that spoils a man’s life. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not going
to be either a fool or a scoundrel. I shall marry Elizabeth and try
to make her as happy as I can; but it will be without prejudice to
the fact that I didn’t know what love was when I promised her. I can
imagine just how brutal that sounds to you, but it’s the truth.”
“The truth is always rather brutal, isn’t it?” Then the golden youth
permitted himself a word that he rarely used. “I’m damned sorry for
Elizabeth.”
“As I told you once before, you needn’t be,” Tregarvon snapped back.
“There is absolutely no question of sentiment between us, and there has
never been. You’d appreciate that if you should read her letters to me;
letters in answer to my babblings about Richardia. If Elizabeth had a
spark of sentiment in her she would have sent me packing long ago.
I’ve told her pretty nearly everything there was to tell.”
“I suppose you have. That is one of your amiable weaknesses--to tell
some woman, any woman who happens to be within reach, a lot of things
that no woman ought to be told. You deserve all that is coming to you,
Vance.”
“I suppose I do,” Tregarvon admitted; and beyond this the silence
came to its own again. After a time, Carfax suggested quizzically
that the ghosts might be too bashful to come out while there were
two able-bodied watchers in sight; and at that they went inside to
find seats on a coil of rope opposite the open door. Before long, the
interior darkness began to make Tregarvon sleepy and he had quite lost
himself when a touch of Carfax’s hand aroused him.
“Look steadily at the big oak just beyond the engine--the one where
we found the tripod marks,” was the whispered injunction. “Do you see
anything?”
Tregarvon rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stared hard at the oak.
“Nothing doing,” he said.
“Yes, there is,” Carfax asserted. “There is a man behind that tree. I
saw him just before I shook you awake.”
“Piffle!” said Tregarvon. “That oak isn’t big enough to hide a man.”
“Just the same, he is there!” retorted Carfax, still in a whisper.
Then: “I suppose it didn’t occur to you that we might need something
more persuasive than our bare hands up here to-night, did it?”
“No; and we shan’t.” Tregarvon was suddenly reminded of his promise
to Richardia that there should be no tragedies. “What we can’t handle
peaceably, we’ll let go.”
“All right; you’re the doctor,” said the golden youth mildly.
“Nevertheless, if I had a gun I’d go out and capture that fellow who is
hiding behind the tree.”
“Still nervous, are you?” Tregarvon put in. “You are dreaming,
Poictiers. There isn’t any one there.”
“All right, again,” was the serene reply. “Have it that way, if you
like. Only don’t forget to keep your eye on the tree.”
That was the beginning of a patient watch which was maintained for
a full quarter of an hour. The night was perfectly still; there was
not wind enough to rustle the browning leaves of the oaks or to
whisper in the pines. Afar off, the little screech-owl whose haunts
had been invaded by the drilling plant lifted up his voice in shrill
chatterings, but there were no other sounds to break the silence. Once
during the watchful vigil Tregarvon thought he saw something stirring
among the trees on the farther side of the glade, and his fingers
closed upon Carfax’s arm. But when he looked again the shadows were
undisturbed.
“This is tremendously exciting,” Carfax commented finally, in gentle
irony. “If I weren’t morally certain that I saw a man dodge behind that
tree a little while ago, I’d fall asleep.”
“Do it anyway,” Tregarvon suggested. “I’ll stand watch, and call you
when your turn comes. Take Rucker’s cot.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“Sure I do. Turn in and take your forty winks. If anything seems likely
to happen, I’ll let you know.”
“Then I believe I’ll take you at your word. I haven’t been so sleepy
since the year before Noah built the ark of gopherwood. If Mrs. Caswell
wasn’t as far above suspicion as the angels of light, I might suspect
her of having put something into the black coffee.”
Five minutes later Tregarvon was sitting alone on the rope coil,
rubbing his eyes and wishing that he might decently follow Carfax’s
example. The very act of staring at the moonlit glade hypnotized him,
the more since there was nothing unusual to be seen. With the view
through the open door becoming hazy and startlingly distinct by turns,
he struggled manfully against the rising tide of somnolence, nodding,
and recovering himself with a jerk when he realized that the tide was
submerging him. But out of one of the nodding moments he came with a
violent start that instantly banished all thoughts of sleep. The little
screech-owl had ceased complaining, and the arousing sound had been the
distinct clink of metal upon stone.
When he looked he saw that the time for action had come. Standing
fairly in the midst of the small clearing, the drill derrick was
struck out boldly in the white moonlight, with every outline and
detail sharply distinguishable. In the square of cleaned rock surface
marked off by the four legs of the derrick frame Tregarvon saw a man
crouching. The clinking noise was repeated and the watcher at the door
faced about and felt his way in the inner darkness to the bed in the
corner of the tool-room.
“Wake up, Poictiers!” he called in low tones; “the play has begun!”
Carfax sat up promptly and asked but a moment for the finding of
himself. “I’m all here,” he said. “What’s doing?”
For answer Tregarvon led him to the door and pointed to the square
of bared bed-rock under the derrick frame. There was a man there,
without doubt, but now he was standing up and was apparently examining
something which lay in the palm of his hand. The sudden rush of the two
from the tool shanty was quite evidently a surprise for the intruder,
but he made no attempt to escape. So far from it, he lifted his soft
hat politely and said: “Good evening again, gentlemen. You took me
completely by surprise--as perhaps you meant to. I was quite sure that
you were both safely in bed in Coalville by this time.”
“No,” said Carfax very gently. “We have not been in Coalville at all:
we have been here, waiting, quite patiently for--you, Mr. Hartridge.”
“That was kind,” said Hartridge affably. “And, now that your patient
waiting has been duly rewarded?----”
“Now that we have caught you we shall ask you to solve that little
problem in psychology for us,” put in Tregarvon. “We’d like to know
what it is that you have just been dropping into that drill-hole.”
“And if I assure you that I have been putting nothing into your
drill-hole, what then, Mr. Tregarvon?”
“In that case I shall ask Carfax to see that you don’t run away while I
ascertain for myself,” was the firm rejoinder; and a careful dip of the
long cleaning spoon into the test-hole brought up a half-dozen small
metallic objects; cubes cut from a bar of tool-steel they appeared to
be.
Tregarvon handled the cubes and passed them on to Carfax.
“We owe you something for a day lost and four drill points all but
ruined, Mr. Hartridge,” he said rather grimly, adding: “But we’ll
credit your account with this present failure to make us do it all over
again to-morrow. Would you mind telling us in so many words what your
object has been--or still is, perhaps?”
The professor’s smile was imperturbably bland.
“I am sure you wouldn’t be so harsh as to put me on the witness-stand
in my own defense,” he said, still amiable. “Especially since you have
no evidence of anything worse than a neighborly call at, perhaps, a
somewhat unseasonable hour.”
At this Carfax came quite close and he forgot to lisp when he said:
“Mr. Hartridge, may I ask you to remove your overcoat for a moment? The
night is a bit chilly, I know, but----”
The tone of the request was gentle enough but there was a quality in
it that made the suggestion a demand. The professor slipped out of the
coat, quaintly quoting Scripture for the ready compliance. “‘If any
man ... take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak, also.’ Anything to
oblige a friend, Mr. Carfax.”
Carfax took the surrendered coat and, feeling in the right-hand pocket,
drew out one of the little steel cubes; quite evidently the one which
Hartridge had had in his hand at the moment of surprises.
“Thank you; that is all,” said the searcher, returning the coat, or
rather holding it thoughtfully while Hartridge put it on. And then:
“You will hardly deny that we have sufficient evidence now, I take it?”
The professor of mathematics spread his hands as one who has done his
best and is only regretful that he can do no more.
“Let us assume that the case has gone to the jury: what is the verdict,
gentlemen?”
“You are asking what we mean to do?” Tregarvon demanded.
“That is it, precisely. What can you do?--drag me before the nearest
justice of the peace on a charge of malicious mischief? You would
scarcely wish to disturb the tranquillity of an old and honored
institution of learning like Highmount College by such a proceeding as
that, would you?”
Tregarvon could not help smiling at the audacity of the man, and the
New Yorker laughed outright.
“You have a most excellent quality of nerve, Mr. Hartridge,” was
Carfax’s tribute to the audacity. “As you suggest, our field is rather
limited. You are perfectly well aware of the fact that Highmount
and its hospitality stand as the only barrier between us and social
starvation. Let us try to discover a _modus vivendi_. The verdict is:
‘Guilty, with a recommendation to mercy.’ We are willing to give any
man’s sense of humor a chance to redeem itself. You quoted Scripture at
me a moment ago, let me return the compliment: ‘Go in peace, and sin no
more.’”
The professor drew himself up, smiling genially and lifting his hat.
“I thank you, gentlemen; you are very considerate,” he returned in
gentle irony. After which he walked away, pausing at the edge of the
glade to lift his hat again.
Carfax drew a long breath when the tall, black-coated figure was lost
under the tree shadows. Then he turned upon his companion:
“I’m not going to say, ‘I told you so,’ Vance, because I think you
came around to my point of view some little time ago. What is the
motive--Hartridge’s motive? Is it merely impish humor? Or does it go
deeper than that?”
Tregarvon was busily engaged in putting two and two together to make
the inevitable four. The schoolmaster was in love with Richardia
Birrell; the Philadelphian’s first visit to Highmount had made this
perfectly plain: could it be possible that Hartridge was acting
as Judge Birrell’s agent in the obstacle-raising? And, if so, did
Richardia know it?
“Stay here a few minutes, Poictiers,” he directed. “I’m going to follow
him and see if he goes straight back to Highmount.”
“Joy go with you,” said Carfax; and when he was left alone he went to
sit on the step of the tool-house to smoke while he waited.
XV
Mammy Ann’s Grave
Carfax was smoking his third cigarette when Tregarvon returned from
spying upon the retreating professor and sat down in sober silence upon
the door-step.
The smoker waited patiently for some little time before he said
suggestively: “I hope you didn’t have your walk for nothing.”
“I saw all I needed to see.”
“Hartridge went to the college?”
“I suppose so; he was headed that way when I turned back.”
Carfax waited again, and when nothing further was forthcoming: “It’s
a remarkably beautiful night, isn’t it? Did you ever see a handsomer
moon?”
“Don’t make me talk!” was the irritable rejoinder. “You’ll be sorry for
it if you do.”
“Try me and see.”
“Well, then--if you will have it: there was a witness to our little
comedy out there under the derrick.”
“Some one who came with Hartridge?”
“I guess so. Some one who went back with him, at any rate.”
“Who was it?”
“I hate to tell you, Poictiers. It was--it was the woman you are going
to marry; Richardia Birrell.”
Carfax laughed softly.
“I don’t see why you need be so desperately gloomy because it happened
to be Richardia. As I remarked a moment ago, the night is jewel fine,
and I don’t wonder that she found it hard to stay indoors. And as to
my rights in the matter, I am far from denying her the privilege of
walking abroad with so old a friend as Mr. William W. Hartridge.”
“You are trying to make a jest of it, as you do of everything,” was the
crabbed retort. “Don’t you see what it means?”
“I must confess that I don’t see anything especially catastrophic about
it.”
“You don’t? Why, good heavens, man! it means that Richardia knows what
Hartridge has been doing. I won’t admit yet that she is a party to it;
but she _knows_!”
“_Place aux dames_,” said Carfax cheerfully. “We’ll give her the
benefit of the doubt; it’s our clear duty--or, at least, it is mine.”
“No, I’ll be hanged if we do!” Tregarvon growled. “There isn’t even a
doubt where she is concerned!”
Carfax threw the half-burnt cigarette away and lighted another.
“Your tone is that of the still deeply infatuated lover. Must we
again come back to that phase of it?” he inquired, in the tone of the
long-suffering but still amiable bystander.
The man beside him took plenty of time to consider. But when he opened
the flood-gates there was a torrent of self-accusings to pour out.
“I’m a beast, a cad, the cheapest of cheap skates, Poictiers!--anything
you like to call me. It hasn’t touched Richardia, but it has gone all
sorts of despicable distances with me. When you told me the other night
that you had proposed to her, I could have murdered you. And just now,
when I saw her walking arm in arm with Hartridge, I wanted to run amuck
and destroy him. I’m not trying to excuse myself when I say that I
didn’t go down without a struggle. I did make some kind of a fight at
first: I even went so far as to tell Richardia all about Elizabeth. But
it didn’t do any good.”
Carfax’s smile was out of the depths of wisdom, and it was not visible
above the horizon for the penitent.
“That was great,” he said, referring to the forlorn-hope confession of
the engagement. “I don’t believe I could have done that.”
“Oh, there is nothing coming to me on that score,” Tregarvon objected,
carrying self-abnegation to the limit. “I couldn’t help telling her;
not because it was the honest thing to do, but because I should have
burst into inconsequent little shards long ago if I hadn’t told her
everything I knew.”
“And she has been encouraging this little idiosyncrasy of yours?”
Carfax asked tentatively.
“Not on your life! She has been doing everything that an angel out of
heaven could do to smash me back into my place; to show me how many
different kinds of an idiot I was making of myself. No longer ago than
this evening, when you went off with the Caswells and left me in the
lurch, the first thing she did was to ask me when I was going home to
marry Elizabeth.”
For the first time in Tregarvon’s knowing of him, Carfax appeared to be
losing his temper.
“‘A beast, a cad, and the cheapest of cheap skates,’” he repeated
carefully. “They are your own words, and they will all apply to you if
you don’t tell Elizabeth all and more than you have just told me.”
“There is the millstone grind of it!” groaned the sinner. “If I should
tell her how far it has gone with me, it would be tantamount to asking
her to make me a present of myself, with the Uncle Byrd millions
thrown in for a _lagniappe_. I suppose I’ve got it to do, now, but I’d
cheerfully accept the alternative of walking into old Brother Daniel’s
den of lions.”
“Y-e-s, I should think you would,” was the drawling comment. “Any man
who would make a football of the happiness of such a woman as Elizabeth
Wardwell----”
“Hold on,” Tregarvon cut in, sobering suddenly. “Get up and walk on me,
if that is what you think is coming to me; but don’t mangle me with a
cold iron. I’m out of it all around. If Richardia doesn’t marry you,
she’ll marry Hartridge; and when I tell Elizabeth, as I’ve got to, that
will be the end of things with her. You mustn’t hit a man when he is
down. It’s wicked.”
“Everything goes--between friends,” said Carfax, who could never take
the trouble to put his displeasure into any permanent form. “It does
look as if you were up against it, before and behind. Far be it from
me to break the bruised reed, or to quench the smoking flax.”
“Oh, confound you for a Job’s comforter!” rasped Tregarvon, breaking
out afresh. “I’ve got to believe in people--I’m built that way; and if
I could think for a moment that Richardia is Hartridge’s accomplice in
this contemptible trickery of his----”
“Well, if you could?” prompted the comforter, after the pause had grown
overlong.
“If I could, I’d lose faith in my own good intentions,” finished
Tregarvon, whose stock of comparisons was running low. “Still,” he
went on, talking now because he was started and could not stop, “still
it’s against me, Poictiers; the whole world is against me. In that
same talk in the music-room this evening--while you were away with the
Caswells--Richardia was anxious about these happenings of ours; afraid
somebody would get hurt; in fact, she made me promise not to hurt
anybody.”
“Meaning Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt?”
“No; er--that is, I don’t think she meant him.” Tregarvon was not yet
ready to tell Carfax that he was well assured that her fear was for her
father; though she had not bound him to secrecy, he felt that what she
had said had been spoken in confidence.
Carfax got up from his cramped sitting on the door-step, stretched,
yawned, and looked at his watch, holding the dial up to the moonlight.
“Ten minutes past eleven,” he announced. “Do we turn in and sleep a few
lines? Or is it to be a continuous performance--like those that the
vaudeville people advertise?”
“Go inside and finish your nap,” Tregarvon directed, filling and
lighting his pipe. “I’m not sleepy now; don’t know as I ever shall be
again.”
“You think the curtain has been rung down for to-night?”
“You’d say so, wouldn’t you? The star has gone home and has probably
gone to bed. If he should get up and walk in his sleep, I’ll call you.”
Carfax hung upon the threshold. “Better call me, anyhow, after I’ve had
another forty winks or so, so you can take your turn. People have to
sleep, you know--even after a funeral.”
“You go to bed!” was the gruff command; and Tregarvon began a
monotonous sentry beat up and down before the tool-house. But a minute
later he thrust his face in at the little square window to say: “Asleep
yet?”
“My Heavens, no!” returned a querulous voice in the inner darkness. “Do
you take me for an auto-hypnotist?”
“I have just developed a notion, and it is beginning to gnaw me,”
explained the sentinel on duty. “What if the man who was on his knees
at the test-hole when I went to waken you wasn’t Hartridge, after all?”
“Oh, good Lord!” complained the voice. “Are you trying to drag somebody
else into it?--when the character cast is already full and running
over, and all the supernumeraries have been tagged and labelled? Turn
the notion out of doors; tread on it; break its back with a stick! We
caught Hartridge with the goods on him, didn’t we?”
“Yes; but----”
“But what?”
“Nothing much: only now that I come to think of it, I seem to remember
that the man I saw dropping things into the hole wasn’t wearing
Hartridge’s kind of a hat.”
“Oh, granny! Go on and do your little sentry go. Your head is muddled
and you want to pass the muddle on to me. I’m asleep, I tell you--sound
asleep! I don’t hear a word you are saying.”
Tregarvon gave it up; not the lately developed notion, which grew
rather more insistent the longer he thought about it, but the attempt
to interest Carfax. During the lonely two-hour watch which followed he
had time to go reflectively over the events of the night, to set them
in orderly array, and to let the unconsidered minor happenings fit into
their places and weigh as they would.
The process straightened out a few of the tangles, or it seemed to.
Richardia’s concern, expressed by her fear that violence might grow out
of the antagonisms, was undoubtedly for her father. Also, it was plain
that up to the moment of confidences she had not suspected Hartridge
of being her father’s agent; it being a fair presumption that she
would have spoken of the professor if she had. Having got that far,
Tregarvon began to ask himself if Hartridge was the only one actively
involved. In at least two instances the schoolmaster might fairly be
held exempt. It was still incredible that the man who had come to the
Coalville headquarters as a guest had deliberately plotted to have his
host’s motor-car wrecked on its return from Highmount. By the same
token, it was difficult to imagine the professor of mathematics in the
rôle of the sardonic practical joker who had shocked Rucker with a
resin-filled skull, dug, doubtless, out of the old burying-ground.
On the other hand, the murderous attempt at wrecking the car and the
grim joke on Rucker fitted the mountain-baron-henchman hypothesis most
accurately; as did the fact, if it were a fact, that there were two
persons concerned in the recent episode of the hardened steel cubes.
There had been time, during the arousing of Carfax, for one man to
disappear and for another to take his place; in which case it seemed
evident that Hartridge had stood his ground merely to cover the retreat
of the other man.
The puzzle promised to give a coherent hint pointing to its solution
while Tregarvon was thinking it out and fitting the pieces together;
and so long as the mental effort continued to feed the fire of
wakefulness he was all that an alert sentinel should be. But after
the various suppositions had been properly labelled and docketed and
pigeonholed the physical reaction came, and drowsiness sat upon his
shoulders, riding him like an Old Man of the Sea.
For a time he fought manfully, keeping up the struggle until he had
exhausted every device he could think of and yielding only when he
found himself actually falling asleep as he walked. The alternative to
leaving the plant without a watchman was to call Carfax, and this he
finally concluded to do. Groping his way blindly into the dark interior
of the tool-shack, he stumbled over the spare coil of rope, sat down
upon it for a momentary rest, and in the flitting of a bat’s wing was
past help.
When he opened his eyes again the high-riding moon had swung far into
the west, the glade was bathed in a ghostly flood of gray shadow, and
Carfax was shaking him gently.
“Another act on,” whispered the impromptu call-boy; “no speaking parts
out, as yet--only pantomime. But it is worth sitting up to see.”
Tregarvon, still sodden with sleep, suffered Carfax to lead him to the
outlook window. In the gray shadows he presently made out the figure
of another intruder. Within the area of the sunken graves a man, old
and black, if the uncertain light could be trusted, was squatting on
the ground and rocking himself back and forth, his swaying body keeping
time with the measure of a weird, crooning melody. From time to time,
he would stop the swaying movement to take a small white object from
a basket at his side. These objects he appeared to be arranging in
some sort of a figure on the ground to the accompaniment of the droning
incantation.
“How long has he been there?” Tregarvon asked.
“Just a little while,” was the low-toned reply. “I awoke about half an
hour ago, and when I looked out, the moon was going over to the other
edge of the world, and everything was quiet. A little later the basket
man came; just appeared, you know, as if he had materialized out of
the shadows. When I first noticed him he was doing his little song and
dance, as you see him now.”
“But what _is_ the ‘song and dance,’ as you call it?”
“Write your guess on one side of a sheet of paper and send it to the
puzzle editor,” chuckled Carfax, adding: “If we had begun doing that at
first, the editor would have a choice collection by this time, don’t
you think?”
“I have been making a few more guesses,” Tregarvon offered. “I was
coming in to unload them on you when my eyes went shut. What time is
it?”
“About two o’clock--the real witching hour. I want to go home.”