After the Manner of Men

CARFAX was smoking his third cigarette when Tregarvon returned from spying upon the retreating professor and sat down in sober silence upon the door-step.

The smoker waited patiently for some little time before he said suggestively: “I hope you didn’t have your walk for nothing.”

“I saw all I needed to see.”

“Hartridge went to the college?”

“I suppose so; he was headed that way when I turned back.”

Carfax waited again, and when nothing further was forthcoming: “It’s a remarkably beautiful night, isn’t it? Did you ever see a handsomer moon?”

“Don’t make me talk!” was the irritable rejoinder. “You’ll be sorry for it if you do.”

“Try me and see.”

“Well, then—if you will have it: there was a witness to our little comedy out there under the derrick.”

“Some one who came with Hartridge?”

“I guess so. Some one who went back with him, at any rate.”

“Who was it?”

“I hate to tell you, Poictiers. It was—it was the woman you are going to marry; Richardia Birrell.”

Carfax laughed softly.

“I don’t see why you need be so desperately gloomy because it happened to be Richardia. As I remarked a moment ago, the night is jewel fine, and I don’t wonder that she found it hard to stay indoors. And as to my rights in the matter, I am far from denying her the privilege of walking abroad with so old a friend as Mr. William W. Hartridge.”

“You are trying to make a jest of it, as you do of everything,” was the crabbed retort. “Don’t you see what it means?”

“I must confess that I don’t see anything especially catastrophic about it.”

“You don’t? Why, good heavens, man! it means that Richardia knows what Hartridge has been doing. I won’t admit yet that she is a party to it; but she knows!”

“Place aux dames,” said Carfax cheerfully. “We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; it’s our clear duty—or, at least, it is mine.”

“No, I’ll be hanged if we do!” Tregarvon growled. “There isn’t even a doubt where she is concerned!”

Carfax threw the half-burnt cigarette away and lighted another.

“Your tone is that of the still deeply infatuated lover. Must we again come back to that phase of it?” he inquired, in the tone of the long-suffering but still amiable bystander.

The man beside him took plenty of time to consider. But when he opened the flood-gates there was a torrent of self-accusings to pour out.

“I’m a beast, a cad, the cheapest of cheap skates, Poictiers!—anything you like to call me. It hasn’t touched Richardia, but it has gone all sorts of despicable distances with me. When you told me the other night that you had proposed to her, I could have murdered you. And just now, when I saw her walking arm in arm with Hartridge, I wanted to run amuck and destroy him. I’m not trying to excuse myself when I say that I didn’t go down without a struggle. I did make some kind of a fight at first: I even went so far as to tell Richardia all about Elizabeth. But it didn’t do any good.”

Carfax’s smile was out of the depths of wisdom, and it was not visible above the horizon for the penitent.

“That was great,” he said, referring to the forlorn-hope confession of the engagement. “I don’t believe I could have done that.”

“Oh, there is nothing coming to me on that score,” Tregarvon objected, carrying self-abnegation to the limit. “I couldn’t help telling her; not because it was the honest thing to do, but because I should have burst into inconsequent little shards long ago if I hadn’t told her everything I knew.”

“And she has been encouraging this little idiosyncrasy of yours?” Carfax asked tentatively.

“Not on your life! She has been doing everything that an angel out of heaven could do to smash me back into my place; to show me how many different kinds of an idiot I was making of myself. No longer ago than this evening, when you went off with the Caswells and left me in the lurch, the first thing she did was to ask me when I was going home to marry Elizabeth.”

For the first time in Tregarvon’s knowing of him, Carfax appeared to be losing his temper.

“‘A beast, a cad, and the cheapest of cheap skates,’” he repeated carefully. “They are your own words, and they will all apply to you if you don’t tell Elizabeth all and more than you have just told me.”

“There is the millstone grind of it!” groaned the sinner. “If I should tell her how far it has gone with me, it would be tantamount to asking her to make me a present of myself, with the Uncle Byrd millions thrown in for a lagniappe. I suppose I’ve got it to do, now, but I’d cheerfully accept the alternative of walking into old Brother Daniel’s den of lions.”

“Y-e-s, I should think you would,” was the drawling comment. “Any man who would make a football of the happiness of such a woman as Elizabeth Wardwell——”

“Hold on,” Tregarvon cut in, sobering suddenly. “Get up and walk on me, if that is what you think is coming to me; but don’t mangle me with a cold iron. I’m out of it all around. If Richardia doesn’t marry you, she’ll marry Hartridge; and when I tell Elizabeth, as I’ve got to, that will be the end of things with her. You mustn’t hit a man when he is down. It’s wicked.”

“Everything goes—between friends,” said Carfax, who could never take the trouble to put his displeasure into any permanent form. “It does look as if you were up against it, before and behind. Far be it from me to break the bruised reed, or to quench the smoking flax.”

“Oh, confound you for a Job’s comforter!” rasped Tregarvon, breaking out afresh. “I’ve got to believe in people—I’m built that way; and if I could think for a moment that Richardia is Hartridge’s accomplice in this contemptible trickery of his——”

“Well, if you could?” prompted the comforter, after the pause had grown overlong.

“If I could, I’d lose faith in my own good intentions,” finished Tregarvon, whose stock of comparisons was running low. “Still,” he went on, talking now because he was started and could not stop, “still it’s against me, Poictiers; the whole world is against me. In that same talk in the music-room this evening—while you were away with the Caswells—Richardia was anxious about these happenings of ours; afraid somebody would get hurt; in fact, she made me promise not to hurt anybody.”

“Meaning Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt?”

“No; er—that is, I don’t think she meant him.” Tregarvon was not yet ready to tell Carfax that he was well assured that her fear was for her father; though she had not bound him to secrecy, he felt that what she had said had been spoken in confidence.

Carfax got up from his cramped sitting on the door-step, stretched, yawned, and looked at his watch, holding the dial up to the moonlight.

“Ten minutes past eleven,” he announced. “Do we turn in and sleep a few lines? Or is it to be a continuous performance—like those that the vaudeville people advertise?”

“Go inside and finish your nap,” Tregarvon directed, filling and lighting his pipe. “I’m not sleepy now; don’t know as I ever shall be again.”

“You think the curtain has been rung down for to-night?”

“You’d say so, wouldn’t you? The star has gone home and has probably gone to bed. If he should get up and walk in his sleep, I’ll call you.”

Carfax hung upon the threshold. “Better call me, anyhow, after I’ve had another forty winks or so, so you can take your turn. People have to sleep, you know—even after a funeral.”

“You go to bed!” was the gruff command; and Tregarvon began a monotonous sentry beat up and down before the tool-house. But a minute later he thrust his face in at the little square window to say: “Asleep yet?”

“My Heavens, no!” returned a querulous voice in the inner darkness. “Do you take me for an auto-hypnotist?”

“I have just developed a notion, and it is beginning to gnaw me,” explained the sentinel on duty. “What if the man who was on his knees at the test-hole when I went to waken you wasn’t Hartridge, after all?”

“Oh, good Lord!” complained the voice. “Are you trying to drag somebody else into it?—when the character cast is already full and running over, and all the supernumeraries have been tagged and labelled? Turn the notion out of doors; tread on it; break its back with a stick! We caught Hartridge with the goods on him, didn’t we?”

“Yes; but——”

“But what?”

“Nothing much: only now that I come to think of it, I seem to remember that the man I saw dropping things into the hole wasn’t wearing Hartridge’s kind of a hat.”

“Oh, granny! Go on and do your little sentry go. Your head is muddled and you want to pass the muddle on to me. I’m asleep, I tell you—sound asleep! I don’t hear a word you are saying.”

Tregarvon gave it up; not the lately developed notion, which grew rather more insistent the longer he thought about it, but the attempt to interest Carfax. During the lonely two-hour watch which followed he had time to go reflectively over the events of the night, to set them in orderly array, and to let the unconsidered minor happenings fit into their places and weigh as they would.

The process straightened out a few of the tangles, or it seemed to. Richardia’s concern, expressed by her fear that violence might grow out of the antagonisms, was undoubtedly for her father. Also, it was plain that up to the moment of confidences she had not suspected Hartridge of being her father’s agent; it being a fair presumption that she would have spoken of the professor if she had. Having got that far, Tregarvon began to ask himself if Hartridge was the only one actively involved. In at least two instances the schoolmaster might fairly be held exempt. It was still incredible that the man who had come to the Coalville headquarters as a guest had deliberately plotted to have his host’s motor-car wrecked on its return from Highmount. By the same token, it was difficult to imagine the professor of mathematics in the rôle of the sardonic practical joker who had shocked Rucker with a resin-filled skull, dug, doubtless, out of the old burying-ground.

On the other hand, the murderous attempt at wrecking the car and the grim joke on Rucker fitted the mountain-baron-henchman hypothesis most accurately; as did the fact, if it were a fact, that there were two persons concerned in the recent episode of the hardened steel cubes. There had been time, during the arousing of Carfax, for one man to disappear and for another to take his place; in which case it seemed evident that Hartridge had stood his ground merely to cover the retreat of the other man.

The puzzle promised to give a coherent hint pointing to its solution while Tregarvon was thinking it out and fitting the pieces together; and so long as the mental effort continued to feed the fire of wakefulness he was all that an alert sentinel should be. But after the various suppositions had been properly labelled and docketed and pigeonholed the physical reaction came, and drowsiness sat upon his shoulders, riding him like an Old Man of the Sea.

For a time he fought manfully, keeping up the struggle until he had exhausted every device he could think of and yielding only when he found himself actually falling asleep as he walked. The alternative to leaving the plant without a watchman was to call Carfax, and this he finally concluded to do. Groping his way blindly into the dark interior of the tool-shack, he stumbled over the spare coil of rope, sat down upon it for a momentary rest, and in the flitting of a bat’s wing was past help.

When he opened his eyes again the high-riding moon had swung far into the west, the glade was bathed in a ghostly flood of gray shadow, and Carfax was shaking him gently.

“Another act on,” whispered the impromptu call-boy; “no speaking parts out, as yet—only pantomime. But it is worth sitting up to see.”

Tregarvon, still sodden with sleep, suffered Carfax to lead him to the outlook window. In the gray shadows he presently made out the figure of another intruder. Within the area of the sunken graves a man, old and black, if the uncertain light could be trusted, was squatting on the ground and rocking himself back and forth, his swaying body keeping time with the measure of a weird, crooning melody. From time to time, he would stop the swaying movement to take a small white object from a basket at his side. These objects he appeared to be arranging in some sort of a figure on the ground to the accompaniment of the droning incantation.

“How long has he been there?” Tregarvon asked.

“Just a little while,” was the low-toned reply. “I awoke about half an hour ago, and when I looked out, the moon was going over to the other edge of the world, and everything was quiet. A little later the basket man came; just appeared, you know, as if he had materialized out of the shadows. When I first noticed him he was doing his little song and dance, as you see him now.”

“But what is the ‘song and dance,’ as you call it?”

“Write your guess on one side of a sheet of paper and send it to the puzzle editor,” chuckled Carfax, adding: “If we had begun doing that at first, the editor would have a choice collection by this time, don’t you think?”

“I have been making a few more guesses,” Tregarvon offered. “I was coming in to unload them on you when my eyes went shut. What time is it?”

“About two o’clock—the real witching hour. I want to go home.”

“Go out and tell the old conjurer yonder; perhaps he may have a magic square of carpet in his basket,” suggested Tregarvon. Then: “Doesn’t the wild and weird atmosphere of this heritage of mine get on your nerves to the queen’s taste? Something doing all the time. I’m going to put a notice on the derrick frame: ‘Don’t shoot the stunt-setter; he is doing the best he can.’”

“’Sh! what is the old ‘ghost doctor’ up to now?”

The droning chant had ceased and the old negro was crouching or kneeling at one end of the oblong figure traced by the enclosing row of white objects. The silence was profound; so complete that the snapping of a twig coming suddenly shattered it like the report of a pistol. Both of the watchers started at the sound, but the kneeling negro seemed not to have heard it.

“What was that?” whispered Carfax.

“I’m guessing once more: the obi-devil, possibly, coming in answer to the old medicine-man’s prayers.”

“Guess again!” Carfax thrust in excitedly. “Look this way—get a line on the corner of the derrick frame and follow it over into the woods. Do you see him?”

Tregarvon said “Yes,” and began to grope for a weapon. A man, hatless and with a handkerchief bound about his head, was edging his way cautiously out of the undergrowth. In the hollow of his left arm he carried a gun, and his advance was like that of the deer-stalking hunter. With the derrick frame intervening it was to be inferred that he did not see the negro.

“Somebody pot-hunting for us, this time?” queried Carfax, under his breath; but Tregarvon pressed his arm for silence. The cautious approach was not in the direction of the tool shanty; it was toward the engine of the drilling installation.

“That is the fellow we want to surround,” Tregarvon whispered. “If he had a hat on, I’d swear he was the man I saw kneeling under the derrick—before he made his drop-out and left Hartridge to throw dust for him! By Jove! he acts as if he were scared!”

The exclamation was not unwarranted. The man with the gun was creeping toward the portable engine, watchful and alert, starting at every whisper of the night air in the pines and exhibiting all the outward signs of an inward tension which was ready to snap and recoil in panic.

When he passed out of sight behind the derrick, Carfax would have led the charge; but Tregarvon restrained him. “Hold on,” he advised. “We may as well wait and find out what he means to do.”

The man was creeping on hands and knees when he came in sight again, and the gun had been left behind. When he stood up he was at the smoke-stack end of the engine-boiler; and a moment further along the two watchers made out that he was unscrewing the fastenings of the iron door which gave access to the smoke-box and the flues. They waited until he had the door unfastened; saw him swing it open by slow inchings; saw him thrust an arm into the sooty depths of the smoke-box.

“Now!” Tregarvon commanded, setting the pace for the charge; but panic was before them. Just as the man was withdrawing his arm a deep groan shuddered upon the stillness. With a cry that was like the snarl of a cornered animal, the man leaped up and flung out his arms as if to ward a blow. At that the huddled figure kneeling among the sunken graves groaned again, following the groan with a terrified, “Oh, my Lordy!” when he saw the man at the boiler head.

That was sufficient. At the spot where the man with a handkerchief about his head had stood clutching the air there was a sudden void, and the noise of his crashing retreat through the undergrowth had died away before Tregarvon and Carfax could give chase.

They captured the “ghost doctor,” however, and were not greatly surprised when the old negro turned out to be Uncle William. His night wandering to the mountain top was sufficiently explained when he pointed to the sunken grave ringed about with bits of broken china.

“Dah’s whah my ol’ ’ooman is, marstehs; yas, suh; right dah’s whah dey bury huh. Dat triflin’ niggah, Sam, from de ol’ place, come erlong down de mounting day befo’ yistidday, an’ he say you-all gemman is a-trompin’ ’round an’ mashin’ up t’ings in de ol’ buryin’-ground. I know dat ain’ so, but I says to mahse’f, ‘Willyum, yo’ gwine right up dah and put dem li’l grabestones you been a-savin’ ’round Mammy Ann; den Marsteh Tregarbin ain’ gwine ’sturb nuffin’ belongin’ ter you.’”

“No,” said Tregarvon soberly. “You may be sure we shan’t disturb your wife’s grave—or any of the others, if we can help it. I didn’t know, until after we had begun work here, that this open place was a burying-ground. Now tell me; do you know who that man was who stood there by the engine and made motions at you?”

“I ’spec’ dat wuz de ol’ debbil, hese’f, marsteh. Couldn’t a-been nobody else; no, suh.”

“What makes you think it was the devil, Uncle William?” Carfax wanted to know.

“’Cause he go off, bing! in a puff o’ yaller smoke when I say ‘Oh, my Lordy!’”

Tregarvon had been groping purposefully in the old man’s explanation to determine if it held any of the missing puzzle pieces.

“You say Sam, from the ‘old place’ told you we were working here, Uncle William; who is Sam, and where is the ‘old place’?”

“Sam, he’s dat triflin’ no-’count niggah what Marsteh Judge keep for stable niggah—when dey ain’ nuffin in de stable ’ceppin’ de ol’ dapple-gray dat’s a heap older’n what I is, hyuh, hyuh! But de ol’ Marsteh Judge ain’ gwine tu’n nobody off’n de ol’ place whilst dar’s a rind o’ bacon lef’ in de gre’t house; no, suh; he ain’ gwine do dat!”

It was at this point that Tregarvon sprang his small trap.

“Why did he turn you off, Uncle William?”

“Who, me? No, suh—I—Miss Dick, she——”

“It’s all right; never mind, Uncle William,” Tregarvon hastened to say. “Now we’ll undertake to keep the devil away while you go on setting your tombstones. I’m sorry we had to break in.”

“Dey’s all sot, yas, suh; dat’s de bes’ I kin do for ol’ Mammy Ann. I’s gwine tromp off down de mounting ag’in, now. Mus’ be gettin’ might’ nigh de ol’ man’s bedtime; yas, suh; it sholy am dat. I’s sayin’ good night to you-all; an’ t’ank yo’ kin’ly, marstehs.”

After the old negro had shuffled away on a short-cut through the wood in the direction of the pike, the two young men took up the affair of the moment, which was to ascertain what the man with the bandaged head had been doing to the engine of the drilling plant. The smoke-box door was standing open, as he had left it, and Tregarvon struck a match and held it in the small sooty cavern. What he saw made him withdraw the match suddenly and blow it out.

“Did it bite you?” asked Carfax, genially quizzical.

Tregarvon’s rejoinder was not in words. Thrusting an arm into the smoke-box he drew out a paper-wrapped cylinder with a capped fuse buried in one end of it, passing the find to Carfax with the remark: “I fancy we can stay awake until daybreak on the strength of that, don’t you think, Poictiers?”

“Dynamite!” gasped Carfax, holding the cartridge gingerly between thumb and finger and at arm’s length.

“Yes, dynamite. It was poked into one of the flues with the business end toward the fire-box, and it made no account of Rucker, who would be the one to fire up the boiler before breakfast the day after to-morrow.”

“Say, by Jove, Vance! this thing is getting serious!” exclaimed the golden youth, forgetting even the slight hint of a lisp. “We’ll have to ‘take measures,’ as my father used to say. Come on over to the shanty and we’ll get busy. I am in the same condition you said you were, a while back: I’m not sleepy now—don’t know as I ever shall be again.”

The talk on the door-step of the tool-house was prolonged far past Tregarvon’s recounting of the suppositions pieced together in the period of his lonely sentry go. But it came back to the suppositions in the end, with Carfax checking off the probabilities on his finger-tips.

“So it figures out about this way,” he said, not too cheerfully. “We have Judge Birrell as Lord High Executioner to a couple of receivers of stolen goods—always without his daughter’s approval or consent, as a matter of course—and Professor Hartridge as his able deputy in the field. Then there is this skulking rascal of a dynamite-planter, who acts under orders, or possibly exceeds them now and then; and he seems to be the only one of the lot that we can satisfactorily pinch—when we shall be lucky enough to catch him. Uncle William isn’t in it, is he?”

Tregarvon shook his head gloomily.

“I have been wrestling with that,” he confessed. “He seems more than trustworthy. But he is evidently an old house servant of the judge’s, and he was sent straight to me from Westwood. That is beyond question.”

“As a spy?—perish the thought!” ranted Carfax, carefully concealing his earnestness with an overlaying of extravagance, as his habit was. “With the memory of Uncle William’s unapproachable dinners in my mind—or mouth—I’ll defend him to the last gasp.”

“He is negligible,” said Tregarvon briefly. “But this dynamiting emissary of Hartridge’s, or the judge’s, isn’t. We must contrive to trap him in some way. If we don’t, he will fool around until he hurts somebody.”

“Yea, verily,” Carfax laughed. “Any guesses coming to you?—as to who he is?”

“One small one; and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it didn’t fit in with some of the others. You saw that he was bareheaded?”

“Yes.”

“And that he was wearing a handkerchief or a bandage of some sort instead of a hat?”

“Another ‘yes’.”

“Well, the day before yesterday the man we’ve been calling ‘Morgan’ was hurt by the falling walking-beam and had to have his head wrapped up in about the same way.”

“All right; but Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t stop with that.”

“Neither do I. Tryon told me a little tale two days ago that possibly forges the connecting link. We know that both Morgan and Sill are McNabbs, and that for some reason of their own they dropped the surname when they hired out to me.”

“Good!” Carfax approved. “The plot thickens. Can’t you stir in a little more stiffening?”

“With the help of Tryon’s story, I can. It seems that these men are, or have been, moonshiners—breakers of the revenue laws. Some years ago the revenue officers raided their secret still, which was hidden somewhere in the Pocket, and arrested these two, with a number of others. Morgan McNabb and his brother were booked for the penitentiary; would have gone there if Judge Birrell hadn’t come out of his retirement and fought for them.”

Carfax was slowly filling the short pipe he had borrowed from his companion. “I begin to see daylight,” he said. “What was the judge’s motive?”

“A sort of clan loyalty, Tryon says. The McNabbs live on his land; they are ‘his people’.”

“Um,” was the thoughtful comment. “And because the judge defends them, they take up the cudgels for him. We have to-morrow—or rather to-day—before us, with nothing especial to do; since Rucker will hardly be back with the drills before afternoon. Shall we telegraph to Hesterville for the sheriff, borrow Tait’s team, and make a party call upon the man with the bandaged head?”

“That would be rather too summary, wouldn’t it?” Tregarvon objected. “We may be well convinced, ourselves, but we have no direct evidence. Neither of us could go on the stand and swear that the man we saw at the boiler-head was Morgan McNabb.”

“No; that is so. Past that, since I have asked the judge’s daughter to consider me as a possible husband—” Carfax had called up the cherubic smile, but it had the opposite of a mollifying effect upon the objector.

“Don’t harp on that part of it any more than you have to,” was the morose interruption.

“I was going to say that the arrest of Morgan McNabb, just at this critical turn in the tide of affairs, might make it embarrassing for the judge; only you wouldn’t let me finish,” said Carfax, with great meekness.

“You are going to call on him?” demanded Tregarvon.

“Since he is Richardia’s father, I don’t see how I can well avoid it. To-morrow—or, I should say, to-day—is Friday, and I thought I’d ask Richardia to let me drive her over to Westwood House—if you’ll lend me the motor-wagon after Rucker gets back.”

Tregarvon rose and stood half-menacingly over the friend of his youth.

“If I thought you were only playing with her,” he grated; but instead of saying what he would do in that case, he turned abruptly and went into the tool-house to fling himself down upon the cot, leaving Carfax to continue the night-watch or to abandon it, as he might choose.