In addition to this, Rucker, characterized by Merkley as a despised, greasy-handed mechanic, whose burglarish aspect would earn him the attentions of a plain-clothes policeman in any properly Scotland-Yarded city of the world, was sometimes called in to these dining-room conferences, while he, Merkley, once the confidential and trusted valet of his Grace the Duke of Marlford, was excluded. At this point in his narrative, Merkley, being the worse for two or three tiltings of Jeff Walters’s or old man Layne’s jug of corn whiskey, would become tearful and despondent.
These Merklean hints of a changed condition of affairs on Mount Pisgah were well buttressed by sundry discouraging facts. During the making-ready of the drilling plant everything had gone on fairly well. But dating from the hour when Rucker had first sent live steam whistling into the cylinder of the small portable engine which furnished the power, a stream of disaster had trickled discouragingly and persistently upon the experiment.
First the drills went dull and refused to cut the fine-grained sandstone of the plateau; and when Rucker had retempered them, the engine worked water and started a cylinder-head. After the cylinder was repaired, one of the natives who was firing the boiler let the water get too low—to the loosening of some of the boiler-flues, and to the imminent risk of an explosion.
Rucker, handiest of mechanics, calked an entire day on the loosened flues, and the machinery was started again. Two hours later the pivot-bolt of the big timber walking-beam which imparted the up-and-down motion to the drill worked loose, and the walking-beam came down, one end of it narrowly missing Tregarvon, and the other wrecking the machinery to the tune of a hundred dollars and an indefinite interval of waiting for renewals.
It was after this last and most disheartening of the disasters, the only one thus far that Rucker had not been able to repair on the spot, that the two young men once more shut the door of the back-office dining-room upon a disappointed London serving-man.
“By George! I’m beginning to come around to your view of it, Poictiers,” said Tregarvon, cramming his pipe with dry tobacco from the jar set out by Uncle William. “These setbacks are knocking us too regularly to fit decently into any chapter of accidents. I’m beginning to believe they are inspired.”
“That is precisely what I have been trying to tell you and Rucker all along, but neither of you would have it that way,” rejoined Carfax coolly.
“Well, carry your theory to a conclusion; who’s doing it?”
“Ah! now you are getting out to a place where the water is over my head,” Carfax admitted, toying delicately with a pipeful of strong “natural-leaf” tobacco. “According to Captain Duncan’s prophecy, you have two possible ill-wishers—haven’t you?—the C. C. & I. people and the McNabbs.”
“Yes; but it is rather incredible on both counts, don’t you think? You can hardly imagine a great corporation getting down on its hands and knees to chuck pebbles into the wheels of our little mechanism up on Pisgah.”