Tregarvon pushed a chair into the fire-warmed semicircle for his visitor and shook his head.
“Some other time—if you’ll be good enough to let the invitation hang over. To-night I’d rather sit here before the fire with you and have a little heart-to-heart talk, Wilmerding. Will you indulge me?”
“Sure,” was the ready response. “The joy-ride can wait. Can you find me another pipe?”
The pipe was found and filled, and at its lighting Tregarvon began without preface, giving the steel-cube facts as they had been developed by Tryon and linking them up with Thaxter’s apparently disinterested effort to promote the sale of the Ocoee to Consolidated Coal. “I’m telling you this, Wilmerding, because I know you’re not implicated,” he said in conclusion. “Also, because it seems no more than fair that you should know. I’m not specially vindictive, you understand. I suppose Thaxter and the men behind him are calling it nothing more than a bit of sharp practice on purely legitimate business lines.”
“That might do for the drill-dulling,” the superintendent conceded thoughtfully, “though I’d take pretty violent exceptions to that, if I were you. But doesn’t this one proved rascality imply the authorship of all the others?”
“No. Hartridge thinks not, and so do I. By a good, vigorous stretch of imagination you could call the drill-dulling something less than criminal. But that can’t be said of the attempt to wreck my motor-car, or of the risk taken of killing somebody by the smashing of the machinery and the planting of a dynamite cartridge in the engine-boiler.”
While the evening lengthened they discussed the various phases of the mystery in all their bearings, and in the end Wilmerding came around to the Tryon-Hartridge hypothesis, namely, that Thaxter, unscrupulous as he may have been in bribing Sawyer, was not the instigator of the more serious barbarities.
“Not that I’m excusing Thaxter or the New York office from which he has his instructions,” he added. “The ‘Big Business’ methods are all more or less crooked, and I’d give half of my salary if I didn’t have to work for an outfit that simply won’t fight in the open, as men ought to fight. Do you know, Tregarvon, I’ve been hoping against hope that you’d strike it, and strike it rich, on the Ocoee. In that case, I had made up my mind to ask you to hire me.”
“If I had a mine, you couldn’t ask anything that would please me better,” said Tregarvon, warming to this expression of friendly loyalty. “But the thing looks pretty hopeless just now. As I have said, Professor Hartridge knows more about the Ocoee than anybody else seems to—and he won’t tell all he knows. But he did assure me this afternoon that we are not going to find the big vein where we are drilling in the old burying-ground, and I have every reason to believe that he was telling the truth. That lets me out. Thaxter ’phoned me this morning that he had got the option extended until to-morrow midnight. I stand to lose a hundred thousand dollars if I take the time to move the drilling plant and try again.”
Wilmerding rose to go, returning the borrowed pipe to its place on the mantel.