Part 21

“You do turn up once in a while, don’t you?” said the solitary diner not too hospitably. “You’re late for dinner, but doubtless Uncle William can find you something. You will have to eat alone. I have some work to do.”

Carfax followed the worker into the front office and, when the lights were turned on, dropped into a chair.

“I don’t want any dinner,” he said. “Or rather I should say, I’m due to show up at Mrs. Caswell’s at the proper dinner-hour.”

Tregarvon had a telegraph pad under his hand and he took time to write a brief message before he said, half-absently: “We keep working-men’s hours here.”

“Which is a delicate way of intimating that I’d better go chase myself and quit bothering you?” put in the intruder with a gentle chuckle. “All right; I’ll vanish presently. But first I’d like to ask if you are still clinging to your fantastic idea of making somebody suffer for the dynamiting?”

“I am; and I don’t see anything fantastic about it. A number of crimes have been committed, and I have no notion of compounding a felony by letting the perpetrators get away. Morgan McNabb is the key to the situation, and I have never understood why you and Judge Birrell turned him loose and gave him a chance to disappear. It has cost me a pretty penny to trace him, but I’ve got him now. He is under arrest in Dallas, Texas.”

“And you are going to have him brought back and given the third degree?”

“Precisely. I have just written the telegram.”

Carfax was feeling in his pockets for his cigarette-case, going about it leisurely as one who would gain time.

“McNabb is only a poor devil of a mountaineer, too ignorant to be held fully accountable, don’t you think?” he ventured at the match-lighting.

“That may be. But he knows the real criminal or criminals who employed him. I’ve been an easy mark all my life, Poictiers, but that is a thing of the past now. I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

The golden youth was blowing delicate little smoke rings at the ceiling.

“So you have, and the new leaf isn’t as pleasant reading as some of the old ones, Vance,” he commented, speaking slowly and without a trace of the lisp. “Some of the things you are writing down on it are rather sordid, don’t you think? You are a bigger man in some ways, and a much smaller one in some others.”

“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” quoted the one under criticism with a short laugh. “Suppose you elucidate.”

“I will. Up to the time of your father’s death you were as much of a _flâneur_ as I’ve always been. You didn’t have to ask for your blessings; you merely reached out and took them--if they didn’t happen to be handed you on a silver platter. During the past few months you’ve been chucked up against life as it really is for the greater part of mankind; a fight, a frantic scramble for a foothold. You’ve made the fight, because you have the good old Cornish fighting blood in you; but while you have been growing on one side you have been shrinking on the other.”

“Go on.”

“Real magnanimity was one of the strongest and most lovable qualities of the man you’ve put off; you’ve lost it completely. Cheerful optimism was one of the other good points, and you’ve dropped it. Just now you are planning first to get square with your enemies, and next to shirk your responsibilities by effacing yourself. What have you done about the new incorporation?”

“I have done exactly what I told you I should. The new company is formed, and the papers for the division of the capital stock are prepared. I am looking for Peters, the family lawyer, on every train, and when he comes the deal will be closed.”

“You tried to tell me the other day what the property arrangement is to be, but I didn’t get it very clearly fixed in my mind,” Carfax offered.

“It is simple. Since you say you don’t want any of the stock, you will be reimbursed for your cash advances out of the first money earned by the mine. The stock is to be divided, sixty per cent to my mother and sister and forty to Judge Birrell for distribution among the original minority stockholders who were swindled out of their holdings by Parker.”

“Parker,” said Carfax musingly. “He will never swindle any more. Did I tell you? I read an item in the New York _Times_. Parker was found dead at his desk in his Broad Street office one day last week.” Then he came back to the matter in hand. “Where do you come in, in the property distribution?”

“I don’t come in; I go out. Wilmerding and Duncan can operate the mine, and I shan’t be needed. I shall go West and try for an engineering job in one of the gold camps.”

“But not before you have had your revenge upon the dynamiters?”

“No; I shall stay long enough to see that part of it through to a finish.”

“You are proving my contention very handsomely, don’t you think?” said the critic quietly; “that you are bigger in some ways and smaller in others? You are telling yourself that this generous thing you are going to do is perfectly magnanimous, and that you are merely raising the magnanimity to the _nth_ power by conserving the ends of pure justice in the prosecution part of it, and by obliterating yourself afterward. But, really, at the bottom of it all there are two rather dismal motives. You want your revenge, and you wish to show the woman in the case that you can turn your back upon her without half trying. Isn’t that true?”

Tregarvon’s grin bordered upon the saturnine. “It’s next to impossible to resent anything you choose to say, Poictiers; that is your one little gift--to be able to flay your friends without getting yourself disliked. Let’s talk of something else. How long is Elizabeth going to stay at Judge Birrell’s?”

This time the golden youth was able to call up the cherubic smile in all its glory.

“Not very much longer now. She, too, is going West.”

“What? Elizabeth? You don’t know her as well as I do. Her ‘West’ begins and ends at the summit of the Alleghenies.”

“Nevertheless, she is planning to make the grand tour--in a private car.”

Tregarvon reached suddenly across the corner of the table-desk and grasped the hand of many helpings.

“There is enough of the old Vance Tregarvon left in me to wish you all the joy there is in the world, Poictiers!” he exclaimed, with some touch of the old-time heartiness. “You two were made for each other; I can see it now.”

“You are quite sure there aren’t any inward daggerings behind that, Vance?” said the successful one half wistfully.

“Not in the least. I’m glad. If you or Elizabeth had only told me at first who the other fellow was ... but it is all right now. How did you contrive to persuade her to overlook your bit of play-acting with Richardia?”

The persuader shook his head. “That part of it was pretty serious. It was one of the things that couldn’t very well be explained in cold words. I think Miss Richardia has helped out some. She knew well enough what I did it for.”

“You didn’t do it for me,” Tregarvon interposed bluntly.

“Not at all,” was the quiet rejoinder. “As I have said before, I assumed most naturally that Elizabeth’s happiness was involved, and I didn’t propose to stand by and see you make ducks and drakes of it if I could help it.”

“Never mind; it’s all over now, and you two at least are in a fair way to get what is coming to you. How is Hartridge getting along by this time?”

“Quite well. He is walking with a crutch, and is able to hear his classes.” So much Carfax said in the matter-of-fact manner of one who answers a commonplace categorically. Then he sat up suddenly and snapped his fingers, and the lisping drawl had returned when he went on: “By Jove! that reminds me, don’t you know. Hartridge would like to see you.”

“Why does he wish to see me?”

Carfax spread his hands. “My dear boy, I’m no mind-reader. But I’m sure it’s rather urgent. Will you go?”

Tregarvon sat frowning down upon the papers on the desk for a full half-minute before he looked up to say: “I can’t go, Poictiers. I don’t care especially to meet Hartridge, or to listen to the begging-off plea which he is probably going to make. He as good as told me that he was jealous, and was trying to get square. Besides, I haven’t seen Richardia since this mad-work whirl began, and--and it will be easier for me if I don’t see her again.”

Carfax had his answer ready. “You’ll not meet Richardia at Highmount. Elizabeth is staying with the Caswells for a few days, and Richardia went home to Westwood House at three o’clock. I know, because I drove her in my car. Hartridge has his rooms in the laboratory building, and you needn’t show up at the president’s house at all if you don’t wish to.”

Tregarvon hesitated a moment and then glanced at his watch.

“I’ll go--a little later,” he decided abruptly. “I don’t know that I owe the professor anything but an action at law for helping to destroy my drilling plant, but I’ll give him a chance to say what he has to say. Now run along and keep your dinner engagement. I can drive up in my own car when I am ready.”

“About what time will that be?” queried Carfax, hanging upon the threshold of the door of leave-takings. “I ought to let Hartridge know when to expect you.”

Again Tregarvon looked at his watch. “Say eight o’clock. Will that do?”

“Perfectly, I should think.” It was the golden youth’s cue to disappear, but still he lingered. “That telegram you have just written, Vance; are you going to send it to-night?”

Tregarvon answered without looking up. “Certainly. And to-morrow I shall notify the sheriff to send a deputy after McNabb.”

Carfax went out, closing the door softly behind him. But when the big expensive motor-car had cut its half-circle to head toward the mountain pike it was brought to a stand at the railroad station, and the driver left it for a minute or two while he had speech through the ticket-window with Orcutt, the night telegraph operator. Daddy Layne, with nothing better to do, was warming his shins at the waiting-room stove, and though he listened, after the manner of his kind, he caught only one sentence of the low-toned talk. That was Orcutt’s, spoken after Layne’s keen old eyes had glimpsed the passing of something that looked like a yellow-backed bank-note through the window. “It’ll be as much as my job’s worth, Mr. Carfax, but I’ll do it.”

A half-hour later, while Layne was dozing in a corner of the superheated waiting-room, Tregarvon came in with his message to the Dallas chief of police. This time there was no effort made to keep the talk from being overheard.

“I’m mighty sorry, Mr. Tregarvon, but I can’t get it off to-night,” was the operator’s deprecatory protest when the message was handed in. “The commercial wires are grounded--been that way all the evening. Mighty sorry, but these things will happen once in a while. Yes; sure! first thing in the morning, if I have to put it through the despatcher’s office. Good night.”

XXXI

On Pisgah’s Height

Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge was reading before the cheerful grate fire in his sitting-room when his visitor was brought up by the old negro janitor.

“Come in, Mr. Tregarvon, and be at home,” he said, rising, with the aid of his crutch, for the welcoming, and making difficult work of it. “Draw your chair to the fire and be comfortable. It was kind of you to----”

“Carfax brought me your message,” Tregarvon interrupted, rather more brusquely than he meant to. “In a certain sense I suppose I am responsible for your present condition, and since you wished to see me----”

“Ah, yes; but I didn’t wish to give myself the opportunity of reproaching you for the accident, I assure you,” was the deprecatory rejoinder. “You were not even constructively to blame for my cowardly legs.” Then he added, with a touch of naïve humor: “I trust they have sufficiently learned their lesson.”

“You are having a pretty long siege of it,” Tregarvon offered, finding himself sympathizing where he had meant to be coldly self-contained.

“Old bones,” returned the schoolmaster, with his quaint smile. “They haven’t knitted quite as rapidly as they might. But let us hope that there is nothing worse than broken bones in store for any of us. May I be very frank with you, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“I shall set you the example. I can conceive of only one reason why you should wish to see me, Mr. Hartridge. You have been told that I am still determined to exact an eye for an eye in the matter of bringing certain criminals to justice, and you would like to forestall your arrest as an accessory. Am I right?”

At this the quaint smile became quizzical. “Partly; but only partly. Have you taken any steps as yet?”

“I have. After a good bit of trouble and expense I have at last succeeded in tracing the man Morgan McNabb. He is under arrest in Dallas, Texas, and I shall have him brought back as soon as the necessary papers can be obtained.”

“And your object in bringing him back?”

“Is to make him give the name of the man who hired him to put the dynamite under my drilling plant. That man is going to the penitentiary, Mr. Hartridge, if any effort of mine can send him there.”

The schoolmaster removed his spectacles to polish them, and for a time sat staring with unshielded eyes into the heart of the coal fire in the grate.

“You have all the precedents on your side,” he admitted at length. “It is your right to prosecute if you choose to do so. Yet I venture to predict that you will be exceedingly sorry if you bring Morgan McNabb to Tennessee and extort his confession--a confession which will necessarily be made public. Besides, there is a much easier way in which you can apprehend his principal.”

“Are you willing to indicate the way?” snapped Tregarvon.

“Not altogether willing; no. You are at heart a much flintier young man than you appeared to be when we first met, Mr. Tregarvon. It is an inheritance from some one of your Cornish forebears, I imagine. But I have allowed myself to be overpersuaded. You have your car here?”

“Yes.”

“I shall ask you to drive me. Will you trust me that far?”

Tregarvon rose, smiling grimly. “I shall have you for my hostage. If you are about to have me ambushed, I shall make you share my risk. Do we go at once?”

Hartridge limped to a closet and found his overcoat, and Tregarvon helped him to put it on. Then he gave the temporary cripple an arm through the laboratory corridor and down the stair. At the steps he lifted Hartridge bodily into the mechanician’s seat of the car. As yet there had been no hint given of their destination, but when he took his place behind the wheel Tregarvon asked for driving directions.

“Westward, on the cross-mountain road,” was the brief reply, and no other word was exchanged until the swiftly driven machine was approaching the intersection of the cross-road with the west-brow pike. Then Hartridge said: “To your left,” and Tregarvon had a sudden sinking of the heart. A mile away he could see the lights of Westwood House, and a great fear rose up to unsteady his hand as he made the turn out of the cross-road.

Tregarvon’s fear was realized in some measure when, at Hartridge’s direction, the car made a second left-hand turn into the Westwood grounds and was brought to a stand before the door of the old mansion. “I have obeyed you blindly thus far,” he said, as he was lifting Hartridge out of the car. “But now you must tell me. Is it Judge Birrell?”

“Wait,” said the schoolmaster, and Tregarvon helped the lame man up the steps and steadied him while he groped for the knocker. Before he could knock, the door opened silently under the hand of the judge’s daughter, and Tregarvon again gave Hartridge an arm to help him over the threshold.

Though the hall was but dimly lighted he saw at once that there had been a pitiful change in Richardia. There was the shadow of a deep grief in her eyes when she greeted him, and the hand that she gave him was nerveless and cold. He had never seen her in black before, and that, and the chill of the great hall and the grave silence of his car companion, made him feel as if he had entered a house of mourning.

Without a word in explanation the changed Richardia led him to the stair and signed to him to precede her. Tregarvon hesitated only long enough to see that the professor was hobbling away toward the lighted library. Then he stood aside and slipped an arm under Richardia’s. “They hadn’t told me you had been ill,” he said reproachfully; and as they went up together the nearness of her set his blood afire and for the moment he forgot the scene in the deep wood timing itself in the Sunday afternoon of revealment.

At the stairhead a door stood ajar, with the flickering light of an open fire in the room beyond shining through the narrow opening. With a quick premonition that a tragedy was about to be revealed, Tregarvon followed his guide into the room. It was a huge chamber, spacious enough to belittle the few pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, and in the great four-poster bed lay a young man with an arm in a sling and his bandaged head propped high among the pillows. Though the face of the sick man was haggard and emaciated, Tregarvon recognized it instantly. It was the face of the handsome young fellow who had kept the Sunday afternoon tryst with Richardia.

It was only natural that he should be checked by a sudden feeling of antagonism, but before it could find expression it was swallowed up in an astoundment too great to be measured. Richardia had led him to the bedside and she was saying quietly: “Mr. Tregarvon has come, brother. Shall I leave him alone with you?”

The sick man roused himself with an effort that was plainly distressful. “Yes,” he said shortly. And after Richardia had gone: “I’m the man you’re looking for.”

Tregarvon dragged a chair to the bedside and sat down. In the rush of conflicting emotions one exultant fact was hammering itself into his brain and dominating all others: Richardia’s secret had not been her lover’s secret; it was her _brother’s_. In the turmoil of readjustment, it was inevitable that the generous impulses of former days--the days before the _débâcle_--should come swiftly to the surface.

“I’m glad to be here, Mr. Birrell; and that is entirely apart from anything you may be going to tell me,” he said quickly. “Are you quite sure you are able to talk?”

“I’ve got to talk; it’s up to me now. Sister told me a little while ago that you had caught Morgan McNabb; that you’re going to have him brought back here so that you can give him the third degree. I’m the man you want. Morgan did only what I made him do.”

Tregarvon was beginning to understand a little. “Perhaps you’d better tell it all, if you feel equal to it,” he suggested soberly. Then he added: “I’m not going to be your judge, Mr. Birrell.”

The sick man rocked his head on the pillows.

“You won’t understand; I couldn’t make anybody understand. But it’s got to be told. Do you know what that crook Parker did to my father?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Yes; all of it.”

“Well, it made a devil of me. I was only a kid then, but it seemed as if I grew to be a man between two days. I tried to kill Parker. Maybe you know that, too.”

“Yes; I have heard about it.”

“He didn’t die; and he spent his money like water until he got me indicted. Then I broke my father’s heart by showing the yellow streak--running away. I’ve been hid out down in Arizona ever since, but I always meant to come back and stand the gaff some day.”

“Go on,” said Tregarvon gravely.

“I didn’t come back by the railroad. The yellow streak showed up again, and I dodged the sheriff by walking in over the mountain from Piketown. The McNabbs hid me out in the ‘Pocket.’ They told me you were Parker’s man, and that you had come to finish what he’d begun. Afterward they told me you were making love to my sister, and that settled it.”

“I see,” said Tregarvon. Then: “Why didn’t you come out in the open like a man and find out a few things for yourself?”

“I couldn’t. The indictment was still hanging over me; as it is yet. And I was crazy mad. I swore I’d run you out of the country or kill you if you didn’t go. I made Morgan McNabb help me. He’d been mixed up in a feud years ago and had ambushed a man, and I was the only one who knew it. I told him I’d give him away if he didn’t help me run you off.”

“Your sister knew you had come back?”

“Yes; but she didn’t know anything else. She thought I was afraid to show myself on account of the old trouble--as I was. She was trying to fix things so that I could come back here to my father and Westwood House. I did come, but they brought me on a stretcher. Somebody set the leaves afire that night in the old negro burying-ground, and the dynamite went off and caught me while I was trying to stamp the fire out. The jig’s up now. All you’ve got to do is to send for the sheriff.”

Tregarvon saw that it was time to intervene. The sick man’s breath was coming in gasps and his face was livid.

“You mustn’t try to talk any more now,” he said, rising and taking the thin hand that was so much like Richardia’s in his own. “For a good many reasons you have nothing to fear from me. Of course, you know now that I am in no sense Parker’s representative. So far from it, the papers are already drawn which will restore to your father and his friends the property that Parker stole from them. I meant to do that from the first, if I should be lucky enough to find the coal.”

The grip of the thin fingers tightened upon the hand of reassurance. “My God!” breathed the prodigal, “and I’ve been trying to kill you! Mr. Tregarvon, can you go one step farther and--and turn Morgan McNabb loose? That’s what made me frame it up with sister and Hartridge and Mr. Carfax to bring you here to-night.”

“McNabb will not be brought back; I promise you that. Shall I send your sister up to you?”

“Not--not right now; tell her to play something; something low and soft that’ll make the devil let me alone. I want to think. I--I reckon I’m willing to go to the convict camps now for trying to square up with Parker; I reckon I _ought_ to go!”

Tregarvon went out softly, closing the door behind him and groping his way down the stair. Richardia was waiting for him in the hall below, as he hoped she would be, and she led him across to the drawing-room where there were lights and a wood-fire purring and crackling in the big stone fireplace.

“Tell me,” she entreated.

“There is nothing to tell--nothing that you haven’t already guessed. I am completely disarmed, as you knew I would be. I have assured your brother that he has nothing to fear from me.”

“It has been very dreadful,” she said, moving aside to hold her hands out to the fire.

“How badly was he hurt in the explosion?”

“So badly that it is only within the past few days that we have dared to hope. Mr. Carfax hasn’t told you?”

“Not a word. Your secret has been guarded very carefully.”

“But now it is a secret no longer. If he gets well it will only be to face a trial for the attempt upon Mr. Parker’s life.”

“Nothing will come of that,” Tregarvon predicted confidently. “Parker is dead; he died suddenly in his New York office a few days ago. And no twelve Tennesseeans could ever be found who would convict your brother for trying to avenge his father’s wrongs.”

“We are your poor debtors--all of us,” she went on. “You are heaping coals of fire on our heads, and--and they _burn_! Of course, you know now that I was my brother’s accomplice?”

“I know nothing of the sort; of course, you were not!”

“But I was--in a way. All along, I feared that it was he who was making, or at least planning, all the trouble you were having. He was _so_ bitter!”

Tregarvon nodded complete comprehension. “I knew you were anxious about somebody; I thought, at first, that it was Hartridge, and later that it was your father. You have had a heavy burden to carry; and I have been doing what I could to make it heavier.”

“You have,” she said quite frankly.

He did not affect to misunderstand.