“It’s a hard proposition,” he admitted. “I’m not going to advise you to throw up the chance to get the hundred thousand. But if I were in your shoes, I’d be just reckless enough to gamble another throw or two. In this talk we’ve had, you have convinced me of one thing, Tregarvon, and that is that the Ocoee has a workable vein somewhere in the property. Hartridge knows it, and Consolidated Coal knows it. And what they know, some other fellow can find out. You have twenty-four hours, and a little better, in which to think it over. I said I wouldn’t advise, but I shall: don’t close with Thaxter one minute before you are obliged to.”
Tregarvon got out of his chair to shake hands with the departing visitor.
“You’re a man, Wilmerding, and I wish I had your nerve. But a couple of things have happened to-day—things that I can’t talk about, even to so good a friend as you are—and they have knocked me out. At the end of the ends, I’m afraid I shall weaken and sell out to your hog of a trust. It was good of you to come down and let me unload on you. If anything new turns up I’ll get you on the wire. Good night, and good luck to you.”
After Wilmerding had gone, Tregarvon sat for another hour before the fire, smoking abstractedly and hardly noting the passing of time. In due course there was another flurry of gas-engine noises, and when the clamor died away, Carfax came in to fling himself into the chair where Wilmerding had been sitting.
Tregarvon broke the silence morosely.
“Well? You are not measuring up very strikingly with the commonly accepted idea of the happy lover. What’s the latest?”
Carfax had taken a cork-tipped cigarette from his case and was absently trying to set fire to the wrong end of it.
“Vance,” he said, in his gentlest tone, “you deserve to be murdered in cold blood. You told me that Elizabeth hadn’t gotten that frenzied letter you wrote her the day you were in Chattanooga. She hadn’t, but it was merely delayed; it was in that lot of forwarded mail that I took up to-night, and I—I gave it to her!”
“So that’s the latest, is it? Where does the tragedy come in?”
“Don’t say another word or I shall explode! You have probably forgotten that you wrote her that I was as good as engaged to Richardia Birrell—it would be quite like you to forget. She excused herself to go and read her letters, and when she came back I knew that the heavens had fallen. Oh, no; there wasn’t any scene; she just simply wouldn’t give me a chance to get a word in edgewise, though I tried for a solid hour to make the chance. I’m ruined for life—and you, with your nimble little pen and your neat facility for telling all you know, and then some, you had to be the one to mangle me!”