“None of the native rock ought to do that,” he demurred. “This is a poor piece of steel, isn’t it?”
“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began. Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole now with only a few more minutes to live.”
“That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the sand pump.”
The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings between his thumb and finger.
“Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the sandstone—‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,” he added reflectively.
“You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?”
“There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s no worse.”
Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again.
“That means Rucker to go to Chattanooga with the cutter points, and more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.”
“I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you going.”