*****
At two o’clock of that day Mr. Wade had concluded that all he had ever heard of the enormities of the West was far below the actual fact.
His first grievance had been the dilapidated conveyance; his second the fact that Richards, who for reasons of his own had not tried to make the expedition a bed of roses, had insisted on his getting out a dozen times to see certain offices, the shaft house, and a number of other buildings, about whose use he was extremely hazy. And these pilgrimages had necessitated his walking through fine red dust, which not only reduced his immaculate footgear to its lowest terms, but bordered the bottom of his pale gray trouser legs with a deep red band, which Richards assured him was indelible.
But the crowning enormity came with the dinner at Raegan’s Hotel, which invitation Mr. Wade had felt he could hardly refuse in courtesy.
At the moment they entered the dining room Richards was called to the phone.
“Take these gentlemen down to my table, Maggie,” he said to the head waitress as he turned away.
Mr. Wade regarded this young woman disapprovingly. The curve of her pompadour and the curves of her figure were too aggressively spherical. That her overgenerous bulk could be compressed to the dimensions of her waist seemed to indicate that whalebone had been unduly overlooked in modern mechanics. It hinted, too, though not to Mr. Wade, of a forcefulness of spirit which, seeing in a handkerchief-sized, knife-pleated white apron a legitimate adornment, adjusted the physical, Spartan-like, to its requirements. But Mr. Wade’s mere passive and impersonal dislike quickened to an active rage in that awful moment when she tucked her arm comfortably in his, and promenaded him the length of the dining room to an untidy looking table already occupied by a portly Hibernian, who was engaged in extensive molar exploration with a diminutive wooden pick.
“Friends of Mr. Richards, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” she said, glibly, and Mr. Wade felt himself released from her muscular arm only to feel the front of a chair pressed with energetic purpose against the back of his knees.
As certain muscles automatically relaxed to enable him to be seated, his stunned sense of propriety recovered consciousness enough to enable him to decide that of all outrages ever perpetrated on a gentleman, this last was the worst.
“Mr. Richards’ friends are my friends,” responded Mr. O’Shaughnessy, cordially.
Mr. Wade looked at Hastings, who was seating himself with outer sobriety and inward hilarity. He comforted himself by taking that sobriety for disgust.
“I suppose you are not out here for your health?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy opined, genially.
“No,” said Mr. Wade, icily.
“What line ar-re you in?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy pursued.
“I fail to understand you,” said Mr. Wade, stiffly.
“What house are you thravelin’ for? What are you selling?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy explained.
That he, Mr. Livingstone Wade, should be taken for a traveling salesman!
“I am a banker,” said Mr. Wade. He felt it due to himself to say as much as that.
“Faro and that face of yours ar-re twins the world over,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy, genially, closing one eye and looking intelligently at Hastings through the other. Then he cast the toothpick on the floor. “Have a cigar?” he said, hospitably, throwing a couple carelessly on the table as he rose to depart. “Drop in and see me if you get thirsty while you’re here. The palm garden. Two doors up. The house is good for a few yet.”
He stopped to joke with the head waitress a moment on his way out.
Richards, returning, decided that Mr. Wade was pretty well fagged. He had become monosyllabic.
The catsup bottle in the middle of the table, the greasy, lukewarm soup in stone-china bowls, the tasteless profusion of canned vegetables, the dubious-looking water, and the muddy mixture, bitter from long boiling, which the Raegan House called coffee, were only additional affronts to a man already at the limit of his endurance.
His announcement of his intention to spend the rest of the day in the car, and to make it his headquarters during his stay, was delivered with a decision which left no possibility for protest.
What was mere dynamite to such indignities as these!
He stepped into the landau, which Richards had ordered round again, with a sensation of relief, heightened by that gentleman’s statement that he shouldn’t be able to see them again until morning. Richards found Mr. Wade rather exhausting, on his side.
“If you see a fellow in freak clothes on your way back, you can know it’s that son of Carrington’s,” he observed, as he stood on the sidewalk.
Hastings had his foot on the step of the landau, but he wheeled.
“Is Ned Carrington here?” he demanded.
“Been here all summer. Fatherbroke his leg in a runaway and sent for him,” Richards growled.
“Then I think I’ll walk over and see him,” Hastings said promptly, “if you’ll excuse me, sir.”
He smiled confidently at his uncle.
“You shan’t go near him,” said Richards, fiercely, “with that shark of a father of his trying to swindle us every way he can.”
“Whatever his father is, Ned Carrington is a gentleman and my friend,” said Hastings, quietly.
“Tell him he can’t go,” Richards demanded of Mr. Wade. And his insistence was fatal. Mr. Wade would not have influenced his nephew at Richards’ dictation just now if Hastings had announced his intention of going to perdition.
Moreover, he trusted Hastings. And—this is an awful anti-climax—he wanted a nap.
“I hope you will find your friend home, Laurence,” he said, suavely. “Business quarrels can safely be ignored between gentlemen.”
Richards, watching the erect old figure disappearing in the landau toward the station, and the athletic young one striding off in the direction of the Star mine, hated them with an equal intensity.
*****
John Carrington, dozing away on the great wicker divan on his broad veranda, in the warmth of a September afternoon, opened his eyes at the click of the gate.
The young man coming rapidly up the graveled walk was a stranger.
“Mr. Carrington?” he said, pleasantly.
“Yes, sir,” Carrington replied.
“Your son and I were friends in Paris, Mr. Carrington,” he went on. “My name is Hastings. I hope he is at home.”
Hastings! Paris! This was the young fellow whom Sarah had written about—who was so attentive to Elenore.
Carrington looked at him critically, and was pleased.
“Sit down, Mr. Hastings,” he said, cordially. “Ned just went in to order the horses for a little later. He will be out presently, and will be glad to see you.”
“I was surprised to hear that Ned was here, Mr. Carrington,” Hastings went on, seating himself. “He was to start for the East with Velantour the day I left Paris, and I supposed he was painting away for dear life somewhere in the Vale of Cashmere.”
“I didn’t even know he intended to go,” said Carrington, quietly.
“What!” said Hastings. “He hasn’t told you that Velantour asked him to go? It was the greatest opportunity he could ever have!” Then he thought. “Of course your illness was first with him,” he said. “I hope I haven’t been telling tales out of school.” He smiled frankly. Then “He’s a genius, though.” The praise burst out spontaneously. “They expect great things of him in Paris, Mr. Carrington.”
John Carrington did some rapid thinking. So the boy had put aside the biggest opportunity in his life to come back to him. Put it aside cheerfully. To gratify—John Carrington was hard on himself now—his father’s selfish pride. The need had not been imperative. He could have written him all the questions it was advisable to ask him. But he had been in pain, and harassed, and he had sacrificed the boy to it. Well, he should go back soon. He, John Carrington, was not so near senility that he couldn’t manage his own affairs. His jaw set squarely.
“I’m glad you told me, Mr. Hastings,” he said, calmly. Quick steps were coming through the hall. “Before he had a chance to head you off,” he concluded, smilingly. The eyes he turned toward the door were very proud. “Here’s a friend you’ll be glad to see,” he said, cheerily. Yet it seemed to him, and to Hastings, that the lad’s first impulse was toward recoil.
He certainly paled a little. And Hastings said to himself that Ned had, in some subtle way, changed indefinably, but certainly. His eyes did not carry out the comfortable familiarity of his attire. It appeared to Hastings that they were making some demand uponhim—a demand that he could not understand.
But the next second young Carrington came forward with at least a surface cordiality.
“How did you find me out—Hastings?” he said, with a slight hesitation before the name, as perplexing as the characteristic grasp of his hand, familiar and unfamiliar at once, and the tinge of formality that obtruded itself unmistakably.
“I had no idea you were here until I heard it just now from Richards,” said Hastings, struggling with a vague sense of rebuff.
The name might have been the Medusa head.
Then “Richards?” John Carrington queried. Hastings flushed.
“My uncle, Mr. Wade, has given me the Tray-Spot mine,” he said, and his voice became formal in turn. “We lunched with our manager to-day.”
In spite of his annoyance, his lips twitched at the memory of it.
“It seems that there is war between the two mines, Mr. Carrington;” he turned to the older man. “I don’t know anything of mining, but there must be some way out of it which would be just both to your interests and to ours.”
For John Carrington had impressed him indelibly as an honest man.
Hastings’ tone was both dignified and frank. John Carrington liked it. But could good come out of anything connected with the Tray-Spot? It had always been a thorn in the flesh.
Ned had crossed the veranda quickly, to seat himself behind a book-laden table. Once so ensconced, he drew a long breath of relief. Then he began to look amused.
“We have suggested a way, but it did not meet with your uncle’s approval,” said John Carrington, quietly.
“I quite agree with my uncle that we do not care to sell,” said Hastings, calmly.
“Nor, I assume, do you care to discharge your manager,” John Carrington went on.
“No,” said Hastings, frankly again; “my uncle has always considered Richards an invaluable man.”
“He certainly has been,” Carrington commented, ironically. “Then, I think we can cut out mining as a topic of conversation, Mr. Hastings. You and Ned can gossip about Paris.”
“That’s where I differ with you, dad,” Ned broke in, spiritedly.
Hastings, stung, started to rise, but “Don’t be silly,” the lad said, impatiently, but with more friendliness than he had yet shown. “We may have a thousand pleasant things to say about Paris, but this is the important thing, and we had better keep at it.
“Laurence”—Hastings gave a little start; Ned had never called him Laurence—“is quite as much of a greenhorn about mines as I was a few months ago. It’s only fair to tell him just what our position is. He will at least hear a story of our grievances that hasn’t been garbled.” His tone was spirited.
“I should like that,” said Hastings, quietly.
Ned leaned forward eagerly. Then he settled his cravat with a peculiar twist, which Hastings recognized as Ned’s characteristic preliminary to discourse. He and Elenore had laughed over it many times together.
“Ours is the older and deeper mine,” Ned began. “That’s the first thing. And all the mines here strike the big bodies of water in sinking. That’s the second. Your manager has hit on the economical plan of doing without large pumps; and when you strike water, he lets it seep through to us, and we raise it for you. It increases our dangers and expenses and your dividends. How would you like it in our place?”
John Carrington watched him with a look of mingled pride and amusement.
“In the case you have stated, I shouldn’t like it at all,” Hastings stated, coolly. “But Richards has assured my uncle that this grievance of yours is imaginary; that the water you get comes from your own sinking. Isn’t there a possibility that may be so?”
“No,” said Ned, positively; “there isn’t.”
Hastings hesitated. That Ned believedwhat he was saying was obvious; but, after all, what did he know about it? Wasn’t he, save in his art, the most impractical soul living? Why shouldn’t it be quite as likely that Carrington’s men deceived him as that Richards deceived his uncle?
“There ought to be the simplest of ways of settling that,” he said, slowly. “Let a couple of your men go down our mine and satisfy themselves that we’re doing what’s right.”
John Carrington’s laugh was ironically amused.
“You might suggest that to Richards,” he said. Then his tone changed. “He won’t even give us a map of your workings,” he said, sharply. “As for letting anyone from the Star underground, he has announced pretty clearly that the man who tried it wouldn’t come up again. And though Richards’ word hasn’t any par value, I am willing to believe that for once he meant what he said.”
“Aren’t you painting Richards in rather too black a color?” Hastings protested. “Aren’t you unduly prejudiced against him? Premeditated murder, now?”
“Accident, my dear sir,” John Carrington said, ironically, “and underground accidents are almost too easy.”
Hastings hesitated. He looked at Ned.
The lad made a Gallic gesture that sent his hands far apart. “What would you?” it signified.
There was a tinge of mockery in his friendly smile. Yet something of confidence, too.
“My dear Hastings,” he said; “it is decidedly up to you. Our word or Richards’.”
Hastings flushed.
“My dear Ned,” he said, steadily, “that I should doubt your good faith is impossible. Nor,” he flared, “do I think you doubt mine. I have been thrust suddenly, through the great generosity of an uncle to whom I am as loyal as you are to your father, into a situation that I know nothing about. I have a manager in whom my uncle, a cautious man, has believed implicitly. You tell me this man is a rogue. But you may be wrong. I can’t condemn him unheard. One thing is certain,” he went on. “I shall find out. And if there has been anything crooked about our management, it shall be righted.” The line of his lips straightened. The muscles of his jaw grew tense. It was impossible to doubt that he meant what he said.
Both listeners believed him. Both admired him. But John Carrington looked his admiration frankly, and young Carrington dropped his eyelids satisfiedly over his.
“That is all we could ask,” said John Carrington, approvingly. “Now let me hear you youngsters chat about Paris.”
But Hastings was impatient to be off now.
“I must get back to my uncle,” he said, lightly. “It has been a hard day for him, and I suggested that I would serve as secretary for once.”
“Then, order the horses round for Mr. Hastings, Ned,” said John Carrington, and as the lad disappeared, and Hastings protested: “They are standing harnessed in the stable,” he said, decisively. “You mustn’t insist on our being too inhospitable.”
And as Hastings capitulated, John Carrington followed out a sudden impulse.
“You will explain to your uncle that this half-mended leg of mine will prevent my calling on him,” he stated, feeling suddenly that Hastings’ uncle must have some good points, “but I shall be glad to put my horses at his disposal while he is here. Ned will come over to your car in the morning, and say so gracefully.”
He smiled confidently at the returning lad.
There was a queer, contented look lurking in the lad’s eyes. “As gracefully as he can,” he laughed, lightly. “I’ll walk down to the gate with you,” he added.
It was on the way to the gate that Hastings asked the question which was really the mainspring of his call.
“Where is your sister now? Did she go to Brittany?”
Young Carrington seemed amused.
“Elenore’s plans were rather upset this summer,” he said, lightly, “as well as mine. She’s far from Brittany, in a curious little place you never heard of in France.” He was rather proud of the way that sentence was turned. “She’s with a friend, and enjoying herself, though she says it’s all queer.”
Hastings had a mental vision of Elenore in some far-off corner of France, making gay over all its out-of-the-way absurdities in that companionable way of hers.
“I wish she were here,” he said, suddenly.
“Oh, well, I dare say she’d rather be where she is than anywhere else,” Ned rejoined, carelessly.
Which was cold comfort to Hastings.
“By the way,” he said, turning, as he was about to step into the trap, “I suppose we’re perfectly safe to make our headquarters in the car here?”
“Safe as the Waldorf, if you’re on a siding,” Ned laughed. “If you stay on the main track the cars will hit you.”
Hastings mentally swore at himself. The question had sounded idiotic.
“See you in the morning,” Ned called, as Hastings drove off. But he walked back to the house rather slowly.
“Pretty tired, dad?” he asked, cheerfully.
“Ned,” said John Carrington, slowly, “when you children were little I’m afraid I loved Elenore best. But no daughter can be to a man what his son is.”
There was a little silence. John Carrington lay with his eyes closed. He was tired.
“Do you think Elenore was interested in that young fellow?” he asked, finally.
“If she was, she never said so,” young Carrington replied. He was looking off in the direction of the Tray-Spot.
“If I were a girl, I’m inclined to think he could have me,” John Carrington announced.
Young Carrington’s laugh was lightly amused.
“If I were a girl, I’d lead him on a bit, myself,” he announced.
When Hastings had returned to the car the afternoon before, he told his uncle the story of his interview with the Carringtons quite simply. He was too wise to urge action upon a tired, out-of-temper man; nor did he wait for Mr. Wade’s comment. He shifted conversation to pleasanter things, and by the time Joseph had served them a nice little dinner Mr. Wade’s outer man bore the visible signs of gastronomic peace. A few games of cribbage, which he won, yet not too easily, were also a soothing influence. When Hastings said good-night, Mr. Wade opened the subject of his own accord.
“How did this claim of Carrington’s strike you, Laurence?”
“It struck me that we must satisfy ourselves about it as a matter of personal honor,” said Hastings, firmly. “Of course you will know better than I how and when to take the initiative.”
There was nothing that urged or insisted in his tone. It was quietly assured.
“Good-night, sir,” he smiled, and disappeared. Disappeared to dream that the car was a balloon, and that he was sailing swiftly through sunny skies to Elenore.
Mr. Livingstone Wade, over-fatigued, was jolted through dreamland by that unbridled nocturnal equine who bolts from one disaster to another.
The horror-stricken Mr. Wade found himself lunching at Sherry’s with the head waitress from Raegan’s. She had tied that knife-pleated apron around her neck, like a bib; and she told him things were “elegunt,” and he could call her Maggie.
She insisted on his drinking catsup instead of claret, and ordered the salad compounded with soft hematite instead of paprika.
All the directors of the bank were seated at a table near them; and they looked quite as appalled as Mr. Wade felthewould, had he seen any one of them in his place.
How he came to be in this awful predicament, he had no idea. He only knewthat he was riveted to his chair, and that his face, in spite of his inward horror,wouldwear a pleased smile. And speech, though he strove desperately to articulate, was an impossibility.
Then Hastings appeared, and said seriously: “This, sir, is a matter that affects your personal honor.”
It was in a grim determination to escape from this purgatory at all hazards that Mr. Wade finally jumped himself awake; and though every muscle in his body ached throbbingly, he gave a sigh of contentment as he stirred his face on his pillow.
*****
Trevanion, coming up to the house on a summons from John Carrington, found young Carrington coming down the steps, looking a bit more of a swashbuckling dandy than ever.
“Morning, Trevanion,” he greeted him, buoyantly.
Then he nodded toward the waiting trap.
“I’m going to pay a morning call on the owners of the Tray-Spot,” he announced, genially.
“Confound ’em!” muttered Trevanion.
The lad looked him straight in the eyes, in the way Trevanion found so remarkable.
“Oh, I think they’re square,” he said, lightly, “and that Richards’ day is about done. It will decide itself in a few days now, anyway.”
Trevanion watched him with a curious expression as he drove off.
*****
Mr. Wade had wakened not only refreshed but in a mood which a certain irreverent clerk had once characterized as his “dusting off the earth day” and a good time to lie low. Hastings greeted the morning sun joyfully, because it shone on the little town where Elenore had spent her childhood.
Richards came in just as they were enjoying their after-breakfast cigars.
“Well,” he said, dropping into a chair without preliminary greetings, or waiting for Mr. Wade to request him to do so, “what’s the program for to-day?”
Then his eyes fell on Mr. Wade’s trouser legs.
“Told you it wouldn’t come off, didn’t I?” he laughed, boisterously.
Mr. Wade resented Richards’ unceremonious entrance, and resented still more this direct allusion to his sartorial disfigurement, which had resisted the most zealous efforts of Joseph. He considered that, under present circumstances, the legs should be considered as analogous to those of the Queen of Spain.
And that phrase of Hastings, “a matter of personal honor,” had hit the bull’s-eye.
Mr. Wade prided himself first that the family fortune had been made honestly, by the rise in Manhattan real estate; and last, that the Wade name stood in the business world to-day as a symbol of integrity that erred, if it erred at all, on the side of over-scrupulousness.
“Mr. Richards,” he said, a trifle stiffly, “when I inquired into the matter, you wrote me that Mr. Carrington’s grievance had no foundation in fact, did you not?”
The bluffness faded out of Richards’ face and left ugliness disclosed.
“He brought that old yarn back with him from Carrington’s yesterday, I suppose,” he sneered, jerking his head toward Hastings.
Hastings had that rare faculty of knowing when to let the game play itself.
“Very naturally, Mr. Richards,” said Mr. Wade, with dangerous smoothness; “but that is not the question.”
Richards’ face darkened.
“I’ll tell you what the question is, Mr. Wade, and you can settle it right now,” he snarled. “It’s whether you are going to take the word of the man who has made the mine, or the word of the man who’s trying to blackmail it, so’s he can buy it cheap.”
It was a good issue, so good that Richards himself was proud of it. He leaned back in his chair with something of a swagger.
“That you are still in charge of the Tray-Spot is the best proof of my confidencein you,” Mr. Wade said, in a more gracious tone, “but I propose to place the Carringtons in a position where they will have to admit that they are in the wrong, as you say they are. We will tell them that they may send a representative through our mine at any time, and that he will be accorded every courtesy.”
“Not on your life, we won’t!” said Richards, fiercely.
“That,” said Mr. Wade, serenely, “is a matter where we differ.”
“Do you suppose,” Richards went on, working himself into a rage, “that anyone they sent down would come up and tell the truth? He’d say just what he was paid to say, and he’d find just what he was paid to find.”
Joseph entered with two cards, and thereby effected a diversion.
One of the cards bore the name of Mr. John Carrington and the other that of Mr. Edward Carrington.
The gods fought on the Carrington side.
“Show him in,” said Mr. Wade, suavely.
Young Carrington, debonair as a certain Monsieur Beaucaire, made his entrance with an easy grace. The delicate deference of his manner toward Mr. Wade, the pleasantcamaraderiewhich he showed to Hastings, the impersonal politeness with which he recognized Richards’ existence, were all points in his favor.
So, too, were his punctiliousness in making his father’s excuses, and the quiet courtesy with which he placed his horses at Mr. Wade’s disposal.
His manner was so free from embarrassment or assertiveness, so evidently inspired by a nice sense of proprieties, that he might have been the ambassador of one king to another.
Richards, retiring to one of the car windows, his back toward them all, his fingers beating a nerve-racking tattoo upon the glass, was his direct antithesis.
“My nephew tells me you have distinct ability as an artist,” Mr. Wade said, when, the preliminary interchange of courtesies over, the three were comfortably seated. Mr. Wade thought it was likely, too.
“Then, I may tell you that we expect him to be one of our best architects,” young Carrington returned, gracefully.
“The rising architect of Yellow Dog,” Hastings said, with a wave of his hands. “I think I shall begin by building a little bungalow here for myself.”
“A very good idea,” said Mr. Wade, decisively.
Hastings’ first phrase had smitten him with a sudden contrition. He felt, too, that if he was going to come out to Yellow Dog himself, and if his nephew stayed there he should, of course, come out once a year, at least, a cozily built bungalow, where he might be made comfortable, was in the line of a necessity. “I should get about it at once,” he declared.
“Perhaps you would like to drive about this morning, and select your site for ‘A Bungalow for One,’” said young Carrington, laughingly. There was a slightly mocking emphasis on the last word.
“I shouldn’t have it too small,” said Mr. Wade, firmly.
Richards was whistling between his teeth now, a performance which always enraged Mr. Wade.
“But we will have to let the site go for this morning, at least;” and there was a precise distinctness about Mr. Wade’s words now. “Mr. Richards has just been arranging to take us down the mine this morning.”
Richards wheeled round, surprised.
Young Carrington rose with an unhurried ease.
“Then, I must not detain you,” he said, calmly.
“And why would it not be a good idea for you to send one of your men, in whom you have full confidence, down with us?”—Mr. Wade’s tone was entirely urbane. “He would, perhaps, be able not only to assure himself of actual conditions, but to explain your contention to us in the workings under discussion.”
Richards held himself tense.
“I should like to send our shift boss, with your permission,” said young Carrington,quietly, though inwardly he exulted. “I will have him meet you at your shaft house whenever you say.”
“Mr. Wade,” said Richards, and the effort he made to control himself made the veins in his face distend purplingly, “when Mr. John Carrington is well enough to go down our mine, I shall be glad”—how the word choked him—“to take him down myself; but Trevanion, their shift boss, is at the bottom of the trouble. He’s tricky and dishonest. I’d rather resign than take him down the mine.”
For in the time that would elapse before John Carrington was able to take such a jaunt much could be done.
There was a moment’s pause, in which Richards’ claim and Carrington’s were equi-balanced. The very fact of Hastings’ personal bias held him inactive.
Then young Carrington spoke.
“I will answer for Trevanion’s honesty with my own,” he said. There was an emotional note in the voice he tried to hold steady.
“Off the same piece,Iguess,” sneered Richards, nastily.
The scales swayed down on the Carrington side.
Mr. Wade’s code did not permit his guests to be insulted by his subordinates.
“My dear Mr. Carrington, you leave us no option when you take that stand,” he said, suavely. “Whenever your man is ready, then.”
“I think he is still at the house with my father,” said young Carrington, unsteadily. “I can telephone from the station here.”
Mr. Wade looked out of the window. Beside Carrington’s trap stood the landau of yesterday. “If you will drive home and bring your man over, we will go directly to the mine with Mr. Richards,” he said.
*****
Young Carrington, bursting in upon his father and Trevanion, told it all in a breath.
Trevanion rose with the last word.
“The sooner I’m there the better,” he said, phlegmatically.
“It’s queer business,” said John Carrington, frowning. “Keep your eyes open. What do you think of it?”
“I’ll tell you when I come up,” said Trevanion. “If I don’t come up, you’ll look after my boy?”
John Carrington nodded.
“Keep close to young Hastings,” he said, tersely. “Don’t let Richards get behind you alone. I’m inclined to think, though, that the whole thing will be a farce. He’ll take you into a few levels where there couldn’t be any question, and that will be all. Wade and his nephew won’t know. And that will be all there is to it.”
“I’ll drive you over,” said Ned. His eyes were bright with excitement.
Trevanion grinned as he settled himself in the trap.
“I’m going to get my swell ride before I go down,” he said. “Mostly they take ’em when they come up—in a box.”
*****
The others were waiting, garbed in oilskins, candles in their caps—precautionary measures which inclined Mr. Wade to feel that there was something wrong in the management of a mine that was neither lighted nor heated.
Hastings was struggling not to chafe under his rôle of masterly inactivity; he comforted himself with the thought that it was causing things to move in the right direction, at any rate.
Richards’ expression was sardonic. As Carrington had surmised, he proposed to tire out the greenhorns by an exhaustive progress through workings which would be of no possible interest to Trevanion.
He calculated shrewdly about how long it would take before they would be glad to come up. If Trevanion remained behind them, or if he went down without them later—Richards shrugged his shoulders. It was easy for a man to fall down an uncovered winze in a strange mine. And the fall would explain any bruises.
As they started for the cage, he turned to young Carrington. His smile was distinctly disagreeable.
“Sorry you don’t feel like coming, too,” he said, “but you might catch cold or get your clothes dirty.”
Whatever faults there were to young Carrington’s credit, cowardice was not one of them. Not that foolhardiness is not almost as reprehensible.
“If you’ll lend me a cap and a pair of boots, I shall be delighted,” he answered instantly.
“No, Mr. Ned. You’re not in this,” Trevanion remonstrated.
Young Carrington was pulling on his cap composedly now.
“You’ve never been down the Star, even. You won’t be of any use,” Trevanion insisted. Young Carrington was getting into an oilskin coat. Richards had not thought he would.
“I’ll telephone your father,” Trevanion declared.
“Then I’ll go down without you while you’re doing it,” young Carrington declared, willfully.
Trevanion followed him into the cage without more ado. But he didn’t like it.
As the cage dropped into the blackness of the shaft, Richards thought with malicious pleasure that he would outwit them all. Trevanion, holding it everyday work for himself, was uneasy over the boy; Hastings was impatient at his own ignorance—he hated to feel so out of his sphere; Mr. Wade, reviewing each successive stage of the proceedings which had placed him in his present situation, called himself what he would have slain any fellow man for thinking, a silly old fool; and Carrington—ah, a curious tangle of thoughts was young Carrington’s brain, with a curious after-vision of a bright blue sky.
Up in the big house on the hill, John Carrington was wondering if it was not time for Ned to come home.
*****
It is a curious experience—this going underground for the first time.
The chill and the dampness, the change in the air pressure, and the darkness—that vague, depressing darkness, on which the candle in your cap makes so vague and flickering an impression that it seems nervous and palpitant at its own temerity in attempting so gigantic a task.
Above all, and above you, as you clearly realize, for an eighth of a mile, perhaps, the huge impending weight of earth and rock, against whose menace timbering a foot and a half thick seems like trying to bolster the basement of a tottering St. Paul’s with matches.
It is like finding oneself in some gigantic letter press, the screw of which the hand of fate may choose to turn—perhaps now; pressing downward with pitiless, relentless, inanimate mechanism until the Parchment of the World bears the dull red mark of these unwilling witnesses to its deed.
These are all terrors unconfessed. Farthest of real menaces you find—whose vague terror is made dormant by the real necessities of the moment, the constant strain of the eye to distinguish—now to avoid the direct peril of an uncovered winze underfoot, now to notice how closely the “lagging” roofs in the drift, this indefinitely long hole, seven and a half feet square, in which you find yourself.
Then comes the strain of the novice brain to comprehend the reasons and the logic of it all.
Richards showed his native shrewdness in the way he managed the expedition. The humor of its personnel was quite within his comprehension. Three men, ignorant of every detail of mining, Trevanion of the Star, and himself.
It was grotesque enough for comedy.
And, too, Richards had at last taken Mr. Wade’s measure—or thought he had.
“You have to sling softsoap to suit the pig-headed old sissy,” he phrased it.
And he assumed a bluff heartiness which actually became genuine at times, as he explained carefully and clearly the A B C’s of things.
For Richards loved the mine he had made, loved it after the fashion of his nature, with an intensity of possession.
Fought for it fairly when fairness served best, and trickily when trickiness seemed more profitable. Took a man’s genuine pride when he had forced it to obey him. Abused its future for the present good if he felt like it. Slaved for it fiercely in reprisal. It was the only way Richards knew how to love anything.
That these two men whom the accident of fortune had placed in actual ownership of the mine should interfere with him had roused first his rage, and now his determination to placate them, to hoodwink them. He showed a good-natured tolerance of their ignorance, and an indefatigable patience in explanation.
“That’s it; now you’re catching on fine,” he encouraged them, as they grasped some elemental principle of mining. He led them over a good deal of ground during these explanations. He piloted them with a rough carefulness which even included young Carrington. The boy’s being there at all amused him rather than otherwise. But Trevanion was guarding young Carrington with as wary an eye as he was watching Richards.
Mr. Wade decided that for the first time Richards was appearing to advantage.
Aboveground his crudities of manner might be repellent; here he was in his native element, shrewd, practical and zealous.
Mr. Wade began to feel that Trevanion the Taciturn was quite as likely to prove the villain of the piece.
To be sure, it appeared that they had embarked on a tremendous undertaking. Mr. Wade felt that the mine was larger than he had supposed, but, as Richards said, they might as well understand it thoroughly. On this Mr. Wade, with legs that threatened to drop from his hip sockets, plodded on.
Young Carrington turned white more than once, but shut his teeth and went on defiantly; and Hastings owned to himself that he was desperately tired. Trevanion was as unwearied as Cornish patience, but Richards was not trying to tired out Trevanion—physically.
It lacked five minutes of the noon hour when they saw the cage ahead of them, waiting at this, the seventh and lowest, working level of the mine.
Below, as Richard told them, was the development level, to which the cage did not descend.
“We can’t go down now,” he said, looking at his watch. “They’re just going to blast, and it will take an hour afterward for the smoke to clear. We’ll go up and have our dinner, and come down again this afternoon to finish up, eh?”
Lunch, up on the earth’s surface, with sunshine and first grade air. The words were as welcome to Mr. Wade as though an archangel had spoken them.
Young Carrington, too, shared his feeling; shared, too, though unknowingly, Mr. Wade’s calculation that his legs would just about carry him to the cage.
Richards, with an inward grin, assured himself that those two, at least, would attempt no afternoon expedition.
This farce of investigation would soon be ended. It would be quite safe to urge them to come down again. They had had quite enough. He looked forward with amused anticipation to making the suggestion after lunch.
Trevanion hesitated about declaring an intention to remain without the others through the noon hour. No, he would see young Carrington safely out of it first;then——
They were almost at the cage now.
Richards was showing them the bell at the side of the shaft, the signal to the engineer to hoist the cage.
“All the men but one get in,” he explained. “He touches the bell and races across to get in the cage. The engineer allows him so many seconds to make it. No, you can’t stop it after it starts.”
Mr. Wade, who had arrived at that stage when he recked not how the cage went up, as long as it went, continued an unlistening way to that haven.
There was a detonation from the development level.
“Blast,” said Richards, to young Carrington’s look. “They’re in rather dangerous ground, and so we have them leave it until just before the noon hour, in case——”
A man shot up from the ladder-way. Another. And another. The ladder-hole spouted them out like a volcano.
They ran toward the cage panic-stricken, sweeping Mr. Wade into it before them. With an instant comprehension of the disaster that placed them allin a common peril, Richards turned swiftly to the others.
“Get in!” he shouted. “They’ve struck water!”
He caught Hastings by the arm, and rammed his way through the press like a great machine.
“You —— fools! There’s plenty of time!” he railed at his men.
Trevanion, guarding young Carrington with his right arm, thrust his mighty bulk through the struggling mass just behind Richards.
They were almost at the cage door when a terrorized Finn fought his way past them, striking out blindly at everything in reach.
One elbow thrust sent young Carrington spinning from Trevanion’s protecting arm to the ground, and the next instant the Finn dropped his full weight between Richards and Hastings, and leaped past them into the cage.
He shouted triumphantly to his fellows. It was jargon to Mr. Wade. But Richards knew, and raged, and the other miners knew, and rejoiced, that he had given the signal to hoist. Trevanion was lifting young Carrington in his arms.
Richards stepped into the cage, with an oath.
“Come!” he said, fiercely, to Hastings, jamming a few inches of space free in the cage with his bulk. “Room for one. You haven’t a second to lose!” he shouted.
Hastings put his hands in his pockets, coolly.
“I stay with my guests,” he said. And with his first word, the cage started upward.
As he turned toward the others, Trevanion, one arm round young Carrington, caught hold of his sleeve.
“We maun run for it!” he shouted.
For out of the great black hole beneath them rose the water, spreading across the bottom of the shaft.
From above, and suddenly faint, they could hear Mr. Wade calling that they must stop, that they must go back for his nephew, and his voice was the voice of a very old man. Trevanion instinctively led them running back into the drift. Young Carrington wrenched himself free. “I’m all right,” he said. “Took the breath out of me for a minute. I won’t hinder.”
Back of them the water followed silently, gaining gradually up the grade of the drift.
“Not time to make that first rise—the one we came down,” Trevanion said, as they sped along. “Ought to be another—here it is!”
He swerved into a black air shaft, but swept them back into the drift the next instant.
“No ladder. Stripped!” he said, laconically, and on they hurried again.
The water was a thin encroaching line thirty feet back now. Now the rise in the level hid it from sight.
And finally another rise. Stripped.
And on again.
Young Carrington was getting tired. Even peril was losing its spur. He stumbled a little.
Trevanion caught him round the waist, lifting him along with a strong gentleness; looking at him with curiously wondering eyes, but eyes that never lost their look of fealty.
“Why are the ladders gone?” young Carrington asked, and he kept his voice resolutely free from fear.
“Economy,” said Trevanion, briefly. “Wanted to use them somewhere else. We’ll find one after a bit.” Which might or might not be so.
“And if we don’t?” said Hastings, swinging alongside.
“They’ll send the cage to the level above, and your men will be hallooing all over the place for us,” Trevanion told him. He thought with a certain grim humor that Richards would not make any wild exertion to save him. Hastings’ presence was their best hope, if the ladders failed.
“If it should take them a long time to find us?” It was young Carrington now.
“Water may stop altogether,” Trevanion stated. “Depends on the size of the vug. Anyway, it rises slower the more ground it covers. We’ll have time enough.” But no one could tell that.
Disappointment. Hope. Then the end of the drift stared them in the face—rockand dirt as a final blast had left it.
But “Here’s our raise,” said Trevanion, bluffly, turning off.
And the raise was ladderless: a vertical opening, whose hard rock walls were too slippery for even a Cornishman to climb. Trapped!
They looked at the place where the ladder should have been, as though it must, perforce, appear. Young Carrington ran a finger rapidly round inside his collar, as though it had grown suddenly tight. The air seemed close. Then he pulled himself together sharply. Say what you will, blood will tell.
“And now what?” he asked Trevanion, cheerfully.
Hastings’ eyes were looking the same question.
“Wait,” said Trevanion, stoically.
To wait, inactive: it is the real test of courage.
With any kind of activity, hope plays an obligato; but when there is no struggle to be made, fears tries a tremolo first on one heartstring and then another.
“You should have gone with the others,” said young Carrington to Hastings, reproachfully.
“Never!” said Hastings, decidedly. “There’s that drop of comfort in the whole thing, anyway.
“How do you suppose I should feel,” he flashed, “if I were safe on the surface, and you were here? I should feel as though I had decoyed you into it.” He turned to Trevanion. “Can’t the pumps get the water under control?” he demanded.
“If you had enough of ’em,” said Trevanion. “That’s another place where Richards economized. The Star’ll pump it out for you after a while.”
“Richards will have his day of reckoning if I get out of this,” said Hastings, furiously.
“Does he know that?” asked Trevanion, dryly.
And Hastings saw the point. So did young Carrington. The cards were Richards’ now, to play as he chose. Hastings turned to his friends.
“Ned,” he said, “I’m mighty sorry. Sorry I interfered at all. I’d give my life to have you and Trevanion safe on the surface.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said the lad, quickly.
Trevanion’s eyes watched him curiously.
“I want to talk with you about Elenore,” Hastings went on, quietly. “I suppose you know that I love Elenore, Ned?”
Trevanion stepped back a few paces, but he listened intently.
“Do you?” said the lad, simply.
“Do I?” said Hastings, impetuously. “The hardest thing I ever did was to leave her without telling her I loved her. But you can’t ask a girl like that to wait indefinitely, you know. Then, when I found out where I was coming, it seemed as though it might have been meant, after all. And I wanted to patch up the trouble between the mines, so that I’d have at least a fair chance.”
“And then?” said young Carrington, softly.
“Then,” said Hastings, recklessly, “I hoped—I was daft enough to dream—that she might not think it a hardship to come back to the little place where she was born—to her father—to me. Tome! And when I talked of building a bungalow, I thought what it would mean to bring my wife home to it.”
There was silence. Then Hastings shrugged his shoulders.
“I may not have the chance to tell Elenore,” he said, bruskly, half-ashamed of the emotion he had displayed. “It’s not quite the same thing to tell you, old man. I’m afraid there’s small chance of our ever being brothers-in-law, but you wouldn’t have objected to me as a brother, would you?”
“Whatever Elenore wished, I should have wished,” the lad said, calmly.
Hastings laughed a short, impatient laugh.
“I suppose we’re all egoists,” he said. “But I don’t mind confessing to you that it would be easier to face the music if I knew what Elenoredidwish—whethershecared.”
There was silence again. Trevanion’sfigure in the background grew tense. Then the lad laughed lightly.
“You hadn’t asked her, you know,” he said, “and Elenore isn’t the kind of a girl to wear her heart on her sleeve. But I know Elenore pretty well, and I think she cared—really.”
Hastings flung his arm in front of his face with a gesture that was almost boyish.
“Elenore!” he whispered to the cold comfort of his coat sleeve. For virile youth loves strongly, humanly.
Young Carrington’s eyes watched him with a wonderful light. Even the flickering candlelight showed Trevanion that.
Then Hastings rammed his hands in his pockets and drew a deep breath.
“Thank Heaven, she’s on the other side of the ocean! It will be easier for her, after all. Harder to realize,” he said, fervently.
Young Carrington drew a quick breath, a breath of relief. “I thought you’d feel that way,” he said, quietly.
Trevanion stepped out into the drift.
“I want to speak with you a bit,” he nodded to young Carrington.
The lad followed him. Hastings, left alone, gave himself up to thoughts of Elenore. The other side of the rock wall, young Carrington faced Trevanion, and knew that he knew. Every detail of their surroundings stood out in the light of that, with sudden distinctness. The great timbers that walled in the drift, the flickering light of the candles in their caps—all seemed but the setting for Trevanion’s eyes. The hand he laid on young Carrington’s arm was almost reverential in its touch.
“I’ve held you in my arms to-day twice,” he said, hurriedly. “I don’t understand why it’s you, but it’s all right.” He looked at young Carrington as one of Jeanne d’Arc’s soldiers might have looked.
Young Carrington faced him very quietly.
“I thought ’twas queer, the way you held the child that time,” Trevanion went on. “And you ride just as you did as a youngster. Will he come back now if——” he demanded.
Young Carrington nodded gently. “Yes, and he’s a splendid fellow.” If the young voice broke for a second, that was all. “He’ll help dad to bear it. It was best for me to come. Best, above all, if this was to happen.” The voice was steady now. “I’m sorry you know, but it would have been safe with you, anyway.”
It was that same confident charm that had conquered Trevanion at the outset.
“You won’t tellhim?” he questioned, jerking his head toward the raise.
Young Carrington’s head shook a slow negative.
“Not unless at the very last I turn weak and womanish;” and there was a whimsical touch in the last word.
Then the young figure straightened up with a quick decision.
“And I really think, Trevanion”—young Carrington’s voice was light now—“that I shall make a nice, plucky, manly finish.”
Trevanion, following back into the raise, would have cut his heart out to save that buoyant young life, but his devotion was the pure fealty of a serf for his sovereign.
They played at bravery after that, each abetting the other.
Young Carrington coaxed Trevanion into telling them mining stories, wheedled Hastings into all kinds of reminiscences of his boyhood, assumed their ultimate escape so confidently that Hastings thought it a genuine hopefulness.
Not so Trevanion. He knew what the spring was that moved young Carrington to play up to a buoyant part. And he helped, with anecdotes of wonderful rescues, of escapes just in the nick of time.
He was in the midst of one of the best of these when a little lapping sound stopped him.
A thin little line of water pulsed gently into the entrance of the raise.
Mr. Wade had shouted his fruitless commands, in the ascending cage, all the way to the surface, raging at Richards and his management, and unconvinced,in spite of a united and profane assurance, of his inability to stop the cage and go back; furious at him for having installed such a defective system, and threatening him with dismissal at the earliest possible moment.
His nephew and his nephew’s friend left to danger, while these brutes were being brought to the surface! He had never suffered such helpless frenzy in all his neatly adjusted life.
At the surface the cage cleared with magical suddenness. Mr. Wade, breathless with rage, was fairly dragged out by Richards, and in so short a time as a signal may be given and obeyed, the cage had again started downward.
Mr. Wade leaned back against the timbers of the shaft house, with the exhaustion of relief.
But it was a relief that Richards did not share. This particular kind of disaster was so frequently recurrent that he knew its possibilities all too well. And he raged that it should have come just now. It was such a routine danger that he had not thought of it as a special menace in taking them down. Casualty, with Mr. Wade involved or witnessing, had been furthest from his thoughts or desires.
“How long before they will be up?”’ Mr. Wade asked, faintly.
Richards, tensely alert, made no answer. The cage had reached the bottom of the shaft now. He waited a minute—two—three. There was no sign from below. He himself gave the signal to hoist.
“Are they coming?” demanded Mr. Wade.
Richards shook his head. “I can’t say, sir,” he said, “but they’ve had plenty of time. Either they got in the cage and forgot to give the signal”—and with Trevanion below this was an unlikely contingency—“or——” he hesitated.
“Or?” said Mr. Wade, sharply.
“Or the water has cut them off,” Richards finished.
“Then——” said Mr. Wade, faintly.
“Reach ’em from the level above,” Richards answered. But he thought of certain contingencies—thought of a good many important things.
There was a crowd of miners now, watching for the cage to appear. The jargon of Finnish comment sounded to Mr. Wade like the buzzing of bees. Then the cage came in sight. Empty and dripping wet.
The next second everything was action, and Richards its mainspring. His orders pelted down like hailstones. Men, tools, paraphernalia, filled the cage. Other men went racing off on surface errands.
Mr. Wade, paralyzed by his complete ignorance of conditions or remedies, seemed crushed under the consciousness of casualty. Richards caught him by the arm and shook him into attention.
“We’ll bring them up, if they are alive,” he shouted to him, as though he were deaf.
Then he stepped into the cage, and down it went again. Mr. Wade leaned back against the wall, motionless, his eyes fixed on the hole where it had disappeared.
But over all the little town the news was spreading like wildfire.