could measure the distance, and were met at the door of the
administration building of the college, not by Miss Birrell, but by
Professor Hartridge, who led them into the visitors’ parlor and calmly
informed them that Miss Richardia had driven to Westwood House with
her father shortly after luncheon.
“By Jove, now!” lisped Carfax; “that’s rather curious, don’t you know!”
And Tregarvon was quite speechless.
“Curious that Miss Birrell should ask you to come up here, and then
run away?” said Hartridge. “It was a little ruse of mine, and Miss
Richardia is altogether blameless. I wished very much to see you both,
and I was afraid you might be foolish enough to disregard an invitation
bearing my name. So I took Miss Richardia into my confidence, and she
very obligingly wrote the note which, I assume, has brought you here.”
Carfax snapped his fingers and laughed softly.
“Upon what footing do we stand with you, Mr. Hartridge?--upon that of
yesterday at dinner-time or upon that of a later hour, when I had the
pleasure of helping you on with your overcoat?”
“I shouldn’t presume to say, Mr. Carfax; you must make your own
attitude. But if that attitude should be inimical, I must still beg you
to believe that I have decoyed you up here to do you a kindness.”
Carfax was still smiling affably. “Is it Virgil who puts it into the
mouth of one of his characters to say that we should beware of the
Greeks bringing gifts, professor? You will pardon us if we seem a bit
suspicious, won’t you? But this”--he held up the small cube of hardened
steel which he happened to have in his pocket--“this is so completely
convincing, you know.”
The mild-eyed mathematician waved the evidence aside as a thing of
small moment.
“Now that you have had time to consider, I am sure you absolve me from
the charge of having tampered with your drill-hole,” he deprecated.
“We do,” said Carfax. “All you did was to cover the retreat of the man
who really did the tampering. But that is sufficient to make us--er--a
bit cautious, as you might say.”
Hartridge smiled in his turn. “You are basing your caution upon a
small specimen of the metal commercially known as steel which you
chanced to find in my pocket,” he remarked. “Let us disregard the bit
of steel for the time being, if you please. If you should happen to
lose it, it could be very easily replaced; but”--he turned short upon
Tregarvon--“you can’t replace the Ocoee if you allow Mr. Thaxter to
persuade you to sell it to Consolidated Coal, Mr. Tregarvon.”
“What’s that?” exclaimed the Ocoee owner, starting from his chair; and
Carfax fell back upon his strongest expletive, “By Jove!”
Hartridge appeared to be entirely at ease now. He seated himself and
crossed his long legs comfortably.
“You are puzzled to account for my friendly interest?--after last
night?” he inquired. “I don’t blame you, and I am only sorry that I
cannot explain more fully. But I may say this: if you part with the
Ocoee properties for any such sum as Mr. Thaxter has doubtless offered
you, you will regret it as long as you live.”
Carfax got his breath sufficiently after a time to say: “May--may we
venture to ask how you know what Mr. Thaxter has offered?”
“Certainly. The offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the lands,
titles, and mineral rights of the property is no secret--or at least it
was not during Mr. Tregarvon’s father’s lifetime. I am merely assuming
that Thaxter has not increased it; and I am also assuming that a
renewal of the offer was the reason for his early morning drive with
Mr. Tregarvon.”
“And you say Vance will be sorry if he accepts the offer?”
“I do; most decidedly.”
Carfax leaned forward and held up an accusing finger.
“Then you know, of your own knowledge, that there is a workable vein of
coal on the property, Mr. Hartridge,” he snapped.
“That, my dear sir, is an assumption which I must decline to confirm.”
“Nevertheless, it is true. And here is another to go with it: _you know
where that vein can be found!_”
Hartridge smiled again.
“You are, constructively at least, my guest, Mr. Carfax; I should be
unpardonably rude if I were to contradict you.”
Carfax glanced aside at Tregarvon, and Tregarvon returned the glance
as one who sees the shore from the crest of a tossing wave, but has no
hope of reaching it. After a little pause Carfax renewed the attack.
“This is a most extraordinary situation, don’t you think, Mr.
Hartridge?” he began mildly. “Would a definite quantity of the thing
known commercially as money tend to relieve it in any way?”
The professor’s answer was prompt and decisive. “You are assuming that
I have information to sell? I have not.”
Carfax countered, quickly.
“Then why have you just given us this pointer on Consolidated Coal? You
profess to be willing to help us and you refuse to help us in one and
the same breath.”
“Oh, if you are going into motives, my dear sir, that is, indeed, a
very deep subject. It would hardly be profitable to discuss it, even
academically. Life, the really human variety of life, is full of
paradoxes. You are wondering why the man from whom, a few hours ago,
you took that small cube of steel, is now apparently trying to save
you from loss. Call it one of the human paradoxes, if you will; only
don’t sell to Consolidated Coal for a paltry hundred thousand dollars a
property upon which more than three or four times that amount has been
spent. This is what I enticed you up here to say to you; and having
said it----”
“Hold on,” Carfax interposed. “We have met some curious varieties of
the genus enemy in this forgotten corner of the world, and you will
pardon me if I say that you are not the least remarkable specimen, Mr.
Hartridge. We are thankful for the pointer, and much more thankful for
the assurance you have given us that we are not fishing in a barren
pond. We----”
The professor had risen and was moving toward the door.
“I have given you no such specific assurance,” he denied.
“No,” said Tregarvon, getting upon his feet and putting in a word for
himself. “You may congratulate yourself upon your discretion. None the
less, we shall continue to work on our problem, Mr. Hartridge, until we
have found the value of ‘_pi_’.”
It was a centre shot, visibly and palpably piercing the bull’s-eye.
A blow would scarcely have disconcerted the schoolmaster more
effectively. Yet he recovered instantly, had blandly excused himself
upon the plea of pressing laboratory work, and was bowing himself out
at the door, when he fired the return shot.
“You have set yourselves an impossible task, gentlemen,” he offered
mildly. “You forget that the value of ‘_pi_’ has never yet been exactly
ascertained.”
“Well, what do you make of it all?” Tregarvon asked, when the yellow
car was rolling smoothly down the mountain pike on the return to
Coalville.
“Nothing; except a disappointment for Mr. Thaxter,” was Carfax’s reply.
“Thaxter; yes. Do you know, Poictiers, I’m beginning to smell brimstone
in _his_ clothes, now. Wilmerding told us definitely, if you remember,
that Thaxter gave him to understand that he didn’t have any data on the
Ocoee; didn’t know anything remotely concerning it. There is a lie out,
somewhere.”
“Which doesn’t matter now, thanks to Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge,
the man of mixed motives,” said Carfax definitively.
“You think, on the strength of Hartridge’s warning, that I shouldn’t
sell to Consolidated Coal?”
Carfax was driving the car and he let the brakes out until the machine
was dropping down the grade like a stone falling from a height.
“Not in a thousand years!” he said.
XVII
An Anticlimax
Bright and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the
repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying
Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They
found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching,
already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting,
and there were no disturbances to report.
“Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing
a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the
tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out
of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it
so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up.
I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and
everything was all shipshape this mornin’.”
Soon after this the drilling was resumed, not, however, until after
the hole had been carefully washed and swabbed out. Tregarvon did not
take any of his men into his confidence to the extent of explaining the
reason for the extra care, but during the swabbing process he stood
aside and looked on, watchful to detect any sign of guilty knowledge
on the part of his helpers. Particularly he studied the face of the
younger McNabb, the one who had been hurt still being absent. The
effort went for nothing. If isolation has been sparing of gifts to the
native of the southern Appalachians, it has at least given him a face
that no man can read. The bushy-bearded Sawyer, the head driller, was
the only one who commented upon the hole-cleaning.
“Hit don’t look t’ me like thar was anything more ’n the drill dust to
be warshed out,” he grumbled, when the swab came up clean; and to prove
it he rubbed some of the powdered rock cuttings between his thumb and
finger.
“It’s better to be sure than sorry,” said Tregarvon. “If we know that
the hole is clean to begin with, we’re that much ahead.”
In due course of time the engine was started, the drill lowered, and
the churning was resumed. Very shortly it became evident that the steel
was cutting again at the usual rate, and Tregarvon’s spirits rose
accordingly.
“Do you know, Poictiers, I believe we are going to ‘prove up’ right
here on this spot?” he predicted, after the work was well under way and
they had gone to sit on the tool-house step. “The indications all point
for us. Here is where the most determined fight has been made to stop
us; here is where we find Hartridge’s hieroglyphics on the trees; and
right here, if you’ll remark it, is where Mr. Onias Thaxter hunts me up
to make me a blanket offer for my landholdings.”
“A little more time will tell the story,” Carfax suggested. “By noon,
if it doesn’t strike any more bones, the drill ought to be down to the
coal, if there is any coal here.”
With hope trotting cheerfully on ahead, the forenoon became a period
of exciting suspense. Each time the drill was withdrawn the cuttings
were examined eagerly. The rock was showing all the characteristics
of the former borings: fine sandstone, coarse sandstone, some little
conglomerate, and, just before the noon hour, the shales which commonly
overlie the coal in the Cumberland region.
“We’re coming to it!” Tregarvon exulted, when the washings which came
up in the churning began to show black. “Eighteen inches more, and
we’ll know whether we live or die!” And he carefully made a chalk-mark
on the drill so that they might determine when the critical depth was
reached.
As in the previous tests, the steel sank rapidly in the vein of coal.
At a foot of additional depth the washings were still coming up black.
At sixteen inches there was no change. Sighting across a derrick
brace, Tregarvon watched the chalk-mark with the blood racing in
his veins. With each plunge of the heavy steel drill his hopes rose
higher. Already he was anticipating a future which, if it should lack
some of the ecstasies, would still have a sufficiency of the great
emollient--money. With a fortune of his own, the impossible situation
which had grown out of the Uncle Byrd legacy would be alleviated, and
he saw himself deeding his half of the legacy irrevocably over to
Elizabeth. The pride wound thus healed, the broken bones of sentiment
might be allowed to knit as they would. Doubtless, in time, the
knitting process would accomplish itself, and possibly without leaving
him a hopeless cripple. Judging from the past, Elizabeth would not
expect much; and even if he should be obliged to limp a little she
would probably never notice it.
“Eighteen inches!” he called out to Carfax, “and she’s still bringing
up the black-diamond dust! Get ready to blow the hewgag and beat the
tom-tom. We’re in it, this time!”
“Easy!” Carfax cautioned. “Don’t let your hopes soar too high. Maybe
the top vein runs a little thicker at this point than it did in the
others. Call it that, anyway, until you’re cocksure.”
As he spoke the power went off. Tregarvon jerked his watch from his
pocket and stifled a hard word. It was noon, and the men were knocking
off work on the dot, quite as nonchalantly as if the fate of empires
were not hanging upon the result of a few more turns of the machinery.
Tregarvon tramped across to the tool-house with Carfax, a sudden
weariness making his feet heavy as lead.
“That’s the workman of it!” he gritted. “If the world were coming to an
end in the next five minutes, they’d stop to eat!”
Carfax permitted himself a subdued chuckle.
“You are beautifully on edge,” he asserted. “A few inches more may mean
a lot to you, but it’s all in the day’s work for the men. They’re not
going to get rich out of your coal mine.”
They had brought some of Uncle William’s biscuits and cold chicken
for the midday snack, and Carfax went to the motor-car, which had
been left standing in the wood road, for the basket. When he returned,
Tregarvon was pacing back and forth impatiently before the tool-house
door, and Rucker was sitting on the step, eating his luncheon. Carfax
carried the basket inside, and they made a table of the coil of rope.
While they were picking the chicken bones, the mechanician spoke again
of a matter that he had mentioned once or twice before.
“I’m beefin’ ag’in about that boiler, Mr. Tregarvon,” he began, between
workman mouthfuls of Mrs. Tryon’s corn bread. “She ain’t much, just as
I told you at first; and draggin’ her ’round over this mountain hain’t
helped her none. She’s leakin’ like a sieve at the fire-box end of her
flues, right now.”
“Here’s hoping that this is the last hole we’ll have to drill with it,
Billy,” said Tregarvon cheerfully. “I bought it second-hand, and the
Chattanooga junk man put one over on me.”
“He sure did,” Rucker returned with a grin. “She’s rotten. Every time
the pop-valve goes off it makes me jump. One o’ these days----”
The interruption was a blatant roar from the boiler in question. Rucker
had prudently shut the drafts and had left the fire-door open, or he
thought he had, but still the pressure had crept up, until now the
safety-valve was relieving it. Through the open door of the tool-shack
the two at the rope-coil table could see the plant, with the plume of
escaping steam rising to the height of the tree-tops. As usual during
the noon hour, there was not a man of the gang in sight. Tregarvon had
early learned that a part of the country laborer’s reticence expressed
itself in a dislike to eat under the boss’s eye. At the stopping of the
machinery the drill-gang would scatter in the wood, each man to his
fallen log.
The roar of the safety-valve continuing, and seeming to increase in
stridency rather than to diminish, Tregarvon leaned forward to shout in
Rucker’s ear:
“Are you sure you left the fire-box door open, Billy?”
The mechanician struggled to his feet. “I thought I was, but I’ll go
see. She’s howlin’ a little bit too loud to suit me.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the earthquake crash
came. With a sound that was oddly like the tearing of a hundred saws
through dry timber, followed by a reverberating thunderclap, the boiler
and engine vanished in a thick cloud of steam, and the air was filled
with flying missiles. One piece of the boiler tore the heart out of
the sheltering oak-tree; another fragment ripped a corner from the
tool-house; a third mowed a swath through a thicket of young pines.
Tregarvon and Carfax were both up and out before the nimbus cloud of
steam had blown aside, and their first thought was for their men.
Rucker had escaped only by a hair’s-breadth. The twisted fire-box sheet
which had knocked a corner out of the small building had passed so
close that the wind of it had bowled him over. Tregarvon left Carfax
to help the machinist to his feet, and ran shouting across the glade.
The drill gang answered and came hurrying in, a man at a time. When all
were accounted for, the material loss was inventoried. It was total, so
far as it went. The engine and boiler were reduced to a tangled heap
of scrap; one end of the drill beam was shattered, and one leg of the
derrick had suffered loss.
For the moment Tregarvon was torn by conflicting emotions; a huge
thankfulness that no life had been lost and bitter disappointment that
the catastrophe had come at the instant when all the doubts as to
the value of the Ocoee were to be either confirmed or swept away. He
held himself together long enough to tell the men that they might go
home--that there would be nothing more done until a new power-plant
could be bought; but when Rucker had gone out to the wood road to see
if the yellow car had been hit, and the disappointed one was left alone
with Carfax, the flood-gates gave way.
“Isn’t it enough to make an angel out of the blue heavens swear himself
black in the face, Poictiers?” he raged. “Just on the very edge of
things--just as we were going to find out, once for all, what this
cursed mountain is going to do to us----”
“One thing at a time,” Carfax broke in soothingly. “The wrecked engine
isn’t fatal--not by many parasangs: it came just in the nick of time,
when I was wondering what under the sun I should do with the dividend
draft that I got in the mail yesterday. Take a fresh grip on yourself
and remember that you have a good bit to be thankful for. If your men
had been sitting around on the job to eat their dinners, as laborers do
up North, there’d be another story to tell.”
“Yes, I know; but think of it--it will be days and maybe weeks before
we can get a new power-plant installed, and all that time we’ll be
hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth; won’t know
any more than we do now.”
Rucker had come back to report that the motor-car had escaped as by
a miracle. A square yard of the boiler shell had been hurled over it
to fall accurately in the middle of the road a rod or two farther on.
While he was telling about it, a goodly portion of the faculty of
Highmount College, followed by a bevy of young women, came upon the
scene. Doctor Caswell was heading the column of reconnaissance, and
Hartridge also was with it.
“Dear me!” exclaimed the president, coming up breathless; “we are all
so glad to find you alive! What has happened?”
Tregarvon pointed to the tangled mass of wreckage. “Our boiler blew up.
It was old, and I suppose we were carrying too much pressure. Luckily,
it happened while the men were eating, and there was no one near enough
to be hurt. I thought of you people at once. It must have made racket
enough to make you think the end of the world was coming.”
“It was frightful!” said Miss Farron. “The windows rattled and--” but
here her voice was lost in the chorus of excited exclamations pitching
themselves in many keys as the young women picked their way over to
the wreck and viewed the remains.
“It is well, sometimes, to be born both lucky and rich,” Hartridge
commented gravely, when his turn came. “The material loss is serious
enough, of course; but you ought to be thankful that no lives were
lost. Were you near enough at the time to see the explosion?”
“We were sitting in the tool-house eating our luncheon,” Carfax
explained, “and Rucker was just outside. We had been speaking of the
boiler a moment before. We were all three looking at it, I think, when
it went up.”
Doctor Caswell had taken his wife over to assist in the sight-seeing,
but Hartridge lingered behind.
“Happening in broad daylight, this way, with three of you looking on, I
suppose you are well assured that it was a pure accident?” he suggested
quietly.
Tregarvon left the answer to Carfax, who made it promptly.
“As you say, we are not able, this time, to blame any one but
ourselves. The boiler was old, and our mechanic had told us that it was
not altogether safe.”
“You have been drilling to-day?”
Carfax nodded.
“May I ask if you found anything?”
Tregarvon turned away and busied himself examining the rent in the
corner of the tool shanty. Carfax called up the cherubic smile for the
inquiring professor and said: “What if I should tell you that we have
found our bonanza, Mr. Hartridge?”
Hartridge glanced at the drill, which was still standing in the
test-hole, and shook his head. “I should say that you are merely
talking for effect,” he smiled back.
“But we have found the coal,” Carfax persisted.
“You have found the upper measure, the same as you have in all the
other trials. Beneath it, you will find your sandstone dike again.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Quite sure.”
“But we have already reached a depth of more than eighteen inches, and
the drill was still in coal when we shut down for the noon stop.”
“That is quite immaterial,” was the cool-voiced reply. “The measures
vary in thickness, though not greatly. Geology is one of my small
side-lines, Mr. Carfax, and I have made a study of this particular
region, largely as a pastime.”
The sight-seers were straggling back, and Tregarvon was explaining to a
group of breathless maidens just where he had been sitting with Carfax
at the moment of catastrophes, and how Rucker had been knocked down by
the wind of the fragment which had struck the corner of the tool-shed.
Carfax saw his opportunity preparing to take its leave and he smiled,
level-eyed, at Hartridge.
“You are still on the obstructive hand, aren’t you?” he threw in. “Even
now, you would like to discourage us if you could.”
The professor of mathematics and other things was turning away to join
the others, but he paused for a low-toned rejoinder.
“I neither deny nor affirm, Mr. Carfax. But I may say this much: if
I were in your shoes, or Mr. Tregarvon’s, I shouldn’t call to-day’s
disaster a pure accident--until I could prove it.”
And with that he turned his back and began to talk to the art teacher.
XVIII
Evolutionary
Intent upon the swift purchase of another power-plant, Tregarvon caught
an afternoon freight on the branch railroad, made a late train on the
main line, and was obliged to spend the Sunday in Chattanooga, with
little to console him save the thought that he would be on hand to
transact business with the machinery merchants bright and early Monday
morning.
It was a sad Sunday, weatherwise, with a chill autumn rain sweeping the
streets of the battle-field city, and the crest of Lookout Mountain
veiled in cloud. Tregarvon had made a few business acquaintances in
town on previous purchasing expeditions, but there were no familiar
faces in the hotel; nothing to lighten the monotony of a dreary day of
enforced idleness.
In such circumstances impatience becomes a rat to gnaw the vitals. The
suspense, the tormenting uncertainty which he had left behind him in
the unfinished test-hole on the summit of Mount Pisgah, would have been
hard to endure even in a whirlwind of work; and upon a day when he
could neither work nor play he was in despair.
After the noon meal, which figured as “Luncheon” on the hotel bill
of fare, and was, in point of fact, a heavy and dispiriting midday
dinner, he braved the elements and went in a closed sight-seeing car
to the Chickamauga battle-field. The drive proved to be a damp test of
endurance, and he brought nothing back from it better than a memory of
rain-sodden fields and forest; of endless colonnades of gray, ghostly
monuments, a majority of them assuring the beholder in letters of
granite that here the Ohio troops fought nobly; of parkings of ancient
cannon, the guns pointing in so many different directions that no human
being could guess which way the battle had run; of the droning singsong
of the chauffeur pouring his explanation patter into the reversed
megaphone for the benefit of his few fares.