XXLimitations
DAY following day in the conflict with steepness on the mountain road, Tregarvon toiled early and late, breakfasting before Carfax was visible, eating at midday out of a basket brought to the scene of the activities by Uncle William, and missing the golden youth two evenings in succession by reason of Carfax’s continued popularity at Highmount.
Such sacrifices to the morose deities of materialism bring their own revenges. By the Friday evening, when the new engine and boiler had been dragged painfully up the final ascent and had been halted for the night at a point nearly opposite the college campus, Tregarvon had become a bitter man-driver and was facing the consequences in a strike on the part of his farmer helpers.
John Teppenpaw, a husky young Wehatcheean from the farther side of the valley who had brought four of the best-pulling beasts to the job, was the first to raise the standard of revolt.
“Ef you-all ’ll thess pay me off, I reckon I won’t come back no more,” Teppenpaw announced,after he had thrown the trace-chains over the backs of his mules for the descent of the mountain.
“What’s that?—what the devil is the matter withyou?” Tregarvon snapped viciously. “Aren’t you getting enough money?”
“Money ain’t the onliest thing ther’ is in this world,” was the sullen retort. “I ain’t allowin’ to let no man hire me to take his cussin’ and swearin’ and browbeatin’. I got a li’l piece o’ land and a few head o’ stock o’ my own, and I allow I don’thafto!”
“I reckon that’s about the size of it f’r me, too,” put in Jeff Daggett, who was Teppenpaw’s nearest neighbor on the north; and from this the fire of resentment spread so rapidly that the strike became unanimous, passing at once beyond any hope of arbitration.
“You’re quitting on me before the job’s finished?” raged Tregarvon. “You are a lot of bally idiots! The money you are getting for this haul is more than any one of you will see from now to Christmas! Are you a pack of silly women that you can’t stand a little man-sized talk from a boss?”
“That’s jist hit,” said Daggett. “Looks like you-all was used to rippin’ and tearin’ at themno-account furriners up No’th that ain’t got nothin’, and don’t know enough to raise a terruction when you cuss ’em out. We-all ain’t nuther niggers n’r furriners. I’ll take my pay and quit.”
Tregarvon became heavily sarcastic. “Is this your way of telling me that you want more money?”
Bickler, the oldest man in the squad, made answer.
“I reckon you-all ain’t got money enough to make us-all come back f’r another day like what this’n has been, Mr. Tregarvon. You’ve got a heap to l’arn ef ye allow to stay down yere in old Tennessee and get white men to work f’r ye.”
“Quit, then, and be damned to you!” Tregarvon exploded. “Show up at the office in Coalville to-morrow morning before I leave, and you’ll get your pay. I don’t carry your money around with me in my pocket.”
To a clattering of hoofs and a jingling of trace-chains the cavalcade moved off down the pike, leaving the deserted boss standing beside the stranded machinery truck. Tregarvon knew very well that by another day the story of the strike and its cause would be passed from lip to ear throughout the length and breadth of the Wehatchee, and there would be no hope of recruitinganother gang among the farmers. The half-mile of sandy wood road still remained to be traversed, and without the teams the load could be moved only by means of a block and tackle and winch, manned by Tryon’s gang of track laborers; a process which would add other exasperating days of delay.
The dusk was thickening under the trees when the discouraged hauling-boss took his coat from the truck and struggled into it preparatory to setting out upon the long tramp down the mountain. He had seen nothing of Carfax since an hour before noon, when the yellow car had edged past the road obstructions on its way up the pike. But now he heard the purring of a motor and waited.
The car was coming down the cross-mountain road, and Tregarvon could see that there were two persons in it. Instead of turning in at the campus gates, it came on, and Carfax braked it to a stop opposite the loaded truck. “Is that you, Vance?” he called to the figure standing in the shadow of the pines.
“Yes.” Tregarvon stepped out of the shadows and crossed to the automobile, though the nearer approach was not needed to assure him that Carfax’s companion was Richardia Birrell.
“You are coming along beautifully!” Carfax praised, speaking as one who holds himself delicately aloof from the toilsome details. “It’s great to be a working-man and able to do things. One day more will take you over to the drilling ground, won’t it?”
“Half a day was all I asked, with the men and teams; but I am not going to have it. They have quit on me.”
“A strike? What was the trouble? Weren’t you paying them enough?”
“It wasn’t a question of more money. They seemed to think that I ought to speak softly and say ‘mister’ and ‘please’ when I wanted them to get a move.”
Carfax laughed and turned to his companion in the other half of the driving-seat.
“He puts it rather—er—diplomatically, don’t you think?” he confided to the young woman. “Really, you know, his language has come to be something frightful!” Then to the diplomat: “What are you going to do?”
Tregarvon ignored Carfax’s companion, and the derisive confidence to which she had made no reply. “If I had the nerve, I suppose I might kill another week dragging the thing through the wood by half-inches with a block and tackle and man-power,” he offered.
“Dear me! And in the meantime the enemy—whoever he is—will be storing up ammunition and getting ready to efface you once more.”
Tregarvon turned away.
“I don’t believe I shall give ‘the enemy’ another chance at me. Will you be down to dinner?”
“Oh, hold on; don’t go off in a huff that way!” Carfax protested in mock concern. “We have had our little joy-ride, and I was just taking Miss Richardia home. Wait a minute and tell us how you are going to block ‘the enemy’s’ game.”
Tregarvon was still ignoring Miss Birrell.
“Thaxter sent me a note this morning. Consolidated Coal is ready to do business with us.”
“With you, you mean; I am only a good-natured bystander. What does Mr. Thaxter say?”
For the first time in the brisk exchange of question and answer, Tregarvon took the silent member of the trio into consideration.
“All this doesn’t interest Miss Richardia. I can talk the business matter over with you later on.”
If the music teacher had been keeping a vow of silence she broke it now with a little laugh.
“I am interested,” she assured him; adding: “I hope you feel better, now that you have made me say it in so many words.”
Tregarvon let the small gibe go without retort.
“The offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee properties has been renewed in my behalf, Thaxter tells me; but if I wish to avail myself of it, I must accept immediately.”
“What is the keen rush?” Carfax inquired.
“It is explained reasonably enough. The C. C. & I. people are preparing to open other veins on their Whitlow lands to the north of the present mine. These plans are being held up, pending my decision. If I sell out to them, they will probably abandon these plans for the present; opening, instead, the south vein—the one Thaxter told us about—and using our tramway and coke-ovens.”
Carfax seemed to have grown suddenly reflective. “It rather puts you between two fires, doesn’t it?” he commented. “You don’t wish to lose your chance to sell, and you don’t wish to sell before you have seen what that unfinished hole over yonder may be going to show you. And if you take time to drag this power-plant over by hand, the golden opportunity will get by. The question which suggests itself to me is a very foolish one, no doubt. I’m asking myself how much the C. C. & I. people paid your farmers to induce them to lie down on you.”
Tregarvon’s laugh was brittle. “You needn’t go that far. I’ll be frank enough to admit that I gave Daggett and his men plenty of provocation for the strike.”
“In other words, you’ve been handing them some of the mule talk. Shocking! But that is spilt milk and it can’t be gathered up now. What is Thaxter’s time limit?”
“He says in his note that he will expect to hear from me by Saturday, at the latest. That is to-morrow.”
At this, Miss Richardia spoke up quickly:
“Does ‘to-morrow’ mean all day to-morrow? Or does it mean to-morrow morning?”
“Oh, I should suppose I might take the day for it. Any option holds good up to midnight of its day of expiration, unless there is some proviso to the contrary.”
“And how long would it take you to do all these things that Mr. Carfax says you would like to do first—before deciding?”
“Only a few hours, if the men and teams had stayed with me. But as it is, it would probably take a week.”
There was silence for a moment and then Carfax said: “Miss Richardia is trying to tell you to postpone your decision as long as you can, onlyshe can’t find the words. That is my advice, too. One can never tell what a day may bring forth. Wait a minute until I can drive back to the college, and then I’ll take you down the hill.”
Tregarvon stood aside while Carfax turned the car and sent it swiftly up to and through the Highmount gateway. A few minutes later the golden youth came sauntering back, alone and afoot.
“That blessed motor of yours has gone dippy again,” he announced coolly, as if the yellow car had lately been acquiring bad habits. “It pegged out just as I drove up to the Caswell door. I suppose I shall have to send a boy over to our shack after Rucker. Mrs. Caswell rises to the occasion and invites us both to dinner while we wait. What do you say?”
“Not on your life!” Tregarvon refused sourly. “I’m not fit company for anybody to-night. I’ll walk down.”
“All right: then I’ll stay and bring the car after Rucker has rejuvenated it. You needn’t sit up for me. And, by the way, that reminds me. There were some letters for you last night—Tait brought them over after you had gone to bed. Did you find them?”
“Yes; I got them this morning.”
“Anything from—er—from Elizabeth yet?”
“Not yet; no.”
Carfax hesitated a moment and then interested himself sympathetically—or seemed to. “I hope you didn’t say too much—or too little—in that confession of yours last Sunday night, Vance; in the letter you sent from Chattanooga.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I suppose I am, as you might say—er—well, I’m a sort of an accessory before the fact, don’t you think? I can’t forget that it was I who clubbed you into the proper frame of mind.”
“You needn’t worry; you’re safely out of it,” declared the confessor, with a laugh which was only half good-natured. “I gave you your just due: told her that I owed you my soul’s salvation; which you had safely clinched against any backsliding by asking Richardia to marry you.”
For a moment there was a silence like that which precedes the crash of summer thunder. Then, in a still, small voice, Carfax said: “You told her that, did you? You gave her to understand that, right off the bat, and merely in passing, as it were, I had carelessly determined to marry your temptation out of your way? There was only one mistake made in your education,Vance; the person who first taught you to put pen to paper ought to have been instantly hanged, drawn and quartered. I—I—” but here, apparently, speech failed him, and he turned abruptly to walk rapidly away toward Highmount, leaving Tregarvon standing, half-remorseful and wholly bewildered, in the middle of the road.
The bewilderment went with the too highly educated one a good part of the way down to Coalville, and it certainly would have been increased if he could have known that, five minutes after he had turned the first curve in the winding pike below Highmount, the car which had been so lately reported out of commission had been mysteriously restored to a state of usefulness; that, with a man and a woman in the driving-seat, it had whisked through the campus portal, cut a perilous quarter-circle at speed in the piked roadway, and had vanished in a thick cloud of limestone dust to the westward, leaving Mrs. Caswell’s dinner to wait for its return.