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.”