Читать книгу After the Manner of Men - Lynde Francis - Страница 10

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ON the morning after the crash of the walking-beam and the consequent halting of the mountain-top activities, Carfax took the yellow car out of its warehouse garage; and after driving for a half-hour or so up and down the valley road with a tonneauful of speechless but highly delighted children picked up at Tryon’s and Jeff Walters’s, he pulled up in front of Tait’s and went in, ostensibly to buy smoking tobacco, but really to make friends with the country-store idlers.

Cursory observers from an alien North, penetrating now and then to unhackneyed regions in the Cumberlands or the Great Smokies, are apt to find the country folk, either valley or mountain bred, reticent by nature and notably shy of strangers. But there was no resisting the genial and childlike affability of the young man who had been giving the village children joy-rides, who recklessly bought a box of Tait’s best two-for-a-nickel cigars and distributed them generously as one among friends, and who presently had the hood lifted from the yellow car’s motor installation and was explaining, in words of one syllable, the workings of the driving mechanism to a group of curious and deeply interested onlookers.

The small lecture explanatory gave Carfax a chance to pick his man, and the choice fell upon the elder Layne. Would Mr. Layne like to take a little ride up the road in the car?—just to see how much more easily manageable it was than a horse-drawn vehicle?

Daddy Layne was overwhelmed with embarrassment, and was also secretly puffed up with pride, though he did not yield too easily, a disposition to haggle and make terms being a ruling passion in the Layne nature.

“I ’low I warn’t thinkin’ none o’ takin’ a trip this mornin’,” he mused reflectively. “Man ortn’t to go projeckin’ ’round on his’n travels when thar’s sech a heap o’ work to be done on the place. But then, thar’s my married daughter Malviny—her man’s coal-diggin’ for the C. C. & I., up yander at Whitlow; ef ye could git me thar an’ back——”

Carfax assured him that there was nothing easier, and by dint of holding the big car down to its slowest speed on the five-mile run to Whitlow he accomplished his purpose, which was to beguile Layne into telling him all that the countryside knew about the C. C. & I., its methods, its local managers, and whether or not the report was true that it made industrial war upon the smaller companies and individual mine owners.

Layne gave him the countryside point of view, which was, of course, inimical to the corporation—to any corporation. The C. C. & I. paid its men next to nothing for digging the coal and then sold it for fabulous prices to the people in the cities; it ran company stores and the miner who refused to buy his supplies thereat was likely to find himself out of a job; when a coal-digger was hurt or killed in an accident, the company’s long purse defeated the ends of justice in the damage suit; and so on to the end of the accusative category.

Pinned down to the particulars about the Whitlow, Layne admitted that the young engineer in charge as superintendent was a “squar’” man; but Connolly, the local manager under this superintendent, was, in Layne’s description, a man-killer. As to the company’s policy toward its competitors, Layne could say nothing definite, the countryside point of view not being penetrative of hidden corporation methods. But it was true that the only mines in operation in the valley belonged to the C. C. & I. Company. Others had been opened from time to time, but they were usually short-lived.

This drawing of Daddy Layne on the drive to Whitlow, and, later, an interview with Connolly, a hard-mouthed Irishman whose crass brutality apparently justified Layne’s descriptive epithet of “the man-killer,” gave Carfax a clue which he followed patiently until it was time to take Layne back to Coalville; a clue which led to a scraped acquaintance with the local leaders of the Amalgamated Mine Workers, to affable and seemingly pointless talks with all who dared to talk, and finally to a friendly conference with the miner Dockery, Layne’s son-in-law.

“The kindling-wood for your obstruction fire is all cut and stacked at Whitlow, Vance,” was his dinner-table announcement to Tregarvon at the close of this day of investigation. “I have discovered a number of things. First, that the C. C. & I. methods of benevolent assimilation as directed toward possible competitors have varied from instigating all sorts of trouble in the mines to be squelched up to swallowing them whole in forced sales of stock.”

“That sounds cheerful,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”

“Next, they leave it to the local managers to nip any new venture in the bud as effectually and quietly as possible, without bothering the trust headquarters. I took a long chance on Connolly, the assistant superintendent at Whitlow, and got that much of it pretty straight.”

“You don’t mean to say that he admitted any such thing as that to you, when it is known all up and down the valley that you are interested here with me!” exclaimed Tregarvon, wholly incredulous.

Carfax’s smile would have made a blushing debutante envious.

“In Mr. Connolly’s office, I was a lost lamb of the flock, looking most pathetically for somebody to lead me home,” he rejoined. “A fellow named Tregarvon had got me down here from New York with a view to pulling my financial leg as an investor in some coal property a few miles down the valley—at Coalville, in fact. I enlarged somewhat upon this part of it; kept it up until I was reasonably sure that I had convinced Connolly that I am a woolly sheep, merely waiting for somebody to come along with a pair of sharp shears.”

“Good—ripping good!” Tregarvon chuckled. “You’ve missed your calling, Poictiers, by all the distance lying between Riverside Drive and the city detective department down-town. But, as you say, you took a long chance; unless Connolly is a bigger fool than he looks to be.”

“Didn’t I? But Connolly is simply an abysmal brute; a man-driver without any of the little gifts of perspicacity. He took me under his wing like a stepfather-in-law; advised me bluntly to put my money into Consolidated Coal at one-forty rather than to go gunning on my own hook, or yours, or anybody’s, in Consolidated Coal’s intimate back yard. Pressed a little harder, he hinted that you wouldn’t be allowed to dig any real coal out of the Ocoee, providing there were any worth digging—which there wasn’t.”

“‘Wouldn’t be allowed, Mr. Connolly?’ said I, as lamb-like as possible. ‘How could Tregarvon be prevented?’”

“‘There’s manny a way, Misther Carfax,’ he scowled up at me; and then he let the cat out of the pillow-case: ‘These young min widout practical experience—’tis manny a blunder they’ll be making, and they’re soon discouraged entirely. I’m hearing that this same Misther Tregarvin is having throuble to beat the band, and him not fair at the beginning of it yet.’”

Tregarvon was absently spilling a spoonful of sugar into his after-dinner coffee—a sufficient measure of his interest in Carfax’s story.

“From all of which you have argued that there is a C. C. & I. spy in our camp, haven’t you, Poictiers?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the remedy?”

“Is to find and fire him.”

“The firing part of it will be easy; but the finding is a horse of another color. All of my squad save one or two, I believe, have worked at odd times for the C. C. & I. Every able-bodied man in this region digs coal a little now and then; ‘huckleberry miners,’ the regulars call them.”

“We’ll simply have to watch and sift; that’s all,” said Carfax.

“Well, you’ve done a good day’s work, anyway,” was Tregarvon’s summing-up of the amateur detective’s report. “Candidly, I didn’t think you had it in you, Poictiers. You don’t look it, you know—to the naked eye.”

The angelic smile came and sat upon the clean-shaven, womanish face of the golden youth.

“Don’t you know, Vance,” he drawled lispingly, “I believe that is my strong point: not looking the ready-made, hand-me-down villain. It is foolishly easy to make people take me for a harmless, good-natured scrap-bag into which they can tuck any old thing they don’t happen to be needing at the moment. Why, even old Daddy Layne confided in me. Coming home, he told me all about the feud of the family of one of his sons-in-law with the McNabbs. By the way, that reminds me: did you know that you have two of the McNabb cousins in your working gang?—the fellows who call themselves Morgan and Sill?”

Tregarvon had not known it; and a new field of conjecture as to the disasters was promptly opened. Why charge the coal trust with the campaign of obstruction when two of the avowed enemies of Ocoee progress were right on the ground day by day?

Carfax rather sheepishly confessed that his brain had not been capacious enough to entertain two ideas at once. Having fixed upon the coal trust as the trouble source to be investigated, he had completely overlooked the McNabb alternative.

“I’ll do time for it, though,” he promised. “To-morrow will be Saturday; and if you’ll lend me the car again, I’ll find out something more about those moonshiners in the Pocket.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” Tregarvon objected joyously. “It is going to be my Saturday off, too—and a holiday at Highmount. I’ll go with you, as far as the college, anyway.”