VIIIThe Stubborn Rock
BY the time Rucker returned from Chattanooga with the repairs for the broken drilling plant, the Saturday-night attempt to wreck the yellow car on Carfax’s run down the mountain had become a past danger-signal, and was in a fair way to be overlaid and forgotten in a fresh upturning of the activities.
After the arrival of the new gears one day more was needed for their installation; then the smoke plume began to wave again from the top of the stack on lofty Pisgah, and the drill resumed its interrupted jouncings in the sandstone. In due course, and with no added untoward happenings to delay the work—this though the two McNabbs, identified now and closely watched by Tregarvon, were still retained in the gang—the drill reached the first coal seam, penetrated it, plunged again into rock, and, a few hours later, into and through the second and lower coal layer; net result—failure.
With the new-found fighting resolution nowfully aroused, Tregarvon did not waste a minute. In the intervals afforded by temporary pauses in the drilling he had found time to select a location farther back on the plateau for the next trial; and while the boiler of the portable engine was still hot from the fire-drawing of failure, the transfer of the plant was begun.
The second trial was a mere repetition of the first, save that the layer of rock separating the two coal seams gained six inches in thickness for the added distance from the original mine opening in the cliff face at the head of the tramway. Wilmerding, the genial young superintendent of the C. C. & I. subsidiaries was on the ground when the sand-pump tests of this second hole were made, and he shook his head doubtfully.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to throw cold water; it doesn’t come with very good grace from the boss in the enemy’s camp,” he said deprecatingly. “But I’m mightily afraid you gentlemen are chasing fireflies. You have two distinct seams, instead of one that has been split by a horizontal wedge of the sand-rock, and I believe a careful analysis of the coal in the two seams will prove it. Going to move still farther back and try again?”
“It’s the surest thing there is,” said Tregarvon,who had already set his men at work striking the derrick. “I may be licked, but I’m too big a fool to know it.”
“Good!” laughed Wilmerding; “I like your courage immensely. But while you are tapping it again, send me some samples and let me analyze the two veins for you. I have a laboratory up at Whitlow, and I’ll be glad to help out to that extent.”
“You are an enemy, right, Mr. Wilmerding!” said Tregarvon heartily. “A fighting friend couldn’t make a fairer offer than that. But you will find that the two seams are one and the same. I made even canny old Captain Duncan admit that he couldn’t detect any difference in the coal taken from the two veins.”
Wilmerding nodded. “The captain is canny, as you say, though you can hardly prove it by me. I don’t know him very well—haven’t been down here long enough. Thaxter knows him from away back, however, and he has told me a good bit about the old Scotchman, who has the reputation, by the way, of being at the top of the heap as an analytical chemist.”
“Thaxter?” put in Carfax interrogatively. He had been an attentive listener; his usual attitude in any three-cornered conference.
“Yes. Don’t you know Thaxter, my bookkeeper? Not to know Thaxter is to argue yourself unknown in the Wehatchee. The rank and file at Whitlow think I’m the boss, and that Connolly comes next. But Thaxter is the real power behind the throne.”
Carfax made the necessary effort of memory and recalled a pursy little man, round-faced, gray-haired and genial, who had beamed up at him through a pair of thick-lensed spectacles on the day when he had invaded the C. C. & I. stronghold at Whitlow.
“I remember him,” he told Wilmerding. “Reminded me of one of the Brothers Cheeryble, and I caught myself unconsciously looking about for the other.”
Not having read Dickens, Wilmerding lost the point of the comparison.
“Yes,” he went on. “Thaxter is It, all right enough. More than anybody else in this neck of woods he is Consolidated Coal: has every coal detail of this entire region down in black on white, neatly docketed and labelled and put away for future reference. I carry him on my pay-roll, but I couldn’t any more fire him than I could fire the President of the United States. On the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprisedif he could have my head any minute he chose to hold up his finger to the big guns in New York.”
“Nice kind of a bombshell to be rolling around under a man’s feet,” Carfax commented.
“Oh, Thaxter is harmless; he doesn’t explode. He is like the assistant secretaries of the Departments in Washington, you know; the fellows who really have the run of the business and stay on the job while the political chiefs come and go. They are like the cat: harmless and necessary and full of wisdom. Which reminds me: I’ll bet my wind-broken old nag, here, against your gas-car, Tregarvon, that Thaxter has an analysis of these coals of yours filed away somewhere this very minute. If he has, I’ll get it for you. It will be a lot more conclusive than any I could make, offhand, in my laboratory.”
So offering, Wilmerding betook himself and his promise to the road leading to Whitlow, leaving the two undismayed coal prospectors on high Pisgah patiently removing their testing plant to a point still farther back from the cliff face. By this time the working gang had acquired the practice which makes perfect; and before the news of the failure of the second attempt had spread beyond the comment of Tait’sstore the drill was churning away in the third of the testing holes, with the lean, bristly-bearded Sawyer acting as drill-master—a post which he had claimed and filled from the first.
“I don’t care how much other people may laugh at you;Ithink your perseverance is beyond praise,” said Miss Richardia, on an afternoon when Tregarvon, scamping his job and snatching a few moments for himself, had driven her and a group of the Highmount young women over in the yellow car to the new location. “I am sure you deserve to succeed—if perseverance by itself ever deserves anything.”
“Why do you say, ‘by itself’?”
“I mean sheer, dogged persistence, without any of the justifying reasons.”
“I have the reasons; I’m obliged to succeed,” was the answer rather gloomily given. Carfax had taken the tonneau party around to the derrick, and the two in the driving-seat of the car had their bit of the mountain-top world momentarily to themselves.
“You say that as if you were sorry,” laughed the music teacher. “Don’t you want to succeed?”
“To want is to desire and need,” he explained meticulously. “Heaven knows, I need success;need it awfully. Yet the very reason for needing it is vicarious on one hand, and an exhibition of the meanest sort of purse-pride on the other. But you know all about that.”
Truly, Miss Richardia did know. It was during his third evening visit to Highmount, while Carfax was trundling the entire school in batches up and down the cherted pike in front of the college grounds in the auto, and Miss Richardia had been playing to him in the otherwise deserted music-room, that Tregarvon had told her all about the family fortunes, and Elizabeth, and his engagement, and the Uncle Byrd millions. He did not regard it as a breach of confidence at the time; of Elizabeth’s confidence or his own. He had merely yielded to an attack of a purely masculine desire to tell all he knew to the nearest woman.
“You still think it is necessary to keep Miss Wardwell waiting?” Miss Richardia was always able to answer his unspoken thought without apparent effort, as he had already learned.
“You wouldn’t have me do anything else, would you?” he retorted discontentedly. “Put yourself in Elizabeth’s place: what would you think of me if I should take advantage of your good-nature, and so give everybody a chance tosay that I didn’t need to be in love with you—that your money was a sufficient bait?”
Miss Birrell was not at all past blushing, and she did it very prettily.
“You are so boyishly personal!” she laughed, and the fact that she did not resent the personality was an ample measure of the degree to which their intimacy had progressed. And then: “You promised me that you were going to be sensible and straightforward, and all those things. You said you were going to be entirely frank with Eliz—with Miss Wardwell, telling her that you haven’t insisted upon her naming the day because you think you ought to have means of your own, first. Have you done this?”
“No, I haven’t—not yet.”
“Why haven’t you? You owe it to her, don’t you?”
“Perhaps; but I owe something to myself, too.”
Miss Richardia seized upon the admission swiftly and turned it as a weapon against him. “You do, indeed! You owe it to Mr. Vance Tregarvon not to keep any of the anchors in reserve. As you once said, yourself, you are too impressionable.”
“A light o’ love,” he laughed. “I must tell Elizabeth what an eloquent special pleader shehas unconsciously acquired down here in the wilds of Tennessee. What have I done that I ought not to have done?”
“I am not your conscience,” was the cool-voiced reply.
“But you are,” he retorted accusingly. “You tell me what I ought to do, and I promise to go and do it. My intentions are always good.”
“I am not sure of even that much, now. You have changed very remarkably in the past few weeks, and you must forgive me if I say that the change hasn’t been altogether for the better. You were just a nice, cheerful boy when you came to Tennessee, and you’re not that any more.”
“I have good reasons, and plenty of them,” he blurted out. “Do you want to hear them?”
“Not when you talk that way,” said Miss Birrell, and her attitude became suddenly indifferent.
“You shall hear them, whether you want to or not,” he broke in almost roughly. “I have the whole world against me on this Ocoee proposition; I have given my word to Elizabeth when I don’t love her as the man who is going to marry her ought to love her; and——”
“That is quite enough,” she interposed quietly.“It only proves what I said a minute ago. You can’t afford to hold any of your anchors in reserve. I think we had better join Mr. Carfax and the young women. Don’t you?”
“No. And I call that downright cruel, when we see so little of each other, and I almost never have you to myself any more.”
“It is your saying such things as that that makes me think I ought to be cruel. There are times when you need cruelty. Nothing milder would do any good.”
“You may as well say the remainder of it,” he prompted.
“I shall. It is really serious. You must come to a better understanding with Miss Wardwell; and you must stop coming so often to Highmount.”
“The first time I went to Highmount you told me that I might come as often as I pleased. You needn’t worry about the school-girls. If you say the word, I’ll never speak to one of them again unless she is duly chaperoned at the moment.”
“We were speaking of Miss Wardwell,” was the rather chilling reminder.
“Well, we will speak of her, then. She isn’t losing any sleep on my account. If you only knew Elizabeth as well as I do—but what’s the use!”
“There appears to be no use at all, and I have already said more than your nearest friend ought to say. Suppose we talk of something else.”
Tregarvon refused flatly to accept the invitation.
“No; I want to know about my welcome at Highmount. I have had Mrs. Caswell’s warrant in the past. I have it yet. You can’t make me stay away.”
Miss Richardia’s pretty chin went up a quarter of an inch.
“Then you will compel me to be disagreeable; and I don’t like to be that. I always have plenty of work to do in the evenings; quite a number of the young women would like to take extra music lessons, and I have a piano in my rooms.”
Tregarvon gasped. “You don’t mean that you’d be hard-hearted enough to shut yourself up? to refuse to see me? That would be—but I simply can’t contemplate it. You—you don’t know what your confidence and your clear insight have come to mean to me!”
“On the contrary, it is because I do know, or rather because I know how you are justifying yourself, that you must——”
“But I shall not! It is just a frank, open friendship that has grown very precious to me, Richardia. Put it upon the lowest possiblegrounds; say that it amuses you and doesn’t hurt Elizabeth—I could show you letters from her in which she actually encourages it—and add to these that it does me a whole lot of good. Why should you freeze up right in the midst of it, just when I am needing all the encouragement I can get?”
Miss Birrell did not wish to laugh, but his protest, the shocked pleading of a little boy who fears he is about to be deprived of his customary piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, was too much for her self-control. None the less, she would not yield a hair’s-breadth.
“You can’t convince me, and you needn’t try,” she declared. “Granting what you say—that it amuses me and doesn’t hurt any one else—there are still the conventions to be considered. Perhaps you think, because you are a thousand miles from Philadelphia, that there are no conventions. If you do, you are greatly mistaken. Highmount, for example, has a complete equipment of them.”
“Confound the conventions!” growled Tregarvon. Carfax was leading his following back to the car, and the end of the confidential talk was approaching.
“No, you needn’t swear at them,” said Miss Richardia, with honey in her tone. “More thanthat, you would be the last person in the world to want to have them confounded. In your proper environment, I can picture you as an exceedingly correct person; one who would protest most vigorously if his sister should——”
She did not finish, because the others were within hearing distance; but the sentence was sufficiently complete to point the comparison for Tregarvon. He bent over the steering-wheel and pretended to be trying the connections of the substitute battery coil. The feint permitted him to say in low tones: “You are altogether right—as you always are. I’ll be as decent as I can: and it will cost more than you think.”
After which he descended from the driving-seat and shifted the responsibility of the return of the party to Highmount over to Carfax, saying that since the drill was doubtless nearing the coal depth, he would better stay on the job.
He was late getting down the mountain that evening, having worked his crew overtime to settle a disputed point with Rucker. The dispute, or rather its outcome, was sufficiently explained in his announcement to Carfax when he tramped into the office dining-room and dropped wearily into a chair before the fire.
“One more slap in the face, Poictiers. Wefound the coal about two hours ago, and a little later the drill landed upon the sandstone layer again. I’m too tired to know whether it’s discouragement or just plain leg-weariness and back-ache, but I feel as if something had gone out of me.”
Carfax rose to the occasion with his customary cheerful alacrity.
“We’re not going to say die, yet a while, Vance, old man. It merely means another try. If you are running low in the ammunition-chest——”
“No, it isn’t that; it isn’t costing so terribly much. But to tell the blank truth, I don’t know where to go with the drill for another try. We are a good quarter of a mile back from the tramway head now; an almost impracticable distance, even if we had found the big vein.”
“Well, what is the matter with swinging around the circle a bit? You have latitude as well as longitude, haven’t you?” said Carfax the comforter.
“Oh, yes; there is Ocoee land enough. And I guess that is about the last hope.”
“Which way had you thought of moving, north or south?”
“Whichever way you say,” was the spiritless reply.
Carfax took a coin from his pocket and balanced it upon his thumb. “Heads, Highmount way; tails, toward Whitlow,” he called, and flipped the coin.
It fell heads uppermost, deciding for the Highmount direction; and when Tregarvon would have picked the coin up to return it, Carfax stopped him.
“Let it alone; I’m superstitious to-night. Uncle William will be in with your warmed-over dinner in a minute: let him pick it up and keep it—for good luck.” And a little while afterward, when the old negro shuffled in with the covered tray: “There is a dollar on the floor which we are both afraid to touch, Uncle William. Don’t you want it?”
The old man scraped a foot and said: “Sarvent, suh,” but he arranged the table to the final nicety before going around to look at the money on the floor.
“Now, Marsteh Poictiers, whut-all is de marter wid dat dollah?” he asked, bending, hands on knees, to eye it suspiciously.
“There is nothing the matter with the dollar, uncle; the trouble is with us. We are afraid of it.”
“Sho’ now! Is you? Dat look lak a mightyrightchus dollah to me. Dat ain’t no debbil’s money, is it?”
“You’ll have to settle that for yourself. Since the dollar came out of my pocket a few minutes ago, I shall be justified in refusing to answer so personal a question as that relating to its righteousness.”
“Hyuh! hyuh!It comed out of yo’ pocket, an’ yit you is skeered of it? Dat look mighty cur’is to me. Look lak you-all is tryin’ to play trick on de ol’ man, Marsteh Poictiers. I ain’t seed no white folks’ money yit dat I’s skeered of,” and he bent cautiously to pick it up.
“Look out, Uncle William; it might burn you!” said Carfax suddenly; and quite as suddenly the old negro dropped the coin and started back.
“Bless gresshus! but datwuzhot!” he exclaimed, blowing upon his fingers. And then: “Des you keep yo’ eye on dat dollah, ef you please, suh, twell I come back, an’ I’ll fix ’im,” and a little later he returned from the cook-house with a small tin pan which he turned down over the piece of money.
“Ef dat won’t be in you gemmans’ way, an’ you-all ’ll des leab ’im dah, I gwine come back bimeby an’ tek de cunjer off ’im. I ain’ gwine lef de ol’ debbil hab dat dollah, not ef itishis’n.”
The little diversion did for Tregarvon what Carfax had hoped it might; and after the belated meal was eaten and the pipes were lighted, the atmosphere of disheartenment was changed somewhat for the better.
“There is one thing we have to be thankful for,” the disappointed one volunteered, when his reflections began to mellow in the tobacco smoke. “We haven’t heard from the enemy since the attempt was made to ditch the car, and there haven’t been any more of the unaccountable accidents to the machinery.”
“That is so,” said Carfax. “And I have been trying to guess, all along, why he—or they—stopped so abruptly.”
“There wasn’t any good reason why he—or they—should have begun,” said Tregarvon musingly.
“Somebody evidently thought there was a reason, and afterward changed his mind. Why should he change his mind? That is the question that has been puzzling me.”
“Perhaps he has found out what a good fellow I really am, and is no longer bloodthirsty,” put in Tregarvon, who was too tired to make any very heavy drafts upon his mentality.
“You haven’t any notion that the fight, ifthere is one, is personal to you, have you?—excluding Professor Hartridge, of course.”
“Oh, no; I was only joking. And we’ll always exclude Hartridge, if you please; I’m still refusing to believe it of him. It was probably somebody’s intention to drown the blind kitten of an Ocoee before it had time to get its eyes open; but the somebody couldn’t, by any stretch of imagination, be Hartridge.”
“But why has the somebody—who isn’t Hartridge—called the fight off so suddenly? By Jove, Vance—I have an idea! It has dawned upon the enemy, whoever he is, that it wasn’t worth while to efface us at a time when we were perseveringly going the right way about it to efface ourselves! I’d like to make a bet with you: when we begin drilling in the right place—if there is any right place—the trouble will blossom out again. What do you think?”
“I haven’t a thought left that isn’t too leg-weary to keep up with you,” Tregarvon confessed; whereat he fell to talking of Miss Richardia Birrell, dribbling on until Carfax, groaning in spirit, got up to light the bed-room candles.