Part 15

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.”

Tregarvon had one small shot in reserve and the time had arrived when it must be fired.

“In that view of the case, Mr. Thaxter, I am afraid I shall have to stay out,” he said, hoping against hope that the shot might find its target.

Once more Thaxter made the sign of regretful negation. From where he was sitting the bookkeeper had a fair view of the installation activities, and Tregarvon could not help wondering if their rapid progress toward completion had anything to do with Thaxter’s immovability. While he was waiting for the bluffing shot to penetrate, if it would, Rucker came across from the new engine, carrying a piece of iron pipe with a valve attached; carrying, also, a ferocious scowl to emphasize his complaint.

“Them machinery guys over in Chattanooga is a fright!” he rapped out. “That boiler dome is tapped for inch-and-a-quarter pipe, and so’s the engine; and they’ve gone and sent us this inch-and-a-half throttle and pipe connection! Wot t’ ’ell am I goin’ to do about that, I’d like to know?”