“It’s some o’ that new-fangled, high-speed tool-steel that you temper by heatin’ it white-hot and coolin’ it in a fan blast. Jenkins, the Whitlow blacksmith, was showin’ me a piece of it last Sat’day night at Tait’s. Looked like it might ’a’ been cut off the same bar with these little chunks o’ Jim Sawyer’s.”
“In other words, you believe that these bits were made in the Whitlow blacksmith shop?”
“I ain’t a-sayin’ so, because I can’t prove it. But my boy, Tom, saw Thaxter, the Whitlow bookkeeper, stop his buggy in the big road two or three days ago whilst a man came out o’ the bushes to talk to him. The man was Jim Sawyer. More ’n that, there’s just natchelly only the one place in the Wehatchee where that steel could come from. They’ve got it at Whitlow, an’ I don’t reckon there’s ar’ another blacksmith shop in the valley that ever heerd tell of it.”
“Tryon, you’ve done a good afternoon’s work,” said the master of Ocoee, dropping the three cubes into his pocket. “We owe all of our hard luck, excepting the blown-up boiler, which may have been due to its own rottenness, to the C. C. & I., with Thaxter pulling the strings and Sawyer doing the actual dirty work. Isn’t that the way you have it figured out?”
“That’s about the way it ort to stack up,” said the foreman. “But somehow it don’t gee all the way ’round. You’d say it’s mighty near a dead cinch that Sawyer was the one that doped the drill-hole with these here slow-’em-downs; but right there the vein pinches out. Them two times that the walkin’-beam fell down, Sawyer was the man that stood the best chance o’ gettin’ his head bu’sted. Then you an’ Mr. Carfax both saw the man that put the dannymite into the old b’iler, an’ I hain’t heerd neither one of you a-sayin’ it was Sawyer. You’d ’a’ knowed him, wouldn’t you?”
“It wasn’t Sawyer,” said Tregarvon definitively. “Sawyer has a beard, and that man was smooth-faced.”
“Jes’ so,” nodded the foreman. Then he drew his own conclusion. “I been knowin’ the C. C. & I. crowd, off an’ on, ever sence they took holt here in the Wehatchee. I reckon they’d rough-house you in a holy minute if they thought that was the easiest way to get the best o’ you in some business fight. I wouldn’t even put the dannymitin’ a-past ’em. But they wouldn’t go at it in no such a bunglesome way; n’r they wouldn’t put skulls in your fire-box, n’r any such fool monkeyshines as that. Them things don’t fit in.”
Again Tregarvon bestowed the meed of praise where praise was due.
“Tryon, you have a pretty level head. I am beginning to suspect that we made a mistake in not calling you in as chief detective in this muddle. But you still think that Thaxter and Sawyer worked the drill-dulling scheme, don’t you?”
“Ez I say, that part of it proves up toler’ble plain. If there was ar’ reason, now, why they’d want to be holdin’ you back for a little spell——”