XXIXBeyond the Gap

XXIXBeyond the Gap

IT was a full fortnight before the Hesterville physician, driven at breakneck speed to Coalville in Wilmerding’s roadster on the night of woundings, pronounced Tregarvon out of danger and in a fair way to recover from the broken head.

Whatever the lapse of time may have meant for others, it had little significance for the man who tossed and rolled in his bed in an upper room of the Ocoee office-building. Dim pictures there were of people coming and going; of grotesque attendants lifting him about, these sometimes parading as liveried Merkleys with Uncle William heads, or the reverse; of faces, affectionately sorrowful, hanging over him, now hopefully, and again with sharp anxiety in eyes which were never completely recognizable.

But for the greater interval, what with thundering brain cataracts to attend to, and a thousand dancing lights which had to be wheeled in vanishing spirals, checked, stopped, and wheeled the other way around precisely three hundred twirlsa minute, he was so pressed for time as not to be aware of the lapse of it. Hence, when he finally opened eyes of full consciousness upon the walls and ceiling of the familiar room, he was sadly out of touch, his latest clear recollection being of a cloud-banked night, of a glade in the mountain-top forest, and of two great white eyes of artificial light staring down upon a cot-bed bier supporting a blanketed body.

At first he thought he was alone in the bare-walled upper room, but at his earliest conscious stirring Carfax came to stand beside the bed.

“That’s better—much better!” said the golden one, noting the turning-point improvement at once. “You certainly had us guessing, old man. Our only comfort has been in the fact that you could eat and didn’t seem to be losing too much flesh. Have the wheels stopped buzzing?”

“They weren’t wheels; they were lights and waterfalls,” said the sick man meticulously.

“All right; call ’em anything you like, so long as they’re gone. We had one doctor, a specialist from Nashville, who gave us a fit of seasickness; said you’d live, and be all right physically, but that you would most probably never recover your reason. Nice cheerful prospect for the friends and relatives, wasn’t it?”

“How long have I been knocked out, Poictiers?”

“Two solid weeks.”

“My mother and sister—has anybody written them?”

“Sure! Elizabeth has been writing them every day or so. They wanted to come down, of course, but we decided that it wasn’t best. You were getting all the care you could stand.”

“Then Elizabeth hasn’t gone home?”

“Not yet. Her father and mother have gone to Florida, and she has been staying on at Westwood House—what time she hasn’t been down here coddling you. She’s an angel, Vance; one of the kind you read about. But I mustn’t let you talk too much.”

“If I can’t talk, you’ll have to. Have you made it up with Elizabeth—about that silly side-play of yours with Richardia?”

Carfax’s smile began on the cherubic lines but it ended in a mere face-wrinkling of soberness.

“We have had too much else to think about; too many little diversions, as you might say. But I’m hoping she isn’t going to insist upon making a horrible example of me for my apparent fickleness.”

“‘Too many little diversions’,” Tregarvonechoed. “That reminds me: I can remember you and the others pulling us out of the crevice—Hartridge and me—and after that, a stretcher was made for Hartridge and we used up an age or so getting back to the glade. Am I right, so far?”

“It was something like that; yes.”

“And when we came into the old burying-ground the motor-car had been run down opposite the tool-house, and its headlamps made everything look ghastly. The judge was sitting on the door-step with his face hidden in his hands, and Rucker’s cot was standing in the open under the lights with a blanketed corpse lying upon it. Who was the dead man, Poictiers?”

Carfax shook his head. “Call it a bad dream,” he said soothingly. “The cracked skull was beginning to get in its work. You didn’t see any dead man.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes wearily. “It’s passing strange how a little knock on the head can mix things. I could swear that I saw the judge and the dead man and the car just as I have described them. Let it go, and tell me about Richardia.”

Carfax seemed suddenly embarrassed. “I—I don’t know as there is much to tell,” he stammered. “She—she is well, I believe.”

Tregarvon raised himself on an elbow.

“You’re keeping something back,” he protested. “Is she—is she—married?”

“Oh, no; nothing of that sort,” was the hasty reply. “She has been here to see you—she and her father—quite often; that is, as often as possible. I have fetched them in the car, you know. They have left nothing undone that could be done.”

Tregarvon still felt the presence of a reservation; of many of them; but he was too weak to fight for the clearer explication.

“How is Hartridge getting along?” he asked, sinking back upon the pillows.

“Rather slowly. It was a bad fracture. But the doctor says he won’t be a cripple.”

“That’s good. I want him to get well so that I can drag him into court. He set the leaf fire that blew us up. Did you know that?”

The golden youth nodded gravely. “I know a good many things that I didn’t know before you got your knockout.”

“Bring me down to date,” said the sick man impatiently. “What have you done about the mine?”

Carfax seemed to welcome the change to the more material field.

“Any number of things,” he answered cheerfully. “In the first place we—the judge and I—swore everybody to secrecy on that Monday night of smashing catastrophes, and the secret has been kept from the world at large, and from Consolidated Coal in particular. The wrecked drilling plant has been left just as it was; your laboring force has been discharged; and the impression has been given that if you ever recovered your wits, you’d go straight away back to Philadelphia, a sadder and much wiser young man.”

“Fine!” approved the listener. “But that isn’t all?”

“Not by a jugful. Two days after you were hurt, Wilmerding resigned from the C. C. & I. service and disappeared. He has been North buying machinery and material and shipping it in as far as Hesterville by littles. The explanation given and accepted is that a new company has been formed to develop some coal lands in the Hesterville vicinity, and the C. C. & I. people are running around in circles and uttering loud cries in their effort to find out where the lands are and who is going to develop them.”

“Good!—ripping good!” the sick man applauded.

“We have been only waiting for you to getupon your feet, and we didn’t wish to give Thaxter and his backers any chance to tangle things for you in the meantime. The moment you are able to take hold you will find everything in train—material and machinery where you can rush it in with motor-trucks, labor all engaged, coke-burners from Pennsylvania ready to take the first train south, and all that.”

Tregarvon doubled the pillows under his head and his eyes were flashing. “Poictiers, you’re a miracle!” he declared.

The professional idler smiled his denial. “I didn’t do any of it. I merely stood aside and told the others to go ahead and we’d pay the bills. Wilmerding was fully competent to take charge of the business part of it, and I have retained old Captain Duncan for the engineering. All you have to do now is to rise up and say the word, and you’ll have a mine that will make the Whitlow proposition compare accurately with a last year’s almanac.”

Tregarvon closed his eyes again and kept them closed so long as to give the impression that he had fallen asleep. But when Carfax was about to tiptoe away the heavy-lidded eyes opened.

“I’ll build upon the foundation you have laid, Poictiers; you and Wilmerding and Duncan.There are three things that I mean to do before I quit and go West to look for another job: to stand the Ocoee upon its feet as a paying proposition, to make provision for my mother and sister with a part of the property and to divide the remainder equitably among those who were frozen out in the Parker robbery, and after this is done to turn heaven and earth over until I have found and punished the man or men who have tried so hard to smash me. When I’ve squared up I’ll vanish.”

Carfax laid a hand as slender and shapely as a woman’s upon the hot forehead. “I’ve let you talk too much and you are getting the ‘wheels’ again,” he said gently. “You mustn’t be vindictive; and there is no reason on earth why you should talk of throwing things up and running away.”

“There are good reasons for both,” was the stubborn insistence. “I owe it to common justice, no less than to myself, to dig up the criminal or criminals and bring them to book. If they should prove to be Thaxter and his backers, after all, the world needs the example; and if it was pure outlawry on the part of the McNabbs and Hartridge and some other scoundrel that McNabb wouldn’t name there is all the more reason whyI should send for the best detectives the country affords and run the outlaws down. And as to running away after it is all over, that says itself, Poictiers. I couldn’t stay on here after Richardia is married to another man. It isn’t in human nature. Now go away and let me sleep. I want to hurry and get well, so that I can stand up and straighten things out.”

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