“It’s a fine morning, also, for a nap in the sunshine,” he reciprocated. “Do you belong to the out-of-door sleepers—the ‘simple-lifers’—Mr. Tregarvon?”
“Not permanently,” laughed Tregarvon; “though I must confess that I am so simple as not to be able to recall your name.”
“Good, dev’lish good!” chuckled the visitor. “Couldn’t have turned it more neatly myself, ’pon my word! I’m Thaxter; Wilmerding’s bookkeeper at Whitlow. One of my fads is to take a drive before breakfast. Excellent habit, Mr. Tregarvon; I can recommend it most highly. Gives you an appetite like a coal-heaver. Speaking of coal—how are you getting along taking soundings on the old Ocoee? Have you hit it yet?”
“Not yet,” Tregarvon admitted, warming to the little man’s friendly interest. “But I am still living in hopes.”
Mr. Thaxter pursed his lips in a way to make them match the general effect of rotundity.
“Mighty mean thing to say to a man before breakfast—you haven’t breakfasted yet, I dare say—but you are butting your head against a stone wall, Mr. Tregarvon. Haven’t they told you that?”
“If your ‘they’ refers to the Coalville gossips, I have been duly warned. They told me, with all the variations, before I’d had time to climb the mountain on my first exploring expedition.”
“Just so; but not specifically, I suppose. You should have come to me. While I am an employee of the C. C. & I. Company, my pay-roll connection wouldn’t have kept me from doing you a good turn. And I could have given you chapter, page, and verse.”
For the moment Tregarvon lost sight of the fact that Wilmerding had reported his bookkeeper totally barren of Ocoee information. So he said: “Possibly you will do it now, Mr. Thaxter. We are mere babes in the wood, Carfax and I, needing a guardian angel pretty severely, if we are to believe what other people say of us.”
“You have certainly been needing a little friendly counsel from some one who was in a position to know what he was talking about. You’ll never find your coal up here, Mr. Tregarvon.”