"Never mind," he gritted, with an out-thrust of the square jaw; "it's the Gordon fighting chance; and pappy says that's all we've ever asked—it's all I'm going to ask, anyway. But I wish Ardea wasn't going over with that crowd!"

The conference in Room 327, Fifth Avenue Hotel, held while the carriages were waiting to take the steamer party to the pier, was brief and businesslike. Something to Tom's surprise, Major Dabney was present; and a little later he learned, with a shock of resentment, that the Major was also a minority stock-holder in the moribund Chiawassee Consolidated. The master of Deer Trace was as gracious to Caleb Gordon's son as only a Dabney knew how to be.

"Nothing could give me greateh pleasure, my deah boy, than this plan of having youh fatheh in command at Gordonia," he beamed, shaking Tom's hand effusively. "I hope you'll have us all made millionaihs when we get back home again; I do, for a fact, suh."

Tom smiled and shook his head.

"It looks pretty black, just now, Major. I'm afraid we're in for rough weather."

"Oh, no; not that, son; a meah passing cloud." And then, with the big Dabney laugh: "You youngstehs oughtn't to leave it for us old fellows to keep up the stock of optimism, suh. A word in youh ear, young man: if these heah damned Yankee rascals would quit thei-uh monkeying right heah in Wall Street, the country would take on a new lease of life, suh; it would for a fact," and he said it loudly enough to be heard in the corridor.

During this bit of side play the attorney was laboring with the two Farleys, and Tom, watching narrowly, saw that there was a hitch of some kind.

"What is it?" he demanded, turning shortly on the trio at the table.

The lawyer explained. Mr. Farley thought the plan proposed was entirely too far-reaching in its effects, or possible effects. He was willing to delegate his authority as president of the company to Caleb Gordon in writing. Would not that answer all the requirements?

Tom asked his attorney with his eyes if it would answer, and read the negative reply very clearly. So he shook his head.

"No," he said, turning his back on the Major and lowering his voice. "We must have your proxy, Mr. Farley."

"And if I don't choose to accede to your demands?"

"I don't think we need to go over that ground again," said Tom coolly. "If you don't sign that paper, you'll miss your steamer."

The president glanced toward the open door, as if he half expected to see an officer waiting for him. Then he said, "Oh, well; it's as broad as it is long," and signed.

The leave-takings were brief, and somewhat constrained, save those of the genial Major. Tom pleaded business, further business, with his attorney, when the Major would have had him wait to tell the ladies good-by; hence he saw no more of the tourists after the conference broke up.

Not to lose time, Tom took a noon train back to Boston, first wiring his father to try and keep things in statu quo at Gordonia for another week at all hazards. Winning back to the technical school, he plunged once more into the examination whirlpool, doing his best to forget Chiawassee Consolidated and its mortal sickness for the time being, and succeeding so well that he passed with colors flying.

But the school task done, he turned down the old leaf, pasting it firmly in place. Telegraphing his father to meet him, on the morning of the third day following, at the station in South Tredegar, he allowed himself a few hours for a run up the North Shore and a conference with the Michigan iron king; after which he turned his face southward and was soon speeding to the battle-field through a land by this time shaking to its industrial foundations in the throes of the panic earthquake.



XIX

ISSACHAR

In accordance with Tom's telegram, Caleb Gordon met his son at the station in South Tredegar, and they went together to breakfast in one of the dining-rooms of the Marlboro. Tom's heart burned within him when he saw how the late stress of things had aged his father, and for the first time in his life he opened a vengeance account: if the Farleys ever came back there should be reckoning for more than the looting of Chiawassee Consolidated. But this was only the primitive under-thought. Uppermost at the moment was the joy of the young soldier arrived, fit and vigorous, on his maiden battle-field.

"You don't know how good it seems to get back home again, pappy," he said, over the bacon and eggs. "I've been grinding pretty hard this year, and now it's over, I feel as if I could whip my weight in wildcats, as Japheth used to say. By the way, how is Japheth?"

Caleb Gordon smiled in spite of the corroding industrial anxieties.

"Japheth's going to surprise you some, I reckon, son; he's gone and got religion."

Tom put down his knife and fork.

"Why, the old sinner!" he laughed. "How did that happen?"

"Oh, just about the way it always does," said Caleb slowly. "The spirit moved your Uncle Silas to come out to Little Zoar and hold a protracted meetin', and Japhe joined the mourners and was gathered into the fold."

"Pshaw!" said Tom, in good-natured incredulity. "Why, the very meat and marrow of his existence is his horse-trading; and who could swap horses and tell the truth at the same time?"

"I don't know," was the doubtful reply. "But Brother Japheth allows that's about what he aims to do. It's sort o' curious the way it works out, too. About a week after the baptizin', Jim Bledsoe came down from Pine Knob with a horse to swap. 'Long about sundown he met up with Japhe, and struck him for a trade on a piebald that the Major wouldn't let run in the same lot with the Deer Trace stock. They had it up one side and down the other; Brother Japhe tryin' to tell Bledsoe that his piebald was about the no-accountest horse in the valley, and Jim takin' it all by contraries and gettin' more and more p'intedly anxious to trade."

"Well?" said Tom, enjoying his return to nature like any creature freed of the urban cage.

"They came to the trade, after a tolerable spell of it," Caleb went on, "and the last thing I heard Japhe say was, 'now you recollect, Brother Bledsoe, I done told you that there piebald's no account on the face of the earth—a-lovin' of my neighbor like I promise' Brother Silas I would.'"

Tom laughed again. There was the smell of the good red soil in the little story, a whiff of the home earth reminiscent and heartening. But the under-thought laid hold on Japheth and his change of heart.

"Japhe was about the last man in Paradise, always excepting Major Dabney," he said half-musingly. "Haven't you often wondered what sort of a maggot it is that gets into the human brain to give it the superstitious twist?"

Caleb's gentle frown was the upcast of paternal bewilderment, partly prideful, partly disconcerting. He was not yet fully acquainted with this young giant with the frank face, the sober gray eyes, and the conscious grasp of himself. More than once since their meeting at the steps of the Pullman car he had felt obliged to reassure himself by saying, "This is Tom; this is my son." There were so many and such marked changes: the quick, curt speech, caught in the Northland; the nervous, sure-footed stride, and the athletic swing of the shoulders; the easy manner and confident air, not of college-boy conceit, but of the assurance of young manhood; and, lastly, this blunt right-about-face in matters of religion. Caleb was not quite sure that this latter change was entirely welcome.

"Whereabouts did ye learn to call it superstition, son? Not at your mammy's knee, leastwise," he said, in sober deprecation.

Tom shook his head. "No; and not altogether at yours. But I guess I've worked around to your point of view, after so long a time."

"It's your mammy's faith, all the same, Buddy," said the father gravely. "Let's not belittle it any more'n we can help."

"I don't belittle it," was the quick response. "In some of its phases it is grand—magnificent. We can't always be prying into the cause; the effect is what counts. And there is no denying that the fairy tale which we call Christianity has built some of the most godlike heroes the world has ever seen."

"You're right sure now that it is a fairy story, son?" said the old man, a little wistfully.

"There is no doubt about that," was the decisive rejoinder. "There is room for credulity only in ignorance. Any thinking person who is brought face to face with the materialistic facts—"

Caleb held up a toil-hardened hand.

"Hold on, Buddy; you'll have to pick a place where the water deepens sort o' gradually for the old man or you'll have him flounderin'. I reckon I been sittin' up on the bank all my life, waitin' for somebody to come along and pole the bottom for me in that pool."

"No," said Tom definitively. "There isn't any bank to that pool. You're in it, or you are out of it; one or the other. That was the notion I took with me to Boston. I thought I'd get well up above the eternal wrangle and look down on it—wouldn't believe, wouldn't disbelieve. It can't be done. Jesus, Himself, said, if they've reported Him straight, 'He that is not with me is against me.'"

"Well," said the father, still deprecating, "that's some farther along than I've ever been able to get—not sayin' that I wouldn't be willin' to go." And then: "You don't allow to argue with your mammy about these things, do you, Tom?"

Tom's rejoinder was gravely considerate.

"It is a sealed book between us, now, pappy. She knows—and knows it can't be helped. If I wasn't her son, I hope I should still be the last person in the world to try to shake her faith—or any one's, for that matter. I have merely turned my own back—because I had to."

The old man put down his coffee-cup and the look in his eyes was half-appealing.

"What was it turned you, son?—nothing I've ever said or done, I hope?"

Tom shook his big blond head slowly.

"No, not directly; though I suppose a man does go back to his father for a measuring-stick. But indirectly you, and the other Gordons, are responsible for the best there is in me—and that's the questioning part. Given the doubt, I hunted till I found the man who could resolve or confirm it."

"Who was he?" inquired Caleb, willing to hear more particularly.

"His name is Bauer—the man I've been rooming with. He is a German biologist who was to have been educated for the Lutheran ministry. His people made the capital mistake of sending him to Freiburg for a couple of years as a preliminary, and, when they found out what the German university had done for him, they sent him to Boston, under the impression that the Puritan American city might correct some of his materialism."

Caleb smiled. "That ain't just the way we think of Boston over here," he remarked.

"No; and, of course, Bauer didn't change his point of view. We used to have it up hill and down. I had Scripture—mother and the Beershebans had taught me that—and Bauer had immense reading, flinty Dutch common sense, and a huge lack of the reverence for the so-called sacred subjects which seems to be ingrained in every race but the Teutonic. I fought hard, both for mother's sake and because it was the first time I had ever met a man with his sword out on the other side."

"Well?" said Caleb.

"He downed me, horse, foot and artillery; made me realize as I never had before what an absolute begging of the premises the entire Christian argument is."

"But how?" persisted the iron-master.

"Held me up at the muzzle of the cold facts. For example: do you happen to know that the oldest Bible manuscripts in existence go back only to the fourth century, and are doubtless copies of copies of copies?"

The father had pushed back his chair and was trying to fold his napkin in the original creases.

"No; there's a heap o' things I don't know, son, but I'm willin' to learn. One o' these days, if we ever get out o' this business tangle alive, we'll sit down quiet together and you'll do for me what this Dutchman has done for you. For, in spite of what you say, I've been sittin' on the fence all these years, and I reckon you're the one to help me down."

Tom smiled first at the thought of it and then grew suddenly sober. It is one thing to be serenely critical for oneself, and quite another to set the pace for a disciple. And when that disciple chances to be one's father?

"I don't know about that, pappy," he said, rather dubiously. "I'd like to have you meet some of the people on my side of the road first. Maybe you wouldn't like the company."

But Caleb would not have it so. "If they're good enough for you, son, they're good enough for me," he said. "Not but what there's some mighty good folks trampin' along on the other side, too."

"Yes, and some mighty bad ones," said Tom, thinking of the promoter vestryman of St. Michael's and his Bible-class-teaching son. "We are going right now to investigate the financiering methods of a pair of them. Is Dyckman still on duty? Or are the offices closed?"

"Dyckman's there," was the answer; and they left the breakfast-room together to go around the block and have themselves lifted to the fifth floor of the Coosa Building, where half a dozen gilt-lettered glass doors advertised the administrative headquarters of Chiawassee Consolidated.

If Caleb Gordon had been mildly bewildered by the outward and instantly visible changes in his college-bred son, he was quite lost in wondering admiration when the young man had climbed fairly into the business saddle and gathered his grip on the reins. Notwithstanding the fact of his stock-holding, Caleb the iron-master had always stood a little in awe of the general office grandeurs; of chief priest Dyckman in particular. But Tom seemed to recognize no distinctions of class, age, or previous condition of overlordship. Dyckman was found busily lounging in the absent president's easy-chair, smoking a good cigar and reading the morning papers. At the outset he was inclined to be genially supercilious, thus:

"Ah, good morning, Mr. Gordon! Hello, Tom! Back from college, are you? The books and papers? They are over in the vaults of the Iron City National—by Mr. Farley's orders. I suppose he thought they'd be safer there in case of fire. Won't you sit down and have a fresh cigar?"

What Tom said, or the precise wording of it, Caleb could never remember. But the staccato sentence or two had the effect of instantly electrifying Mr. Dyckman. Certainly; whatever Mr. Thomas desired should be done. He—Dyckman—had had no notice of the change in the plans of the company, and Mr. Farley's instructions—

Tom cut the oath of fealty short and stated his desires succinctly. The bookkeeper was to reassemble his office force immediately, taking particular care to reinstate Norman, the correspondence man. That done, he was to prepare full and complete exhibits of the company's condition: assets, liabilities, contracts, in short, the results in statement form of a thorough and searching house-cleaning in the accounting and administrative departments.

"I am going to put you on your good behavior, Dyckman," said the new tyrant in conclusion, driving the words home with a shrewd sword-thrust of the gray eyes. "At first I thought I'd bring an expert accountant down here from New York and put him on your books; but I'm going to spare you that—on one condition. Those exhibits must be made absolutely without fear or favor; they must contain the exact truth and all of it. If you tinker them, you'll not be able to run fast enough nor far enough to get away from me. Do I make it plain?"

"Very plain, indeed, Mr. Tom; the office boy would catch your meaning, I think."

"All right, then; gather up your force and pitch in. I haven't time to watch you, and I don't mean to take it. But I shall know it when you begin to flicker."

When the two early morning disturbers of Mr. Dyckman's peace were once more in the street and on the way to the station to take the train for Gordonia and the seat of war, Caleb found speech.

"Son," he said gravely, "do you know that you've made a mighty bitter enemy in the last fifteen minutes? Dyckman is Farley's confidential man, and when he gets his knife ground good and sharp he's goin' to cut you with it, once for himself and once for his boss."

Tom's laugh was an easing of strains.

"It does me a heap of good to know that I can crack the whip where you'd be putting on the brakes, pappy; it does, for a fact. But you needn't worry about Dyckman. He won't quarrel with his bread and butter. I don't care anything about his personal loyalty so long as he does his work."

Again Caleb had to withdraw a little and look his stalwart young captain over and say: "It is Tom; it's just Buddy, grown up and come to be a man." But it was hard to realize.

"I reckon you've got it all figured out—what-all we're goin' to do, Tom," he said, when they were seated in the car of the accommodation train.

"Yes, I think I have; at least, I have the beginning struck out. We are going to call a stock-holders' meeting, vote you into the presidency, take the bull squarely by the horns and blow in the Chiawassee furnace again—dig coal, roast coke and make iron."

"But, son! at the present price of iron, we can't make any money; couldn't clear a dollar a car if the buyers would push their cars right into our yard. And there ain't any buyers."

Tom was looking out of the window at the procession of smokeless factory chimneys. The blight had already fallen on the South Tredegar industries.

"It's going to be a battle to the strong, to the fellow who can wait, and work while he waits," he said, half to himself. Then, more particularly to his father's protest: "I know, we are in pretty bad shape. When we get those exhibits we shall find that the Farleys have picked the bones, leaving them for us to bury decently out of sight. Then, when the funeral is over, they'll come back and charge it all to the Gordon mismanagement. It's a cinch, isn't it?"

The old iron-master was silent for the train-speed's measuring of a long mile. Then he said slowly:

"I don't aim to go back on you, Buddy; not a foot 'r an inch. But it does seem to me like you put your finger in the fire when you hilt up Duxbury Farley for that proxy paper in New York. If we go under—and the good Lord only knows how we can he'p it—they'll come out of it with clean clothes, and we'll have to take all the mud-slingin', just as you say."

Tom's smile would have stamped him as the son of the grim old ex-artilleryman in any court of inquiry.

"Did your old general ever go into battle with the idea that he was bound to be licked, pappy?" he asked.

"Who? Stonewall Jackson? Well, I reckon not, son."

"Neither shall we," said Tom laconically. "We are going in to win. We are in bad shape, I admit, but we are better off than a lot of these furnaces that are shutting down. We have our own ore beds, and our own coking plant. Our coal costs us seventy-five cents less than Pocahontas, our water is free, and we can hold the property as long as we can stand the sheriff off. My notion is to make iron and hold it; stack it in the yards, mortgage it for what we can get, and make more iron. Some day the country will get iron hungry; then we'll have it to sell when the other fellows will have to make it first and sell it afterward. Have I got it straight?"

Caleb nodded.

"Yes; I don't know but what you have. What's puzzlin' me right now, son, is where you got it."

Tom's laugh was a tonic for sore nerves.

"I'd like to know what you've been spending your good money on me for if it wasn't to give me a chance to get it. Do you think I've been playing foot-ball all the time?"

"No; but—well, Tom, the last I knew of you, you was just a little shaver, spattin' around barefooted in the dust o' the Paradise pike, and I can't seem to climb up to where you're at now."

Tom laughed again.

"You'll come to it, after while. I reckon I haven't much more sense, in some ways, than the little shaver had; but I've been trying my level best to learn my trade. There is only one thing about this tangle that is worrying me: that's the labor end of it."

"We can get all the labor we want," said Caleb.

"Yes; but didn't you write me that the men were on strike?"

"I said the white miners were likely to make trouble if they got hungry enough."

"Was there any pay in arrears when you shut down?"

"No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but I fought him out o' that."

"Good! Then what are they kicking about?"

"Oh, because they're out of a job. There are always a lot of keen noses in a crowd the size of ours, and they've smelled out some o' the Farley doin's. Of course, they don't believe in the cry of hard times; laborin' men are always the last to believe that."

The train was tracking thunderously around the nose of Lebanon, and Tom was looking out of the window again, this time for the first glimpse of the Gordonia chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.

"That is where you will have to put your shoulder into the collar with me, pappy," he said. "Most of the older men know me as a boy who has grown up among them. When I spring my proposition, they'll howl, if only for that reason."

But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously than ever.

"You won't get any help from the men, Buddy, more 'n what you pay for. You know the whites—Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good sprinklin' o' 'huckleberries.' And the blacks don't count, one way or the other."

The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for Gordonia, and Tom was gathering his dunnage.

"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and shape up my talk?"

Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship.



XX

DRY WELLS

As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials.

As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority and doing most of the talking.

"What's all this buzzin' round about young Tom?" queried one of the men in the miners' caucus. "Might' nigh every other word with old Caleb was, 'Tom; my son, Tom.' Why, I riccollect him when he wasn't no more'n knee-high to a hop-toad!"

"Well, you bet your life he's a heap higher'n that now," said another, who had chanced to be at the station when the Gordons, father and son, left the train together. "He's a half a head taller than the old man, an' built like one o' Maje' Dabney's thoroughbreds. But I reckon he ain't nothin' but a school-boy, for all o' that."

"Gar-r-r!" spat a third. "We've had one kid too many in this outfit, all along. I'll bet, if the truth was knowed, th't that young Farley'd skin a louse for the hide and tallow."

"Yes," chimed in a fourth, a "huckleberry" miner from the Bald Mountain district, "and I reckon whar thar's sich a hell of a smoke, thar's a right smart heap o' fire, ef it could on'y be onkivered."

But all of this was in a manner beside the mark, and there were many to inquire what the Gordons were going to do. Ludlow, check weigher in Number Two entry, and the head of the local union, took it on himself to reply.

"B'gosh! I don't b'lieve the old man knows, himself. He fit around and fit around, talkin' to me, and never said nothin' more'n that there was goin' to be a meetin' here at two o'clock, and Tom—his son Tom—was goin' to speak to it."

"All right; we're a-waitin' on son Tom right now," said a grizzled old coal-digger on the outer edge of the group. "And ef he's got anything to say, he cayn't say hit none too sudden. My ol' woman told me this mornin' she was a-hittin' the bottom o' the meal bar'l, kerchuck! ever' time she was dippin' into hit. Hit's erbout time there was somepin doin', ez I allow."

"Saw it off!" warned Ludlow. "Here they come, both of 'em."

Tom and his father had entered the building from the cupola side, and Tom mounted the flask-built platform while the men were scattering to find seats. He made a goodly figure of young manhood, standing at ease on the pile of frames until quiet should prevail, and the glances flung up from the throng of workmen were friendly rather than critical. When the time came, he began to speak quietly, but with a certain masterful quality in his voice that unmistakably constrained attention.

"I suppose you have all been told why the works are shut down—why you are out of a job in the middle of summer; and I understand you are not fully satisfied with the reason that was given—hard times. You have been saying among yourselves that if the president and the treasurer could go off on a holiday trip to Europe, the situation couldn't be so very desperate. Isn't that so?"

"That's so; you've hit it in the head first crack out o' the box," was the swift reply from a score of the men.

"Good; then we'll settle that point before we go any further. I want to tell you men that the hard times are here, sure enough. We are all hoping that they won't last very long; but the fact remains that the wheels have stopped. Let me tell you: I've just come down from the North, and the streets of the cities up there are full of idle men. All the way down here I didn't see a single iron-furnace in blast, and those of you who have been over to South Tredegar know what the conditions are there. Mr. Farley has gone to Europe because he believes there is nothing to be done here, and the facts are on his side. For anybody with money enough to live on, this is a mighty good time to take a vacation."

There was a murmur of protest, voicing itself generally in a denial of the possibility for men who wrought with their hands and ate in the sweat of their brows.

"I know that," was Tom's rejoinder. "Some of us can't afford to take a lay-off; I can't, for one. And that's why we are here this afternoon. Chiawassee can blow in again and stay in blast if we've all got nerve enough to hang on. If we start up and go on making pig, it'll be on a dead market and we'll have to sell it at a loss or stack it in the yards. We can't do the first, and I needn't tell you that it is going to take a mighty long purse to do the stacking. It will be all outgo and no income. If—"

"Spit it out," called Ludlow, from the forefront of the miners' division. "I reckon we all know what's comin'."

Gordon thrust out his square jaw and gave them the fact bluntly.

"It's a case of half a loaf or no bread. If Chiawassee blows in again, it will be on borrowed money. If you men will take half-pay in cash and half in promises, the promised half to be paid when we can sell the stacked pig, we go on. If not, we don't. Talk it over among yourselves and let us have your decision."

There was hot caucusing and a fair imitation of pandemonium on the foundry floor following this bomb-hurling, and Tom sat down on the edge of the platform to give the men time. Caleb Gordon sat within arm's reach, nursing his knee, diligently saying nothing. It was Tom, undoubtedly, but a Tom who had become a citizen of another world, a newer world than the one the ex-artilleryman knew and lived in. He—Caleb—had freely predicted a riot as the result of the half-pay proposal; yet Tom had applied the match and there was no explosion. The buzzing, arguing groups were not riotous—only fiercely questioning.

It was Ludlow, hammering clamorously for silence on the shell of the big crane ladle, who acted as spokesman when the uproar was quelled.

"You're all right, Tom Gordon—you and your daddy. But you've hit us plum' 'twixt dinner and supper. If you two was the company—"

Tom stood up and interrupted.

"We are the company. While Mr. Farley is away we're the bosses; what we say, goes."

"All right," Ludlow went on. "That's a little better. But we've got a kick or two comin'. Is this half-pay goin' to be in orders on the company's store?"

"I said cash," said Tom briefly.

"Good enough. But I s'pose we'd have to spend it at the company's store, jest the same, 'r get fired."

"No!"—emphatically. "I'm not even sure that we should reopen the store. We shall not reopen it unless you men want it. If you do want it, we'll make it strictly cooeperative, dividing the profits with every employee according to his purchases."

"Well, by gol, that's white, anyway," commented one of the coke burners. "Be a mighty col' day in July when old man Farley'd talk as straight as that."

"Ag'in," said Ludlow, "what's this half-pay to be figured on—the reg'lar scale?"

"Of course."

"And what security do we have that t'other half 'll be paid, some time?"

"My father's word, and mine."

"And if old man Farley says no?"

"Mr. Farley is out of it for the present, and he has nothing to say about it. You are making this deal with Gordon and Gordon."

"Well, now, that's a heap more like it." Ludlow turned to the miners. "What d'ye say, boys? Fish or cut bait? Hands up!"

There was a good showing of hands among the white miners and the coke burners, but the negro foundry men did not vote. Patty, the mulatto foreman who was Helgerson's second, explained the reason.

"You ain't said nuttin' 'bout de foundry, Boss Tom. W-w-w-w-we-all boys been wukkin' short ti-ti-time, and m-m-m-makin' pig ain't gwine give we-all n-n-nuttin' ter do." Patty had a painful impediment in his speech, and the strain of the public occasion doubled it.

"We are going to run the foundry, too, Patty, and on full time. There will be work for all of you on the terms I have named."

Caleb Gordon closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. For weeks before the shut-down the foundry had been run on short time, because there was no market for its miscellaneous output. Surely Tom must be losing his mind!

But the negro foundry men were taking his word for it, as the miners had. "Pup-pup-put up yo' hands, boys!" said Patty, and again the ayes had it.

Tom looked vastly relieved.

"Well, that was a short horse soon curried," he said bruskly. "The power goes on to-morrow morning, and we'll blow in as soon as the furnaces are relined. Ludlow, you come to the office at five o'clock and I'll list the shifts with you. Patty, you report to Mr. Helgerson, and you and the pattern-maker show up at half-past five. I want to talk over some new work with you. Anybody else got anything to say? If not, we'll adjourn."

Caleb followed his son out and across the yard to the old log homestead which still served as the superintendent's office and laboratory. When the door was shut, he dropped heavily into a chair.

"Son," he said brokenly, "you're—you're crazy—plum' crazy. Don't you know you can't do the first one o' these things you've been promisin'?"

Tom was already busy at the desk, emptying the pigeonholes one after another and rapidly scanning their contents.

"If I believed that, I'd be taking to the high grass and the tall timber. But don't you worry, pappy; we're going to do them—all of them."

"But, Buddy, you can't sell a pound of foundry product! We may be able to make pig cheaper than some others, but when it comes to the foundry floor, South Tredegar can choke us off in less'n a week."

"Wait," said Tom, still rummaging. "There is one thing we can make—and sell."

"I'd like tolerable well to know what it is," was the hopeless rejoinder.

"You ought to know, better than any one else. It's cast-iron pipe—water-pipe. Where are the plans of that invention of yours that Farley wouldn't let you install?"

Caleb found the blue-prints, and his hands were trembling. The invention, a pit machine process for molding and casting water-and gas-pipe at a cost that would put all other makers of the commodity out of the field, had been wrought out and perfected in Tom's second Boston year. It was Caleb's one ewe lamb, and he had nursed it by hand through a long preparatory period.

Tom took the blue-prints and spread them on the desk, absorbing the details as his father leaned over him and pointed them out. He saw clearly that the invention would revolutionize pipe-making. The accepted method was to cast each piece separately in a floor flask made in two parts, rammed by hand, once for the drag and again for the cope, with reversings, crane-handlings and all the manipulations necessary for the molding of any heavy casting. But the new process substituted machinery. A cistern-like pit; a circular table pivoted over it, with a hundred or more iron flasks suspended upright from its edges; a huge crane carrying a mechanical ram, these were the main points of the machine which, with a single small gang of men, would do the work of an entire foundry floor.

"It's great!" said Tom enthusiastically. "I got your idea pretty well from your letters, but you've improved on it since then. I wonder Farley didn't snap at it."

"He was willin' to," said Caleb grimly. "Only he wanted me to transfer the patents to the company; in other words, to make him a present of the controlling interest. I bucked at that, and we come near havin' a fall-out. If there was any market for pipe now—"

"There is a market," said Tom hopefully. "I got a pointer on that before I left Boston. Did I tell you I had a little talk with Mr. Clarkson the day I came away?"

"No."

"Well, I did. I told him the conditions and asked his advice. Among other things, I spoke of this pipe pit of yours, and he said at once, 'There is your chance. Cast-iron water-pipe is like bread, or sugar, or butcher's meat—it's a necessity, in good times or bad. If that machine is practicable, you can make pipe for less than half the present labor cost.' Then we talked ways and means. Money is tighter than a shut fist—up East as well as everywhere else. But men with money to invest will still bet on a sure thing. Mr. Clarkson advised me to try our own banks first. Failing with them, he authorized me to call on him. Now you know where I'm digging my sand."

The old iron-master sat back in his chair with his hands locked over one knee, once more taking the measure of this new creation calling itself Tom Gordon and purporting to be his son.

"Say, Buddy," he said at length, "are there many more like you out yonder in the big road?—young fellows that can walk right out o' school and tell their daddies how to run things?"

Tom's laugh was boyishly hearty.

"Plenty of 'em, pappy; lots of 'em! The old world is moving right along; it would be a pity if it didn't, don't you think? But about this pipe business: I want you to make over these patents to me."

"They're yours now, Tom; everything I've got will be yours in a little while," said the father; but his voice betrayed the depth of that thrust. Was the new Tom beginning so soon to grasp and reach out avariciously for the fruit of the old tree?

"You ought to know I don't mean it that way," said Tom, frowning a little. "But here is the way it sizes up. There is money in this pipe-making; some money now, and big money later on. Farley has refused to go into it unless you make it a company proposition; as president and a controlling stock-holder you can't very well go into it now without making it in some sort a company proposition. But you can transfer the patents to me, and I can contract with Chiawassee Consolidated to make pipe for me."

Caleb Gordon's frown matched that of his son.

"That would certainly be givin' Colonel Duxbury a dose of his own medicine; but I don't like it, Tom. It looks as if we were taking advantage of him."

"No. I'd make the proposition to him, personally, if he were here, and the boss; and he'd be a fool if he didn't jump at it," said Tom earnestly. "But there is more to it than that. If we make a go of this, and don't protect ourselves, the two Farleys will come back and put the whole thing in their pockets. I won't go into it on any such terms. When they do come back, I'm going to have money to fight them with, and this is our one little ghost of a chance. Ring up Judge Bates and get him to come over here and make a legal transfer of these patents to me."

The thing was done, though not without some misgivings on Caleb's part. Honesty and fair dealing, even with a known enemy, had been the rule of his life; and while he could not put his finger on the equivocal thing in Tom's plan, he was vaguely troubled. Analyzed after the fact, the trouble was vicarious, and for Tom. It defined itself more clearly when they went together to South Tredegar to have an attorney draw up the agreement under which Tom's pipe venture was to be conducted. Tom, as the owner of the patents, was fair with the Chiawassee Consolidated, but he was not liberal; indeed, he would have been quite illiberal if the attorney had not warned him that an agreement, to be defensible, must be equitable as well as legal.

At this stage in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him. He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its largeness. Ruth for the Farleys was not to be expected of him, he argued; but behind this was a vaster ruthlessness, arming him to win the industrial battle, making him a hard man as he had suddenly become a strong one.

And the experiences of the summer were all hardening. He plunged headlong into the world of business, into a panic-time competition which was in grim reality a fight for life, and there seemed to be little to choose between trampling or being trampled. By early autumn the iron industries of the country were gasping, and the stacks of pig in the Chiawassee yards, kept down a little during the summer by a few meager orders, grew and spread until they covered acres. As long as money could be had, the iron was bonded as fast as it was made, and the proceeds were turned into wages to make more. But when money was no longer obtainable from this source, the pipe venture was the only hope.

With the entire foundry force at the Chiawassee making pipe, Tom had gone early into the market with his low-priced product. But the commercial side of the struggle was fire-new to him, and he found himself matched against men who knew buying and selling as he knew smelting and casting. They routed him, easily at first, with increasing difficulty as he learned the new trade, but always with certainty. It was Norman, the correspondence man, transformed now into a sales agent, who gave him his first hint of the inwardnesses.

"We're too straight, Mr. Gordon; that's at the bottom of it," he said to Tom, over a grill-room luncheon at the Marlboro one day. "It takes money to make money."

Tom's eyebrows went up and his ears were open. The battle had grown desperate.

"Our prices are right," he said. "Isn't that enough?"

"No," said Norman, looking down. Like all the others, he stood a little in awe of the young boss.

"Why?"

"Four times out of five we have to sell to a municipal committee, and the other time we have to monkey with the purchasing agent of a corporation. In either case it takes money—other money besides the difference in price."

Tom wagged his head in a slow affirmative. "It's rotten!" he said.

Norman smiled.

"It's our privilege to cuss it out; but it's a condition."

Tom was in town that day for the purpose of taking a train to Louisville, where he was to meet the officials of an Indiana city forced, despite the hard times, to relay many miles of worn-out water-mains. He made a pencil computation on the back of an envelope. The contract was a large one, and his bid, which he was confident was lower than any competitor could make, would still stand a cut and leave a margin of profit. Before he took the train he went to the bank, and, when he reached the Kentucky metropolis, his first care was to assure the "wheel-horse" member of the municipal purchasing board that he was ready to talk business on a modern business basis.

Notwithstanding, he lost the contract. Other people were growing desperate, too, it appeared, and his bribe was not great enough. One member of the committee stood by him and gave him the facts. A check had been passed, and it was a bigger check than Tom could draw without trenching on the balance left in the Iron City National to meet the month's pay-roll at Gordonia.

"You sent a boy to mill," said the loyal one. "And now it's all over, I don't mind telling you that you sent him to the wrong mill, at that. Bullinger's a hog."

"I'd like to do him up," said Tom vindictively.

"Well, that might be done, too. But it would cost you something."

Tom did not take the hint; he was not buying vengeance. But on the way home he grew bitterer with every subtracted mile. He could meet one more pay-day, and possibly another; and then the end would come. This one contract would have saved the day, and it was lost.

The homing train, rushing around the boundary hills of Paradise, set him down at Gordonia late in the afternoon. There was no one at the station to meet him, but there was bad news in the air which needed no herald to proclaim it. Though it still wanted half an hour of quitting time, the big plant was silent and deserted.

Tom walked out the pike and found his father smoking gloomily on the Woodlawn porch.

"You needn't say it, son," was his low greeting, when Tom had flung himself into a chair. "It was in the South Tredegar papers this morning."

"What was in the papers?"

"About our losin' the Indiany contract. I reckon it was what did the business for us, though there were a-plenty of black looks and a storm brewin' when we missed the pay-day yesterday."

Tom started as if he had been stung.

"Missed the pay-day? Why, I left money in bank for it when I went to Louisville!"

"Yes, I know you did. When Dyckman didn't come out with the pay-rolls yesterday evening I telephoned him. He said Vint Farley, as treasurer of the company, had made a draft on him and taken it all."

Tom sprang out of his chair and the bitter oaths upbubbled and choked him. But he stifled them long enough to say: "And the men?"

"The miners went out at ten o'clock this morning. The blacks would have stood by us, but Ludlow's men drove 'em out—made 'em quit. We're done, Buddy."

Tom dashed his hat on the floor, and the Gordon rage, slow to fire and fierce to scorch and burn when once it was aflame, made for the moment a yelling, cursing maniac of him. In the midst of it he turned, and the tempest of imprecation spent itself in a gasp of dismay. His mother was standing in the doorway, thin, frail, with the sorrow in her eyes that had been there since the long night of chastenings three years agone.

As he looked he saw the growing pallor in her face, the growing speechless horror in her gaze. Then she put out her hands as one groping in darkness and fell before he could reach her.

It was her stalwart son who carried Martha Gordon to her room and laid her gently on the bed, with the husband to follow helplessly behind. Also, it was Tom, tender and loving now as a woman, who sat upon the edge of the bed, chafing the bloodless hands and striving as he could to revive her.

"I'm afeard you've killed her for sure, this time, son!" groaned the man.

But Tom saw the pale lips move and bent low to catch their whisperings. What he heard was only the echo of the despairing cry of the broken heart: "Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!"



XXI

GILGAL

In these days of slowing wheels and silenced anvils South Tredegar had its own troubles, and when some one telephoned the editor of the Morning Tribune that Chiawassee Consolidated had succumbed at last, he did not deem it worth while to inquire whether the strike at Gordonia was the cause or the consequence of the sudden shut-down.

But a day or two later, when rumors of threatened violence began to trickle in over the telephone wires, a Tribune man called, in passing, at the general offices in the Coosa Building, and was promptly put to sleep by the astute Dyckman, who, for reasons of his own, was quite willing to conceal the true state of affairs. Yes, there was a suspension of active operations at Gordonia, and he believed there had been some hot-headed talk among the miners. But there would be no trouble. Mr. Farley was at present in London negotiating for English capital. When he should return, the capital stock of the company would be increased, and the plant would probably be removed to South Tredegar and enlarged.

All of which was duly jotted down to be passed into the Tribune's archives; and the following morning Tom, doing guard duty with his father, the two Helgersons and a squad of the yard men at the threatened plant, read a pointless editorial in which misstatement of fact and sympathy for the absent and struggling Farleys were equally and impartially blended.

"Look at that!" he growled wrathfully, handing the paper across the office desk to Caleb. "One of these fine days I'm going to land that fellow Dyckman in the penitentiary."

The iron-master put on his spectacles and plodded slowly and conscientiously through the editorial, turning the paper, at length, to glance over the headings on the telegraphic page. In the middle of it he looked up suddenly to say:

"Son, what was the name o' that Indiany town with the big water-pipe contract?"

Tom gave it in a word, and Caleb passed the paper back, with his thumb on one of the press despatches.

"Read that," he said.

Tom read, and the wrathful scowl evoked by the foolish editorial gave place to a flitting smile of triumph. There was trouble in the Indiana city over the awarding of the pipe contract. In some way unknown to the press reporter, it had leaked out that a much lower bid than the one accepted had been ignored by the purchasing committee. A municipal election was pending, and the people were up in arms. Rumors of a wholesale indictment of the suspected officials were rife, and the city offices were in a state of siege.

Tom put the paper down and smote on the desk.

"Damn them!" he said; "I thought perhaps I could give them a run for their money."

"You?" said Caleb, removing his glasses. "How's that?"

The new recruit in the army of business chicane nodded his head.

"It was a shot in the dark, and I didn't want to brag beforehand," he explained. "I wrestled it out Saturday night when I was tramping the hills after Doc Williams had brought mother around. One member of the purchasing committee was ready to dodge; he gave me a pointer before I left Louisville. I didn't see anything in it then but revenge; but afterward I saw how we might spend some money to a possible advantage."

Caleb's eyes had grown narrow.

"I reckon I'm sort o' dull, Buddy; what-all did you do?"

"Wired the disgruntled one that there was a letter and a check in the mail for him, to be followed by another and a bigger if his pole proved long enough to reach the persimmons."

The old iron-master left his chair and began to walk the floor, six steps and a turn. After a little he said:

"Tom, is that business?"

"It is the modern definition of it."

"What's goin' to happen up yonder in Indiany?"

"If I knew, I'd be a good bit easier in my mind. What I'm hoping is that the rumpus will be big enough to make 'em turn the contract our way."

Caleb stopped short.

"My God!" he ejaculated. "Where's your heart, Buddy? Would you take the chance of sendin' these fellows to jail for the sake of gettin' that contract?"

"Cheerfully," said Tom. "They're rascals; I could have bought them if I'd had money enough; and the other fellow did buy them."

The old man resumed his monotonous tramp up and down the room. The hardness in Tom's voice unnerved him. After another interval of silence he spoke again.

"I wish you hadn't done it, son. It's a dirty job, any way you look at it."

Tom shrugged.

"Norman says it's a condition, not a theory; and he is right. We are living under a new order of things, and if we want to stay alive, we've got to conform to it. It gagged me at first: I reckon there are some traces of the Christian tradition left. But, pappy, I'm going to win. That is what I'm here for."

Caleb Gordon shook his head as one who deprecates helplessly, but he sat down again and asked Tom what the programme was to be.

"There is nothing for us to do but to sit tight and wait. If we get a telegram from Indiana before these idiots of ours lose their heads and go to rioting and burning, we shall still have a fighting chance. If not, we're smashed."

"You mustn't be too hard on the men, Buddy. They've been mighty patient."

The scowl deepened between the level gray eyes.

"If I could do what I'd like to, I'd fire the last man of them. It makes me savage to have them turn up and knock us on the head after we've been sweating blood to pull through. Have you seen Ludlow?"

"Yes; I saw him last night. He's right ugly; swore he wouldn't raise a hand even if the boys took kerosene and dynamite to us."

"Well, if they do, he'll be the first man to pay for it," said Tom; and he left the office and the house to make the round of the guarded gates.

Ludlow was as good as his word. On the night following the day of suspense an attempt was made to wreck the inclined railway running from the mines on Lebanon to the coke yard. It was happily frustrated; but when Tom and his handful of guards got back to the foot of the hill they found a fire started in a pile of wooden flasks heaped against the end of the foundry building.

The fire was easily extinguishable by a willing hand or two, but Tom tried an experiment. Steam had been kept up in a single battery of boilers against emergencies, and he directed Helgerson to throw open the great gates while he ran to the boiler room and sent the fire call of the huge siren whistle shrieking out on the night.

The experiment was only meagerly successful. Less than a score of the strikers answered the call, but these worked with a will, and the fire was quickly put out.

Tom was under the arc-light at the gates when the volunteers straggled out. He had a word for each man,—a word of appreciation and a plea for suspended judgment. Most of the men shook their heads despondently, but a few of them promised to stand on the side of law and order. Tom took the names of the few, and went back to his guard duty with the burden a little lightened. But the succeeding night there were more attempts at violence, three of them so determined as to leave no doubt that the crisis was at hand. This was Tom's discouraged admission when his father came to relieve him in the morning.

"We're about at the end of the rope," he said wearily, when Caleb had closed the door of the log-house yard office behind him. "The two Helgersons are played out, and neither of us can stand this strain for another twenty-four hours. I'm just about dead on my feet for sleep, and I know you are."

The old ex-artilleryman stifled a yawn, and admitted the fact.

"I'm gettin' right old and no-account, son; there's no denyin' that. And you can't make out to shoulder it all, stout as you are. But what-all can we do different?"

"I know what I'm going to do. I had a 'phone wire from Bradley, the sheriff, last night after you went home. He funked like a boy; said he couldn't raise a posse in South Tredegar that would serve against striking workmen. Then I wired the governor, and his answer came an hour ago. We can have the soldiers if we make a formal demand for them."

"But, Tom, son; you wouldn't do that!" protested Caleb tremulously. Then, getting up to walk the floor as was his wont under sharp stress: "Let's try to hold out a little spell longer, Buddy. It'll be like fire to tow; there'll be men killed—men that I've known ever since they were boys: men killed, and women made widders. Tom, I've seen enough of war to last me."

"I know," said Tom. None the less, he found a telegraph blank and began to write the message. There had been shots fired in the night, in a sally on the inclined railway, and one of them had scored his arm. If the rioters needed the strong hand to curb them, they should have it.

"Think of what it'll mean for this town that we've built up, son. We'll have to stay here—'er leastwise, I will, and there'll be blood on the streets for me to see as long as I walk 'em."

"I know," Tom reiterated, in the same monotonous tone. But his pen did not pause.

"Then there's your mammy," Caleb pleaded, and now the pen stopped.

"Mother must not know."

"How can we he'p her knowin', Buddy? I tell you, son, the very stones o' Paradise'll rise up to testify against us, now, and at the last great day, maybe."

The frown deepened between the young man's eyes.

"The old, old phantom!" he said, half to himself. "Will it never be laid, even for those who know it to be a myth?" And then to his father: "It's no use, pappy. I tell you we've got to take this thing by the neck. See here; that's how near they came to settling me last night," and he showed the perforated coat-sleeve.

Caleb Gordon was silenced. He resumed his restless pacing while Tom signed the call for help, read it over methodically, and placed it between dampened sheets in the letter-press. He had pushed the electric button which summoned Stub Helgerson, when the door opened silently and Jeff Ludlow's boy thrust face and hand through the aperture.

"Well; what is it?" demanded Tom, more sharply than he meant to. The strain was beginning to tell on his nerves.

"Hit's a letter for you-all from Mr. Stamford at the dee-po," said the boy. "He allowed maybe you-all'd gimme a nickel for bringin' hit."

The coin was found and passed, and the small boy was whooping and yelling for Helgerson to come and let him through the gates when Tom tore the envelope across and read the telegram. It was from the Indiana city, and it was signed by the chairman of the Board of Public Works.

"Proposals for water-pipe have been reopened, and your bid is accepted. Wire how soon you can begin to ship eighteen-inch mains," was what it said. Tom handed it to his father and stepped quickly to the telephone. There was a little delay in getting the ear of the president of the Iron City National at South Tredegar, and the bounding, pulsing blood of impatience made it seem interminable.

"Is that you, Mr. Henniker? This is Gordon at the Chiawassee plant, Gordonia. We have secured that Indiana contract I was telling you about, and I'll be in to see you on the ten o'clock train. Will you save five minutes for me? Thank you. Good-by."

Tom hung the ear-piece on its hook and turned to face his father.

"Have you surrounded it?" he laughed, with a little quaver of excitement in his voice, which he had been careful to master in the announcement to the bank president. "We live, pappy; we live and win! Get word to the men to come up here at three o'clock for their pay. Tell them we blow in again to-morrow, and they can all come back to work and no questions asked. Can you stay on your feet long enough to do all that?"

Caleb was nodding gravely; yet bewilderment was still in the saddle.

"But the money for the pay-rolls, son—this is only an order to go to work," he said, fingering the telegram doubtfully.

Tom laughed joyously.

"If I can't make Mr. Henniker believe that he can afford to carry us a while longer on the strength of that bit of yellow paper, I'll rob his bank. You get the men together by three o'clock, and I'll be here with the money. If I'm not, it will be because somebody has sandbagged me between the bank and the train."

Caleb was still wrestling with the incredible thing, but light was breaking in on him slowly.

"Hold on, son," he said, and the old-time smile was wrinkling at the corners of his eyes; "how much did you allow to make out o' this job? I disremember what you said when you talked about it before."

Tom checked off the items on his fingers.

"Enough to put us through the winter; enough to stand us on our feet independent of Duxbury Farley and his son; enough to let us pay Major Dabney the back royalties on the coal. More than this, it's going to use up iron—hundreds of tons of it. We'll buy out of our own yards, and the men shall have the back-pay dividends."

The general manager had taken his burned-out corn-cob pipe from his pocket and was looking at it speculatively.

"Well, now, if that's the case, I reckon I can go down to Hargis's and buy me a new pipe, Buddy; and I—I'll be switched if I don't do it right now."

And in such gladsome easing of the strain were the wheels of Chiawassee Consolidated oiled to their new whirlings on the road to fortune. If Caleb Gordon remembered how the miracle had been wrought, he said no word to clench his disapproval; and as for Tom—ah, well; it was not the first time in the history of the race that the end has served to justify the means—to make them clean and white and spotless, if need were.



XXII

LOVE

If Tom Gordon could have known how slightly the Dabney's European plans coincided with those of the Farleys, he might have had fewer heartburnings in those intervals when the harassing struggle for industrial existence gave him time to think of Ardea.

As a strict matter of fact, the voyage across, and some little guide-book touring of England, were the sum total of coincidence. On leaving London the Farleys set out on the grand tour which was to land them in Naples for the winter, while the Dabneys went directly to Paris and to a modest pension in the Rue Cambon to spend the European holiday in a manner better befitting the purse of a country gentleman.

So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music under a Parisian master—and was doing it. The Major found melancholy pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.

In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September they began to talk about going home.

"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon. "I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."

Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he generously concealed the symptoms—or thought he did. So the decision was finally left to Ardea.

She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.

This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.

He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.

As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.

The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea, shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.

The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, her courrier du place in the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.

Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the negative virtues. But the negative virtues, failing to score brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings. Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she had—or believed she had—her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in hand. Vincent's self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference, conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment. So she gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip and pointed its prow toward the headlands.

With rough weather on the homeward passage, she had space and opportunity to consider the consequences. Being the only good sailor in the trio, she had her own self-communings for company during the greater part of the six days, and the incident sentimental took on an aspect of finality which was rather dismaying. It was quite in vain that she sought comfort in the reflection that she was committed to nothing conclusive. Vincent Farley had not taken that view of it. True, he had asked for nothing more than a favorable attitude on her part; but she thought he would be less than a man if he had not seen his final answer foreshadowed in her acquiescence.

The finality admitted, a query arose. Was Vincent Farley the man who, giving her his best, could call out the best there was in her? It annoyed her to admit the query, or rather the doubt which fathered it; it distressed her when the doubt appeared to grow with the lengthening leagues of distance.

Now vacillation was not a Dabney failing; and the aftermath of these storm-tossed musings made for Vincent Farley's cause. Romance also, in the eternal feminine, is a constant quantity, and if it be denied the Romeo-and-Juliet form of expression, will find another. Vincent Farley, as man or as lover, presented obstacles to any idealizing process, but Ardea set herself resolutely to overcome them. Distance and time have other potentialities besides the obliterative: they may breed halos. When the French liner reached its New York slip, Ardea was remembering only the studied kindnesses, the conventional refinements, the correctnesses which, if they did seem artificial at times, were so many guarantees of self-respect: when the Great Southwestern train had roared around the cliffs of Lebanon with the returning exiles, and the locomotive whistle was sounding for Gordonia, some other of the negative virtues had become definitely positive, and the halo was beginning to be distinctly visible.

How Tom Gordon had informed himself of the precise day and train of their home-coming, Ardea did not think to inquire. But he was on the platform when the train drew in, and was the first to welcome them.

She was quick to see and appreciate the changes wrought in him, by time, by the Boston sojourn, by the summer's struggle with adverse men and things—though of this last she knew nothing as yet. It seemed scarcely credible that the big, handsome young fellow who was shaking hands with her grandfather, helping Miss Euphrasia with her multifarious belongings, and making himself generally useful and hospitable, could be a later reincarnation of the abashed school-boy who had sweated through the trying luncheon at Crestcliffe Inn.

"Not a word for me, Tom?" she said, when the last of Cousin Euphrasia's treasures had been rescued from the impatient train porter and added to the heap on the platform.

"All the words are for you—or they shall be presently," he laughed. "Just let me get your luggage out of pawn and started Deer-Traceward, and I'll talk you to a finish."

She stood by and looked on while he did it. Surely, he had grown and matured in the three broadening years! There was conscious manhood, effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him. She had a little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion such young men in the Old World—could not, perhaps.

Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he would have taken them from Major Dabney. Ardea marked this, too, and being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the scroll of esteem. Pete's respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent of nobility. The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.

When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside for three passengers.

"That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy," said Tom to Ardea. "Do you mind? Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as ever, but he's reasonably sure."

"Any way," said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in behind the carriage. Before they were half-way to the iron-works they had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.

"My land! but it's good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!" he declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little. Then: "It has been a full month of Sundays. Do you realize that?"

"Since we saw each other? It has been much longer than that, hasn't it?"

"Not so very much. I saw you in New York the day you sailed."

"You did! Where was I?"

"You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your grandfather and Miss Euphrasia."

"And you wouldn't stop to speak to us? I think that was simply barbarous!"

"Wasn't it?" he laughed. "But the time was horribly unpropitious."

"Why?"

He looked at her quizzically.

"I'm wondering whether I'd better lie out of it; say I knew you were on your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and all that. Shall I do it?"

She did not reply at once. The undeceived inner self was telling her that here lay the parting of the ways; that on her answer would be built the structure, formal or confidential, of their future intercourse. Loyalty to the halo demanded self-restraint; but every other fiber of her was reaching out for a reestablishment of the old boy-and-girl openness of heart and mind. Her hesitation was only momentary.

"You are just as rude and Gothic as you used to be, aren't you, Tom? Don't you know, I'm childishly glad of it; I was afraid you might be changed in that way, too,—and I don't want to find anything changed. You needn't be polite at the expense of truth—not with me."

He looked at her with love in his eyes.

"This time, you mean—or all the time."

"All the time, if you like."

"I do like; there has got to be some one person in this world to whom I can talk straight, Ardea."

She laughed a little laugh of half-constraint.

"You speak as if there had been a vacancy."

"There has been—for just about three years. I remember you told me once that I'd find two kinds of friends: those who would refuse to believe anything bad of me, and those who would size me up and still stick to me. You are the only one of that second lot I have discovered thus far."

"We are getting miles away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel," she reminded him.

"No; we are just now approaching it from the proper direction. I had my war paint on that morning, and I wasn't fit to talk to you."

"Business?" she queried.

"Yes. Didn't the Major tell you about it?"

"Not a word. I hope you didn't quarrel with him, too?"

He marked the adverb of addition and wondered if Vincent Farley had been less reticent than Major Dabney.

"No; I didn't quarrel with your grandfather."

"But you did quarrel with Mr. Farley?—or was it with Vincent?"

He smiled and shook his head.

"We can't do it, Ardea—go back to the old way, you know. You see there's a stump in the road, the very first thing."

"I shan't admit it," she said half-defiantly. "I am going to make you like the Farleys."

He shook his head again. "You'll have to make a Christian of me first, and teach me how to love my enemies."

"Don't you do that now?"

"No; not unless you are my enemy; I love you."

She looked up at him appealingly.

"Don't make fun of such things, Tom. Love is sacred."

"I was never further from making fun of things in my life. I mean it with every drop of blood in me. You said you didn't want to find me changed; I'm not changed in that, at least."

"You ridiculous boy!" she said; but that was only a stop-gap, and Longfellow added another by coming to a stand opposite a vast obstruction of building material half damming the white road. "What are you doing here—building more additions?" she asked.

"No," said Tom. "It is a new plant—a pipe foundry."

"Don't tell me we are going to have more neighbors in Paradise," she said in mock concern.

"I'll tell you something that may shock you worse than that: the owner of this new plant has camped down right next door to Deer Trace."

"How dreadful! You don't mean that!"

"Oh, but I do. He's a young man, of poor but honest parentage, with a large eye for the main chance. I shouldn't be surprised if he took every opportunity to make love to you."

"How absurd you can be, Tom! Who is he?"

"He is Mr. Caleb Gordon's son. I think you think you know him, but you don't; nobody does."

"Really, Tom? Have you gone into business for yourself? I thought you had another year at Boston."

"I have another year coming to me, but I don't know when I shall get it. And I am in business for myself; though perhaps I should be modest and call it a firm—Gordon and Gordon."

"What does the firm do?"

"A number of things; among others, it buys the entire iron output of the Chiawassee Consolidated, just at present."

"Dear me!" she said; "how fine and large that sounds! If I should say anything like that you would tell me that Brag was a good dog, but—"

He grinned ecstatically. It was so like old times—the good old times—to be bandying good-tempered abuse with her.

"I do brag a lot, don't I? But have you ever noticed that I 'most always have something to brag about? This time, for instance. I built this new firm, and it is all that has kept Chiawassee from going into the sheriff's hands any time during the past six months."

Longfellow had picked his way judiciously around the obstructions and through the gap in the boundary hills, and was jogging in a vertical trot up the valley pike made clean and hard and stony-white by the sweeping and hammering of the autumn rains. The mingled clamor of the industries was left behind, but the throbbing pulsations of the big blowing-engines hung in the air like the sighings of an imprisoned giant. They were passing the miniature copy of Morwenstow Church when Ardea spoke again.

"You have been home all summer?" she asked.

"At home and on the road, trying to hypnotize somebody into buying something—anything—made out of cast-iron. Ah, girl! it's been a bitter fight!"

She was instantly sympathetic; more, there was a little thrill of vicarious triumph to go with the sympathy. She was sure he had won, or was winning, the battle.

"We read something about the hard times in the American papers," she said. "You don't know how far away anything like that seems when there is an ocean between. And I was hoping all the time that our homeland down here was escaping."

"Escaping? You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is dead—too dead to bury. You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?—you will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it again. When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other furnaces in the South—only worse."

"How worse, Tom?"

He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.

"Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company."

She laid a restraining hand on his arm.

"Let us understand each other," she said gently. "You must not say such things of Mr. Farley and—and his son to me. If you do, I can't listen."

"You don't believe what I say?"

"I believe you have convinced yourself. But you are vindictive; you know you are. And I mean to be fair and just."

He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.

"Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth. What is Vincent Parley to you—anything more than Eva's brother?"

Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such a pointed question. But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.

"He has asked me to be his wife, Tom."

"And you have consented?"

"I wonder if I have," she said half-musingly.

"Don't you know?" he demanded. And then, "Ardea, I'd rather see you dead and in your coffin!"

"Just why—apart from your prejudice?"

"It's Beauty and the Beast over again. You don't know Vint Farley."

"Don't I? My opportunities have been very much better than yours," she retorted.

"That may be, but I say you don't know him. He is a whited sepulcher."

"But you can not particularize," she insisted. "And the evidence is all the other way."

Tom was silent. During the summer of strugglings he had gone pretty deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the edge of criminality. Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court.

"The evidence isn't all one-sided," he asserted. "If you were a man, I could convince you in two minutes that both of the Farleys are rascals and hypocrites."

"Yet they are your father's business associates," she reminded him.

He saw the hopelessness of any argument on that side, and was silent again, this time until they had passed the Deer Trace gates and he had cut the buggy before the great Greek-pillared portico of the manor-house. When he had helped her out, she thanked him and gave him her hand quite in the old way; and he held it while he asked a single blunt question.

"Tell me one thing more, Ardea: do you love Vincent Farley?"

Her swift blush answered him, and he did not wait for her word.

"That settles it; you needn't say it in so many words. Isn't it a hell of a world, Ardea? I love you—love you as this man never will, never could. And with half his chance, I could have made you love me. I—"

"Don't, Tom! please don't," she begged, trying to free her hand.

"I must, for this once; then we'll quit and go back to the former things. You said a while ago that I was vindictive; I'll show you that I am not. When the time comes for me to put my foot on Vint Farley's neck, I'm going to spare him for your sake. Then you'll know what it means to have a man's love. Good-by; I'm coming over for a few minutes this evening if you'll let me."



XXIII

TARRED ROPES

"Now jest you listen at me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't goin' to make out to find no better hawss 'n that this side o' the Blue Grass. Sound as a dollar in lung and leg, highstepper—my Land! jest look at the way he holds his head—rides like a baby's cradle; why, that hawss is a perfect gentleman, Tom-Jeff."

Since her return from Europe Miss Ardea Dabney had taken to horseback riding, a five-mile canter before breakfast in the fine brisk air of the autumn mornings; and Tom had discovered that he needed a saddle animal. Wherefore Brother Japheth was parading a handsome bay up and down before the door of the small office building of the new foundry, descanting glowingly on its merits, while Tom lounged on the step and pretended to make difficulties.

"You think he's a pretty good horse, do you, Japhe—worth the money?" he queried, with the air of one who is about to surrender, not to the fact, but to the presentation of it.

"If you cayn't stable him this winter and then get your money back on him in ary hawss market this side o' the Ohio River, I'll eat hawss for the rest o' my bawn days. Now that's fair, ain't it?"

"It's more than fair; it's generous. But let me ask you: is this protracted-meeting talk you're giving me, or just plain, every-day horse lies?"

Brother Japheth halted the parade and there was aggrieved reproachfulness in every line of his long, lantern-jawed face.

"Now lookee here; I didn't 'low to find you a-sittin' in the seat of the scornful, Tom-Jeff; I shore didn't. Ain't the good cause precious to your soul no mo' sence you to'd loose f'om your mammy's apron-string?"

Tom's shrewd overlooking of the horse-trader spoke eloquently of the spiritual landmarks past and left behind.

"I don't know about you, Japhe. A fair half of the time you have me cornered; and the other half I'm wondering if you are just ordinary, canting hypocrite, like the majority of 'the brethren.'"

"Now see here, Tom-Jeff, you know a heap better'n that! First and fo'most, the majority ain't the majority, not by three sights and a horn-blow. Hit don't take more'n one good, perseverin' hypocrite in the chu'ch to spile the name o' chu'ch-member as fur as ye can holler it. You been on a railroad train and seen the con-duc-tor havin' a furss with the feller 'at pays for one seat and tries to hog four, and you've set back and said, 'My gosh! what a lot o' swine the human race is when hit gits away f'om home!' And right at that ve'y minute, mebbe, ther' was forty-five 'r fifty other people in that cyar goin' erlong, mindin' their own business, and not hoggin' any more 'n they paid for."

Tom smiled. "And you think that's the way it is in the church, do you?"

"I don't think nare' thing about hit; I know sufferin' well that's the how of it. Lord forgive me! didn't I let one scribe-an'-Pharisee keep me out o' the Isra'l o' God for nigh on to twenty year?"

"Who was it?" asked Tom, tranquilly curious.

"That ther' Jim Bledsoe, Brother Bill Layne's brother-in-law. He kep' Brother Bill out, too, for a right smart spell."

Tom was turning the memory pages half-absently.

"Let me see," he said. "Didn't I hear something about your whaling the everlasting daylights out of Bledsoe sometime last winter?"

Japheth hung his head after the manner of one who has spoiled a good argument by overstating it.

"That ther's jest like me," he said disgustedly. "I nev' do know enough to quit when I git thoo. Ain't it somewher's in the Bible 'at it says some folks is bawn troublesome, and some goes round huntin' for trouble, and some has trouble jammed up ag'inst 'em?"

"You can't prove it by me," Tom laughed. "I believe Shakespeare said something like that about greatness."

"Well, nev' mind; whoa, Saladin, boy, we'll git round to you ag'in, bime-by. As I was sayin', this here furss with Jim Bledsoe jest natchelly couldn't be holped, nohow. Hit was thisaway: 'long late in the fall I swapped Jim a piebald that was jest erbout the no-accountest hawss 'at ever had a bit in his mouth. I done told Jim all his meanness; but Jim, he 'lowed I was lyin' and made the trade anyhow. Inside of a week he was back here, callin' me names. I turned him first one cheek and then t'other, like the Good Book says, till they was jest plum' wo' out; and then I says, says I: 'Lookee here, Jim, you've done smack' me on both sides o' the jaw, and that ther's your priv'lege—me bein' a chu'ch-member in good and reg'lar standin', and no low-down, in-fergotten, turkey-trodden hypocrite like you. But right here the torections erbout what I'm bounden to do sort o' peter out. I got as many cheeks to turn as any of 'em, but that ain't sayin' that the stock's immortil' With that he ups and allows a heap mo' things about my morils; and me havin' turned both cheeks till my neck ached, and not havin' any mo' toe turn, what-all could I do—what-all would you 'a' done, Tom-Jeff?"