“Well, what do you make of it all?” Tregarvon asked, when the yellow car was rolling smoothly down the mountain pike on the return to Coalville.
“Nothing; except a disappointment for Mr. Thaxter,” was Carfax’s reply.
“Thaxter; yes. Do you know, Poictiers, I’m beginning to smell brimstone in his clothes, now. Wilmerding told us definitely, if you remember, that Thaxter gave him to understand that he didn’t have any data on the Ocoee; didn’t know anything remotely concerning it. There is a lie out, somewhere.”
“Which doesn’t matter now, thanks to Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge, the man of mixed motives,” said Carfax definitively.
“You think, on the strength of Hartridge’s warning, that I shouldn’t sell to Consolidated Coal?”
Carfax was driving the car and he let the brakes out until the machine was dropping down the grade like a stone falling from a height.
“Not in a thousand years!” he said.
XVII
An Anticlimax
BRIGHT and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching, already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting, and there were no disturbances to report.
“Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up. I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and everything was all shipshape this mornin’.”