square of carpet in his basket,” suggested Tregarvon. Then: “Doesn’t
the wild and weird atmosphere of this heritage of mine get on your
nerves to the queen’s taste? Something doing all the time. I’m going to
put a notice on the derrick frame: ‘Don’t shoot the stunt-setter; he is
doing the best he can.’”
“’Sh! what is the old ‘ghost doctor’ up to now?”
The droning chant had ceased and the old negro was crouching or
kneeling at one end of the oblong figure traced by the enclosing row of
white objects. The silence was profound; so complete that the snapping
of a twig coming suddenly shattered it like the report of a pistol.
Both of the watchers started at the sound, but the kneeling negro
seemed not to have heard it.
“What was that?” whispered Carfax.
“I’m guessing once more: the obi-devil, possibly, coming in answer to
the old medicine-man’s prayers.”
“Guess again!” Carfax thrust in excitedly. “Look this way--get a line
on the corner of the derrick frame and follow it over into the woods.
Do you see him?”
Tregarvon said “Yes,” and began to grope for a weapon. A man, hatless
and with a handkerchief bound about his head, was edging his way
cautiously out of the undergrowth. In the hollow of his left arm he
carried a gun, and his advance was like that of the deer-stalking
hunter. With the derrick frame intervening it was to be inferred that
he did not see the negro.
“Somebody pot-hunting for us, this time?” queried Carfax, under his
breath; but Tregarvon pressed his arm for silence. The cautious
approach was not in the direction of the tool shanty; it was toward the
engine of the drilling installation.
“That is the fellow we want to surround,” Tregarvon whispered. “If
he had a hat on, I’d swear he was the man I saw kneeling under the
derrick--before he made his drop-out and left Hartridge to throw dust
for him! By Jove! he acts as if he were scared!”
The exclamation was not unwarranted. The man with the gun was creeping
toward the portable engine, watchful and alert, starting at every
whisper of the night air in the pines and exhibiting all the outward
signs of an inward tension which was ready to snap and recoil in panic.
When he passed out of sight behind the derrick, Carfax would have led
the charge; but Tregarvon restrained him. “Hold on,” he advised. “We
may as well wait and find out what he means to do.”
The man was creeping on hands and knees when he came in sight again,
and the gun had been left behind. When he stood up he was at the
smoke-stack end of the engine-boiler; and a moment further along the
two watchers made out that he was unscrewing the fastenings of the
iron door which gave access to the smoke-box and the flues. They
waited until he had the door unfastened; saw him swing it open by slow
inchings; saw him thrust an arm into the sooty depths of the smoke-box.
“_Now!_” Tregarvon commanded, setting the pace for the charge; but
panic was before them. Just as the man was withdrawing his arm a deep
groan shuddered upon the stillness. With a cry that was like the snarl
of a cornered animal, the man leaped up and flung out his arms as if
to ward a blow. At that the huddled figure kneeling among the sunken
graves groaned again, following the groan with a terrified, “_Oh_, my
Lordy!” when he saw the man at the boiler head.
That was sufficient. At the spot where the man with a handkerchief
about his head had stood clutching the air there was a sudden void,
and the noise of his crashing retreat through the undergrowth had died
away before Tregarvon and Carfax could give chase.
They captured the “ghost doctor,” however, and were not greatly
surprised when the old negro turned out to be Uncle William. His night
wandering to the mountain top was sufficiently explained when he
pointed to the sunken grave ringed about with bits of broken china.
“Dah’s whah my ol’ ’ooman is, marstehs; yas, suh; right dah’s whah dey
bury huh. Dat triflin’ niggah, Sam, from de ol’ place, come erlong
down de mounting day befo’ yistidday, an’ he say you-all gemman is
a-trompin’ ’round an’ mashin’ up t’ings in de ol’ buryin’-ground. I
know dat ain’ so, but I says to mahse’f, ‘Willyum, yo’ gwine right up
dah and put dem li’l grabestones you been a-savin’ ’round Mammy Ann;
den Marsteh Tregarbin ain’ gwine ’sturb nuffin’ belongin’ ter you.’”
“No,” said Tregarvon soberly. “You may be sure we shan’t disturb
your wife’s grave--or any of the others, if we can help it. I didn’t
know, until after we had begun work here, that this open place was a
burying-ground. Now tell me; do you know who that man was who stood
there by the engine and made motions at you?”
“I ’spec’ dat wuz de ol’ debbil, hese’f, marsteh. Couldn’t a-been
nobody else; no, suh.”
“What makes you think it was the devil, Uncle William?” Carfax wanted
to know.
“’Cause he go off, _bing!_ in a puff o’ yaller smoke when I say ‘_Oh_,
my Lordy!’”
Tregarvon had been groping purposefully in the old man’s explanation to
determine if it held any of the missing puzzle pieces.
“You say Sam, from the ‘old place’ told you we were working here, Uncle
William; who is Sam, and where is the ‘old place’?”
“Sam, he’s dat triflin’ no-’count niggah what Marsteh Judge keep for
stable niggah--when dey ain’ nuffin in de stable ’ceppin’ de ol’
dapple-gray dat’s a heap older’n what I is, _hyuh, hyuh!_ But de ol’
Marsteh Judge ain’ gwine tu’n nobody off’n de ol’ place whilst dar’s a
rind o’ bacon lef’ in de gre’t house; no, suh; he ain’ gwine do dat!”
It was at this point that Tregarvon sprang his small trap.
“Why did he turn you off, Uncle William?”
“Who, me? No, suh--I--Miss Dick, she----”
“It’s all right; never mind, Uncle William,” Tregarvon hastened to say.
“Now we’ll undertake to keep the devil away while you go on setting
your tombstones. I’m sorry we had to break in.”
“Dey’s all sot, yas, suh; dat’s de bes’ I kin do for ol’ Mammy Ann. I’s
gwine tromp off down de mounting ag’in, now. Mus’ be gettin’ might’
nigh de ol’ man’s bedtime; yas, suh; it sholy am dat. I’s sayin’ good
night to you-all; an’ t’ank yo’ kin’ly, marstehs.”
After the old negro had shuffled away on a short-cut through the wood
in the direction of the pike, the two young men took up the affair of
the moment, which was to ascertain what the man with the bandaged head
had been doing to the engine of the drilling plant. The smoke-box door
was standing open, as he had left it, and Tregarvon struck a match and
held it in the small sooty cavern. What he saw made him withdraw the
match suddenly and blow it out.
“Did it bite you?” asked Carfax, genially quizzical.
Tregarvon’s rejoinder was not in words. Thrusting an arm into the
smoke-box he drew out a paper-wrapped cylinder with a capped fuse
buried in one end of it, passing the find to Carfax with the remark: “I
fancy we can stay awake until daybreak on the strength of that, don’t
you think, Poictiers?”
“Dynamite!” gasped Carfax, holding the cartridge gingerly between thumb
and finger and at arm’s length.
“Yes, dynamite. It was poked into one of the flues with the business
end toward the fire-box, and it made no account of Rucker, who would be
the one to fire up the boiler before breakfast the day after to-morrow.”
“Say, by Jove, Vance! this thing is getting serious!” exclaimed the
golden youth, forgetting even the slight hint of a lisp. “We’ll have to
‘take measures,’ as my father used to say. Come on over to the shanty
and we’ll get busy. I am in the same condition you said you were, a
while back: I’m not sleepy now--don’t know as I ever shall be again.”
The talk on the door-step of the tool-house was prolonged far past
Tregarvon’s recounting of the suppositions pieced together in the
period of his lonely sentry go. But it came back to the suppositions in
the end, with Carfax checking off the probabilities on his finger-tips.
“So it figures out about this way,” he said, not too cheerfully. “We
have Judge Birrell as Lord High Executioner to a couple of receivers
of stolen goods--always without his daughter’s approval or consent, as
a matter of course--and Professor Hartridge as his able deputy in the
field. Then there is this skulking rascal of a dynamite-planter, who
acts under orders, or possibly exceeds them now and then; and he seems
to be the only one of the lot that we can satisfactorily pinch--when we
shall be lucky enough to catch him. Uncle William isn’t in it, is he?”
Tregarvon shook his head gloomily.
“I have been wrestling with that,” he confessed. “He seems more than
trustworthy. But he is evidently an old house servant of the judge’s,
and he was sent straight to me from Westwood. That is beyond question.”
“As a spy?--perish the thought!” ranted Carfax, carefully concealing
his earnestness with an overlaying of extravagance, as his habit was.
“With the memory of Uncle William’s unapproachable dinners in my
mind--or mouth--I’ll defend him to the last gasp.”
“He is negligible,” said Tregarvon briefly. “But this dynamiting
emissary of Hartridge’s, or the judge’s, isn’t. We must contrive to
trap him in some way. If we don’t, he will fool around until he hurts
somebody.”
“Yea, verily,” Carfax laughed. “Any guesses coming to you?--as to who
he is?”
“One small one; and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it didn’t fit
in with some of the others. You saw that he was bareheaded?”
“Yes.”
“And that he was wearing a handkerchief or a bandage of some sort
instead of a hat?”
“Another ‘yes’.”
“Well, the day before yesterday the man we’ve been calling ‘Morgan’ was
hurt by the falling walking-beam and had to have his head wrapped up in
about the same way.”
“All right; but Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t stop with that.”
“Neither do I. Tryon told me a little tale two days ago that possibly
forges the connecting link. We know that both Morgan and Sill are
McNabbs, and that for some reason of their own they dropped the surname
when they hired out to me.”
“Good!” Carfax approved. “The plot thickens. Can’t you stir in a little
more stiffening?”
“With the help of Tryon’s story, I can. It seems that these men
are, or have been, moonshiners--breakers of the revenue laws. Some
years ago the revenue officers raided their secret still, which
was hidden somewhere in the Pocket, and arrested these two, with a
number of others. Morgan McNabb and his brother were booked for the
penitentiary; would have gone there if Judge Birrell hadn’t come out of
his retirement and fought for them.”
Carfax was slowly filling the short pipe he had borrowed from his
companion. “I begin to see daylight,” he said. “What was the judge’s
motive?”
“A sort of clan loyalty, Tryon says. The McNabbs live on his land; they
are ‘his people’.”
“Um,” was the thoughtful comment. “And because the judge defends
them, they take up the cudgels for him. We have to-morrow--or rather
to-day--before us, with nothing especial to do; since Rucker will
hardly be back with the drills before afternoon. Shall we telegraph to
Hesterville for the sheriff, borrow Tait’s team, and make a party call
upon the man with the bandaged head?”
“That would be rather too summary, wouldn’t it?” Tregarvon objected.
“We may be well convinced, ourselves, but we have no direct evidence.
Neither of us could go on the stand and swear that the man we saw at
the boiler-head was Morgan McNabb.”
“No; that is so. Past that, since I have asked the judge’s daughter to
consider me as a possible husband--” Carfax had called up the cherubic
smile, but it had the opposite of a mollifying effect upon the objector.
“Don’t harp on that part of it any more than you have to,” was the
morose interruption.
“I was going to say that the arrest of Morgan McNabb, just at this
critical turn in the tide of affairs, might make it embarrassing for
the judge; only you wouldn’t let me finish,” said Carfax, with great
meekness.
“You are going to call on him?” demanded Tregarvon.
“Since he is Richardia’s father, I don’t see how I can well avoid it.
To-morrow--or, I should say, to-day--is Friday, and I thought I’d ask
Richardia to let me drive her over to Westwood House--if you’ll lend me
the motor-wagon after Rucker gets back.”
Tregarvon rose and stood half-menacingly over the friend of his youth.
“If I thought you were only playing with her,” he grated; but instead
of saying what he would do in that case, he turned abruptly and went
into the tool-house to fling himself down upon the cot, leaving Carfax
to continue the night-watch or to abandon it, as he might choose.
XVI
A Friend at Need
With the object-lessons of the night of visitations to emphasize
the need for vigilance, the two young men, discussing the situation
in the gray dawn, agreed that the drilling plant must not be left
unguarded during the Friday of enforced idleness, or at any other
time. Accordingly, soon after sunrise, Carfax set out to walk down the
mountain for the purpose of sending Tryon and a man or two of the track
gang up to relieve Tregarvon.
This arrangement left the owner of the Ocoee to do sentry duty alone
until Tryon should come--a duty which he scamped ingloriously by
sitting upon the door-step of the tool-shack and promptly falling
asleep.
It was a brusque “Hello!” that awakened him, and he sprang up with
a start to find a round-faced, pursy little man in pepper-and-salt
garmentings and mouse-colored driving-gloves standing before him. A
horse and buggy motionless in the edge of the glade accounted for
the manner of the visitor’s coming, but not for its object. Tregarvon
took a good look at the stranger before he committed himself, even to
a greeting. The round face, with its twinkling eyes, double chin, and
the little patches of closely cropped side-whisker, was altogether
reassuring; it not only beamed good-nature, it fairly shone with an
irresistible kindliness. Tregarvon, gathering his scattered wits as he
could, said: “Good morning; it’s a fine morning for a drive through the
woods.”
The little man added another layer of geniality to his smile.
“It’s a fine morning, also, for a nap in the sunshine,” he
reciprocated. “Do you belong to the out-of-door sleepers--the
‘simple-lifers’--Mr. Tregarvon?”
“Not permanently,” laughed Tregarvon; “though I must confess that I am
so simple as not to be able to recall your name.”
“Good, dev’lish good!” chuckled the visitor. “Couldn’t have turned it
more neatly myself, ’pon my word! I’m Thaxter; Wilmerding’s bookkeeper
at Whitlow. One of my fads is to take a drive before breakfast.
Excellent habit, Mr. Tregarvon; I can recommend it most highly. Gives
you an appetite like a coal-heaver. Speaking of coal--how are you
getting along taking soundings on the old Ocoee? Have you hit it yet?”
“Not yet,” Tregarvon admitted, warming to the little man’s friendly
interest. “But I am still living in hopes.”
Mr. Thaxter pursed his lips in a way to make them match the general
effect of rotundity.
“Mighty mean thing to say to a man before breakfast--you haven’t
breakfasted yet, I dare say--but you are butting your head against a
stone wall, Mr. Tregarvon. Haven’t they told you that?”
“If your ‘they’ refers to the Coalville gossips, I have been duly
warned. They told me, with all the variations, before I’d had time to
climb the mountain on my first exploring expedition.”
“Just so; but not specifically, I suppose. You should have come to
me. While I am an employee of the C. C. & I. Company, my pay-roll
connection wouldn’t have kept me from doing you a good turn. And I
could have given you chapter, page, and verse.”
For the moment Tregarvon lost sight of the fact that Wilmerding had
reported his bookkeeper totally barren of Ocoee information. So he
said: “Possibly you will do it now, Mr. Thaxter. We are mere babes in
the wood, Carfax and I, needing a guardian angel pretty severely, if we
are to believe what other people say of us.”
“You have certainly been needing a little friendly counsel from some
one who was in a position to know what he was talking about. You’ll
never find your coal up here, Mr. Tregarvon.”
“That is what they all say; but they don’t tell us precisely why we
shan’t.”
“Ah,” said the kindly one, shaking his head in deprecation. “Human
nature is the same everywhere. Tait could have told you, or Tryon,
or Walters; all of them who have lived here long enough. But you had
money and were willing to spend it. It would have been killing the
golden-egged goose to have driven you away.”
Tregarvon grinned. “Thank you for trying to break it gently to me, Mr.
Thaxter; but I am braced for it now. Hurl it in.”
“They could have told you that this test-boring experiment of yours has
been tried before, all over the mountain top. I presume I could show
you a dozen holes, if they are not all filled up with wash and hidden
under the leaves.”
Tregarvon was thinking hard.
“Does Captain Duncan know this?” he asked.
“I should suppose so; he ought to know it. The testing was done by the
New Ocoee Coal Company, and it may have timed itself during the summer
that Duncan spent in the West. Come to think, I believe it did. You
advised with him, of course; surely he didn’t encourage you to spend
money on the property, did he?”
“No; I am obliged to confess that he did not. On the contrary, he
advised me not to.”
The little man’s smile became benignantly tolerant. “You young men
are like Mr. Kipling’s puppy at times; you _will_ chew soap, knowing
perfectly well that it is soap.”
Tregarvon’s answering laugh admitted the justness of the charge.
“Possibly some of us like the flavor of soap,” he retorted. “There is
no accounting for the depravity of some tastes, you know.”
“Oh, well,” said the visitor, with the air of one who is far too wise
to combat the vagaries of youth, “go on and have your fling. It is
harmless enough. If you can afford to buy a little amusement in this
way, why shouldn’t you do it? It won’t hurt you, and it is a Godsend to
Tait and the poor devils on your pay-roll while it lasts.”
“But if I can’t afford it?” suggested Tregarvon.
“Ah; that is another matter. From what Wilmerding has let fall, I have
been assuming that you and Mr. Carfax desired the experience and the
fun of it rather than any possible money gain.”
“The money side of it may not appeal to Carfax; but it does to me, very
forcibly.”
“Still, you are throwing good money after bad in putting down these
test-holes.”
Tregarvon shrugged his shoulders. “What would you?” he asked. “I
inherited the Ocoee, and it is up to me to make something out of it, if
I can.”
The round-bodied bookkeeper laughed until he shook like a bowl of jelly.
“It is very evident, Mr. Tregarvon, that you were born in the purple.
If you wish to make money out of the Ocoee, why don’t you sell it?”
“Because I should first have to find a purchaser, and before I could
find a purchaser--I should think--it would be a condition precedent
that I should find the coal. It resolves itself into the vicious
circle, as you see.”
Mr. Thaxter smote his gloved hands together softly and appeared to be
debating a nice point with himself. When he spoke again his manner had
lost the touch of brisk impersonality.
“Pardon me if I seem to crowd the mourners,” he apologized, “but it
strikes me that this is a matter in which the good-natured bystander
may quite properly take a hand. Is it possible that you haven’t been
told of the offer made by our people to your father?”
“It is more than possible; it is a fact.”
“I am truly astonished! Your lawyers must know of it.”
“There has never been any mention of it made to me. What was the offer?”
“If I remember correctly, it was one hundred thousand dollars for all
the titles.”
“Thank you!” exclaimed Tregarvon triumphantly. “That is the best news
I’ve heard in many a day. If your company ever made any such an offer
as that, it proves conclusively that there is coal in the property,
somewhere.”
The bookkeeper shook his round head in evident dismay.
“Dear, dear!” he lamented; “I was afraid you might jump at some such
conclusion as that, and it puts me in a rather awkward position. As I
have said, I am only a pay-roll man in Consolidated Coal; I’m not even
one of its many superintendents. Yet, as man to man, perhaps I may
venture to tell you just why the C. C. & I. might still be willing to
pay you the price named, though in telling you I may be betraying an
official secret. You probably know that your property line on the north
abuts on the Whitlow lands about an eighth of a mile from your tramway?”
Tregarvon nodded.
“Very good. Now we have a vein of coal quite near this joint boundary;
not a very thick vein, but one which could be made to pay for working
if we could send the coal down over your tramway, and coke it in your
old ovens at Coalville, but which would not pay if we should be obliged
to build a new tramway to get at it. That is the whole thing in a
nutshell.”
“You say that this offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee was once
made to my father? It’s odd that I had never heard of it. Was it in any
sense a standing offer?”
“It was at the time, and I think it still is, though there has been no
talk of it latterly, so far as I know. But since the reasons for making
it still exist, I should imagine that you would stand a good chance of
reviving it if you should care to do so.”
“If I only had a little breakfast in me!” Tregarvon protested
half-jokingly. “I’m too hungry to talk hundred-thousand-dollar deals
with you with any assurance that an empty stomach isn’t making me
flighty, Mr. Thaxter.”
The bookkeeper laughed pleasantly.
“There are your men coming over from the tramhead,” he said. “Give
them your orders, and then let me drive you down to Coalville to your
breakfast. Perhaps you’ll be willing to give me a bite, too, and in
that case I shall have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carfax again. I
didn’t more than half get acquainted with him the day he drove up to
Whitlow.”
“You are certainly the jolliest lot of commercial pirates a man ever
had to fight--you people up at the C. C. & I.,” said Tregarvon, after
he had climbed into the buggy with Thaxter and the spirited black horse
was flinging the soft sand of the wood road from his hoofs. “First,
Wilmerding comes to the rescue; and now you are trying to give us a
lift. It’s heart-warming.”
Thaxter’s rejoinder had just the requisite touch of friendly solicitude
in it.
“Then you meant what you said a few moments ago, about the financial
aspect of the--of your experiment? A hundred thousand dollars would be
worth considering?”
“That amount would look as big as a hundred thousand cart-wheels to me,
just now,” Tregarvon confided. “My father is dead, as I suppose you
know, and there have been family misfortunes big enough to sink a ship.
A hundred thousand would give us a fresh start in the world.”
“Then we must certainly try to get it for you,” was the affable
rejoinder; and from this on, the spirited horse demanded Thaxter’s
undivided attention, so pointedly that the bookkeeper did not even seem
to see Professor Hartridge when the buggy whirled past that gentleman
as he was returning from his morning walk down the pike.
Carfax was waiting breakfast on Tregarvon when the black horse came to
a stand at the door of the Ocoee office-building. The young millionaire
remembered Thaxter perfectly, and seemed to be glad to renew his
acquaintance with the “Brother Cheeryble.” Yet it was Carfax’s
judicious applying of the brakes at the breakfast-table conference of
three that kept Tregarvon from committing himself too definitely in the
matter of bargain and sale.
Nevertheless, the talk over the ham and eggs pushed the business
affair considerably farther along on the road to a tentative
conclusion. Before he took his leave to continue his return drive to
Whitlow, Thaxter was authorized to communicate by wire with the New
York headquarters of Consolidated Coal, and, without betraying any
confidences, to ascertain if the offer of one hundred thousand dollars
for the Ocoee properties still held good.
After Thaxter had taken his departure, and the two young experimenters
had threshed the new prospect out to its final straw, the wakeful night
came in for its revenges, and they slept through the forenoon. Rucker
did not return from Whitlow with the car and the repointed drills until
long after the noon meal; and when he came he found his two employers
waiting impatiently for him--or rather for the car. The reason for the
impatience was a note from Miss Richardia sent down by the college
mail-carrier early in the afternoon; a brief message addressed to both,
begging them to come to Highmount at the earliest possible moment:
urgency only; no hint of what had happened or was due to happen.