Oddly enough, the task ran smoothly, despite the makeshift pulling beasts and the prodigious inexperience of the drivers with any load so formidable as the engine-mounted truck. To offset the inexperience, there was a quiet and resolute willingness that was heart-warming after the exacerbating sullenness of the valley farmers. Tregarvon found that his normal good-nature had not been slain; it had only been pushed aside; discovered also that hard words may make hard work. Turning the new leaf handsomely, he let the agile old patriarch do the bossing, and thus, rod by rod, the sandy half-mile was traversed and the goal in the old burying-ground was reached. Just before noon, when the truck load had been pushed and pulled and inched into place in the glade, Carfax turned up, walking across from the school. His congratulations were profuse, but if he knew anything about the manner of the miracle-working, he betrayed neither himself nor the secret. “I was certain you’d find a way out of the strike trouble,” he asserted blandly. “I told the folks at the dinner-table last evening that I had never seen you knocked out so completely that you were obliged to take the count. How did you do it?” Tregarvon shook his head. “I didn’t do it; it was done for me. When I came up this morning with Tryon and the trackmen, the teams were ready and waiting. Somebody had rounded them up for me during the night. I have been charging it to you.” Carfax’s laugh was a sufficient negation of the charge. “Do I look it?” he demanded. “If I do, I can prove an _alibi_. I spent a very pleasant evening with the Caswells and a bunch of the senior girls, and I am reasonably sure that I didn’t walk in my sleep afterward.” “Did Richardia go home for the week-end, as usual?” “She did; though she stayed and took dinner with us at Highmount. I drove her over to Westwood House in the car, later.” “So the car is all right again, is it?” “Oh, yes; there wasn’t much the matter with it.” Tryon had taken over the bossing of the gang, with Rucker for his able second, and Tregarvon was free to stand aside and talk with Carfax about the miracle. “You say Richardia went home after dinner?” he queried. Then: “I can’t help thinking that this is her doing. These men are all mountaineers.” Carfax’s chuckle was frankly derisive. “That is mere sentiment on your part; the wish the father to the thought. You’d rather like to feel that you are indebted to her, wouldn’t you? But I shall have to spoil that little day-dream. She was with the rest of us at Highmount until after ten o’clock, and it must have been nearly eleven when I drove her over to Westwood House--much too late to begin any campaign of team-raising for you.” Tregarvon took this apparent evidence of Miss Richardia’s non-complicity at its face value, but he was still shaking his head dubiously.