“Yes; but it is rather incredible on both counts, don’t you think? You can hardly imagine a great corporation getting down on its hands and knees to chuck pebbles into the wheels of our little mechanism up on Pisgah.” Carfax nodded. Then he said: “How about the McNabbs?” “It seems rather more in their line, you’d say. And yet I haven’t a shadow of right to accuse them. So far, they are entirely mythological; a mere name mentioned by Captain Duncan and a few others. So far as I am aware, I have not yet seen a McNabb.” “Whoever it is who is setting these little traps for us is deucedly clever,” remarked Carfax, who was still toying half-heartedly with his long-stemmed pipe. “Rucker is fooled, all right; he still insists that it is mere hard luck.” “Yes, and that is another argument against the McNabb hypothesis,” Tregarvon put in. “It would take a pretty skilful mechanic to fool Rucker; and from what I can hear, these title-claimants are ignorant mountaineers whose mechanical gifts most probably don’t rise beyond the lock action of an old-fashioned squirrel-rifle or the simple intricacies of a ten-quart whiskey-still.” “Which brings us back to the original proposition--the C. C. & I.,” suggested Carfax reflectively, and, after a pause: “How long is this last smash going to hang us up?” “Three or four days. If Rucker gets back from Chattanooga with the new gears by Monday, he will be doing well.” “All right. To-morrow morning I shall ask you to lend me your yellow chug-wagon. I have a premonition that the spirit will move me to go and run this little mystery of yours into a corner.” Tregarvon laughed good-naturedly. “You’d much better go back to your own stamping-ground and begin to take up your shooting engagements. You can’t afford to stay down here monkeying with this last-resort hustle of mine.” The golden youth was looking shrewdly over the smoke wreaths at his companion. “Is it a last resort, Vance?” he asked quietly, adding: “You have never told me much about the family smash.” “It was complete, Poictiers; an up-to-date, finished product of modern high-finance methods. The Vanderburg crowd got father against the wall in the steel merger, and--well, you’ll know how bad it was when I tell you that it killed him. The doctors said pneumonia, but it was really a Wall Street sand-bagging. He didn’t leave a will; and when we gathered up the fragments afterward, we knew why he didn’t; there wasn’t enough to make it worth while. So, you see, the Ocoee _is_ a last resort, for me.” Carfax was musing again. “Yet you are going to many a comfortable little gold mine,” he said, after a time.