Part 4

Rucker, handiest of mechanics, calked an entire day on the loosened flues, and the machinery was started again. Two hours later the pivot-bolt of the big timber walking-beam which imparted the up-and-down motion to the drill worked loose, and the walking-beam came down, one end of it narrowly missing Tregarvon, and the other wrecking the machinery to the tune of a hundred dollars and an indefinite interval of waiting for renewals.

It was after this last and most disheartening of the disasters, the only one thus far that Rucker had not been able to repair on the spot, that the two young men once more shut the door of the back-office dining-room upon a disappointed London serving-man.

“By George! I’m beginning to come around to your view of it, Poictiers,” said Tregarvon, cramming his pipe with dry tobacco from the jar set out by Uncle William. “These setbacks are knocking us too regularly to fit decently into any chapter of accidents. I’m beginning to believe they are inspired.”

“That is precisely what I have been trying to tell you and Rucker all along, but neither of you would have it that way,” rejoined Carfax coolly.

“Well, carry your theory to a conclusion; who’s doing it?”

“Ah! now you are getting out to a place where the water is over my head,” Carfax admitted, toying delicately with a pipeful of strong “natural-leaf” tobacco. “According to Captain Duncan’s prophecy, you have two possible ill-wishers--haven’t you?--the C. C. & I. people and the McNabbs.”

“Yes; but it is rather incredible on both counts, don’t you think? You can hardly imagine a great corporation getting down on its hands and knees to chuck pebbles into the wheels of our little mechanism up on Pisgah.”

Carfax nodded. Then he said: “How about the McNabbs?”

“It seems rather more in their line, you’d say. And yet I haven’t a shadow of right to accuse them. So far, they are entirely mythological; a mere name mentioned by Captain Duncan and a few others. So far as I am aware, I have not yet seen a McNabb.”

“Whoever it is who is setting these little traps for us is deucedly clever,” remarked Carfax, who was still toying half-heartedly with his long-stemmed pipe. “Rucker is fooled, all right; he still insists that it is mere hard luck.”

“Yes, and that is another argument against the McNabb hypothesis,” Tregarvon put in. “It would take a pretty skilful mechanic to fool Rucker; and from what I can hear, these title-claimants are ignorant mountaineers whose mechanical gifts most probably don’t rise beyond the lock action of an old-fashioned squirrel-rifle or the simple intricacies of a ten-quart whiskey-still.”

“Which brings us back to the original proposition--the C. C. & I.,” suggested Carfax reflectively, and, after a pause: “How long is this last smash going to hang us up?”

“Three or four days. If Rucker gets back from Chattanooga with the new gears by Monday, he will be doing well.”

“All right. To-morrow morning I shall ask you to lend me your yellow chug-wagon. I have a premonition that the spirit will move me to go and run this little mystery of yours into a corner.”

Tregarvon laughed good-naturedly. “You’d much better go back to your own stamping-ground and begin to take up your shooting engagements. You can’t afford to stay down here monkeying with this last-resort hustle of mine.”

The golden youth was looking shrewdly over the smoke wreaths at his companion.

“Is it a last resort, Vance?” he asked quietly, adding: “You have never told me much about the family smash.”

“It was complete, Poictiers; an up-to-date, finished product of modern high-finance methods. The Vanderburg crowd got father against the wall in the steel merger, and--well, you’ll know how bad it was when I tell you that it killed him. The doctors said pneumonia, but it was really a Wall Street sand-bagging. He didn’t leave a will; and when we gathered up the fragments afterward, we knew why he didn’t; there wasn’t enough to make it worth while. So, you see, the Ocoee _is_ a last resort, for me.”

Carfax was musing again.

“Yet you are going to many a comfortable little gold mine,” he said, after a time.

“Uncle Byrd’s Colorado millions?--yes. And I am rather sorry; for Elizabeth’s sake, not less than for my own. We were engaged before Uncle Byrd died, and he knew it. It was entirely unnecessary--not to say cruel--for him to leave his fortune to Elizabeth on the condition that she shouldn’t change her mind and marry somebody else, and to me in case she did.”

Carfax did not comment upon the cruelty. He was perfectly familiar with the terms of Mr. Byrd Tregarvon’s will. Instead, he said: “You hear from Elizabeth regularly, I suppose?”

“Oh, certainly. Duty is always written out in large capitals for Elizabeth.”

“And you think she writes to you from a sense of duty?”

“We needn’t put it just that way. But I have no doubt she conceives it to be her duty to a man she has promised to marry.”

“You shouldn’t say such things as that, Vance, not even to me,” corrected the other man quickly.

“I know I shouldn’t. It is only one of the many ways in which Uncle Byrd’s millions corrode things. Without meaning to, the old uncle stood matters upon an entirely different, and most difficult, footing for us two. We meant to marry: we had passed our word to the various members of the clan that we were going to marry; and the clan was glad because it had always counted upon that outcome for us. So far as a man up a tree might discern, it was a perfectly free choice for both of us.”

“Go on,” said Carfax, when Tregarvon stopped to refill his pipe.

“Then one day, out of a clear sky, _zip!_ comes Uncle Byrd with his will and his millions. After which, of course, Elizabeth can’t throw me over without impoverishing herself; and it is equally out of the question for me to let her do it. Moreover, it is imperatively up to me to make good before I marry her. If I don’t, uncharitable people will say that I let go of the business end of things because I knew that my wife’s money would stop all the holes to keep the wind away. There you have it--sermon length.”

Carfax smoked in sober silence for quite a few minutes. Then he said mildly: “Do you know, Vance, I don’t more than half like your attitude--as you’ve just expressed it?”

Tregarvon’s smile was a grin.

“Tell me what there is about it that you don’t like, and I’ll change it, Poictiers. You are by long odds the best friend I have in the world, and I’d change a dozen attitudes for you, any day in the week.”

“It isn’t lover-like,” Carfax objected.

“You mean that it is too purely cousinly? I can’t very well help that phase of it, you know; we _are_ cousins, and we have been trotting around together, more or less, ever since Noah walked out of the ark. Nothing like that for killing sentiment.”

“But sentiment shouldn’t be killed, if you are going to marry Elizabeth,” insisted the purist.

“We have threshed all that out, time and again, down to the final spear of straw, Elizabeth and I,” Tregarvon explained carelessly. “At first we did try to galvanize ourselves into some of the sentimental throes, but it was such a ridiculous little comedy that Elizabeth herself called it off. We are sufficiently fond of each other; Uncle Byrd’s will is mandatory, and we shall be able to live together without quarrelling. What more could you ask?”

“I don’t know,” said Carfax thoughtfully. “Your summary fits in pretty accurately with the way of the world. Yet, if I had to change places with either of you, I fancy I should ask a good bit more.”

“If you were Elizabeth Wardwell, you wouldn’t ask any more; and if you were Vance Tregarvon, you couldn’t. So there you are.”

Again there was a smoke-beclouded silence, and into the thick of it Carfax launched a pointed query:

“Have you told Elizabeth anything at all about the girls’ school on the mountain--Highmount?”

“Oh, sure; and about the bewitching Miss Birrell, as well. I always tell Elizabeth everything; I haven’t sense enough not to.”

“And her comment?” asked the golden one half-absently.

“On Miss Birrell, you mean? To tell the brazen truth, I expected a wigging; not anything like a jealous outbreak, you understand--Elizabeth is miles above that--but some nicely worded, cool-lipped advice about not pitching the conventions out at the window just because I happen to be living a thousand miles from real civilization--Philadelphia civilization.”

“And you didn’t get it?”

“No, indeed. She didn’t say a word about Miss Birrell, specifically, but she wrote me a good cousinly letter in which she told me how glad she was that I needn’t deny myself all of the social mitigations, and urging me not to let my job on the Ocoee make a one-sided hermit of me. That letter came nearer to making me sentimental over her than anything else she has ever said or done. It did, for a fact.”

Carfax did not vote Aye or No on this. He appeared content to let the sentimental matter rest, since he went back to the business difficulties.

“About this last-resort tussle of yours, Vance, I see now why it is mighty necessary for you to make it win, and I wish you had a little better assurance that you are not up against a brace game; that Old Pisgah hasn’t stacked the cards on you.”

“I can’t very well afford to think of that possibility,” said Tregarvon grimly.

“No, I suppose you can’t. Yet if the genially cynical attitude of the native bystander counts for anything----”

“The loafers over at Tait’s, you mean? They’d scoff at anything that smelled of good, honest work.”

“I wasn’t thinking of them particularly, though they help swell the grand total. But the entire countryside seems to think that you are barking up an empty tree. President Caswell says you are wasting time and money; and that mild-eyed, clerical-looking professor of sciences, Hartridge, fairly chortled when I told him what we were doing. You may remember that he strolled over from Highmount the day we started the drill.”

“What did he say?” Tregarvon demanded.

“He very pointedly said nothing. But there was a look in his skim-milk eyes that recalled the villain in a play.”

Tregarvon was laughing appreciatively. “You have an eye for the dramatic possibilities, always, haven’t you, Poictiers? Why should Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge have it in for me?”

“I can only make a crude guess. Even a mild-eyed professor of sciences may turn, like the trodden worm. You umpire him out of the game pretty ruthlessly when we spend an evening at Highmount.”

“With Miss Richardia? Pshaw! you don’t suppose that dried-up old stick of a pedagogue--why, it would be Beauty and the Beast!”

Carfax’s smile was truly angelic, but it betrayed a wisdom far beyond his years.

“Yes,” he rejoined reflectively, “Hartridge may be all of ten years your senior--possibly fifteen. No doubt he ought to be quietly chloroformed and carried behind the scenes. But, as I say, he chortled--with his eyes--when I told him that you were planning to drill a series of test-holes, continuing the series until you find the place where your two coal seams come together as one. He is a geologist, among other things, and they tell me he knows this region like a book. I believe I’d cultivate him a little, if I were you; even if it did cost me an occasional _tête-à-tête_ with Miss Richardia Birrell.”

Tregarvon scoffed hardily at the suggestion, and the scorn was not thrown away upon his companion. Perhaps that was the reason why Carfax, going to bed a little later, without the ministrations of a lachrymose and whiskey-breathing Merkley, opened the back of his watch to gaze long and earnestly at a picture therein, closing the case finally with a little sigh. Millions are good things in their way, but there be pearls, trampled thoughtlessly underfoot by the millionless, which millions cannot buy.

VI

Daddy Layne, and Others

On the morning after the crash of the walking-beam and the consequent halting of the mountain-top activities, Carfax took the yellow car out of its warehouse garage; and after driving for a half-hour or so up and down the valley road with a tonneauful of speechless but highly delighted children picked up at Tryon’s and Jeff Walters’s, he pulled up in front of Tait’s and went in, ostensibly to buy smoking tobacco, but really to make friends with the country-store idlers.

Cursory observers from an alien North, penetrating now and then to unhackneyed regions in the Cumberlands or the Great Smokies, are apt to find the country folk, either valley or mountain bred, reticent by nature and notably shy of strangers. But there was no resisting the genial and childlike affability of the young man who had been giving the village children joy-rides, who recklessly bought a box of Tait’s best two-for-a-nickel cigars and distributed them generously as one among friends, and who presently had the hood lifted from the yellow car’s motor installation and was explaining, in words of one syllable, the workings of the driving mechanism to a group of curious and deeply interested onlookers.

The small lecture explanatory gave Carfax a chance to pick his man, and the choice fell upon the elder Layne. Would Mr. Layne like to take a little ride up the road in the car?--just to see how much more easily manageable it was than a horse-drawn vehicle?

Daddy Layne was overwhelmed with embarrassment, and was also secretly puffed up with pride, though he did not yield too easily, a disposition to haggle and make terms being a ruling passion in the Layne nature.

“I ’low I warn’t thinkin’ none o’ takin’ a trip this mornin’,” he mused reflectively. “Man ortn’t to go projeckin’ ’round on his’n travels when thar’s sech a heap o’ work to be done on the place. But then, thar’s my married daughter Malviny--her man’s coal-diggin’ for the C. C. & I., up yander at Whitlow; ef ye could git me thar an’ back----”

Carfax assured him that there was nothing easier, and by dint of holding the big car down to its slowest speed on the five-mile run to Whitlow he accomplished his purpose, which was to beguile Layne into telling him all that the countryside knew about the C. C. & I., its methods, its local managers, and whether or not the report was true that it made industrial war upon the smaller companies and individual mine owners.

Layne gave him the countryside point of view, which was, of course, inimical to the corporation--to any corporation. The C. C. & I. paid its men next to nothing for digging the coal and then sold it for fabulous prices to the people in the cities; it ran company stores and the miner who refused to buy his supplies thereat was likely to find himself out of a job; when a coal-digger was hurt or killed in an accident, the company’s long purse defeated the ends of justice in the damage suit; and so on to the end of the accusative category.

Pinned down to the particulars about the Whitlow, Layne admitted that the young engineer in charge as superintendent was a “squar’” man; but Connolly, the local manager under this superintendent, was, in Layne’s description, a man-killer. As to the company’s policy toward its competitors, Layne could say nothing definite, the countryside point of view not being penetrative of hidden corporation methods. But it was true that the only mines in operation in the valley belonged to the C. C. & I. Company. Others had been opened from time to time, but they were usually short-lived.

This drawing of Daddy Layne on the drive to Whitlow, and, later, an interview with Connolly, a hard-mouthed Irishman whose crass brutality apparently justified Layne’s descriptive epithet of “the man-killer,” gave Carfax a clue which he followed patiently until it was time to take Layne back to Coalville; a clue which led to a scraped acquaintance with the local leaders of the Amalgamated Mine Workers, to affable and seemingly pointless talks with all who dared to talk, and finally to a friendly conference with the miner Dockery, Layne’s son-in-law.

“The kindling-wood for your obstruction fire is all cut and stacked at Whitlow, Vance,” was his dinner-table announcement to Tregarvon at the close of this day of investigation. “I have discovered a number of things. First, that the C. C. & I. methods of benevolent assimilation as directed toward possible competitors have varied from instigating all sorts of trouble in the mines to be squelched up to swallowing them whole in forced sales of stock.”

“That sounds cheerful,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”

“Next, they leave it to the local managers to nip any new venture in the bud as effectually and quietly as possible, without bothering the trust headquarters. I took a long chance on Connolly, the assistant superintendent at Whitlow, and got that much of it pretty straight.”

“You don’t mean to say that he admitted any such thing as that to you, when it is known all up and down the valley that you are interested here with me!” exclaimed Tregarvon, wholly incredulous.

Carfax’s smile would have made a blushing debutante envious.

“In Mr. Connolly’s office, I was a lost lamb of the flock, looking most pathetically for somebody to lead me home,” he rejoined. “A fellow named Tregarvon had got me down here from New York with a view to pulling my financial leg as an investor in some coal property a few miles down the valley--at Coalville, in fact. I enlarged somewhat upon this part of it; kept it up until I was reasonably sure that I had convinced Connolly that I am a woolly sheep, merely waiting for somebody to come along with a pair of sharp shears.”

“Good--ripping good!” Tregarvon chuckled. “You’ve missed your calling, Poictiers, by all the distance lying between Riverside Drive and the city detective department down-town. But, as you say, you took a long chance; unless Connolly is a bigger fool than he looks to be.”

“Didn’t I? But Connolly is simply an abysmal brute; a man-driver without any of the little gifts of perspicacity. He took me under his wing like a stepfather-in-law; advised me bluntly to put my money into Consolidated Coal at one-forty rather than to go gunning on my own hook, or yours, or anybody’s, in Consolidated Coal’s intimate back yard. Pressed a little harder, he hinted that you wouldn’t be allowed to dig any real coal out of the Ocoee, providing there were any worth digging--which there wasn’t.”

“‘Wouldn’t be allowed, Mr. Connolly?’ said I, as lamb-like as possible. ‘How could Tregarvon be prevented?’”

“‘There’s manny a way, Misther Carfax,’ he scowled up at me; and then he let the cat out of the pillow-case: ‘These young min widout practical experience--’tis manny a blunder they’ll be making, and they’re soon discouraged entirely. I’m hearing that this same Misther Tregarvin is having throuble to beat the band, and him not fair at the beginning of it yet.’”

Tregarvon was absently spilling a spoonful of sugar into his after-dinner coffee--a sufficient measure of his interest in Carfax’s story.

“From all of which you have argued that there is a C. C. & I. spy in our camp, haven’t you, Poictiers?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the remedy?”

“Is to find and fire him.”

“The firing part of it will be easy; but the finding is a horse of another color. All of my squad save one or two, I believe, have worked at odd times for the C. C. & I. Every able-bodied man in this region digs coal a little now and then; ‘huckleberry miners,’ the regulars call them.”

“We’ll simply have to watch and sift; that’s all,” said Carfax.

“Well, you’ve done a good day’s work, anyway,” was Tregarvon’s summing-up of the amateur detective’s report. “Candidly, I didn’t think you had it in you, Poictiers. You don’t look it, you know--to the naked eye.”

The angelic smile came and sat upon the clean-shaven, womanish face of the golden youth.

“Don’t you know, Vance,” he drawled lispingly, “I believe that is my strong point: not looking the ready-made, hand-me-down villain. It is foolishly easy to make people take me for a harmless, good-natured scrap-bag into which they can tuck any old thing they don’t happen to be needing at the moment. Why, even old Daddy Layne confided in me. Coming home, he told me all about the feud of the family of one of his sons-in-law with the McNabbs. By the way, that reminds me: did you know that you have two of the McNabb cousins in your working gang?--the fellows who call themselves Morgan and Sill?”

Tregarvon had not known it; and a new field of conjecture as to the disasters was promptly opened. Why charge the coal trust with the campaign of obstruction when two of the avowed enemies of Ocoee progress were right on the ground day by day?

Carfax rather sheepishly confessed that his brain had not been capacious enough to entertain two ideas at once. Having fixed upon the coal trust as the trouble source to be investigated, he had completely overlooked the McNabb alternative.

“I’ll do time for it, though,” he promised. “To-morrow will be Saturday; and if you’ll lend me the car again, I’ll find out something more about those moonshiners in the Pocket.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” Tregarvon objected joyously. “It is going to be my Saturday off, too--and a holiday at Highmount. I’ll go with you, as far as the college, anyway.”

VII

Company Come

On the day following Carfax’s journey of investigation to Whitlow, Tregarvon did not keep his promise to accompany the amateur Vidocq. There were still some repairs to be made on the tramway, and since a working squad of the laborers turned up to round out the week, Tregarvon stayed with his men and became a track foreman again.

Carfax, too, had apparently changed his mind overnight. Instead of driving off up the mountain after breakfast, he headed the yellow car down the valley road and was gone all day. When he returned, late in the afternoon, it was evident that he had discovered some other way of ascending Pisgah. The committee of leisure, sitting, as usual, on Tait’s porch, and amusing itself, also as usual, at the expense of an expatriated London serving-man, marked the yellow car returning by way of the mountain pike; observed, further, that Carfax was accompanied by two men, one of whom sprang from the car at the turn in the road nearest to the railway and ran to catch a northbound train of coal-empties, so escaping unidentified by the idlers. Carfax’s other passenger, well-known to Coalville as “The Bug Professor” at Highmount, descended from the auto more deliberately and went across to the coke-ovens to shake hands with Tregarvon.

“Comp’ny come, over yander,” Daddy Layne remarked to Merkley. “Better hump yo’self acrost the track an’ git ready to curl yo’ boss’s ha’r, hadn’t ye, English?”

Merkley adjourned himself accordingly, reaching the office-building in time to be sent to show Hartridge the way to the bath-room on the second floor. Carfax made no explanation to Tregarvon about the guest-bringing other than to say that he had captured the professor on the mountain, and had brought him down to take pot-luck of Uncle William’s preparing.

“We can eat him all right,” said the young mine owner hospitably; “but if we have to sleep him as well----”

“We shan’t,” Carfax asserted. “I have promised to drive him back to Highmount in the car after dinner.”

“Oh, that’s better. Who was the other fellow?--the one who jumped out and sprinted for the up freight?”

“Wait,” said Carfax mysteriously; “wait and you’ll find out.” And Tregarvon, having no alternative, had to wait.

The dinner for three in the back-office dining-room followed in due course, and Tregarvon, who brought a working-man’s appetite to the table, let the other two do most of the talking. Carfax proved to be at his captivating best; solicitous for the guest’s entertainment, ingenuous, eager to be informed. Wouldn’t Mr. Hartridge have some more of the--er--rabbit, he thought it must be? And was it really a fact that the entire Cumberland region was underlaid by a vast sheet of bituminous coal?