“I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn nugget of plug tobacco.
“He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,” volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless. “He’s got two of ’em in his gang now—Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they don’t git him afore he gits the coal——”
“Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,” laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way.
Thus ran the leisurely comment in the gray of the evening, working its way from man to man among the loungers on Tait’s porch. But in the dilapidated office-building across the railroad-tracks there was consternation.
“Why, Poictiers, old man, you can’t endure it for twenty-four hours!” Tregarvon was protesting anxiously. “Look at this place—a dusty, cobwebby ruin that a self-respecting tramp wouldn’t lodge in! Heavens, man! couldn’t you see a joke when it was written out plain with a pen and ink? I would have as soon invited Elizabeth—meaning it!”
Carfax had slipped out of his dust-coat and goggles, the valet assisting, and stood revealed as a handsome young fellow, a shade too well-groomed, perhaps, but with smiling good-nature atoning for the Carfax millions in every line of his beardless and almost effeminate face.
“Now that is what I call downright inhospitable,” he laughed, with the faintest suspicion of a lisp on the sibilants, “after you had written me to come. Your letter is out in the go-cart, if Merkley didn’t forget to put it in my letter-case. Also, after I’ve driven that unspeakable car of yours over a thousand miles of the worst roads the rain ever rained on——”
“Oh, good Lord, Poictiers—you’re welcome; as welcome as the sunshine! Don’t rub it into me that way. But the place; the—the——”
Carfax’s smile was cherubic; or rather it would have been if the womanish lines of his face had not made it seraphic.
“No apologies, you inexpressible old coal-digger. I knew you were only joking when you asked me—or rather dared me—to come down. But the notion seized me, and here I am. Here, likewise, is Rucker, the machinist, who will happily shift for himself; and what is more serious, perhaps, here also is Merkley. In all human probability I shall bleat like a sheep at the corn-pones and the hardtack, and all that; but Merkley was once in the service of the Duke of Marlford and his agonies——”