“Heavens! You burned it?” Tregarvon was still conventional enough to be half horrified, and Carfax shuddered in sympathy.
“I certain’y did. But he got back at me, right now! In less ’n five minutes by the watch that old boiler was red-hot and blowin’ off steam to beat the band. She was sweatin’ black smoke at every joint; and when I chases ’round to open the fire-door—Well, you needn’t believe me if you don’t want to, but them grate-bars was drippin’ something ’r other that looked like burnin’ blood!”
There is a point beyond which the thread of sympathetic horror snaps, and the ball rebounds into the field of the ridiculous.
“That will do for you, Billy,” Tregarvon laughed. “We’ll allow you the skull, but you needn’t embroider it for us. Somebody played a grisly joke on you—with no particular object, that I can see. Just the same, it has its significance. Some prowler was sneaking around here while you were asleep. Are you sure the drill is working all right?”
“You can see for yourself,” said Rucker, not unboastfully. “She’s jumpin’ up and down to the old tune of forty to the minute, same as I promised you she’d be this mornin’.”
But a closer inspection proved that Rucker’s boast was loyal to the eye but a traitor to the fact. The drill was merely “jumping up and down.” It was hardly cutting its own clearance; had gained in depth less than half an inch in half an hour, according to the report of Sawyer, who was at his customary post, “churning and turning” at the hole.
Rucker looked on critically for a few minutes and then laid a listening ear to the steel, bowing and recovering in unison with the stroke.
“She’s hit a bone o’ some kind,” was his verdict; and he stopped the churning machinery and threw in the hoist by means of which the heavy cutting-bar was lifted from the hole.
An examination of the drill point amply verified the mechanician’s guess that something much harder than the fine-gritted sandstone of the mountain top had been encountered in the bottom of the test-hole. The cutting edges of the drill burr were completely gone, broken down and gnawed smooth until the steel cutter-bar was no more than a blunt-ended ram.
Tregarvon swore painstakingly, anathematizing the demon of ill luck by bell, book, and candle, thereby further emphasizing the distance he had travelled on the road toward things elemental.