XVIIAn Anticlimax
BRIGHT and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching, already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting, and there were no disturbances to report.
“Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up. I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and everything was all shipshape this mornin’.”
Soon after this the drilling was resumed, not, however, until after the hole had been carefully washed and swabbed out. Tregarvon did nottake any of his men into his confidence to the extent of explaining the reason for the extra care, but during the swabbing process he stood aside and looked on, watchful to detect any sign of guilty knowledge on the part of his helpers. Particularly he studied the face of the younger McNabb, the one who had been hurt still being absent. The effort went for nothing. If isolation has been sparing of gifts to the native of the southern Appalachians, it has at least given him a face that no man can read. The bushy-bearded Sawyer, the head driller, was the only one who commented upon the hole-cleaning.
“Hit don’t look t’ me like thar was anything more ’n the drill dust to be warshed out,” he grumbled, when the swab came up clean; and to prove it he rubbed some of the powdered rock cuttings between his thumb and finger.
“It’s better to be sure than sorry,” said Tregarvon. “If we know that the hole is clean to begin with, we’re that much ahead.”
In due course of time the engine was started, the drill lowered, and the churning was resumed. Very shortly it became evident that the steel was cutting again at the usual rate, and Tregarvon’s spirits rose accordingly.
“Do you know, Poictiers, I believe we aregoing to ‘prove up’ right here on this spot?” he predicted, after the work was well under way and they had gone to sit on the tool-house step. “The indications all point for us. Here is where the most determined fight has been made to stop us; here is where we find Hartridge’s hieroglyphics on the trees; and right here, if you’ll remark it, is where Mr. Onias Thaxter hunts me up to make me a blanket offer for my landholdings.”
“A little more time will tell the story,” Carfax suggested. “By noon, if it doesn’t strike any more bones, the drill ought to be down to the coal, if there is any coal here.”
With hope trotting cheerfully on ahead, the forenoon became a period of exciting suspense. Each time the drill was withdrawn the cuttings were examined eagerly. The rock was showing all the characteristics of the former borings: fine sandstone, coarse sandstone, some little conglomerate, and, just before the noon hour, the shales which commonly overlie the coal in the Cumberland region.
“We’re coming to it!” Tregarvon exulted, when the washings which came up in the churning began to show black. “Eighteen inches more, and we’ll know whether we live or die!” And hecarefully made a chalk-mark on the drill so that they might determine when the critical depth was reached.
As in the previous tests, the steel sank rapidly in the vein of coal. At a foot of additional depth the washings were still coming up black. At sixteen inches there was no change. Sighting across a derrick brace, Tregarvon watched the chalk-mark with the blood racing in his veins. With each plunge of the heavy steel drill his hopes rose higher. Already he was anticipating a future which, if it should lack some of the ecstasies, would still have a sufficiency of the great emollient—money. With a fortune of his own, the impossible situation which had grown out of the Uncle Byrd legacy would be alleviated, and he saw himself deeding his half of the legacy irrevocably over to Elizabeth. The pride wound thus healed, the broken bones of sentiment might be allowed to knit as they would. Doubtless, in time, the knitting process would accomplish itself, and possibly without leaving him a hopeless cripple. Judging from the past, Elizabeth would not expect much; and even if he should be obliged to limp a little she would probably never notice it.
“Eighteen inches!” he called out to Carfax, “and she’s still bringing up the black-diamonddust! Get ready to blow the hewgag and beat the tom-tom. We’re in it, this time!”
“Easy!” Carfax cautioned. “Don’t let your hopes soar too high. Maybe the top vein runs a little thicker at this point than it did in the others. Call it that, anyway, until you’re cocksure.”
As he spoke the power went off. Tregarvon jerked his watch from his pocket and stifled a hard word. It was noon, and the men were knocking off work on the dot, quite as nonchalantly as if the fate of empires were not hanging upon the result of a few more turns of the machinery. Tregarvon tramped across to the tool-house with Carfax, a sudden weariness making his feet heavy as lead.
“That’s the workman of it!” he gritted. “If the world were coming to an end in the next five minutes, they’d stop to eat!”
Carfax permitted himself a subdued chuckle.
“You are beautifully on edge,” he asserted. “A few inches more may mean a lot to you, but it’s all in the day’s work for the men. They’re not going to get rich out of your coal mine.”
They had brought some of Uncle William’s biscuits and cold chicken for the midday snack, and Carfax went to the motor-car, which hadbeen left standing in the wood road, for the basket. When he returned, Tregarvon was pacing back and forth impatiently before the tool-house door, and Rucker was sitting on the step, eating his luncheon. Carfax carried the basket inside, and they made a table of the coil of rope. While they were picking the chicken bones, the mechanician spoke again of a matter that he had mentioned once or twice before.
“I’m beefin’ ag’in about that boiler, Mr. Tregarvon,” he began, between workman mouthfuls of Mrs. Tryon’s corn bread. “She ain’t much, just as I told you at first; and draggin’ her ’round over this mountain hain’t helped her none. She’s leakin’ like a sieve at the fire-box end of her flues, right now.”
“Here’s hoping that this is the last hole we’ll have to drill with it, Billy,” said Tregarvon cheerfully. “I bought it second-hand, and the Chattanooga junk man put one over on me.”
“He sure did,” Rucker returned with a grin. “She’s rotten. Every time the pop-valve goes off it makes me jump. One o’ these days——”
The interruption was a blatant roar from the boiler in question. Rucker had prudently shut the drafts and had left the fire-door open, or he thought he had, but still the pressure had creptup, until now the safety-valve was relieving it. Through the open door of the tool-shack the two at the rope-coil table could see the plant, with the plume of escaping steam rising to the height of the tree-tops. As usual during the noon hour, there was not a man of the gang in sight. Tregarvon had early learned that a part of the country laborer’s reticence expressed itself in a dislike to eat under the boss’s eye. At the stopping of the machinery the drill-gang would scatter in the wood, each man to his fallen log.
The roar of the safety-valve continuing, and seeming to increase in stridency rather than to diminish, Tregarvon leaned forward to shout in Rucker’s ear:
“Are you sure you left the fire-box door open, Billy?”
The mechanician struggled to his feet. “I thought I was, but I’ll go see. She’s howlin’ a little bit too loud to suit me.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the earthquake crash came. With a sound that was oddly like the tearing of a hundred saws through dry timber, followed by a reverberating thunderclap, the boiler and engine vanished in a thick cloud of steam, and the air was filled with flying missiles. One piece of theboiler tore the heart out of the sheltering oak-tree; another fragment ripped a corner from the tool-house; a third mowed a swath through a thicket of young pines.
Tregarvon and Carfax were both up and out before the nimbus cloud of steam had blown aside, and their first thought was for their men. Rucker had escaped only by a hair’s-breadth. The twisted fire-box sheet which had knocked a corner out of the small building had passed so close that the wind of it had bowled him over. Tregarvon left Carfax to help the machinist to his feet, and ran shouting across the glade. The drill gang answered and came hurrying in, a man at a time. When all were accounted for, the material loss was inventoried. It was total, so far as it went. The engine and boiler were reduced to a tangled heap of scrap; one end of the drill beam was shattered, and one leg of the derrick had suffered loss.
For the moment Tregarvon was torn by conflicting emotions; a huge thankfulness that no life had been lost and bitter disappointment that the catastrophe had come at the instant when all the doubts as to the value of the Ocoee were to be either confirmed or swept away. He held himself together long enough to tell themen that they might go home—that there would be nothing more done until a new power-plant could be bought; but when Rucker had gone out to the wood road to see if the yellow car had been hit, and the disappointed one was left alone with Carfax, the flood-gates gave way.
“Isn’t it enough to make an angel out of the blue heavens swear himself black in the face, Poictiers?” he raged. “Just on the very edge of things—just as we were going to find out, once for all, what this cursed mountain is going to do to us——”
“One thing at a time,” Carfax broke in soothingly. “The wrecked engine isn’t fatal—not by many parasangs: it came just in the nick of time, when I was wondering what under the sun I should do with the dividend draft that I got in the mail yesterday. Take a fresh grip on yourself and remember that you have a good bit to be thankful for. If your men had been sitting around on the job to eat their dinners, as laborers do up North, there’d be another story to tell.”
“Yes, I know; but think of it—it will be days and maybe weeks before we can get a new power-plant installed, and all that time we’ll be hanging,like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth; won’t know any more than we do now.”
Rucker had come back to report that the motor-car had escaped as by a miracle. A square yard of the boiler shell had been hurled over it to fall accurately in the middle of the road a rod or two farther on. While he was telling about it, a goodly portion of the faculty of Highmount College, followed by a bevy of young women, came upon the scene. Doctor Caswell was heading the column of reconnaissance, and Hartridge also was with it.
“Dear me!” exclaimed the president, coming up breathless; “we are all so glad to find you alive! What has happened?”
Tregarvon pointed to the tangled mass of wreckage. “Our boiler blew up. It was old, and I suppose we were carrying too much pressure. Luckily, it happened while the men were eating, and there was no one near enough to be hurt. I thought of you people at once. It must have made racket enough to make you think the end of the world was coming.”
“It was frightful!” said Miss Farron. “The windows rattled and—” but here her voice was lost in the chorus of excited exclamations pitching themselves in many keys as the youngwomen picked their way over to the wreck and viewed the remains.
“It is well, sometimes, to be born both lucky and rich,” Hartridge commented gravely, when his turn came. “The material loss is serious enough, of course; but you ought to be thankful that no lives were lost. Were you near enough at the time to see the explosion?”
“We were sitting in the tool-house eating our luncheon,” Carfax explained, “and Rucker was just outside. We had been speaking of the boiler a moment before. We were all three looking at it, I think, when it went up.”
Doctor Caswell had taken his wife over to assist in the sight-seeing, but Hartridge lingered behind.
“Happening in broad daylight, this way, with three of you looking on, I suppose you are well assured that it was a pure accident?” he suggested quietly.
Tregarvon left the answer to Carfax, who made it promptly.
“As you say, we are not able, this time, to blame any one but ourselves. The boiler was old, and our mechanic had told us that it was not altogether safe.”
“You have been drilling to-day?”
Carfax nodded.
“May I ask if you found anything?”
Tregarvon turned away and busied himself examining the rent in the corner of the tool shanty. Carfax called up the cherubic smile for the inquiring professor and said: “What if I should tell you that we have found our bonanza, Mr. Hartridge?”
Hartridge glanced at the drill, which was still standing in the test-hole, and shook his head. “I should say that you are merely talking for effect,” he smiled back.
“But we have found the coal,” Carfax persisted.
“You have found the upper measure, the same as you have in all the other trials. Beneath it, you will find your sandstone dike again.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Quite sure.”
“But we have already reached a depth of more than eighteen inches, and the drill was still in coal when we shut down for the noon stop.”
“That is quite immaterial,” was the cool-voiced reply. “The measures vary in thickness, though not greatly. Geology is one of my small side-lines, Mr. Carfax, and I have made a study of this particular region, largely as a pastime.”
The sight-seers were straggling back, and Tregarvon was explaining to a group of breathless maidens just where he had been sitting with Carfax at the moment of catastrophes, and how Rucker had been knocked down by the wind of the fragment which had struck the corner of the tool-shed. Carfax saw his opportunity preparing to take its leave and he smiled, level-eyed, at Hartridge.
“You are still on the obstructive hand, aren’t you?” he threw in. “Even now, you would like to discourage us if you could.”
The professor of mathematics and other things was turning away to join the others, but he paused for a low-toned rejoinder.
“I neither deny nor affirm, Mr. Carfax. But I may say this much: if I were in your shoes, or Mr. Tregarvon’s, I shouldn’t call to-day’s disaster a pure accident—until I could prove it.”
And with that he turned his back and began to talk to the art teacher.