Part 3

“Now that is what I call downright inhospitable,” he laughed, with the faintest suspicion of a lisp on the sibilants, “after you had written me to come. Your letter is out in the go-cart, if Merkley didn’t forget to put it in my letter-case. Also, after I’ve driven that unspeakable car of yours over a thousand miles of the worst roads the rain ever rained on----”

“Oh, good Lord, Poictiers--you’re welcome; as welcome as the sunshine! Don’t rub it into me that way. But the place; the--the----”

Carfax’s smile was cherubic; or rather it would have been if the womanish lines of his face had not made it seraphic.

“No apologies, you inexpressible old coal-digger. I knew you were only joking when you asked me--or rather dared me--to come down. But the notion seized me, and here I am. Here, likewise, is Rucker, the machinist, who will happily shift for himself; and what is more serious, perhaps, here also is Merkley. In all human probability I shall bleat like a sheep at the corn-pones and the hardtack, and all that; but Merkley was once in the service of the Duke of Marlford and his agonies----”

Tregarvon laughed, and the stresses came off.

“Luckily, I have acquired Uncle William, or, perhaps I should say, he has acquired me, since I wrote you, and you won’t starve, whatever happens to Merkley. Find your way up-stairs and take possession, while I tell the old uncle what he is up against in the way of supper-getting. You’ll find a bath, with ice-cold mountain spring water--my one luxury--at the end of the upper corridor.”

Considering his resources, which were few and strictly limited, Uncle William shed a lustre all his own upon the dinner for two, which was served in the makeshift dining-room as soon as Carfax came down.

“I’m sure you needn’t find fault with your table,” was the guest’s comment, when the snowy biscuits and the egg-bread, the fried chicken and the riced potatoes had passed in review. “I only wish I could induce an Uncle William to adopt me.”

Thus the master; but the London-bred man was not faring so well. It was Uncle William’s effort to orient the valet--an effort vocalizing itself through the screened windows of Tregarvon’s dining-room--that reopened the question of the practicabilities.

“Is you-all dat gemman’s white niggah?” was the blunt demand, made when Merkley, dinner-inclined, ventured into the sacred precincts of Uncle William’s detached cook-house.

“H-I am Mr. Carfax’s man, and h-I’ll trouble you to serve my dinner,” was the lofty reply, returned in Merkley’s best tone of aloofness.

“I’s askin’ ef you is dat gemman’s white niggah!”--scornfully. “Ef you is, you jes’ sots youse’f down on dat door-step an’ waits, same as any turrer niggah. When de quality folks gets t’rough, an’ _I_ gets t’rough, den you kin have what’s lef’.”

Carfax waved a shapely hand toward the open window.

“The irrepressible conflict has begun,” he remarked. “What do you do in such cases in--er--Coalville?”

“We go down on our knees, metaphorically speaking, and plead with an outraged and righteously indignant Uncle William,” Tregarvon laughed; and when the old negro made his next appearance in the dining-room, the Philadelphian did it so skilfully that Merkley was provided for at a side table in the hall; not of grace, as certain mumblings from the cook-house proved, but because the master desired it.

“That settles our status,” said Carfax, with the cherubic smile, “at least down to Rucker, the mechanician. I wonder what has become of him?”

“If he is the same mechanical barbarian you had last year, he’ll not go hungry,” Tregarvon ventured; and then, with the assurance of a tried friend: “Whatever possessed you to come down here _en suite_, Poictiers? Did I give you the impression that the Ocoee headquarters was a summer-resort hotel?”

Carfax laughed joyously. “You certainly did not. But I was tired of Lenox, and it was too early for the shooting. Moreover, you said you wanted your car, and the fit took me to drive it. That accounts for Rucker; and I suppose I account for poor Merkley. He is due to have the time of his gay young life--don’t you think?--with Uncle William and the elemental environment? But tell me more about your affair. What have you been letting yourself in for, down here in the Southern backwoods?”

Uncle William had removed the cloth, and had put a tobacco-jar and two pipes on the table.

“It is the best we can do, even for you,” said Tregarvon, indicating the tobacco aftermath apologetically. “Nobody has ever seen a bottle of wine in Coalville, and the whiskey of the country isn’t fit to drink.” Then he plunged abruptly into the story of the Ocoee, so far as he knew it, giving the last-resort reasons why he was trying to make a family windbreak of it, and Carfax heard him through patiently.

“Then it sums itself up about like this: You haven’t anything at present, and if you succeed in getting anything, the other fellows will nab it,” he said, when Tregarvon had finished. “Is that about the size of it?”

“You have surrounded it completely. Only I am eliminating the ‘if.’ I mean to get something, and I don’t mean to let the other fellows get away with it.”

“Any move made yet?” queried Carfax, between delicate little puffs at the pipe of hospitality.

“Not visibly. The trust people will scarcely move in the matter until after I have proved my first proposition, which is that the two veins of coal become one farther back in the mountain. But the McNabbs may not wait that long.”

“Who are the McNabbs?”

Tregarvon explained again, at some length, not omitting mention of a mysterious leaf fire which had threatened to destroy a tramway trestle, and other small accidents which had somewhat impeded the work of the past fortnight, and which were blankly unaccountable save upon a theory of somebody’s malice.

“Why don’t you buy ’em off?” said Carfax casually. Money was his cure-all for most human ills.

“For one reason, they haven’t given me a chance. For another, I don’t propose to be held up and robbed. They haven’t any title to the land; they have never had a shadow of a title.” Then he broke off suddenly, glanced at his watch, and changed the subject. “How much too tired are you to take a five-mile spin with me up the mountain in the car, Poictiers?” he asked.

Carfax’s eyebrows went up in mild surprise. Nevertheless, he said: “Call it a go--if you can find Rucker.”

“Never mind Rucker; I’ll drive you myself,” said Tregarvon, and a few minutes later the big car, with its dazzling headlamps picking out the way, was storming up the steep grades of the Pisgah pike to Highmount.

IV

In Which Carfax Enlists

On the broad veranda of the administration building at Highmount, which looked down sidewise upon the twinkling light or two of Coalville and faced on even terms an opposing shoulder of the mountain where the newly erected drill derrick stood, Carfax was holding Miss Farron and four privileged members of the senior class at bay, while Tregarvon contentedly monopolized Miss Richardia Birrell.

The two thus comfortably isolated had quickly exhausted the commonplaces. Tregarvon was made to know thus early that one of Miss Richardia’s charms was her ability to plunge at once into the heart of things; and the talk had turned upon Carfax, distance and the hubbub of the others sanctioning personalities.

“Oh, you don’t know him yet,” Tregarvon protested, in refutation of a remark of Miss Birrell’s based upon Carfax’s apparent satisfaction with his present besetment. “He is anything but a butterfly, in the meaning you imply; and I say this in spite of his pretty face and airy gabble, and the lisp and his bad habit of slipping instinctively, as you might say, into the easiest chair in sight. I’ve summered him and wintered him, and I know.”

“I like loyalty,” said Miss Richardia, with the air of one to whom abstractions are as daily bread. “Are you going to winter him in Coalville?”

“No such good luck as that for me, I’m afraid. After the shooting begins, I don’t imagine he has a week untaken. You may not believe it, but Poictiers is in demand--where he is known and appreciated.”

“I am sure we shall appreciate him,” was the half-mocking rejoinder. “Young men who come to Highmount driving their own tonneau cars are not so plentiful.”

Tregarvon’s laugh was not more than decently boastful.

“This particular tonneau car happens to be mine,” he explained. “Besides, Carfax might discount your praise. His latest purchase is an imported Dumont-Sillery, I believe. It probably cost three times as much as mine; and on the other side of the water, at that.”

“How easily and familiarly you talk of imported luxuries and ‘the other side’,” she commented, still in the mocking vein. And then, with an exactly proportioned touch of wistfulness: “I wish I might have a glimpse into your world; the world you have turned your back upon--temporarily.”

Tregarvon slid into this little pitfall without realizing that it had been digged especially for him, thus proving that social hunger may be as blind as any of the other appetites. So far from suspecting pitfalls, he was thinking that there were many less enjoyable diversions than sitting in a moderately secluded corner of a dimly lighted veranda in the company of a young woman who was kind enough to evince an interest in a chance visitor’s proper sphere.

“It is not such a very high-planed world, the one I’ve left behind, Miss Richardia; not nearly as human as this of Coalville and Mount Pisgah,” he returned. “I believe I have seen more real human nature in the past three weeks than I had ever seen before.”

“You mean that the other world is artificial?”

“It is; without intending to be, especially. We are not elemental any more; not even in our passions. We do things in a certain well-defined way because that is the way other people do them. We are afraid, or at least disinclined, to strike out on new lines.”

“You have struck out on a new line, haven’t you?” she asked.

“I have been pushed out, in this Ocoee matter. There is enough of the elemental surviving in me to make me break with traditions and become a hustler when it is a question of bread and meat for my mother and sister. But apart from that, I suppose I am quite as hidebound as other men of my world.”

“And Mr. Carfax?” she queried. “Is he a slave to conventions, too?”

“Poictiers is a law unto himself in a good many ways; but on the whole, he’s tarred with the same stick. You will remark his regalia: I couldn’t have pulled him up here to-night with a three-inch hawser if he hadn’t happened to have evening clothes in his kit. And he has brought his man; a typical Cockney valet, knee-smalls, Oxford ties, and all.”

Miss Richardia’s quiet laugh fitted the incongruity. But when she spoke again it was of the business affair.

“You are at work on the Ocoee?” she inquired.

“Yes, indeed! I am going to make a spoon or spoil a perfectly good horn. You must all come over and see my test-drilling outfit when we get it going.”

“Is it your machine that we can see over beyond the glen? I wonder if you could make me understand what you are going to do?” she said, with interest real or so skilfully feigned that Tregarvon could not distinguish the difference.

He expressed himself as being very willing to try; did try at some considerable length. And Miss Birrell, notwithstanding an air of abstraction that seemed to come and go, appeared to grasp the mechanical details.

“You have no doubt that you will succeed? It will be fine to prove to everybody that all that was needed was for some one to come from the other world--your world--to show them how to do it.”

Tregarvon winced, seeing now the pitfall into which he had suffered himself to be led.

“Is that the impression I’ve been giving you?” he asked. “Do I advertise myself as such a blooming bounder as that would signify?”

“Forgive me,” she said, with a little laugh which might have meant anything from veiled ridicule to a keen appreciation of a palpable hit. “I suspect it is the way of your world to be austerely sufficient unto itself. You may contradict me if I am wrong.”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed generously. “You are as much of my world as I am.”

“Oh, no!” she objected: “we are only poor outlanders. I was called that once, in Boston; not spitefully, of course, but rather as an excuse for my shortcomings, I fancy.”

“Whoever said it was a snob,” he exploded. “Boston is horribly provincial, at times, you know.”

“And Philadelphia never is?”

“I shouldn’t dare to make the claim too broad. But I am sure we recognize the fact that there is an America west of the Alleghenies--and south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

“That is charitable, at least,” she conceded. “Still, you think it is left for you to demonstrate success where others have failed--in the Ocoee undertaking.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” he answered, with due modesty. “Indeed, I know little or nothing about the early history of the mine. My father became interested in it some years before he died, and I think he always regarded it as a dead loss. But he bought the stock, or rather, I should say, had it forced upon him, when it was pretty cheap, and----”

“Yes,” she interrupted, a little forbiddingly, he thought; and then she began to speak of other things as if groping for a more congenial common ground. It was found when Tregarvon confessed to an amiable weakness for good music.

“I’ll play for you if you wish,” she said almost abruptly; and it was an hour later when Carfax entered the music-room to break the spell which Miss Richardia had woven about her single listener.

“You must do this again, but not too often,” was Tregarvon’s half-jesting warning to his entertainer at the moment of leave-taking; a moment snatched while Carfax was giving the privileged seniors a spin around the campus drive in the yellow car.

“Why not often?--or as often as you care to come?” the musician asked indifferently.

“Because I am much too impressionable. You could very easily make me forget some things that it is up to me to remember.”

“For example?” she prompted.

“It’s a long story, and Poictiers won’t give me time to tell it now. But some other evening, if I may come?”

“Why shouldn’t you come when you feel like it? I hope you won’t go away underestimating your welcome--you and Mr. Carfax. You owe it to us to come frequently, so that the novelty will wear off--for the student body. I’ll venture to assert that Miss Longstreet has been having the time of her life keeping order in the dormitories this evening. Good night; and give my love to Uncle William.”

“To Uncle William? Then you know him?”

She laughed and showed him that Carfax was waiting for him. “Uncle William will know who sent the message if you say ‘Miss Dick’,” she explained; and he was obliged to accept this as an answer to his eager question.

The road down the mountain was a speeding track only in spots, and between stretches the big car crept at a snail’s pace on the brakes, and so permitted conversation.

Carfax began it in genial raillery, congratulating Tregarvon upon the accessibility of Highmount and the very evident heartiness of his welcome.

“You can’t desiccate entirely down here, Vance, with such a well-spring of youth and beauty as that within shouting distance,” he remarked.

But Tregarvon was thinking pointedly of Miss Richardia when he rejoined: “She is a puzzle to me, Poictiers; nothing less.”

“The charming music teacher, you mean? Peaches-and-cream, I’d call her, if she’d let me.”

“You’re blind; blind as a mole!” retorted Tregarvon. “Why, man! she is anything but that--or those.”

“Doubtless,” Carfax laughed. “They are all ‘anything but that’ when you get down under the pose. But ‘peaches-and-cream’ is Miss Birrell’s pose, just the same; not the conventional kind they serve you at the Waldorf or Ritz-Carlton, of course, but the sort you get when the cream comes thick and rich from your own dairy, and the peaches are picked, sun-warm, in your own orchard. You may tell her that, if you like, and palm it off as original with you. Strikes me it’s rather neat.”

“Oh, you go hang!” said Tregarvon. “I don’t have to work in your compliments, second-hand. I can turn ’em myself, at a pinch.”

At this point a half-mile of good road beckoned for speed, and the talk was interrupted. When it was resumed at the next curving hazard in the pike, Carfax had somewhat to say about the Ocoee.

“What do you know about the ancient history of your mine, Vance?” he asked, when the topic was fairly launched.

“Nothing much, in detail. Why?”

“I was asking for information. President Caswell was speaking of it while you were in the music-room with Miss Birrell. He came out and sat with us for half an hour or so. There is a mystery of some sort connected with the Ocoee.”

“Sure!” said Tregarvon. “The mystery is six feet thick, and it consists of a layer of good solid sandstone. I’m about to penetrate it with a test-drill.”

“No; I didn’t mean that,” Carfax objected. “It is another kind of mystery. I’ll tell you what Doctor Caswell said, and you may draw your own conclusions. We had been talking about superstitions and their hold upon humanity. I was scoffing, as usual, but the president seemed inclined to a belief that Providence or fate, or whatever you wish to call it, does interfere sometimes; and that these interferences form a basis for some of the convictions we call superstitions.”

“All of which would seem to be a good many miles from a pair of coal seams made profitless by a stone ‘horse’ between them,” suggested Tregarvon mildly.

“I’m coming to that; the distance isn’t so great as it may seem. The doctor rode his notion as if it were a hobby. He spoke of the well-grounded belief in the saying that ‘murder will out,’ and insisted that the facts proved the truth of this saying; facts which were often mysterious. Then he referred to that other pet notion of the bulk of mankind: that misfortune pursues the possessor of ill-gotten gains. To my astonishment, he pointed to your Ocoee property as an example.”

“The dickens he did!” exclaimed Tregarvon, with interest suddenly awakened. “How did he make the Ocoee fit in?”

“That is the peculiar part of it. When I betrayed my complete ignorance of matters Ocoeean by beginning to ask questions, he shut up like a clam. All I could get out of him was an assertion that misfortunes had accompanied every succeeding attempt to open the mine, and that they would doubtless continue to follow until justice was done.”

“But justice to whom?” queried Tregarvon. “You didn’t let it rest at that, I hope.”

“I tried not to, but he gave me a dignified cold shoulder and referred me to you; said you doubtless knew all the circumstances, and would, he hoped, take proper steps toward removing the curse.”

The descent of Pisgah was accomplished, and Tregarvon steered the yellow car into an empty warehouse which was to be its garage.

Later, when he was showing his guest to the sleeping-room made ready for him by Uncle William, he said: “I don’t wish to pull you into this thing with me blindfolded, Poictiers. If there is a skeleton in the Ocoee closet, I’ll have it out and give it decent Christian burial before I ask you to back me.”

But at this, Carfax appeared at his multi-millionaire best.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, old man. You will find me some old clothes to-morrow morning and we’ll go up and set your test-drill at work. Further along, when more money is needed, I’ll go somewhere to a bank and turn the fortunate spigot. We’ve got to make a go of your mine now, if only to show Doctor Caswell that the superstitions can’t prove up on this particular homestead.”

V

Partly Sentimental

Carfax’s promise to stay and see the Ocoee experiment fairly on its feet was made in good faith, as the idlers at Tait’s store, and more than these, a London-bred and disconsolate Merkley, were shortly given to understand. Moreover, the golden youth’s threat of wearing old clothes and dipping into the crude mechanical processes of the experiment was also carried out; which not only deepened Merkley’s conviction that he had attached himself to a mild-mannered lunatic of a peculiarly American type, but left him without an occupation--a mere fragment of urban flotsam eddying in the backlash of a rude current of bucolic unfamiliarity.

Unlike Rucker, the mechanician, who promptly donned overalls and jumper, pulled his tight-fitting burglar’s cap down to his ears, and put himself at the head of Tregarvon’s drilling squad on the mountain top, Merkley took to drink and the company of the loungers on Tait’s porch. Here he became (though unhappily without knowing it) a target for the shrewd wit of the idlers, and, what he was even further from suspecting, the gossip circle’s chief source of information touching the daily progress of the latest attempt to make a silk purse out of the Ocoee sow’s ear.

At first there was little for Merkley to tell, and the army of leisure, smoking its corn-cob pipes and whittling the corners of the packing-boxes on Tait’s porch, looked on and amused itself by slyly baiting the disconsolate Londoner.

Day by day, Tregarvon, Carfax, and the promoted chauffeur turned out early in the morning, took their places with the native laborers in the tram-car, and were lifted to the scene of their labors on high Pisgah. At sunset they came down, ate much, smoked a little, talked less, and, save for an occasional evening when Tregarvon and his guest got out the yellow automobile and drove to Highmount College, went early to bed as those who had earned their rest by good, honest muscle-weariness.

But when the smoke plume streaming bravely from the stack of the mountain-top drilling plant announced the actual beginning of the experiment, Merkley brought news to Tait’s. Something had gone wrong on the mountain summit; something was continually going wrong. The two young men inhabiting the tumble-down office-building across the railroad-track no longer went to bed immediately after their evening meal. Instead, there were prolonged conferences behind the closed door of the dining-room in the rear.

In addition to this, Rucker, characterized by Merkley as a despised, greasy-handed mechanic, whose burglarish aspect would earn him the attentions of a plain-clothes policeman in any properly Scotland-Yarded city of the world, was sometimes called in to these dining-room conferences, while he, Merkley, once the confidential and trusted valet of his Grace the Duke of Marlford, was excluded. At this point in his narrative, Merkley, being the worse for two or three tiltings of Jeff Walters’s or old man Layne’s jug of corn whiskey, would become tearful and despondent.

These Merklean hints of a changed condition of affairs on Mount Pisgah were well buttressed by sundry discouraging facts. During the making-ready of the drilling plant everything had gone on fairly well. But dating from the hour when Rucker had first sent live steam whistling into the cylinder of the small portable engine which furnished the power, a stream of disaster had trickled discouragingly and persistently upon the experiment.

First the drills went dull and refused to cut the fine-grained sandstone of the plateau; and when Rucker had retempered them, the engine worked water and started a cylinder-head. After the cylinder was repaired, one of the natives who was firing the boiler let the water get too low--to the loosening of some of the boiler-flues, and to the imminent risk of an explosion.