spend money in this way, heaven only knows in what other foolish
enterprise we might be investing.”
“That is a new power-plant you are hauling up the hill?” the engineer
inquired.
“Brand-new,” boasted Tregarvon’s proxy.
“The purchase doesn’t look as if you were intending to stop throwing
the money away,” said Thirlwall.
“Oh, that is entirely as it may happen,” Carfax countered cheerfully.
“You know the bankrupt always puts up the best front he can when he
finds himself coming to the jumping-off place.”
“I hope you and Mr. Tregarvon are not trying to run a bluff on anything
so unimpressible as Consolidated Coal,” laughed Thaxter.
“Much obliged for the hint,” returned the golden youth, accurately
matching the bookkeeper’s laugh. “I give you my word, we hadn’t
thought of that. Would it astonish you beyond measure if we should?”
“Don’t try it,” the engineer advised. “We have excellent records of
every acre of coal land in this region, with all the data; thickness of
veins, their placement, and so on. You can’t very well run a bluff when
the other fellow knows every card in your hand, Mr. Carfax.”
“That is so,” Carfax yielded gracefully. “You people have the age on
us, in both meanings of the word. Have you heard anything from New
York, Mr. Thaxter?”
“Nothing positive, as yet; there has scarcely been time. But I believe
Mr. Thirlwall has been asked to make a report on the present condition
of the equipment.”
The engineer confirmed the supposition with a nod, and Carfax said:
“Tregarvon will be glad to show you everything he has, I’m sure. Will
you make the inspection to-day?”
Thirlwall looked at his watch.
“I can hardly spare the time this afternoon,” he demurred. “Besides, if
I know anything about such things, Mr. Tregarvon wouldn’t care to leave
his machinery blocking a public road while he was showing us around.”
Carfax had learned all he wished to know, and now he became
urgently hospitable. Wouldn’t the visitors stop and rest awhile in
the office-building? True, there was little to offer in the way of
refreshment, but the old negro cook could make a passable pot of tea.
To all of this, Thaxter made excuses for both and said they must be
driving back to Whitlow.
Carfax let them go, apparently with the greatest reluctance, walking
with them to the post where Thaxter’s horse was hitched. But after
the natty side-bar buggy had disappeared over the small rise in the
northward road, he smiled like an angelic understudy of the villain in
a play.
“Not much, you didn’t drive down here to tell us that our coke-ovens
are out of repair, Mr. Thaxter!” he derided joyously, apostrophizing
the vanished bookkeeper. “You came to see if it were really true that
we had bought a new engine and were going on with the game! And you are
jolly well welcome to all that you found out!”
At a little past two o’clock, Carfax, driving the yellow car, tailed
in behind the machinery procession on the mountain road. Tregarvon had
been having good luck and was correspondingly jubilant; but the sight
of Carfax going to keep an appointment with Richardia Birrell gave him
another set back.
“That’s right; go on and enjoy yourself,” he grumbled sourly, as Carfax
came up to edge his way past the obstructing raffle of teams and
machinery. “If you knew how to chock a wheel or handle a pinch-bar, I’d
pull you out of that joy wagon and set you at work. Since you don’t,
you’d better trundle along and get out of our way.”
“I shall tell Miss Richardia that I left you in a heavenly temper,”
threatened the gentle mocker in the driving-seat.
“The less you say about me in that quarter, the better,” was the
surly rejoinder; and with that, Tregarvon began to shout again at his
teamsters.
In due time Carfax negotiated his passage and the yellow car
disappeared in the direction of Highmount. But the sting was left
behind, and Tregarvon drank deep from the opium cup of fierce labor
without being able to purchase blessed oblivion. Jagged thoughts came
uppermost; repinings as old as mankind; as venerable, at least, as that
prehistoric day when the first friend took it upon himself to smite his
brother into the straight and narrow path.
Why must civilized man, alone of all sentient beings, be burdened with
that inconsiderate thing called conscience? The bird of the air, the
beast of the field, was free to choose its mate; the savage stood
aside only when some bigger savage compelled him. Environment and the
stress of the moment have shaping influences mighty in proportion to
the strenuosities. Tregarvon, fighting for the up-hill inches with a
load a ton or so heavier than his pulling power, became immune to the
gentler leadings. Why should a promise, made to a woman who had taken
it serenely as a conventional matter of course, stand in the way of a
passion so vital that it laid hold upon the very well-springs of life?
Why should he stand aside and let Carfax, under a fantastic sense
of duty, mar three lives, or possibly four, in a foolish attempt to
preserve the conventional unities?
The materialistic afternoon had done its worst for Tregarvon by the
time Tryon’s boy, who had been stationed on ahead to give warning
of the approach of descending teams, waved his hat as a signal that
some one was driving down the mountain. The moment was inauspicious.
A pulling-rope had just broken; the heavy load of machinery was
stalled in a crooked bend in the road, and was for the time immovable.
Tregarvon yelped out a string of orders to his helpers, and then went
on past the tangle of mules and rope tackle to meet the descending
vehicle. Being in the proper frame of mind, he swore crabbedly to the
world at large when he saw that it was his own car, with Carfax at the
wheel, Richardia in the mechanician’s seat, and the tonneau thickly
packed with young women from Highmount.
“You can’t pass,” was his curt denial of the right of way when Carfax
slowed to a stop. “We have just broken a tackle, and everything is all
balled up. Couldn’t you find any other road to drive on?”
Carfax laughed and turned to his seat-mate. “You see how inhospitable
he really is when he isn’t parading his company manners.” Then to the
young women behind him: “Mr. Tregarvon won’t let us drive down, but
if you young ladies would care to see the wheels go round at a moment
when, as it seems, they have just stopped going round, we can walk.”
There was an instant chorus of walking votes, and Carfax got out
to open the tonneau door. Tregarvon stood aside, scowling as any
working-boss might when his difficulties are about to be made a
raree-show for the frivolous. Miss Richardia slipped out of the
mechanician’s seat on her own side of the car, unassisted, but when
the sight-seeing contingent marshalled itself for the descent into the
tangle, she did not join it.
“You are not going with the others?” said Tregarvon ungraciously.
“There are enough of them for you to be spiteful at, without adding me
to the number,” she returned, adding: “Besides, I wanted to speak to
you. It was I who asked Mr. Carfax to drive down here.”
She had come around to his side of the car and he looked her squarely
in the eyes.
“Be careful what you say to me to-day, Richardia: I am not the same man
that I was a few days ago.”
“_Boo!_” she said, with the little grimace that always set his blood
afire; “you make me shivery when you look and talk that way. I came to
try to help you--not to be frozen.”
“Say it,” he commanded.
“How can I, when you won’t let me? I have a piece of news for
you--something that I imagine you’d like to know. Have you written to
Miss Wardwell lately?”
“Yes; Sunday night in Chattanooga.”
“And this is Wednesday: have you had a reply?”
“No; not yet. What is your news?”
“I was just wondering whether I’d better not keep it to myself, after
all. Mr. Carfax said you were in a bad temper, but he didn’t tell me
that you were utterly impossible.”
Tregarvon’s scowl deepened.
“Impossible? Of course, I am impossible. What would you expect, in the
circumstances?”
At this, she smiled up at him and said: “I’m beginning to be a little
deaf now--charitably deaf.”
“I don’t need charity,” he broke out hotly. “All I need is a chance to
fight for my own hand. Tell me one thing: have you promised to marry
Poictiers yet?”
“Have you any right to ask me such a question as that?”
“I have; the best right in the world: you know I have.”
She met his half-angry, half-passionate gaze calmly.
“I know that you are about to make a shipwreck of your better self,”
she averred. Then: “Don’t you know that there are some things that are
hard for a woman to forgive--or, having forgiven them, to forget?”
“I am in no mood to split hairs with you to-day,” he grated. “You
are thinking of Elizabeth: she knows already what she will have to
forgive. I told her in the letter I wrote Sunday night.”
She shook her head sorrowfully.
“You are tearing the anchors loose, one by one. Will nothing make you
realize what you are doing?”
“What would you have me do? It has come to that, Richardia: I don’t
care for anything else. A little further along, you may be another
man’s wife, and I may be another woman’s husband; but it will make no
difference----”
“_Don’t!_” she cried sharply; and then, before he could add another
word, she had left him and was walking down the road to meet the
tonneau party which was stringing along on its return to the car, with
Carfax in the lead.
Tregarvon tramped moodily away when Carfax began to help his charges
into the car, going back to the tangle which Tryon had finally
contrived to straighten out. Taking over the command, he flung himself
once more into the work, but the fine fire was gone, and when evening
came and the machinery truck was left blocked at the roadside to wait
for another day, he trudged back to Coalville at the tail of the mule
cavalcade, sodden with weariness.
Carfax had not returned when Uncle William served dinner, and Tregarvon
ate alone, morosely thankful for the solitude. Afterward he went
directly to his room on the second floor; and Carfax, coming in a
little after nine o’clock, had no chance to tell him of Thaxter’s visit
and its probable object.
XX
Limitations
Day following day in the conflict with steepness on the mountain
road, Tregarvon toiled early and late, breakfasting before Carfax was
visible, eating at midday out of a basket brought to the scene of the
activities by Uncle William, and missing the golden youth two evenings
in succession by reason of Carfax’s continued popularity at Highmount.
Such sacrifices to the morose deities of materialism bring their own
revenges. By the Friday evening, when the new engine and boiler had
been dragged painfully up the final ascent and had been halted for the
night at a point nearly opposite the college campus, Tregarvon had
become a bitter man-driver and was facing the consequences in a strike
on the part of his farmer helpers.
John Teppenpaw, a husky young Wehatcheean from the farther side of the
valley who had brought four of the best-pulling beasts to the job, was
the first to raise the standard of revolt.
“Ef you-all ’ll thess pay me off, I reckon I won’t come back no more,”
Teppenpaw announced, after he had thrown the trace-chains over the
backs of his mules for the descent of the mountain.
“What’s that?--what the devil is the matter with _you_?” Tregarvon
snapped viciously. “Aren’t you getting enough money?”
“Money ain’t the onliest thing ther’ is in this world,” was the sullen
retort. “I ain’t allowin’ to let no man hire me to take his cussin’ and
swearin’ and browbeatin’. I got a li’l piece o’ land and a few head o’
stock o’ my own, and I allow I don’t _haf_ to!”
“I reckon that’s about the size of it f’r me, too,” put in Jeff
Daggett, who was Teppenpaw’s nearest neighbor on the north; and from
this the fire of resentment spread so rapidly that the strike became
unanimous, passing at once beyond any hope of arbitration.
“You’re quitting on me before the job’s finished?” raged Tregarvon.
“You are a lot of bally idiots! The money you are getting for this haul
is more than any one of you will see from now to Christmas! Are you a
pack of silly women that you can’t stand a little man-sized talk from a
boss?”
“That’s jist hit,” said Daggett. “Looks like you-all was used to
rippin’ and tearin’ at them no-account furriners up No’th that ain’t
got nothin’, and don’t know enough to raise a terruction when you cuss
’em out. We-all ain’t nuther niggers n’r furriners. I’ll take my pay
and quit.”
Tregarvon became heavily sarcastic. “Is this your way of telling me
that you want more money?”
Bickler, the oldest man in the squad, made answer.
“I reckon you-all ain’t got money enough to make us-all come back f’r
another day like what this’n has been, Mr. Tregarvon. You’ve got a heap
to l’arn ef ye allow to stay down yere in old Tennessee and get white
men to work f’r ye.”
“Quit, then, and be damned to you!” Tregarvon exploded. “Show up at the
office in Coalville to-morrow morning before I leave, and you’ll get
your pay. I don’t carry your money around with me in my pocket.”
To a clattering of hoofs and a jingling of trace-chains the cavalcade
moved off down the pike, leaving the deserted boss standing beside the
stranded machinery truck. Tregarvon knew very well that by another day
the story of the strike and its cause would be passed from lip to ear
throughout the length and breadth of the Wehatchee, and there would be
no hope of recruiting another gang among the farmers. The half-mile of
sandy wood road still remained to be traversed, and without the teams
the load could be moved only by means of a block and tackle and winch,
manned by Tryon’s gang of track laborers; a process which would add
other exasperating days of delay.
The dusk was thickening under the trees when the discouraged
hauling-boss took his coat from the truck and struggled into it
preparatory to setting out upon the long tramp down the mountain. He
had seen nothing of Carfax since an hour before noon, when the yellow
car had edged past the road obstructions on its way up the pike. But
now he heard the purring of a motor and waited.
The car was coming down the cross-mountain road, and Tregarvon could
see that there were two persons in it. Instead of turning in at the
campus gates, it came on, and Carfax braked it to a stop opposite the
loaded truck. “Is that you, Vance?” he called to the figure standing in
the shadow of the pines.
“Yes.” Tregarvon stepped out of the shadows and crossed to the
automobile, though the nearer approach was not needed to assure him
that Carfax’s companion was Richardia Birrell.
“You are coming along beautifully!” Carfax praised, speaking as one who
holds himself delicately aloof from the toilsome details. “It’s great
to be a working-man and able to do things. One day more will take you
over to the drilling ground, won’t it?”
“Half a day was all I asked, with the men and teams; but I am not going
to have it. They have quit on me.”
“A strike? What was the trouble? Weren’t you paying them enough?”
“It wasn’t a question of more money. They seemed to think that I ought
to speak softly and say ‘mister’ and ‘please’ when I wanted them to get
a move.”
Carfax laughed and turned to his companion in the other half of the
driving-seat.
“He puts it rather--er--diplomatically, don’t you think?” he confided
to the young woman. “Really, you know, his language has come to be
something frightful!” Then to the diplomat: “What are you going to do?”
Tregarvon ignored Carfax’s companion, and the derisive confidence to
which she had made no reply. “If I had the nerve, I suppose I might
kill another week dragging the thing through the wood by half-inches
with a block and tackle and man-power,” he offered.
“Dear me! And in the meantime the enemy--whoever he is--will be storing
up ammunition and getting ready to efface you once more.”
Tregarvon turned away.
“I don’t believe I shall give ‘the enemy’ another chance at me. Will
you be down to dinner?”
“Oh, hold on; don’t go off in a huff that way!” Carfax protested in
mock concern. “We have had our little joy-ride, and I was just taking
Miss Richardia home. Wait a minute and tell us how you are going to
block ‘the enemy’s’ game.”
Tregarvon was still ignoring Miss Birrell.
“Thaxter sent me a note this morning. Consolidated Coal is ready to do
business with us.”
“With you, you mean; I am only a good-natured bystander. What does Mr.
Thaxter say?”
For the first time in the brisk exchange of question and answer,
Tregarvon took the silent member of the trio into consideration.
“All this doesn’t interest Miss Richardia. I can talk the business
matter over with you later on.”
If the music teacher had been keeping a vow of silence she broke it now
with a little laugh.
“I am interested,” she assured him; adding: “I hope you feel better,
now that you have made me say it in so many words.”
Tregarvon let the small gibe go without retort.
“The offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee properties has been
renewed in my behalf, Thaxter tells me; but if I wish to avail myself
of it, I must accept immediately.”
“What is the keen rush?” Carfax inquired.
“It is explained reasonably enough. The C. C. & I. people are preparing
to open other veins on their Whitlow lands to the north of the present
mine. These plans are being held up, pending my decision. If I sell
out to them, they will probably abandon these plans for the present;
opening, instead, the south vein--the one Thaxter told us about--and
using our tramway and coke-ovens.”
Carfax seemed to have grown suddenly reflective. “It rather puts you
between two fires, doesn’t it?” he commented. “You don’t wish to lose
your chance to sell, and you don’t wish to sell before you have seen
what that unfinished hole over yonder may be going to show you. And
if you take time to drag this power-plant over by hand, the golden
opportunity will get by. The question which suggests itself to me is a
very foolish one, no doubt. I’m asking myself how much the C. C. & I.
people paid your farmers to induce them to lie down on you.”
Tregarvon’s laugh was brittle. “You needn’t go that far. I’ll be frank
enough to admit that I gave Daggett and his men plenty of provocation
for the strike.”
“In other words, you’ve been handing them some of the mule talk.
Shocking! But that is spilt milk and it can’t be gathered up now. What
is Thaxter’s time limit?”
“He says in his note that he will expect to hear from me by Saturday,
at the latest. That is to-morrow.”
At this, Miss Richardia spoke up quickly:
“Does ‘to-morrow’ mean all day to-morrow? Or does it mean to-morrow
morning?”
“Oh, I should suppose I might take the day for it. Any option holds
good up to midnight of its day of expiration, unless there is some
proviso to the contrary.”
“And how long would it take you to do all these things that Mr. Carfax
says you would like to do first--before deciding?”
“Only a few hours, if the men and teams had stayed with me. But as it
is, it would probably take a week.”
There was silence for a moment and then Carfax said: “Miss Richardia is
trying to tell you to postpone your decision as long as you can, only
she can’t find the words. That is my advice, too. One can never tell
what a day may bring forth. Wait a minute until I can drive back to the
college, and then I’ll take you down the hill.”
Tregarvon stood aside while Carfax turned the car and sent it swiftly
up to and through the Highmount gateway. A few minutes later the golden
youth came sauntering back, alone and afoot.
“That blessed motor of yours has gone dippy again,” he announced
coolly, as if the yellow car had lately been acquiring bad habits. “It
pegged out just as I drove up to the Caswell door. I suppose I shall
have to send a boy over to our shack after Rucker. Mrs. Caswell rises
to the occasion and invites us both to dinner while we wait. What do
you say?”
“Not on your life!” Tregarvon refused sourly. “I’m not fit company for
anybody to-night. I’ll walk down.”
“All right: then I’ll stay and bring the car after Rucker has
rejuvenated it. You needn’t sit up for me. And, by the way, that
reminds me. There were some letters for you last night--Tait brought
them over after you had gone to bed. Did you find them?”
“Yes; I got them this morning.”
“Anything from--er--from Elizabeth yet?”
“Not yet; no.”
Carfax hesitated a moment and then interested himself
sympathetically--or seemed to. “I hope you didn’t say too much--or too
little--in that confession of yours last Sunday night, Vance; in the
letter you sent from Chattanooga.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I suppose I am, as you might say--er--well, I’m a sort of an
accessory before the fact, don’t you think? I can’t forget that it was
I who clubbed you into the proper frame of mind.”
“You needn’t worry; you’re safely out of it,” declared the confessor,
with a laugh which was only half good-natured. “I gave you your just
due: told her that I owed you my soul’s salvation; which you had safely
clinched against any backsliding by asking Richardia to marry you.”
For a moment there was a silence like that which precedes the crash
of summer thunder. Then, in a still, small voice, Carfax said: “You
told her that, did you? You gave her to understand that, right off the
bat, and merely in passing, as it were, I had carelessly determined
to marry your temptation out of your way? There was only one mistake
made in your education, Vance; the person who first taught you to put
pen to paper ought to have been instantly hanged, drawn and quartered.
I--I--” but here, apparently, speech failed him, and he turned abruptly
to walk rapidly away toward Highmount, leaving Tregarvon standing,
half-remorseful and wholly bewildered, in the middle of the road.
The bewilderment went with the too highly educated one a good part of
the way down to Coalville, and it certainly would have been increased
if he could have known that, five minutes after he had turned the first
curve in the winding pike below Highmount, the car which had been so
lately reported out of commission had been mysteriously restored to a
state of usefulness; that, with a man and a woman in the driving-seat,
it had whisked through the campus portal, cut a perilous quarter-circle
at speed in the piked roadway, and had vanished in a thick cloud of
limestone dust to the westward, leaving Mrs. Caswell’s dinner to wait
for its return.
XXI
The Clansmen
Tregarvon turned out early in the morning of a Saturday, to be known
afterward as a day of fateful happenings, largely from force of
habit--since there was no mule cavalcade to be led to the Pisgah
heights. As on the three previous mornings, he breakfasted alone. In
reply to his inquiry, Uncle William told him that the motor-car was not
in its shed, and the inference was that Carfax had spent the night as
the guest of the Caswells.
“Summa dem po’ white men out yondeh on de po’ch a-waitin’ faw you-all,
Mistoo Tregarbin,” the old negro announced, after the solitary meal was
despatched. “Look lak dey’s mighty grumptious erbout somepin, dey does.”
Tregarvon went to the front of the building, where he had established a
rude excuse for an office, and opened the door. The farmers were there,
waiting for their pay, and the settlement was made without waste of
words on either side. But after the money had been handed out, Daggett
was moved to make peaceful overtures, natural kindliness having gotten
the better of resentment. They--the farmers--had been talking it over
among themselves, and Daggett “allowed” that they might have been
hasty. Without prejudice to the fact that they objected to being sworn
at, they would come back Monday or Tuesday of the following week and
finish the hauling job, if the boss so desired.
At this, as was most natural after a night of worry and disappointment,
Tregarvon’s temper flew into shards.
“Not in a hundred years, you won’t!” he exploded wrathfully. “If I
can’t move that machinery without your help, it may stand right where
it is until it rots! You’ve got your money, and I’ve learned my lesson.
We’re quits.” And with that he shouldered his way through the group
and went to rally Tryon and the track gang, marshalling the handful of
laborers for the ascent of the mountain in the tram-car.