“Ah,” murmured Carfax. “Now I am better able to understand President Caswell’s attitude. In strict justice, he would say, the mine belongs to those earliest investors who contributed the land and bought the stock; or at least these early people should have an equity in it. These later--er--Yankees had no ethical rights; hence their venture was bound to be ill-starred. By Jove, Tregarvon,”--and here Carfax’s lisp became quite apparent--“that puts the black mark on you, too, doesn’t it?” If Carfax had any diplomatic designs on the dinner-guest, Tregarvon was not a party to them. “I only know that my father paid good money for the Ocoee,” he said bluntly; “paid it to these same Yankees you are telling us about, Mr. Hartridge, when they were ready to lie down. It is up to me to prove that they didn’t stick him as bad as they doubtless believed they were sticking him when they pulled him into it.” Carfax, who was observing the dinner-guest narrowly, saw the sign he had been watching for flit into the pale-blue eyes of Mr. William Wilberforce Hartridge; a half-smile of gratified derision. “You think Vance isn’t very likely to make good on his little brag, professor?” he put in, firing a pointblank shot at the target. There was no indication that the shot had gone home, unless it lay in the quick veiling of the pale-blue eyes. “Who am I, that I should take out a license as a prophet of evil, Mr. Carfax?” was the quiet rejoinder. “He is a brave man nowadays who has the assurance to deny anything whatever to youth, vigor, and the spirit of modern industry.” “Still, you believe that Tregarvon isn’t going to win out?” persisted the golden youth. Hartridge laughed. “As Miss Richardia might put it, I haven’t any think coming to me, have I?” he parried. Carfax gave it up. There was a point beyond which he could not press a man who was dipping with him into the common salt-dish, and he felt that the point had been reached. “It is a pity you can’t stay and spend the evening with us, Mr. Hartridge,” he said, a little further along, when Uncle William came in to bare the table; but he added nothing to the conventional protest when the professor declared that he must go: on the contrary, he sped the parting guest so nimbly that Tregarvon was scarcely at his third pipe-filling when the purring of the yellow car’s motor announced Carfax’s return from Highmount. “I told you so!” was the New Yorker’s first word, as he came in to take his place before the handful of fire on the dining-room hearth. “Where is my pipe?” “What did you tell me?” queried Tregarvon, finding the pipe and pushing the tobacco within reach. “That Hartridge knows, or thinks he knows, that you are on a false scent up yonder on the Pisgah cliffs: also, that he is deuced glad of it.” “You can see farther into the millstone than I can, if you can draw any such conclusion as that,” Tregarvon remarked. “I thought he bluffed you good and plenty.”