Part 20

“When you are older, Mr. Tregarvon, and come to know human nature a little better, you will apprehend the truth of that worldly wise beatitude, ‘Blessed are they who expect little, for, verily, they shall not be disappointed.’ Consider a moment: you came here, the legal owner of the Ocoee, to be sure, and the innocent owner, inasmuch as your father was the unsuspecting purchaser of stolen goods. Yet you were none the less the legitimate successor of the bandit who had looted us. You wouldn’t expect much from those who had been so ruthlessly defrauded, would you?”

“Since I was not even constructively to blame, yes,” Tregarvon insisted stubbornly. “Your motive went deeper than that.”

“It did,” the professor admitted gravely. “Almost from the first I saw the slight chance of a reward, the attainment of which has been the one thing desirable in a rather drab-colored life, slipping away from me; taken away from me in sheer wantonness, as it seemed, since, I had been given to understand, you were already pledged to marry Miss Wardwell. It was not in human nature to be entirely unresentful, Mr. Tregarvon.”

“Oh; so that was it?” said Tregarvon shortly. Then: “What I saw yesterday afternoon in the forest back of Westwood House seems to prove that I am as far out of the running as you are with Judge Birrell’s daughter.”

The professor’s face became, for the moment, a study in astoundment.

“Ah--yes,” he said, stumbling over the words; and then: “I am to infer that you didn’t recognize the young man whom you saw with Miss Richardia yesterday afternoon?”

“No; he was a stranger to me. Doesn’t the judge approve of him?”

This time the professor’s smile was rather grim.

“He does not--most decidedly.”

“But Richardia loves him; and that is enough--for you and for me.”

“Assuredly she loves him--very loyally,” was the grave reply; and a moment later, as if the mention of the judge had evoked a new train of thought: “I am curious to know if my leaf-fire diversion--which had such unlooked-for and disastrous results--came soon enough. How much had Morgan McNabb confessed?”

Tregarvon ignored the brow-wrinkling of pain which accompanied the question.

“I am beginning to believe that you are a very hardened criminal, Mr. Hartridge. If you know that McNabb had a confession to make, it follows that you were his accomplice.”

The answer was a suppressed groan, for which the schoolmaster instantly apologized.

“You--you must forgive me if I say that I can’t go into the matter of culpability with you just now. This leg--of mine--grows a bit insistent. But it will be the greatest possible satisfaction to me if you will answer my question.”

“All right; you shall have it. Just before the explosion came McNabb had admitted that he was acting for somebody else.”

“But he did not name the person?”

“The judge was trying to make him do so, but he was still refusing. The last thing he said, as I remember it, was something which seemed to implicate Miss Richardia as the one who could tell if she chose. Which was absurd, of course.”

“Quite so,” was the low-voiced reply. “Shall we let the matter rest there--for the present?”

Tregarvon was holding his head in his hands again. The throbbing pain was so intense that he could only grit his teeth and endure. When speech became possible he gave his answer.

“It may rest until I am able to take hold again. Then I shall make somebody pay for this night’s work if it takes every dollar I can dig out of the Ocoee for the next ten years!”

Once more Hartridge bent in apparent agony over the broken leg. But when the paroxysm had passed he looked up with a face that was gray with a deeper suffering than that inflicted by the broken bone.

“If you do; if you strike back in the spirit of reprisal, which seems so justifiable to you now, you will carry the woundings of your own vindictiveness to your grave, Mr. Tregarvon,” he said solemnly.

Tregarvon did not comment upon the sober prophecy. He was heaping more leaves upon the fire and wondering irritably why it was taking the rescuers so long to find them. The hammering agony in his head climaxed now at shorter intervals and the recurrences were blinding, but he contrived to keep the leaf glow alive until a welcome shout from the cliff above announced the presence of the searchers.

The hauling of the two injured men out of the deep cleft proved to be a difficult undertaking, this though there were five in the rescue party, which included the freed McNabb. Once it was done, a stretcher was quickly improvised for Hartridge, with Rucker, Tryon, and McNabb to take turns as bearers; and Tregarvon made shift to help himself a little, with Wilmerding and Carfax to shoulder him on either side.

On the slow progress back to the glade Tregarvon realized vaguely that his companions were gravely silent; and as the lagging procession issued from the wood he saw the cause. Rucker, or some one, had replaced the deflated tire and the motor-car had been brought upon the scene. The white glare of its headlamps focused upon the open space in front of the tool shanty. Judge Birrell, bowed and shrunken, was sitting upon the tool-house door-step with his face hidden in his hands; and on Rucker’s cot-bed, which had been placed under the light of the headlamps, lay the body of a man covered with one of the blankets.

“Who is it?” Tregarvon muttered, leaning more heavily upon his helpers.

He thought it singular that no one answered him, and the thought swiftly became an irritation too keen to be borne.

“What the devil is the matter with you all?” he rasped, with a curious idea that he had to shout to make his voice heard above the deafening thunder of many cataracts in his brain. Then, as in a dream, he seemed to hear Wilmerding saying to Carfax, almost savagely: “Ease him down and we’ll carry him. Can’t you see he’s gone off his head?”

XXIX

Beyond the Gap

It was a full fortnight before the Hesterville physician, driven at breakneck speed to Coalville in Wilmerding’s roadster on the night of woundings, pronounced Tregarvon out of danger and in a fair way to recover from the broken head.

Whatever the lapse of time may have meant for others, it had little significance for the man who tossed and rolled in his bed in an upper room of the Ocoee office-building. Dim pictures there were of people coming and going; of grotesque attendants lifting him about, these sometimes parading as liveried Merkleys with Uncle William heads, or the reverse; of faces, affectionately sorrowful, hanging over him, now hopefully, and again with sharp anxiety in eyes which were never completely recognizable.

But for the greater interval, what with thundering brain cataracts to attend to, and a thousand dancing lights which had to be wheeled in vanishing spirals, checked, stopped, and wheeled the other way around precisely three hundred twirls a minute, he was so pressed for time as not to be aware of the lapse of it. Hence, when he finally opened eyes of full consciousness upon the walls and ceiling of the familiar room, he was sadly out of touch, his latest clear recollection being of a cloud-banked night, of a glade in the mountain-top forest, and of two great white eyes of artificial light staring down upon a cot-bed bier supporting a blanketed body.

At first he thought he was alone in the bare-walled upper room, but at his earliest conscious stirring Carfax came to stand beside the bed.

“That’s better--much better!” said the golden one, noting the turning-point improvement at once. “You certainly had us guessing, old man. Our only comfort has been in the fact that you could eat and didn’t seem to be losing too much flesh. Have the wheels stopped buzzing?”

“They weren’t wheels; they were lights and waterfalls,” said the sick man meticulously.

“All right; call ’em anything you like, so long as they’re gone. We had one doctor, a specialist from Nashville, who gave us a fit of seasickness; said you’d live, and be all right physically, but that you would most probably never recover your reason. Nice cheerful prospect for the friends and relatives, wasn’t it?”

“How long have I been knocked out, Poictiers?”

“Two solid weeks.”

“My mother and sister--has anybody written them?”

“Sure! Elizabeth has been writing them every day or so. They wanted to come down, of course, but we decided that it wasn’t best. You were getting all the care you could stand.”

“Then Elizabeth hasn’t gone home?”

“Not yet. Her father and mother have gone to Florida, and she has been staying on at Westwood House--what time she hasn’t been down here coddling you. She’s an angel, Vance; one of the kind you read about. But I mustn’t let you talk too much.”

“If I can’t talk, you’ll have to. Have you made it up with Elizabeth--about that silly side-play of yours with Richardia?”

Carfax’s smile began on the cherubic lines but it ended in a mere face-wrinkling of soberness.

“We have had too much else to think about; too many little diversions, as you might say. But I’m hoping she isn’t going to insist upon making a horrible example of me for my apparent fickleness.”

“‘Too many little diversions’,” Tregarvon echoed. “That reminds me: I can remember you and the others pulling us out of the crevice--Hartridge and me--and after that, a stretcher was made for Hartridge and we used up an age or so getting back to the glade. Am I right, so far?”

“It was something like that; yes.”

“And when we came into the old burying-ground the motor-car had been run down opposite the tool-house, and its headlamps made everything look ghastly. The judge was sitting on the door-step with his face hidden in his hands, and Rucker’s cot was standing in the open under the lights with a blanketed corpse lying upon it. Who was the dead man, Poictiers?”

Carfax shook his head. “Call it a bad dream,” he said soothingly. “The cracked skull was beginning to get in its work. You didn’t see any dead man.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes wearily. “It’s passing strange how a little knock on the head can mix things. I could swear that I saw the judge and the dead man and the car just as I have described them. Let it go, and tell me about Richardia.”

Carfax seemed suddenly embarrassed. “I--I don’t know as there is much to tell,” he stammered. “She--she is well, I believe.”

Tregarvon raised himself on an elbow.

“You’re keeping something back,” he protested. “Is she--is she--married?”

“Oh, no; nothing of that sort,” was the hasty reply. “She has been here to see you--she and her father--quite often; that is, as often as possible. I have fetched them in the car, you know. They have left nothing undone that could be done.”

Tregarvon still felt the presence of a reservation; of many of them; but he was too weak to fight for the clearer explication.

“How is Hartridge getting along?” he asked, sinking back upon the pillows.

“Rather slowly. It was a bad fracture. But the doctor says he won’t be a cripple.”

“That’s good. I want him to get well so that I can drag him into court. He set the leaf fire that blew us up. Did you know that?”

The golden youth nodded gravely. “I know a good many things that I didn’t know before you got your knockout.”

“Bring me down to date,” said the sick man impatiently. “What have you done about the mine?”

Carfax seemed to welcome the change to the more material field.

“Any number of things,” he answered cheerfully. “In the first place we--the judge and I--swore everybody to secrecy on that Monday night of smashing catastrophes, and the secret has been kept from the world at large, and from Consolidated Coal in particular. The wrecked drilling plant has been left just as it was; your laboring force has been discharged; and the impression has been given that if you ever recovered your wits, you’d go straight away back to Philadelphia, a sadder and much wiser young man.”

“Fine!” approved the listener. “But that isn’t all?”

“Not by a jugful. Two days after you were hurt, Wilmerding resigned from the C. C. & I. service and disappeared. He has been North buying machinery and material and shipping it in as far as Hesterville by littles. The explanation given and accepted is that a new company has been formed to develop some coal lands in the Hesterville vicinity, and the C. C. & I. people are running around in circles and uttering loud cries in their effort to find out where the lands are and who is going to develop them.”

“Good!--ripping good!” the sick man applauded.

“We have been only waiting for you to get upon your feet, and we didn’t wish to give Thaxter and his backers any chance to tangle things for you in the meantime. The moment you are able to take hold you will find everything in train--material and machinery where you can rush it in with motor-trucks, labor all engaged, coke-burners from Pennsylvania ready to take the first train south, and all that.”

Tregarvon doubled the pillows under his head and his eyes were flashing. “Poictiers, you’re a miracle!” he declared.

The professional idler smiled his denial. “I didn’t do any of it. I merely stood aside and told the others to go ahead and we’d pay the bills. Wilmerding was fully competent to take charge of the business part of it, and I have retained old Captain Duncan for the engineering. All you have to do now is to rise up and say the word, and you’ll have a mine that will make the Whitlow proposition compare accurately with a last year’s almanac.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes again and kept them closed so long as to give the impression that he had fallen asleep. But when Carfax was about to tiptoe away the heavy-lidded eyes opened.

“I’ll build upon the foundation you have laid, Poictiers; you and Wilmerding and Duncan. There are three things that I mean to do before I quit and go West to look for another job: to stand the Ocoee upon its feet as a paying proposition, to make provision for my mother and sister with a part of the property and to divide the remainder equitably among those who were frozen out in the Parker robbery, and after this is done to turn heaven and earth over until I have found and punished the man or men who have tried so hard to smash me. When I’ve squared up I’ll vanish.”

Carfax laid a hand as slender and shapely as a woman’s upon the hot forehead. “I’ve let you talk too much and you are getting the ‘wheels’ again,” he said gently. “You mustn’t be vindictive; and there is no reason on earth why you should talk of throwing things up and running away.”

“There are good reasons for both,” was the stubborn insistence. “I owe it to common justice, no less than to myself, to dig up the criminal or criminals and bring them to book. If they should prove to be Thaxter and his backers, after all, the world needs the example; and if it was pure outlawry on the part of the McNabbs and Hartridge and some other scoundrel that McNabb wouldn’t name there is all the more reason why I should send for the best detectives the country affords and run the outlaws down. And as to running away after it is all over, that says itself, Poictiers. I couldn’t stay on here after Richardia is married to another man. It isn’t in human nature. Now go away and let me sleep. I want to hurry and get well, so that I can stand up and straighten things out.”

XXX

A Grounded Wire

The small world of Coalville, centring socially under Tait’s store porch, had its vivifying shock when it awoke one morning to find that in a single night, as one might say, the entire face of nature had changed for the sleepy little hamlet at the foot of old Pisgah. In the instant of transformation the Ocoee of many disappointments had suddenly leaped into the foreground as a coal discovery of unlimited possibilities; an army of workmen was massing to shift the old tramway to the new opening; motor-trucks, piled high with material, were trundling over the valley pike from Hesterville; carpenters were rushing up new buildings at top speed; and at the centre of all these stirring activities, directing and driving them, was the young man whom rumor had been bulletining as dead or dying in his room on the second floor of the old office-building, or at best destined to pass the remainder of his life in an asylum.

Taking one thing with another, the gossips at Tait’s found it difficult to recognize the convalescent Tregarvon. The brief period of his illness had seemed to mature him curiously; to make him a man of a single idea--the idea being to turn the Ocoee into a producing industry in the shortest possible time. Also, they missed the genial and mollifying influence of the young New York millionaire, who, though still nominally an inmate of the Ocoee headquarters building, spent most of his time on the mountain, presumably as a guest of the Caswells.

As it chanced, the store-porch gossips were not the only persons who were finding a changed Tregarvon sitting at the desk of overlordship in the hastily remodelled Ocoee office-building. There were others, among them Barnby, travelling freight agent for the railroad, who had come all the way from his own headquarters to find out why the Ocoee was hauling its new material from Hesterville in motor-trucks.

“You will find the reason in the correspondence files of your general office,” was the curt reply of the Ocoee organizer. “I asked for a rate from Hesterville to Coalville on the material and was told that the shortage of cars would make it impossible for your road to handle the freight save as it might be transported a little at a time by the daily way-train. I don’t propose to be held up by a railroad company, the policy of which seems to be dictated by the C. C. & I., Mr. Barnby.”

Barnby was a fleshy young man with an easy smile, and he gave the smile its blandishing opportunity.

“You will have to ship your product out over our road when you get in operation, won’t you?” he asked mildly.

“Not necessarily. We have all the capital we need, and if you don’t give us an equal show with the C. C. & I. we shall build a ten-mile industrial track, for which we have already secured a right of way, to a connection with the South Central at Midvale. It’s up to your people. Talk it over with them when you go back to headquarters. Glad to have met you. Drop in again when you are going over the line. Good morning.”

Touching this intimation that the coal trust had already begun a new series of impeding activities, speculation was rife. Some said that the C. C. & I. would buy the new mine, lock, stock, and barrel, and close it; others hinted that the trust would put the price of coke so low that the new company would be bankrupted in short order; still others suggested that Consolidated Coal would conspire with the railroad and call Tregarvon’s bluff to build the industrial cut-off.

Wilmerding or Duncan, or both of them, brought these rumors to Tregarvon, and were amazed to find that he refused to be either disturbed or greatly interested. In many ways the superintendent and the old Scotch engineer were discovering daily that they had to do with a man who had developed suddenly into a master of himself and others. The light-hearted young fellow who had thrown himself so joyously into the fray at the beginning had given place to a modern captain of industry, alert, strong-willed, a bit dictatorial, perhaps, but entirely capable.

“Never mind what the C. C. & I. is doing, or will try to do,” he told his oddly assorted lieutenants. “Our job is to get the mine open and the ovens fired. Consolidated Coal will neither buy us nor break us, nor force us to build a railroad to Midvale. I’ll take care of all those details at the proper time.”

It was on the day when the first tram loads of Ocoee coal were coming down the mountain to be dumped into the oven-filling hoppers that another caller discovered the new Tregarvon. Late in the afternoon a neat, rubber-tired buggy, drawn by a black Hambletonian, stopped in front of the Ocoee office-building, and a round-bodied little man descended and hitched the horse.

Somewhat to his chagrin, it may be supposed, Mr. Onias Thaxter was allowed to cool his heels for a full quarter of an hour in the outer office before he was admitted to the presence of the new overlord; and the waiting was doubtless the harder to endure since he came bearing the olive-branch of peace. Tregarvon sat back in his chair and listened coldly while the peace branch was getting itself waved to an accompaniment of placative speech.

“There is no such thing as personal vindictiveness in business, Mr. Tregarvon,” was the summing-up of the Thaxter argument. “Without admitting it as a fact, let us assume, for the moment, that the man Sawyer was employed as a sort of scout for our people. This is a thing that is done every day; it’s business, and good business. You might do it yourself, if you had a competitor. We are hearing it asserted here and there and everywhere that you are charging us with a lot of outlawry with which we had nothing to do, and that you are going to press the charges in the courts. Will you pardon me if I say that that isn’t playing the game?”

“You may say anything you wish to say, if you will only make it sufficiently brief,” was the discouraging rejoinder.

“I have already made my suggestion. It must be evident to you that a consolidation of interests with us is by far the most sensible plan you can adopt. You can hardly hope to do business here, as an independent coal operator, in the heart of a region which we have developed. There would be constant friction; in the market, with your labor, with the transportation companies. I am not authorized to make a definite proposal, but if you will organize your new company on a conservative basis with a modest capitalization, I feel sure that our people would take you in as a subsidiary, share for share at par value.”

“Are you quite through?” asked the new Tregarvon, when the emissary paused to take breath. “If you are, you may have my answer in one word--No.”

“I am sure you are deciding too hastily, and because you haven’t given the plan sufficient thought. As I have pointed out, there is no such thing as vindictiveness in business; but when you deliberately set up that standard for yourself, you mustn’t expect the other fellow to lie down and let you run the truck-wheels over him.”

“By which you mean that if I refuse to let you swallow me peaceably, you will do it the other way?”

“That is your own deduction--not mine,” said the bookkeeper in the tone of one trying to soothe a wayward child.

“Then listen to me, Mr. Thaxter. Some scoundrels--possibly you and your people--have harried me like a lot of pirates. Nothing has been left undone in the effort either to swindle me out of my property on the one hand, or to force me out of it on the other. But now the shoe is on the other foot”--he was leaning across the corner of the desk and emphasizing the words with a clenched fist beating softly upon the oak--“we have Sawyer where we can make him talk. We know that he can implicate you, individually, in one of the criminalities; and perhaps he can tell us something about the others. Mr. Thaxter, I am going to sift these bushwhackings to the bottom, and you know best whether or not you or the combination you represent can afford to heap more fuel on the fire now by fighting me in the manner you have suggested. That is all I have to say, I believe, and I shall have to ask you to excuse me. This is my busy day.”

In the early evening of the fourth day after Thaxter’s visit, Carfax made one of his infrequent descents of the mountain, driving a ridiculously high-priced car, the purchasing of which had been his latest extravagance. The coke-ovens in the long rank were aglow with the fires of the initial charging, and the air of the valley was murky with the smoke of the new industry. Wilmerding and Duncan were at the mine, and Tregarvon had just finished his dinner when Carfax entered the dining-room.