“The letters will be all the excuse you will need for making two calls in the same half-day. Take the car and go and do what you’re aching to do. After you have sung your little song, you may give Elizabeth my love and my blessing. No, don’t stop to talk any more; just make your little bow and vanish, before I get to thinking too pointedly of all the things you’ve done to me.” Carfax took his cue promptly, and before Tregarvon had finished filling his pipe the roar of the yellow car’s motor told him that the golden youth had begun his flight to the mountain top. A short half-hour later, at a second filling of the pipe, the motor roar was repeated, and while the solitary smoker was wondering what had brought Carfax back so soon, the dining-room door opened to admit Wilmerding. “You are responsible,” said the young superintendent, explaining the motor-car clamor. “You gave me the fever, flaunting that big yellow devil of yours in my face, and I was obliged to go and buy. Want to take a little spin in the new wagon to see how she handles?” Tregarvon pushed a chair into the fire-warmed semicircle for his visitor and shook his head. “Some other time--if you’ll be good enough to let the invitation hang over. To-night I’d rather sit here before the fire with you and have a little heart-to-heart talk, Wilmerding. Will you indulge me?” “Sure,” was the ready response. “The joy-ride can wait. Can you find me another pipe?” The pipe was found and filled, and at its lighting Tregarvon began without preface, giving the steel-cube facts as they had been developed by Tryon and linking them up with Thaxter’s apparently disinterested effort to promote the sale of the Ocoee to Consolidated Coal. “I’m telling you this, Wilmerding, because I know you’re not implicated,” he said in conclusion. “Also, because it seems no more than fair that you should know. I’m not specially vindictive, you understand. I suppose Thaxter and the men behind him are calling it nothing more than a bit of sharp practice on purely legitimate business lines.” “That might do for the drill-dulling,” the superintendent conceded thoughtfully, “though I’d take pretty violent exceptions to that, if I were you. But doesn’t this one proved rascality imply the authorship of all the others?” “No. Hartridge thinks not, and so do I. By a good, vigorous stretch of imagination you could call the drill-dulling something less than criminal. But that can’t be said of the attempt to wreck my motor-car, or of the risk taken of killing somebody by the smashing of the machinery and the planting of a dynamite cartridge in the engine-boiler.” While the evening lengthened they discussed the various phases of the mystery in all their bearings, and in the end Wilmerding came around to the Tryon-Hartridge hypothesis, namely, that Thaxter, unscrupulous as he may have been in bribing Sawyer, was not the instigator of the more serious barbarities.