wishers?”
“Sometimes I’ve been tempted to.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why you should say that.”
“I have said it,” Carfax returned, with the gentle doggedness which
he could assume when the need was sufficiently pressing. “I shall be
delighted to be assured that I am mistaken.”
Now came Miss Richardia’s opportunity to fall silent, and she improved
it. When she spoke again the playful mockery was laid aside.
“My father was one of the sorriest of the losers in the Ocoee in the
promoting period,” she began soberly. “This entire mountain top was
once a part of the Birrell estate; my grandfather gave the site for
this school. When Mr. Parker was promoting the Ocoee, father went into
the plan, heart and soul, giving a large part of the land, and putting
all the money he could rake and scrape into the stock of Mr. Parker’s
company. Worse than that, he was so firmly convinced of the future
success of the undertaking that he persuaded his friends to invest. You
mustn’t expect us to be very enthusiastic now, Mr. Carfax. It isn’t in
human nature to rejoice when others are preparing to reap where we have
sown.”
Carfax’s smile was angel-compassionate.
“Poor Vance isn’t reaping very successfully as yet,” he pointed out.
Then he added: “I hope your good father doesn’t feel vindictive toward
him. I think we may safely say that Vance is the innocent third party
in the transaction--if there ever is such a thing.”
“You don’t know my father; if you did, you would hardly accuse him of
vindictiveness, even in your thoughts.”
“Can you say as much for yourself?” asked the accuser gently.
“Indeed, I can!”
“You wouldn’t put a straw in Vance’s way, if you could?”
“I wish you would listen!” she laughed. “Do I look like a--a
subterranean plotter, Mr. Carfax?”
“You always look charming. But you don’t want Vance to succeed.”
“I am sure I don’t know why you should think such a thing. Perhaps you
don’t think it. I can never tell when you are really in earnest.”
“Strange that you should have noticed that. Others have said it of me,
too, at times. But I am very much in earnest this afternoon. It lies in
your hands to make Vance fail most conspicuously, you know.”
“You are fond of riddles, and I am not. I wish you would be more
explicit.”
Carfax stole a glance aside at his veranda companion and it was borne
in upon him that he would have to choose his words carefully. The
slate-blue eyes had grown a trifle hard, and Miss Richardia’s tone was
no longer sympathetic.
“Vance can’t mix business and sentiment very well,” he ventured. “He
has been spending a good bit of time here at Highmount, forgetting some
things that he ought to remember. Surely you have discovered his one
weakness by this time, haven’t you?” he went on, gravely pleading. “Not
that it isn’t tremendously excusable in the present instance, you know.
You--er--you are enough to turn any man’s head, Miss Richardia; you
are, indeed.”
Her little shriek of laughter was sufficient to break any thin skim of
ice which may have been congealing between them.
“You can be quite as absurd as Mr. Vance, himself, when you try!” she
mocked. Then, with the frankness which was all her own: “Are you trying
to tell me that I have been playing the part of a modern Delilah, Mr.
Carfax!”
“Oh, dear, no! But”--he swallowed hard once or twice, and then took
the plunge--“but Vance simply couldn’t help falling in love with you.
Er--hardly any man could. And it’s--it’s smashing him to perfection. I
don’t say that he is admitting the--the little lapse, even to himself;
he is too honorable to do that, after he has given his word to Eliz--to
Miss Wardwell. But the fact remains.”
Miss Richardia laughed again, but now the laugh scarcely rang true.
“You are making me out a poor, miserable sinner; though I am a most
innocent one, I do assure you,” she protested, not without a suggestion
of sarcasm. “What is it you wish me to do?”
Carfax needed no one to tell him that he was wading in deep waters,
and that another step might put him in over his head. Yet he could not
retreat; he had gone too far.
“I have been trying to hammer a little common sense into Vance; perhaps
I have said more than even a good friend has a right to say. Hitherto
it hasn’t done much good; but last night I had a perfectly brilliant
inspiration. I wonder if you could be induced to help me carry it
out?--just in the interests of a--of a square deal all around, you
know.”
“Another absurdity?” she queried, half scornfully.
“Yes, just that; a--a most ridiculous absurdity. Will you--er--will you
marry me, Miss Richardia?”
“Most certainly not,” she returned, with a strained little laugh. “Why
should I?”
“There isn’t any reason at all, of course,” he hastened to say. “But if
you would make your answer not quite so--er--so positive: if you would
be so generous as to--er--to seem to take it under consideration; just
until Vance can get on his feet again----”
This time her laughter was wholly mirthful; an abandonment of all
hamperings.
“Of all preposterous askings!” she gasped. “Are there many more like
you, Mr. Carfax--in New York?”
“Plenty of them,” he assured her, not too seriously. Then: “It wouldn’t
be such a dreadful thing, would it? I can make love very nicely, you
know; honestly, I can. And we shouldn’t have to do anything more than
to keep up appearances.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not going to humor you far enough to even pretend to take you
seriously,” she declared.
“Not even for Vance’s sake? Of course, I know you don’t care for
him, particularly, but I do; he has been like a brother to me, Miss
Richardia; really he has. And we ought to make him realize what he is
about; it’s--er--it’s a sort of duty, don’t you think?”
“If I should tell you what I think I am afraid it might sound
dreadfully unkind, Mr. Carfax. You seem to have had very little
experience with women.”
“Oh, but I have, you know,” he burst out. “I--I’m in love,
myself--with--with some one I can’t possibly marry. That ought to make
you feel sorry for me, and I’m sure it does. Perhaps you are in a
similar situation yourself; in love with some one else, I mean. In that
case----”
Miss Richardia had risen, and the mocking mood was once more firmly
intrenched behind her laughing eyes.
“You have given me a most delicious half-hour, Mr. Carfax, and in the
days to come, when I feel particularly blue, I shall always have it
to look back to and remember. You are not expecting me to say any more
than that, are you? I can’t, you know, because I have an appointment
with a pupil, and I shall have to go and keep it.”
Carfax had risen with her. “I’m perfectly delighted to be your
laughing-stock,” he asserted gently. “You’ll let me come and be it
again? Thanks, awfully.” And when she was gone he sat down like a man
who has been through a pass perilous, and smoked three of the imported
cigarettes in rapid succession.
That evening, returning from the hard day’s work on the repairs, the
owner of the Ocoee found Carfax awaiting him in the office headquarters
at the foot of Pisgah. Uncle William’s dinner, served as soon as
Tregarvon had taken his bath, was not provocative of conversation; and
even afterward the talk, revolving around the repairs and the mystery,
was only desultory. It was not until Tregarvon was smoking his bedtime
pipe that he dug the one important thing out of his mind and flung it
at his companion.
“You spent the day at Highmount, I suppose?”
“Oh, dear, no; not quite so bad as that. I’ve been down here since
half-past four or such a matter.”
“But you went to the college after you left us?”
“Yes; and Mrs. Caswell was good enough to give me something to eat at
the proper time. She makes one believe all the old-time stories of
Southern hospitality. Which reminds me: we are both invited there to
dinner to-morrow evening.”
Tregarvon refused to be turned aside.
“You didn’t go to Highmount to visit with Mrs. Caswell,” he suggested
sourly.
“Not altogether; no.”
“Did you see Richardia?”
Carfax had lighted his candle and was preparing to beat a hasty
retreat, did retreat as far as the door before he turned to say: “Yes,
I saw I Miss Richardia. You wished me joy, last night, Vance, and I
hope you are going to do it again. I’ve asked her to marry me, you
know.”
“_What!_” shouted Tregarvon, springing from his chair. And then, with a
mighty effort to keep the words from choking him: “What did she say?”
Carfax smiled like a winning angel. “She--well, it seemed to strike her
as being a bit sudden, as you might say, and----”
[Illustration: Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more.]
Tregarvon had dropped into a chair beside the table, and was hiding
his face in the crook of an elbow. Carfax stopped abruptly and said no
more; and when he closed the door behind him it was done so gently that
the latch made no sound.
XII
Dull Steel
Rucker proved as good as his word in the matter of estimating the
delay, two days sufficing for the work of restoration. Having made a
test run in the evening after Tregarvon had gone down the mountain, the
mechanician had the machinery whirling merrily to the _chug chug_ of
the drill by the time his two bosses came on the ground the following
morning.
Among his better qualities Tregarvon was able to number a certain
degree of resilience which, given time to take the full impact of a
blow, could recover and rebound and make the best of the inevitable.
Whatever might have come of the intimacy with Richardia Birrell--and he
told himself that nothing could have come of it in any event--it was
now an episode ended; and after a night of very much mingled emotions,
he had risen up with the determination to play the man, for Carfax’s
sake if not for his own, and to let the industrial battle fill all the
horizons for one Vance Tregarvon. With this determination firmly seated
in the saddle, he had constrained himself to meet Carfax at breakfast
without bitterness; to motor with him up the mountain in terms of
good-fellowship; and, upon their arrival, to shout cheerfully to Rucker.
“Got her going all right again, have you, Billy? Any more puzzle people
come to see you last night?”
Rucker grinned sheepishly.
“I ain’t goin’ to lie about it, Mr. Tregarvon. What with pushin’ the
job so bloomin’ hard yesterday, and losin’ so much sleep between
whiles, I guess they might’ve come and lugged me off bodily without my
knowin’ it.”
“And you didn’t find anything wrong this morning?”
“Well, no; not to say just wrong; only sort o’ spookerish.” Then, in a
tone that the men at the drill might not hear: “There was somebody here
again last night--humans ’r ghosts. I had a fit o’ the jumps a while
back that everlastin’ly swiped my appetite for breakfast.”
“How was that?” asked Tregarvon, looking up from his inspection of
the yellow car’s motor; and Carfax said: “It must have been something
pretty fierce, Billy, if it crippled your pneumogastric nerve.”
“It was this way,” Rucker explained. “Last night, after we got the
derrick rigged again, I starts and runs the engine for a little while,
just to make sure everything is in workin’ order. When I shuts down, I
banks the fire under the boiler so it’ll keep overnight. ’Long about
sunrise this mornin’ I hikes over to stir her up for business, and when
I yanks the fire-box door open, it’s me for throwin’ that fit o’ the
jumps. There was the yallerist, cockiest-lookin’ skull you ever see,
settin’ on top o’ the banked fire, ready to pull a grin on me when I
opens the door.”
“A skull?--a human skull?” exclaimed Tregarvon incredulously.
“Yep; a yaller one; all teeth and eye-holes, and with a sort of greasy
black smoke comin’ out o’ the place where its nose ought to ’a’ been.”
“How did it get there?” Carfax asked the question and then answered it
himself by adding: “But, of course, you don’t know.”
Rucker was wiping his face with a piece of cotton waste--the
machinist’s handkerchief. The autumn morning was cool and bracing on
the mountain top, yet the perspiration stood in fine little beads on
his forehead.
“No, I don’t know; and if you was to search me all day, you’d never get
it out o’ me where it come from, ’r who put it there,” he said. “I
ain’t what you’d call jumpy, but after it was all over, I didn’t want
no breakfast.”
“What did you do with it?” Tregarvon asked.
“Me? I jammed it back into the coals with the clinker hook, and put the
blower on, quick! Says I, ‘All right, my bucko! You make me throw a
fit, and I’ll make you make steam!’”
“Heavens! You burned it?” Tregarvon was still conventional enough to be
half horrified, and Carfax shuddered in sympathy.
“I certain’y did. But he got back at me, right now! In less ’n five
minutes by the watch that old boiler was red-hot and blowin’ off steam
to beat the band. She was sweatin’ black smoke at every joint; and when
I chases ’round to open the fire-door--Well, you needn’t believe me if
you don’t want to, but them grate-bars was drippin’ something ’r other
that looked like burnin’ blood!”
There is a point beyond which the thread of sympathetic horror snaps,
and the ball rebounds into the field of the ridiculous.
“That will do for you, Billy,” Tregarvon laughed. “We’ll allow you the
skull, but you needn’t embroider it for us. Somebody played a grisly
joke on you--with no particular object, that I can see. Just the same,
it has its significance. Some prowler was sneaking around here while
you were asleep. Are you sure the drill is working all right?”
“You can see for yourself,” said Rucker, not unboastfully. “She’s
jumpin’ up and down to the old tune of forty to the minute, same as I
promised you she’d be this mornin’.”
But a closer inspection proved that Rucker’s boast was loyal to the eye
but a traitor to the fact. The drill was merely “jumping up and down.”
It was hardly cutting its own clearance; had gained in depth less than
half an inch in half an hour, according to the report of Sawyer, who
was at his customary post, “churning and turning” at the hole.
Rucker looked on critically for a few minutes and then laid a listening
ear to the steel, bowing and recovering in unison with the stroke.
“She’s hit a bone o’ some kind,” was his verdict; and he stopped the
churning machinery and threw in the hoist by means of which the heavy
cutting-bar was lifted from the hole.
An examination of the drill point amply verified the mechanician’s
guess that something much harder than the fine-gritted sandstone of the
mountain top had been encountered in the bottom of the test-hole. The
cutting edges of the drill burr were completely gone, broken down and
gnawed smooth until the steel cutter-bar was no more than a blunt-ended
ram.
Tregarvon swore painstakingly, anathematizing the demon of ill luck by
bell, book, and candle, thereby further emphasizing the distance he had
travelled on the road toward things elemental.
“Scrap it,” he snapped, meaning the ruined drill point. “How many more
have you?”
“Three.”
“All right; put another one in and drive it!”
Rucker got out a fresh point, mounted and lowered it, and the churning
was resumed. Three hours of steady thumping showed a gain of less than
two inches in the depth of the hole, and at the end of that time the
second drill burr was worn as smooth as the first.
This went on until the last of the four cutters was put in service.
For a wasted day of patient churning the hole had gone down only a few
inches, and Rucker was in despair.
“When this cutter goes, we’re hung up for more ’n any day ’r two,” he
announced. “I can sharpen these points all right enough, but it’ll take
scads o’ time with the tools we’ve got here on the job. You two bosses
hain’t made up your minds what t’ ’ell it is we’re tryin’ to chew
through down yonder, have you?”
Tregarvon had taken an engineering course in the university, but he was
no geologist; and Carfax’s equipment was even less hopeful. It was a
case for a specialist; and the specialist turned up at the opportune
moment in the person of Mr. Guy Wilmerding, who had ridden over from
Whitlow to see how the Ocoee experiment was progressing.
His coming was hailed with acclamations by the two amateurs.
“By Jove, Wilmerding, you’re just in time to save us from
strait-jackets and a padded cell!” Tregarvon exclaimed. “What kind of
rock do you have in this region that will make a drill point look like
that?” showing the C. C. & I. superintendent one of the blunted cutters.
Wilmerding scrutinized the dulled point carefully.
“None of the native rock ought to do that,” he demurred. “This is a
poor piece of steel, isn’t it?”
“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began.
Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole
now with only a few more minutes to live.”
“That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the
points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the
sand pump.”
The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding
examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings
between his thumb and finger.
“Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the
sandstone--‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this
conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have
never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,”
he added reflectively.
“You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?”
“There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the
reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you
would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother
Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s
no worse.”
Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again.
“That means Rucker to go to Chattanooga with the cutter points, and
more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.”
“I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt
generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith
who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points
into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you
going.”
Tregarvon’s ill temper vanished like the dew on a summer morning. “You
are certainly an enemy of a hitherto unsuspected variety!” he declared.
“We’ve been having a good bit of trouble, first and last; some of it
bearing all the earmarks of design on somebody’s part. Do you know for
a while I thought you might be inspiring it? That was before Carfax
discovered you personally, of course.”
Wilmerding’s laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
“I hope you didn’t think so small of Consolidated Coal as to suspect it
of popping at you with a boy’s whip!” he retorted. “By and by, when you
find your coal and meet us in the open market, we may have to buy you
or smash you. But it will be done in the good, old-fashioned commercial
way.”
“We shall be there when you put up the large come-off-the-perch
bluff,” Carfax thrust in gently. “But in the meantime, somebody _is_
popping at us with the boy’s whip.”
“Who?--for a guess?” asked the Whitlow superintendent.
“Ah!” said Carfax, in the same gentle tone, “I have a thousand dollars
somewhere about my belongings that would be delighted to blow itself
against the real answer to that question.”
“And you have no clue?”
Carfax smiled. “A dozen of them, more or less. But they all have a
way of coming out by the roots when we begin to pull on them ever so
cautiously.”
“You are calling me the enemy, but that doesn’t count until the real
fight opens up,” said Wilmerding. “If any suggestion of mine will help
while you are clawing for a foothold.... By the way, that reminds me: I
made an analysis of your coals the other day. Thaxter didn’t have one,
didn’t seem to know anything definite about the Ocoee.”
“Well?” queried Tregarvon. “Do you agree with Captain Duncan?”
“If your two veins are not one and the same, they ought to be. I
couldn’t sift out the slightest difference between the two specimens.”
There was some further talk about the characteristics, analytical and
otherwise, of the Ocoee coal, and Wilmerding stayed long enough to see
the fourth and last drill point withdrawn from the hole. The cutter,
like its predecessors, was a mechanical ruin; and Wilmerding again made
the proffer of the Whitlow repair-plant. Tregarvon promised to send
Rucker and the burrs up from Coalville in the morning, and the young
superintendent climbed upon his nag and rode away.
“Tools up, men!” Tregarvon called to the drilling squad, when
Wilmerding had disappeared among the trees. “We’ll call it a day; and
to-morrow you may all go on the track-repairing with Tryon.”