XBlind Alleys
THERE was a council of war, held without preliminaries, to follow Rucker’s report made to his two employers on the morning after the night of mysterious alarms. The small tool shanty served as the council-chamber, and the councillors were only two, Rucker having been heard and dismissed to take his place as chief mechanician in the drilling squad.
“Talk about fourteen-fifteen puzzles and the fourth dimension: this masquerade puts the kibosh on them all,” remarked Carfax, opening his pocket-case of freshly imported cigarettes. “Or are you wiping the slate clean by charging Billy Rucker with a bad supper or a drink or so too many?”
Tregarvon shook his head.
“It is too circumstantial to be a nightmare. Besides, there are the two sets of wheel tracks in the road, and the marks of the tripod under the oak; likewise the burnt pine torch and Rucker’s stake to mark the place of it. It’s no pipe-dream—more’s the pity.”
“Then what the deuce is it?—or they?—since there seem to have been two distinct sets of phenomena.”
Again the owner of the Ocoee shook his head.
“I think we may safely assume that Rucker saw two acts in the same play. But what the play may have been is beyond my wildest guess. Rucker’s suggestion that we’ve dropped down into a neighborhood of crazy people seems to fit better than anything else.”
Carfax was sitting on the cot with his hands locked over one knee. “It is rather pointedly our job to chase the shy guess into a corner, don’t you think? There is mischief in it. One’s bosom friends would hardly come here at night to shake their fists at things, or to run surveyors’ lines by moonlight.”
Tregarvon got up to tramp the floor, but there was no room in the cluttered tool shanty and he sat down again upon a coil of rope.
“Damn this crazy Southern mining country!” he rapped out. “Rucker is right: I believe it’s peopled with escaped lunatics fresh from Bedlam! You’ve got a theory, Poictiers; I can see it in your eye. Put it in words. Whom do you suspect?”
“Small minds suspect: larger ones reasoncalmly,” said the golden youth in mild irony. “The thing for us to do first is to establish a few identities, if we can. Who were these late-in-the-evening visitors? Let’s take them in their natural order; first come, first served. Rucker seems to have had a fair eye-shot at the man in a soft hat and long-tailed coat. Doesn’t his description of the man’s clothes and figure throw at least a suggestion into you?”
Tregarvon frowned. “You’ve got Hartridge on the brain,” he retorted. “You can travel anywhere in the South and still find plenty of men who wear soft hats and full-skirted Prince Alberts.”
“Yes; quite so. But we have met only one on Mount Pisgah, thus far, and his name is William Wilberforce Hartridge. And if we take Mr. Hartridge for the fist-shaking gentleman, the next step—the identity of the lady—is simplified.”
“I don’t see it,” Tregarvon objected sourly.
“You mean you won’t see it. What woman, from Highmount, would be most likely to be Mr. Hartridge’s companion on a moonlight evening drive? Don’t let your prejudices, or rather your prepossessions, make a blind mule of you, Vance.”
“I suppose you mean that the woman wasRichardia Birrell. It doesn’t necessarily follow, and I don’t believe it.”
“It isn’t so dreadfully hard to believe. There is no reason why she shouldn’t go driving with the professor of mathematics, if she feels like it. Neither is there anything especially culpable in the fact that she walked down here with him when he came to shake his professorial fist at your drilling-machine. When you have cooled down sufficiently, we’ll go and see if my little primary guess won’t prove out.”
“I’m cool enough,” was the answer to this; and together they went to seek the proof.
The buggy tracks in the damp sand of the little-used road were not hard to trace, and there were places where the hoof-prints of the horse which had been driven toward Highmount were clean-cut and distinct. Carfax was a spoiled son of fortune only in his affectations. Beneath the carefully cultivated fopperies there was a keen, active mentality which rarely missed its mark and never fumbled. He made pencil sketches of the hoof-prints on the back of an old letter in passing, and it was he, and not Tregarvon, who noted the single peculiarity in the horse’s shoeing; a missing corner from the toe-calk on the left hind foot.
As the New Yorker’s hypothesis had assumed, the buggy tracks led directly to Highmount; or at least the assumption seemed a fair one. The two investigators did not follow the vehicle trail all the way to the college gates; could not, since the trail-recording wood road came out into the hard-metalled mountain pike a few hundred yards below the Highmount grounds, and the wheel marks were no longer visible. But there seemed to be no reasonable doubt of the correctness of Carfax’s guess; and Tregarvon admitted as much on the way back to the starting-point.
“Mind you, I’m not admitting that Richardia was a party to anything underhanded or crooked,” he added in qualification. “She may have been driving with Hartridge; as you say, there isn’t any particular reason why she shouldn’t go buggy-riding with him if she wishes to; and she may have walked down to the glade with him. I don’t say that she didn’t; but I do say that she isn’t tangled up in any of the disreputable mysteries, knowingly.”
“Oh, no; I’d be as loath to admit that as you are,” said Carfax gently. “In fact, it is barely possible that I have the better right to defend her. We’ll put it all up to Hartridge. The next thing is to find out, if we can, where Hartridgegot his two surveyors on such short notice, and what it was that could be proved or disproved by a transit sight taken in the moonlight under conditions which must have barred anything like mathematical accuracy. Where are your blue-prints of the Ocoee property?—down below, or up here?”
The map copies were in the tool-house, one set of them; and when they were found, Carfax spread them out on the cot and pored over them thoughtfully.
“You are not trespassing on somebody else’s land, at all events,” was the verdict, rendered after he had verified the position of the glade in which the fourth test-hole was being driven. “It is all Ocoee in every direction; your land covers all this part of the mountain. By the way, what is this name, ‘Westwood,’ written across these mountain-top plats?”
Tregarvon did not know, and he said so; adding that he supposed it might be the name of the original owner of the land.
“Who is he? Ever hear of him?”
“I don’t recall that I have. But that is not singular. I haven’t had occasion, or the time, to dig very deeply into ancient history.”
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything veryilluminating about these blue-prints, save that they establish your perfect right to bore holes almost anywhere you please,” said Carfax. “Suppose we go now and take up the trail of the two surveyors.”
The track of the second buggy proved to be a short scent soon lost. Within a hundred yards of its turning-point opposite the glade the buggy had left the wood road, the tracks swerving to the right in a direction opposite to that taken by the earlier vehicle; and neither the wheels nor the hoofs of the horse had left any impress on the thick carpeting of fallen leaves under the trees; or none that amateur trailers could see and follow.
They were returning down the by-road when a crash and a hoarse roar of escaping steam notified them that once more something had gone wrong with the machinery. Carfax threw up his head like a thoroughbred starting in a race.
“We have been hunting for causes,” he snapped: “there is effect number one, right now! I can outrun you to the home plate!”
They came upon the scene, neck and neck, just after Rucker had stopped the engine and opened his fire-door. The walking-beam had fallen again, carrying down a portion of the derrickframework; and the mountaineer whose name on the pay-roll appeared as “Morgan,” and who had been drill-turning in Sawyer’s place at the moment, was caught and held under the wreckage.
Happily, the man was neither killed nor very severely injured. A few minutes’ quick work, to which everybody lent a hand, sufficed to extricate him from the mass of broken timbers; and a rather ugly scalp wound, which Carfax proceeded deftly to wash and dress and bandage, figured as the worst of his hurts.
Tregarvon sent the man home in charge of the other masquerading McNabb; and then came the reckoning with the smashed drilling plant.
“What are we in for this time, Rucker?” was the owner’s question, put after the machinist had measured the damage with a critical eye.
“Mostly a couple o’ days’ hang-up, I guess. Leave me a man or two to help me blacksmith, and I’ll see what I can do. But what’s eatin’ me is, what done it?”
There seemed to be no categorical answer to this, the cause of the breakdown being as yet well hidden in thedébrisof the effect. Tregarvon was willing to charge it to the chapter of accidents, but Carfax was less easily satisfied.
“If it were the first,” he demurred; “but itisn’t. There is an entire series behind it. And, coming right on the heels of the little mysteries of last night ... I’m of the opinion that this is the beginning of more hostilities, Vance.” Then to Rucker: “How far did you get the hole down, Billy?”
“Not more than a couple o’ feet.”
“Drilling hard?” asked Tregarvon.
“Um-m-m; middlin’ hard; ’bout like the one we put down over yonder at the head of the tramway—the first one we drilled.”
Tregarvon told off three of the laborers to help Rucker, and sent the remaining three back to Coalville to report to Tryon, who, with another small squad, was replacing rotted cross-ties on the lower end of the tramway. After this, he beckoned to Carfax, and they went together down the shallow glade ravine to the spot where Rucker had found the burnt pine-knot torch and had driven his marking stake.
Out of hearing of the four men left at the drilling-stand, Tregarvon said: “Well, the McNabbs are eliminated, definitely. It is fair to assume that a man wouldn’t be so careless as to get caught in a trap of his own setting.”
“You would think not,” was Carfax’s rejoinder; but he did not say that it was impossible.
On the ground where the torch-bearer of the previous night had stood they searched carefully for something that might give a working clue to the mystery of the moonlight survey. There was nothing, unless an oak-tree, with a half-overgrown “blaze” and some ancient markings cut in it, might be called a clue.
Two or three hundred feet below the scarred oak lay the cliff edge, at this point something less than a precipice. Tregarvon stood on the brink, looking down over the rough, broken talus. A hundred yards below his perch the gray ribbon of the mountain pike leading to Coalville wound in and out among the trees and huge boulders. Farther around to the left, and almost on a level with the broken talus, he could see the head of the Ocoee tramway. At once he called Carfax’s attention to the favoring topographies.
“If we should find our big vein anywhere between here and the tramhead, it would be almost as accessible as the old opening,” he said. “The track could be continued on an easy curve and grade, and there is drop enough to give us the gravity haul. I wonder if any one has ever looked along here for the outcrop?”
Viewed from the summit, the rough declivity, rocky, wooded, and thickly-covered with a mattedtangle of brier, laurel, and undergrowth, looked as if it had never been trodden by the foot of man. Carfax, leaning against a tree which grew on the extreme edge of the cliff, gave it as his opinion that the rocky slope had never felt the prospector’s pick.
“They have to dig trenches or holes or something, in prospecting for coal, don’t they?” he asked; and when Tregarvon confirmed the surmise: “I should say that this toboggan-slide is just as old Madam Nature left it, shouldn’t you? Can we get from here to the tramhead without going back and around and over the mountain?”
“Easily,” said Tregarvon, and he swung out and dropped over the low cliff to lead the way along the broken ledges.
It was while Carfax was lowering himself with more care than Tregarvon had taken, with the leaning tree to help, that he made a small discovery and called Tregarvon back. On its outer or valley-facing side the leaning tree carried a “blazed” scar with markings similar to those on the white-oak half-way between the cliff and the glade. Like the other scar, this one was old, and the bark had long since healed around the edges of the ax-wound. But the markings, whichwere cut into the heart-wood, were still quite distinct.
“Well?” said Tregarvon, after they had examined the scar together, “what do you make of it?”
Carfax was pencilling the mark on the back of the letter upon which he had sketched the damp-sand hoof-prints.
“I don’t know. It looks something like the Greek letter ‘pi’, a capital ‘T’ with two stems, don’t you think? But, of course, that is only a coincidence.”
“Is it, though?” queried Tregarvon thoughtfully.
“It must be. What woodsman in this part of the world would ever mark a tree with a Greek letter?”
“No woodsman, perhaps; but a schoolmaster might. Poictiers, I am slowly coming around to your point of view. Hartridge is at the bottom of all these smash-ups and mysteries. I hate to believe it of him, but everything leans in his direction.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? But the admission of the fact doesn’t clear up the mysteries. Say that, for some reason, sentimental or other, Hartridge wishes to drive you out—make you quit. That might explain the smash-ups and thehindrances; but it doesn’t begin to explain why we should find these marks of his—if they are his—made on these two trees years and years ago; or why he should send a pair of surveyors up here to make monkey motions in the moonlight.”
Tregarvon was leading the way along the ledge toward the tramhead.
“We shall probably find out more about all these things before we are much older on the job,” he replied; and then, vengefully: “If I can catch him at it, I promise you I’ll make him sorry!”
After they reached the head of the inclined track and had signalled to Tryon at the foot to let them down in the tip-car, Tregarvon outlined his plan for the broken day.
“We’ll go down and get out the auto and my engineering instruments, motor back to the drilling plant, and do a little surveying on our own account. Beyond that, you may take the car and kill time with it as you please. I’ll stay and help Rucker.”
The programme was carried out in due course. By ten o’clock they were back on the mountain top with the surveying instruments. Placing the transit upon the tripod marks under the tree on the edge of the glade, Tregarvon took a forwardsight to the eastward, with Carfax holding the target-staff on the spot where the burnt torch was found. Then, without changing the position of the instrument, Tregarvon signalled Carfax to go back, halting him at the cliff edge, and moving him to right and left until the target was once more in line with the cross-hairs of the telescope.
“What developments?” he inquired, when the staff-bearer came up.
“Nothing startling. Your line of sight merely picked up the second of the two marked trees, whatever significance that may have.”
“You may be sure it has some significance, if we were shrewd enough to figure it out,” Tregarvon asserted. Then: “What will you do with yourself until dinner-time?”
“Oh, I don’t know; chase around in the car awhile, maybe, if you can’t use me here. Perhaps I may be able to pick up a clue or so—if I can find anybody to talk to.”
Tregarvon stripped off his coat and went to work with Rucker and the helpers, and in this manner the better part of the day was accounted for. Late in the afternoon, when the blacksmithing of new irons left him without an occupation, he yielded to a prompting which had been urging him all day, and went for a long tramp which tookhim over the route covered by the drilling plant in its several removals.
The sun had gone behind the mountain when he finally came out at the tramhead and signalled for the cable-car to take him down. Tryon answered the signal and started the machinery, and in a few minutes Tregarvon was landed at the Coalville level, where he found Carfax waiting for him on the porch of the office-building.
“I beat you to it,” said the golden youth; and then, whimsically: “What do you know now more than you knew before you knew so little as you know now?”
Tregarvon cast himself down upon the porch-step. “I’ll tell you, after a bit. Did you find out anything new?”
“Nothing very conclusive. Item number one is that there are only two horses in the Highmount stables; neither of them white, and neither with a broken toe-calk on the left hind foot.”
Tregarvon smiled wearily. “More negative information; it’s always negative.”
“Yes; and you may put into the same basket the item that no one of the half-dozen people I asked knew of any white horse owned on the mountain. But I picked up one little pointer that belongs in the other basket—the positive. I hadluncheon at Highmount—upon Mrs. Caswell’s very pressing invitation. At table, Miss Richardia wanted to know how you came to plant your drilling-machine right in the middle of the old burying-ground.”
“What’s that?” said Tregarvon. “You don’t mean to say that the glade is a graveyard!”
“It seems that it used to be, many years ago—for the slaves. You will remember that you remarked the sunken spots in the only bit of soft earth there is, and wondered what made them. They are graves. Do you suppose Rucker would sleep any better to-night than he did last night if he knew that? If he had known it last night, perhaps it might have accounted for some of his restlessness. But I’m drifting from the point, which is that Miss Richardia’s question betrayed her: she was the young woman who drove with the man behind the white horse; otherwise she would not have known about the location of the drilling plant in the glade.”
“That doesn’t follow,” Tregarvon objected. “Some one might have told her. But let that part of it go. Did you discover anything else?”
“Yes. After school hours I took Miss Farron, Miss Longstreet, and the French teacher out for a spin in the car. Miss Richardia said shecouldn’t go because she had another engagement. We made a rather long round to the south and came back to Highmount by a road which parallels the western brow of the mountain. Are you paying attention?”
“Breathless attention,” said Tregarvon ironically. “Joy-ride stories always make me sit up. Go on.”
“Over on the west-brow road we passed a place which looked as if it might be—or might some time have been—a gentleman’s country house. It is walled in from the road, with a magnificently groved lawn, a box-bordered, weed-grown carriage drive, and a great, rambling, porticoed mansion needing the repair-man pretty savagely. Still sitting up and taking notice?”
“Yes.”
“Just as were rolling up to pass the stone-pillared lodge-gates a horse and buggy came out, with a young woman driving. The horse was old and countrified, and he didn’t take kindly to the auto. So I stopped and got out to lead him past the machine. You won’t want to believe it, but the young woman driver was Miss Richardia; and the horse—well, no horseman would call it white, to be sure. It was a dapple-gray, light enough to pass for white in the moonlight,and with a mechanician like Rucker for the color expert.”
Tregarvon came out of his listless mood with a snap.
“Let it be said, once for all, Poictiers, that I won’t stand for any theory that involves Richardia Birrell in the crooked part of it,” he declared firmly. “I’d trust her with anything I own; with my life, if she cared to borrow it. That dapple-gray suggestion of yours makes my back ache! It isn’t worthy of you. Rucker said ‘white,’ and white isn’t gray; not by a long shot!”
“Wait,” said Carfax, evenly. “After I had led the horse safely past the car, I made sure. ‘Hold on a minute, Miss Richardia,’ said I, ‘let me see if your horse hasn’t a pebble in his shoe.’ That gave me an excuse to lift his near hind foot. There wasn’t any pebble, of course, but the shoe was badly worn,and the toe-calk had a piece broken out of it!”
Tregarvon maintained a stubborn silence for a full minute. Then he denied again, with more heat than the occasion seemed to demand.
“I don’t care what evidence you bring. I’ll believe nothing against Richardia;nothing, you understand? And, after all, what does it amount to? We agreed this morning that she mightblamelessly take an evening drive with Hartridge. The fact that they were driving behind her father’s horse cuts no especial figure that I can see.”
“She might have been driving with Hartridge blamelessly; we agree on that. Or even still more blamelessly with—her father.”
“Put it in words,” snapped Tregarvon.
“Two or three people to whom I have spoken saw them together behind the dapple-gray, her and her father.”
“I won’t stand for it!” was the angry retort. “You are hinting that her father is behind these bushwhackings, and that she is a party to them. That doesn’t go!”
“That was spoken very much like a lover,” said Carfax slowly. And then: “You mustn’t let your major weakness get away with you, Vance.”
“And what do you call my ‘major weakness’?” Tregarvon inquired, with a rasp to the words that made them sound like a challenge.
Carfax did not mince matters. “The inability to be off with the old love before you are on with the new,” he said crisply. “Elizabeth has some rights which you ought to respect, don’t you think?”
“Go on,” Tregarvon jerked out. “You haven’t said it all.”
“No, I haven’t; but I shall say it all. You are a changed man, Vance. Either this coal-mine fight or your infatuation for this young woman, or both, are bringing out the worst there is in you. Don’t you realize it?”
“I realize that this is a devil of a world!” was the gritting rejoinder. “First Richardia puts the knife into me and twists it around, and now you’re doing it. I suppose it will be Elizabeth’s turn, next!”
“You deserve all that is coming to you, I venture to say,” suggested the mentor evenly. “You are engaged to one woman, and you come here and make love openly to another.”
Tregarvon was lost now to all sense of proportion. “I shall do as I please!” he retorted hotly. “If you want to write to Elizabeth, it’s your privilege. If you do, I shall tell her that you’ve had Richardia out in the car twice to my once!”
Carfax’s mentor mood slipped away, and he laughed softly.
“Miss Richardia is a dear girl, and worthy of the best that any man can give her, Vance,” he said gently. “Somebody ought to save her fromthe machinations of a William Wilberforce Hartridge, don’t you think? You can’t, you know; and sometimes I’ve wondered if that doesn’t put it pretty squarely up to me.”
Tregarvon rose and stood over his friend, and for an instant there were black passions to blaze in the wide-set gray eyes. But there was manhood enough underlying the tumult to enable him to throttle the worst of the impulses.
“I—I guess I’m just a jealous dog in the manger, Poictiers,” he confessed gratingly. “I’ve had a hunch that it was going that way, and I’ve been resenting it—like the damned scoundrel I’m coming to be. But it’s all over now, and—and I wish you joy. Can I say more than that?”
Carfax looked up with a quaint twinkle in his eye.
“I’m thinking you might say a good bit more, only you are too charitable to turn the whole menagerie loose. Shall we go in and get ready to eat? Uncle William will be calling us in a minute or so.”
It was not until after the dinner had been eaten, and they were smoking bedtime pipes before the dining-room fire, that Tregarvon went back to the discoveries of the day.
“About the time you were going for your drivethis afternoon, I took a walk,” he said, by way of prefacing the story of the last of the discoveries. “I went over the ground we have been covering with the drill, examining every inch of it as if I had lost the set out of a diamond ring. I know now why we have been permitted to go on drilling holes in the rock without interference.”
Carfax nodded. “I’ve had a hint of my own: I wonder if you are not going to confirm it.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, I found that somebody else had been over precisely the same ground with a test-drill a good while ago. I located five holes in all, each of them filled to the top, of course, with sand and washings. One of these holes isn’t twenty feet from the last one we drilled before we moved to the present location in the graveyard glade.”
“Um,” said Carfax, absently rolling a cigarette between his palms. “That was my guess, based upon a word that Hartridge let drop the day I drove him down here to eat with us. I suppose the corollary to that is——”
“That the accident that smashed things this morning was ‘assisted,’ as the others have been. So long as we went on drilling in dead ground it wasn’t worth while to interfere. But now that we are trying a new wrinkle——”
Carfax got up and returned the softened cigarette to its place in his pocket-case.
“I think we’d better sleep on that corollary of yours, Vance,” he suggested mildly. “If it looks as plausible in daylight as it does now, I don’t know but we had better call out the militia and give Rucker more help in the night-watching. Anyway, we’ll see how it stacks up in the morning.”