Part 9

“When this cutter goes, we’re hung up for more ’n any day ’r two,” he announced. “I can sharpen these points all right enough, but it’ll take scads o’ time with the tools we’ve got here on the job. You two bosses hain’t made up your minds what t’ ’ell it is we’re tryin’ to chew through down yonder, have you?”

Tregarvon had taken an engineering course in the university, but he was no geologist; and Carfax’s equipment was even less hopeful. It was a case for a specialist; and the specialist turned up at the opportune moment in the person of Mr. Guy Wilmerding, who had ridden over from Whitlow to see how the Ocoee experiment was progressing.

His coming was hailed with acclamations by the two amateurs.

“By Jove, Wilmerding, you’re just in time to save us from strait-jackets and a padded cell!” Tregarvon exclaimed. “What kind of rock do you have in this region that will make a drill point look like that?” showing the C. C. & I. superintendent one of the blunted cutters.

Wilmerding scrutinized the dulled point carefully.

“None of the native rock ought to do that,” he demurred. “This is a poor piece of steel, isn’t it?”

“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began. Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole now with only a few more minutes to live.”

“That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the sand pump.”

The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings between his thumb and finger.

“Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the sandstone--‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,” he added reflectively.

“You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?”

“There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s no worse.”

Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again.

“That means Rucker to go to Chattanooga with the cutter points, and more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.”

“I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you going.”

Tregarvon’s ill temper vanished like the dew on a summer morning. “You are certainly an enemy of a hitherto unsuspected variety!” he declared. “We’ve been having a good bit of trouble, first and last; some of it bearing all the earmarks of design on somebody’s part. Do you know for a while I thought you might be inspiring it? That was before Carfax discovered you personally, of course.”

Wilmerding’s laugh was good-naturedly derisive.

“I hope you didn’t think so small of Consolidated Coal as to suspect it of popping at you with a boy’s whip!” he retorted. “By and by, when you find your coal and meet us in the open market, we may have to buy you or smash you. But it will be done in the good, old-fashioned commercial way.”

“We shall be there when you put up the large come-off-the-perch bluff,” Carfax thrust in gently. “But in the meantime, somebody _is_ popping at us with the boy’s whip.”

“Who?--for a guess?” asked the Whitlow superintendent.

“Ah!” said Carfax, in the same gentle tone, “I have a thousand dollars somewhere about my belongings that would be delighted to blow itself against the real answer to that question.”

“And you have no clue?”

Carfax smiled. “A dozen of them, more or less. But they all have a way of coming out by the roots when we begin to pull on them ever so cautiously.”

“You are calling me the enemy, but that doesn’t count until the real fight opens up,” said Wilmerding. “If any suggestion of mine will help while you are clawing for a foothold.... By the way, that reminds me: I made an analysis of your coals the other day. Thaxter didn’t have one, didn’t seem to know anything definite about the Ocoee.”

“Well?” queried Tregarvon. “Do you agree with Captain Duncan?”

“If your two veins are not one and the same, they ought to be. I couldn’t sift out the slightest difference between the two specimens.”

There was some further talk about the characteristics, analytical and otherwise, of the Ocoee coal, and Wilmerding stayed long enough to see the fourth and last drill point withdrawn from the hole. The cutter, like its predecessors, was a mechanical ruin; and Wilmerding again made the proffer of the Whitlow repair-plant. Tregarvon promised to send Rucker and the burrs up from Coalville in the morning, and the young superintendent climbed upon his nag and rode away.

“Tools up, men!” Tregarvon called to the drilling squad, when Wilmerding had disappeared among the trees. “We’ll call it a day; and to-morrow you may all go on the track-repairing with Tryon.”

Rucker was busying himself about the machinery after the laborers had gone, and as yet he had said nothing about wishing to be relieved from the night-watching. But it was clear that a man who put in full time during the day could scarcely be expected to sleep with one eye open at night. Moreover, if Rucker were to start in the morning for Whitlow with the drills, it would be necessary for him to sleep at Coalville.

“What is your programme for to-night?” asked Carfax, as he walked with Tregarvon to the tool-house. “I suppose you’ll send Rucker down for the early start to Whitlow. You’ll hardly care to leave things up here without a watchman, will you?”

“Not at the present stage of the game,” was the prompt reply. “You may go down in the car with Rucker, and I’ll stay here for the night. I’d like to see some of these queer happenings for myself.”

“I can beat that plan,” Carfax put in. “You’ve forgotten that we have an invitation to Highmount for dinner this evening. Mrs. Caswell gave it, and I accepted for both of us. We’ll go down and dress, and come back in the car, leaving Rucker to stand watch here while we do the social act. Later, Rucker can come for us, trundling us over here, first, and himself and the drills to Coalville afterward. How will that answer?”

Tregarvon demurred upon two counts. “You mean that you’ll sit up with me? You don’t have to play night-watchman to this sick project of mine, Poictiers. Besides, I don’t care to go to the Highmount faculty dinner. More than that, you ought to be the last man in the world to put me in for it. I’ve already wasted too much time in that way, and you know it.”

“In the present instance I’ve promised for you, and I guess you’ll have to go,” said Carfax quietly. “And as for my sitting up with you afterward, that’s a part of the game. I’m immensely interested in skulls and things.”

And thus, without further argument, it was decided.

XIII

The Burnt Child

The dinner in the president’s dining-room at Highmount College was anything but formal. By this time the two young men from the North were on a footing which lacked little of the household relation, Mrs. Caswell having said hospitably, more than once, that their plates were always laid at the faculty table.

Quite naturally, the Ocoee experiment came in for a share of the table-talk, and in this field Tregarvon let Carfax do most of the ploughing. For one reason, Miss Richardia had changed her place and was sitting on the other side of the golden one; and for another, his own companion was the French teacher, who persisted in talking, and making him talk, of things trans-atlantic and Parisian.

Later, however, he was tempted--and fell. The night was too cool for the veranda, and the after-dinner dispersal was to the music-room. Richardia played, and for a time Tregarvon sat beside Miss Farron and said “Yes” and “No,” as the occasion demanded, coming always afterward to a rapt and regretful contemplation of the pearl of great price on the piano-bench.

Being an artist to her finger-tips, Miss Birrell at the piano became a breaker of hearts by just so much more as the mask of self-consciousness fell away, leaving the true art soul free to express itself in the musician’s ecstasy of detachment. In such moments Tregarvon saw her as the embodied spirit of all that was most desirable in the world of women; gazed spellbound, sinned, repented, and sinned again; calling himself hard names in one breath, and rhapsodizing deliriously over the supernal charm of her in the next.

Again and again he told himself in caustic self-derision that his infatuation was merely the result of propinquity--the nearness of Richardia coupled with the remoteness of Elizabeth. But as often as he pleaded this excuse, the merciless inner and final court of appeals assured him that the evasion was but the adding of self-deception to unfaithfulness, and insisted upon a restatement of the humiliating facts: that he had promised to marry a woman whom he did not love, when he knew he did not love her; and that he was now adding to this baseness by admitting his love for another.

This restatement of the case was dinning itself into his ears for the hundredth time while he was saying “Yes” and “No” to the pretty assistant in mathematics, and praying in his more lucid intervals that Rucker might come early with the motor-car and so forestall any chance of deeper mirings. But Rucker was apparently in no hurry. Miss Richardia played until she was tired; Madame Fortier and Miss Farron excused themselves and went to their duties in the dormitories; Hartridge and Miss Longstreet went to brave the chill of the evening in a pacing constitutional on the veranda; and the group in the music-room was cut down to the Caswells, their guests, and Miss Birrell.

At this conjuncture Tregarvon saw that Carfax was about to add insult to injury by leaving him alone with Richardia. The president was talking about some improvements he wished to make in the school gymnasium: would Mr. Carfax be good enough to look the plans over and give a country schoolmaster the benefit of his advice? Tregarvon turned to the nearest window to watch for the headlamps of the expected auto. They were not yet in sight; and when the silence behind him gave token that Carfax and the Caswells had gone, he knew that he had been basely deserted.

Miss Richardia was still at the piano, letting her fingers run in delicate little harmonies up and down the keyboard. Tregarvon meant to keep his distance, but she drew him so irresistibly that he was beside her before he realized that he was once more breaking all the good resolutions.

“Don’t go just yet,” he pleaded, when she looked around, saw that the others were gone, and made as if she would rise. Then he added: “It isn’t my fault this time: I didn’t wish to come, but Poictiers had accepted for me. You mustn’t punish me when I don’t deserve it.”

She looked up at him with the air of detachment which he had always found more trying than her sharpest accusations.

“Why should I punish you at all? Hasn’t your conscience been doing that much for you?”

“Don’t!” he begged again. “Now that it is all over, I am going to tell you that I have been a liar and a hypocrite.”

She stopped him with a quick little gesture of dismay.

“Please don’t spoil it all now--just because we happen to be alone together for a minute or two. When are you going home to marry Miss Wardwell?”

“You are perfectly merciless,” he complained. “Must we talk about Elizabeth?”

“Ask your conscience,” she retorted.

“My conscience is busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed. One would think you had been born and bred in New England!”

“I wasn’t; I was born on this mountain.”

He sat down in the nearest chair and tried to remember that he was talking to the woman who was as good as promised to Poictiers Carfax.

“I know,” he offered; “in a rambling old house with a groved lawn. It has a box-bordered carriage drive, and a big, pillared veranda fronting the west.”

“Yes; when have you ever seen Westwood House?”

“Perhaps I haven’t seen it; perhaps I am only imagining how it ought to look. But the name ‘Westwood’ is familiar enough. It is written all over the Ocoee maps.”

Her smile, on any other lips, would have had more than a hint of bitterness in it.

“I suppose we ought to be proud of the distinction. The printing of the home name on the maps was the only return my father ever had for what he did for Mr. Parker. But, of course, you know all about that.”

“Not so much as I’d like to know. I have understood that your father was a heavy investor in the original Ocoee company, and that Parker contrived to give him the hot end of things in the reorganization.”

“It is all true.”

“It makes me feel as if I had been caught stealing sheep,” he volunteered. “Ethically, I suppose the Ocoee doesn’t belong to me at all, though I hope it is clear to everybody that neither I nor my father had any part in the crookedness. So far as that goes, my father never knew anything about the early history of the mine; and neither did I before I came down here. How does your father feel about it?”

It did not strike him at the moment as being particularly significant that she did not answer the question categorically.

“Those things are all past and gone,” she said half-absently. And then: “I wish you might meet my father; you and Mr. Carfax.”

The mention of Carfax’s name was as salt to a fresh wound.

“You’ve changed your mind about Poictiers, haven’t you?” he said, and he tried to make the saying of it entirely judicial. “You made fun of him at first, you know.”

“Not of him, but of some of the things that he said and did,” she corrected quickly. “And that was only because I didn’t know him; because I was so stupid as not to recognize the real man under the transparent little mask of affectation that he delights in holding up between himself and all the rest of the world.”

Tregarvon made a loud call upon his magnanimity, and concurred heartily.

“He is the finest there is, Richardia. I--I hope he will be able to make you as happy as you deserve to be.”

For the moment he was puzzled. Sheer maiden modesty might have accounted for the blush, but why should the slate-blue eyes grow suspiciously bright, as with tears?

“Then he has told you?” She had turned away from him and there was a little catch in her voice.

“Yes. It broke my heart, Richardia--which shows you how far I had gone on the road to depravity. Poictiers said to me once that I was playing the dog in the manger, and so I was. There was no excuse, of course; there never is an excuse for dishonor. But you were heart and soul and conscience to me, and I seemed to need you so much more than anybody else ever could. I can say all this without blame now, can’t I? You are going to marry Poictiers, and I am going to marry Elizabeth.”

She had turned farther away, as if to conceal emotions too profound to be shared. At first he thought she was crying, and wondered why. Then it was borne in upon him that she was laughing, and he became instantly and hotly resentful.

“If you are laughing at me and my little lunacy, it is all right,” he exploded. “But if it’s at Poictiers----”

When she let him see her face again it was perfectly straight, but there were twin imps of mockery dancing in the eyes of desire.

“Between you and Mr. Carfax it is hard for a poor country mouse to find breathing space,” she asserted. “Am I to understand that you are trying to congratulate me?”

Tregarvon frowned heavily. “No; Poictiers is the one to be congratulated--if you were not laughing at him.”

“I wasn’t,” she denied promptly. “He is much too splendid to be laughed at. Don’t criticise the word; it is the only one that fits him.”

“Then you were laughing at me?”

“No.”

“At what I said, then? that is just as cruel.”

“Why will you insist upon being so quarrelsome? I was laughing because I couldn’t help it. Let us talk about something else; about your mine. Have you been having any more of the mysterious trouble?”

“Yes; it is one thing after another. You heard what Poictiers was telling at the table this evening. He made it sound like hard luck, but it isn’t luck; it’s design. Some one is making the trouble for us.”

“Who would do such a thing as that?”

“For a long time we were totally in the dark. But now we know the man.”

Miss Richardia had the translucent complexion that harmonizes perfectly with cloudy blue eyes and masses of light-brown hair brightened by touches of warmer tints; hence there was no telltale pink to vanish at the command of sudden emotion. Yet Tregarvon saw she was startled, and that the exciting cause was quick-springing anxiety.

“You have seen him?” she asked.

“Rucker, the machinist, has.” Tregarvon was always making good resolutions about not talking too much, and always breaking them. It had been no part of his intention to refer to the incriminating incident in which Richardia herself figured as one of the two actors, but the inexpedient thing was said and he could only hope that Richardia would not ask for more.

She was looking away again when she said: “Now that you know, I suppose you will defend your rights?”

“Take legal steps, you mean? I don’t wish to do that, if it can be avoided.”

“No; anything but that!” she pleaded in low tones. “You must remember the provocation.”

“I didn’t give the provocation.”

“No; but you are associated, in a way, with those who did. You have inherited a legacy of ill will.”

“I might be able to understand that, if the man who is making the trouble were one of the ignorant natives. But he is not.”

“No,” she agreed half-absently; “he is not.”

“Then you know who it is?” said Tregarvon, again permitting himself to say one of the things which might better have been left unsaid.

She nodded slowly. “I--I am afraid I do. And I am going to plead for him, if you will let me. There are mitigating circumstances--prejudices against all Northerners _as_ Northerners. You can’t understand that, because the North didn’t suffer as the South did in the war between the States--at least, not in the same way. And the South has suffered bitterly since the war; from such men as Mr. Parker. There was a disposition on our part to let bygones be bygones, after the great struggle; but a few unprincipled promoters have done much to keep the old sectional animosities alive.”

Tregarvon was regarding her thoughtfully.

“You are wise beyond your years and your sex,” he said soberly. “What do you think I ought to do to this anachronistic gentleman who is visiting the sins of other people upon my poor head?”

“I can only beg of you to be broad-minded and charitable and slow to anger for the sake of all concerned--for my sake, if you must put it upon narrower ground.”

At this appeal, the earnestness of which could not be questioned, Tregarvon was frankly puzzled. A little earlier in the adventure he would not have been surprised to find Richardia Birrell pleading for Hartridge; but now, with Carfax apparently elbowing the professor aside in the sentimental field, there seemed to be less reason for the plea, unless pure friendship might account for it.

“I shall put it wholly upon ‘narrower ground,’ as you call it,” he maintained. “If you tell me that you care enough for the man you are pleading for to ask me to spare him for your sake----”

“Care enough?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “I should be singularly inhuman if I didn’t care!”

As in a flash of revealing lightning Tregarvon saw and thought he understood. It was not Hartridge for whom she was interceding; the professor of mathematics was not the man who had driven with her to the glade on the night of strange happenings--who had stood with her in the shadow of the drill derrick, shaking his fist at the inanimate symbol of the renewed Ocoee activities. The moving spirit in all the enmities and antagonisms was her father!

For a moment the thing seemed unbelievable. That a man who had formerly been a judge and a champion of the law should become a feudist, carrying his vindictiveness over from those who had defrauded him to the defrauders’ innocent successor, appeared blankly incredible. Yet Tregarvon remembered that the South still held many archaic well-springs of thought and action--he had to fight anachronisms daily in his laborers--and that the older generation was not to be judged by the standards of the new. Judge Birrell had felt the heel of the invader, not only in the great conflict between the States, but afterward, when the invader came as a friend and robbed him in the name of business.

Tregarvon had little time in which to determine what he ought to say; time for nothing but a sudden and loyal resolve not to fail Richardia in her moment of need. Voices in the hall warned him that Carfax and the Caswells were returning, and at the same moment he heard the honk of the motor announcing Rucker’s approach. He was upon his feet when he said: “You have told me something that I didn’t know--didn’t suspect. I can scarcely believe it yet. But you need have no fears for anything that I shall do. You mustn’t worry for a single moment. It will all come out right in the end.”

He had his reward in a quick little grasp of the hand, in eyes filling this time with real tears, and in a low-toned outpouring of gratitude.

“I knew you would say that,” she avouched. “It is what you have taught me to expect of you. I am doing all I can to--to bring about a better understanding, and if you will only be patient and wait a little while----”

Carfax and the two Caswells were entering the music-room, and Tregarvon turned quickly and made a pretense of rearranging the music on the piano desk. The small diversion gave him a chance for another whispered word of assurance. “I’ve been advertising myself to you as all kinds of a graceless wretch, but now I’ll show you that I can rise to the occasion. Don’t be afraid: there will be no scandal--no tragedy, so far as you and yours are concerned.”

She caught instantly at the qualification. “Then there are others?” she queried.

“One other, at least. And after what you have just told me I am quite sure he is acting entirely upon his own responsibility. I’ll tell you more about him some other time.”

Carfax was already taking leave, and Tregarvon joined him. The host and hostess went no farther than the door with the departing guests, and Miss Richardia remained in the music-room. At the veranda steps there was a little delay while Rucker was doing something to the motor. In the waiting interval Tregarvon found himself answering a question of Hartridge’s about the progress of the test-drilling, the professor having outstayed his art-teacher companion in their retreat to the open air.

“No,” said Tregarvon, “we are not getting along as well as we might. There seems to be a curious obstructive fatality dogging us. If you were in the chair of psychology instead of that of mathematics, we might give you a very handsome little problem to work on, Mr. Hartridge. I wonder if you would attack it?”

The mild-eyed professor’s smile was blandly incommunicative.

“You mustn’t expect any sympathy from me,” he returned genially. “The proverb tells us specifically that the burnt child dreads the fire; but it doesn’t add the corollary, which is equally true, and as old as human nature--namely, that the burnt child experiences an unholy joy when his playmate attempts to pick up the same hot nail.”

“Ah?” said Tregarvon. And then: “I had forgotten, if, indeed, I ever knew. You were one of the original stockholders in the Ocoee?”