But privacy in a Southern country hamlet, where gossip is as the breath of life to the isolated few, is only to be bought with a price. From his post of observation in Tait’s doorway, a lank, bristly-bearded man in grimy jeans that had once been butternut, marked the direction of the retreat across the railroad-tracks, made a dodging détour around the engine of the standing train, and was safely hidden behind a thick clump of althea bushes at the corner of the office-building when Tregarvon and the Scotchman came leisurely to sit on the door-stone. “Ye’re paying me for an expert opeenion, Mr. Tregarvon, and that’s what I’m bound to gie ye,” the engineer was saying. “I’ve known the Ocoee ever since the first pick was piked intil it, and ye’ll be wasting your time and money if you try to develop it. That’s what I told your father, and it’s what I’m telling his son.” “Poor coal? Or not enough of it?” Tregarvon’s manner was that of a man desirous of knowing the exact facts. “Good coal--fine! It makes a coke that would run everything this side of Pocahontas, or maybe Connellsville, out o’ the market. And there is enough of it if the two veins could be worked as one. But there’s the bogie, Mr. Tregarvon; two well-defined veins, each a foot and a half thick, one above the other, and with six foot of solid rock between. If you had twenty such veins it wouldn’t pay to work them in this part of the country.” “You mean that the digging out of the rock between the two coal seams would eat up all the profits?” “Just that.” Tregarvon was pulling ineffectually at his short pipe. When he stooped to pluck a spear of grass for a stem-cleaner he said: “Wasn’t it the notion of the earliest promoters that the two veins would merge into one, farther back in the mountain?” The expert waved his hand toward the long and costly inclined tramway running straight up the steep slope of the mountain to the two black openings at the foot of the cliff-line. “Ye’d think they believed in it--wouldn’t ye now--to build that tramway on the strength of it? Two hunner’ thousand and better they put in here, first and last; on the tramway and the coke-ovens, the miners’ houses, and this fine office-building that’s crum’ling down behind our backs! And with every practical coal man in the country telling them that such a thing as two veins--two separate veins, mind ye--coming into one was a geological impossibeelity. Parker--the man who set the trap and caught everybody--he knew, I’m thinking; but Judge Birrell and all the rest of ’em were crazy--fair crazy!” “But is it a geological impossibility, Captain Duncan? That is one of the questions I got you up here to answer for me,” Tregarvon put in. The Scotch engineer was too cautious to be definitely oracular.