“‘Wouldn’t be allowed, Mr. Connolly?’ said I, as lamb-like as possible. ‘How could Tregarvon be prevented?’”
“‘There’s manny a way, Misther Carfax,’ he scowled up at me; and then he let the cat out of the pillow-case: ‘These young min widout practical experience—’tis manny a blunder they’ll be making, and they’re soon discouraged entirely. I’m hearing that this same Misther Tregarvin is having throuble to beat the band, and him not fair at the beginning of it yet.’”
Tregarvon was absently spilling a spoonful of sugar into his after-dinner coffee—a sufficient measure of his interest in Carfax’s story.
“From all of which you have argued that there is a C. C. & I. spy in our camp, haven’t you, Poictiers?” he said.
“Yes.”
“And the remedy?”
“Is to find and fire him.”
“The firing part of it will be easy; but the finding is a horse of another color. All of my squad save one or two, I believe, have worked at odd times for the C. C. & I. Every able-bodied man in this region digs coal a little now and then; ‘huckleberry miners,’ the regulars call them.”
“We’ll simply have to watch and sift; that’s all,” said Carfax.
“Well, you’ve done a good day’s work, anyway,” was Tregarvon’s summing-up of the amateur detective’s report. “Candidly, I didn’t think you had it in you, Poictiers. You don’t look it, you know—to the naked eye.”