Tregarvon immediately recognized his own car and the cacophonous thunderings of it; but it was only a guess that the slender young man in dust-coat and goggles behind the steering-wheel was Carfax; that the square-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket and closely fitting cap beside him was the machinist; and that the liveried person sitting bolt upright with folded arms in the exact centre of the tonneau seat was Merkley, Carfax’s imported valet. Tregarvon gasped, and his hands went up in the gesture of a man vainly striving to avert a crash of worlds. “Great Heavens!” he ejaculated. And at that moment Jefferson Walters, acting chairman of the convention of idlers in session under the awning of Tait’s store porch, made himself an imaginary errand to Tryon’s, across from and a little beyond the Ocoee office-building, timing his saunter to bring him upon the scene as an interested onlooker when the yellow car rolled up to Tregarvon’s door. “Hit do beat the Dutch--what-all gits up in the big woods when you ain’t totin’ a gun,” he remarked to the executive session when he returned to the other side of the railroad. “Young feller with the eye-glasses--he must be powerful nigh blind to have to wear sech big ones--he pulls up the team with a jerk at a han’le, and says: ‘Hello, Vance! Here we are; the dog and the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.’ And Tregarvon, he jest shets his fists tight and says, sort o’ hoarse-like, ‘My Lord, Putters’--’r some sech name as that--‘did you tool that car all the way down here from Philadelphia?’ ‘Sure, I did,’ says Goggles; and all the while that there circus ringmaster was a-settin’ up like he’d growed with a hick’ry saplin’ down his back, lookin’ straight out ahead of him as if he didn’t know that anything was happenin’,’r was ever goin’ to happen.” “President o’ the new Ocoee Comp’ny, d’ ye reckon?” queried one of the listeners. “President o’ nothin’! I’m comin’ to him, right now. ‘And you brought Merkley?’ says Tregarvon, speakin’ right low and soft, and chokin’ some more. ‘Naturally,’ says Goggles, as cool as a cucumber, and then he climbs out and goes in with our man, with the ringmaster feller _totin’ the carpet-bags_!” “I know,” chirruped the oldest man in the circle, a wizened veteran of the Mexican War. “I seed ’em in the army; the West Pointer gin’rals had ’em--called ’em val-lays.” “I wonder what-all our young feller over yander’ll turn up next?” mused Jabez Layne, bringing his huge jack-knife to bear upon a pocket-worn nugget of plug tobacco. “He’ll turn up a heap o’ trouble ef he don’t quit hirin’ them McNabbs,” volunteered one of the valley men who had hitherto been speechless. “He’s got two of ’em in his gang now--Morgan an’ Sill; an’ ef they don’t git him afore he gits the coal----” “Why, then, the C. C. & I.’ll git him about five minutes afte’wards,” laughed Walters, breaking in to complete the sentence in his own way.