Chapter VII: Part 7

“She has said something of the same nature to me,” Carfax admitted. “But it seems that there were other troubles besides the property losses. The judge had a son, a year or so older than Richardia. He was a school-boy at the time of the big smash, but was old enough, Wilmerding says, to be hot-headed and a bit wild and ungovernable. Parker, the promoter, was foolish enough to show up here again, after the _débâcle_; and this boy actually tried to kill him; emptied a pistol at him, winged him with one of the shots, and then ran away. He has never been heard from since.”

“That is all new to me,” Tregarvon commented. “I didn’t know Richardia had a brother. She has never spoken of him to me.”

“Wilmerding says nobody ever speaks of him,” Carfax went on. “Parker was vindictive, and pushed the assault case. A grand jury found a true bill against young Birrell, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He couldn’t be found; has never been found. His son’s disappearance, and the struggle to keep faith with his friends, made the judge what he is now, a proud, broken-spirited old hermit who is carrying the heaviest burden a father can bear--the disgrace of a son.”

“Disgrace?” echoed Tregarvon. “It’s hardly that, is it? Haven’t we been taught that it is a part of the Southern code that a son should shoot his father’s betrayer?”

“Oh, yes; that part of it was all right. The disgrace was in showing the white feather by running away; in not staying to face the consequences. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose there would have been any consequences. Any jury that could have been impanelled in this vicinity at that particular time would have acquitted the boy. The cowardly streak is what broke the judge’s heart.”

“This story of the boy opens up a bit of new ground,” said Tregarvon musingly. “I wonder if Richardia doesn’t know where he is? She has given me the impression, more than once, that she has a deep-buried trouble of some sort--a trouble that she never shares with anybody. Haven’t you had the same notion?”

Carfax shook his head.

“She doesn’t need to go that far afield to find her troubles. The wrecked family fortunes, and a broken old man to shield and comfort and care for on a music teacher’s wages, are enough to fill all the requirements, I should imagine.”

“Surely. But as to the money hardship ... you’ll be able to change all that, Poictiers.”

Carfax rose, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and slowly refilled it.

“You have come to see things in their right light, at last, have you?” he inquired at the end of the little interval of silence.

“Partly. There is only one light in which they can be seen. I had no shadow of right to fall in love with Richardia.”

“Wait a minute,” said Carfax in his gentlest tone. “Are you sure it was real? You know, you have had so many of these--er--these little erotic explosions in the past----”

“I know,” was the humble admission. “But this was different. You may say that the difference lay in the fact that it was forbidden, and point me to the moral twist--as old as the race--that makes the forbidden thing figure as the one thing altogether desirable. Doubtless I have the twist, in common with other men: but the difference remains.”

“You have written to Elizabeth?”

“Yes; I wrote last night at the hotel in Chattanooga.”

“I hope you said all you ought to say.”

“I tried conscientiously to do just that, Poictiers. I’ll confess now that I didn’t begin to see how dastardly it would look when it was written out in black on white. But I didn’t spare myself in the least.”

“What kind of an answer do you expect?” Carfax had sat down again and his face was turned away.

“Honestly, I don’t know. Every word that I have ever told you about the lack of sentiment between us is true: and yet ... well, Elizabeth is a woman, after all, Poictiers. Even in a relationship as unsentimental as ours has been there are limitations--there must be limitations.”

Carfax was gazing now into the heart of the dying fire.

“If the case were reversed, Vance, what would your answer be?”

Tregarvon gave a short laugh. “I can’t imagine the reversal,” he parried. “Elizabeth is one of those splendid, serene, _élevé_ women who go through life without ever knowing the meaning of a grand passion.”

“Still, you haven’t answered my question.”

“I am not afraid to answer it. If Elizabeth had told me, even before I met Richardia, that she had-- Oh, piffle! it’s no use; I can’t imagine it!”

For a long time Carfax said nothing. But when the final whiff had been drawn from the bedtime pipes, he ventured a small request.

“I’ve been butting in on your affairs so long that it has come to be a habit, Vance,” he said, with his quaint smile. “When you hear from Elizabeth, will you tell me what she says?”

Tregarvon, who had been thinking of many things during the speechless interval, answered on the impulse of the moment.

“Of course; I’ll let you read the letter, if you care to. Why shouldn’t I? There’s your candle on the mantel, when you want it. I’m going to bed.”

XIX

The Human Equation

On the Tuesday after Tregarvon’s return to Coalville the arrival of the new equipment was the signal for a brisk renewal of the activities. Tregarvon had spent the day scouring the valley for men and teams, and by Wednesday morning he had a small army at his command. Many hands made light work, and by noon the machinery was unloaded, and all was ready for the beginning of the toilsome haul up the mountain.

“I suppose you know how you are going to do it,” Carfax remarked, dallying over his luncheon in the office-building dining-room while Tregarvon was hastily bolting his meal as fast as Uncle William could serve it. “Where did you learn? The university didn’t teach you, I’m sure.”

“Experience,” mumbled the working-man. “I learned the trade getting the other boiler and engine up the hill.”

Carfax was apparently in a reflective mood. “This rough-and-tumble game down here is making a different man of you,” he offered. “Don’t you realize the change?”

“I’ve never been afraid of work, if that is what you mean.”

“Yes, I know; but the kind of work that implies the wearing of corduroys and a flannel shirt, and builds horny lumps on the palms of your hands, and makes you talk to a mule in the only language a mule understands--I never used to dream it of you in the old days, Vance.”

“I work for the same reason that other men do--because it’s up to me. This would be a damned lazy world if necessity didn’t crack the whip.”

“There it is again,” Carfax smiled; “you even let bits of the mule language come to the table with you. It runs in my mind that Elizabeth is going to have her hands full recivilizing you.”

“Perhaps she won’t care to. Quite likely she won’t need to. If the Ocoee should turn out to be a real mine with a dividend attachment, it is altogether probable that I shall become again what I have been heretofore--an ornament to polite society and a wart on the body economic.”

Carfax shook his head as one who refuses to be convinced.

“That will never happen in the wide, wide world, my dear Vance. We may go around, but we never go back. I have heard you spoken of, in times past, as a woman’s man: you’ll never be that again.”

“That is the kindest thing you’ve said in a week,” Tregarvon averred. Whereupon he bolted the final mouthful and left the prophet to his own devices.

Somewhat later, Carfax joined the working party--but only as an onlooker. The engine was mounted on heavy trucks, and a string of twelve mule-spans was inching it up the mountain pike to an accompaniment of cracking whips and much profanity. Tregarvon was in the thick of it, and the young purse-holder stood aside and tried to realize that this sweating, bullying gang boss and man-of-all-work was the light-hearted _flâneur_ of whom his best friends had predicted nothing either very good or very bad, and certainly nothing strenuous. Carfax was given to nice weighings and measurings of the human atom, and he wondered if the roughing-out process owed anything to sentimental reactions. Disappointments are rude tonics to some natures, and defeat in one field may be the germ of victory in another. Being a good friend, he proceeded to administer an additional dose of the tonic, dragging Tregarvon aside while the mules were catching their breath.

“I like your nerve,” he began, with the drawl more than usually pronounced. “You are taking up the entire road with your beastly contrivances. How am I going to get past all this clutter with the motor-car, I’d like to know?”

“That’s your lookout,” growled the man-of-all-work. “The road is mine while I’m using it.”

“But I have an engagement,” was the mild protest. “I’m to take Richardia out for a drive after three o’clock.”

“Well, I can’t help that, can I? You’ve got all the time there is for your courting, and then some. My job is to get this engine up the mountain.”

Carfax chuckled softly. “In another minute or so you’ll be mistaking me for one of the mules. I suppose I can take the other road, from Hesterville; but as likely as not it will make me late--it’s such a long way around.”

“Can’t you send a note up by one of Tryon’s boys explaining the situation?”

“Why, my dear Vance! Can it be possible that you are suggesting that I should break an engagement with a young lady?--you who just a few weeks ago would have broken your neck to----”

“Cut it out,” was the gruff interruption. “I’m busy now, and you are delaying the game. Tag along behind us when you are ready to drive up, and we’ll make room for you if we can.” Then to his farmer helpers: “Now, then--are you fellows going to let those mules rest all day? Push ’em into the collars and let’s go somewhere! _Hi!_ you fellows up ahead--straighten out those leaders!”

The cherubic smile was at its shining best when Carfax turned away and sauntered back toward the coke-ovens. Human atoms are among the most interesting things in the world, once the study of them has passed the elementary stages. Carfax, deep in the contemplation of the subject, had reached the ovens themselves before he saw two men coming toward him, stopping at each stoke-door to allow the taller of the two to go on his hands and knees to inspect the cavern-like interiors. Carfax recognized the shorter of the pair at once. It was Thaxter.

“Mr. Carfax, shake hands with Mr. Thirlwall, our consulting engineer--or rather, you’d better not, because his hands are dirty: Mr. Thirlwall, this is Mr. Poictiers Carfax, Mr. Tregarvon’s friend and financial backer.” Thus the bookkeeper, when Carfax came up.

Carfax acknowledged the introduction and shook hands with the tall man, in spite of the warning.

“Delighted,” he murmured; “always delighted to meet any friend of Mr. Thaxter’s. Tregarvon is up the road a bit, wrestling with a transportation problem. Shall I send for him?”

Thaxter negatived the suggestion at once. “It isn’t at all necessary to take him away from his work,” he protested genially. “Mr. Thirlwall was with us for the day, and we thought we would run down and have a look at your coking-plant. It’s in rather bad repair, isn’t it?”

Now what Carfax did not know about coking-plants would have filled volumes, but he was careful not to betray his ignorance.

“There are years of service in these old ovens yet,” he asserted confidently. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Thirlwall? But as to that, we should expect to put them in good repair if any one wished to buy them.”

“Mr. Tregarvon is still in the mind to sell?” queried the round-faced bookkeeper.

“Candidly, Vance doesn’t know his own mind from one day to another,” said Carfax, parrying nimbly. “But I guess we are all that way, more or less; up one day and down the next.”

The tall engineer smiled because it seemed obvious that he was expected to. “You have been having some more bad luck up on the mountain, so Mr. Thaxter tells me,” he put in. “It seems rather a pity that you and your friend won’t take the word of those who know, and stop throwing good money away.”

“It is a pity, isn’t it?” Carfax concurred heartily. “But if we didn’t 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.

Some half-hour beyond this, the handful having taken a short-cut through the summit forest from the tramhead, Tregarvon found a sharp surprise awaiting him at the point on the pike where the truck load had been halted for the night. Scattered along the road or drawn up under the trees were a dozen or more teams of all sorts and descriptions--raw-boned mules in mismatched pairs, spans in which an ancient horse was harnessed with a mule or with another horse to the full as venerable, animals with back-bones like ridge-poles, others posturing as the halt, the lame, and the blind, and, completing the makeshifts, a wagon drawn by a pair of diminutive bulls. The drivers of this new levy were harmoniously in keeping with their outworn stock, decrepit wagons, and rope-patched harnesses; lank, sallow-faced mountain men of the McNabb type, with a toothless patriarch of the McNabb name to act as their spokesman.

“We-uns done heerd you-uns wuz a-needin’ holp fer to pull thish-yer load thoo the woods,” said the aged spokesman, shrilling in a high, cracked voice at Tregarvon. “Me an’ th’ boys ’lowed we’d drap erlong an’ gin ye a h’ist. How-all does ye hitch on ter that thar kintraption?” with a thumb-jerk over his shoulder toward the loaded truck.

Tregarvon recovered from his surprise in a rebound of heartfelt thankfulness. Here was manna from the skies, indeed. He asked no questions; made no ungrateful effort to pry into the whys and wherefores of the miracle. It was enough that the gods had relented. Treading softly among the adjectives, he proceeded to set his curiously assorted helpers, man and beast, in order, and the advance was begun.

Oddly enough, the task ran smoothly, despite the makeshift pulling beasts and the prodigious inexperience of the drivers with any load so formidable as the engine-mounted truck. To offset the inexperience, there was a quiet and resolute willingness that was heart-warming after the exacerbating sullenness of the valley farmers. Tregarvon found that his normal good-nature had not been slain; it had only been pushed aside; discovered also that hard words may make hard work. Turning the new leaf handsomely, he let the agile old patriarch do the bossing, and thus, rod by rod, the sandy half-mile was traversed and the goal in the old burying-ground was reached.

Just before noon, when the truck load had been pushed and pulled and inched into place in the glade, Carfax turned up, walking across from the school. His congratulations were profuse, but if he knew anything about the manner of the miracle-working, he betrayed neither himself nor the secret.

“I was certain you’d find a way out of the strike trouble,” he asserted blandly. “I told the folks at the dinner-table last evening that I had never seen you knocked out so completely that you were obliged to take the count. How did you do it?”

Tregarvon shook his head. “I didn’t do it; it was done for me. When I came up this morning with Tryon and the trackmen, the teams were ready and waiting. Somebody had rounded them up for me during the night. I have been charging it to you.”

Carfax’s laugh was a sufficient negation of the charge. “Do I look it?” he demanded. “If I do, I can prove an _alibi_. I spent a very pleasant evening with the Caswells and a bunch of the senior girls, and I am reasonably sure that I didn’t walk in my sleep afterward.”

“Did Richardia go home for the week-end, as usual?”

“She did; though she stayed and took dinner with us at Highmount. I drove her over to Westwood House in the car, later.”

“So the car is all right again, is it?”

“Oh, yes; there wasn’t much the matter with it.”

Tryon had taken over the bossing of the gang, with Rucker for his able second, and Tregarvon was free to stand aside and talk with Carfax about the miracle.

“You say Richardia went home after dinner?” he queried. Then: “I can’t help thinking that this is her doing. These men are all mountaineers.”

Carfax’s chuckle was frankly derisive. “That is mere sentiment on your part; the wish the father to the thought. You’d rather like to feel that you are indebted to her, wouldn’t you? But I shall have to spoil that little day-dream. She was with the rest of us at Highmount until after ten o’clock, and it must have been nearly eleven when I drove her over to Westwood House--much too late to begin any campaign of team-raising for you.”

Tregarvon took this apparent evidence of Miss Richardia’s non-complicity at its face value, but he was still shaking his head dubiously.

“I can’t understand it, Poictiers. These McNabbs and their cousins might very properly have it in for me on the old score of the land lawsuit; and, as you know, we have been suspecting them, more or less, all along. But now they turn out to give me a lift, just as I am about to lose my grip. What’s the answer?”

Carfax’s grin was as nearly impish as his cherubic semblance would permit. “Call it an attack of conscience,” he suggested playfully. “The other night we decided that it was one of the McNabbs who put the dynamite into the old boiler. Perhaps they have all had a change of heart, and this is their way of showing it. Will you be ready to go on drilling this afternoon?”

“I am afraid not. We shall have the machinery unloaded in another hour or so, and I can let these outsiders go home. But it will take the remainder of the day to get the engine in working order, so Rucker says.”

“How about the C. C. & I. buying offer? The option expires with to-day, doesn’t it?”

Tregarvon turned quickly upon the questioner.

“Do you advise me to take the offer, Poictiers? You will remember that after our talk with Hartridge a week ago you said I was not to sell.”

“I know; but only idiots and corpses are unable to change their minds. You owe it to your people at home not to fall between two stools. After all is said, a sure hundred thousand is better than nothing.”

“Hartridge has been working on you again,” said Tregarvon accusingly. “And this time he has taken the other tack. Isn’t that so?”

Carfax neither admitted nor denied a later talk with the schoolmaster. “He asserts positively that you will find the two thin veins again here, with the rock between. He ought to know.”

Tregarvon was silenced for the moment. Then he broke out impatiently.

“I’ve got to know for myself, Poictiers. If I don’t stay with it long enough to prove up, I shall be a quitter. I’m all the other things you have occasionally called me, but not that!”

“No; I know you are not. I was just thinking: if you could meet Thaxter and talk with him? Possibly you could get the option time extended for a few days. You have a good reason for asking--apart from the real one, which is to find out what this drill-hole is going to say to you. You might urge that you’d like to have time to communicate with your lawyers. Suppose we drive up to Whitlow this afternoon?”

“We’ll see,” Tregarvon conceded. “It is barely possible that we shall get the drill in operation again to-day, and in that case I shall know definitely what to do. Do you lunch at Highmount?”

“I do,” laughed the golden youth. “The Caswells have adopted me, and I shall get square with them a little further along by financing the new gymnasium. How about paying this miracle gang? Have you money enough with you?”

“I haven’t, and I was going to ask if you would drive down to the office and break into the safe for me.”

“I can do better than that,” said the money-finder, producing a thick roll of bank-notes. “Money is the one thing I’m rotten with. I must go back and report for luncheon now, but I’ll be over again later on, and we can decide about the trip to Whitlow.”

A short time after Carfax’s departure, Tregarvon paid the mountaineers and let them go. Singularly enough, some of the volunteers did not wish to take money and had to be persuaded. The sums named were ridiculously small, and in each instance Tregarvon gave more than was asked, putting the larger wage on the ground of the value of the service to him.

In the settlement the beneficiary of the miracle made an attempt to find out to whom the timely help was owing, but the effort spent itself against a dead wall of mountaineer reticence--or unknowledge. The McNabb patriarch had “heerd” of the trouble with the valley farmers through “ol’ man Kent”; Kent had got the word from somebody else; and so it went, with the first cause either unknown or carefully concealed. Tregarvon did not press too curiously for the explanation. It was too much like inquiring the age of the proverbial gift-horse.

After the noon halt, with the glade cleared of the men and teams, the work of installation was begun. For a time it progressed handsomely. Rucker and Tryon were both competent foremen, and by three o’clock they had the engine and boiler shifted from the truck to its place behind the drill derrick, with only the steam-pipe connections remaining to be made.

Carfax had not yet returned, and Tregarvon began to wonder if he had forgotten the proposed Whitlow expedition. By this time it seemed altogether probable that the drilling could be resumed within an hour or two, and the mining gambler’s passion to stay in the game until the last card had been turned fought against cool-headed prudence for first place in the struggle Tregarvon was making to decide as to what he should do.

If he should leave the mountain before the drilling began, the uncertainties would still be unresolved. On the other hand, if Consolidated Coal meant to hold him rigidly to the terms of the option, it became crucially necessary that he should know in advance what this final drilling-test was going to prove. If it should prove only another failure, the opportunity to sell must not be allowed to lapse. But if the test should prove that he had at last discovered the workable mother-vein.... Tregarvon gasped at the golden possibility, and the offer of a paltry tenth of a million shrank to nothing.

He was wishing, for the hundredth time, that Carfax would come and help him to decide, when a buggy drawn by a high-stepping black horse appeared among the trees on the opposite side of the glade. Tregarvon recognized the equipage at once. It was Thaxter’s, and the round-bodied bookkeeper was alone. The victim of indecision pulled himself together quickly. Chance, or the kindlier gods, had given him his opportunity, and he meant to improve it.

Thaxter came across to the tool shanty with the Cheeryble smile in commission.

“Still spending your good money on the kite-flying, are you?” he said, with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder at the new power-plant. “I don’t know as I can blame you so very much: I was young and enthusiastic once, myself. You’ve worked wonders getting that thing up the mountain in such a short time. Somebody told me you were hung up with a strike, or something of the sort, and as it was our Saturday half-holiday, I thought I’d drive up and condole with you.”

Tregarvon offered the bookkeeper a seat on the shanty step, saying: “We were hung up, temporarily, but we are getting into shape now.”

“So I see,” returned the jovial little man; and for a space the talk ran upon the difficulties of mountain installations and the drawbacks of having to depend upon picked-up labor in a region where labor was scarce. After a time, Thaxter broached the option matter of his own accord.

“You got my note the other day, I presume?”

“Promptly,” Tregarvon acknowledged. “I was planning to go to Whitlow this afternoon.”

“And you changed your mind?”

“I have changed it now, since you have been good enough to drive up. I suppose we can talk here as well as in your office. I have been considering the offer to purchase, and on some accounts it is rather attractive. We all like to bet on a sure thing when we can.”

The genial go-between chuckled sagely. “And, on the other hand, we all like to bet upon the possibilities, now and then,” he thrust in. “If you only had any possibilities----”

Tregarvon made haste to fight away from that phase of the situation.

“We’ll disregard the possibilities, which I may believe in, and you don’t, Mr. Thaxter. This new power outfit was bought before I had your letter, and since we had it, we could hardly do less than to go on and install it. Let that part of it go, and we’ll attack the business affair. As I say, I have been considering Consolidated Coal’s offer to buy me out. Since you are buying nothing but the equipment, the offer is fair enough. But my father’s estate is concerned, and the option is too short. In common prudence, I ought to consult my lawyers, and there hasn’t been time.”

The small man shook his head regretfully.

“These matters are all decided for us by the big fellows in New York,” he explained. “In my letter I gave you the reasons why they have put the hurry speed on in this particular instance. It is really a very small detail to Consolidated Coal whether it buys you out or doesn’t buy you out--merely a pen-scratch in the day’s work. Of course, you know that, as well as I do.”

“Yes,” Tregarvon admitted. “But in spite of that, I am going to ask you to take it up with the powers again, suggesting that they give me a little more time. A few days, more or less, can make no difference.”

This time the bookkeeper shook his head more firmly.

“I should be risking my poor little job, Mr. Tregarvon. I am only the humblest of under-strappers in the big corporation, and if I should try to pull strings for you, some nippy chief clerk in the New York offices would tell me to pack my grip and get out.”

“Then supposing you turn the papers over to me and let me do my own bargaining with headquarters,” Tregarvon ventured.

“It wouldn’t do a particle of good, as you’d know if you had had any dealings with the great corporations. These things are mere matters of routine, and you couldn’t break that routine with a sledge-hammer, Mr. Tregarvon. I’m awfully sorry, but I am afraid the option will have to stand as it was made--to expire at midnight to-night.”