At a little past two o’clock, Carfax, driving the yellow car, tailed in behind the machinery procession on the mountain road. Tregarvon had been having good luck and was correspondingly jubilant; but the sight of Carfax going to keep an appointment with Richardia Birrell gave him another set back.
“That’s right; go on and enjoy yourself,” he grumbled sourly, as Carfax came up to edge his way past the obstructing raffle of teams and machinery. “If you knew how to chock a wheel or handle a pinch-bar, I’d pull you out of that joy wagon and set you at work. Since you don’t, you’d better trundle along and get out of our way.”
“I shall tell Miss Richardia that I left you in a heavenly temper,” threatened the gentle mocker in the driving-seat.
“The less you say about me in that quarter, the better,” was the surly rejoinder; and with that, Tregarvon began to shout again at his teamsters.
In due time Carfax negotiated his passage and the yellow car disappeared in the direction of Highmount. But the sting was left behind, and Tregarvon drank deep from the opium cup of fierce labor without being able to purchase blessed oblivion. Jagged thoughts came uppermost; repinings as old as mankind; as venerable, at least, as that prehistoric day when the first friend took it upon himself to smite his brother into the straight and narrow path.
Why must civilized man, alone of all sentient beings, be burdened with that inconsiderate thing called conscience? The bird of the air, the beast of the field, was free to choose its mate; the savage stood aside only when some bigger savage compelled him. Environment and the stress of the moment have shaping influences mighty in proportion to the strenuosities. Tregarvon, fighting for the up-hill inches with a load a ton or so heavier than his pulling power, became immune to the gentler leadings. Why should a promise, made to a woman who had taken it serenely as a conventional matter of course, stand in the way of a passion so vital that it laid hold upon the very well-springs of life? Why should he stand aside and let Carfax, under a fantastic sense of duty, mar three lives, or possibly four, in a foolish attempt to preserve the conventional unities?
The materialistic afternoon had done its worst for Tregarvon by the time Tryon’s boy, who had been stationed on ahead to give warning of the approach of descending teams, waved his hat as a signal that some one was driving down the mountain. The moment was inauspicious. A pulling-rope had just broken; the heavy load of machinery was stalled in a crooked bend in the road, and was for the time immovable. Tregarvon yelped out a string of orders to his helpers, and then went on past the tangle of mules and rope tackle to meet the descending vehicle. Being in the proper frame of mind, he swore crabbedly to the world at large when he saw that it was his own car, with Carfax at the wheel, Richardia in the mechanician’s seat, and the tonneau thickly packed with young women from Highmount.
“You can’t pass,” was his curt denial of the right of way when Carfax slowed to a stop. “We have just broken a tackle, and everything is all balled up. Couldn’t you find any other road to drive on?”
Carfax laughed and turned to his seat-mate. “You see how inhospitable he really is when he isn’t parading his company manners.” Then to the young women behind him: “Mr. Tregarvon won’t let us drive down, but if you young ladies would care to see the wheels go round at a moment when, as it seems, they have just stopped going round, we can walk.”
There was an instant chorus of walking votes, and Carfax got out to open the tonneau door. Tregarvon stood aside, scowling as any working-boss might when his difficulties are about to be made a raree-show for the frivolous. Miss Richardia slipped out of the mechanician’s seat on her own side of the car, unassisted, but when the sight-seeing contingent marshalled itself for the descent into the tangle, she did not join it.