The men came; some from the half-tilled valley farms, a few from the C. C. & I. mines farther up the railroad, and two or three mountaineers. Two of the mountain dwellers, long-haired, unshaven backwoodsmen, gave their names as Morgan and Sill, suppressing, for some reason best known to themselves, their surname of McNabb. Also there came the lean, bristly-bearded man who had squatted behind the althea bushes at the corner of the office-building during Tregarvon’s talk with Captain Duncan; James Sawyer, by name. Tregarvon knew nothing of this man’s antecedents; of the forehistory of any of them, for that matter. What he demanded was work, and he went about securing it in the best of all possible ways: by stripping off his coat and acting as his own foreman. In strenuous toilings fled the first two weeks, during which period the old machinery was overhauled, the tramway up the mountain repaired and put in running order, and the _débris_ of disuse cleared away. For the aggressive campaign a deep-well drilling plant was secured in Chattanooga, and upon its arrival all things were made ready for transporting it to the top of the plateau mountain. Tregarvon’s plan, which he thought was original with him, was to go back on the level mountain top with his test-drill, and to sink a series of holes down to the coal-measures. If the first test should show the two veins still separated by the stubborn ledge of intervening rock, he would move the machinery farther back and try again--and yet again, if need be; though of all this he said no more to his workmen than was necessary to enable them to help intelligently. At the beginning of the second week the drilling machinery was hauled up the mountain, and two days later, Uncle William, a solemn-faced old negro with a narrow fringe of white wool ringing his otherwise perfectly bald head, made his appearance at Coalville. He was waiting for Tregarvon on the Thursday morning when the Philadelphian turned out to go up the mountain with his working gang; waiting to doff his battered hat and scrape his foot, and to announce in honeyed tones that he had come “ter tek cha’ge of de young marsteh.” Quite naturally, Tregarvon thought there must be some mistake, and said so; but the old man persisted with the velvety sort of pertinacity which refuses to be denied, vaunting himself as a body-servant of “the quality,” and acquiring, or seeming to acquire, a curious hardness of hearing when Tregarvon questioned him as to where he had come from and who had sent him. “Yas, suh--yas, suh; cayn’t hear ve’y good on dat side o’ my haid--no, suh. But I’se suttin sho’ gwine tek mighty good keer o’ you-all; I is dat, marsteh.” “But a body-servant is the last thing on earth that I am needing here, uncle!” protested Tregarvon, firing his final shot of objection. “If I could find a good cook now, that would be more to the point.”