Part 6

“The first time I went to Highmount you told me that I might come as often as I pleased. You needn’t worry about the school-girls. If you say the word, I’ll never speak to one of them again unless she is duly chaperoned at the moment.”

“We were speaking of Miss Wardwell,” was the rather chilling reminder.

“Well, we will speak of her, then. She isn’t losing any sleep on my account. If you only knew Elizabeth as well as I do--but what’s the use!”

“There appears to be no use at all, and I have already said more than your nearest friend ought to say. Suppose we talk of something else.”

Tregarvon refused flatly to accept the invitation.

“No; I want to know about my welcome at Highmount. I have had Mrs. Caswell’s warrant in the past. I have it yet. You can’t make me stay away.”

Miss Richardia’s pretty chin went up a quarter of an inch.

“Then you will compel me to be disagreeable; and I don’t like to be that. I always have plenty of work to do in the evenings; quite a number of the young women would like to take extra music lessons, and I have a piano in my rooms.”

Tregarvon gasped. “You don’t mean that you’d be hard-hearted enough to shut yourself up? to refuse to see me? That would be--but I simply can’t contemplate it. You--you don’t know what your confidence and your clear insight have come to mean to me!”

“On the contrary, it is because I do know, or rather because I know how you are justifying yourself, that you must----”

“But I shall not! It is just a frank, open friendship that has grown very precious to me, Richardia. Put it upon the lowest possible grounds; say that it amuses you and doesn’t hurt Elizabeth--I could show you letters from her in which she actually encourages it--and add to these that it does me a whole lot of good. Why should you freeze up right in the midst of it, just when I am needing all the encouragement I can get?”

Miss Birrell did not wish to laugh, but his protest, the shocked pleading of a little boy who fears he is about to be deprived of his customary piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, was too much for her self-control. None the less, she would not yield a hair’s-breadth.

“You can’t convince me, and you needn’t try,” she declared. “Granting what you say--that it amuses me and doesn’t hurt any one else--there are still the conventions to be considered. Perhaps you think, because you are a thousand miles from Philadelphia, that there are no conventions. If you do, you are greatly mistaken. Highmount, for example, has a complete equipment of them.”

“Confound the conventions!” growled Tregarvon. Carfax was leading his following back to the car, and the end of the confidential talk was approaching.

“No, you needn’t swear at them,” said Miss Richardia, with honey in her tone. “More than that, you would be the last person in the world to want to have them confounded. In your proper environment, I can picture you as an exceedingly correct person; one who would protest most vigorously if his sister should----”

She did not finish, because the others were within hearing distance; but the sentence was sufficiently complete to point the comparison for Tregarvon. He bent over the steering-wheel and pretended to be trying the connections of the substitute battery coil. The feint permitted him to say in low tones: “You are altogether right--as you always are. I’ll be as decent as I can: and it will cost more than you think.”

After which he descended from the driving-seat and shifted the responsibility of the return of the party to Highmount over to Carfax, saying that since the drill was doubtless nearing the coal depth, he would better stay on the job.

He was late getting down the mountain that evening, having worked his crew overtime to settle a disputed point with Rucker. The dispute, or rather its outcome, was sufficiently explained in his announcement to Carfax when he tramped into the office dining-room and dropped wearily into a chair before the fire.

“One more slap in the face, Poictiers. We found the coal about two hours ago, and a little later the drill landed upon the sandstone layer again. I’m too tired to know whether it’s discouragement or just plain leg-weariness and back-ache, but I feel as if something had gone out of me.”

Carfax rose to the occasion with his customary cheerful alacrity.

“We’re not going to say die, yet a while, Vance, old man. It merely means another try. If you are running low in the ammunition-chest----”

“No, it isn’t that; it isn’t costing so terribly much. But to tell the blank truth, I don’t know where to go with the drill for another try. We are a good quarter of a mile back from the tramway head now; an almost impracticable distance, even if we had found the big vein.”

“Well, what is the matter with swinging around the circle a bit? You have latitude as well as longitude, haven’t you?” said Carfax the comforter.

“Oh, yes; there is Ocoee land enough. And I guess that is about the last hope.”

“Which way had you thought of moving, north or south?”

“Whichever way you say,” was the spiritless reply.

Carfax took a coin from his pocket and balanced it upon his thumb. “Heads, Highmount way; tails, toward Whitlow,” he called, and flipped the coin.

It fell heads uppermost, deciding for the Highmount direction; and when Tregarvon would have picked the coin up to return it, Carfax stopped him.

“Let it alone; I’m superstitious to-night. Uncle William will be in with your warmed-over dinner in a minute: let him pick it up and keep it--for good luck.” And a little while afterward, when the old negro shuffled in with the covered tray: “There is a dollar on the floor which we are both afraid to touch, Uncle William. Don’t you want it?”

The old man scraped a foot and said: “Sarvent, suh,” but he arranged the table to the final nicety before going around to look at the money on the floor.

“Now, Marsteh Poictiers, whut-all is de marter wid dat dollah?” he asked, bending, hands on knees, to eye it suspiciously.

“There is nothing the matter with the dollar, uncle; the trouble is with us. We are afraid of it.”

“Sho’ now! Is you? Dat look lak a mighty rightchus dollah to me. Dat ain’t no debbil’s money, is it?”

“You’ll have to settle that for yourself. Since the dollar came out of my pocket a few minutes ago, I shall be justified in refusing to answer so personal a question as that relating to its righteousness.”

“_Hyuh! hyuh!_ It comed out of yo’ pocket, an’ yit you is skeered of it? Dat look mighty cur’is to me. Look lak you-all is tryin’ to play trick on de ol’ man, Marsteh Poictiers. I ain’t seed no white folks’ money yit dat I’s skeered of,” and he bent cautiously to pick it up.

“Look out, Uncle William; it might burn you!” said Carfax suddenly; and quite as suddenly the old negro dropped the coin and started back.

“Bless gresshus! but dat _wuz_ hot!” he exclaimed, blowing upon his fingers. And then: “Des you keep yo’ eye on dat dollah, ef you please, suh, twell I come back, an’ I’ll fix ’im,” and a little later he returned from the cook-house with a small tin pan which he turned down over the piece of money.

“Ef dat won’t be in you gemmans’ way, an’ you-all ’ll des leab ’im dah, I gwine come back bimeby an’ tek de cunjer off ’im. I ain’ gwine lef de ol’ debbil hab dat dollah, not ef it _is_ his’n.”

The little diversion did for Tregarvon what Carfax had hoped it might; and after the belated meal was eaten and the pipes were lighted, the atmosphere of disheartenment was changed somewhat for the better.

“There is one thing we have to be thankful for,” the disappointed one volunteered, when his reflections began to mellow in the tobacco smoke. “We haven’t heard from the enemy since the attempt was made to ditch the car, and there haven’t been any more of the unaccountable accidents to the machinery.”

“That is so,” said Carfax. “And I have been trying to guess, all along, why he--or they--stopped so abruptly.”

“There wasn’t any good reason why he--or they--should have begun,” said Tregarvon musingly.

“Somebody evidently thought there was a reason, and afterward changed his mind. Why should he change his mind? That is the question that has been puzzling me.”

“Perhaps he has found out what a good fellow I really am, and is no longer bloodthirsty,” put in Tregarvon, who was too tired to make any very heavy drafts upon his mentality.

“You haven’t any notion that the fight, if there is one, is personal to you, have you?--excluding Professor Hartridge, of course.”

“Oh, no; I was only joking. And we’ll always exclude Hartridge, if you please; I’m still refusing to believe it of him. It was probably somebody’s intention to drown the blind kitten of an Ocoee before it had time to get its eyes open; but the somebody couldn’t, by any stretch of imagination, be Hartridge.”

“But why has the somebody--who isn’t Hartridge--called the fight off so suddenly? By Jove, Vance--I have an idea! It has dawned upon the enemy, whoever he is, that it wasn’t worth while to efface us at a time when we were perseveringly going the right way about it to efface ourselves! I’d like to make a bet with you: when we begin drilling in the right place--if there is any right place--the trouble will blossom out again. What do you think?”

“I haven’t a thought left that isn’t too leg-weary to keep up with you,” Tregarvon confessed; whereat he fell to talking of Miss Richardia Birrell, dribbling on until Carfax, groaning in spirit, got up to light the bed-room candles.

IX

A Bad Night for Rucker

After the drilling plant had been moved to the chance-chosen, fourth trial site a short half-mile south of the original line of prospect holes, the work of reinstallation was begun. At its completion, it was at Rucker’s suggestion that the small tool-house was fitted with a single-sashed window and a folding cot-bed, and that the duties of night-watchman were added to his daytime oversight of the drilling machinery.

Just why the plant, which had been left unguarded since the first week of the campaign, and had been unmolested, should now need a night-watchman, the mechanician did not attempt to explain. His reasons for wishing to transfer his lodgings from the valley to the mountain top were entirely personal. He had been taken as a boarder at the Tryons’, and to wear out the dull evenings after working hours, he had been drawn first into the lounging circle at Tait’s store, and later into the smaller circle of the Layne household on the lower valley road.

The loadstone at Layne’s was a granddaughter of the patriarch’s, a black-eyed, red-lipped girl of primal passions and impulses; and in the beginning Rucker had been given a fair field and no questions asked as to his eligible state and standing. Evening strolls on the country roads with Nancy Layne for a companion were not to be compared with a night off on Broadway under the bright lights; but such diversions were made to suffice until a day when Daddy Layne, abruptly pointing to the long-barrelled squirrel-rifle resting on its pegs over the kitchen fireplace, assumed the aggressive. “Git yo’ license an’ yo’ preachuh, ’r let Nan alone an’ quit projec’in’ round this yer valley o’ nights,” was the old man’s ultimatum; and Rucker, having a wholesome fear of consequences, and the best of reasons for not applying for a marriage license, asked permission to sleep at the drilling plant.

The first night on the mountain was frankly harrowing to the city-bred mechanic, whose burglarish aspect did not insure him against the still alarms of the forest intensified by moon-flung shadows of solemn trees, by scurryings of fallen leaves rattling like dry bones under the autumn night-wind, and, more than all, by a sense of complete and lonely isolation.

Each unfamiliar sound brought Rucker out of his cot-bed blankets with a bound and sent him groping to the square window. First it was a little screech-owl, perching on the walking-beam of the drill, and chattering out its blood-curdling cry. Next it was a slow and measured crashing in the undergrowth, sound mysterious and unnerving to a degree until the night-prowling cow responsible for it lowed gently and crossed the clearing to snuff suspiciously at the boiler and machinery.

The tension once more relieved, Rucker tumbled into the blankets again, calling himself shop names and swearing by all the gods of the metalworkers that nothing short of a forest-fire or an earthquake should make him lose any more sleep. Yet, while he was still only eye-deep in his first doze a new alarm brought him leaping to his feet and sent him, blinking and breathing hard, to the square of moonlight framed by the small window.

What he heard this time sounded like the measured hoof-beats of a horse. Rucker had a pocket flash-light, and he turned it upon the face of his watch. He had gone early to bed, and it was still early, barely ten o’clock. A by-road, the one by which the drilling plant had been brought in, ran through the wood a little distance to the left of the glade. Staring wide-eyed, Rucker made out the shadowy bulk of a wheeled vehicle standing in this road, with a white horse, seemingly of incredible size, looming gigantic between the thills.

The mechanician got his breath, and his heart began to pump in steadier rhythm. A horse and buggy betokened the presence of humankind, and Rucker was not a coward of men. Moreover, the ball-peen machinist’s hammer, lying within easy reach, was no mean weapon of defense in the grasp of a man who knew how to swing it.

Obsessed by the idea that he might shortly have to resort to the hammer, the mechanician was wholly unprepared for what followed. Slowly, and as if they were materializing out of the shadows of the wood, two figures glided into the watcher’s field of vision: a man, tall, stately, wearing the long coat and the wide-brimmed soft hat which even an unobservant Rucker knew to be the garmentings of the old-fashioned Southern gentleman. And, hanging on the man’s arm, a woman, small and trimly clad.

They came only to the edge of the open glade. The woman’s hat left her face in shadow, so that even if the light had been better, Rucker could not have seen what she looked like. The man’s back was turned to him, and here, again, he was at fault. Nevertheless, he was presently able to postulate the man’s gestures as those of anger, and to understand that the woman was pleading with him. It was etched out wholly in pantomime; Rucker could hear nothing. Twice or thrice the man made an inclusive motion with his free hand as if indicating the glade as the subject of whatever he was saying; and finally he balled his hand into a fist and shook it wrathfully at the unoffending drill derrick.

This went on for some moments, the woman, Rucker fancied, trying to end it and draw the man away. Whether as the result of her efforts, or for some other reason, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun. The two figures turned and faded into the wood shadows as mysteriously as they had come out of them; and while Rucker was still straining his eyes to keep them in sight, the horse and buggy vanished to a soft thudding of hoofs on the sandy road.

After this apparition had disappeared, the machinist filled his black cutty pipe, opened the door of the tool-house, and sat upon the step to smoke and ruminate and strive for a better collecting of things into their normal groupings. Later, he strolled out to the by-road to see if the hoof and wheel marks were really there; to satisfy himself beyond question that he had not been dreaming. The ocular demonstration convinced him that he was sane, sober, and awake. The hoof-prints were there, though they were by no means so gigantic as he had expected to find them; and so were the wheel ruts.

“I guess I needn’t be botherin’ my head about who they was,” he muttered to himself as he went back to his seat on the tool-house door-step. “Th’ bosses’ll know that, all right, all right. But if there’s goin’ to be a whole lot of this ghost business up here, it’s me for the downstairs, even if I do have to duck every time I see old man Layne comin’ up th’ road. These moonlight picture-shows get next to my gizzard-nerve. I ain’t no ghost-killer--not me.”

His pipe was smoked out and, knocking the ash from the bowl, he got up, having fresh designs upon the tool-house bed-room and the blanketed cot. But he was scarcely afoot before the sounds of wheels and hoofs came again, this time from the opposite direction.

“My gosh!” he complained, “are they comin’ back? Or is it a torchlight procession of ’em? No, by jing! it’s somebody else: that horse is a black one!”

More to be out of harm’s way than for any spying purpose, he slipped into the tool-house and softly closed and fastened the door. When he tiptoed to the window two other figures had entered the glade; two men, and both of them with burdens.

Their movements were even more mysterious than those of the earlier visitors. The shorter of the two carried a square box, handling it by a buckled strap which encircled it, and the other had a shoulder load which Rucker could liken only to a small bundle of poles. Both burdens were quickly put down; and at Rucker’s final glimpse, obtained just as the moon was passing behind a cloud, the shorter man had gone down on his knees beside the box, and was apparently opening it.

Everything turned to a blurred gray for the watcher at the square window while the cloud obscured the direct rays of the moon; and when a better light came, the taller of the two men had disappeared, and the other was standing motionless under a great oak, whose spreading branches were sadly obstructing Rucker’s line of sight.

“Now, what the devil is he doin’?” was Rucker’s demand, whispered to the inner darknesses. “And where has t’ other guy skipped to, all of a sudden. By jinks! I b’lieve the short one’s sightin’ a gun; no, it ain’t a gun, either; it’s a kodak. No, I’m off again, and I hain’t got any more guesses. Now, what t’ ’ell’s the sawed-off doin’, wavin’ his arms up and down that way? By gollies, this whole mountain’s gone bug-house, ’r else I have!”

Rucker watched the arm-waving for a full minute before it dawned upon him that the short man who seemed to be sighting something was making signals. The small square window of espial commanded nothing but the glade. The watcher crept cautiously to the end of the room facing toward the near-by brow of the mountain. The moonlight helped him to find the knot-hole he was looking for, but for a time the contracted field of vision revealed nothing but a forest tangle of moon-spattered shadows.

Rucker had the patience of his craft, and the practical reasoning power that goes with it. The man under the oak was evidently signalling to some one to the eastward of his position at the edge of the glade: Rucker’s knot-hole in the planking at the end of the tool-house covered the same field: hence the eye at the knot-hole should be able to descry what was apparently visible to the eyes under the spreading oak.

The mechanician stuck to his hypothesis until finally the fact proved it to be the true one. Far down among the trees, almost at the cliff’s edge, Rucker thought, a dancing light, such as might be made by a flaring pine torch, flashed up, flickered, and disappeared. The general aspect of the mystery remained as impenetrable as before, but one point became clear. The man under the tree was waving to the man with the torch, and some purpose, quite well understood by both, was getting itself forwarded.

Rucker stayed at his peep-hole until the torch reappeared, flared steadily in one place for a few seconds, and then went out as suddenly as if a gust of wind had extinguished it. After which he tiptoed back to his window, and was there, looking on curiously, when the torch-bearer came tramping up from the eastward. There was a little delay when the upcomer joined the man under the oak. The watcher saw them taking the sighting mechanism, whatever it might be, apart and depositing some portion of it carefully in the square box; saw the two men resume their respective burdens and thread their way rapidly among the trees to the waiting vehicle. Then came the grinding protest of buggy wheels cramped short to turn in the narrow by-road, the _shough_ of a horse, minishing hoof-beats, and silence.

By this time Rucker was beginning to stand somewhat less in awe of a forest wilderness which seemed, after all, to be anything but an uninhabited solitude. A fresh filling of the short black pipe was the preliminary to a careful scrutiny of the ground under the spreading oak-tree. There was but a thin layer of sandy top-soil overlying the rock through which the drill was to be churned on the morrow, but it sufficed to reveal what Rucker was looking for--three conical indentations made by the sharply pointed ends of a tripod, the stand of the sighting mechanism, level, transit, or telescope, used by the shorter of the two men.

This much proved, Rucker went back to the tool shanty, found and lighted a lantern, and with it steered a course between the trees to the eastward point where the torch-bearer had stood. It took him several minutes to discover the exact spot; but when it was found and identified by the remains of the extinguished pine-knot torch, he whittled a small stake and with a stone for a hammer drove it to mark the place.

“There, by heck!” he said, when he was once more sitting on the tool-house door-step to finish his pipe. “If I hain’t got funny business enough to keep the bosses guessin’ f’r a week ’r so, I’ll sit up a few minutes longer and pull down some more.”

It was far past midnight when he found himself nodding over the smoking lantern, and got up to go and tumble sleepily into his bed. And this time neither the shrilling of the katydids and tree-toads nor the screeching of the little owl that came once more to perch upon the drill walking-beam, kept him awake.

X

Blind Alleys

There was a council of war, held without preliminaries, to follow Rucker’s report made to his two employers on the morning after the night of mysterious alarms. The small tool shanty served as the council-chamber, and the councillors were only two, Rucker having been heard and dismissed to take his place as chief mechanician in the drilling squad.

“Talk about fourteen-fifteen puzzles and the fourth dimension: this masquerade puts the kibosh on them all,” remarked Carfax, opening his pocket-case of freshly imported cigarettes. “Or are you wiping the slate clean by charging Billy Rucker with a bad supper or a drink or so too many?”

Tregarvon shook his head.

“It is too circumstantial to be a nightmare. Besides, there are the two sets of wheel tracks in the road, and the marks of the tripod under the oak; likewise the burnt pine torch and Rucker’s stake to mark the place of it. It’s no pipe-dream--more’s the pity.”

“Then what the deuce is it?--or they?--since there seem to have been two distinct sets of phenomena.”

Again the owner of the Ocoee shook his head.

“I think we may safely assume that Rucker saw two acts in the same play. But what the play may have been is beyond my wildest guess. Rucker’s suggestion that we’ve dropped down into a neighborhood of crazy people seems to fit better than anything else.”

Carfax was sitting on the cot with his hands locked over one knee. “It is rather pointedly our job to chase the shy guess into a corner, don’t you think? There is mischief in it. One’s bosom friends would hardly come here at night to shake their fists at things, or to run surveyors’ lines by moonlight.”

Tregarvon got up to tramp the floor, but there was no room in the cluttered tool shanty and he sat down again upon a coil of rope.