Carfax made the necessary effort of memory and recalled a pursy little man, round-faced, gray-haired and genial, who had beamed up at him through a pair of thick-lensed spectacles on the day when he had invaded the C. C. & I. stronghold at Whitlow.
“I remember him,” he told Wilmerding. “Reminded me of one of the Brothers Cheeryble, and I caught myself unconsciously looking about for the other.”
Not having read Dickens, Wilmerding lost the point of the comparison.
“Yes,” he went on. “Thaxter is It, all right enough. More than anybody else in this neck of woods he is Consolidated Coal: has every coal detail of this entire region down in black on white, neatly docketed and labelled and put away for future reference. I carry him on my pay-roll, but I couldn’t any more fire him than I could fire the President of the United States. On the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprised if he could have my head any minute he chose to hold up his finger to the big guns in New York.”
“Nice kind of a bombshell to be rolling around under a man’s feet,” Carfax commented.
“Oh, Thaxter is harmless; he doesn’t explode. He is like the assistant secretaries of the Departments in Washington, you know; the fellows who really have the run of the business and stay on the job while the political chiefs come and go. They are like the cat: harmless and necessary and full of wisdom. Which reminds me: I’ll bet my wind-broken old nag, here, against your gas-car, Tregarvon, that Thaxter has an analysis of these coals of yours filed away somewhere this very minute. If he has, I’ll get it for you. It will be a lot more conclusive than any I could make, offhand, in my laboratory.”
So offering, Wilmerding betook himself and his promise to the road leading to Whitlow, leaving the two undismayed coal prospectors on high Pisgah patiently removing their testing plant to a point still farther back from the cliff face. By this time the working gang had acquired the practice which makes perfect; and before the news of the failure of the second attempt had spread beyond the comment of Tait’s store the drill was churning away in the third of the testing holes, with the lean, bristly-bearded Sawyer acting as drill-master—a post which he had claimed and filled from the first.
“I don’t care how much other people may laugh at you; I think your perseverance is beyond praise,” said Miss Richardia, on an afternoon when Tregarvon, scamping his job and snatching a few moments for himself, had driven her and a group of the Highmount young women over in the yellow car to the new location. “I am sure you deserve to succeed—if perseverance by itself ever deserves anything.”
“Why do you say, ‘by itself’?”
“I mean sheer, dogged persistence, without any of the justifying reasons.”