Part 12
“Oh, well,” said the visitor, with the air of one who is far too wise to combat the vagaries of youth, “go on and have your fling. It is harmless enough. If you can afford to buy a little amusement in this way, why shouldn’t you do it? It won’t hurt you, and it is a Godsend to Tait and the poor devils on your pay-roll while it lasts.”
“But if I can’t afford it?” suggested Tregarvon.
“Ah; that is another matter. From what Wilmerding has let fall, I have been assuming that you and Mr. Carfax desired the experience and the fun of it rather than any possible money gain.”
“The money side of it may not appeal to Carfax; but it does to me, very forcibly.”
“Still, you are throwing good money after bad in putting down these test-holes.”
Tregarvon shrugged his shoulders. “What would you?” he asked. “I inherited the Ocoee, and it is up to me to make something out of it, if I can.”
The round-bodied bookkeeper laughed until he shook like a bowl of jelly.
“It is very evident, Mr. Tregarvon, that you were born in the purple. If you wish to make money out of the Ocoee, why don’t you sell it?”
“Because I should first have to find a purchaser, and before I could find a purchaser--I should think--it would be a condition precedent that I should find the coal. It resolves itself into the vicious circle, as you see.”
Mr. Thaxter smote his gloved hands together softly and appeared to be debating a nice point with himself. When he spoke again his manner had lost the touch of brisk impersonality.
“Pardon me if I seem to crowd the mourners,” he apologized, “but it strikes me that this is a matter in which the good-natured bystander may quite properly take a hand. Is it possible that you haven’t been told of the offer made by our people to your father?”
“It is more than possible; it is a fact.”
“I am truly astonished! Your lawyers must know of it.”
“There has never been any mention of it made to me. What was the offer?”
“If I remember correctly, it was one hundred thousand dollars for all the titles.”
“Thank you!” exclaimed Tregarvon triumphantly. “That is the best news I’ve heard in many a day. If your company ever made any such an offer as that, it proves conclusively that there is coal in the property, somewhere.”
The bookkeeper shook his round head in evident dismay.
“Dear, dear!” he lamented; “I was afraid you might jump at some such conclusion as that, and it puts me in a rather awkward position. As I have said, I am only a pay-roll man in Consolidated Coal; I’m not even one of its many superintendents. Yet, as man to man, perhaps I may venture to tell you just why the C. C. & I. might still be willing to pay you the price named, though in telling you I may be betraying an official secret. You probably know that your property line on the north abuts on the Whitlow lands about an eighth of a mile from your tramway?”
Tregarvon nodded.
“Very good. Now we have a vein of coal quite near this joint boundary; not a very thick vein, but one which could be made to pay for working if we could send the coal down over your tramway, and coke it in your old ovens at Coalville, but which would not pay if we should be obliged to build a new tramway to get at it. That is the whole thing in a nutshell.”
“You say that this offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee was once made to my father? It’s odd that I had never heard of it. Was it in any sense a standing offer?”
“It was at the time, and I think it still is, though there has been no talk of it latterly, so far as I know. But since the reasons for making it still exist, I should imagine that you would stand a good chance of reviving it if you should care to do so.”
“If I only had a little breakfast in me!” Tregarvon protested half-jokingly. “I’m too hungry to talk hundred-thousand-dollar deals with you with any assurance that an empty stomach isn’t making me flighty, Mr. Thaxter.”
The bookkeeper laughed pleasantly.
“There are your men coming over from the tramhead,” he said. “Give them your orders, and then let me drive you down to Coalville to your breakfast. Perhaps you’ll be willing to give me a bite, too, and in that case I shall have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carfax again. I didn’t more than half get acquainted with him the day he drove up to Whitlow.”
“You are certainly the jolliest lot of commercial pirates a man ever had to fight--you people up at the C. C. & I.,” said Tregarvon, after he had climbed into the buggy with Thaxter and the spirited black horse was flinging the soft sand of the wood road from his hoofs. “First, Wilmerding comes to the rescue; and now you are trying to give us a lift. It’s heart-warming.”
Thaxter’s rejoinder had just the requisite touch of friendly solicitude in it.
“Then you meant what you said a few moments ago, about the financial aspect of the--of your experiment? A hundred thousand dollars would be worth considering?”
“That amount would look as big as a hundred thousand cart-wheels to me, just now,” Tregarvon confided. “My father is dead, as I suppose you know, and there have been family misfortunes big enough to sink a ship. A hundred thousand would give us a fresh start in the world.”
“Then we must certainly try to get it for you,” was the affable rejoinder; and from this on, the spirited horse demanded Thaxter’s undivided attention, so pointedly that the bookkeeper did not even seem to see Professor Hartridge when the buggy whirled past that gentleman as he was returning from his morning walk down the pike.
Carfax was waiting breakfast on Tregarvon when the black horse came to a stand at the door of the Ocoee office-building. The young millionaire remembered Thaxter perfectly, and seemed to be glad to renew his acquaintance with the “Brother Cheeryble.” Yet it was Carfax’s judicious applying of the brakes at the breakfast-table conference of three that kept Tregarvon from committing himself too definitely in the matter of bargain and sale.
Nevertheless, the talk over the ham and eggs pushed the business affair considerably farther along on the road to a tentative conclusion. Before he took his leave to continue his return drive to Whitlow, Thaxter was authorized to communicate by wire with the New York headquarters of Consolidated Coal, and, without betraying any confidences, to ascertain if the offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the Ocoee properties still held good.
After Thaxter had taken his departure, and the two young experimenters had threshed the new prospect out to its final straw, the wakeful night came in for its revenges, and they slept through the forenoon. Rucker did not return from Whitlow with the car and the repointed drills until long after the noon meal; and when he came he found his two employers waiting impatiently for him--or rather for the car. The reason for the impatience was a note from Miss Richardia sent down by the college mail-carrier early in the afternoon; a brief message addressed to both, begging them to come to Highmount at the earliest possible moment: urgency only; no hint of what had happened or was due to happen.
They made the ascent of the mountain as rapidly as the big touring-car could measure the distance, and were met at the door of the administration building of the college, not by Miss Birrell, but by Professor Hartridge, who led them into the visitors’ parlor and calmly informed them that Miss Richardia had driven to Westwood House with her father shortly after luncheon.
“By Jove, now!” lisped Carfax; “that’s rather curious, don’t you know!” And Tregarvon was quite speechless.
“Curious that Miss Birrell should ask you to come up here, and then run away?” said Hartridge. “It was a little ruse of mine, and Miss Richardia is altogether blameless. I wished very much to see you both, and I was afraid you might be foolish enough to disregard an invitation bearing my name. So I took Miss Richardia into my confidence, and she very obligingly wrote the note which, I assume, has brought you here.”
Carfax snapped his fingers and laughed softly.
“Upon what footing do we stand with you, Mr. Hartridge?--upon that of yesterday at dinner-time or upon that of a later hour, when I had the pleasure of helping you on with your overcoat?”
“I shouldn’t presume to say, Mr. Carfax; you must make your own attitude. But if that attitude should be inimical, I must still beg you to believe that I have decoyed you up here to do you a kindness.”
Carfax was still smiling affably. “Is it Virgil who puts it into the mouth of one of his characters to say that we should beware of the Greeks bringing gifts, professor? You will pardon us if we seem a bit suspicious, won’t you? But this”--he held up the small cube of hardened steel which he happened to have in his pocket--“this is so completely convincing, you know.”
The mild-eyed mathematician waved the evidence aside as a thing of small moment.
“Now that you have had time to consider, I am sure you absolve me from the charge of having tampered with your drill-hole,” he deprecated.
“We do,” said Carfax. “All you did was to cover the retreat of the man who really did the tampering. But that is sufficient to make us--er--a bit cautious, as you might say.”
Hartridge smiled in his turn. “You are basing your caution upon a small specimen of the metal commercially known as steel which you chanced to find in my pocket,” he remarked. “Let us disregard the bit of steel for the time being, if you please. If you should happen to lose it, it could be very easily replaced; but”--he turned short upon Tregarvon--“you can’t replace the Ocoee if you allow Mr. Thaxter to persuade you to sell it to Consolidated Coal, Mr. Tregarvon.”
“What’s that?” exclaimed the Ocoee owner, starting from his chair; and Carfax fell back upon his strongest expletive, “By Jove!”
Hartridge appeared to be entirely at ease now. He seated himself and crossed his long legs comfortably.
“You are puzzled to account for my friendly interest?--after last night?” he inquired. “I don’t blame you, and I am only sorry that I cannot explain more fully. But I may say this: if you part with the Ocoee properties for any such sum as Mr. Thaxter has doubtless offered you, you will regret it as long as you live.”
Carfax got his breath sufficiently after a time to say: “May--may we venture to ask how you know what Mr. Thaxter has offered?”
“Certainly. The offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the lands, titles, and mineral rights of the property is no secret--or at least it was not during Mr. Tregarvon’s father’s lifetime. I am merely assuming that Thaxter has not increased it; and I am also assuming that a renewal of the offer was the reason for his early morning drive with Mr. Tregarvon.”
“And you say Vance will be sorry if he accepts the offer?”
“I do; most decidedly.”
Carfax leaned forward and held up an accusing finger.
“Then you know, of your own knowledge, that there is a workable vein of coal on the property, Mr. Hartridge,” he snapped.
“That, my dear sir, is an assumption which I must decline to confirm.”
“Nevertheless, it is true. And here is another to go with it: _you know where that vein can be found!_”
Hartridge smiled again.
“You are, constructively at least, my guest, Mr. Carfax; I should be unpardonably rude if I were to contradict you.”
Carfax glanced aside at Tregarvon, and Tregarvon returned the glance as one who sees the shore from the crest of a tossing wave, but has no hope of reaching it. After a little pause Carfax renewed the attack.
“This is a most extraordinary situation, don’t you think, Mr. Hartridge?” he began mildly. “Would a definite quantity of the thing known commercially as money tend to relieve it in any way?”
The professor’s answer was prompt and decisive. “You are assuming that I have information to sell? I have not.”
Carfax countered, quickly.
“Then why have you just given us this pointer on Consolidated Coal? You profess to be willing to help us and you refuse to help us in one and the same breath.”
“Oh, if you are going into motives, my dear sir, that is, indeed, a very deep subject. It would hardly be profitable to discuss it, even academically. Life, the really human variety of life, is full of paradoxes. You are wondering why the man from whom, a few hours ago, you took that small cube of steel, is now apparently trying to save you from loss. Call it one of the human paradoxes, if you will; only don’t sell to Consolidated Coal for a paltry hundred thousand dollars a property upon which more than three or four times that amount has been spent. This is what I enticed you up here to say to you; and having said it----”
“Hold on,” Carfax interposed. “We have met some curious varieties of the genus enemy in this forgotten corner of the world, and you will pardon me if I say that you are not the least remarkable specimen, Mr. Hartridge. We are thankful for the pointer, and much more thankful for the assurance you have given us that we are not fishing in a barren pond. We----”
The professor had risen and was moving toward the door.
“I have given you no such specific assurance,” he denied.
“No,” said Tregarvon, getting upon his feet and putting in a word for himself. “You may congratulate yourself upon your discretion. None the less, we shall continue to work on our problem, Mr. Hartridge, until we have found the value of ‘_pi_’.”
It was a centre shot, visibly and palpably piercing the bull’s-eye. A blow would scarcely have disconcerted the schoolmaster more effectively. Yet he recovered instantly, had blandly excused himself upon the plea of pressing laboratory work, and was bowing himself out at the door, when he fired the return shot.
“You have set yourselves an impossible task, gentlemen,” he offered mildly. “You forget that the value of ‘_pi_’ has never yet been exactly ascertained.”
“Well, what do you make of it all?” Tregarvon asked, when the yellow car was rolling smoothly down the mountain pike on the return to Coalville.
“Nothing; except a disappointment for Mr. Thaxter,” was Carfax’s reply.
“Thaxter; yes. Do you know, Poictiers, I’m beginning to smell brimstone in _his_ clothes, now. Wilmerding told us definitely, if you remember, that Thaxter gave him to understand that he didn’t have any data on the Ocoee; didn’t know anything remotely concerning it. There is a lie out, somewhere.”
“Which doesn’t matter now, thanks to Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge, the man of mixed motives,” said Carfax definitively.
“You think, on the strength of Hartridge’s warning, that I shouldn’t sell to Consolidated Coal?”
Carfax was driving the car and he let the brakes out until the machine was dropping down the grade like a stone falling from a height.
“Not in a thousand years!” he said.
XVII
An Anticlimax
Bright and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching, already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting, and there were no disturbances to report.
“Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up. I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and everything was all shipshape this mornin’.”
Soon after this the drilling was resumed, not, however, until after the hole had been carefully washed and swabbed out. Tregarvon did not take any of his men into his confidence to the extent of explaining the reason for the extra care, but during the swabbing process he stood aside and looked on, watchful to detect any sign of guilty knowledge on the part of his helpers. Particularly he studied the face of the younger McNabb, the one who had been hurt still being absent. The effort went for nothing. If isolation has been sparing of gifts to the native of the southern Appalachians, it has at least given him a face that no man can read. The bushy-bearded Sawyer, the head driller, was the only one who commented upon the hole-cleaning.
“Hit don’t look t’ me like thar was anything more ’n the drill dust to be warshed out,” he grumbled, when the swab came up clean; and to prove it he rubbed some of the powdered rock cuttings between his thumb and finger.
“It’s better to be sure than sorry,” said Tregarvon. “If we know that the hole is clean to begin with, we’re that much ahead.”
In due course of time the engine was started, the drill lowered, and the churning was resumed. Very shortly it became evident that the steel was cutting again at the usual rate, and Tregarvon’s spirits rose accordingly.
“Do you know, Poictiers, I believe we are going to ‘prove up’ right here on this spot?” he predicted, after the work was well under way and they had gone to sit on the tool-house step. “The indications all point for us. Here is where the most determined fight has been made to stop us; here is where we find Hartridge’s hieroglyphics on the trees; and right here, if you’ll remark it, is where Mr. Onias Thaxter hunts me up to make me a blanket offer for my landholdings.”
“A little more time will tell the story,” Carfax suggested. “By noon, if it doesn’t strike any more bones, the drill ought to be down to the coal, if there is any coal here.”
With hope trotting cheerfully on ahead, the forenoon became a period of exciting suspense. Each time the drill was withdrawn the cuttings were examined eagerly. The rock was showing all the characteristics of the former borings: fine sandstone, coarse sandstone, some little conglomerate, and, just before the noon hour, the shales which commonly overlie the coal in the Cumberland region.
“We’re coming to it!” Tregarvon exulted, when the washings which came up in the churning began to show black. “Eighteen inches more, and we’ll know whether we live or die!” And he carefully made a chalk-mark on the drill so that they might determine when the critical depth was reached.
As in the previous tests, the steel sank rapidly in the vein of coal. At a foot of additional depth the washings were still coming up black. At sixteen inches there was no change. Sighting across a derrick brace, Tregarvon watched the chalk-mark with the blood racing in his veins. With each plunge of the heavy steel drill his hopes rose higher. Already he was anticipating a future which, if it should lack some of the ecstasies, would still have a sufficiency of the great emollient--money. With a fortune of his own, the impossible situation which had grown out of the Uncle Byrd legacy would be alleviated, and he saw himself deeding his half of the legacy irrevocably over to Elizabeth. The pride wound thus healed, the broken bones of sentiment might be allowed to knit as they would. Doubtless, in time, the knitting process would accomplish itself, and possibly without leaving him a hopeless cripple. Judging from the past, Elizabeth would not expect much; and even if he should be obliged to limp a little she would probably never notice it.
“Eighteen inches!” he called out to Carfax, “and she’s still bringing up the black-diamond dust! Get ready to blow the hewgag and beat the tom-tom. We’re in it, this time!”
“Easy!” Carfax cautioned. “Don’t let your hopes soar too high. Maybe the top vein runs a little thicker at this point than it did in the others. Call it that, anyway, until you’re cocksure.”
As he spoke the power went off. Tregarvon jerked his watch from his pocket and stifled a hard word. It was noon, and the men were knocking off work on the dot, quite as nonchalantly as if the fate of empires were not hanging upon the result of a few more turns of the machinery. Tregarvon tramped across to the tool-house with Carfax, a sudden weariness making his feet heavy as lead.
“That’s the workman of it!” he gritted. “If the world were coming to an end in the next five minutes, they’d stop to eat!”
Carfax permitted himself a subdued chuckle.
“You are beautifully on edge,” he asserted. “A few inches more may mean a lot to you, but it’s all in the day’s work for the men. They’re not going to get rich out of your coal mine.”
They had brought some of Uncle William’s biscuits and cold chicken for the midday snack, and Carfax went to the motor-car, which had been left standing in the wood road, for the basket. When he returned, Tregarvon was pacing back and forth impatiently before the tool-house door, and Rucker was sitting on the step, eating his luncheon. Carfax carried the basket inside, and they made a table of the coil of rope. While they were picking the chicken bones, the mechanician spoke again of a matter that he had mentioned once or twice before.
“I’m beefin’ ag’in about that boiler, Mr. Tregarvon,” he began, between workman mouthfuls of Mrs. Tryon’s corn bread. “She ain’t much, just as I told you at first; and draggin’ her ’round over this mountain hain’t helped her none. She’s leakin’ like a sieve at the fire-box end of her flues, right now.”
“Here’s hoping that this is the last hole we’ll have to drill with it, Billy,” said Tregarvon cheerfully. “I bought it second-hand, and the Chattanooga junk man put one over on me.”
“He sure did,” Rucker returned with a grin. “She’s rotten. Every time the pop-valve goes off it makes me jump. One o’ these days----”
The interruption was a blatant roar from the boiler in question. Rucker had prudently shut the drafts and had left the fire-door open, or he thought he had, but still the pressure had crept up, until now the safety-valve was relieving it. Through the open door of the tool-shack the two at the rope-coil table could see the plant, with the plume of escaping steam rising to the height of the tree-tops. As usual during the noon hour, there was not a man of the gang in sight. Tregarvon had early learned that a part of the country laborer’s reticence expressed itself in a dislike to eat under the boss’s eye. At the stopping of the machinery the drill-gang would scatter in the wood, each man to his fallen log.
The roar of the safety-valve continuing, and seeming to increase in stridency rather than to diminish, Tregarvon leaned forward to shout in Rucker’s ear:
“Are you sure you left the fire-box door open, Billy?”
The mechanician struggled to his feet. “I thought I was, but I’ll go see. She’s howlin’ a little bit too loud to suit me.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the earthquake crash came. With a sound that was oddly like the tearing of a hundred saws through dry timber, followed by a reverberating thunderclap, the boiler and engine vanished in a thick cloud of steam, and the air was filled with flying missiles. One piece of the boiler tore the heart out of the sheltering oak-tree; another fragment ripped a corner from the tool-house; a third mowed a swath through a thicket of young pines.
Tregarvon and Carfax were both up and out before the nimbus cloud of steam had blown aside, and their first thought was for their men. Rucker had escaped only by a hair’s-breadth. The twisted fire-box sheet which had knocked a corner out of the small building had passed so close that the wind of it had bowled him over. Tregarvon left Carfax to help the machinist to his feet, and ran shouting across the glade. The drill gang answered and came hurrying in, a man at a time. When all were accounted for, the material loss was inventoried. It was total, so far as it went. The engine and boiler were reduced to a tangled heap of scrap; one end of the drill beam was shattered, and one leg of the derrick had suffered loss.