the same sort o’ quarrel ez you have, judge. Didn’t they-all steal the
Ocoee f’om you in the first place?”
“That’s neithuh heah nor there!” was the stern rejoinder. “Would you
give these gentlemen to understand that _I_ am yo-uh principal in these
scandalous outrages? See heah, Mo’gan, we all know that you haven’t
been actin’ on yo-uh own responsibility. Who has been puttin’ you up to
all these deviltries?”
“If you don’t know, I reckon _I_ ain’t a-goin’ to be the one to tell
you,” said the prisoner, relapsing into his former attitude of
sullenness. Then, as if upon a second thought: “You ask Miss Dick,
judge; I allow _she_ knows.”
The little pause of consternation which this statement precipitated was
broken by an exclamation from Rucker.
“Look out yonder! Somebody’s set the leaves afire! My God! we left the
dynamite out there!”
Carfax, who was standing beside the mechanician, wheeled quickly to
face the open door. Out beyond the drill derrick a thin line of fire,
driven by the freshening west wind and showing orange-colored under the
mist-wraiths, was sweeping down upon the clearing. “Show me where you
left the stuff!” he snapped at the mechanician, but even as he spoke,
a fuse squibbed and the thunder of a terrific explosion shattered the
forest silences, the concussion smashing the glass in the small square
window, rocking the lightly built tool-house like the heaving of an
earthquake, and bombarding it an instant later with a rain of falling
_débris_. The judge, sitting upon the coil of rope, was not thrown
down, but the five men who were standing were flung in a heap on the
floor.
Tregarvon was the first to regain his feet and to reach the open. The
cloud mantlings had been thrust aside for the moment, but the stir
was full of gray dust and acrid with the fumes of the explosive. Where
the derrick and the new power-plant had stood there was a mass of
tangled wreckage, and the burying-ground glade looked as if it had been
swept by a tornado. In the wan moonlight Tregarvon caught a glimpse
of something moving under the trees beyond the wreck; then the moving
object erected itself into the stature of a man.
One glance at the tall, frock-coated figure was enough. With a mad yell
of rage, Tregarvon snatched the gun from the judge’s hands and gave
chase, calling to the frock-coated man to stand or he would shoot.
There was an instant of hesitation, seemingly of indecision; then the
man turned and fled. And, as if to favor him, another scudding cloud
settled upon the mountain top, burying forest and glade, the tangled
wreck and the two runners in its fleecy depths.
Tregarvon raced on for a breath-cutting space; guided solely by the
crashing of the fugitive through the brier tangles and dry-leaf beds.
Then he began to get his second wind, and again he shouted the command
to halt. Since this seemed only to have the effect of hastening the
thudding footsteps on ahead, he fired the gun, holding the muzzle
high, as he thought and intended, but apparently not high enough,
as the dreadful sequence immediately indicated. For, almost exactly
coincident with the report of the gun, there was a shriek, the crash of
a falling body, and silence.
At this the pursuer came down from the transporting heights of berserk
rage with a shock that was sickening. “Oh, good Lord!” he gasped; “I’ve
killed him!” Whereupon he flung the offending weapon afar and ran to
confirm the horrifying conclusion.
He was still running in the direction from which the cry had come when
the curious happening befell. As if the solid earth had been whisked
away from beneath his feet he found himself whirling through empty
space; falling through unfathomable depths of it, it seemed, before he
collided with another world--a world of shocks and coruscating pains,
of beatings and bruisings, and presently of grateful forgetfulness.
XXVIII
The Ocoee’s Answer
When Tregarvon recovered consciousness he knew at once what had
happened to him. In the blind and hurried search for the body of the
man he had presumptively shot he had fallen from the cliff edge; how
far was still problematical, but far enough, as a painful roaring
in his ears, a tightening agony in his forehead, and a bruised and
stiffening ankle sufficiently testified.
His first thought was for his victim. The man might not have been
killed outright; in which case he might be even now dying for the lack
of timely help. The thought was insupportable and Tregarvon tried to
rise. But the ankle, broken or twisted, he could not determine which,
gripped him like a fanged wild beast and he fell back with a groan.
None the less, in some way he must contrive to bring help. He felt in
his pockets for matches. A heap of dry leaves furnished the kindling
and a clear flame leaped up, hollowing out a small cavity of yellow
light in the misty gloom. At this the fire-lighter saw that he was
at the bottom of a deep, water-worn cleft opening back from the outer
scarp of the cliff, and at right angles to it; a ravine which was
little more than a crevice, save that it was large enough to have trees
and shrubs growing in it.
He knew the crevice, though he had never explored it. It lay at a point
almost exactly half-way between the glade and the tramhead. Knowing
that the sound would not carry upward and backward over the cliff,
he did not waste his breath in vain shoutings. The alternative was a
fire signal. If the cloud would but lift a little, and he could gather
enough of the dry leaves to make a glow, the light would guide those
who must certainly, by this time, be searching for him.
This was his thought while he was nursing the handful of fire and
adding more leaves to it. The blaze rose higher and the cavity in the
gloom grew larger until it became a hemisphere, with the black scarp of
the crevice wall for its flattened side. A thickly matted vine covered
the face of the precipice, completely concealing the perpendicular
surface upon which it climbed. At its roots in the crevice bottom the
dry leaves were bedded a foot deep. Tregarvon was reaching painfully
for the mass of fresh fuel when the fire licked out and caught it
first. There was a puff of dense smoke, a fierce blaze, and then the
climbing vine took fire and was brightly outlined in a network of
short-lived flame.
All this was normal enough, but what followed was curiously abnormal.
As the fire glowed hotter small fragments of the cliff face began to
split off, and these fragments, falling into the burning leaf-bed,
sprang alight with hissings and sputterings and much pungent smoke.
Tregarvon, ignoring the throbbing ankle, dragged himself an agonizing
foot or so nearer and secured one of the splintered fragments. _It was
coal!_
Almost beside himself with excitement, he heaped more leaves upon the
fire. By the light of the fresh upblaze he could make out the upper
line of the great coal seam. It was at the height of a tall man’s head
above the bottom of the cleft, well-defined, unmistakable; the roof
shale of a vein fully six feet thick. Here, discovered in the moment of
defeat, disaster, and woundings, was the Ocoee’s lavish answer to all
the costly questionings.
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his
elbow, said: “Quite so; if the heavens may be purchased with the gifts
of the earth. The gifts are yours, Mr. Tregarvon; first by the right
of inheritance, and now by the right of discovery.”
Tregarvon twisted himself into a sitting posture, gritting his teeth
at the ankle’s protest and holding his head in his hands. At a
little distance away sat the professor of mathematics, one long leg
jack-knifed for a support, and the other stretched awkwardly upon a
makeshift cushion of the fallen leaves.
“You?” Tregarvon cried. “Did you fall over the cliff, too?”
“I think it was I who showed you the way,” Hartridge amended. “You are
a very apt pupil, Mr. Tregarvon. I was scarcely well down here before
you played the part of Jill.”
“Are you--are you hurt?”
“Not by your shot-gun charge, happily; but my leg is broken. And you?”
Tregarvon winced. “I have a cracked skull, I think, and an ankle that
won’t let me get up. But about that gunshot; I didn’t fire at you; I
shot into the air to make you stop. Just the same, you gave me a quick
fit of the horrors. When you yelled, I thought I had inadvertently
killed you. What made you run?”
The professor’s smile was a little rueful, and also a little
shamefaced.
[Illustration: “My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice,
apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so.”]
“What made you chase me?” he asked.
“Because I was hot--fighting mad. I wanted to drag you to an accounting
on the spot. I don’t suppose you will be foolish enough to deny that
you set the leaf fire that caused the explosion?”
“Since I was near enough to be blown up myself such a denial might
have the weight of circumstantial evidence to support it,” was the
quiet reply. “But I do not make the denial. It was I who set the leaves
afire. I shall be greatly relieved if you can tell me that nobody was
injured.”
“So far as I know the dynamite didn’t kill any of us. But tell me, did
you start that fire knowing that the explosion would follow?”
“By no means. I may confess that I knew the dynamite had been placed;
but I supposed, as the most ordinary matter of course, that your men
had taken care of it when they captured their prisoner.”
“Then why did you light the fire?”
Again the quaint smile flitted across the face of the man who had
always contrived to tell less than the sum total of all he knew.
“Once again, Mr. Tregarvon, you are going into the question of motives,
which is a very large field, indeed. Let us say that I wished to make
a diversion of some sort. Will that satisfy you?”
“No,” was the blunt reply.
“I am sorry; I am afraid it will have to suffice for the present.”
Tregarvon’s head was throbbing so painfully that he found it next to
impossible to think clearly. But he would not desist.
“Hartridge, it has come to a show-down between us. I’m giving you fair
warning. Once I did you an injustice--or thought I did--but this time
you’ve given yourself away. When I get up and around again, I’m going
to sift this thing to the ultimate bottom and somebody will be made to
sweat blood for what has been done to-night. As matters stand now, you
seem to be the man the officers will want first.”
Once more the professor smiled. “And yet you can’t say that I have ever
wittingly done anything to harm you,” he offered mildly.
“That remains to be proved,” was the angry retort. “Meaning to, or
not meaning to, you fired that dynamite a little while back; and you
certainly have never strained yourself in any effort to help me. You
knew that this big vein was here--you have known it all along!”
“This time you are not my guest, Mr. Tregarvon, and I may contradict
you without blame. I did not know it.”
“Then why did you carve the Greek letter _pi_ on those two oak-trees
below the glade? Or do you deny that, as well?”
“It is you who have found the value of _pi_,” said the one who was
under accusation. “I am ashamed to confess that it baffled me. Some
three years ago, two strange surveyors acting, as I learned afterward,
in the interests of Consolidated Coal, ran many lines over this
property of yours, which was then practically abandoned. I had no
access to their note-books, of course, so I was obliged to work out my
conclusions as best I could from their stakes. One of these conclusions
was that the true vein would be found somewhere in this locality. Can
you believe me thus far?”
“I’m trying to,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”
“It is humiliating to have to acknowledge that, while all the
line-running on the part of these strangers pointed to this immediate
locality, I could never discover the outcrop. True, I never thought
of looking in this particular crevice. But to preserve a record for
possible future investigation, I made the marks on the two trees. The
distance between the oaks, carefully measured and multiplied by _pi_,
or three and the decimal one thousand, four hundred and sixteen, gives
the distance around the cliff from the lower oak to the point somewhere
below us where the intruding strangers drove their final stake.”
Tregarvon heaped more leaves upon the fire, which was threatening to
die out.
“You are still miles beyond my comprehension,” he complained moodily.
“On one hand, you stop at nothing to prevent me from finding out what
you have just told me, and on the other you make what appears to be a
very worthy and earnest effort to keep me from flinging myself into the
maw of Consolidated Coal. How am I to reconcile such things?”
“When you are older, Mr. Tregarvon, and come to know human nature
a little better, you will apprehend the truth of that worldly wise
beatitude, ‘Blessed are they who expect little, for, verily, they shall
not be disappointed.’ Consider a moment: you came here, the legal owner
of the Ocoee, to be sure, and the innocent owner, inasmuch as your
father was the unsuspecting purchaser of stolen goods. Yet you were
none the less the legitimate successor of the bandit who had looted
us. You wouldn’t expect much from those who had been so ruthlessly
defrauded, would you?”
“Since I was not even constructively to blame, yes,” Tregarvon insisted
stubbornly. “Your motive went deeper than that.”
“It did,” the professor admitted gravely. “Almost from the first I saw
the slight chance of a reward, the attainment of which has been the one
thing desirable in a rather drab-colored life, slipping away from me;
taken away from me in sheer wantonness, as it seemed, since, I had been
given to understand, you were already pledged to marry Miss Wardwell.
It was not in human nature to be entirely unresentful, Mr. Tregarvon.”
“Oh; so that was it?” said Tregarvon shortly. Then: “What I saw
yesterday afternoon in the forest back of Westwood House seems to prove
that I am as far out of the running as you are with Judge Birrell’s
daughter.”
The professor’s face became, for the moment, a study in astoundment.
“Ah--yes,” he said, stumbling over the words; and then: “I am to
infer that you didn’t recognize the young man whom you saw with Miss
Richardia yesterday afternoon?”
“No; he was a stranger to me. Doesn’t the judge approve of him?”
This time the professor’s smile was rather grim.
“He does not--most decidedly.”
“But Richardia loves him; and that is enough--for you and for me.”
“Assuredly she loves him--very loyally,” was the grave reply; and a
moment later, as if the mention of the judge had evoked a new train of
thought: “I am curious to know if my leaf-fire diversion--which had
such unlooked-for and disastrous results--came soon enough. How much
had Morgan McNabb confessed?”
Tregarvon ignored the brow-wrinkling of pain which accompanied the
question.
“I am beginning to believe that you are a very hardened criminal, Mr.
Hartridge. If you know that McNabb had a confession to make, it follows
that you were his accomplice.”
The answer was a suppressed groan, for which the schoolmaster instantly
apologized.
“You--you must forgive me if I say that I can’t go into the matter
of culpability with you just now. This leg--of mine--grows a bit
insistent. But it will be the greatest possible satisfaction to me if
you will answer my question.”
“All right; you shall have it. Just before the explosion came McNabb
had admitted that he was acting for somebody else.”
“But he did not name the person?”
“The judge was trying to make him do so, but he was still refusing.
The last thing he said, as I remember it, was something which seemed to
implicate Miss Richardia as the one who could tell if she chose. Which
was absurd, of course.”
“Quite so,” was the low-voiced reply. “Shall we let the matter rest
there--for the present?”
Tregarvon was holding his head in his hands again. The throbbing pain
was so intense that he could only grit his teeth and endure. When
speech became possible he gave his answer.
“It may rest until I am able to take hold again. Then I shall make
somebody pay for this night’s work if it takes every dollar I can dig
out of the Ocoee for the next ten years!”
Once more Hartridge bent in apparent agony over the broken leg. But
when the paroxysm had passed he looked up with a face that was gray
with a deeper suffering than that inflicted by the broken bone.
“If you do; if you strike back in the spirit of reprisal, which seems
so justifiable to you now, you will carry the woundings of your own
vindictiveness to your grave, Mr. Tregarvon,” he said solemnly.
Tregarvon did not comment upon the sober prophecy. He was heaping more
leaves upon the fire and wondering irritably why it was taking the
rescuers so long to find them. The hammering agony in his head climaxed
now at shorter intervals and the recurrences were blinding, but he
contrived to keep the leaf glow alive until a welcome shout from the
cliff above announced the presence of the searchers.
The hauling of the two injured men out of the deep cleft proved to be
a difficult undertaking, this though there were five in the rescue
party, which included the freed McNabb. Once it was done, a stretcher
was quickly improvised for Hartridge, with Rucker, Tryon, and McNabb
to take turns as bearers; and Tregarvon made shift to help himself a
little, with Wilmerding and Carfax to shoulder him on either side.
On the slow progress back to the glade Tregarvon realized vaguely that
his companions were gravely silent; and as the lagging procession
issued from the wood he saw the cause. Rucker, or some one, had
replaced the deflated tire and the motor-car had been brought upon
the scene. The white glare of its headlamps focused upon the open
space in front of the tool shanty. Judge Birrell, bowed and shrunken,
was sitting upon the tool-house door-step with his face hidden in
his hands; and on Rucker’s cot-bed, which had been placed under the
light of the headlamps, lay the body of a man covered with one of the
blankets.
“Who is it?” Tregarvon muttered, leaning more heavily upon his helpers.
He thought it singular that no one answered him, and the thought
swiftly became an irritation too keen to be borne.
“What the devil is the matter with you all?” he rasped, with a curious
idea that he had to shout to make his voice heard above the deafening
thunder of many cataracts in his brain. Then, as in a dream, he seemed
to hear Wilmerding saying to Carfax, almost savagely: “Ease him down
and we’ll carry him. Can’t you see he’s gone off his head?”
XXIX
Beyond the Gap
It was a full fortnight before the Hesterville physician, driven at
breakneck speed to Coalville in Wilmerding’s roadster on the night of
woundings, pronounced Tregarvon out of danger and in a fair way to
recover from the broken head.
Whatever the lapse of time may have meant for others, it had little
significance for the man who tossed and rolled in his bed in an upper
room of the Ocoee office-building. Dim pictures there were of people
coming and going; of grotesque attendants lifting him about, these
sometimes parading as liveried Merkleys with Uncle William heads, or
the reverse; of faces, affectionately sorrowful, hanging over him,
now hopefully, and again with sharp anxiety in eyes which were never
completely recognizable.
But for the greater interval, what with thundering brain cataracts to
attend to, and a thousand dancing lights which had to be wheeled in
vanishing spirals, checked, stopped, and wheeled the other way around
precisely three hundred twirls a minute, he was so pressed for time as
not to be aware of the lapse of it. Hence, when he finally opened eyes
of full consciousness upon the walls and ceiling of the familiar room,
he was sadly out of touch, his latest clear recollection being of a
cloud-banked night, of a glade in the mountain-top forest, and of two
great white eyes of artificial light staring down upon a cot-bed bier
supporting a blanketed body.
At first he thought he was alone in the bare-walled upper room, but at
his earliest conscious stirring Carfax came to stand beside the bed.
“That’s better--much better!” said the golden one, noting the
turning-point improvement at once. “You certainly had us guessing,
old man. Our only comfort has been in the fact that you could eat
and didn’t seem to be losing too much flesh. Have the wheels stopped
buzzing?”
“They weren’t wheels; they were lights and waterfalls,” said the sick
man meticulously.
“All right; call ’em anything you like, so long as they’re gone. We
had one doctor, a specialist from Nashville, who gave us a fit of
seasickness; said you’d live, and be all right physically, but that you
would most probably never recover your reason. Nice cheerful prospect
for the friends and relatives, wasn’t it?”
“How long have I been knocked out, Poictiers?”
“Two solid weeks.”
“My mother and sister--has anybody written them?”
“Sure! Elizabeth has been writing them every day or so. They wanted
to come down, of course, but we decided that it wasn’t best. You were
getting all the care you could stand.”
“Then Elizabeth hasn’t gone home?”
“Not yet. Her father and mother have gone to Florida, and she has been
staying on at Westwood House--what time she hasn’t been down here
coddling you. She’s an angel, Vance; one of the kind you read about.
But I mustn’t let you talk too much.”
“If I can’t talk, you’ll have to. Have you made it up with
Elizabeth--about that silly side-play of yours with Richardia?”
Carfax’s smile began on the cherubic lines but it ended in a mere
face-wrinkling of soberness.
“We have had too much else to think about; too many little diversions,
as you might say. But I’m hoping she isn’t going to insist upon making
a horrible example of me for my apparent fickleness.”
“‘Too many little diversions’,” Tregarvon echoed. “That reminds
me: I can remember you and the others pulling us out of the
crevice--Hartridge and me--and after that, a stretcher was made for
Hartridge and we used up an age or so getting back to the glade. Am I
right, so far?”
“It was something like that; yes.”
“And when we came into the old burying-ground the motor-car had been
run down opposite the tool-house, and its headlamps made everything
look ghastly. The judge was sitting on the door-step with his face
hidden in his hands, and Rucker’s cot was standing in the open under
the lights with a blanketed corpse lying upon it. Who was the dead man,
Poictiers?”
Carfax shook his head. “Call it a bad dream,” he said soothingly. “The
cracked skull was beginning to get in its work. You didn’t see any dead
man.”
Tregarvon closed his eyes wearily. “It’s passing strange how a little
knock on the head can mix things. I could swear that I saw the judge
and the dead man and the car just as I have described them. Let it go,
and tell me about Richardia.”
Carfax seemed suddenly embarrassed. “I--I don’t know as there is much
to tell,” he stammered. “She--she is well, I believe.”
Tregarvon raised himself on an elbow.
“You’re keeping something back,” he protested. “Is she--is
she--married?”
“Oh, no; nothing of that sort,” was the hasty reply. “She has been
here to see you--she and her father--quite often; that is, as often
as possible. I have fetched them in the car, you know. They have left
nothing undone that could be done.”
Tregarvon still felt the presence of a reservation; of many of them;
but he was too weak to fight for the clearer explication.
“How is Hartridge getting along?” he asked, sinking back upon the
pillows.
“Rather slowly. It was a bad fracture. But the doctor says he won’t be
a cripple.”
“That’s good. I want him to get well so that I can drag him into court.
He set the leaf fire that blew us up. Did you know that?”
The golden youth nodded gravely. “I know a good many things that I
didn’t know before you got your knockout.”
“Bring me down to date,” said the sick man impatiently. “What have you
done about the mine?”
Carfax seemed to welcome the change to the more material field.