“Dear, dear!” he lamented; “I was afraid you might jump at some such conclusion as that, and it puts me in a rather awkward position. As I have said, I am only a pay-roll man in Consolidated Coal; I’m not even one of its many superintendents. Yet, as man to man, perhaps I may venture to tell you just why the C. C. & I. might still be willing to pay you the price named, though in telling you I may be betraying an official secret. You probably know that your property line on the north abuts on the Whitlow lands about an eighth of a mile from your tramway?” Tregarvon nodded. “Very good. Now we have a vein of coal quite near this joint boundary; not a very thick vein, but one which could be made to pay for working if we could send the coal down over your tramway, and coke it in your old ovens at Coalville, but which would not pay if we should be obliged to build a new tramway to get at it. That is the whole thing in a nutshell.” “You say that this offer of a hundred thousand for the Ocoee was once made to my father? It’s odd that I had never heard of it. Was it in any sense a standing offer?” “It was at the time, and I think it still is, though there has been no talk of it latterly, so far as I know. But since the reasons for making it still exist, I should imagine that you would stand a good chance of reviving it if you should care to do so.” “If I only had a little breakfast in me!” Tregarvon protested half-jokingly. “I’m too hungry to talk hundred-thousand-dollar deals with you with any assurance that an empty stomach isn’t making me flighty, Mr. Thaxter.” The bookkeeper laughed pleasantly. “There are your men coming over from the tramhead,” he said. “Give them your orders, and then let me drive you down to Coalville to your breakfast. Perhaps you’ll be willing to give me a bite, too, and in that case I shall have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carfax again. I didn’t more than half get acquainted with him the day he drove up to Whitlow.” “You are certainly the jolliest lot of commercial pirates a man ever had to fight--you people up at the C. C. & I.,” said Tregarvon, after he had climbed into the buggy with Thaxter and the spirited black horse was flinging the soft sand of the wood road from his hoofs. “First, Wilmerding comes to the rescue; and now you are trying to give us a lift. It’s heart-warming.” Thaxter’s rejoinder had just the requisite touch of friendly solicitude in it. “Then you meant what you said a few moments ago, about the financial aspect of the--of your experiment? A hundred thousand dollars would be worth considering?” “That amount would look as big as a hundred thousand cart-wheels to me, just now,” Tregarvon confided. “My father is dead, as I suppose you know, and there have been family misfortunes big enough to sink a ship. A hundred thousand would give us a fresh start in the world.”