AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN

BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

After the Manner of Men. Illus. 12mo net $1.35

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“Did you really think that some one was shooting at you?”
([Page 7].)

After the Manner
of Men

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE

ILLUSTRATED BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : : : : : : 1916

Copyright, 1916, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published September, 1916

TO
JOSEPH FRATER,
LOYAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS,
TO WHOM MUCH OF THE MATERIAL AND ALL OF THE
ATMOSPHERE OF THE STORY IS OWING
THIS BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
WITH GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FROM
THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

After the Manner of Men

I
The Townlander

COINCIDENT with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity.

“Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete——”

The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his own steadiness of nerve.

Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak, he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes, and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he fancied he could see more—the sunlight reflecting from the polished barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees.

While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it.

Harboring this distrust, he was content for the moment to make himself small behind his tree, sitting between two of the flanking root buttresses with his back against the barrier trunk, and wincing in spite of himself while other bullets, following now in rapid and measured succession, whined to right or left, or buried themselves in the solid wood. Oddly enough, the misses, though he could feel the wind of them on either side, were less disquieting than the hits. At each impact of lead against wood there was a jarring little shock quite thrillingly transmissible to quick-set nerves in sympathetic contact with the other side of the target.

“By Jove! if Elizabeth could only see me now!” he chuckled broadly; “Elizabeth, or the mutterchen, or even my rough-riding little sister! This fusillading miscreant of mine must be one of the McNabb outlaws, trying in his elemental fashion to settle the old feud about our title to the coal lands. By and by, I suppose— Whew!”

The spine-tingling thrill was so real this time that he was half minded to look and see if the impacting bullet had not come all the way through the tree to bulge the bark on his side of it. But he restrained the prompting and went on talking to himself.

“By and by, I suppose, he’ll get tired of blazing away at a safe distance and come charging down upon me. Then I shall be most unhappily obliged to kill him; which will be about the crassest misfortune that could happen, next to his killing me. Confound their barbarous feuds, anyway! Why can’t these out-of-date mountain people wake up and realize that they are living in the twentieth century of civilization and Christian enlightenment? That’s what I’d like to know!”

The only reply to this very reasonable query being the vicious “ping” of another rifle-bullet, he went on discontentedly.

“As if matters were not hopeless enough without adding a scrap with these silly mountaineers about the land titles! Everything torn up at home, the family anchor pulled out by the roots in the steel merger, two women to be taken care of—with Elizabeth presently to make a third—and nothing to make good on but this failure of a Cumberland Mountain coal mine! And now, before I’ve had time to turn around, the spirit moves this rifle-popping moonshine-maker to turn his grouch loose until I feel it in my bones that I shall have to kill him to make him quit!”

Then, the zip-zip of the bullets beginning again after a momentary pause, the soliloquy went on: “That’s right; keep it up, you pin-headed barbarian! I’ve got you for an excuse to commit manslaughter—that’s the surest thing there is. Which brings on more talk. I wonder how it feels to kill a man? I’d give all my old shoes if I didn’t have to find out experimentally. Then there is Elizabeth: it is two completed generations back to her Quaker forepeople, but she is quite capable of flatly refusing to marry what they would have stigmatized as ‘a man of blood.’ Say, you bloodthirsty assassin—that was an uncomfortably near one!”

After the glancing shot, which had flicked a handful of bark chips into Tregarvon’s lap, the firing ceased. Assuring himself that the battling moment at short range was approaching, the young man from the North sat tight, gripping the house pistol in nervous anticipation, and listening tensely for the sound of advancing footfalls.

The suspense was short. Some one, several persons, as it presently appeared, were pushing through the tangle of low-hanging undergrowth toward the oak-tree. Tregarvon wondered that there should be no attempt cautionary on the part of the enemy; wondered again, this time with nettle pricklings of foolishness, when a voice, cheerfully exultant and unmistakably feminine, cried out close at hand.

“Oh, you people—come here and see! I did hit it—lots of times; not that trifling little sheet of paper, of course”—scornfully—“but the tree, I mean. Just come and— Ee-e-ow!”

The shrill little scream of surprise and alarm was for Mr. Vance Tregarvon, issuing cautiously from behind the bulwark oak, still mystified, and still absently gripping the pistol.

The Philadelphian found himself confronting a young woman gowned in stone-blue linen, and wearing an embroidery hat to match, the hat shading a face too unaffectedly winsome to be called beautiful, perhaps, but yet the most piquant and expressive face he had ever looked upon. This young woman was carrying a target-rifle; and pinned upon the bullet-punctured side of the oak was the square of white paper at which she had evidently been shooting.

There were others coming up to join the pretty markswoman: a lean-faced, mild-eyed, spectacled gentleman of middle age, whose coat suggested the church or the schoolroom; a vivacious lady in black, with strongly marked eyebrows and eloquent hands and shoulders; a young woman who wore an artist’s smock over her walking-gown; and another who was girlish enough to wear a red tarn, and to be the prettier for it. But by preference Tregarvon made his stammering apologies to the blue embroidery hat.

“Ah—er—please don’t mind me,” he begged, acutely conscious that his abrupt and pistol-bearing entrance was handicapping him prodigiously. “I thought—that is—er—you see, I really couldn’t know that it was merely a peaceful target practice, and I——”

“Of all things!” gasped the young woman, her slate-blue eyes emphasizing her shocked amazement. “Did you really think that some one was shooting at you? But, of course, you must have! How perfectly dreadful!”

Tregarvon was trying ineffectually to hide the ornamental revolver in his coat pocket when the others closed in.

“You are sure you are not hurt?” the mild-eyed escort made haste to inquire, and Tregarvon grinned sheepishly.

“Only in my self-esteem,” he confessed. “I was silly enough to think that somebody was trying to mark me down, though I might have known better after the first shot or two.”

“But how could you know when you were behind the tree and couldn’t see us?” protested the one who had been doing the shooting. “I’m sure it speaks libraries for your self-control that you didn’t retaliate in kind! Don’t you think so, Madame Fortier?” and she appealed to the lady with the Gallic eyebrows and the eloquent shoulders.

“Ciel! but the sangfroid—what you call the cold blood—of these American zhentlemen is of a grandeur the moz’ magnificent!” exclaimed madame. “Mees Richardia she is shoot a hondred time at zis zhentleman, and he is say he is injure’ onlee in hees amour-propre!”

It was at this point that the humor of the situation overtook the chief offender, and she laughed, the sweetest and most delectable laugh that ever gladdened the ears of a young man keenly sensitive to the charms of heavenly slate-blue eyes, a piquant face, and a voice remindful of wood-thrushes and song-sparrows and golden-throated warblers.

“After this, there is nothing left for us but to declare ourselves,” she submitted ruefully, turning to the spectacled escort. “It is the least we can do to save the gentleman the trouble of describing us if he wishes to have us taken before Squire Prigmore.”

But now Tregarvon was regaining some measure of equanimity.

“Let me be the one to begin the identifying process,” he amended. “My name is Vance Tregarvon, and I have the misfortune to be the present owner of the valueless piece of property known as the Ocoee Mine. You are more than welcome to make a rifle-range of my landscape any time you wish. I am quite certain it is the only useful purpose it has ever subserved.”

The gentleman whose coat was either clerical or schoolmasterish, bowed gravely and took his turn, prefacing it with a question.

“Have you ever heard of Highmount College for Young Women, Mr. Tregarvon?”

Tregarvon, in deference to piquancies and slate-blue eyes and the like, was tempted to quibble and say that, of course, every one knew of Highmount College. But the heavenly eyes were holding him, and they promised intolerance of anything but the pellucid truth. So he shook his head regretfully.

“Such is fame—the fame of an old, a great, and a noble institution of learning!” said the spectacled one, in mock deprecation. “With a foundation laid over half a century in the past, with the most healthful and charming location on the entire Cumberland Mountain for its site; with a corps of instructors second only to those of the richly endowed colleges of the North—correct me, Miss Richardia, if I am not quoting the prospectus accurately—with all these splendid advantages, and with a student body drawn from the oldest and most distinguished families of the South.... Mr. Tregarvon, can it be possible——”

“Spare me!” laughed the victim. “You must remember that I am only a poor, ignorant provincial from Philadelphia, less than a fortnight out of the shell.”

“We are merely trying to impress you properly so that you will think twice before having us arrested for trespass and attempted assassination,” broke in the laughing markswoman. “We may not look it, but we are a majority of the faculty of Highmount College for Young Women. Let me present you to Madame Fortier, Modern Languages; to Miss Longstreet, Art; to Miss Farron, Assistant Mathematics; and to Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt, Higher Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.”

Tregarvon bowed in turn to the Gallic eyebrows, to the artist’s smock, to the red tam-o’-shanter, and shook hands cordially with the M.A., Vanderbilt.

“This is fine, you know; it’s like Robinson Crusoe’s meeting with his rescuers,” he asserted joyously. “This is my first real hearing of the English tongue since I began doing time down yonder in Coalville, with my old ruin of an office-building for a dungeon, and Mrs. Matt Tryon for my jail matron. Is it very far to Highmount College? And may I hope sometime to——”

The three younger women laughed at this, and Madame Fortier hastened to be hospitable.

“We shall be moz’ charm’, Monsieur Tregarvong. I will spik for President Caswell and hees good madame.” But Tregarvon waited for Miss Richardia’s confirmation, which was given unhesitatingly.

“Certainly, you must come, if you can spare the time,” she affirmed. “We were speaking of you, and of the Ocoee prospects, at dinner the other evening, and Doctor Caswell was even then threatening to look you up. I think he said he had met your father in years gone by.”

“I am sure that was exceedingly kind and hospitable—to think of taking the stranger up before he had made himself known,” said Tregarvon, with the hearth-warmed exile’s glow at his heart. They were moving over to the rifle-rest, and he had fallen a step or two behind with Miss Richardia. “You would have to be a castaway in a strange land yourself to know how good it feels to be counted in.”

“I have been both—the castaway and the counted-in,” she returned. “I was four years in Boston; two of them without knowing a single soul outside of a limited little Conservatory circle.”

“Ah,” he said, with the air of one who pats himself on the back for his own perspicacity. “You didn’t introduce yourself a moment ago, as you may remember, but I was sure you were Music.”

“Why were you?” she asked.

“Because you look it.”

“Harmony or discord?” she queried, with the bright little laugh remindful of the bird songs.

“How can you ask! Celestial harmony—no less!” It was only a matter of a hundred yards, between the oak-tree target and the firing-stand, but they were getting on very well, indeed.

“Following that line of reasoning, you might say that Miss Longstreet looks picturesque, I suppose? And Miss Farron——”

“Miss Farron is far too charming to warrant any allusion to figures, mathematical or other,” he retorted lightly.

“And how about Professor Billy?”

Tregarvon chuckled. “Is that what you call him? I’m glad I have a Christian name that can’t very well be nicked entirely out of all resemblance to the original. Which reminds me: have I got to call you ‘Miss Richardia’? It sounds awfully formal—don’t you think?—in the mouth of a man who has been familiarly shot at by its possessor.”

“You had better,” she replied calmly. “I am ‘Miss Dick’ in the classrooms; but that is the student body’s privilege. Other people have to earn it.”

“Consider me an employee from this moment, if you please. I’m good at earning things.”

“Have you earned the Ocoee property?” she asked, altogether, as it appeared, by way of making conversation.

“No; but my father did—very bitterly, as it turned out. May I ask what you know about the Ocoee?”

“Only what every one knows: that it brings sorrow and ruin to everybody who has anything to do with it.”

They had reached the rifle-stand, and Hartridge was reloading the target-gun for Miss Farron. There was still a little isolation for Tregarvon and his companion, and the young man made the most of it.

“Your words imply a lot more than they say,” he suggested. “I shall take an early opportunity to make my Highmount call, and when I do, perhaps you will tell me some of the things I need to know.”

“Professor Hartridge or President Caswell can tell you better than I can,” she demurred, as one dismissing an unpleasant subject. “I only know that the mine has always been a wretched failure; first a thing of broken promises, and afterward a cunningly devised pitfall for the unwary.”

If Tregarvon had for his major weakness the love of women, he was not lacking such other qualities as may go with broad shoulders, good gray eyes set wide apart, a clean-cut face, and a resolute jaw. The squareness of the jaw was emphasized when he said: “This is the time when the Ocoee quits being a failure, Miss Richardia. It is up to me to make it a success, and I mean to do it.”

It was at this conjuncture that Miss Farron, trying vainly to sight the rifle over the fallen-tree firing-stand, broke in upon the tête-à-tête.

“Dickie, dear, do come here and hold your hand over my left eye,” she called plaintively. “It just persists in coming open to see what the other one is trying to do.”

II
The Sow’s Ear

THE rough-hewn world of mountain and valley had taken on a distinctly cheerful aspect for the young man from Philadelphia when, late in the afternoon, he reluctantly separated himself from the rifle-shooting party and turned his steps valleyward to keep an appointment made two days earlier with one Angus Duncan, an old Scotch mining expert, upon whom the great Southern title company, unlimited, had long since conferred the brevet of “captain.”

Whatever the Tregarvon gray eyes and resolute jaw promised in the way of decisive action and stubborn determination, their possessor was never born to be a contented anchorite. Not even the matchless beauties of nature, arrayed in all the glories of a Tennessee mountain September, could atone for the solitude imposed by the dead-alive hamlet of Coalville, and the newly opened prospect of an occasional escape to the congenial social atmosphere of the mountain-top school was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

Tregarvon was planning the first of these escapes, and forecasting the time which would be consumed in freighting his motor-car down from Philadelphia, when the forest path ended and let him out among the deserted slope-foot buildings and empty coke-ovens of the Ocoee. He glanced at his watch. The up-train on the branch railroad was due; it had doubtless announced its approach by some distant crossing whistle, since the little squad of village idlers had left its cantonments under the porch of Tait’s store to straggle across to the station platform.

Tregarvon remained on his own side of the railroad-tracks and waited. He knew that Captain Duncan’s visit would be discussed in all its possible bearings in the idlers’ caucus at Tait’s, and he was willing to disappoint the country-store gossips when it came in his way.

There were but few passengers to get on or off at Coalville when the branch-line train rolled up to the platform, and Tregarvon had no difficulty in identifying his man; the stocky, ruddy-faced, shrewd-eyed mining engineer who had been named to him as the foremost coal expert in the Tennessee field. He cut Duncan out of the group of loungers at the instant of hand-shaking, and took him across to the dilapidated building which had once been the superintendent’s office and the commissary of the Ocoee Company, seeking, and securing, as he imagined, ear-shot privacy for the business conference.

But privacy in a Southern country hamlet, where gossip is as the breath of life to the isolated few, is only to be bought with a price. From his post of observation in Tait’s doorway, a lank, bristly-bearded man in grimy jeans that had once been butternut, marked the direction of the retreat across the railroad-tracks, made a dodging détour around the engine of the standing train, and was safely hidden behind a thick clump of althea bushes at the corner of the office-building when Tregarvon and the Scotchman came leisurely to sit on the door-stone.

“Ye’re paying me for an expert opeenion, Mr. Tregarvon, and that’s what I’m bound to gie ye,” the engineer was saying. “I’ve known the Ocoee ever since the first pick was piked intil it, and ye’ll be wasting your time and money if you try to develop it. That’s what I told your father, and it’s what I’m telling his son.”

“Poor coal? Or not enough of it?” Tregarvon’s manner was that of a man desirous of knowing the exact facts.

“Good coal—fine! It makes a coke that would run everything this side of Pocahontas, or maybe Connellsville, out o’ the market. And there is enough of it if the two veins could be worked as one. But there’s the bogie, Mr. Tregarvon; two well-defined veins, each a foot and a half thick, one above the other, and with six foot of solid rock between. If you had twenty such veins it wouldn’t pay to work them in this part of the country.”

“You mean that the digging out of the rock between the two coal seams would eat up all the profits?”

“Just that.”

Tregarvon was pulling ineffectually at his short pipe. When he stooped to pluck a spear of grass for a stem-cleaner he said: “Wasn’t it the notion of the earliest promoters that the two veins would merge into one, farther back in the mountain?”

The expert waved his hand toward the long and costly inclined tramway running straight up the steep slope of the mountain to the two black openings at the foot of the cliff-line.

“Ye’d think they believed in it—wouldn’t ye now—to build that tramway on the strength of it? Two hunner’ thousand and better they put in here, first and last; on the tramway and the coke-ovens, the miners’ houses, and this fine office-building that’s crum’ling down behind our backs! And with every practical coal man in the country telling them that such a thing as two veins—two separate veins, mind ye—coming into one was a geological impossibeelity. Parker—the man who set the trap and caught everybody—he knew, I’m thinking; but Judge Birrell and all the rest of ’em were crazy—fair crazy!”

“But is it a geological impossibility, Captain Duncan? That is one of the questions I got you up here to answer for me,” Tregarvon put in.

The Scotch engineer was too cautious to be definitely oracular.

“It’s never been h’ard of yet,” he replied shrewdly, “and there’s a many to tell ye that the day o’ merricles is past. But that isn’t all, Mr. Tregarvon. Besides being a sow’s ear that ye canna hope to make into a silk purse, the Ocoee has another handicap. If ye had your coal in profitable shape and quantity, ye’d never be allowed to mine and coke and market it; never in this warld.”

“Who would stop me?”

“The C. C. & I. Company, which is another name in this part o’ the warld for Consolidated Coal—the trust. The combine owns all the producing mines hereabouts; they’ve got one in full blast at Whitlow, five miles above this. If you should develop into anything worth while, it would be another case of the lion and the lamb lying down in peace together—with the Ocoee lamb inside of the trust lion. They couldn’t afford to lat ye operate. Your coke, for as much of it as ye could make, would drive theirs out o’ the market.”

“Well?” said the Philadelphian.

“They’d buy ye, if they could haggle ye down to sell at a bargain; and, failing in that, they’d break ye. I’m not questioning your resources, ye unnerstand; that part of it was none of my business after I’d had your check for my fee safely in my pocket,” he threw in cannily. “But tell me, now: if ye had your four or five or even six foot of coal, are ye big enough in the way o’ backing and capital to fight Consolidated Coal wi’ any hope of coming out alive?”

“That is as it may be,” said Tregarvon, wishing neither to deny nor to affirm publicly. Then he asked casually if the engineer could give chapter and page proving the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company’s policy of extermination.

“Can I no?” said the Scotchman, with a snap of the shrewd eyes. “I can show ye wrecked mines by the handfu’ in a day’s ride up and down this same Wehatchee Valley we’re sitting in. ’Tis the power o’ money, Mr. Tregarvon. When ye get between the jaws o’ that crusher, ye’re like this”—picking up a bit of friable sandstone and crumbling it in his palm.

The younger man smoked on thoughtfully for a time. Then he said: “Two of the points upon which I wished to have your opinion have been covered pretty conclusively, it would seem. But there is a third. What about this trouble with the McNabbs over the land title?”

The Scotchman waved the third point away as if it had been a buzzing fly.

“The McNabbs are just a whiskey-making lot of poor bodies living back in the Pocket beyond Highmount. An unscrupulous lawyer-scamp got hold of them when the second Ocoee Company was fair rolling in money, and showed them how they could trump up a claim to a wedge-like slip o’ land on the top o’ the mountain which, if the claim could be made good, would cut off the mine a hundred feet or so back from the cliff. There was neither sense nor justice in it, and the courts said so. Ye’ll be having no trouble wi’ the McNabbs, unless one o’ them might be taking a pop at ye wi’ his squirrel-gun some fine day.”

Tregarvon smiled, recalling his sensations while Miss Richardia’s bullets were snipping bark souvenirs from his sheltering oak.

“One wouldn’t be scared out by a little thing like that,” he remarked half humorously. Then he asked, quite abruptly, another question—the chief question for an answer to which he had paid the expert’s fee.

“I have been told, Captain Duncan, that you have made an analysis of the Ocoee coals. Also, I have been given to understand that no two veins in these Tennessee coal-measures have exactly the same characteristics; that the quality of the coal varies with its distance from the original surface, though the depth difference between any two deposits may be very slight. If you didn’t know of the existence of the six-foot layer of stone lying between my two coal seams, would you, or would you not, say that they were one and the same?”

Duncan took time to consider before answering the crucial question.

“I see what ye’re driving at, now,” he said at length. “Ye’ve paid me for a true answer, Mr. Tregarvon, and much as I’ll hate to see your father’s son banging his head against a stone wall, I’ll give it ye. I’ve made half a dozen analyses: so far as they prove anything, the coal in the two seams is the same.”

“Thank you,” returned Tregarvon, drawing a free breath as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders by the answer. And then, as a quavering whistle blast announced the approach of the down freight train on the branch: “There is your return train, Captain Duncan. If I had any hospitality to offer you, you shouldn’t go back to Hesterville to-night. As it is, I know you’ll be glad you don’t have to stop over in Coalville. Even the name is a misnomer, it would seem.”

The grizzled Scotchman had discharged his duty and earned his fee. But the cravings of a purely Caledonian curiosity were still unsatisfied.

“And what’ll ye be doing, think ye, Mr. Tregarvon?” he asked inquisitively.

Tregarvon’s answer was pointedly and purposefully indifferent. “Oh, I don’t know definitely yet. I may take a notion to butt my head against the stone wall, and I may not. If I should, you’ll doubtless hear of it. Good-by; it was mighty good of you to take the trouble to come and talk with me when you might have put me off with a letter.”

Though the leave-taking at the door of the office-building was a fact accomplished, Tregarvon prolonged it a little by walking across to the station with Duncan. Thereby he missed a possible chance of seeing the retreat of the man who had been crouching behind the althea bushes, the dodging run, first to the shelter of the row of coke-ovens, and later to the lower fringe of the Mount Pisgah forest, darkening now in the early valley twilight.

Late that night, in his room in the cobwebbed and dismantled office-building, Tregarvon wrote two letters. The first was to a certain golden youth in New York, a young man rejoicing in the ancient and honorable name of Poictiers Carfax, and whose father had left him more money than he knew what to do with. Upon Carfax Tregarvon leaned as upon a brother, having shared rooms with the golden one in the university at a period in which the Tregarvon family check could also have been drawn for seven figures.

“You are always howling and taking on about living the simple life,” was the opening phrase in the letter to Carfax. “I wish you could be with me to-night and have a taste of what it really is—ten thousand miles from the Great White Way or a decent beefsteak. I’d describe it for you if this were anything but a begging letter—which it isn’t.

“First, I wish you’d send your machinist over to Philadelphia and have him ship my car to me here. Tell him to put in extras of everything, from spark-plugs to tires, just the same as if he were sending it to a man in Darkest Africa.

“Next (and this is of more importance to me, and perhaps less to you), I am going into a scheme here which promises to leave me stony broke before I shall have pulled half-way through the experimental stage, and will possibly bankrupt even the Carfax strong box when it fairly gets its second wind. I may have to sell you some stock, later on, and to that end I’ll be glad if you’ll keep in touch—so that you may be ‘touched’—or at least keep yourself within reach of a wire.

“This is all I’m going to write, for the time being, except to say that I’ve thought of you about five times a minute during the past week, and have tried to picture you in Coalville, hesitating between suicide and a lingering death from disgust. Come down and try it. I’ll go bail it will give you an entirely new set of sensations. What do you say?”

The second letter was to Miss Elizabeth Wardwell, and it was a masterpiece in its way—the way of a man who writes as he would talk, and who talks when he would much better hold his tongue.

“The adventures began to-day,” so ran the words of unwisdom. “While I was clambering around on the mountain above the Ocoee opening, zip! came a bullet—yes, an indubitable leaden bullet fired from a gun—near enough to make me dodge. What will you think of me when I write it down in muddy black ink on white paper that I hid behind a tree! I did, you know, and immediately had plenty of reasons for being thankful that the tree was big enough to cover me, and thick enough through to stop a rifle-bullet.

“For fifteen minutes, or such a matter—though it seemed a moderately long lifetime—my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth, and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man. Would you?

“When it was all over, my assassins—it turned out that there was a bunch of them—proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount College shooting at a mark, which the same—though I hadn’t seen it, and didn’t remotely suspect its existence—was affixed to the farther side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my face, I suppose.

“They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh. It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell, I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing about and looking on and listening in?

“I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I shall—later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go.

“Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of your letters—how much they mean to me.”

III
The Golden Youth

IT was on the day following Captain Angus Duncan’s visit that the hamlet of Coalville, nestling at the foot of Mount Pisgah, took a fresh start as an industrial centre. Word went out from Tait’s store, which served as a general intelligence exchange for the country roundabout, that Tregarvon wanted laborers and would pay good wages.

The men came; some from the half-tilled valley farms, a few from the C. C. & I. mines farther up the railroad, and two or three mountaineers. Two of the mountain dwellers, long-haired, unshaven backwoodsmen, gave their names as Morgan and Sill, suppressing, for some reason best known to themselves, their surname of McNabb. Also there came the lean, bristly-bearded man who had squatted behind the althea bushes at the corner of the office-building during Tregarvon’s talk with Captain Duncan; James Sawyer, by name. Tregarvon knew nothing of this man’s antecedents; of the forehistory of any of them, for that matter. What he demanded was work, and he went about securing it in the best of all possible ways: by stripping off his coat and acting as his own foreman.

In strenuous toilings fled the first two weeks, during which period the old machinery was overhauled, the tramway up the mountain repaired and put in running order, and the débris of disuse cleared away. For the aggressive campaign a deep-well drilling plant was secured in Chattanooga, and upon its arrival all things were made ready for transporting it to the top of the plateau mountain.

Tregarvon’s plan, which he thought was original with him, was to go back on the level mountain top with his test-drill, and to sink a series of holes down to the coal-measures. If the first test should show the two veins still separated by the stubborn ledge of intervening rock, he would move the machinery farther back and try again—and yet again, if need be; though of all this he said no more to his workmen than was necessary to enable them to help intelligently.

At the beginning of the second week the drilling machinery was hauled up the mountain, and two days later, Uncle William, a solemn-faced old negro with a narrow fringe of white wool ringing his otherwise perfectly bald head, made his appearance at Coalville.

He was waiting for Tregarvon on the Thursday morning when the Philadelphian turned out to go up the mountain with his working gang; waiting to doff his battered hat and scrape his foot, and to announce in honeyed tones that he had come “ter tek cha’ge of de young marsteh.”

Quite naturally, Tregarvon thought there must be some mistake, and said so; but the old man persisted with the velvety sort of pertinacity which refuses to be denied, vaunting himself as a body-servant of “the quality,” and acquiring, or seeming to acquire, a curious hardness of hearing when Tregarvon questioned him as to where he had come from and who had sent him.

“Yas, suh—yas, suh; cayn’t hear ve’y good on dat side o’ my haid—no, suh. But I’se suttin sho’ gwine tek mighty good keer o’ you-all; I is dat, marsteh.”

“But a body-servant is the last thing on earth that I am needing here, uncle!” protested Tregarvon, firing his final shot of objection. “If I could find a good cook now, that would be more to the point.”

“Dat’s it—dat’s it, suh. You-all jes’ go ’long up de mounting and boss dem po’ white trash, and lef’ ol’ Unc’ Wilyum ter fix up dat cook-house. He gwine show you what quality cookin’ is; yas, suh; he will dat!”

Tregarvon left the old man bowing and scraping and backing away to take possession of the deserted office-building and its detached cook-shanty; and when he came back to the valley in the evening he gasped to remember how near he had come to incurring the penalty imposed upon those who refuse to entertain angels in disguise.

The old office-building was swept and garnished, above and below. Out of the lumber-room in the basement Uncle William had rescued a dining-table, chairs, napery of a sort, and dishes; and in the rear room, which had once been the office of the Ocoee superintendent, a supper was spread, hot, smoking, and appetizing enough to tempt a sick man. Even the napkins, improvised for the moment out of pieces of a flour-sack washed to snowy whiteness, were not lacking; and when the master would sit down, Uncle William was behind him to whisk the chair away and to replace it, with all the deftness of a trained butler.

Tregarvon ate and drank in grateful and heartfelt silence down to the black coffee, which was served, for the want of the proper crockery, in an egg-cup, with a small fruit dish for a saucer. Then he made the amende honorable.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, Uncle William, but I owe you an apology, none the less,” he said. “Consider that I belong to you for as long as you care to keep me—at your own price.”

“Yas, suh; dat’s it—dat’s jes’ de way de quality talk to ol’ Unc’ Wilyum, eve’y time—hyuh! hyuh! ’Long erbout an hour o’ sun, white woman comed ercross f’om dat white-niggah cabin turrer side de big road, and she say: ‘I gwine fix up Mistoo Tregarbin’s suppeh.’ I say, ‘Mistoo Tregarbin ’sents his compliments an’ say t’ank you kin’ly, but he done got he own body-sarvant!’ Yas, suh; dat’s what I done tol’ huh.”

Tregarvon’s eyes twinkled.

“You’ll be getting yourself disliked, Uncle William, if you put on your quality manners with Mrs. Tryon and her kind. They tell me that this county was Republican during the war.” Then he added: “Are you ready to tell me now who sent you here?”

The old man was clearing the supper-table, and he seemed to have entirely misunderstood the query.

“Dat ol’ cook-house? Yas, suh; it sholy did try me for to git dat ol’ chimley ter mek de fiah bu’n for de supper-fixin’s. Ter-morrer I gwine chink him up some; yas, suh, I sholy is.”

After Uncle William’s mysterious advent the work on the mountain progressed the more rapidly by precisely the difference between a well-fed leader and an ill-fed. Tregarvon and his pick-up crew wrought manfully, and on the eighteenth day—the day of fresh surprises—the drilling machinery had been safely transported to the plateau, had been set up, and was ready to be started on the test upon which the Tregarvon hopes were building airy structures of future affluence.

At quitting-time on this eighteenth day of preparatory toil Tregarvon came down in a tram-car with his men and, after the dispersal at the mountain foot, stood for a moment on the office-building porch to let the quiet grandeur of the perfect autumn evening soak in and wash the work-weariness out of his jaded brain and muscles.

The sun had gone behind the mountain for all the lower reaches of the valley, but its level rays were still pouring in a flood of yellow light across the flat-topped promontory crowned by the buildings of Highmount College. Pisgah, densely forested on slope and summit, loomed vast as the early shadows rose like silently drawn curtains to soften its rugged detail, and on the sky-line Tregarvon’s gaze sought and found the derrick skeleton of his drilling plant struck out in rigid lines of black against the hazy blue. Just above him the tramway cut its steeply ascending gash through the forest of the slope, and in his mind’s eye he could see the cars descending, each with its load of the reopened mine’s largesse, to be dumped upon the receiving-platform beside the row of coke-ovens.

From the outlined derrick to the sun-illumined college buildings was an airy leap of a mile or more. Tregarvon had not as yet used his invitation, though the French teacher’s giving of it had been promptly confirmed by a cordial note from the president’s wife. The social hunger rose strong in the expatriated townlander as he let his eyes make the leap from the industries, typified by the derrick skeleton, to the possible relaxations harboring on Highmount. He meant to go; he promised himself afresh that he would go, the moment his motor-car should arrive and be put into commission to make the five-mile climb up the mountain pike from Coalville something less than an added weariness after a hard day’s work.

He was still looking longingly up to the sun-shot heights and wondering why he had heard nothing from Poictiers Carfax, when a sound, breeze-blown up the valley, made him start and listen. When he heard it again it was nearer; the unmistakable roar of an automobile’s engines with the muffler cut out. To confirm the witness of the ear, a big yellow car presently topped the rise in the valley road below the village and came bounding over the roughnesses of the country wagon track toward the railroad crossing.

Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet.

Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated. And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to Tregarvon’s door.

“Hit do beat the Dutch—what-all gits up in the big woods when you ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the eye-glasses—he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big ones—he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello, Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’—’r some sech name as that—‘did you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back, lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.”

“President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the listeners.

“President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’ some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller totin’ the carpet-bags!”

“I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had ’em—called ’em val-lays.”

“I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn nugget of plug tobacco.

“He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,” volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless. “He’s got two of ’em in his gang now—Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they don’t git him afore he gits the coal——”

“Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,” laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way.

Thus ran the leisurely comment in the gray of the evening, working its way from man to man among the loungers on Tait’s porch. But in the dilapidated office-building across the railroad-tracks there was consternation.

“Why, Poictiers, old man, you can’t endure it for twenty-four hours!” Tregarvon was protesting anxiously. “Look at this place—a dusty, cobwebby ruin that a self-respecting tramp wouldn’t lodge in! Heavens, man! couldn’t you see a joke when it was written out plain with a pen and ink? I would have as soon invited Elizabeth—meaning it!”

Carfax had slipped out of his dust-coat and goggles, the valet assisting, and stood revealed as a handsome young fellow, a shade too well-groomed, perhaps, but with smiling good-nature atoning for the Carfax millions in every line of his beardless and almost effeminate face.

“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.

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.”