XIIDull Steel
RUCKER proved as good as his word in the matter of estimating the delay, two days sufficing for the work of restoration. Having made a test run in the evening after Tregarvon had gone down the mountain, the mechanician had the machinery whirling merrily to thechug chugof the drill by the time his two bosses came on the ground the following morning.
Among his better qualities Tregarvon was able to number a certain degree of resilience which, given time to take the full impact of a blow, could recover and rebound and make the best of the inevitable. Whatever might have come of the intimacy with Richardia Birrell—and he told himself that nothing could have come of it in any event—it was now an episode ended; and after a night of very much mingled emotions, he had risen up with the determination to play the man, for Carfax’s sake if not for his own, and to let the industrial battle fill all the horizons for one Vance Tregarvon. With this determination firmly seated in the saddle, he had constrainedhimself to meet Carfax at breakfast without bitterness; to motor with him up the mountain in terms of good-fellowship; and, upon their arrival, to shout cheerfully to Rucker.
“Got her going all right again, have you, Billy? Any more puzzle people come to see you last night?”
Rucker grinned sheepishly.
“I ain’t goin’ to lie about it, Mr. Tregarvon. What with pushin’ the job so bloomin’ hard yesterday, and losin’ so much sleep between whiles, I guess they might’ve come and lugged me off bodily without my knowin’ it.”
“And you didn’t find anything wrong this morning?”
“Well, no; not to say just wrong; only sort o’ spookerish.” Then, in a tone that the men at the drill might not hear: “There was somebody here again last night—humans ’r ghosts. I had a fit o’ the jumps a while back that everlastin’ly swiped my appetite for breakfast.”
“How was that?” asked Tregarvon, looking up from his inspection of the yellow car’s motor; and Carfax said: “It must have been something pretty fierce, Billy, if it crippled your pneumogastric nerve.”
“It was this way,” Rucker explained. “Lastnight, after we got the derrick rigged again, I starts and runs the engine for a little while, just to make sure everything is in workin’ order. When I shuts down, I banks the fire under the boiler so it’ll keep overnight. ’Long about sunrise this mornin’ I hikes over to stir her up for business, and when I yanks the fire-box door open, it’s me for throwin’ that fit o’ the jumps. There was the yallerist, cockiest-lookin’ skull you ever see, settin’ on top o’ the banked fire, ready to pull a grin on me when I opens the door.”
“A skull?—a human skull?” exclaimed Tregarvon incredulously.
“Yep; a yaller one; all teeth and eye-holes, and with a sort of greasy black smoke comin’ out o’ the place where its nose ought to ’a’ been.”
“How did it get there?” Carfax asked the question and then answered it himself by adding: “But, of course, you don’t know.”
Rucker was wiping his face with a piece of cotton waste—the machinist’s handkerchief. The autumn morning was cool and bracing on the mountain top, yet the perspiration stood in fine little beads on his forehead.
“No, I don’t know; and if you was to search me all day, you’d never get it out o’ me where it come from, ’r who put it there,” he said. “Iain’t what you’d call jumpy, but after it was all over, I didn’t want no breakfast.”
“What did you do with it?” Tregarvon asked.
“Me? I jammed it back into the coals with the clinker hook, and put the blower on, quick! Says I, ‘All right, my bucko! You make me throw a fit, and I’ll make you make steam!’”
“Heavens! You burned it?” Tregarvon was still conventional enough to be half horrified, and Carfax shuddered in sympathy.
“I certain’y did. But he got back at me, right now! In less ’n five minutes by the watch that old boiler was red-hot and blowin’ off steam to beat the band. She was sweatin’ black smoke at every joint; and when I chases ’round to open the fire-door—Well, you needn’t believe me if you don’t want to, but them grate-bars was drippin’ something ’r other that looked like burnin’ blood!”
There is a point beyond which the thread of sympathetic horror snaps, and the ball rebounds into the field of the ridiculous.
“That will do for you, Billy,” Tregarvon laughed. “We’ll allow you the skull, but you needn’t embroider it for us. Somebody played a grisly joke on you—with no particular object,that I can see. Just the same, it has its significance. Some prowler was sneaking around here while you were asleep. Are you sure the drill is working all right?”
“You can see for yourself,” said Rucker, not unboastfully. “She’s jumpin’ up and down to the old tune of forty to the minute, same as I promised you she’d be this mornin’.”
But a closer inspection proved that Rucker’s boast was loyal to the eye but a traitor to the fact. The drill was merely “jumping up and down.” It was hardly cutting its own clearance; had gained in depth less than half an inch in half an hour, according to the report of Sawyer, who was at his customary post, “churning and turning” at the hole.
Rucker looked on critically for a few minutes and then laid a listening ear to the steel, bowing and recovering in unison with the stroke.
“She’s hit a bone o’ some kind,” was his verdict; and he stopped the churning machinery and threw in the hoist by means of which the heavy cutting-bar was lifted from the hole.
An examination of the drill point amply verified the mechanician’s guess that something much harder than the fine-gritted sandstone of the mountain top had been encountered in thebottom of the test-hole. The cutting edges of the drill burr were completely gone, broken down and gnawed smooth until the steel cutter-bar was no more than a blunt-ended ram.
Tregarvon swore painstakingly, anathematizing the demon of ill luck by bell, book, and candle, thereby further emphasizing the distance he had travelled on the road toward things elemental.
“Scrap it,” he snapped, meaning the ruined drill point. “How many more have you?”
“Three.”
“All right; put another one in and drive it!”
Rucker got out a fresh point, mounted and lowered it, and the churning was resumed. Three hours of steady thumping showed a gain of less than two inches in the depth of the hole, and at the end of that time the second drill burr was worn as smooth as the first.
This went on until the last of the four cutters was put in service. For a wasted day of patient churning the hole had gone down only a few inches, and Rucker was in despair.
“When this cutter goes, we’re hung up for more ’n any day ’r two,” he announced. “I can sharpen these points all right enough, but it’ll take scads o’ time with the tools we’ve got here on the job. You two bosses hain’t made up yourminds what t’ ’ell it is we’re tryin’ to chew through down yonder, have you?”
Tregarvon had taken an engineering course in the university, but he was no geologist; and Carfax’s equipment was even less hopeful. It was a case for a specialist; and the specialist turned up at the opportune moment in the person of Mr. Guy Wilmerding, who had ridden over from Whitlow to see how the Ocoee experiment was progressing.
His coming was hailed with acclamations by the two amateurs.
“By Jove, Wilmerding, you’re just in time to save us from strait-jackets and a padded cell!” Tregarvon exclaimed. “What kind of rock do you have in this region that will make a drill point look like that?” showing the C. C. & I. superintendent one of the blunted cutters.
Wilmerding scrutinized the dulled point carefully.
“None of the native rock ought to do that,” he demurred. “This is a poor piece of steel, isn’t it?”
“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began. Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole now with only a few more minutes to live.”
“That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the sand pump.”
The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings between his thumb and finger.
“Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the sandstone—‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,” he added reflectively.
“You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?”
“There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s no worse.”
Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again.
“That means Rucker to go to Chattanoogawith the cutter points, and more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.”
“I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you going.”
Tregarvon’s ill temper vanished like the dew on a summer morning. “You are certainly an enemy of a hitherto unsuspected variety!” he declared. “We’ve been having a good bit of trouble, first and last; some of it bearing all the earmarks of design on somebody’s part. Do you know for a while I thought you might be inspiring it? That was before Carfax discovered you personally, of course.”
Wilmerding’s laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
“I hope you didn’t think so small of Consolidated Coal as to suspect it of popping at you with a boy’s whip!” he retorted. “By and by, when you find your coal and meet us in the open market, we may have to buy you or smash you. But it will be done in the good, old-fashioned commercial way.”
“We shall be there when you put up the largecome-off-the-perch bluff,” Carfax thrust in gently. “But in the meantime, somebodyispopping at us with the boy’s whip.”
“Who?—for a guess?” asked the Whitlow superintendent.
“Ah!” said Carfax, in the same gentle tone, “I have a thousand dollars somewhere about my belongings that would be delighted to blow itself against the real answer to that question.”
“And you have no clue?”
Carfax smiled. “A dozen of them, more or less. But they all have a way of coming out by the roots when we begin to pull on them ever so cautiously.”
“You are calling me the enemy, but that doesn’t count until the real fight opens up,” said Wilmerding. “If any suggestion of mine will help while you are clawing for a foothold.... By the way, that reminds me: I made an analysis of your coals the other day. Thaxter didn’t have one, didn’t seem to know anything definite about the Ocoee.”
“Well?” queried Tregarvon. “Do you agree with Captain Duncan?”
“If your two veins are not one and the same, they ought to be. I couldn’t sift out the slightest difference between the two specimens.”
There was some further talk about the characteristics, analytical and otherwise, of the Ocoee coal, and Wilmerding stayed long enough to see the fourth and last drill point withdrawn from the hole. The cutter, like its predecessors, was a mechanical ruin; and Wilmerding again made the proffer of the Whitlow repair-plant. Tregarvon promised to send Rucker and the burrs up from Coalville in the morning, and the young superintendent climbed upon his nag and rode away.
“Tools up, men!” Tregarvon called to the drilling squad, when Wilmerding had disappeared among the trees. “We’ll call it a day; and to-morrow you may all go on the track-repairing with Tryon.”
Rucker was busying himself about the machinery after the laborers had gone, and as yet he had said nothing about wishing to be relieved from the night-watching. But it was clear that a man who put in full time during the day could scarcely be expected to sleep with one eye open at night. Moreover, if Rucker were to start in the morning for Whitlow with the drills, it would be necessary for him to sleep at Coalville.
“What is your programme for to-night?”asked Carfax, as he walked with Tregarvon to the tool-house. “I suppose you’ll send Rucker down for the early start to Whitlow. You’ll hardly care to leave things up here without a watchman, will you?”
“Not at the present stage of the game,” was the prompt reply. “You may go down in the car with Rucker, and I’ll stay here for the night. I’d like to see some of these queer happenings for myself.”
“I can beat that plan,” Carfax put in. “You’ve forgotten that we have an invitation to Highmount for dinner this evening. Mrs. Caswell gave it, and I accepted for both of us. We’ll go down and dress, and come back in the car, leaving Rucker to stand watch here while we do the social act. Later, Rucker can come for us, trundling us over here, first, and himself and the drills to Coalville afterward. How will that answer?”
Tregarvon demurred upon two counts. “You mean that you’ll sit up with me? You don’t have to play night-watchman to this sick project of mine, Poictiers. Besides, I don’t care to go to the Highmount faculty dinner. More than that, you ought to be the last man in the world to put me in for it. I’ve already wasted too much time in that way, and you know it.”
“In the present instance I’ve promised for you, and I guess you’ll have to go,” said Carfax quietly. “And as for my sitting up with you afterward, that’s a part of the game. I’m immensely interested in skulls and things.”
And thus, without further argument, it was decided.