Part 11

“You think the curtain has been rung down for to-night?”

“You’d say so, wouldn’t you? The star has gone home and has probably gone to bed. If he should get up and walk in his sleep, I’ll call you.”

Carfax hung upon the threshold. “Better call me, anyhow, after I’ve had another forty winks or so, so you can take your turn. People have to sleep, you know--even after a funeral.”

“You go to bed!” was the gruff command; and Tregarvon began a monotonous sentry beat up and down before the tool-house. But a minute later he thrust his face in at the little square window to say: “Asleep yet?”

“My Heavens, no!” returned a querulous voice in the inner darkness. “Do you take me for an auto-hypnotist?”

“I have just developed a notion, and it is beginning to gnaw me,” explained the sentinel on duty. “What if the man who was on his knees at the test-hole when I went to waken you wasn’t Hartridge, after all?”

“Oh, good Lord!” complained the voice. “Are you trying to drag somebody else into it?--when the character cast is already full and running over, and all the supernumeraries have been tagged and labelled? Turn the notion out of doors; tread on it; break its back with a stick! We caught Hartridge with the goods on him, didn’t we?”

“Yes; but----”

“But what?”

“Nothing much: only now that I come to think of it, I seem to remember that the man I saw dropping things into the hole wasn’t wearing Hartridge’s kind of a hat.”

“Oh, granny! Go on and do your little sentry go. Your head is muddled and you want to pass the muddle on to me. I’m asleep, I tell you--sound asleep! I don’t hear a word you are saying.”

Tregarvon gave it up; not the lately developed notion, which grew rather more insistent the longer he thought about it, but the attempt to interest Carfax. During the lonely two-hour watch which followed he had time to go reflectively over the events of the night, to set them in orderly array, and to let the unconsidered minor happenings fit into their places and weigh as they would.

The process straightened out a few of the tangles, or it seemed to. Richardia’s concern, expressed by her fear that violence might grow out of the antagonisms, was undoubtedly for her father. Also, it was plain that up to the moment of confidences she had not suspected Hartridge of being her father’s agent; it being a fair presumption that she would have spoken of the professor if she had. Having got that far, Tregarvon began to ask himself if Hartridge was the only one actively involved. In at least two instances the schoolmaster might fairly be held exempt. It was still incredible that the man who had come to the Coalville headquarters as a guest had deliberately plotted to have his host’s motor-car wrecked on its return from Highmount. By the same token, it was difficult to imagine the professor of mathematics in the rôle of the sardonic practical joker who had shocked Rucker with a resin-filled skull, dug, doubtless, out of the old burying-ground.

On the other hand, the murderous attempt at wrecking the car and the grim joke on Rucker fitted the mountain-baron-henchman hypothesis most accurately; as did the fact, if it were a fact, that there were two persons concerned in the recent episode of the hardened steel cubes. There had been time, during the arousing of Carfax, for one man to disappear and for another to take his place; in which case it seemed evident that Hartridge had stood his ground merely to cover the retreat of the other man.

The puzzle promised to give a coherent hint pointing to its solution while Tregarvon was thinking it out and fitting the pieces together; and so long as the mental effort continued to feed the fire of wakefulness he was all that an alert sentinel should be. But after the various suppositions had been properly labelled and docketed and pigeonholed the physical reaction came, and drowsiness sat upon his shoulders, riding him like an Old Man of the Sea.

For a time he fought manfully, keeping up the struggle until he had exhausted every device he could think of and yielding only when he found himself actually falling asleep as he walked. The alternative to leaving the plant without a watchman was to call Carfax, and this he finally concluded to do. Groping his way blindly into the dark interior of the tool-shack, he stumbled over the spare coil of rope, sat down upon it for a momentary rest, and in the flitting of a bat’s wing was past help.

When he opened his eyes again the high-riding moon had swung far into the west, the glade was bathed in a ghostly flood of gray shadow, and Carfax was shaking him gently.

“Another act on,” whispered the impromptu call-boy; “no speaking parts out, as yet--only pantomime. But it is worth sitting up to see.”

Tregarvon, still sodden with sleep, suffered Carfax to lead him to the outlook window. In the gray shadows he presently made out the figure of another intruder. Within the area of the sunken graves a man, old and black, if the uncertain light could be trusted, was squatting on the ground and rocking himself back and forth, his swaying body keeping time with the measure of a weird, crooning melody. From time to time, he would stop the swaying movement to take a small white object from a basket at his side. These objects he appeared to be arranging in some sort of a figure on the ground to the accompaniment of the droning incantation.

“How long has he been there?” Tregarvon asked.

“Just a little while,” was the low-toned reply. “I awoke about half an hour ago, and when I looked out, the moon was going over to the other edge of the world, and everything was quiet. A little later the basket man came; just appeared, you know, as if he had materialized out of the shadows. When I first noticed him he was doing his little song and dance, as you see him now.”

“But what _is_ the ‘song and dance,’ as you call it?”

“Write your guess on one side of a sheet of paper and send it to the puzzle editor,” chuckled Carfax, adding: “If we had begun doing that at first, the editor would have a choice collection by this time, don’t you think?”

“I have been making a few more guesses,” Tregarvon offered. “I was coming in to unload them on you when my eyes went shut. What time is it?”

“About two o’clock--the real witching hour. I want to go home.”

“Go out and tell the old conjurer yonder; perhaps he may have a magic square of carpet in his basket,” suggested Tregarvon. Then: “Doesn’t the wild and weird atmosphere of this heritage of mine get on your nerves to the queen’s taste? Something doing all the time. I’m going to put a notice on the derrick frame: ‘Don’t shoot the stunt-setter; he is doing the best he can.’”

“’Sh! what is the old ‘ghost doctor’ up to now?”

The droning chant had ceased and the old negro was crouching or kneeling at one end of the oblong figure traced by the enclosing row of white objects. The silence was profound; so complete that the snapping of a twig coming suddenly shattered it like the report of a pistol. Both of the watchers started at the sound, but the kneeling negro seemed not to have heard it.

“What was that?” whispered Carfax.

“I’m guessing once more: the obi-devil, possibly, coming in answer to the old medicine-man’s prayers.”

“Guess again!” Carfax thrust in excitedly. “Look this way--get a line on the corner of the derrick frame and follow it over into the woods. Do you see him?”

Tregarvon said “Yes,” and began to grope for a weapon. A man, hatless and with a handkerchief bound about his head, was edging his way cautiously out of the undergrowth. In the hollow of his left arm he carried a gun, and his advance was like that of the deer-stalking hunter. With the derrick frame intervening it was to be inferred that he did not see the negro.

“Somebody pot-hunting for us, this time?” queried Carfax, under his breath; but Tregarvon pressed his arm for silence. The cautious approach was not in the direction of the tool shanty; it was toward the engine of the drilling installation.

“That is the fellow we want to surround,” Tregarvon whispered. “If he had a hat on, I’d swear he was the man I saw kneeling under the derrick--before he made his drop-out and left Hartridge to throw dust for him! By Jove! he acts as if he were scared!”

The exclamation was not unwarranted. The man with the gun was creeping toward the portable engine, watchful and alert, starting at every whisper of the night air in the pines and exhibiting all the outward signs of an inward tension which was ready to snap and recoil in panic.

When he passed out of sight behind the derrick, Carfax would have led the charge; but Tregarvon restrained him. “Hold on,” he advised. “We may as well wait and find out what he means to do.”

The man was creeping on hands and knees when he came in sight again, and the gun had been left behind. When he stood up he was at the smoke-stack end of the engine-boiler; and a moment further along the two watchers made out that he was unscrewing the fastenings of the iron door which gave access to the smoke-box and the flues. They waited until he had the door unfastened; saw him swing it open by slow inchings; saw him thrust an arm into the sooty depths of the smoke-box.

“_Now!_” Tregarvon commanded, setting the pace for the charge; but panic was before them. Just as the man was withdrawing his arm a deep groan shuddered upon the stillness. With a cry that was like the snarl of a cornered animal, the man leaped up and flung out his arms as if to ward a blow. At that the huddled figure kneeling among the sunken graves groaned again, following the groan with a terrified, “_Oh_, my Lordy!” when he saw the man at the boiler head.

That was sufficient. At the spot where the man with a handkerchief about his head had stood clutching the air there was a sudden void, and the noise of his crashing retreat through the undergrowth had died away before Tregarvon and Carfax could give chase.

They captured the “ghost doctor,” however, and were not greatly surprised when the old negro turned out to be Uncle William. His night wandering to the mountain top was sufficiently explained when he pointed to the sunken grave ringed about with bits of broken china.

“Dah’s whah my ol’ ’ooman is, marstehs; yas, suh; right dah’s whah dey bury huh. Dat triflin’ niggah, Sam, from de ol’ place, come erlong down de mounting day befo’ yistidday, an’ he say you-all gemman is a-trompin’ ’round an’ mashin’ up t’ings in de ol’ buryin’-ground. I know dat ain’ so, but I says to mahse’f, ‘Willyum, yo’ gwine right up dah and put dem li’l grabestones you been a-savin’ ’round Mammy Ann; den Marsteh Tregarbin ain’ gwine ’sturb nuffin’ belongin’ ter you.’”

“No,” said Tregarvon soberly. “You may be sure we shan’t disturb your wife’s grave--or any of the others, if we can help it. I didn’t know, until after we had begun work here, that this open place was a burying-ground. Now tell me; do you know who that man was who stood there by the engine and made motions at you?”

“I ’spec’ dat wuz de ol’ debbil, hese’f, marsteh. Couldn’t a-been nobody else; no, suh.”

“What makes you think it was the devil, Uncle William?” Carfax wanted to know.

“’Cause he go off, _bing!_ in a puff o’ yaller smoke when I say ‘_Oh_, my Lordy!’”

Tregarvon had been groping purposefully in the old man’s explanation to determine if it held any of the missing puzzle pieces.

“You say Sam, from the ‘old place’ told you we were working here, Uncle William; who is Sam, and where is the ‘old place’?”

“Sam, he’s dat triflin’ no-’count niggah what Marsteh Judge keep for stable niggah--when dey ain’ nuffin in de stable ’ceppin’ de ol’ dapple-gray dat’s a heap older’n what I is, _hyuh, hyuh!_ But de ol’ Marsteh Judge ain’ gwine tu’n nobody off’n de ol’ place whilst dar’s a rind o’ bacon lef’ in de gre’t house; no, suh; he ain’ gwine do dat!”

It was at this point that Tregarvon sprang his small trap.

“Why did he turn you off, Uncle William?”

“Who, me? No, suh--I--Miss Dick, she----”

“It’s all right; never mind, Uncle William,” Tregarvon hastened to say. “Now we’ll undertake to keep the devil away while you go on setting your tombstones. I’m sorry we had to break in.”

“Dey’s all sot, yas, suh; dat’s de bes’ I kin do for ol’ Mammy Ann. I’s gwine tromp off down de mounting ag’in, now. Mus’ be gettin’ might’ nigh de ol’ man’s bedtime; yas, suh; it sholy am dat. I’s sayin’ good night to you-all; an’ t’ank yo’ kin’ly, marstehs.”

After the old negro had shuffled away on a short-cut through the wood in the direction of the pike, the two young men took up the affair of the moment, which was to ascertain what the man with the bandaged head had been doing to the engine of the drilling plant. The smoke-box door was standing open, as he had left it, and Tregarvon struck a match and held it in the small sooty cavern. What he saw made him withdraw the match suddenly and blow it out.

“Did it bite you?” asked Carfax, genially quizzical.

Tregarvon’s rejoinder was not in words. Thrusting an arm into the smoke-box he drew out a paper-wrapped cylinder with a capped fuse buried in one end of it, passing the find to Carfax with the remark: “I fancy we can stay awake until daybreak on the strength of that, don’t you think, Poictiers?”

“Dynamite!” gasped Carfax, holding the cartridge gingerly between thumb and finger and at arm’s length.

“Yes, dynamite. It was poked into one of the flues with the business end toward the fire-box, and it made no account of Rucker, who would be the one to fire up the boiler before breakfast the day after to-morrow.”

“Say, by Jove, Vance! this thing is getting serious!” exclaimed the golden youth, forgetting even the slight hint of a lisp. “We’ll have to ‘take measures,’ as my father used to say. Come on over to the shanty and we’ll get busy. I am in the same condition you said you were, a while back: I’m not sleepy now--don’t know as I ever shall be again.”

The talk on the door-step of the tool-house was prolonged far past Tregarvon’s recounting of the suppositions pieced together in the period of his lonely sentry go. But it came back to the suppositions in the end, with Carfax checking off the probabilities on his finger-tips.

“So it figures out about this way,” he said, not too cheerfully. “We have Judge Birrell as Lord High Executioner to a couple of receivers of stolen goods--always without his daughter’s approval or consent, as a matter of course--and Professor Hartridge as his able deputy in the field. Then there is this skulking rascal of a dynamite-planter, who acts under orders, or possibly exceeds them now and then; and he seems to be the only one of the lot that we can satisfactorily pinch--when we shall be lucky enough to catch him. Uncle William isn’t in it, is he?”

Tregarvon shook his head gloomily.

“I have been wrestling with that,” he confessed. “He seems more than trustworthy. But he is evidently an old house servant of the judge’s, and he was sent straight to me from Westwood. That is beyond question.”

“As a spy?--perish the thought!” ranted Carfax, carefully concealing his earnestness with an overlaying of extravagance, as his habit was. “With the memory of Uncle William’s unapproachable dinners in my mind--or mouth--I’ll defend him to the last gasp.”

“He is negligible,” said Tregarvon briefly. “But this dynamiting emissary of Hartridge’s, or the judge’s, isn’t. We must contrive to trap him in some way. If we don’t, he will fool around until he hurts somebody.”

“Yea, verily,” Carfax laughed. “Any guesses coming to you?--as to who he is?”

“One small one; and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it didn’t fit in with some of the others. You saw that he was bareheaded?”

“Yes.”

“And that he was wearing a handkerchief or a bandage of some sort instead of a hat?”

“Another ‘yes’.”

“Well, the day before yesterday the man we’ve been calling ‘Morgan’ was hurt by the falling walking-beam and had to have his head wrapped up in about the same way.”

“All right; but Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t stop with that.”

“Neither do I. Tryon told me a little tale two days ago that possibly forges the connecting link. We know that both Morgan and Sill are McNabbs, and that for some reason of their own they dropped the surname when they hired out to me.”

“Good!” Carfax approved. “The plot thickens. Can’t you stir in a little more stiffening?”

“With the help of Tryon’s story, I can. It seems that these men are, or have been, moonshiners--breakers of the revenue laws. Some years ago the revenue officers raided their secret still, which was hidden somewhere in the Pocket, and arrested these two, with a number of others. Morgan McNabb and his brother were booked for the penitentiary; would have gone there if Judge Birrell hadn’t come out of his retirement and fought for them.”

Carfax was slowly filling the short pipe he had borrowed from his companion. “I begin to see daylight,” he said. “What was the judge’s motive?”

“A sort of clan loyalty, Tryon says. The McNabbs live on his land; they are ‘his people’.”

“Um,” was the thoughtful comment. “And because the judge defends them, they take up the cudgels for him. We have to-morrow--or rather to-day--before us, with nothing especial to do; since Rucker will hardly be back with the drills before afternoon. Shall we telegraph to Hesterville for the sheriff, borrow Tait’s team, and make a party call upon the man with the bandaged head?”

“That would be rather too summary, wouldn’t it?” Tregarvon objected. “We may be well convinced, ourselves, but we have no direct evidence. Neither of us could go on the stand and swear that the man we saw at the boiler-head was Morgan McNabb.”

“No; that is so. Past that, since I have asked the judge’s daughter to consider me as a possible husband--” Carfax had called up the cherubic smile, but it had the opposite of a mollifying effect upon the objector.

“Don’t harp on that part of it any more than you have to,” was the morose interruption.

“I was going to say that the arrest of Morgan McNabb, just at this critical turn in the tide of affairs, might make it embarrassing for the judge; only you wouldn’t let me finish,” said Carfax, with great meekness.

“You are going to call on him?” demanded Tregarvon.

“Since he is Richardia’s father, I don’t see how I can well avoid it. To-morrow--or, I should say, to-day--is Friday, and I thought I’d ask Richardia to let me drive her over to Westwood House--if you’ll lend me the motor-wagon after Rucker gets back.”

Tregarvon rose and stood half-menacingly over the friend of his youth.

“If I thought you were only playing with her,” he grated; but instead of saying what he would do in that case, he turned abruptly and went into the tool-house to fling himself down upon the cot, leaving Carfax to continue the night-watch or to abandon it, as he might choose.

XVI

A Friend at Need

With the object-lessons of the night of visitations to emphasize the need for vigilance, the two young men, discussing the situation in the gray dawn, agreed that the drilling plant must not be left unguarded during the Friday of enforced idleness, or at any other time. Accordingly, soon after sunrise, Carfax set out to walk down the mountain for the purpose of sending Tryon and a man or two of the track gang up to relieve Tregarvon.

This arrangement left the owner of the Ocoee to do sentry duty alone until Tryon should come--a duty which he scamped ingloriously by sitting upon the door-step of the tool-shack and promptly falling asleep.

It was a brusque “Hello!” that awakened him, and he sprang up with a start to find a round-faced, pursy little man in pepper-and-salt garmentings and mouse-colored driving-gloves standing before him. A horse and buggy motionless in the edge of the glade accounted for the manner of the visitor’s coming, but not for its object. Tregarvon took a good look at the stranger before he committed himself, even to a greeting. The round face, with its twinkling eyes, double chin, and the little patches of closely cropped side-whisker, was altogether reassuring; it not only beamed good-nature, it fairly shone with an irresistible kindliness. Tregarvon, gathering his scattered wits as he could, said: “Good morning; it’s a fine morning for a drive through the woods.”

The little man added another layer of geniality to his smile.

“It’s a fine morning, also, for a nap in the sunshine,” he reciprocated. “Do you belong to the out-of-door sleepers--the ‘simple-lifers’--Mr. Tregarvon?”

“Not permanently,” laughed Tregarvon; “though I must confess that I am so simple as not to be able to recall your name.”

“Good, dev’lish good!” chuckled the visitor. “Couldn’t have turned it more neatly myself, ’pon my word! I’m Thaxter; Wilmerding’s bookkeeper at Whitlow. One of my fads is to take a drive before breakfast. Excellent habit, Mr. Tregarvon; I can recommend it most highly. Gives you an appetite like a coal-heaver. Speaking of coal--how are you getting along taking soundings on the old Ocoee? Have you hit it yet?”

“Not yet,” Tregarvon admitted, warming to the little man’s friendly interest. “But I am still living in hopes.”

Mr. Thaxter pursed his lips in a way to make them match the general effect of rotundity.

“Mighty mean thing to say to a man before breakfast--you haven’t breakfasted yet, I dare say--but you are butting your head against a stone wall, Mr. Tregarvon. Haven’t they told you that?”

“If your ‘they’ refers to the Coalville gossips, I have been duly warned. They told me, with all the variations, before I’d had time to climb the mountain on my first exploring expedition.”

“Just so; but not specifically, I suppose. You should have come to me. While I am an employee of the C. C. & I. Company, my pay-roll connection wouldn’t have kept me from doing you a good turn. And I could have given you chapter, page, and verse.”

For the moment Tregarvon lost sight of the fact that Wilmerding had reported his bookkeeper totally barren of Ocoee information. So he said: “Possibly you will do it now, Mr. Thaxter. We are mere babes in the wood, Carfax and I, needing a guardian angel pretty severely, if we are to believe what other people say of us.”

“You have certainly been needing a little friendly counsel from some one who was in a position to know what he was talking about. You’ll never find your coal up here, Mr. Tregarvon.”

“That is what they all say; but they don’t tell us precisely why we shan’t.”

“Ah,” said the kindly one, shaking his head in deprecation. “Human nature is the same everywhere. Tait could have told you, or Tryon, or Walters; all of them who have lived here long enough. But you had money and were willing to spend it. It would have been killing the golden-egged goose to have driven you away.”

Tregarvon grinned. “Thank you for trying to break it gently to me, Mr. Thaxter; but I am braced for it now. Hurl it in.”

“They could have told you that this test-boring experiment of yours has been tried before, all over the mountain top. I presume I could show you a dozen holes, if they are not all filled up with wash and hidden under the leaves.”

Tregarvon was thinking hard.

“Does Captain Duncan know this?” he asked.

“I should suppose so; he ought to know it. The testing was done by the New Ocoee Coal Company, and it may have timed itself during the summer that Duncan spent in the West. Come to think, I believe it did. You advised with him, of course; surely he didn’t encourage you to spend money on the property, did he?”

“No; I am obliged to confess that he did not. On the contrary, he advised me not to.”

The little man’s smile became benignantly tolerant. “You young men are like Mr. Kipling’s puppy at times; you _will_ chew soap, knowing perfectly well that it is soap.”

Tregarvon’s answering laugh admitted the justness of the charge.

“Possibly some of us like the flavor of soap,” he retorted. “There is no accounting for the depravity of some tastes, you know.”