Читать книгу After the Manner of Men - Lynde Francis - Страница 11

Table of Contents

ON the day following Carfax’s journey of investigation to Whitlow, Tregarvon did not keep his promise to accompany the amateur Vidocq. There were still some repairs to be made on the tramway, and since a working squad of the laborers turned up to round out the week, Tregarvon stayed with his men and became a track foreman again.

Carfax, too, had apparently changed his mind overnight. Instead of driving off up the mountain after breakfast, he headed the yellow car down the valley road and was gone all day. When he returned, late in the afternoon, it was evident that he had discovered some other way of ascending Pisgah. The committee of leisure, sitting, as usual, on Tait’s porch, and amusing itself, also as usual, at the expense of an expatriated London serving-man, marked the yellow car returning by way of the mountain pike; observed, further, that Carfax was accompanied by two men, one of whom sprang from the car at the turn in the road nearest to the railway and ran to catch a northbound train of coal-empties, so escaping unidentified by the idlers. Carfax’s other passenger, well-known to Coalville as “The Bug Professor” at Highmount, descended from the auto more deliberately and went across to the coke-ovens to shake hands with Tregarvon.

“Comp’ny come, over yander,” Daddy Layne remarked to Merkley. “Better hump yo’self acrost the track an’ git ready to curl yo’ boss’s ha’r, hadn’t ye, English?”

Merkley adjourned himself accordingly, reaching the office-building in time to be sent to show Hartridge the way to the bath-room on the second floor. Carfax made no explanation to Tregarvon about the guest-bringing other than to say that he had captured the professor on the mountain, and had brought him down to take pot-luck of Uncle William’s preparing.

“We can eat him all right,” said the young mine owner hospitably; “but if we have to sleep him as well——”

“We shan’t,” Carfax asserted. “I have promised to drive him back to Highmount in the car after dinner.”

“Oh, that’s better. Who was the other fellow?—the one who jumped out and sprinted for the up freight?”

“Wait,” said Carfax mysteriously; “wait and you’ll find out.” And Tregarvon, having no alternative, had to wait.

The dinner for three in the back-office dining-room followed in due course, and Tregarvon, who brought a working-man’s appetite to the table, let the other two do most of the talking. Carfax proved to be at his captivating best; solicitous for the guest’s entertainment, ingenuous, eager to be informed. Wouldn’t Mr. Hartridge have some more of the—er—rabbit, he thought it must be? And was it really a fact that the entire Cumberland region was underlaid by a vast sheet of bituminous coal?

Tregarvon ate and listened, and presently became aware of two things: that Carfax was persistently threshing the talk around to the coal-measures, and that the professor seemed equally determined to escape from them. A little later, he observed that in this verbal ball-passing Carfax was proving himself the better player. Hartridge was coerced inch by inch; first into talking about the Southern coal-fields in the abstract, and finally into relating the ancient history of the Ocoee; which was the purpose for which Carfax had baited and set the dinner trap.

“I suspect Mr. Tregarvon can tell you more about the history of the Ocoee than I can,” Hartridge demurred modestly, after Carfax had fairly pushed him over the brink; and upon Tregarvon’s monosyllabic disclaimer, he went on reflectively: “Let me see; I believe it was about ten years ago that the first company was formed—to the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, as you might say.”

“A promoter’s scheme?” queried Carfax, alertly inquisitive now.

“Yes. A man from New York—Parker was his name—launched the enterprise; bought a little land, obtained free-will donations of a great deal more, and, as a favor to the benighted natives who had contributed the land, consented to part with about forty-five per cent of the stock of his company at half-price, payable in money.”

“Dear, dear; what a world this is!” sighed Carfax gently. “Sold them their own land back again, did he? And then what?”

Hartridge’s smile was genially cynical.

“I think it took the able Mr. Parker all of four months, or possibly a little longer, to squeeze the local stockholders—the only investors who had contributed any real values—out of his scheme; after which he sold the reorganized Ocoee to a New England syndicate. The Yankees—pardon me; the word is no longer a term of reproach with us—the Yankees meant honestly by the Ocoee; though, of course, they were under no obligation to recognize the frozen-out natives. They spent money liberally in development and on a costly equipment. But it proved to be a bad investment for them—as it had for the natives.”

“Ah,” murmured Carfax. “Now I am better able to understand President Caswell’s attitude. In strict justice, he would say, the mine belongs to those earliest investors who contributed the land and bought the stock; or at least these early people should have an equity in it. These later—er—Yankees had no ethical rights; hence their venture was bound to be ill-starred. By Jove, Tregarvon,”—and here Carfax’s lisp became quite apparent—“that puts the black mark on you, too, doesn’t it?”

If Carfax had any diplomatic designs on the dinner-guest, Tregarvon was not a party to them.

“I only know that my father paid good money for the Ocoee,” he said bluntly; “paid it to these same Yankees you are telling us about, Mr. Hartridge, when they were ready to lie down. It is up to me to prove that they didn’t stick him as bad as they doubtless believed they were sticking him when they pulled him into it.”

Carfax, who was observing the dinner-guest narrowly, saw the sign he had been watching for flit into the pale-blue eyes of Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge; a half-smile of gratified derision.

“You think Vance isn’t very likely to make good on his little brag, professor?” he put in, firing a pointblank shot at the target.

There was no indication that the shot had gone home, unless it lay in the quick veiling of the pale-blue eyes.

“Who am I, that I should take out a license as a prophet of evil, Mr. Carfax?” was the quiet rejoinder. “He is a brave man nowadays who has the assurance to deny anything whatever to youth, vigor, and the spirit of modern industry.”

“Still, you believe that Tregarvon isn’t going to win out?” persisted the golden youth.

Hartridge laughed.

“As Miss Richardia might put it, I haven’t any think coming to me, have I?” he parried.

Carfax gave it up. There was a point beyond which he could not press a man who was dipping with him into the common salt-dish, and he felt that the point had been reached.

“It is a pity you can’t stay and spend the evening with us, Mr. Hartridge,” he said, a little further along, when Uncle William came in to bare the table; but he added nothing to the conventional protest when the professor declared that he must go: on the contrary, he sped the parting guest so nimbly that Tregarvon was scarcely at his third pipe-filling when the purring of the yellow car’s motor announced Carfax’s return from Highmount.

“I told you so!” was the New Yorker’s first word, as he came in to take his place before the handful of fire on the dining-room hearth. “Where is my pipe?”

“What did you tell me?” queried Tregarvon, finding the pipe and pushing the tobacco within reach.

“That Hartridge knows, or thinks he knows, that you are on a false scent up yonder on the Pisgah cliffs: also, that he is deuced glad of it.”

“You can see farther into the millstone than I can, if you can draw any such conclusion as that,” Tregarvon remarked. “I thought he bluffed you good and plenty.”

“He did; and then again he didn’t. I insist that there is something doing, and that this mild-mannered gentleman who teaches mathematics and the natural sciences is in on it. I have just had an experience that was an eye-opener.”

“Unload it,” said Tregarvon briefly.

“Somebody tried to kill one of us a few minutes ago, and—and I’m afraid Hartridge knew it was due to come off!”

“Nonsense—you’re joking!” Tregarvon had come out of his pipe-musings with a bound.

“I’ll tell you just what happened, and then you shall judge for yourself. You know that stretch of good road about two-thirds of the way up the mountain?—the longest one there is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, just as we turned into it, going up, Hartridge twisted himself in the seat, looked back, and made some sort of a motion with his hand. I was talking; trying to pump him some more; and I don’t know why I should have noticed the bit of pantomime. Neither do I know why, coming down a few minutes later, I should have hit that piece of road at a ten-mile-an-hour gait instead of a thirty or forty. It was mighty lucky I wasn’t speeding. For about two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail you stood to lose a good friend and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. There was a tree lying across the road at precisely the correct angle to shoot me out into space if I had hit it.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed the listener. “Done while you were going and coming?”

“Done while I was going and coming. And that tree was lying at the exact spot where Hartridge turned in his seat and made the little signal with his hand to somebody that I couldn’t see.”

“But, good Lord, Poictiers! It’s unbelievable. Why, the man wasn’t ten minutes away from his bread-breaking with us!”

“I can’t help that. You have the facts.”

“What did you do?”

“I stopped, skirmished under the tonneau seat and found your towing rope, and took a hitch on the obstruction. The car was good for it, and I dragged the tree around and rolled it over the embankment. Then I examined the place where it had stood: it had been partly undermined by the road grading, and probably didn’t require much of a push to tip it over.”

“Then it might have been a sheer accident?”

Carfax was shaking his head. “I thought so at first. But when I turned the flash-light on the gap it had left in the upper bank, I saw that it had not fallen accidentally. There are pick marks in the clay, and a crowbar had been thrust in behind the roots to pry with.”

“You didn’t see or hear anybody?”

“Not a sign. I even went so far as to make a circuit in the woods along the upper embankment. There wasn’t a leaf stirring.”

“But think a minute, Poictiers: whatever crazy grudge any one might have against me or the Ocoee, it couldn’t be made to lap over on you!”

“That’s all right; it is your car, and you have usually driven it. You are doubtless the one who had the narrow escape, and I was only your happen-so proxy.”

For a thoughtful half-hour they sat before the dying embers of the fire and discussed the murderous attempt in all its bearings, Tregarvon stoutly maintaining to the last that Hartridge could not possibly have been an accomplice. But disregarding that single slight clue, they were left completely in the dark as to the identity or motive of the man or men who had tried to wreck the car.

In the early stages of the discussion Tregarvon had suggested the McNabbs; and after every other guess had been exhausted he returned to them. But Carfax demurred at this.

“No,” he said. “As I told you yesterday, you have two of the McNabbs in your working gang, and they have had a thousand chances to extinguish you since you came down here. Besides, I’ve been over in the Pocket neighborhood to-day, and have found out a lot about the clan McNabb. They’re perfectly harmless, I should say. I ran across both Morgan and Sill, and they took me in and fed me fat bacon and corn pone. It is all of ten miles to their shack in the Pocket, and they would have had to walk out to get on this side of Pisgah. Besides that, Wilmerding gave me a lot of pointers about the McNabb tribe.”

“Who is Wilmerding?”

“He is the man who rode down the mountain with Hartridge and me, and made the quick dash for the up-train. He is the chief of staff for the C. C. & I. in the Wehatchee Valley; has the oversight of all the various mines of the company. He is a fine fellow; a mining engineer with a few German university finishing touches.”

“How did you happen to meet him?”

“I hunted him up this morning; drove down to the Cardiff Mine for that purpose. They told me yesterday at Whitlow that he was at the Cardiff. I found him, and we foregathered on the spot. He is having some labor troubles, and was about to drive over the mountain to the Swiss settlement at New Basel to see if he couldn’t pick up a little new blood. I didn’t have to persuade very hard to get him to abandon his horse and buckboard, and I drove him over and back.”

“He is all right, you think?”

“As straight as a string. If the C. C. & I. is crooked, he is no party to the underhand work. Also, he told me a lot about the McNabbs. He seems to be quite certain that they have no grudge of their own to work off. Laster McNabb, who is the grandfather of the outfit and the chief of the clan, has talked very freely with Wilmerding about the Ocoee lawsuit, and if the McNabbs have it in for anybody, it is for the lawyer who dragged them into the fight with the New Englanders.”

Tregarvon stood up to rest an elbow against the rough stone mantel. “If your estimate of Wilmerding is correct, the C. C. & I. can’t be held responsible; and, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be the mountaineers. Yet we have had the accidents with the drilling machinery, and somebody has just tried to assassinate you. You may say it’s Hartridge, but I can’t follow you there. The motive is lacking.”

“Is the motive altogether lacking?” Carfax queried gently.

“You mean that Hartridge may be asinine enough to think that I am trespassing on his preserves at Highmount? That is nonsense. Miss Richardia Birrell and I are merely good friends. Besides that, I don’t believe she has ever given the ‘bug professor’ a second thought, sentimentally.”

“Maybe not. But a woman as a factor in any problem is always the unknown quantity,” Carfax remarked half musingly. Then he added: “It would be a real charity, both to you and to Professor William Wilberforce, if some outsider would step in and marry Miss Richardia out of the game, don’t you think?”

Tregarvon’s frown was morose. Slowly but surely the light with the difficulties, material and mysterious, was working a change in the young man whose chief characteristic had hitherto been finding its principal expression in the light-hearted optimism of those who neither toil nor spin. For the first time in his wealth-smoothed saunter he was coming to hand-grips with the primitive, and the quick glance shot at Carfax was almost a challenge.

“Perhaps you’d like to be the outsider, Poictiers? Is that what you had in mind?” he threw in bluntly.

Carfax, gazing reflectively into the heart of the fire embers, took the demand, or assumed to take it, at its face value.

“A chap might do a lot worse,” he replied, as one who weighs the pros and cons judicially. “It’s a broken family, to be sure, as to its fortunes, but it’s good blood. They say that the old judge is as fine as they make ’em; a gentleman of the old Southern school, land-poor, but as proud as Lucifer. The two McNabb boys were telling me about him to-day. They are squatters on Birrell land, as their forefathers were before them, and they’d fight for the old judge at the drop of the hat.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” said Tregarvon pointedly.

Carfax rose and stretched his arms over his head like a man who has put in a full day.

“No; and I’m not going to answer it to-night. Later on, if you still insist on needing a guardian angel, there may be a different story to tell. Where’s my candle? I’m going to bed.”