“There it is again,” Carfax smiled; “you even let bits of the mule language come to the table with you. It runs in my mind that Elizabeth is going to have her hands full recivilizing you.”
“Perhaps she won’t care to. Quite likely she won’t need to. If the Ocoee should turn out to be a real mine with a dividend attachment, it is altogether probable that I shall become again what I have been heretofore—an ornament to polite society and a wart on the body economic.”
Carfax shook his head as one who refuses to be convinced.
“That will never happen in the wide, wide world, my dear Vance. We may go around, but we never go back. I have heard you spoken of, in times past, as a woman’s man: you’ll never be that again.”
“That is the kindest thing you’ve said in a week,” Tregarvon averred. Whereupon he bolted the final mouthful and left the prophet to his own devices.
Somewhat later, Carfax joined the working party—but only as an onlooker. The engine was mounted on heavy trucks, and a string of twelve mule-spans was inching it up the mountain pike to an accompaniment of cracking whips and much profanity. Tregarvon was in the thick of it, and the young purse-holder stood aside and tried to realize that this sweating, bullying gang boss and man-of-all-work was the light-hearted flâneur of whom his best friends had predicted nothing either very good or very bad, and certainly nothing strenuous. Carfax was given to nice weighings and measurings of the human atom, and he wondered if the roughing-out process owed anything to sentimental reactions. Disappointments are rude tonics to some natures, and defeat in one field may be the germ of victory in another. Being a good friend, he proceeded to administer an additional dose of the tonic, dragging Tregarvon aside while the mules were catching their breath.
“I like your nerve,” he began, with the drawl more than usually pronounced. “You are taking up the entire road with your beastly contrivances. How am I going to get past all this clutter with the motor-car, I’d like to know?”
“That’s your lookout,” growled the man-of-all-work. “The road is mine while I’m using it.”
“But I have an engagement,” was the mild protest. “I’m to take Richardia out for a drive after three o’clock.”
“Well, I can’t help that, can I? You’ve got all the time there is for your courting, and then some. My job is to get this engine up the mountain.”