Carfax laid a hand as slender and shapely as a woman’s upon the hot forehead. “I’ve let you talk too much and you are getting the ‘wheels’ again,” he said gently. “You mustn’t be vindictive; and there is no reason on earth why you should talk of throwing things up and running away.” “There are good reasons for both,” was the stubborn insistence. “I owe it to common justice, no less than to myself, to dig up the criminal or criminals and bring them to book. If they should prove to be Thaxter and his backers, after all, the world needs the example; and if it was pure outlawry on the part of the McNabbs and Hartridge and some other scoundrel that McNabb wouldn’t name there is all the more reason why I should send for the best detectives the country affords and run the outlaws down. And as to running away after it is all over, that says itself, Poictiers. I couldn’t stay on here after Richardia is married to another man. It isn’t in human nature. Now go away and let me sleep. I want to hurry and get well, so that I can stand up and straighten things out.” XXX A Grounded Wire The small world of Coalville, centring socially under Tait’s store porch, had its vivifying shock when it awoke one morning to find that in a single night, as one might say, the entire face of nature had changed for the sleepy little hamlet at the foot of old Pisgah. In the instant of transformation the Ocoee of many disappointments had suddenly leaped into the foreground as a coal discovery of unlimited possibilities; an army of workmen was massing to shift the old tramway to the new opening; motor-trucks, piled high with material, were trundling over the valley pike from Hesterville; carpenters were rushing up new buildings at top speed; and at the centre of all these stirring activities, directing and driving them, was the young man whom rumor had been bulletining as dead or dying in his room on the second floor of the old office-building, or at best destined to pass the remainder of his life in an asylum. Taking one thing with another, the gossips at Tait’s found it difficult to recognize the convalescent Tregarvon. The brief period of his illness had seemed to mature him curiously; to make him a man of a single idea--the idea being to turn the Ocoee into a producing industry in the shortest possible time. Also, they missed the genial and mollifying influence of the young New York millionaire, who, though still nominally an inmate of the Ocoee headquarters building, spent most of his time on the mountain, presumably as a guest of the Caswells. As it chanced, the store-porch gossips were not the only persons who were finding a changed Tregarvon sitting at the desk of overlordship in the hastily remodelled Ocoee office-building. There were others, among them Barnby, travelling freight agent for the railroad, who had come all the way from his own headquarters to find out why the Ocoee was hauling its new material from Hesterville in motor-trucks.