AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS =After the Manner of Men.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35 =The Real Man.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35 =The City of Numbered Days.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35 =The Honorable Senator Sage-brush.= 12mo _net_ $1.30 =Scientific Sprague.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.25 =The Price.= 12mo _net_ $1.30 =The Taming of Red Butte Western.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35 =The King of Arcadia.= Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.35 =A Romance In Transit.= 16mo _net_ .75 [Illustration: “Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_?” (_Page 7._)] After the Manner of Men BY FRANCIS LYNDE _ILLUSTRATED BY_ ARTHUR E. BECHER CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK::::::::::1916 COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published September, 1916 [Illustration] TO JOSEPH FRATER, LOYAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS, TO WHOM MUCH OF THE MATERIAL AND ALL OF THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE STORY IS OWING THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED, WITH GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FROM THE AUTHOR CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE TOWNLANDER 1 II. THE SOW’S EAR 16 III. THE GOLDEN YOUTH 30 IV. IN WHICH CARFAX ENLISTS 47 V. PARTLY SENTIMENTAL 59 VI. DADDY LAYNE, AND OTHERS 73 VII. COMPANY COME 82 VIII. THE STUBBORN ROCK 96 IX. A BAD NIGHT FOR RUCKER 114 X. BLIND ALLEYS 125 XI. ROSEMARY AND RUE 148 XII. DULL STEEL 164 XIII. THE BURNT CHILD 177 XIV. THE LOGIC OF FACT 194 XV. MAMMY ANN’S GRAVE 207 XVI. A FRIEND AT NEED 230 XVII. AN ANTICLIMAX 248 XVIII. EVOLUTIONARY 261 XIX. THE HUMAN EQUATION 278 XX. LIMITATIONS 294 XXI. THE CLANSMEN 305 XXII. OUT OF A CLEAR SKY 323 XXIII. AT WESTWOOD HOUSE 334 XXIV. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 346 XXV. THE MANGLING OF POICTIERS 365 XXVI. TRYON’S NEWS 377 XXVII. CLOUD-WRAITHS 389 XXVIII. THE OCOEE’S ANSWER 397 XXIX. BEYOND THE GAP 410 XXX. A GROUNDED WIRE 419 XXXI. ON PISGAH’S HEIGHT 436 ILLUSTRATIONS “Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_?” _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more 162 “Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!” 328 “My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so” 400 After the Manner of Men I The Townlander Coincident with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity. “Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete----” The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his own steadiness of nerve. Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak, he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes, and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he fancied he could see more--the sunlight reflecting from the polished barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees. While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it. Harboring this distrust, he was content for the moment to make himself small behind his tree, sitting between two of the flanking root buttresses with his back against the barrier trunk, and wincing in spite of himself while other bullets, following now in rapid and measured succession, whined to right or left, or buried themselves in the solid wood. Oddly enough, the misses, though he could feel the wind of them on either side, were less disquieting than the hits. At each impact of lead against wood there was a jarring little shock quite thrillingly transmissible to quick-set nerves in sympathetic contact with the other side of the target. “By Jove! if Elizabeth could only see me now!” he chuckled broadly; “Elizabeth, or the _mutterchen_, or even my rough-riding little sister! This fusillading miscreant of mine must be one of the McNabb outlaws, trying in his elemental fashion to settle the old feud about our title to the coal lands. By and by, I suppose-- Whew!” The spine-tingling thrill was so real this time that he was half minded to look and see if the impacting bullet had not come all the way through the tree to bulge the bark on his side of it. But he restrained the prompting and went on talking to himself. “By and by, I suppose, he’ll get tired of blazing away at a safe distance and come charging down upon me. Then I shall be most unhappily obliged to kill him; which will be about the crassest misfortune that could happen, next to his killing me. Confound their barbarous feuds, anyway! Why can’t these out-of-date mountain people wake up and realize that they are living in the twentieth century of civilization and Christian enlightenment? That’s what I’d like to know!” The only reply to this very reasonable query being the vicious “ping” of another rifle-bullet, he went on discontentedly. “As if matters were not hopeless enough without adding a scrap with these silly mountaineers about the land titles! Everything torn up at home, the family anchor pulled out by the roots in the steel merger, two women to be taken care of--with Elizabeth presently to make a third--and nothing to make good on but this failure of a Cumberland Mountain coal mine! And now, before I’ve had time to turn around, the spirit moves this rifle-popping moonshine-maker to turn his grouch loose until I feel it in my bones that I shall have to kill him to make him quit!” Then, the _zip-zip_ of the bullets beginning again after a momentary pause, the soliloquy went on: “That’s right; keep it up, you pin-headed barbarian! I’ve got you for an excuse to commit manslaughter--that’s the surest thing there is. Which brings on more talk. I wonder how it feels to kill a man? I’d give all my old shoes if I didn’t have to find out experimentally. Then there is Elizabeth: it is two completed generations back to her Quaker forepeople, but she is quite capable of flatly refusing to marry what they would have stigmatized as ‘a man of blood.’ Say, you bloodthirsty assassin--that was an uncomfortably near one!” After the glancing shot, which had flicked a handful of bark chips into Tregarvon’s lap, the firing ceased. Assuring himself that the battling moment at short range was approaching, the young man from the North sat tight, gripping the house pistol in nervous anticipation, and listening tensely for the sound of advancing footfalls. The suspense was short. Some one, several persons, as it presently appeared, were pushing through the tangle of low-hanging undergrowth toward the oak-tree. Tregarvon wondered that there should be no attempt cautionary on the part of the enemy; wondered again, this time with nettle pricklings of foolishness, when a voice, cheerfully exultant and unmistakably feminine, cried out close at hand. “Oh, you people--come here and see! I _did_ hit it--_lots_ of times; not that trifling little sheet of paper, of course”--scornfully--“but the tree, I mean. Just come and-- _Ee-e-ow!_” The shrill little scream of surprise and alarm was for Mr. Vance Tregarvon, issuing cautiously from behind the bulwark oak, still mystified, and still absently gripping the pistol. The Philadelphian found himself confronting a young woman gowned in stone-blue linen, and wearing an embroidery hat to match, the hat shading a face too unaffectedly winsome to be called beautiful, perhaps, but yet the most piquant and expressive face he had ever looked upon. This young woman was carrying a target-rifle; and pinned upon the bullet-punctured side of the oak was the square of white paper at which she had evidently been shooting. There were others coming up to join the pretty markswoman: a lean-faced, mild-eyed, spectacled gentleman of middle age, whose coat suggested the church or the schoolroom; a vivacious lady in black, with strongly marked eyebrows and eloquent hands and shoulders; a young woman who wore an artist’s smock over her walking-gown; and another who was girlish enough to wear a red tarn, and to be the prettier for it. But by preference Tregarvon made his stammering apologies to the blue embroidery hat. “Ah--er--please don’t mind me,” he begged, acutely conscious that his abrupt and pistol-bearing entrance was handicapping him prodigiously. “I thought--that is--er--you see, I really couldn’t know that it was merely a peaceful target practice, and I----” “Of all things!” gasped the young woman, her slate-blue eyes emphasizing her shocked amazement. “Did you really think that some one was shooting at _you_? But, of course, you must have! How perfectly dreadful!” Tregarvon was trying ineffectually to hide the ornamental revolver in his coat pocket when the others closed in. “You are sure you are not hurt?” the mild-eyed escort made haste to inquire, and Tregarvon grinned sheepishly. “Only in my self-esteem,” he confessed. “I was silly enough to think that somebody was trying to mark me down, though I might have known better after the first shot or two.” “But how could you know when you were behind the tree and couldn’t see us?” protested the one who had been doing the shooting. “I’m sure it speaks libraries for your self-control that you didn’t retaliate in kind! Don’t you think so, Madame Fortier?” and she appealed to the lady with the Gallic eyebrows and the eloquent shoulders. “_Ciel!_ but the _sangfroid_--what you call the cold blood--of these American zhentlemen is of a grandeur the moz’ magnificent!” exclaimed madame. “Mees Richardia she is shoot a hondred time at zis zhentleman, and he is say he is injure’ onlee in hees _amour-propre_!” It was at this point that the humor of the situation overtook the chief offender, and she laughed, the sweetest and most delectable laugh that ever gladdened the ears of a young man keenly sensitive to the charms of heavenly slate-blue eyes, a piquant face, and a voice remindful of wood-thrushes and song-sparrows and golden-throated warblers. “After this, there is nothing left for us but to declare ourselves,” she submitted ruefully, turning to the spectacled escort. “It is the least we can do to save the gentleman the trouble of describing us if he wishes to have us taken before Squire Prigmore.” But now Tregarvon was regaining some measure of equanimity. “Let me be the one to begin the identifying process,” he amended. “My name is Vance Tregarvon, and I have the misfortune to be the present owner of the valueless piece of property known as the Ocoee Mine. You are more than welcome to make a rifle-range of my landscape any time you wish. I am quite certain it is the only useful purpose it has ever subserved.” The gentleman whose coat was either clerical or schoolmasterish, bowed gravely and took his turn, prefacing it with a question. “Have you ever heard of Highmount College for Young Women, Mr. Tregarvon?” Tregarvon, in deference to piquancies and slate-blue eyes and the like, was tempted to quibble and say that, of course, every one knew of Highmount College. But the heavenly eyes were holding him, and they promised intolerance of anything but the pellucid truth. So he shook his head regretfully. “Such is fame--the fame of an old, a great, and a noble institution of learning!” said the spectacled one, in mock deprecation. “With a foundation laid over half a century in the past, with the most healthful and charming location on the entire Cumberland Mountain for its site; with a corps of instructors second only to those of the richly endowed colleges of the North--correct me, Miss Richardia, if I am not quoting the prospectus accurately--with all these splendid advantages, and with a student body drawn from the oldest and most distinguished families of the South.... Mr. Tregarvon, can it be possible----” “Spare me!” laughed the victim. “You must remember that I am only a poor, ignorant provincial from Philadelphia, less than a fortnight out of the shell.” “We are merely trying to impress you properly so that you will think twice before having us arrested for trespass and attempted assassination,” broke in the laughing markswoman. “We may not look it, but we are a majority of the faculty of Highmount College for Young Women. Let me present you to Madame Fortier, Modern Languages; to Miss Longstreet, Art; to Miss Farron, Assistant Mathematics; and to Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt, Higher Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.” Tregarvon bowed in turn to the Gallic eyebrows, to the artist’s smock, to the red tam-o’-shanter, and shook hands cordially with the M.A., Vanderbilt. “This is fine, you know; it’s like Robinson Crusoe’s meeting with his rescuers,” he asserted joyously. “This is my first real hearing of the English tongue since I began doing time down yonder in Coalville, with my old ruin of an office-building for a dungeon, and Mrs. Matt Tryon for my jail matron. Is it very far to Highmount College? And may I hope sometime to----” The three younger women laughed at this, and Madame Fortier hastened to be hospitable. “We shall be moz’ charm’, Monsieur Tregarvong. I will spik for President Caswell and hees good madame.” But Tregarvon waited for Miss Richardia’s confirmation, which was given unhesitatingly. “Certainly, you must come, if you can spare the time,” she affirmed. “We were speaking of you, and of the Ocoee prospects, at dinner the other evening, and Doctor Caswell was even then threatening to look you up. I think he said he had met your father in years gone by.” “I am sure that was exceedingly kind and hospitable--to think of taking the stranger up before he had made himself known,” said Tregarvon, with the hearth-warmed exile’s glow at his heart. They were moving over to the rifle-rest, and he had fallen a step or two behind with Miss Richardia. “You would have to be a castaway in a strange land yourself to know how good it feels to be counted in.” “I have been both--the castaway and the counted-in,” she returned. “I was four years in Boston; two of them without knowing a single soul outside of a limited little Conservatory circle.” “Ah,” he said, with the air of one who pats himself on the back for his own perspicacity. “You didn’t introduce yourself a moment ago, as you may remember, but I was sure you were Music.” “Why were you?” she asked. “Because you look it.” “Harmony or discord?” she queried, with the bright little laugh remindful of the bird songs. “How can you ask! Celestial harmony--no less!” It was only a matter of a hundred yards, between the oak-tree target and the firing-stand, but they were getting on very well, indeed. “Following that line of reasoning, you might say that Miss Longstreet looks picturesque, I suppose? And Miss Farron----” “Miss Farron is far too charming to warrant any allusion to figures, mathematical or other,” he retorted lightly. “And how about Professor Billy?” Tregarvon chuckled. “Is that what you call him? I’m glad I have a Christian name that can’t very well be nicked entirely out of all resemblance to the original. Which reminds me: have I got to call you ‘Miss Richardia’? It sounds awfully formal--don’t you think?--in the mouth of a man who has been familiarly shot at by its possessor.” “You had better,” she replied calmly. “I am ‘Miss Dick’ in the classrooms; but that is the student body’s privilege. Other people have to earn it.” “Consider me an employee from this moment, if you please. I’m good at earning things.” “Have you earned the Ocoee property?” she asked, altogether, as it appeared, by way of making conversation. “No; but my father did--very bitterly, as it turned out. May I ask what you know about the Ocoee?” “Only what every one knows: that it brings sorrow and ruin to everybody who has anything to do with it.” They had reached the rifle-stand, and Hartridge was reloading the target-gun for Miss Farron. There was still a little isolation for Tregarvon and his companion, and the young man made the most of it. “Your words imply a lot more than they say,” he suggested. “I shall take an early opportunity to make my Highmount call, and when I do, perhaps you will tell me some of the things I need to know.” “Professor Hartridge or President Caswell can tell you better than I can,” she demurred, as one dismissing an unpleasant subject. “I only know that the mine has always been a wretched failure; first a thing of broken promises, and afterward a cunningly devised pitfall for the unwary.” If Tregarvon had for his major weakness the love of women, he was not lacking such other qualities as may go with broad shoulders, good gray eyes set wide apart, a clean-cut face, and a resolute jaw. The squareness of the jaw was emphasized when he said: “This is the time when the Ocoee quits being a failure, Miss Richardia. It is up to me to make it a success, and I mean to do it.” It was at this conjuncture that Miss Farron, trying vainly to sight the rifle over the fallen-tree firing-stand, broke in upon the _tête-à-tête_. “Dickie, dear, do come here and hold your hand over my left eye,” she called plaintively. “It just persists in coming open to see what the other one is trying to do.” II The Sow’s Ear The rough-hewn world of mountain and valley had taken on a distinctly cheerful aspect for the young man from Philadelphia when, late in the afternoon, he reluctantly separated himself from the rifle-shooting party and turned his steps valleyward to keep an appointment made two days earlier with one Angus Duncan, an old Scotch mining expert, upon whom the great Southern title company, unlimited, had long since conferred the brevet of “captain.” Whatever the Tregarvon gray eyes and resolute jaw promised in the way of decisive action and stubborn determination, their possessor was never born to be a contented anchorite. Not even the matchless beauties of nature, arrayed in all the glories of a Tennessee mountain September, could atone for the solitude imposed by the dead-alive hamlet of Coalville, and the newly opened prospect of an occasional escape to the congenial social atmosphere of the mountain-top school was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. Tregarvon was planning the first of these escapes, and forecasting the time which would be consumed in freighting his motor-car down from Philadelphia, when the forest path ended and let him out among the deserted slope-foot buildings and empty coke-ovens of the Ocoee. He glanced at his watch. The up-train on the branch railroad was due; it had doubtless announced its approach by some distant crossing whistle, since the little squad of village idlers had left its cantonments under the porch of Tait’s store to straggle across to the station platform. Tregarvon remained on his own side of the railroad-tracks and waited. He knew that Captain Duncan’s visit would be discussed in all its possible bearings in the idlers’ caucus at Tait’s, and he was willing to disappoint the country-store gossips when it came in his way. There were but few passengers to get on or off at Coalville when the branch-line train rolled up to the platform, and Tregarvon had no difficulty in identifying his man; the stocky, ruddy-faced, shrewd-eyed mining engineer who had been named to him as the foremost coal expert in the Tennessee field. He cut Duncan out of the group of loungers at the instant of hand-shaking, and took him across to the dilapidated building which had once been the superintendent’s office and the commissary of the Ocoee Company, seeking, and securing, as he imagined, ear-shot privacy for the business conference. But privacy in a Southern country hamlet, where gossip is as the breath of life to the isolated few, is only to be bought with a price. From his post of observation in Tait’s doorway, a lank, bristly-bearded man in grimy jeans that had once been butternut, marked the direction of the retreat across the railroad-tracks, made a dodging détour around the engine of the standing train, and was safely hidden behind a thick clump of althea bushes at the corner of the office-building when Tregarvon and the Scotchman came leisurely to sit on the door-stone. “Ye’re paying me for an expert opeenion, Mr. Tregarvon, and that’s what I’m bound to gie ye,” the engineer was saying. “I’ve known the Ocoee ever since the first pick was piked intil it, and ye’ll be wasting your time and money if you try to develop it. That’s what I told your father, and it’s what I’m telling his son.” “Poor coal? Or not enough of it?” Tregarvon’s manner was that of a man desirous of knowing the exact facts. “Good coal--fine! It makes a coke that would run everything this side of Pocahontas, or maybe Connellsville, out o’ the market. And there is enough of it if the two veins could be worked as one. But there’s the bogie, Mr. Tregarvon; two well-defined veins, each a foot and a half thick, one above the other, and with six foot of solid rock between. If you had twenty such veins it wouldn’t pay to work them in this part of the country.” “You mean that the digging out of the rock between the two coal seams would eat up all the profits?” “Just that.” Tregarvon was pulling ineffectually at his short pipe. When he stooped to pluck a spear of grass for a stem-cleaner he said: “Wasn’t it the notion of the earliest promoters that the two veins would merge into one, farther back in the mountain?” The expert waved his hand toward the long and costly inclined tramway running straight up the steep slope of the mountain to the two black openings at the foot of the cliff-line. “Ye’d think they believed in it--wouldn’t ye now--to build that tramway on the strength of it? Two hunner’ thousand and better they put in here, first and last; on the tramway and the coke-ovens, the miners’ houses, and this fine office-building that’s crum’ling down behind our backs! And with every practical coal man in the country telling them that such a thing as two veins--two separate veins, mind ye--coming into one was a geological impossibeelity. Parker--the man who set the trap and caught everybody--he knew, I’m thinking; but Judge Birrell and all the rest of ’em were crazy--fair crazy!” “But is it a geological impossibility, Captain Duncan? That is one of the questions I got you up here to answer for me,” Tregarvon put in. The Scotch engineer was too cautious to be definitely oracular. “It’s never been h’ard of yet,” he replied shrewdly, “and there’s a many to tell ye that the day o’ merricles is past. But that isn’t all, Mr. Tregarvon. Besides being a sow’s ear that ye canna hope to make into a silk purse, the Ocoee has another handicap. If ye had your coal in profitable shape and quantity, ye’d never be allowed to mine and coke and market it; never in this warld.” “Who would stop me?” “The C. C. & I. Company, which is another name in this part o’ the warld for Consolidated Coal--the trust. The combine owns all the producing mines hereabouts; they’ve got one in full blast at Whitlow, five miles above this. If you should develop into anything worth while, it would be another case of the lion and the lamb lying down in peace together--with the Ocoee lamb inside of the trust lion. They couldn’t afford to lat ye operate. Your coke, for as much of it as ye could make, would drive theirs out o’ the market.” “Well?” said the Philadelphian. “They’d buy ye, if they could haggle ye down to sell at a bargain; and, failing in that, they’d break ye. I’m not questioning your resources, ye unnerstand; that part of it was none of my business after I’d had your check for my fee safely in my pocket,” he threw in cannily. “But tell me, now: if ye had your four or five or even six foot of coal, are ye big enough in the way o’ backing and capital to fight Consolidated Coal wi’ any hope of coming out alive?” “That is as it may be,” said Tregarvon, wishing neither to deny nor to affirm publicly. Then he asked casually if the engineer could give chapter and page proving the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company’s policy of extermination. “Can I no?” said the Scotchman, with a snap of the shrewd eyes. “I can show ye wrecked mines by the handfu’ in a day’s ride up and down this same Wehatchee Valley we’re sitting in. ’Tis the power o’ money, Mr. Tregarvon. When ye get between the jaws o’ that crusher, ye’re like this”--picking up a bit of friable sandstone and crumbling it in his palm. The younger man smoked on thoughtfully for a time. Then he said: “Two of the points upon which I wished to have your opinion have been covered pretty conclusively, it would seem. But there is a third. What about this trouble with the McNabbs over the land title?” The Scotchman waved the third point away as if it had been a buzzing fly. “The McNabbs are just a whiskey-making lot of poor bodies living back in the Pocket beyond Highmount. An unscrupulous lawyer-scamp got hold of them when the second Ocoee Company was fair rolling in money, and showed them how they could trump up a claim to a wedge-like slip o’ land on the top o’ the mountain which, if the claim could be made good, would cut off the mine a hundred feet or so back from the cliff. There was neither sense nor justice in it, and the courts said so. Ye’ll be having no trouble wi’ the McNabbs, unless one o’ them might be taking a pop at ye wi’ his squirrel-gun some fine day.” Tregarvon smiled, recalling his sensations while Miss Richardia’s bullets were snipping bark souvenirs from his sheltering oak. “One wouldn’t be scared out by a little thing like that,” he remarked half humorously. Then he asked, quite abruptly, another question--the chief question for an answer to which he had paid the expert’s fee. “I have been told, Captain Duncan, that you have made an analysis of the Ocoee coals. Also, I have been given to understand that no two veins in these Tennessee coal-measures have exactly the same characteristics; that the quality of the coal varies with its distance from the original surface, though the depth difference between any two deposits may be very slight. If you didn’t know of the existence of the six-foot layer of stone lying between my two coal seams, would you, or would you not, say that they were one and the same?” Duncan took time to consider before answering the crucial question. “I see what ye’re driving at, now,” he said at length. “Ye’ve paid me for a true answer, Mr. Tregarvon, and much as I’ll hate to see your father’s son banging his head against a stone wall, I’ll give it ye. I’ve made half a dozen analyses: so far as they prove anything, the coal in the two seams is the same.” “Thank you,” returned Tregarvon, drawing a free breath as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders by the answer. And then, as a quavering whistle blast announced the approach of the down freight train on the branch: “There is your return train, Captain Duncan. If I had any hospitality to offer you, you shouldn’t go back to Hesterville to-night. As it is, I know you’ll be glad you don’t have to stop over in Coalville. Even the name is a misnomer, it would seem.” The grizzled Scotchman had discharged his duty and earned his fee. But the cravings of a purely Caledonian curiosity were still unsatisfied. “And what’ll ye be doing, think ye, Mr. Tregarvon?” he asked inquisitively. Tregarvon’s answer was pointedly and purposefully indifferent. “Oh, I don’t know definitely yet. I may take a notion to butt my head against the stone wall, and I may not. If I should, you’ll doubtless hear of it. Good-by; it was mighty good of you to take the trouble to come and talk with me when you might have put me off with a letter.” Though the leave-taking at the door of the office-building was a fact accomplished, Tregarvon prolonged it a little by walking across to the station with Duncan. Thereby he missed a possible chance of seeing the retreat of the man who had been crouching behind the althea bushes, the dodging run, first to the shelter of the row of coke-ovens, and later to the lower fringe of the Mount Pisgah forest, darkening now in the early valley twilight. Late that night, in his room in the cobwebbed and dismantled office-building, Tregarvon wrote two letters. The first was to a certain golden youth in New York, a young man rejoicing in the ancient and honorable name of Poictiers Carfax, and whose father had left him more money than he knew what to do with. Upon Carfax Tregarvon leaned as upon a brother, having shared rooms with the golden one in the university at a period in which the Tregarvon family check could also have been drawn for seven figures. “You are always howling and taking on about living the simple life,” was the opening phrase in the letter to Carfax. “I wish you could be with me to-night and have a taste of what it really is--ten thousand miles from the Great White Way or a decent beefsteak. I’d describe it for you if this were anything but a begging letter--which it isn’t. “First, I wish you’d send your machinist over to Philadelphia and have him ship my car to me here. Tell him to put in extras of everything, from spark-plugs to tires, just the same as if he were sending it to a man in Darkest Africa. “Next (and this is of more importance to me, and perhaps less to you), I am going into a scheme here which promises to leave me stony broke before I shall have pulled half-way through the experimental stage, and will possibly bankrupt even the Carfax strong box when it fairly gets its second wind. I may have to sell you some stock, later on, and to that end I’ll be glad if you’ll keep in touch--so that you may be ‘touched’--or at least keep yourself within reach of a wire. “This is all I’m going to write, for the time being, except to say that I’ve thought of you about five times a minute during the past week, and have tried to picture you in Coalville, hesitating between suicide and a lingering death from disgust. Come down and try it. I’ll go bail it will give you an entirely new set of sensations. What do you say?” The second letter was to Miss Elizabeth Wardwell, and it was a masterpiece in its way--the way of a man who writes as he would talk, and who talks when he would much better hold his tongue. “The adventures began to-day,” so ran the words of unwisdom. “While I was clambering around on the mountain above the Ocoee opening, _zip!_ came a bullet--yes, an indubitable leaden bullet fired from a gun--near enough to make me dodge. What will you think of me when I write it down in muddy black ink on white paper that I hid behind a tree! I did, you know, and immediately had plenty of reasons for being thankful that the tree was big enough to cover me, and thick enough through to stop a rifle-bullet. “For fifteen minutes, or such a matter--though it seemed a moderately long lifetime--my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth, and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man. Would you? “When it was all over, my assassins--it turned out that there was a bunch of them--proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount College shooting at a mark, which the same--though I hadn’t seen it, and didn’t remotely suspect its existence--was affixed to the farther side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my face, I suppose. “They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh. It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell, I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing about and looking on and listening in? “I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I shall--later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go. “Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of your letters--how much they mean to me.” III The Golden Youth It was on the day following Captain Angus Duncan’s visit that the hamlet of Coalville, nestling at the foot of Mount Pisgah, took a fresh start as an industrial centre. Word went out from Tait’s store, which served as a general intelligence exchange for the country roundabout, that Tregarvon wanted laborers and would pay good wages. The men came; some from the half-tilled valley farms, a few from the C. C. & I. mines farther up the railroad, and two or three mountaineers. Two of the mountain dwellers, long-haired, unshaven backwoodsmen, gave their names as Morgan and Sill, suppressing, for some reason best known to themselves, their surname of McNabb. Also there came the lean, bristly-bearded man who had squatted behind the althea bushes at the corner of the office-building during Tregarvon’s talk with Captain Duncan; James Sawyer, by name. Tregarvon knew nothing of this man’s antecedents; of the forehistory of any of them, for that matter. What he demanded was work, and he went about securing it in the best of all possible ways: by stripping off his coat and acting as his own foreman. In strenuous toilings fled the first two weeks, during which period the old machinery was overhauled, the tramway up the mountain repaired and put in running order, and the _débris_ of disuse cleared away. For the aggressive campaign a deep-well drilling plant was secured in Chattanooga, and upon its arrival all things were made ready for transporting it to the top of the plateau mountain. Tregarvon’s plan, which he thought was original with him, was to go back on the level mountain top with his test-drill, and to sink a series of holes down to the coal-measures. If the first test should show the two veins still separated by the stubborn ledge of intervening rock, he would move the machinery farther back and try again--and yet again, if need be; though of all this he said no more to his workmen than was necessary to enable them to help intelligently. At the beginning of the second week the drilling machinery was hauled up the mountain, and two days later, Uncle William, a solemn-faced old negro with a narrow fringe of white wool ringing his otherwise perfectly bald head, made his appearance at Coalville. He was waiting for Tregarvon on the Thursday morning when the Philadelphian turned out to go up the mountain with his working gang; waiting to doff his battered hat and scrape his foot, and to announce in honeyed tones that he had come “ter tek cha’ge of de young marsteh.” Quite naturally, Tregarvon thought there must be some mistake, and said so; but the old man persisted with the velvety sort of pertinacity which refuses to be denied, vaunting himself as a body-servant of “the quality,” and acquiring, or seeming to acquire, a curious hardness of hearing when Tregarvon questioned him as to where he had come from and who had sent him. “Yas, suh--yas, suh; cayn’t hear ve’y good on dat side o’ my haid--no, suh. But I’se suttin sho’ gwine tek mighty good keer o’ you-all; I is dat, marsteh.” “But a body-servant is the last thing on earth that I am needing here, uncle!” protested Tregarvon, firing his final shot of objection. “If I could find a good cook now, that would be more to the point.” “Dat’s it--dat’s it, suh. You-all jes’ go ’long up de mounting and boss dem po’ white trash, and lef’ ol’ Unc’ Wilyum ter fix up dat cook-house. He gwine show you what quality cookin’ is; yas, suh; he will dat!” Tregarvon left the old man bowing and scraping and backing away to take possession of the deserted office-building and its detached cook-shanty; and when he came back to the valley in the evening he gasped to remember how near he had come to incurring the penalty imposed upon those who refuse to entertain angels in disguise. The old office-building was swept and garnished, above and below. Out of the lumber-room in the basement Uncle William had rescued a dining-table, chairs, napery of a sort, and dishes; and in the rear room, which had once been the office of the Ocoee superintendent, a supper was spread, hot, smoking, and appetizing enough to tempt a sick man. Even the napkins, improvised for the moment out of pieces of a flour-sack washed to snowy whiteness, were not lacking; and when the master would sit down, Uncle William was behind him to whisk the chair away and to replace it, with all the deftness of a trained butler. Tregarvon ate and drank in grateful and heartfelt silence down to the black coffee, which was served, for the want of the proper crockery, in an egg-cup, with a small fruit dish for a saucer. Then he made the amende honorable. “I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, Uncle William, but I owe you an apology, none the less,” he said. “Consider that I belong to you for as long as you care to keep me--at your own price.” “Yas, suh; dat’s it--dat’s jes’ de way de quality talk to ol’ Unc’ Wilyum, eve’y time--_hyuh! hyuh!_ ’Long erbout an hour o’ sun, white woman comed ercross f’om dat white-niggah cabin turrer side de big road, and she say: ‘I gwine fix up Mistoo Tregarbin’s suppeh.’ _I_ say, ‘Mistoo Tregarbin ’sents his compliments an’ say t’ank you kin’ly, but he done got he own body-sarvant!’ Yas, suh; dat’s what I done tol’ _huh_.” Tregarvon’s eyes twinkled. “You’ll be getting yourself disliked, Uncle William, if you put on your quality manners with Mrs. Tryon and her kind. They tell me that this county was Republican during the war.” Then he added: “Are you ready to tell me now who sent you here?” The old man was clearing the supper-table, and he seemed to have entirely misunderstood the query. “Dat ol’ cook-house? Yas, suh; it sholy did try me for to git dat ol’ chimley ter mek de fiah bu’n for de supper-fixin’s. Ter-morrer I gwine chink him up some; yas, suh, I sholy is.” After Uncle William’s mysterious advent the work on the mountain progressed the more rapidly by precisely the difference between a well-fed leader and an ill-fed. Tregarvon and his pick-up crew wrought manfully, and on the eighteenth day--the day of fresh surprises--the drilling machinery had been safely transported to the plateau, had been set up, and was ready to be started on the test upon which the Tregarvon hopes were building airy structures of future affluence. At quitting-time on this eighteenth day of preparatory toil Tregarvon came down in a tram-car with his men and, after the dispersal at the mountain foot, stood for a moment on the office-building porch to let the quiet grandeur of the perfect autumn evening soak in and wash the work-weariness out of his jaded brain and muscles. The sun had gone behind the mountain for all the lower reaches of the valley, but its level rays were still pouring in a flood of yellow light across the flat-topped promontory crowned by the buildings of Highmount College. Pisgah, densely forested on slope and summit, loomed vast as the early shadows rose like silently drawn curtains to soften its rugged detail, and on the sky-line Tregarvon’s gaze sought and found the derrick skeleton of his drilling plant struck out in rigid lines of black against the hazy blue. Just above him the tramway cut its steeply ascending gash through the forest of the slope, and in his mind’s eye he could see the cars descending, each with its load of the reopened mine’s largesse, to be dumped upon the receiving-platform beside the row of coke-ovens. From the outlined derrick to the sun-illumined college buildings was an airy leap of a mile or more. Tregarvon had not as yet used his invitation, though the French teacher’s giving of it had been promptly confirmed by a cordial note from the president’s wife. The social hunger rose strong in the expatriated townlander as he let his eyes make the leap from the industries, typified by the derrick skeleton, to the possible relaxations harboring on Highmount. He meant to go; he promised himself afresh that he would go, the moment his motor-car should arrive and be put into commission to make the five-mile climb up the mountain pike from Coalville something less than an added weariness after a hard day’s work. He was still looking longingly up to the sun-shot heights and wondering why he had heard nothing from Poictiers Carfax, when a sound, breeze-blown up the valley, made him start and listen. When he heard it again it was nearer; the unmistakable roar of an automobile’s engines with the muffler cut out. To confirm the witness of the ear, a big yellow car presently topped the rise in the valley road below the village and came bounding over the roughnesses of the country wagon track toward the railroad crossing. Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet. Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated. And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to Tregarvon’s door. “Hit do beat the Dutch--what-all gits up in the big woods when you ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the eye-glasses--he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big ones--he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello, Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’--’r some sech name as that--‘did you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back, lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.” “President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the listeners. “President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’ some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller _totin’ the carpet-bags_!” “I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had ’em--called ’em val-lays.” “I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn nugget of plug tobacco. “He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,” volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless. “He’s got two of ’em in his gang now--Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they don’t git him afore he gits the coal----” “Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,” laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way. Thus ran the leisurely comment in the gray of the evening, working its way from man to man among the loungers on Tait’s porch. But in the dilapidated office-building across the railroad-tracks there was consternation. “Why, Poictiers, old man, you can’t endure it for twenty-four hours!” Tregarvon was protesting anxiously. “Look at this place--a dusty, cobwebby ruin that a self-respecting tramp wouldn’t lodge in! Heavens, man! couldn’t you see a joke when it was written out plain with a pen and ink? I would have as soon invited Elizabeth--meaning it!” Carfax had slipped out of his dust-coat and goggles, the valet assisting, and stood revealed as a handsome young fellow, a shade too well-groomed, perhaps, but with smiling good-nature atoning for the Carfax millions in every line of his beardless and almost effeminate face. “Now that is what I call downright inhospitable,” he laughed, with the faintest suspicion of a lisp on the sibilants, “after you had written me to come. Your letter is out in the go-cart, if Merkley didn’t forget to put it in my letter-case. Also, after I’ve driven that unspeakable car of yours over a thousand miles of the worst roads the rain ever rained on----” “Oh, good Lord, Poictiers--you’re welcome; as welcome as the sunshine! Don’t rub it into me that way. But the place; the--the----” Carfax’s smile was cherubic; or rather it would have been if the womanish lines of his face had not made it seraphic. “No apologies, you inexpressible old coal-digger. I knew you were only joking when you asked me--or rather dared me--to come down. But the notion seized me, and here I am. Here, likewise, is Rucker, the machinist, who will happily shift for
{'title': 'After the Manner of Men by Francis Lynde', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}