“Maybe not. But a woman as a factor in any problem is always the unknown quantity,” Carfax remarked half musingly. Then he added: “It would be a real charity, both to you and to Professor William Wilberforce, if some outsider would step in and marry Miss Richardia out of the game, don’t you think?”
Tregarvon’s frown was morose. Slowly but surely the light with the difficulties, material and mysterious, was working a change in the young man whose chief characteristic had hitherto been finding its principal expression in the light-hearted optimism of those who neither toil nor spin. For the first time in his wealth-smoothed saunter he was coming to hand-grips with the primitive, and the quick glance shot at Carfax was almost a challenge.
“Perhaps you’d like to be the outsider, Poictiers? Is that what you had in mind?” he threw in bluntly.
Carfax, gazing reflectively into the heart of the fire embers, took the demand, or assumed to take it, at its face value.
“A chap might do a lot worse,” he replied, as one who weighs the pros and cons judicially. “It’s a broken family, to be sure, as to its fortunes, but it’s good blood. They say that the old judge is as fine as they make ’em; a gentleman of the old Southern school, land-poor, but as proud as Lucifer. The two McNabb boys were telling me about him to-day. They are squatters on Birrell land, as their forefathers were before them, and they’d fight for the old judge at the drop of the hat.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” said Tregarvon pointedly.
Carfax rose and stretched his arms over his head like a man who has put in a full day.
“No; and I’m not going to answer it to-night. Later on, if you still insist on needing a guardian angel, there may be a different story to tell. Where’s my candle? I’m going to bed.”
VIII
The Stubborn Rock
BY the time Rucker returned from Chattanooga with the repairs for the broken drilling plant, the Saturday-night attempt to wreck the yellow car on Carfax’s run down the mountain had become a past danger-signal, and was in a fair way to be overlaid and forgotten in a fresh upturning of the activities.