Tregarvon smiled, recalling his sensations while Miss Richardia’s bullets were snipping bark souvenirs from his sheltering oak. “One wouldn’t be scared out by a little thing like that,” he remarked half humorously. Then he asked, quite abruptly, another question--the chief question for an answer to which he had paid the expert’s fee. “I have been told, Captain Duncan, that you have made an analysis of the Ocoee coals. Also, I have been given to understand that no two veins in these Tennessee coal-measures have exactly the same characteristics; that the quality of the coal varies with its distance from the original surface, though the depth difference between any two deposits may be very slight. If you didn’t know of the existence of the six-foot layer of stone lying between my two coal seams, would you, or would you not, say that they were one and the same?” Duncan took time to consider before answering the crucial question. “I see what ye’re driving at, now,” he said at length. “Ye’ve paid me for a true answer, Mr. Tregarvon, and much as I’ll hate to see your father’s son banging his head against a stone wall, I’ll give it ye. I’ve made half a dozen analyses: so far as they prove anything, the coal in the two seams is the same.” “Thank you,” returned Tregarvon, drawing a free breath as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders by the answer. And then, as a quavering whistle blast announced the approach of the down freight train on the branch: “There is your return train, Captain Duncan. If I had any hospitality to offer you, you shouldn’t go back to Hesterville to-night. As it is, I know you’ll be glad you don’t have to stop over in Coalville. Even the name is a misnomer, it would seem.” The grizzled Scotchman had discharged his duty and earned his fee. But the cravings of a purely Caledonian curiosity were still unsatisfied. “And what’ll ye be doing, think ye, Mr. Tregarvon?” he asked inquisitively. Tregarvon’s answer was pointedly and purposefully indifferent. “Oh, I don’t know definitely yet. I may take a notion to butt my head against the stone wall, and I may not. If I should, you’ll doubtless hear of it. Good-by; it was mighty good of you to take the trouble to come and talk with me when you might have put me off with a letter.” Though the leave-taking at the door of the office-building was a fact accomplished, Tregarvon prolonged it a little by walking across to the station with Duncan. Thereby he missed a possible chance of seeing the retreat of the man who had been crouching behind the althea bushes, the dodging run, first to the shelter of the row of coke-ovens, and later to the lower fringe of the Mount Pisgah forest, darkening now in the early valley twilight.