“Nothing; except a disappointment for Mr. Thaxter,” was Carfax’s reply. “Thaxter; yes. Do you know, Poictiers, I’m beginning to smell brimstone in _his_ clothes, now. Wilmerding told us definitely, if you remember, that Thaxter gave him to understand that he didn’t have any data on the Ocoee; didn’t know anything remotely concerning it. There is a lie out, somewhere.” “Which doesn’t matter now, thanks to Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge, the man of mixed motives,” said Carfax definitively. “You think, on the strength of Hartridge’s warning, that I shouldn’t sell to Consolidated Coal?” Carfax was driving the car and he let the brakes out until the machine was dropping down the grade like a stone falling from a height. “Not in a thousand years!” he said. XVII An Anticlimax Bright and early on the Saturday morning the two young men, with the repointed drill bits in the car, drove to the mountain top, carrying Rucker’s breakfast in a basket generously filled by Mrs. Tryon. They found the mechanician, who had resumed his job of night-watching, already up and stirring, with the engine fired and ready for starting, and there were no disturbances to report. “Did a little stunt of my own,” Rucker explained with a grin, showing a concealed wire which ran all around the glade and led to the tool-house. “Yesterday, up at Whitlow, I fished an electric bell out of the scrap heap, and last night, before I went to bed, I rigged it so that if anybody come monkeyin’ ’round, it’d ring and wake me up. I guess there wa’n’t any ghost-walkin’. The bell didn’t ring, and everything was all shipshape this mornin’.” Soon after this the drilling was resumed, not, however, until after the hole had been carefully washed and swabbed out. Tregarvon did not take any of his men into his confidence to the extent of explaining the reason for the extra care, but during the swabbing process he stood aside and looked on, watchful to detect any sign of guilty knowledge on the part of his helpers. Particularly he studied the face of the younger McNabb, the one who had been hurt still being absent. The effort went for nothing. If isolation has been sparing of gifts to the native of the southern Appalachians, it has at least given him a face that no man can read. The bushy-bearded Sawyer, the head driller, was the only one who commented upon the hole-cleaning. “Hit don’t look t’ me like thar was anything more ’n the drill dust to be warshed out,” he grumbled, when the swab came up clean; and to prove it he rubbed some of the powdered rock cuttings between his thumb and finger. “It’s better to be sure than sorry,” said Tregarvon. “If we know that the hole is clean to begin with, we’re that much ahead.” In due course of time the engine was started, the drill lowered, and the churning was resumed. Very shortly it became evident that the steel was cutting again at the usual rate, and Tregarvon’s spirits rose accordingly.