“It is one of the four cutters we have been using ever since we began. Three of them have gone that way, and the fourth is mulling in the hole now with only a few more minutes to live.” “That’s queer. I can’t imagine what you’ve hit that would dub the points like this. Let me see the stuff you’ve been taking out with the sand pump.” The little heap of finely powdered cuttings was exhibited. Wilmerding examined them with the eye of an expert, rubbing some of the cuttings between his thumb and finger. “Pebbles,” he said definitely; “white quartz pebbles embedded in the sandstone--‘pudding,’ the miners call it. You’ve hit a streak of this conglomerate, and sometimes it is as hard as blue blazes. Still, I have never seen any of it that was hard enough to smash a drill like that,” he added reflectively. “You are the doctor,” Carfax suggested. “What is the needed medicine?” “There is nothing to do but to keep on hammering away at it,” was the reply. “If you shift your location, the probabilities are that you would run into the same stratum again. When you go prying into Mother Earth’s secrets, you have to take what she sends and be thankful it’s no worse.” Tregarvon’s cup of objurgation overflowed again. “That means Rucker to go to Chattanooga with the cutter points, and more delay. We haven’t any tool-making facilities here.” “I guess this is where I come in,” said Wilmerding, with prompt generosity. “We have a well-equipped plant at Whitlow, and a blacksmith who is out of sight on drill-tempering. Load your man and the points into your motor-car and shoot them up to us. We’ll try to keep you going.” Tregarvon’s ill temper vanished like the dew on a summer morning. “You are certainly an enemy of a hitherto unsuspected variety!” he declared. “We’ve been having a good bit of trouble, first and last; some of it bearing all the earmarks of design on somebody’s part. Do you know for a while I thought you might be inspiring it? That was before Carfax discovered you personally, of course.” Wilmerding’s laugh was good-naturedly derisive. “I hope you didn’t think so small of Consolidated Coal as to suspect it of popping at you with a boy’s whip!” he retorted. “By and by, when you find your coal and meet us in the open market, we may have to buy you or smash you. But it will be done in the good, old-fashioned commercial way.” “We shall be there when you put up the large come-off-the-perch bluff,” Carfax thrust in gently. “But in the meantime, somebody _is_ popping at us with the boy’s whip.” “Who?--for a guess?” asked the Whitlow superintendent. “Ah!” said Carfax, in the same gentle tone, “I have a thousand dollars somewhere about my belongings that would be delighted to blow itself against the real answer to that question.” “And you have no clue?” Carfax smiled. “A dozen of them, more or less. But they all have a way of coming out by the roots when we begin to pull on them ever so cautiously.”