XXVIII
The Ocoee’s Answer
WHEN Tregarvon recovered consciousness he knew at once what had happened to him. In the blind and hurried search for the body of the man he had presumptively shot he had fallen from the cliff edge; how far was still problematical, but far enough, as a painful roaring in his ears, a tightening agony in his forehead, and a bruised and stiffening ankle sufficiently testified.
His first thought was for his victim. The man might not have been killed outright; in which case he might be even now dying for the lack of timely help. The thought was insupportable and Tregarvon tried to rise. But the ankle, broken or twisted, he could not determine which, gripped him like a fanged wild beast and he fell back with a groan. None the less, in some way he must contrive to bring help. He felt in his pockets for matches. A heap of dry leaves furnished the kindling and a clear flame leaped up, hollowing out a small cavity of yellow light in the misty gloom. At this the fire-lighter saw that he was at the bottom of a deep, water-worn cleft opening back from the outer scarp of the cliff, and at right angles to it; a ravine which was little more than a crevice, save that it was large enough to have trees and shrubs growing in it.
He knew the crevice, though he had never explored it. It lay at a point almost exactly half-way between the glade and the tramhead. Knowing that the sound would not carry upward and backward over the cliff, he did not waste his breath in vain shoutings. The alternative was a fire signal. If the cloud would but lift a little, and he could gather enough of the dry leaves to make a glow, the light would guide those who must certainly, by this time, be searching for him.
This was his thought while he was nursing the handful of fire and adding more leaves to it. The blaze rose higher and the cavity in the gloom grew larger until it became a hemisphere, with the black scarp of the crevice wall for its flattened side. A thickly matted vine covered the face of the precipice, completely concealing the perpendicular surface upon which it climbed. At its roots in the crevice bottom the dry leaves were bedded a foot deep. Tregarvon was reaching painfully for the mass of fresh fuel when the fire licked out and caught it first. There was a puff of dense smoke, a fierce blaze, and then the climbing vine took fire and was brightly outlined in a network of short-lived flame.
All this was normal enough, but what followed was curiously abnormal. As the fire glowed hotter small fragments of the cliff face began to split off, and these fragments, falling into the burning leaf-bed, sprang alight with hissings and sputterings and much pungent smoke. Tregarvon, ignoring the throbbing ankle, dragged himself an agonizing foot or so nearer and secured one of the splintered fragments. It was coal!
Almost beside himself with excitement, he heaped more leaves upon the fire. By the light of the fresh upblaze he could make out the upper line of the great coal seam. It was at the height of a tall man’s head above the bottom of the cleft, well-defined, unmistakable; the roof shale of a vein fully six feet thick. Here, discovered in the moment of defeat, disaster, and woundings, was the Ocoee’s lavish answer to all the costly questionings.
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so; if the heavens may be purchased with the gifts of the earth. The gifts are yours, Mr. Tregarvon; first by the right of inheritance, and now by the right of discovery.”
Tregarvon twisted himself into a sitting posture, gritting his teeth at the ankle’s protest and holding his head in his hands. At a little distance away sat the professor of mathematics, one long leg jack-knifed for a support, and the other stretched awkwardly upon a makeshift cushion of the fallen leaves.
“You?” Tregarvon cried. “Did you fall over the cliff, too?”
“I think it was I who showed you the way,” Hartridge amended. “You are a very apt pupil, Mr. Tregarvon. I was scarcely well down here before you played the part of Jill.”
“Are you—are you hurt?”
“Not by your shot-gun charge, happily; but my leg is broken. And you?”
Tregarvon winced. “I have a cracked skull, I think, and an ankle that won’t let me get up. But about that gunshot; I didn’t fire at you; I shot into the air to make you stop. Just the same, you gave me a quick fit of the horrors. When you yelled, I thought I had inadvertently killed you. What made you run?”
The professor’s smile was a little rueful, and also a little shamefaced.
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice,
apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so.”
“What made you chase me?” he asked.
“Because I was hot—fighting mad. I wanted to drag you to an accounting on the spot. I don’t suppose you will be foolish enough to deny that you set the leaf fire that caused the explosion?”
“Since I was near enough to be blown up myself such a denial might have the weight of circumstantial evidence to support it,” was the quiet reply. “But I do not make the denial. It was I who set the leaves afire. I shall be greatly relieved if you can tell me that nobody was injured.”
“So far as I know the dynamite didn’t kill any of us. But tell me, did you start that fire knowing that the explosion would follow?”
“By no means. I may confess that I knew the dynamite had been placed; but I supposed, as the most ordinary matter of course, that your men had taken care of it when they captured their prisoner.”
“Then why did you light the fire?”
Again the quaint smile flitted across the face of the man who had always contrived to tell less than the sum total of all he knew.
“Once again, Mr. Tregarvon, you are going into the question of motives, which is a very large field, indeed. Let us say that I wished to make a diversion of some sort. Will that satisfy you?”
“No,” was the blunt reply.
“I am sorry; I am afraid it will have to suffice for the present.”
Tregarvon’s head was throbbing so painfully that he found it next to impossible to think clearly. But he would not desist.
“Hartridge, it has come to a show-down between us. I’m giving you fair warning. Once I did you an injustice—or thought I did—but this time you’ve given yourself away. When I get up and around again, I’m going to sift this thing to the ultimate bottom and somebody will be made to sweat blood for what has been done to-night. As matters stand now, you seem to be the man the officers will want first.”
Once more the professor smiled. “And yet you can’t say that I have ever wittingly done anything to harm you,” he offered mildly.
“That remains to be proved,” was the angry retort. “Meaning to, or not meaning to, you fired that dynamite a little while back; and you certainly have never strained yourself in any effort to help me. You knew that this big vein was here—you have known it all along!”
“This time you are not my guest, Mr. Tregarvon, and I may contradict you without blame. I did not know it.”
“Then why did you carve the Greek letter pi on those two oak-trees below the glade? Or do you deny that, as well?”
“It is you who have found the value of pi,” said the one who was under accusation. “I am ashamed to confess that it baffled me. Some three years ago, two strange surveyors acting, as I learned afterward, in the interests of Consolidated Coal, ran many lines over this property of yours, which was then practically abandoned. I had no access to their note-books, of course, so I was obliged to work out my conclusions as best I could from their stakes. One of these conclusions was that the true vein would be found somewhere in this locality. Can you believe me thus far?”
“I’m trying to,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”
“It is humiliating to have to acknowledge that, while all the line-running on the part of these strangers pointed to this immediate locality, I could never discover the outcrop. True, I never thought of looking in this particular crevice. But to preserve a record for possible future investigation, I made the marks on the two trees. The distance between the oaks, carefully measured and multiplied by pi, or three and the decimal one thousand, four hundred and sixteen, gives the distance around the cliff from the lower oak to the point somewhere below us where the intruding strangers drove their final stake.”
Tregarvon heaped more leaves upon the fire, which was threatening to die out.
“You are still miles beyond my comprehension,” he complained moodily. “On one hand, you stop at nothing to prevent me from finding out what you have just told me, and on the other you make what appears to be a very worthy and earnest effort to keep me from flinging myself into the maw of Consolidated Coal. How am I to reconcile such things?”
“When you are older, Mr. Tregarvon, and come to know human nature a little better, you will apprehend the truth of that worldly wise beatitude, ‘Blessed are they who expect little, for, verily, they shall not be disappointed.’ Consider a moment: you came here, the legal owner of the Ocoee, to be sure, and the innocent owner, inasmuch as your father was the unsuspecting purchaser of stolen goods. Yet you were none the less the legitimate successor of the bandit who had looted us. You wouldn’t expect much from those who had been so ruthlessly defrauded, would you?”
“Since I was not even constructively to blame, yes,” Tregarvon insisted stubbornly. “Your motive went deeper than that.”
“It did,” the professor admitted gravely. “Almost from the first I saw the slight chance of a reward, the attainment of which has been the one thing desirable in a rather drab-colored life, slipping away from me; taken away from me in sheer wantonness, as it seemed, since, I had been given to understand, you were already pledged to marry Miss Wardwell. It was not in human nature to be entirely unresentful, Mr. Tregarvon.”
“Oh; so that was it?” said Tregarvon shortly. Then: “What I saw yesterday afternoon in the forest back of Westwood House seems to prove that I am as far out of the running as you are with Judge Birrell’s daughter.”
The professor’s face became, for the moment, a study in astoundment.
“Ah—yes,” he said, stumbling over the words; and then: “I am to infer that you didn’t recognize the young man whom you saw with Miss Richardia yesterday afternoon?”
“No; he was a stranger to me. Doesn’t the judge approve of him?”
This time the professor’s smile was rather grim.
“He does not—most decidedly.”
“But Richardia loves him; and that is enough—for you and for me.”
“Assuredly she loves him—very loyally,” was the grave reply; and a moment later, as if the mention of the judge had evoked a new train of thought: “I am curious to know if my leaf-fire diversion—which had such unlooked-for and disastrous results—came soon enough. How much had Morgan McNabb confessed?”
Tregarvon ignored the brow-wrinkling of pain which accompanied the question.
“I am beginning to believe that you are a very hardened criminal, Mr. Hartridge. If you know that McNabb had a confession to make, it follows that you were his accomplice.”
The answer was a suppressed groan, for which the schoolmaster instantly apologized.
“You—you must forgive me if I say that I can’t go into the matter of culpability with you just now. This leg—of mine—grows a bit insistent. But it will be the greatest possible satisfaction to me if you will answer my question.”
“All right; you shall have it. Just before the explosion came McNabb had admitted that he was acting for somebody else.”
“But he did not name the person?”
“The judge was trying to make him do so, but he was still refusing. The last thing he said, as I remember it, was something which seemed to implicate Miss Richardia as the one who could tell if she chose. Which was absurd, of course.”
“Quite so,” was the low-voiced reply. “Shall we let the matter rest there—for the present?”
Tregarvon was holding his head in his hands again. The throbbing pain was so intense that he could only grit his teeth and endure. When speech became possible he gave his answer.
“It may rest until I am able to take hold again. Then I shall make somebody pay for this night’s work if it takes every dollar I can dig out of the Ocoee for the next ten years!”
Once more Hartridge bent in apparent agony over the broken leg. But when the paroxysm had passed he looked up with a face that was gray with a deeper suffering than that inflicted by the broken bone.
“If you do; if you strike back in the spirit of reprisal, which seems so justifiable to you now, you will carry the woundings of your own vindictiveness to your grave, Mr. Tregarvon,” he said solemnly.
Tregarvon did not comment upon the sober prophecy. He was heaping more leaves upon the fire and wondering irritably why it was taking the rescuers so long to find them. The hammering agony in his head climaxed now at shorter intervals and the recurrences were blinding, but he contrived to keep the leaf glow alive until a welcome shout from the cliff above announced the presence of the searchers.
The hauling of the two injured men out of the deep cleft proved to be a difficult undertaking, this though there were five in the rescue party, which included the freed McNabb. Once it was done, a stretcher was quickly improvised for Hartridge, with Rucker, Tryon, and McNabb to take turns as bearers; and Tregarvon made shift to help himself a little, with Wilmerding and Carfax to shoulder him on either side.
On the slow progress back to the glade Tregarvon realized vaguely that his companions were gravely silent; and as the lagging procession issued from the wood he saw the cause. Rucker, or some one, had replaced the deflated tire and the motor-car had been brought upon the scene. The white glare of its headlamps focused upon the open space in front of the tool shanty. Judge Birrell, bowed and shrunken, was sitting upon the tool-house door-step with his face hidden in his hands; and on Rucker’s cot-bed, which had been placed under the light of the headlamps, lay the body of a man covered with one of the blankets.
“Who is it?” Tregarvon muttered, leaning more heavily upon his helpers.
He thought it singular that no one answered him, and the thought swiftly became an irritation too keen to be borne.
“What the devil is the matter with you all?” he rasped, with a curious idea that he had to shout to make his voice heard above the deafening thunder of many cataracts in his brain. Then, as in a dream, he seemed to hear Wilmerding saying to Carfax, almost savagely: “Ease him down and we’ll carry him. Can’t you see he’s gone off his head?”