Part 17

“I didn’t suspect it,” she said musingly; “I was very far from suspecting it. It came all at once, like a blow, you know; and then it was too late to ‘choke it off,’ as you say.”

The man, the true man, in him rose up in its might to buffet him into the path of uprightness and straightforwardness. “No; it is not too late, Elizabeth,” he assured her gravely.

“Yes, it is,” she objected with pathetic earnestness.

“No,” he insisted. “We must still make good. Do you know what people at home will say if our engagement is broken now? They will say that I made it impossible for you to carry out Uncle Byrd’s wishes; and that I did it deliberately, to get the money for myself.”

“But you haven’t!” she cried in wide-eyed astonishment. “_I_ am the guilty one.”

“You?”

“Yes. This is what I came all the way from Philadelphia to say to you, Vance. Do you remember, one time when we were trying to ‘galvanize,’ I think that was the word you used, ourselves into the sentimental ecstasy supposed to be the normal condition of engaged people, I told you jokingly that if I ever found any one whom I could really lo--like better----”

“_Elizabeth!_”

She nodded, soberly and looked away from him. “Yes; it is true; and I had to come and tell you. You may despise me; it is your privilege.”

Tregarvon got up and took the necessary step to the veranda end which gave him the view into the rearward flower-garden. They were there, Carfax and Richardia, bending together over the chrysanthemums. When he turned back to face his cousin he was smiling grimly.

“As our cattle-ranching cousin in the West would say, you mustn’t ‘rawhide’ yourself too severely, Elizabeth. Leaving the dollars out of it--and I’ll find a way to leave them out if I have to throw them to the birds--I’m getting about what I deserve; which is the glad hand all around the block.”

“You are bitter, and I can’t blame you,” she said, with something alarmingly like a sob at the catching of her breath. “But really, at the very bottom of it all, you don’t care so very much, do you, Vance?”

“Don’t I? I’d be a mighty good specimen of the superman if I didn’t care. Who is this fellow who, coming after me, is preferred before me?”

“I--I can’t tell you that.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because--oh, you are perfectly savage with me!--because he has had no right to speak, nor I to listen. He hasn’t spoken; he may never speak. But that doesn’t make any difference.”

“No,” said Tregarvon wearily; “nothing makes any difference now. But I told you a moment ago not to reproach yourself too bitterly. I am in precisely the same sort of a boat myself, Elizabeth--without your good hope of getting ashore.”

“You? _Vance!_”

The grim smile came again, and he said--though rather in shame than in malice: “It hurts a little, doesn’t it?--when it is the other way about. For nearly a week I have been thinking that you knew. I told you all about it, you know, in the letter I wrote last Sunday night in Chattanooga; the letter which seems to have gone astray. That is why I was so slow in getting your meaning: I was looking for you to dagger me the other way around, you know.”

Miss Wardwell was no longer embarrassed, but she was well-nigh tearful.

“I suppose it is one of those horridly pretty Southern girls in the school,” she said half-spitefully. “Have you----”

“No,” he hastened to say; “I have been almost as decent as the other fellow; the fellow you won’t name for me. I haven’t asked her to marry me.”

“And she?”

“She is going to marry a man old enough to be her father--if she doesn’t reconsider and marry a young donkey of a millionaire.”

Rucker, following an order which had been given him earlier in the day, was tooling the yellow car up the weed-grown carriage approach, coming to drive the two young men back to Coalville. Also, Carfax and Miss Birrell were returning from the posy-patch. Miss Wardwell stood up and put her hands into Tregarvon’s.

“I’m sorry and happy and miserable all in the same breath,” she said. “I shall be here for a few days. Papa and mamma are going over to the Shiloh battle-field after they leave Chattanooga, and I shall stay until they come back. You’ll come again, won’t you?”

He was able to smile down into the brown eyes of beseeching. The stabbed-vanity pain was passing--a little.

“Most certainly I shall come, as often as you can get me an invitation, and as my job on the Ocoee will permit. I don’t propose to lose my best cousin just because I happen to have lost a lot of other things.”

This was the key-note of the cheerful tone which he contrived to preserve throughout the leave-takings. But at the car boarding he let Carfax have the tonneau to himself, taking the seat beside Rucker for the better chance it offered for a needed interval in which to bind up the wounds of the pierced _amour-propre_.

XXIV

The Unknown Quantity

When the yellow motor-car, driven by Rucker with his customary disregard for speed limitations, had crossed the mountain and was approaching Highmount and the forking of the wood road leading to the old negro burying-ground, Tregarvon told the mechanician to stop and let him out. To Carfax he made plausible excuse: Tryon was watching at the drilling plant and he might have something to report. It was still only mid-afternoon, and Tregarvon added that he would walk to Coalville by way of the tramhead and the short-cut path.

After the car had gone on, Tregarvon kept the first part of his promise, covering the half-mile briskly. Tryon was at his post, killing time with the aid of strong tobacco and a railroad man’s clay pipe. He had relieved Rucker at noon, in accordance with his orders; there had been no Sunday-afternoon visitors--nothing to disturb the peace of the day of rest.

Tregarvon listened perfunctorily to the foreman’s report. His object in delaying his return to Coalville had been only half formed at the moment of car stopping, but it had nothing to do with checking up the day-watchman. The talk with Elizabeth and its astounding revelations had opened new vistas. With Elizabeth calmly proposing to marry some one else, if the some one else should ask her, a full half of the spur which had been driving him to fight the Ocoee battle to a finish was gone.

Under the changed conditions the sensible thing to do, after all, might be to close with the coal trust’s offer. But before committing himself finally to this, he was inclined to go to Hartridge with a frank plea for a word of friendly advice. From what had transpired it was evident that the professor of mathematics knew much more about the Ocoee and its mysteries than he had as yet been willing to tell; and though the episode of the steel cubes seemed to array him definitely on the side of the enemy, his later warning in the matter of bargain and sale was unquestionably disinterested, if not actively amicable.

Tregarvon was still considering the half-formed resolve to appeal to Hartridge when Tryon fished in the pocket of his overalls and brought up three small cubes of metal, the exact counterparts of the one which Carfax had taken from the pocket of the schoolmaster’s overcoat.

“I been savin’ these to show you,” said the foreman, handing the bits of metal to Tregarvon. “What-all d’you reckon they’re meant for?”

Tregarvon permitted the query to go unanswered. “Where did you find them?” he asked.

“In the pocket of an old coat that Jim Sawyer’s been wearin’ here on the job. It’s hangin’ up in the tool shanty. I run out o’ matches a little spell ago, and went to rummagin’ ’round to see if I couldn’t find some.”

“Sawyer’s coat, eh?” said Tregarvon, struck suddenly alert.

Tryon nodded soberly. “An’ that ain’t all,” he went on. “I got a file and tried ’em; they’re harder ’n flint--been tempered till you couldn’t cut ’em with anything softer ’n an emery-wheel. Rucker’d been tellin’ me how the drills went all to the bad that time when you was hung up before the old b’iler bu’sted. Sawyer’s got a tool-box in the shanty where he keeps his wrenches and little traps. It was locked, but I happened to have a key that fitted. What d’you reckon I found?”

“More of these?”

“You’ve hit it plumb centre; a tomatter can about half full of ’em.”

“Tell me all you know about Sawyer,” Tregarvon cut in concisely.

“What I know about him wouldn’t get him a job anywheres where I had the say-so. Last summer he was workin’ for the C. C. & I. at Whitlow--a strike-breaker. Before that he was doin’ time at Brushy Mountain, for some sort o’ crookedness, I dunno what. Maybe I ort to ’a’ told you this when you hired him, but I allowed you knowed what you was doin’, an’ it wasn’t none o’ my business. He’s a good drill boss.”

Tregarvon was examining the bits of steel critically. “Tryon, I’d give something to know just where these came from originally,” he said.

“Maybe I might help out a little on that, too. I served my time in the shop before I went to work for the railroad. D’you know what kind o’ steel that is?”

“No.”

“It’s some o’ that new-fangled, high-speed tool-steel that you temper by heatin’ it white-hot and coolin’ it in a fan blast. Jenkins, the Whitlow blacksmith, was showin’ me a piece of it last Sat’day night at Tait’s. Looked like it might ’a’ been cut off the same bar with these little chunks o’ Jim Sawyer’s.”

“In other words, you believe that these bits were made in the Whitlow blacksmith shop?”

“I ain’t a-sayin’ so, because I can’t prove it. But my boy, Tom, saw Thaxter, the Whitlow bookkeeper, stop his buggy in the big road two or three days ago whilst a man came out o’ the bushes to talk to him. The man was Jim Sawyer. More ’n that, there’s just natchelly only the one place in the Wehatchee where that steel _could_ come from. They’ve got it at Whitlow, an’ I don’t reckon there’s ar’ another blacksmith shop in the valley that ever heerd tell of it.”

“Tryon, you’ve done a good afternoon’s work,” said the master of Ocoee, dropping the three cubes into his pocket. “We owe all of our hard luck, excepting the blown-up boiler, which may have been due to its own rottenness, to the C. C. & I., with Thaxter pulling the strings and Sawyer doing the actual dirty work. Isn’t that the way you have it figured out?”

“That’s about the way it _ort_ to stack up,” said the foreman. “But somehow it don’t gee all the way ’round. You’d say it’s mighty near a dead cinch that Sawyer was the one that doped the drill-hole with these here slow-’em-downs; but right there the vein pinches out. Them two times that the walkin’-beam fell down, Sawyer was the man that stood the best chance o’ gettin’ his head bu’sted. Then you an’ Mr. Carfax both saw the man that put the dannymite into the old b’iler, an’ I hain’t heerd neither one of you a-sayin’ it was Sawyer. You’d ’a’ knowed him, wouldn’t you?”

“It wasn’t Sawyer,” said Tregarvon definitively. “Sawyer has a beard, and that man was smooth-faced.”

“Jes’ so,” nodded the foreman. Then he drew his own conclusion. “I been knowin’ the C. C. & I. crowd, off an’ on, ever sence they took holt here in the Wehatchee. I reckon they’d rough-house you in a holy minute if they thought that was the easiest way to get the best o’ you in some business fight. I wouldn’t even put the dannymitin’ a-past ’em. But they wouldn’t go at it in no such a bunglesome way; n’r they wouldn’t put skulls in your fire-box, n’r any such fool monkeyshines as that. Them things don’t fit in.”

Again Tregarvon bestowed the meed of praise where praise was due.

“Tryon, you have a pretty level head. I am beginning to suspect that we made a mistake in not calling you in as chief detective in this muddle. But you still think that Thaxter and Sawyer worked the drill-dulling scheme, don’t you?”

“Ez I say, that part of it proves up toler’ble plain. If there was ar’ reason, now, why they’d want to be holdin’ you back for a little spell----”

“There is a reason. They are trying to buy me out.”

“Now you’re talkin’!” said the foreman sagely. “Maybe you’ve got coal here under your feet, ’r maybe you hain’t. _You_ don’t know, yet, an’ maybe _they_ don’t know. But they’d just as soon you wouldn’t find out for sure whilst the dickerin’ ’s goin’ on. They’d like as not call it ‘good business’ to hold you up for a spell, wouldn’t they?”

“Quite likely,” Tregarvon was glancing at his watch. The call upon Hartridge had now become a necessity, if only for apologetic and explanatory reasons. True, it was still possible that the professor had been in collusion with the planter of steel cubes on the night of surprises, but these later developments seemed to exonerate him handsomely. “I must go,” he told the foreman. “Rucker will relieve you here in time for you to go to your supper. If Sawyer should happen to turn up, just keep your own counsel about what we have discovered. We’ll deal with him--and his bosses--when the time comes.”

A few minutes beyond this, Tregarvon was at Highmount, inquiring for Professor Hartridge. The young woman who answered his ring told him that the professor had gone over to the McNabb neighborhood to see a sick child. Not wishing to let his opportunity escape, Tregarvon set out to walk through the forest, taking a path leading in the general direction of the sunken mountain-top valley known locally as the “Pocket”; this on the chance of meeting Hartridge and walking back to the school with him.

Now it so chanced that Tregarvon had never visited the “Pocket,” and though he knew, from Carfax’s description of the locality, that it could not be more than a mile or two beyond Highmount, he was not aware that the path he had chosen was not the right one. Having plenty of other things to think about, he paid little attention to his surroundings until, at the end of a half-hour, he found that the path, which had been growing indistinct, had disappeared entirely, leaving him in a region of deep ravines with their slopes heavily wooded; hollows boulder-strewn, in which the old-growth timber stood thickly, with only a fallen and rotting trunk here and there to show where the tan-bark gatherers had slain some monarch of the forest for the paltry stripping of its outer skin--mute testimony to the waste of a nation.

It was not until after he had covered distance enough, as he thought, to have taken him all the way across from Highmount to the western brow of the mountain, that he saw a man--whom he took to be Hartridge--sitting upon a flat stone in the shadow of a great boulder on the opposite side of a small mountain brook. Just as he was about to call out and make his presence known, the man sprang to his feet suddenly, as if in alarm, and whipped a weapon from his pocket.

Obeying the instinct of self-preservation in pure automatism, Tregarvon dropped silently behind the nearest boulder on his own side of the stream. When he looked again he saw that the man was not Hartridge; he was a much younger man; a handsome young fellow, well-built and athletic-looking, with nothing in his appearance to connect him with the mountain and its natives. The attitude of strained anxiety into which the quick leap afoot had thrown him lasted only for a moment. While Tregarvon looked, a warbling bird whistle rose shrill and clear on the windless air. The watcher saw the young man hastily pocket the pistol and heard him whistle a reply. Almost at the same instant the figure of a woman appeared at the buried up-hill heel of the great boulder. She stood for a moment in the yellow light of the westering sun, long enough for Tregarvon to recognize her beyond any question of doubt. Then she ran, slipping and sliding, down the leaf-carpeted hazard slope, to be caught in the arms of the waiting man.

For a little time Tregarvon sat with his back to the sheltering boulder, trying to surround this latest and newest development in the maze of mysteries. Slowly it came to him that this was the explanation of Richardia’s attitude; the reason why she had slipped aside, masking the true state of affairs and rebuffing him by seeming to accept the attentions of Carfax. One by one the corroborative inferences fell into place, each fitting with exact nicety: Richardia’s piquant reticences; her half-confidences which had always stopped short of revealment; her little flights to the shelter of detachment whenever the talk threatened to lean toward sentiment; all these were signs which might have been read--which were plainly readable now in the light of the small tableau staging itself in the shadow of the great rock on the opposite hillside.

Tregarvon peeped again. It was most obviously a lovers’ meeting. The young man had drawn the judge’s daughter to a seat beside him on the flat stone, and he still had his arm about her. They were talking eagerly in low tones; Tregarvon could hear only a murmur of voices, but Richardia’s face was toward him, and in it he re-read his complete effacement. In a series of revealing flashes more of the corroborative fragments whisked into place; he had been blind not to see the pointing of certain playful allusions made now and then at the Caswells’ dinner-table and aimed at the music teacher. Doubtless, to the small world of the mountain top, these Sunday-afternoon trysts in the forest were an old story. But why were they clandestine? The answer fitted itself promptly. By all accounts Judge Birrell was a person of shrewd prejudices; quite possibly he disapproved of this young man who had stolen his daughter’s heart; and perhaps the disapproval was not entirely without reason. Tregarvon recalled the signs of perturbation and the sudden pistol drawing which had preceded Richardia’s appearance.

In deference to a prompting which took its color more from complete and hopeless chagrin than from any charitable scruples, Tregarvon squared his back against the concealing boulder and refused to look any more. While the pair across the streamlet kept their places, it was impossible for him to retreat undiscovered. The waiting interval was not unduly long. When he could no longer distinguish the murmur of voices he ventured to peep again. The flat-stone seat was empty and they were gone.

The sun had dropped behind the mountain, and Tregarvon was tramping soberly through the lengthening wood shadows toward Highmount, when the frock-coated figure of the professor of mathematics loomed suddenly in the path ahead. At Tregarvon’s call, Hartridge stopped and waited.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” said the schoolmaster, with his genial smile. “Are you walking my way?”

“Very pointedly,” said Tregarvon. “They told me at the college that you had gone to one of the McNabbs’, and I came out on the chance of meeting you.”

“That was neighborly, I’m sure,” returned the master of arts, catching the step. “Am I to infer that you are going to let me be of some service to you?”

Tregarvon’s laugh was a trifle strained. “It’s a little that way,” he confessed. “But first I wish to say that I believe we have been doing you an injustice--Carfax and I.”

“About the small cube of the metal known commercially as steel?” was the gentle inquiry.

“Precisely. I’m sorry we were not broad-minded enough to take your word in explanation.”

“Then you have discovered the real culprit?”

For answer Tregarvon briefed the story of Tryon’s findings.

“Ah!” said the listener; “then my own impression wasn’t at fault, after all. I saw the man under the drill derrick: I thought it was Sawyer, but I couldn’t be certain. I assume you don’t need to be told why he did it, or who bribed him to do it?”

“No. For some reason best known to themselves, the C. C. & I. people do not wish me to drill that test-hole in the old burying-ground. Do you know the reason, Professor Hartridge?”

It was too nearly dark for Tregarvon to see the quizzical smile which this query evoked, but he knew it was there.

“You are asking me as man to man, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“I am--just that. I have been condemning you unjustly, and you now have a most excellent chance to heap coals of fire upon my head.”

“You are making it impossible for me to hold malice,” was the genial response. “I wish I could answer your question definitely; but I cannot. I do _not_ know why Thaxter should wish to prevent you from drilling that particular test-hole.”

“You mean that I am not going to find the paying vein of coal under the old burying-ground?”

“I am practically certain that you are not.”

“Would you mind giving me your reasons?”

“They are geological--and conclusive. The strata under the glade are precisely the same as those occurring at your tramhead. Moreover, if you will take the trouble to examine the ground at the foot of the cliff below your present location you will find the coal outcrop: a single vein, not over twenty inches thick. A little lower down you will find another, still thinner.”

Tregarvon laughed mirthlessly. “I asked you for bread, and you have given me a stone,” he protested. “Am I to assume that Consolidated Coal is better informed than you are, professor?”

Hartridge’s reply was guarded. “No man is infallible, Mr. Tregarvon. I speak only of the things I know.”

“Then there is a chance that, in spite of your geological deduction, Thaxter and the men he represents have more accurate data?”

This time the professor’s rejoinder was fairly cryptic. “The earth holds many secrets. During the long interval in which the Ocoee properties were allowed to lie idle and uncared for, it was anybody’s privilege to investigate them. I am violating no confidence in saying that the people who are now trying to induce you to sell have made a number of surveys. They probably know your ground foot by foot.”

Once more Tregarvon found himself confronted by the dead wall of Hartridge’s reservations. That the professor was making reservations he did not doubt for an instant. There was still some bar to perfect frankness, and he seemed powerless to break it down. In sheer desperation he shunted the talk to the field of the obstacles.

“It seems to be conclusively proved that the drill-dulling is chargeable to Thaxter, acting through the man Sawyer,” he said. “But Tryon refuses to believe that the other harassings have been inspired by the trust.”

They had reached the Highmount boundary, and Hartridge paused with his hand on the gate latch.

“I am entirely at one with your foreman in that belief, Mr. Tregarvon,” he rejoined. “Now that we are again upon amicable terms, I may confess that I have been greatly interested in the problem which these harassments have presented--the solving of problems being one of my small recreations. Did you leave an enemy at home who would be vindictive enough to follow you here?”

Tregarvon shook his head. “So far as I know, I hadn’t an enemy in the wide world when I came here.”

“Then you have developed one _in situ_, as it were, and a very unscrupulous one. Have you formed any theory of your own?”

“None that is worth considering. At first, I suspected the McNabbs, fancying that their enmity might be a holdover on account of the old lawsuit about the land titles. That was before I knew that I had two of them working for me in the drill-gang. Later--I am ashamed to confess it--I thought that possibly Judge Birrell might have passed the word that I was to be driven out. That was a pure absurdity, of course.”

“Quite so,” said the professor. “The judge is entirely incapable of doing such a thing, bitter as some of his prejudices are. It need not be denied that he was prejudiced against you at first. One evening, when he was driving with his daughter, he visited your drilling plant and was greatly incensed at finding it in the old Westwood slave burying-ground. But now you and Mr. Carfax have met him and have eaten at his table, and this, to a man of his characteristics, salves all wounds. Besides, as a matter of fact, you owe the help which enabled you to place your new power-plant directly to the judge. It was he who sent word to the mountain-folk to turn out with their teams.”