At quitting-time on this eighteenth day of preparatory toil Tregarvon came down in a tram-car with his men and, after the dispersal at the mountain foot, stood for a moment on the office-building porch to let the quiet grandeur of the perfect autumn evening soak in and wash the work-weariness out of his jaded brain and muscles.
The sun had gone behind the mountain for all the lower reaches of the valley, but its level rays were still pouring in a flood of yellow light across the flat-topped promontory crowned by the buildings of Highmount College. Pisgah, densely forested on slope and summit, loomed vast as the early shadows rose like silently drawn curtains to soften its rugged detail, and on the sky-line Tregarvon’s gaze sought and found the derrick skeleton of his drilling plant struck out in rigid lines of black against the hazy blue. Just above him the tramway cut its steeply ascending gash through the forest of the slope, and in his mind’s eye he could see the cars descending, each with its load of the reopened mine’s largesse, to be dumped upon the receiving-platform beside the row of coke-ovens.
From the outlined derrick to the sun-illumined college buildings was an airy leap of a mile or more. Tregarvon had not as yet used his invitation, though the French teacher’s giving of it had been promptly confirmed by a cordial note from the president’s wife. The social hunger rose strong in the expatriated townlander as he let his eyes make the leap from the industries, typified by the derrick skeleton, to the possible relaxations harboring on Highmount. He meant to go; he promised himself afresh that he would go, the moment his motor-car should arrive and be put into commission to make the five-mile climb up the mountain pike from Coalville something less than an added weariness after a hard day’s work.
He was still looking longingly up to the sun-shot heights and wondering why he had heard nothing from Poictiers Carfax, when a sound, breeze-blown up the valley, made him start and listen. When he heard it again it was nearer; the unmistakable roar of an automobile’s engines with the muffler cut out. To confirm the witness of the ear, a big yellow car presently topped the rise in the valley road below the village and came bounding over the roughnesses of the country wagon track toward the railroad crossing.
Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet.
Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated. And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to Tregarvon’s door.
“Hit do beat the Dutch—what-all gits up in the big woods when you ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the eye-glasses—he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big ones—he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello, Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’—’r some sech name as that—‘did you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back, lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.”
“President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the listeners.
“President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’ some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller totin’ the carpet-bags!”
“I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had ’em—called ’em val-lays.”