The
"inquiry" which had so gladdened the colonel's heart the morning ofthe
breakfast with aunt Nancy had proceeded from this rotund negotiator.
The colonel had, as usual, started the road at Cartersville, and had
gotten as far as the double-span iron bridge over the Tench when the
rotund gentleman asked abruptly,--
"How far are you from a coal-field?"
The colonel lifted the point of his pen, adjusted his glasses, and
punched a hole in the rumpled map within a hair's breadth of a black
dot labeled "Cartersville."
"Right there, suh. Within a stone's throw of our locomotives."
Fitz looked into the hole with as much astonishment as if it were the
open mouth of the mine itself.
"Hard or soft?" said the stout man.
"Soft, suh, and fairly good coal, I understand, although I have never
used it, suh; my ancestors always burned wood."
Fitz heard the statement in undisguised wonder. In all his intercourse
with the colonel he had never before known him to depart so much as
a razor's edge from the truth.
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