Ethel Morton's Enterprise Part 39

"I wish it hadn't been such a muddy day," sighed Ethel Blue. "The mud squeezed around so that his toe marks were filled right up."

"It certainly was a muddy day," agreed Roger, "but I'm glad it was. If he had been walking on rocks we never should have known that he had pa.s.sed this way a million or so years ago."

They were all so filled with interest that they were almost unwilling to go on in the afternoon, although Mr. Emerson promised them other sights around Uniontown, quite different from any they had seen yet.

It was late in the afternoon when they ferried across the river in a boat running on a chain, and took the train for the seat of Fayette County. As the daylight waned they found themselves travelling through a country lighted by a glare that seemed to spread through the atmosphere and to be reflected back from the clouds and sky.

"What is it?" d.i.c.ky almost whimpered, as he snuggled closer to his mother.

"Ask Grandfather," returned Mrs. Morton.

"It's the glare from the c.o.ke ovens," answered Mr. Emerson. "Do you see those long rows of bee-hives? Those are ovens in which soft coal is being burned so that a certain ingredient called bitumen may be driven off from it. What is left after that is done is a substance that looks somewhat like a dry, sponge if that were gray and hard. It burns with a very hot flame and is invaluable in the smelting of iron and the making of steel."

"That's why they make so much here," guessed Ethel Brown, who had been counting the ovens and was well up in the hundreds with plenty more in sight. "Here is where they make most of the iron and steel in the United States and they have to have c.o.ke for it."

"And you notice how conveniently the coal beds lie to the iron mines?

Nature followed an efficiency program, didn't she?" laughed Roger.

"They turn out about twenty million tons of c.o.ke a year just around here," Helen read from her guidebook, "and it is one of the two greatest c.o.ke burning regions of the world!"

"Where's the other?"

"In the neighborhood of Durham, England."

"It is a wonderful sight!" exclaimed Ethel Blue. "I never knew fire could be so wonderful and so different!"

Mr. Emerson's search for Stanley Clark seemed to be a stern chase and consequently a long one. Here again the hotel clerk told him that Mr.

Clark had gone on, this time to Washington, the seat of Washington County. He was fairly sure that he was still there because he had received a letter from him just the day before asking that something he had left behind should be sent him to that point, which was done.

As soon as the Record Office was open in the morning Mr. Emerson and Roger went there.

"We might as well check up on Hapgood's investigations," said Mr.

Emerson. "They may be all right, and he may be honestly mistaken in thinking that his Emily is the Clarks' Emily; or he may have faked some of his records. It won't take us long to find out. Mr. Clark let me take his copy of Hapgood's papers."

It was not a long matter to prove that Hapgood's copy of the records was correct. Emily Leonard had married Edward Smith; their son, Jabez, had married a Hapgood and Mary was their child. Where Hapgood's copy had been deficient was in his failing to record that this Emily Leonard was the daughter of George and Sabina Leonard, whereas the Clarks' Emily was the daughter of Peter and Judith Leonard.

"There's Hapgood's whole story knocked silly," remarked Mr. Emerson complacently.

"But it leaves us just where we were about the person the Clarks' Emily married."

"Stanley wouldn't have telegraphed that she married a Smith if he hadn't been sure. He sent that wire from Millsboro, you know. He must have found something in that vicinity."

"I'm going to try to get him on the telephone to-night, and then we can join him in Washington tomorrow if he'll condescend to stay in one spot for a few hours and not keep us chasing over the country after him."

"That's Jabez Smith over there now," the clerk, who had been interested in their search, informed them.

"Jabez Smith!" repeated Roger, his jaw dropped.

"Jabez Smith!" repeated Mr. Emerson. "Why, he's dead!"

"Jabez Smith? The Hapgood woman's husband? Father of Mary Smith? He isn't dead. He's alive and drunk almost every day."

He indicated a man leaning against the wall of the corridor and Mr.

Emerson and Roger approached him.

"Don't you know the Miss Clarks said they thought that Mary said her father was alive but her uncle interrupted her loudly and said she was 'an orphan, poor kid'?" Roger reminded his grandfather.

"She's half an orphan; her mother really is dead, the clerk says."

Jabez Smith acknowledged his ident.i.ty and received news of his brother-in-law and his daughter with no signs of pleasure.

"What scheming is Hapgood up to now?" he muttered crossly.

"Do you remember what your grandfather and grandmother Leonards' names were," asked Mr. Emerson.

The man looked at him dully, as if he wondered what trick there might be in the inquiry, but evidently he came to the conclusion that his new acquaintance was testing his memory, so he pulled himself together and after some mental searching answered, "George Leonard; Sabina Leonard."

His hearers were satisfied, and left him still supporting the Court House wall with his person instead of his taxes.

Stanley, the long pursued, was caught on the wire, and hailed their coming with delight. He said that he thought he had all the information he needed and that he had been planning to go home the next day, so they were just in time.

"That's delightful; he can go with us," exclaimed Ethel Brown, and Helen and Roger looked especially pleased.

The few hours that pa.s.sed before they met in Washington were filled with guesses as to whether Stanley had built up the family tree of his cousin Emily so firmly that it could not be shaken.

"We proved this morning that Hapgood's story was a mixture of truth and lies," Mr. Emerson said, "but we haven't anything to replace it. Our evidence is all negative."

"Stanley seems sure," Roger reminded him.

When Stanley met them at the station in Washington he seemed both sure and happy. He shook hands with them all.

"It is perfectly great to have you people here," he said to Helen.

"Have you caught Emily?" she replied, dimpling with excitement.

"I have Emily traced backwards and forwards. Let's go into the writing room of the hotel and you shall see right off how she stands."

They gathered around the large table and listened to the account of the young lawyer's adventures. He had had a lead that took him to Millsboro soon after he reached western Pennsylvania, but he missed the trail there and spent some time in hunting in surrounding towns before he came on the record in the Uniontown courthouse.

"I certainly thought I had caught her then," he confessed. "I thought so until I compared the ages of the two Emilies. I found that our Emily would have been only ten years old at the time the Uniontown Emily married Edward Smith."

"Mr. Clark wired you to find out just that point."

"Did he? I never received the despatch. Hadn't I told him the date of our Emily's birth?

"He has a crow to pick with you over that."

"Too bad. Well, I moseyed around some more, and the trail led me back to Millsboro again, where I ought to have found the solution in the first place if I had been more persevering. I came across an old woman in Millsboro who had been Emily Leonard's bridesmaid when she married Julian Smith. That sent me off to the county seat and there I found it all set down in black and white;--Emily Leonard, adopted daughter of Asa Wentworth and daughter of Peter and Judith (Clark) Leonard. There was everything I wanted."