He thought he was alone in the moon-lighted dusk of the upper chamber when he closed the door and began to pace a rageful sentry-beat back and forth between the windows. But all unknown to him one of the three fell sisters, she of the implacable front and deep-set, burning eyes, had entered with him to pace evenly as he paced, and to lay a maddening finger on his soul.

Without vowing a vow and confirming it with an oath, he had partly turned a new life-leaf on the night of heavenly comfort when Ardea had sent him forth to tramp the pike with her kiss of sisterly love still caressing him. Beyond the needs of the moment, the recall of Norman and the determination to turn his back on the world struggle for the time being, he had not gone in that first fervor of the uplifting impulse. But later on there had been other steps: a growing hunger for success with self-respect kept whole; a dulling of the sharp edge of his hatred for the Farleys; a meliorating of his fierce contempt for all the hypocrites, conscious and subconscious.

With the changing point of view had come a corresponding change in the life. The men of his class had marked it, and there were helping hands held out, as there always are when one struggles toward the forward margin of any Slough of Despond. He had even gone to church at long intervals, having there the good hap to fall under the influence of a man whose faults were neither of ignorance nor of insincerity.

In these surface-scratchings of the heart soil there had sprung up a mixed growth in which the tares of self-righteousness began presently to overtop the good grain of humility. One must not be too exacting. If the world were not all good, neither was it all bad; at all events, it was the part of wisdom to make the magnanimous best of it, and to be thankful that the day-star of reason had at last arisen for one's self. At the close of his college course he would go home prepared to deal firmly but justly with the Farleys, prepared to show Ardea and the small world of Paradise a pattern of business rectitude, of filial devotion, of upright, honorable manhood. As Ardea had said, the example was needed; it should be forthcoming. And perhaps, in the dim and distant future, Ardea herself would look back to the night when her word and her kiss had fashioned a man after her own heart, and be—not sorry (true love was still stronger than prideful Phariseeism here), but a little regretful, it might be, that her love could not have gone where it was sent.

And now.... With Alecto's maddening finger pressed on the soul-hurt, no man is responsible. After the furious storm of upbubbling curses had spent itself there was a little calm, not of surcease but of vacuity, since even the cursing vocabulary has its limitations. Then a grouping of words long forgotten arrayed itself before him, like the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzer's banqueting hall.

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

He put his hands before his face to shut out the sight of the words. Farther on, he felt his way across the room to stand at the window where he could look across to the gray, shadowy bulk of the manor-house, to the house and to the window of the upper room which was Ardea's.

"They've got me down," he whispered, as if the words might reach her ear. "The devils have come back, Ardea, my love; but you can cast them out again, if you will. Ah, girl, girl! Vincent Farley will never need you as I need you this night!"



XXVIII

THE BURDEN OF HABAKKUK

During the first half of the year 1894, with Norman too busy at the pipe foundry to worry him, and the iron-master president too deeply engrossed in matters mechanical, Mr. Henry Dyckman, still bookkeeper and cashier for Chiawassee Consolidated, had fewer nightmares; and by the time he had been a month in undisputed command at the general office he had given over searching for a certain packet of papers which had mysteriously disappeared from a secret compartment in his desk.

Later, when the time for the return of the younger Gordon drew near, there was encouraging news from Europe. Dyckman had not failed to keep the mails warm with reports of the Gordon and Gordon success; with urgings for the return of the exiled dynasty; and late in May he had news of the home-coming intention. From that on there were alternating chills and fever. If Colonel Duxbury should arrive and resume the reins of management before Tom Gordon should reappear, all might yet be well. If not,—the alternative impaired the bookkeeper's appetite, and there were hot nights in June when he slept badly.

When Tom's advent preceded the earliest date named by Mr. Farley by a broad fortnight or more, the bookkeeper missed other of his meals, and one night fear and a sharp premonition of close-pressing disaster laid cold hands on him; and nine o'clock found him skulking in the great train shed at the railway station, a ticket to Canada in his pocket, a goodly sum of the company's money tightly buckled in a safety-belt next to his skin—all things ready for flight save one, the courage requisite to the final step-taking.

The following morning the premonition became a certainty. In the Gordonia mail there was a note from the younger Gordon, directing him to come to the office of the pipe foundry, bringing the cash-book and ledger for a year whose number was written out in letters of fire in the bookkeeper's brain. He went, again lacking the courage either to refuse or to disappear, and found Gordon waiting for him. There were no preliminaries.

"Good morning, Dyckman," said the tyrant, pushing aside the papers on his desk. "You have brought the books? Sit down at that table and open the ledger at the company's expense account for the year. I wish to make a few comparisons," and he took a thick packet of papers from a pigeonhole of the small iron safe behind his chair.

Dyckman was unbuckling the shawl-strap in which he had carried the two heavy books, but at the significant command he desisted, went swiftly to the door opening into the stenographer's room, satisfied himself that there were no listeners, and resumed his chair.

"You have cut out some of the preface, Mr. Gordon; I'll cut out the remainder," he said, moistening his dry lips. "You have the true record of the expense account in that package. I'm down and out; what is it you want?"

The inexorable one at the desk did not keep him in suspense.

"I want a written confession of just what you did, and what you did it for," was the direct reply. "You'll find Miss Ackerman's type-writer in the other room; I'll wait while you put it in type."

The bookkeeper's lips were dryer than before, and his tongue was like a stick in his mouth when he said:

"You're not giving me a show, Mr. Gordon; the poor show a common murderer would have in any court of law. You are asking me to convict myself."

Gordon held up the packet of papers.

"Here is your conviction, Mr. Dyckman—the original leaves taken from those books when you had them re-bound. I need your statement of the facts for quite another purpose."

"And if I refuse to make it? A cornered rat will fight for his life, Mr. Gordon."

"If you refuse I shall be reluctantly compelled to hand these papers over to our attorneys—reluctantly, I say, because you can serve me better just now out of jail than in it."

Dyckman made a final attempt to gain fighting space.

"It's an unfair advantage you're taking; at the worst, I am only an accessory. My principals will be here in a few days, and—"

"Precisely," was the cold rejoinder. "It is because your principals are coming home, and because they are not yet here, that I want your statement. Oblige me, if you please; my time is limited this morning."

There was no help for it, or none apparent to the fear-stricken; and for the twenty succeeding minutes the type-writer clicked monotonously in the small ante-room. Dyckman could hear his persecutor pacing the floor of the private office, and once he found himself looking about him for a weapon. But at the end of the writing interval he was handing the freshly-typed sheet to a man who was yet alive and unhurt.

Gordon sat down at his desk to read it, and again the roving eyes of the bookkeeper swept the interior of the larger room for the means to an end; sought and found not.

The eye-search was not fully concluded when Gordon pressed the electric button which summoned the young man who kept the local books of the Chiawassee plant across the way. While he waited he saw the conclusion of the eye-search and smiled rather grimly.

"You'll not find it, Dyckman," he said, divining the desperate purpose of the other; adding, as an afterthought: "and if you should, you wouldn't have the courage to use it. That is the fatal lack in your makeup. It is what kept you from taking the train last night with the money belt which you emptied this morning. You'll never make a successful criminal; it takes a good deal more nerve than it does to be an honest man."

The bookkeeper was sliding lower in his chair.

"I—I believe you are the devil in human shape," he muttered; and then he made an addendum which was an unconscious slipping of the under-thought into words: "It's no crime to kill a devil."

Gordon smiled again. "None in the least,—only you want to make sure you have a silver bullet in the gun when you try it."

Hereupon the young man from the office across the pike came in, and Gordon handed a pen to Dyckman.

"I want you to witness Mr. Dyckman's signature to this paper, Dillard," he said, folding the confession so that it could not be read by the witness; and when the thing was done, the young man appended his notarial attestation and went back to his duties.

"Well?" said Dyckman, when they were once more alone together.

"That's all," said Gordon curtly. "As long as you are discreet, you needn't lose any sleep over this. If you don't mind hurrying a little, you can make the ten-forty back to town."

Dyckman restrapped his books and made a show of hastening. But before he closed the office door behind him he had seen Gordon place the type-written sheet, neatly folded, on top of the thick packet, snapping an elastic band over the whole and returning it to its pigeonhole in the small safe.

Later in the day, Tom crossed the pike to the oak-shingled office of the Chiawassee Consolidated. His father was deep in the new wage scale submitted by the miners' union, but he sat up and pushed the papers away when his son entered.

"Have you seen this morning's Tribune?" asked Tom, taking the paper from his pocket.

"No; I don't make out to find much time for it before I get home o' nights," said Caleb. "Anything doin'?"

"Yes; they are having a hot time in Chicago and Pullman. The strike is spreading all over the country on sympathy lines."

"Reckon it'll get down to us in any way?" queried the iron-master.

"You can't tell. I'd be a little easy with Ludlow and his outfit on that wage scale, if I were you."

"I don't like to be scared into doin' a thing."

"No; but we don't want a row on our hands just now. Farley might make capital out of it."

Caleb nodded. Then he said: "Didn't I see Dyckman comin' out of your shanty 'long about eleven o'clock?"

"Yes; he came out to do me a little favor, and it went mighty near to making him sweat blood. Shall you need me any more to-day?"

"No, I reckon not. Goin' away?"

"I'm going to town on the five-ten, and I may not be back till late."

Tom's business in South Tredegar was unimportant. There was a word or two to be said personally in the ear of Hanchett, the senior member of the firm of attorneys intrusted with the legal concernments of Gordon and Gordon, and afterward a solitary dinner at the Marlboro. But the real object of the town trip disclosed itself when he took an electric car for the foot of Lebanon on the line connecting with the inclined railway running up the mountain to Crestcliffe Inn. He had not seen Ardea since the midwinter night of soul-awakenings; and Alecto's finger was still pressing on the wound inflicted by the closed doors of Mountain View Avenue and his father's misdirected sympathy.

He found Major Dabney smoking on the hotel veranda, and his welcome was not scanted here, at least. There was a vacant chair beside the Major's and the Major's pocket case of long cheroots was instantly forthcoming. Would not the returned Bachelor of Science sit and smoke and tell an old man what was going on in the young and lusty world beyond the mountain-girt horizons?

Tom did all three. His boyish awe for the old autocrat of Paradise had mellowed into an affection that was almost filial, and there was plenty to talk about: the final dash in the technical school; the outlook in the broader world; the great strike which was filling all mouths; the business prospects for Chiawassee Consolidated.

The moment being auspicious, Tom sounded the master of the Deer Trace coal lands on the reorganization scheme, and found nothing but complaisance. Whatever rearrangement commended itself to Tom and his father, and to Colonel Duxbury Farley, would be acceptable to the Major.

"I reckon I can trust you, Tom, and my ve'y good friend, youh fatheh, to watch out for Ardea's little fo'tune," was the way he put it. "I haven't so ve'y much longeh to stay in Paradise," he went on, with a silent little chuckle for the grim pun, "and what I've got goes to her, as a matteh of cou'se." Then he added a word that set Tom to thinking hard. "I had planned to give her a little suhprise on her wedding-day: suppose you have the lawyehs make out that block of new stock to Mistress Vincent Farley instead of to me?"

Tom's hard thinking crystallized into a guarded query.

"Of course, Major Dabney, if you say so. But wouldn't it be more prudent to make it over in trust for her and her children before she becomes Mrs. Farley?"

The piercing Dabney eyes were on him, and the fierce white mustaches took the militant angle.

"Tell me, Tom, have you had youh suspicions in that qua'teh, too? I'm speaking in confidence to a family friend, suh."

"It is just as well to be on the safe side," said Tom evasively. There was enough of the uplift left to make him reluctant to strike his enemy in the dark.

"No, suh, that isn't what I mean. You've had youh suspicions aroused. Tell me, suh, what they are."

"Suppose you tell me yours, Major," smiled the younger man.

Major Dabney became reflectively reminiscent. "I don't know, Tom, and that's the plain fact. Looking back oveh ouh acquaintance, thah's nothing in that young man for me to put a fingeh on; but, Tom, I tell you in confidence, suh, I'd give five yeahs of my old life, if the good Lord has that many mo' in His book for me, if the blood of the Dabneys didn't have to be—uh—mingled with that of these heah damned Yankees. I would, for a fact, suh!"

Tom rose and flung away the stub of his third cheroot.

"Then you'll let me place your third of the new stock in trust for her and her children?" he said. "That will be best, on all accounts. By the way, where shall I find Miss Ardea?"

"She's about the place, somewhahs," was the reply; and Tom passed on to the electric-lighted lobby to send his card in search of her.

Chance saved him the trouble. Some one was playing in the music-room and he recognized her touch and turned aside to stand under the looped portieres. She was alone, and again, as many times before, it came on him with the sense of discovery that she was radiantly beautiful—that for him she had no peer among women.

It was the score of a Bach fugue that stood on the music-rack, and she was oblivious to everything else until her fingers had found and struck the final chords. Then she looked up and saw him.

There was no greeting, no welcoming light in the slate-blue eyes; and she did not seem to see when he came nearer and offered to shake hands.

"I've been talking to your grandfather for an hour or more," he began, "and I was just going to send my card after you. Haven't you a word of welcome for me, Ardea?"

Her eyes were holding him at arm's length.

"Do you think you deserve a welcome from any self-respecting woman?" she asked in low tones.

His smile became a scowl—the anger scowl of the Gordons.

"Why shouldn't I?" he demanded. "What have I done to make every woman I meet look at me as if I were a leper?"

She rose from the piano-stool and confronted him bravely. It was now or never, if their future attitude each to the other was to be succinctly defined.

"You know very well what you have done," she said evenly. "If you had a spark of manhood left in you, you would know what a dastardly thing you are doing now in coming here to see me."

"Well, I don't," he returned doggedly. "And another thing: I'm not to be put off with hard words. I ask you again what has happened? Who has been lying about me this time?"

Three other guests of the hotel were entering the music-room and the quarrel had to pause. Ardea had a nerve-shaking conviction that it would never do to leave it in the air. He must be made to understand, once for all, that he had sinned beyond forgiveness. She caught up the light wrap she had been wearing earlier in the evening and turned to one of the windows opening on the rear veranda. "Come with me," she whispered; and he followed obediently.

But there was no privacy to be had out of doors. There was a goodly scattering of people in the veranda chairs enjoying the perfect night and the white moonlight. Ardea stopped suddenly.

"You were intending to walk down to the valley?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I will walk with you to the cliff edge."

It was a short hundred yards, and there were many abroad in the graveled walks: lovers in pairs, and groups of young people pensive or chattering. So it was not until they stood on the very battlements of the western cliff that they were measurably alone.

"Has no one told you what happened last March—on the day of the ice storm?" she asked coldly.

"No."

"Don't you know it without being told?"

"Of course, I don't; why should I?"

His angry impassiveness shook her resolution. It seemed incredible that the most accomplished dissembler could rise to such supreme heights of seeming.

"I used to think I knew you," she said, faltering, "but I don't. Why don't you despise hypocrisy and double-dealing as you used to?"

"I do; more heartily than ever."

"Yet, in spite of that, you have—oh, it is perfectly unspeakable!"

"I am taking your word for it," he rejoined gloomily. "You are denying me what the most wretched criminal is taught to believe is his right—to know what he is accused of."

"Have you forgotten that night last winter when you—when I saw you at the gate with Nancy Bryerson?"

"I'm not likely to forget it."

She seized her courage and held it fast, putting maidenly shame to the wall.

"Tom, it is a terrible thing to say—and your punishment will be terrible. But you must marry Nancy!"

"And father another man's child?—not much!" he answered brutally.

"And father your own children—two of them," she said, with bitter emphasis.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" he said, with a deeper scowl. "So there are two of them, are there? That's why no woman in Mr. Farley's country colony is at home to me any more, I suppose." And then, still more bitterly: "Of course, you are all sure of this?—Nan has at last confessed that I am the guilty man?"

"You know she has not, Tom. Her loyalty is still as strong and true at it is mistaken. But your duty remains."

He was standing on the brink of the cliff, looking down on Paradise Valley, spread like a silver-etched map far below in the moonlight. The flare and sough of the furnace at the iron-works came and went with regular intermittency; and just beyond the group of Chiawassee stacks a tiny orange spot appeared and disappeared like a will-o'-the-wisp. He was staring down at the curious spot when he said:

"If I say that I have no duty toward Nan, you will believe it is a lie—as you did once before. Have you ever reflected that it is possible to trample on love until it dies—even such love as I bear you?"

"It is a shame for you to speak of such things to me, Tom. Consider what I have endured—what you have made me endure. People said I was standing by you, condoning a sin that no right-minded young woman should condone. I bore it because I thought, I believed, you were sorry. And at that very time you were deceiving me—deceiving every one. You have dragged me in the very dust of shame!"

"There is no shame save what we make for ourselves," he retorted. "One day, according to your creed, we shall stand naked before your God, and before each other. In that day you will know what you have done to me to-night. No, don't speak, please; let me finish. The last time we were together you gave me a strong word, and—and you kissed me. For the sake of that word and that kiss I went out into the world a different man. For the little fragment of your love that you gave me then, I have lived a different man from that day to this. Now you shall see what I shall be without it."

Before he had finished she had turned from him gasping, choking, strangling in the grip of a mighty passion, new-born and yet not new. With the suddenness of a revealing flash of lightning she understood; knew that she loved him, that she had been loving him from childhood, not because, but in spite of everything, as he had once defined love. It was terrible, heartbreaking, soul-destroying. She called on shame for help, but shame had fled. She was cold with a horrible fear lest he should find out and she should be for ever lost in the bottomless pit of humiliation.

It was the sight of the little orange-colored spot glowing and growing beyond the Chiawassee chimneys that saved her.

"Look!" she cried. "Isn't that a fire down in the valley just across the pike from the furnace? It is a fire!"

He made a field-glass of his hands and looked long and steadily.

"You are quite right," he said coolly. "It's my foundry. Can you get back to the hotel alone? If you can, I'll take the short cut down through the woods. Good night, and—good-by." And before she could reply, he had lowered himself over the cliff's edge and was crashing through the underbrush on the slopes below.



XXIX

AS BRUTES THAT PERISH

It was the office building of the pipe foundry that burned on the night of July fifteenth, and the fire was incendiary. Suspicion, put on the scent by the night-watchman's story, pointed to Tike Bryerson as the criminal. The old moonshiner, in the bickering stage of intoxication, had been seen hanging about the new plant during the day, and had made vague threats in the hearing of various ears in Gordonia.

Wherefore the small world of Paradise and its environs looked to see a warrant sworn out for the mountaineer's arrest; and when nothing was done, gossip reawakened to say that Tom Gordon did not dare to prosecute; that Bryerson's crime was a bit of wild justice, so recognized by the man whose duty it was to invoke the law.

It was remarked, also, that neither of the Gordons had anything to say, and that an air of mystery enveloped the little that they did. The small wooden office building was a total loss, but the night shift at the Chiawassee had saved most of the contents; everything of value except the small iron safe which had stood behind the manager's desk in the private office. The safe, as the onlookers observed, was taken from the debris and conveyed, unopened, across the road to the Chiawassee laboratory and yard office. Whether or not its keepings were destroyed by the fire, was known only to the younger Gordon, who, as the foreman of the Chiawassee night shift informed a Tribune reporter, had broken it open himself, deep in the small hours of the night following the fire, and behind the locked door of the furnace laboratory.

At another moment South Tredegar newspaperdom might have made something of the little mystery. But there were more exciting topics to the fore. The great strike, with Chicago and Pullman as its storm-centers, was gripping the land in its frenzied fist, and the press despatches were greedy of space. Hence, young Gordon was suffered to open his safe in mysterious secrecy; to rebuild his burned office; and to let the incendiary, sufficiently identified by the watchman, it was believed, go scot-free.

With the greater land-wide interest to divert it, even Paradise failed to note the curious change that had come over the younger of the Gordons, dating from the night of burnings. But the few who came in contact with him in the business day saw and felt it. Miss Ackerman, the pipe-works stenographer, quit when her week was up. It was nothing that the young manager had said or done; but, as she confided to her sister, more fortunately situated in town, it was like being caged with a living threat. Even Norman, the trusted lieutenant, was cut out of his employer's confidence; and for hours on end in the business day the card "Not in" would be displayed on the glass-paneled door of the private room in the rebuilt office.

Not to make a mystery of it for ourselves, Tom had passed another milestone in the descent to the valley of lost souls. Or rather, let us say, he had taken a longer step backward toward the primitive. Daggered amour-propre is rarely a benign wound. Oftener than not it gangrenes, and there is loss of sound tissue and the setting-up of strange and malevolent growth. With the passing of the first healthful shock of honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab dealt with Amasa became the one thing worth living for.

The first step was taken in secrecy. One day a stranger, purporting to be a walking delegate for the United Miners, but repudiated as such by check-weigher Ludlow, took up his residence in Gordonia and began to interest himself, quite unminer-like, in the various mechanical appliances of the Chiawassee plant, and particularly in the different sources of its water supply.

Divested of his cloakings, this sham walking delegate was a Pinkerton man, detailed grudgingly from the Chicago storm-center on Tom's requisition. His task was to scrutinize Nancy Bryerson's past, and to identify, if possible, one or more of the three men who, in January of the year 1890, had inspected and repaired the pipe-line running from the coke-yard tank up to the barrel-spring on high Lebanon.

To the detective the exclusion card on Tom's door did not apply, and the conferences between the hired and the hirer were frequent and prolonged. If we shall overhear one of them—the final one, held on the day of the Farleys' return to Paradise and Warwick Lodge—it will suffice.

"It looks easy enough, as you say, Mr. Gordon," the human ferret is explaining; "but in point of fact there's nothing to work on—less than nothing. Three years ago you had no regular repair gang, and when a job of that kind was to be done, any Tom, Dick or Harry picked up a helper or two and did it. But I think you can bet on one thing: none of the three men who made that inspection is at present in your employ."

"In other words, you'd like to get back to your job at Pullman," snaps Tom.

"Oh, I ain't in any hurry! That job looks as if it would keep for a while longer. But I don't like to take a man's good money for nothing; and that's about what I'm doing here."

Tom swings around to his desk and writes a check.

"I suppose you have no further report to make on the woman?"

"Nothing of any importance. I told you where she is living—in a little cabin up on the mountain in a settlement called Pine Knob."

"Yes; but I found that out for myself."

"So you did. Well, she's living straight, as far as anybody knows; and if you can believe what you hear, the only follower she ever had was a young mountaineer named Kincaid. I looked him up; he's been gone from these parts for something over three years. He is ranching in Indian Territory, and only came back last week. You can check him off your list."

"He was never on, and I have no list," says the manhunter grittingly. "But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Beckham," passing the signed check to the other, "I shall begin where you leave off, and end by finding my man."

"I hope you do, I'm sure," says the Pinkerton, moved by the liberal figure of the check. "And if there's anything more the Agency can do—"

In the afternoon of the same day, when the self-dismissed detective was speeding northward toward Chicago and the car-burners, Tom saddled the bay and rode long and hard over a bad mountain cart track to the hamlet of Pine Knob. It was a measure of his abandonment that he was breaking his promise to Ardea; and another of his reckless singleness of purpose that he rode brazenly through the little settlement to Nan's door, dismounted and entered as if he had right.

The cabin was untenanted, but he found Nan sitting on the slab step of a rude porch at the back, nursing her child. She greeted him without rising, and her eyes were downcast.

"I've come for justice, Nan," he said, without preface, seating himself on the end of the step and flicking the dust from his leggings with his riding-crop. "You know what they're saying about us—about you and me. I want to know who to thank for it: what is the man's name?"

She did not reply at once, and when she lifted the dark eyes to his they were full of suffering, like those of an animal under the lash.

"I nev' said hit was you," she averred, after a time.

"No; but you might as well. Everybody believes it, and you haven't denied it. Who is the man?"

"I cayn't tell," she said simply.

"You mean you won't tell."

"No, I cayn't; I'm livin' on his money, Tom-Jeff."

"No, you are not. What makes you say that?"

"She told me I was."

"Who? Miss Dabney?"

Her nod was affirmative, and he went on: "Tell me just what she said; word for word, if you can remember."

The answer came brokenly.

"I was ashamed—you don't believe hit, but hit's so. I allowed it was her money. When I made out like I'd run off, she said, 'No; it's his money 'at's bein' spent for you, and you have a right to it.'"

Tom was silent for a time; then he said the other necessary word.

"She believes I am the man who wronged you, Nan. It was my money."

The woman half rose and then sat down again, rocking the child in her arms.

"You're lyin' to me, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Hit's on'y a lie to make me tell!" she panted.

"No, it's the truth. I was sorry for you and helped you because—well, because of the old times. But everybody has misunderstood, even Miss Dabney."

Silence again; the silence of the high mountain plateau and the whispering pines. Then she asked softly:

"Was you aimin' to marry her, Tom-Jeff?"

His voice was somber. "I've never had the beginning of a chance; and besides, she is promised to another man."

The woman was breathing hard again. "I heerd about that, too—jest the other day. I don't believe hit!"

"It is true, just the same. But I didn't come out here to talk about Miss Dabney. I want to know a name—the name of a man."

She shook her head again and relapsed into unresponsiveness.

"I cayn't tell; he'd shore kill me. He's always allowed he'd do hit if I let on."

"Tell me his name, and I'll kill him before he ever gets a chance at you," was the savage rejoinder.

"D'ye reckon you'd do that, Tom-Jeff—for me?"

The light of the old allurement was glowing in the dark eyes when she said it, but there was no answering thrill of passion in his blood. For one moment, indeed, the bestial demon whispered that here was vengeance of a sort, freely proffered; but the fiercer devil thrust this one aside, and Tom found himself looking consciously and deliberately into the abyss of crime. Once he might have said such a thing in the mere exuberance of anger, meaning nothing more deadly than the retaliatory buffet of passion. But now—

It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do—if iron-shod chance, blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface it. Who first took it on him to say, Thou shalt not kill? What were any or all of the prohibitions but the frantic shrillings of some of the atoms to the others?

In the clear outlook Thomas Gordon saw himself as one whose foot was already across the threshold. True, he had thus far broken with the world of time-honored traditions only in part. But why should he scruple to be wholly free? If the man whose deed of brutality or passion was disturbing the chanceful equilibrium for two other human dust-grains should be identified, why should he not be effaced?

The child at Nan's breast stirred in its sleep and threw up its tiny hands in the convulsive movement which is the human embryo's first unconscious protest against the helplessness of which it is born inheritor. Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.

"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied the spring for me—robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall blot him out—like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments.

The glow in the dark eyes of the woman had died down again, and her voice was hard and lifeless when she said:

"But not for me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't wantin' to kill him like my brother would, if I had one."

"No; not at all for you, Nan," he said half-absently. And then he tramped away to the gate, and put a leg over Saladin, and rode down the straggling street of the little settlement, again in the face and eyes of all who cared to see.

The bay had measured less than a mile of the homeward way when there came a clatter of hoof-beats in the rear. Tom awoke out of the absent fit, spoke to Saladin and rode the faster. Nevertheless, the pursuing horseman overtook him, and a drawling voice said:

"Hit's right smart wicked to shove the bay thataway down-hill, son."

Tom pulled his horse down to a walk. He was in no mood for companionship, but he knew Pettigrass would refuse to be shaken off.

"Where have you been?" he asked sourly.

"Me? I been over to McLemore's Valley, lookin' at some brood-mares that old man Mac is tryin' to sell the Major."

"Did you come through Pine Knob?"

"Shore, I did. I was a-settin' on Brother Bill Layne's porch whilst you was talkin' to Nan Bryerson. Seems sort o' pitiful you cayn't let that pore gal alone, Tom-Jeff."

"That's enough," said Tom hotly. "I've heard all I'm going to about that thing, from friends or enemies."

"I ain't no way shore about that," said the horse-trader easily. "I was 'lottin' to say a few things, m'self."

Tom pulled the bay up short in the cart track.

"There's the road," he said, pointing. "You can have the front half or the back half—whichever you like."

Japheth's answer was a good-natured laugh and a tacit refusal to take either.

"You cayn't rile me thataway, boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take your medicine like a man."

Since there appeared to be no help for it, Tom set his horse in motion again, and Japheth gave him a mile of silence in which to cool down.

"Now you listen at me, son," the horse-trader began again, when he judged the cooling process was sufficiently advanced. "I ain't goin' to tell no tales out o' school this here one time. But you got to let Nan alone, d'ye hear?"

"Oh, shut up!" was the irritable rejoinder. "I'll go where I please, and do what I please. You seem to forget that I'm not a boy any longer!"

"Ya-as, I do; that's the toler'ble straight fact," drawled the other. "But I ain't so much to blame; times you ack like a boy yit, Tom-Jeff."

Tom was silent again, turning a thing over in his mind. It was a time to bend all means to the one end, the trivial as well as the potent.

"Tell me something, Japhe," he said, changing front in the twinkling of an eye. "Is Nan coming back to the dog-keeper's cabin when the family leaves the hotel?"

"'Tain't goin' to make any difference to you if she does," said Pettigrass, wondering where he was to be hit next.

"It may, if you'll do me a favor. You'll be where you can see and hear. I want to know who visits her—besides Miss Ardea."

Brother Japheth's smile was more severe than the sharpest reproach.

"Still a-harpin' on that old string, are ye? Say, Tom-Jeff, I been erbout the best friend you've had, barrin' your daddy, for a right smart spell o' years. Don't you keep on tryin' to th'ow dust in my eyes."

"Call it what you please; I don't care what you think or say. But when you find a man hanging around Nan—"

"They's one right now," said the horse-trader casually.

Tom reined up as if he would ride back to Pine Knob forthwith.

"Who is it?" he demanded.

"Young fellow named Kincaid—jest back f'om out West, somewheres. Brother Bill Layne let on to me like maybe he'd overlook what cayn't be he'ped, and marry Nan anyhow. And that's another reason you got to keep away."

"Let up on that," said Tom, stiffening again. "If you had been where you could have used your ears as you did your eyes back yonder at Pine Knob, you'd know more than you seem to know now."

There was silence between them from this on until the horses were footing it cautiously down the bridle-path connecting the cart track with the Paradise pike. Then Pettigrass said:

"Allowin' ther' might be another man, Tom-Jeff, jest for the sake of argyment, what-all was you aimin' to do if you found him?"

It was drawing on to dusk, and the electric lights of Mountain View Avenue and the colonial houses were twinkling starlike in the blue-gray haze of the valley. They had reach the junction of the steep bridle-path with the wood road which edged the Dabney horse pasture and led directly to the Deer Trace paddocks, and when Japheth pulled his horse aside into the short cut, Tom drew rein to answer.

"It's nobody's business but mine, Japhe; but I'd just as soon tell you: it runs in my head that he needs killing mighty badly, and I've thought about it till I've come to the conclusion that I'm the appointed instrument. You turn off here? Well, so long."

Brother Japheth made the gesture of leave-taking with his riding-switch, and sent his mount at an easy amble down the wood road, apostrophizing great nature, as his habit was. "Lawzee! how we pore sinners do tempt the good Lord at every crook and elbow in the big road, toe be shore! Now ther's Tom-Jeff, braggin' how he'll be the one to kill the pappy o' Nan's chillern: he's a-ridin' a mighty shore-footed hawss, but hit do look like he'd be skeered the Lord might take him at his word and make that hawss stumble. Hit do, for a fact!"



XXX

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

On the night of the fire, Ardea had remained on the cliff's edge until the blaze died down and disappeared, which was some little time, she decided, before Tom could possibly have reached the foot of the mountain.

When there was nothing more to be seen she went back to the hotel and called up the Young-Dicksons, whose cottage commanded a short-range view of the Gordon plant. It was Mrs. Young-Dickson who answered the telephone. Yes; the fire was one of the foundry buildings—the office, she believed. Mr. Young-Dickson had gone over, and she would have him call up when he should return, if Miss Dabney wished.

Ardea said it did not matter, and having exhausted this small vein of distraction she returned to the music-room and the Bach fugue, as one, who has had a fall, rises and tries to go on as before, ignoring the shock and the bruisings. But the shock had been too severe. Tom Gordon had proved himself a wretch, beyond the power of speech to portray, and—she loved him! Not all the majestic harmonies of the inspired Kapellmeister could drown that terrible discord.

The next day it was worse. There was a goodly number of South Tredegar people summering at the Inn, and hence no lack of companionship. But the social distractions were powerless in the field where Bach and the piano had failed, and after luncheon Ardea shut herself in her room, desperately determined to try what solitude would do.

That failed, too, more pathetically than the other expedients. It was to no purpose that she went bravely into the torture chamber of opprobrium and did penance for the sudden lapse into the elemental. It was the passion of the base-born, she cried bitterly. He was unworthy, unworthy! Why had he come? Why had she not refused to see him—to speak to him?

Such agonizing questions flung themselves madly on the spear points of fact and were slain. He had come; she had spoken. Never would she forget the look in his eyes when he had said, "Good night, and—good-by;" nor could she pass over the half-threat in the words that had gone before the leave-taking. To what deeper depth despicable could he plunge, having already sounded the deepest of them all—that of unfaith, of infidelity alike to the woman he had wronged and to the woman he professed to love?

At dinner-time she sent word to her grandfather and her cousin that she was not feeling well, which was a mild paraphrasing of the truth, and had a piece of toast and a cup of tea sent to her room. The bare thought of going down to the great dining-room and sitting through the hour-long dinner was insupportable. She made sure every eye would see the shame in her face.

With the toast and tea the servant brought the evening paper, sent up by a doting Major Caspar, thoughtful always for her comfort. A marked item in the social gossip transfixed her as if it had been an arrow. The Farleys had sailed from Southampton, and the house renovators were already busy at Warwick Lodge.

After that the toast proved too dry to be eaten and the tea took on the taste of bitter herbs. Vincent Farley was returning, coming to claim the fulfilment of her promise. She had never loved him; she knew it as she had not known it before; and that was dreadful enough. But now there were a thousand added pangs to go with the conviction. For in the interval love had been found—found and lost in the same moment—and the solid earth was still reeling at the shock.

Ardea of the strong heart and the calm inner vision had always had a feeling bordering on contempt for women of the hysterical type; yet now she felt herself trembling and slipping on the brink of the pit she had derided.

The third day brought surcease of a certain sort. In the Gallic blood there is ever a trace of fatalism; the shrug is its expression. It was generations back to the D'Aubignes, yet now and then some remote ancestor would reach up out of the shadowy past to lay a compelling finger on the latest daughter of his race. Her word was passed, beyond honorable recall. Somewhere and in some way she would find the courage to tell Vincent that she did not love him as the wife should love the husband; and if he should still exact the price, she would pay it. After all, it would be a refuge, of a kind.

Now it is human nature to assume finalities and to base conduct on the assumption. Conversely, it is not in human nature to tighten one knot without loosening another. Having firmly resolved to be unflinchingly just to a Vincent Farley, one could afford to be humanely interested in the struggles shoreward or seaward of a poor swimmer in the welter of the tideway. She did not put it thus baldly, even in her secret thought. But the thing did itself.

The opportunities for marking the struggles of the poor swimmer were limited; but where is the woman who can not find the way when desire drives? Ardea had something more than a speaking acquaintance with Mr. Frederic Norman who, as acting-manager of the foundry plant in Tom's absence, had generously thrown one of the buildings open for a series of Sunday services for the workmen, promoted by Miss Dabney and the Reverend Francis Morelock. Since the warm nights had come, Norman had taken a room at the Inn, climbing the mountain from the Paradise side in time for dinner, and going down in the cool of the morning after an early breakfast.

Being first and last a man of business, he knew, or seemed to know, nothing of the valley gossip, or of the social sentence passed on his chief by the Mountain View Avenue court. When Ardea had assured herself of this, she utilized Norman freely as a source of information.

"You've known the boss a long time, haven't you, Miss Dabney?" asked the manager, one evening when Ardea had made room for him in a quiet corner of the veranda between the Major's chair and her own.

"Mr. Gordon? Oh, yes; a very long time, indeed. We were children together, you know."

"Well, I'd like to ask you one thing," said Frederic, the unfettered. "Did you ever get to know him well enough to guess what he'd do next? I thought I'd been pretty close to him, but once in a while he runs me up a tree so far that I get dizzy."

"As for example?" prompted Miss Ardea, leaving the personal question in the air.

"I mean his way of breaking out in a new spot every now and then. Last winter was one of the times, when he made up his mind between two minutes to chuck the pipe-making and go back to college. And now he's got another streak."

Miss Dabney made the necessary show of interest.

"What is it this time—too much business, or not enough?"

Norman rose and went to the edge of the veranda to flick his cigar ash into the flower border. When he came back he took a chair on that side of Miss Dabney farthest from the Major, who was dozing peacefully in a great flat-armed rocker.

"I declare I don't know, Miss Dabney; he's got me guessing harder than ever," he said, lowering his voice. "Since the night when the office burned he's been miles beyond me. While the carpenters were knocking together the shack we're in now, he put in the time wandering around the plant and looking as if he had lost something and forgotten what it was. Now that we've got into the new office, he shuts himself up for hours on end; won't see anybody—won't talk—scamps his meals half the time, and has actually got old Captain Caleb scared stiff."

"How singular!" said Ardea; but in her heart there was a great pity. "Do you suppose it was his loss in the fire?" she asked.

The manager shook his head.

"No; that was next to nothing, and we're doing a good business. It was something else; something that happened about the same time. If I can't find out what it is, I'll have to quit. He's freezing me out."

Ardea was inconsistent enough to oppose the alternative.

"No," she objected. "You mustn't do that, Mr. Norman. It is a friend's part to stand by at such times, don't you think?"

"Oh, I'm willing," was the generous reply. "Only I'm a little lonesome; that's all."

At another time Norman told her of the mysterious walking delegate, who was admitted to the private office when an anxious and zealous business manager was excluded. Later still, he made a half-confidence. Caleb, in despair at the latest transformation in his son, had finally unfolded his doubts and fears, business-wise, to the manager. The Farleys were returning; a legal notice of a called meeting of the Chiawassee Consolidated had been published; and it was evident that Colonel Duxbury meant to take hold with his hands. And Tom seemed to have forgotten that there was a battle to be fought.

Norman's recounting of this to Miss Dabney was the merest unburdening of an overloaded soul, and he was careful to garble it so that the prospective daughter-in-law of Colonel Duxbury might not be hurt. But Ardea read between the lines. Could it be possible that Tom's lifelong enmity for the Farleys, father and son, had even a little justification in fact? She put the thought away, resolutely setting herself the task of disbelieving. Yet, in the conversation which followed, Mr. Frederic Norman was very thoroughly cross-questioned without his suspecting it. Ardea meant to cultivate the open mind, and she did not dream that it was the newly-discovered love which was prompting her to master the intricacies of the business affair.

Two days later the Farleys came home, and since Vincent went promptly into residence at Crestcliffe, the evenings with Norman were interrupted. But they had served their purpose; and when Vincent began to press for the naming of an early day in September for the wedding, Ardea found it quite feasible to be calmly indefinite. You see, she had still to tell him that it had become purely a matter of promise-keeping with her—a task easy only for the heartless.

It was in the third week in August, a full month, earlier than their original plans contemplated, that the Dabneys returned to Paradise and Deer Trace. Miss Euphrasia was led to believe that the Major had tired of the hotel and the mountain; and the Major thought the suggestion came first from Miss Euphrasia.

But the real reason for the sudden return lay in a brief note signed "Norman," and conveyed privately to Ardea's hands by a grimy-faced boy from the foundry.

"Mr. Tom was waylaid by two footpads at the Woodlawn gates Saturday night and half killed," it read. "He is delirious and asks continually for you. Could you come?"



XXXI

THE NET OF THE FOWLER

Which of the Cynic Fathers was it who defined virtue as an attitude of the mind toward externals? One may not always recall a pat quotation on the spur of the moment, but it sounds like Demonax or another of the later school, when the philosophy of cynicism had sunk to the level of a sneer at poor human nature.

To say that Mr. Duxbury Farley, returning to find Chiawassee Consolidated in some sense at the mercy of the new pipe plant, regarded himself as a benefactor whose confidence had been grossly abused, is only to take him at his word. What, pray tell us, was Caleb Gordon in the crude beginning of things?—a village blacksmith or little more, dabbling childishly in the back-wash of the great wave of industry and living poverty-stricken between four log walls. To whom did he owe the brick mansion on the Woodlawn knoll, the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, the higher education of his son?

In Mr. Farley's Index Anathema, ingratitude ranked with crime. He had trusted these Gordons, and in return they had despoiled him; crippled a great and growing industry by segregating the profitable half of it; cast doubt on the good name of its founder by reversing his business methods. Chiawassee had been making iron by the hundreds of tons: where were the profits? The query answered itself. They were in the credit account of Gordon and Gordon, every dollar of which justly belonged to the parent company. Was not the pipe-making invention perfected by a Chiawassee stock-holder, who was also a Chiawassee employee, on Chiawassee time, and with Chiawassee materials? Then why, in the name of justice, was it not to be considered a legitimate Chiawassee asset?

Mr. Duxbury Farley asked these questions pathetically and insistently; at the Cupola Club, in the Manufacturers' Association, in season and out of season, wherever there was a willing ear to hear or the smallest current of public sentiment to be diverted into the channel so patiently dug for it. Was his virtuous indignation merely the mental attitude of all the Duxbury Farleys toward things external? That bubble is too huge for this pen to prick; besides, its bursting might devastate a world.

But if we may not probe too deeply into primal causes, we may still be regardful of the effects. Mr. Farley's bid for public sympathy was not without results. True, there were those who hinted that the veteran promoter was only paving the way for a coup de grace which should obliterate the Gordons, root and branch; but when the days and weeks passed, and Mr. Farley had done nothing more revolutionary than to reelect himself president of Chiawassee Consolidated, and to resume, with Dyckman as his lieutenant, the direction of its affairs, these prophets of evil were discredited.

It was observed also that Caleb remained general manager at Gordonia, and still received the patronizing friendship of former times; and to Tom the full width of the pike was given—a distance which he kept scrupulously. But as for the younger Gordon, he knew it was the lull before the storm, and he was watching the horizon for the signs of its coming—when he was not searching for clues or brooding behind the closed door of his private office with the devil of homicide for a closet companion.

During this reproachful period Vincent Farley gave himself unreservedly, as it would seem, to the sentimental requirements, spending much time on the mountain top and linking his days to Ardea's in a way to give her a sinking of the heart at the thought that this was an earnest of all time to come.

Mountain View Avenue had understood that the wedding was to be in September; but as late as the final week in August the cards were not out, and Miss Euphrasia, the source and fountainhead of the Avenue's information, could only say that she supposed the young people were making up for the time lost by separation and absence, and were willing to prolong the delights sentimental of an acknowledged engagement.

But at the risk of cutting sentiment to the very bone, it must be admitted that, after the first ardent attempt to commit Ardea to a certain and early day, the delay was of Vincent's own making; and the motive was basely commercial. Through Major Dabney, who was not proof against Colonel Duxbury's blandishments at short range, however much he might distrust them at a distance, Tom's plan of reorganization, with the suggestion of the trusteeship for Ardea's third, had become known to the Farleys. Thereupon ensued a conference of two held in Vincent's room in the hotel, and sentence of extinction was passed on Tom and Caleb.

"The ungrateful cub!" was Colonel Duxbury's indignant comment. "To use his influence over Major Dabney to sequestrate, absolutely sequestrate, a full third of our property!"

"Forewarned is forearmed," said the son coolly. "It's up to us to break the slate."

"We'll do it, never fear. Just give me a little more time in which to win public sentiment over to our side, and don't press Ardea to name the exact day until I give the word," was the promoter's parting injunction to his son; and Vincent trimmed his sails accordingly, as we have seen.

Planting the good seed, which was a little later to yield an abundant harvest of public approbation sanctioning anything he might see fit to do to the Gordons, was a congenial task to Mr. Farley; but in the midst it was rather rudely interrupted by a belated unburdening on the part of his first lieutenant in the South Tredegar offices.

Dyckman held his peace as long as he dared; in point of fact he did not speak until he saw his superiors rushing blindly into the pit digged for their feet by the astute young tyrant of the pipe foundry. If they could have fallen without carrying him with them, it is conceivable that the bookkeeper might have remained dumb. But their immunity was doubly his, and the end of it was a bad quarter of an hour for him, two of them, to be precise: the first, in which he told the president and the treasurer the story of the missing cash-book and ledger pages and the extorted confession, and the other, during which he sat under a scathing fire of abuse poured on him by the younger of his two listeners. After it was over, he escaped to the welcome refuge of his own office while father and son took counsel together against this new and unsuspected peril.

"Anybody but an idiot like Dyckman would have found out long ago if those papers were burned in Gordon's safe," snapped Vincent, when the danger had been duly weighed and measured.

The president shook his head mournfully.

"Anybody but Dyckman would have burned them himself, you'd think. It was criminally careless in him not to do so."

"They are the key to the lock," summed up the younger man. "We've got to have them."

"Assuredly—if they are in existence."

"You needn't try to squeeze comfort out of that. I tell you, they went through the fire all right, and Tom has them."

"I am afraid you are right, Vincent; afraid, also, that Dyckman so far forgot himself as to set fire to Gordon's office in the hope of retrieving his own neglect. But how are we to regain them?" Mr. Farley's weapons were two, only: first persuasion, and when that failed, corruption.

Vincent's cold blue eyes were darkening. The little virtues interpose but a slight barrier to a sharp attack of the large vices.

"The fight has fallen into halves," he said briefly. "You go on with your part as if nothing had happened, and I'll do mine. Has the old iron-melter been taken in on it, do you think?"

"No; I don't believe Caleb knows."

"That's better. Are you going up the mountain to-night?"

"Yes, I had thought of it. Eva wants me to take her."

"All right; you go, and get Major Dabney to yourself for a quiet half-hour. Tell him we are all ready to close the deal, and we're only waiting on the Gordons. I'll be up to dinner, and if anybody asks for me later, let it be understood that I have gone to my room to write letters."

This bomb-hurling of Dyckman's occurred on the Wednesday. That night, between the hours of nine and eleven, the new steel safe in Tom Gordon's private office was broken open and ransacked, though nothing was taken. On Thursday afternoon, while Martha Gordon was over at Deer Trace training the new growth on Ardea's roses, Tom's room at Woodlawn was thoroughly and systematically pillaged: drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor, the closets were stripped of their contents, and even the bed mattresses were ripped open and destroyed.

Mrs. Martha was terrified, as so bold a daylight housebreaking gave her a right to be; and Caleb was for sending to the county workhouse for the bloodhounds. But Tom was apparently unmoved.

"It won't happen again," he said; and it did not. But on the Saturday evening, just before the late dinner-hour at Woodlawn, Japheth Pettigrass, who had been trying to halter a shy filly running loose in the field across the pike, saw a stirring little drama enacted at the Woodlawn gates; saw it, and played some small part in it.

It centered on Tom, who was late getting home. He never rode with his father now if he could avoid it, and Japheth saw him swinging along up the pike, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of his short coat. The Woodlawn entrance was a walled semicircle giving back from the roadway, with the carriage gates hinged to great stone pillars in the center, and a light iron grille at the side for foot-passengers. Tom's hand was on the latch of the little gate when two men darted from the shadow of the nearest pillar and flung themselves on him.

Japheth saw them first and gave a great yell of warning. Tom turned at the cry, and so was not taken entirely unawares. But the two had beaten him down and were busily searching him when Japheth dashed across the pike, shouting as he ran. The footpads persisted until the horse-trader came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men with blackened faces and hands. Then they sprang up and vanished in the gathering dusk.

Tom was conscious when Pettigrass got him on his feet and hastily bound a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head. He was still conscious when Japheth walked him slowly up the path to the house, and was sanely concerned lest his mother should be frightened.

But after they got him to bed he sank into an inert sleep out of which he awoke the next morning wildly delirious. Ardea's name was oftenest on his lips in his ravings, and while his strength remained, his calling for her was monotonously insistent. He seemed to think she was at the great house across the lawns, and it took the united efforts of Japheth and Norman to hold him when he tried to get to the window to shout across for her.

Norman stood it until late Monday afternoon. Then, when Caleb had relieved him at Tom's bedside, he drove down to Gordonia and wrote the note to Miss Dabney, sending it up the mountain by one of the Helgerson boys with strict injunctions to give it to Miss Ardea herself.

The Dabneys came down from the mountain Tuesday morning, and Ardea was so far from disregarding her summons that she stopped the carriage at the Woodlawn gates and went directly to comfort Mrs. Martha and to offer her services in the sick-room. Tom was in one of his stubbornest paroxysms when she entered, but at the touch of her hand he became quiet, and a little later fell into a deep sleep, the first since the Saturday night of coma and stertorous breathings.

That same afternoon Crestcliffe Inn lost another guest, and the smoking-room at Warwick Lodge was lighted far into the night. Two men talked in low tones behind the carefully-shaded windows, one of them, the younger, lounging in the depths of an easy-chair, and the other pacing the floor in deepest abstraction.

"I only know what Ardea tells me," said the lounger, answering the final question put by the floor pacer. "He's out of his head—and out of the way, temporarily, at least. Now is your time to strike."

Mr. Duxbury Farley nodded his head slowly.

"It was providential for us, Vincent, this assault just at the critical moment. I have struck. I had an interview with Caleb this evening and made him an offer for the pipe plant. He is to give us his answer to-morrow morning."

Silence fell for a little time, and then the younger man in the wicker chair smote his palms together.

"Curse him!" he gritted vengefully, transferring his thought from Caleb Gordon to Caleb Gordon's son. "I hope he'll die!"

The elder man paused in his walk. "Why, Vincent, my son! What has come over you? It is merely a matter of business, and we mustn't be vindictive."

"Business be damned!" snarled the younger man. "Can't you see? She has promised to marry me—and she loves him. Are you going to bed? Well, I'm not. I've got something else to do first."

A few minutes later he let himself noiselessly out at the side door of the Lodge, and turned down the avenue in the direction of Deer Trace. But after crossing the bridge over the creek, he took a diagonal course through the stubble-fields and bore to the right. And when he finally reached and climbed the wall into the pike, it was at a point directly opposite the forking of the rough wood road which led off to the Pine Knob settlement.

As he leaped over into the highway, a man carrying a squirrel gun stepped from behind a tree.

"I was allowin' you'd done forgot," said the man, yawning sleepily.

"I never forget," was the short rejoinder. Then: "Come with me, and you shall hear with your own ears, since you won't take my word for it. Then, if you still want to sleep on your wrongs, it's your own affair."



XXXII

WHOSO DIGGETH A PIT

If Thomas Gordon, opening his eyes to consciousness on the mid-week morning, felt the surprise which might naturally grow out of the sight of Ardea sitting in a low rocker at his bedside, he did not evince it, possibly because there were other and more perplexing things for the tired brain to grapple with first.

For the moment he did not stir or try to speak. There was a long dream somewhere in the past in which he had been lost in the darkness, stumbling and groping and calling for her to come and lead him out to life and light. It must have been a dream, he argued, and perhaps this was only a continuation of it. Yet, no; she was there in visible presence, bending over a tiny embroidery frame; and they were alone together.

"Ardea!" he said tremulously.

She looked up, and her eyes were like cooling well-springs to quench the fever fires in his.

"You are better," she said, rising. "I'll go and call your mother."

"Wait a minute," he pleaded; then his hand found the bandage on his head. "What happened to me?"

"Don't you remember? Two men tried to rob you last Saturday evening as you were coming home. One of them struck you."

"Saturday? And this is—"

"This is Wednesday."

The cool preciseness of her replies cut him to the heart. He did not need to ask why she had come. It was mere neighborliness, and not for him, but for his mother. He remembered the Saturday evening quite clearly now: Japheth's shout; the two men springing on him; the instant just preceding the crash of the blow when he had recognized one of his assailants and guessed the identity of the other.

"It was no more than right that you should come," he said bitterly. "It was the least you could do, since your—"

She was moving toward the door, and his ungrateful outburst had the effect of stopping her. But she did not go back to him.

"I owe your mother anything she likes to ask," she affirmed, in the same colorless tone.

"And you owe me nothing at all, you would say. I might controvert that. But no matter; we have passed the Saturday and have come to the Wednesday. Where is Norman? Hasn't he been here?"

"He has been with you almost constantly from the first. He was here less than an hour ago."

"Where is he now?"

She hesitated. "There is urgency of some kind in your business affairs. Your father spent the night in South Tredegar; and a little while ago he telephoned for Mr. Norman—from the iron-works, I think." She had moved away again, and her hand was on the door-knob.

He raised himself on one elbow.

"You are in a desperate hurry, aren't you?" he gritted; though the teeth-grinding was from the pain it cost him to move. "Would you mind handing me that desk telephone before you go?"

She came back and tried it, but the wired cord was not long enough to reach to the bed.

"If you wish to speak to some one, perhaps I could do it for you," she suggested, quite in the trained-nurse tone.

His smile was a mere grimace of torture.

"If you could stretch your good-will to—to my mother—that far," he said. "Please call my office—number five-twenty-six G—and ask for Mr. Norman."

She complied, but with only a strange young-woman stenographer at the other end of the wire, a word of explanation was necessary. "This is Miss Dabney, at Woodlawn. Mr. Gordon is better, and he wishes to say—what did you want to say?" she asked, turning to him.

"Just ask what's going on; if it's Norman you've got, he'll know," said Tom, sinking back on the pillows.

What the stenographer had to say took some little time, and Ardea's color came and went in hot flashes and her eyes grew large and thoughtful as she listened. When she put the ear-piece down and spoke to the sick man, her tone was kinder.

"There is an important business meeting going on over at the furnace office, and Mr. Norman is there with your father," she said. "The stenographer wants me to ask you about some papers Mr. Norman thinks you may have, and—"

She stopped in deference to the yellow pallor that was creeping like a curious mask over the face of the man in the bed. Through all the strain of the last twenty hours she had held herself well in hand, doing for him only what she might have done for a sick and suffering stranger. But there were limits beyond which love refused to be driven.

"Tom!" she gasped, rising quickly to go to him.

"Wait," he muttered; "let me pull myself together. The papers—are—in—"

He seemed about to relapse into unconsciousness, and she hastily poured out a spoonful of the stimulating medicine left by Doctor Williams and gave it to him. It strangled him, and she slipped her hand under the pillow and raised his head. It was the nearness of her that revived him.

"I—I'm weaker than a girl," he whispered. "Vince—I mean the thug, hit me a lot harder than he needed to. What was I saying?—oh, yes; the papers. Will you—will you go over there in the corner by the door and look behind the mopboard? You will find a piece of it sawed so it will come out. In the wall behind it there ought to be a package."

She found it readily,—a thick packet securely tied with heavy twine and a little charred at the corners.

"That's it," he said weakly. "Now one more last favor; please send Aunt 'Phrony up as you go down. Tell her I want my clothes."

Miss Dabney became the trained nurse again in the turning of a leaf.

"You are not going to get up?" she said.

"Yes, I must; I'm due this minute at that meeting down yonder."

"Indeed, you shall do no such insane thing!" she cried. "What are you thinking of!"

"Listen!" he commanded. "My father has worked hard all his life, and he's right old now, Ardea. If I should fail him—but I'm not going to. Please send Aunt 'Phrony."

"I'm going to call your mother," she said firmly.

"If you do, you'll regret it the longest day you live."

"Then let me take the papers down to Mr. Norman for you."

He considered the alternative for a moment—only a moment. What an exquisite revenge it would be to make her the messenger! But he found he did not hate her so bitterly as he had been trying to since that soul-torturing evening on the cliff's edge.

"No, I can't quite do that," he objected; and again he besought her to send the old negro housekeeper.

She consented finally, and as she was leaving him, she said:

"I hope your mother is still asleep. She was here with you all night, and Mr. Norman and I made her go to bed at daybreak. If you must go, get out of the house as quietly as you can, and I'll have Pete and the buggy waiting for you at the gate."

"God bless you!" said Tom fervently; and then he set his teeth hard and did that which came next.

The Dabney buggy was waiting for him when, after what seemed like a pilgrimage of endless miles, he had crept down to the gate. But it was Miss Dabney, and not Mammy Juliet's Pete, who was holding the reins.

"I couldn't find Pete, and Japheth has gone to town," she explained. "Can you get in by yourself?"

He was holding on by the cut wheel, and the death-look was creeping over his face again.

"I can't let you," he panted; and she thought he was thinking of the disgrace for her.

"I am my own mistress," she said coldly. "If I choose to drive you when you are too sick to hold the reins, it is my own affair."

He shook his head impatiently.

"I wasn't thinking of that; but you must first know just what you're doing. My father stands to lose all he has got to—to the Farley's. That's what the meeting is for. Do you understand?"

She bit her lip and a far-away look came into her eyes. Then she turned on him with a little frown of determination gathering between her straight eyebrows—a frown that reminded him of the Major in his militant moods.

"I must take your word for it," she said, and the words seemed to cut the air like edged things. "Tell me the truth: is your cause entirely just? Your motive is not revenge?"

"As God is my witness," he said solemnly. "It is my father's cause, and none of mine; more than that, it is your grandfather's cause—and yours."

She pushed the buggy hood back with a quick arm sweep and gave him her free hand. "Step carefully," she cautioned; and a minute later they were speeding swiftly down the pike in a white dust cloud of their own making.

* * * * *

There was a sharp crisis to the fore in the old log-house office at the furnace. Caleb Gordon, haggard and tremulous, sat at one end of the trestle-board which served as a table, with Norman at his elbow; and flanking him on either side were the two Farleys, Dyckman, Trewhitt, acting general counsel for the company in the Farley interest, and Hanchett, representing the Gordons.

Having arranged the preliminaries to his entire satisfaction, Colonel Duxbury had struck true and hard. The pipe foundry might be taken into the parent company at a certain nominal figure payable in a new issue of Chiawassee Limited stock, or three several things were due to happen simultaneously: the furnace would be shut down indefinitely "for repairs," thus cutting off the iron supply and making a ruinous forfeiture of pipe contracts inevitable; suit would be brought to recover damages for the alleged mismanagement of Chiawassee Consolidated during the absence of the majority stock-holders; and the validity of the pipe-pit patents would be contested in the courts. This was the ultimatum.

The one-sided battle had been fought to a finish. Hanchett, hewing away in the dark, had made every double and turn that keen legal acumen and a sharp wit could suggest to gain time. But Mr. Farley was inexorable. The business must be concluded at the present sitting; otherwise the papers in the two suits, which were already prepared, would be filed before noon. Hanchett took his principal into the laboratory for a private word.

"It's for you to decide, Mr. Gordon," he said. "If you want to follow them into the court, we'll do the best we can. But as a friend I can't advise you to take that course."

"If we could only make out to find out what Tom's holdin' over 'em!" groaned Caleb helplessly.

"Yes; but we can't," said the lawyer. "And whatever it may be, they are evidently not afraid of it."

"We'll never see a dollar's dividend out o' the stock, Cap'n Hanchett. I might as well give 'em the foundry free and clear."

"That's the chance you take, of course. But on the other hand, they can force you to the wall in a month and make you lose everything you have. I've been over the books with Norman: if you can't fill your pipe contracts, the forfeitures will ruin you. And you can't fill them unless you can have Chiawassee iron, and at the present price."

The old iron-master led the way back to the room of doom and took his place at the end of the trestle-board table.

"Give me the papers," he said gloomily; and the Farleys' attorney passed them across, with his fountain-pen.

There was a purring of wheels in the air and the staccato clatter of a horse's hoofs on the hard metaling of the pike. Vincent Farley rose quietly in his place and tiptoed to the door. He was in the act of snapping the catch of the spring-latch, when the door flew inward and he fell back with a smothered exclamation. Thereupon they all looked up, Caleb, the tremulous, with the pen still suspended over the signatures upon which the ink was still wet.

Tom was standing in the doorway, deathly sick and clinging to the jamb for support. In putting on his hat he had slipped the bandages, and the wound was bleeding afresh. Dyckman yelped like a stricken dog, overturning his chair as he leaped up and backed away into a corner. Only Mr. Duxbury Farley and his attorney were wholly unmoved. The lawyer had taken his fountain-pen from Caleb's shaking fingers and was carefully recapping it; and Mr. Farley was pocketing the agreement, by the terms of which the firm of Gordon and Gordon had ceased to exist.

Tom lurched into the room and threw himself feebly on the promoter, and Vincent made as if he would come between. But there was no need for intervention. Duxbury Farley had only to step aside, and Tom fell heavily, clutching the air as he went down.

The dusty office which had once been his mother's sitting-room was cleared of all save his father when Tom recovered consciousness and sat up, with Caleb's arm to help.

"There, now, Buddy; you ortn't to tried to get up and come down here," said the father soothingly. But Tom's blood was on fire.

"Tell me!" he raved: "have they got the foundry away from you?"

Caleb nodded gravely. "But don't you mind none about that, son. What I'm sweatin' about now is the fix you're in. My God! ain't Fred ever goin' to get back with Doc Williams!"

Tom struggled to his feet, tottering.

"I don't need any doctor, pappy; you couldn't kill me with a bullet—not till I've cut the heart out of these devils that have robbed you. Give me the pistol from that drawer, and drive me down to the station before their train comes. I'll do it, and by God, I'll do it now!"

But when old Longfellow, jigging vertically between the buggy shafts, picked his way out of the furnace yard, he was permitted to turn of his own accord in the homeward direction; and an hour later the sick man was back in bed, mingling horrible curses with his insistent calls for Ardea. And this time Miss Dabney did not come.



XXXIII

THE WINE-PRESS OF WRATH

There was more to that crazy outburst of Tom's about the cutting out of hearts, and the like, than would appear on the surface of things, to you who dwell in a land shadowed with wings, where law abides and a man sues his neighbor for defamation of character, if he is called a liar, I mean.

In the land unshadowed, where Polaris makes a somewhat sharper angle with the horizon, there is law, also, but much of it is unwritten. And one of the unwritten statutes is that which maintains the inherent right of a man to avenge his own quarrel with his own hand.

So, when the younger Gordon was up and about again, and was able to keep his seat soldierly on the back of the big bay, folk who knew the Gordon blood and temper looked for trouble, not of the plaintiff-and-defendant sort; and when it did not come, there were a few to lament the degeneracy of the times, and to say that old Caleb, for example, would never have so slept on his father's wrongs.

But Tom was not degenerate, even in the sense of those who thought he should have called out and shot the younger of the Farleys. It was in him to kill or be killed, quite in the traditional way: that grim gift is in the blood as the wine is in the grape—to stay unless you shall water it to extinction with many base inbreedings. Nor was the spur lacking. When the sweeping extent of the business coup de grace was measured, Woodlawn was left, and there were a few thousands in bank; these and the three hundred and fifty shares of the reorganization stock which the Farleys might render worthless at will.

Tom's heart burned within him, and the race thirst—for vengeance that could be touched and seen and handled—parched his lips and swelled the veins in his forehead. Vincent Farley had it all: the business, the good repute, the love of the one woman. At such crises the wild beast in a man, if any there be, rattles the bars of its cage, and—well, you will see that the gnashing of teeth and that fierce talk of heart-cutting at the quickening moment were not inartistic.

Soberer second thought, less frenzied, was no less vengeful and vindictive. Tom had lived four formative years in a climate where the passions are colder—and more comprehensive. Also, he was of his own generation—which slays its enemy peacefully and without messing in bloody-angle details.

Riding up the pike one sun-shot afternoon in the golden September, Tom saw Ardea entering the open door of the Morwenstow church-copy, drew rein, flung himself out of the saddle and followed her. She saw him and stopped in the vestibule, quaking a little as she felt she must always quake until the impassable chasm of wedlock with another should be safely opened between them.

"Just a moment," he said abruptly. "There was a time when I said I would spare Vincent Farley and his kin for your sake. Do you remember it?"

She bowed her head without speaking. Her lips were dry.

"That was a year ago," he went on roughly. "Things have changed since then; I have changed. When my father is buried, I shall do my best to fill the mourners' carriages with those who have killed him."

"How is your father to-day?" she asked, not daring to trust speech otherwise.

"He is the same as he was yesterday and the day before; the same as he will always be from this on—a broken man."

"You will strike back?" She said it with infinite sadness in her voice and an upcasting of eyes that were swimming. "I don't question your right—but I pity you. The blow may be just—I don't know, but God knows—yet it will fall hardest on you in the end, Tom."

His smile was almost boyish in its frank anger. But there was a man's sneer in his words.

"Excuse me; I forgot for the moment that we are in a church. But I am taking consequences, these days."

She looked out from the cool, dark refuge of the vestibule when he mounted and rode on, and her heart was full. It was madness, vindictive madness and fell anger. But it was a generous wrath, large and manlike. It was not to be a blow in the dark or in the back, as some men struck; and he would not strike without first giving her warning. Ardea had been cross-questioning Japheth about the assault at the Woodlawn gates—to her own hurt. Japheth had evaded as he could, but she had guessed what he was keeping back—the identity of the two footpads blackened to look like negroes. It was a weary world, and life had lost much that had made it worth living.

After the incident of the church vestibule, Tom spent a week or more roaming the forests of Lebanon in rough shooting clothes, with the canvas hat pulled well over his eyes and a fowling-piece under his arm.

People said harsher things then. With old Caleb failing visibly from day to day, and his mother keeping her room for the greater part of the time, it was a shame that a great strong young giant like Tom should go loitering about on the mountain, deliberately shirking his duty. This was the elder Miss Harrison's wording of the censure; and it was kinder than Mrs. Henniker's, since it was the banker's wife who first asked, with uplifted brows and the accent accusative, if the unspeakable Bryerson woman were safely beyond tramping distance from Woodlawn.

They were both mistaken. For all Tom thought of her, Nancy Bryerson was as safe in her retreat at Pine Knob as were the squirrels he was supposed to be hunting; and they came and frisked unharmed on the branches of the tree under which he sat and munched his bit of bread and meat when the sun was at the meridian.

And he was not killing time. He was deep in an inventive trance, with vengeance for the prize to be won, and for the means to the end, iron-works and pipe plants and forgings—especially the forging of one particular thunderbolt which should shatter the Farley fortunes beyond repair. When this bolt was finally hammered into shape he came out of the wood and out of the inventive trance, had an hour's interview with Major Dabney, and took a train for New York.

I am not sure, but I think it was at Bristol, Tennessee, that the telegram from Norman, begging him to come back to South Tredegar at speed, overtook him. This is a detail, important only as a marker of time. For three days a gentleman with shrewd eyes and a hard-bitted jaw, registering at the Marlboro as "A. Dracott, New York," had been shut up with Mr. Duxbury Farley in the most private of the company's offices in the Coosa Building, and on the fourth day Norman had made shift to find out this gentleman's business. Whereupon the wire to Tom, already on his way to New York, and the prayer for returning haste.

Tom caught a slow train back, and was met at a station ten miles out of town by his energetic ex-lieutenant.

"Of course, I didn't dare do anything more than give him a hint," was the conclusion of Norman's exciting report. "I didn't know but he might give us away to Colonel Duxbury. So, without telling him much of anything, I got him to agree to meet you at his rooms in the Marlboro to-night after dinner. Then I was scared crazy for fear my wire to you would miss."

"You are a white man, Fred, and a friend to tie to," said Tom; which was more than he had ever said to Norman by way of praise in the days of master and man. Then, as the train was slowing into the South Tredegar station: "If this thing wins out, you'll come in for something bigger than you had with Gordon and Gordon; you can bet on that."

It was ordained that Gordon should anticipate his appointment by meeting his man at the dinner-table in the Marlboro cafe; and it was accident or design, as you like to believe, that Dyckman should be sitting two tables away, choking over his food and listening only by the road of the eye, since he was unhappily out of ear range. When the two had lighted their cigars and passed out to the elevator, the bookkeeper rose hastily and made for the nearest telephone. This, at least, was not accidental.

The conference in Suite 32 lasted until nearly midnight, with Dyckman painfully shadowing the corridor and sweating like a furnace laborer, though the night was more than autumn cool. The door was thick, the transom was closed, and the keyhole commanded nothing but a square of blank wall opposite in the electric-lighted sitting-room of the suite. Hence the bookkeeper could only guess what we may know.

"You have let in a flood of light on Mr. Farley's proposition, Mr. Gordon," said the representative of American Aqueduct, when the ground had been thoroughly gone over. "I don't mind telling you now that he made his first overtures to us on his arrival from Europe, giving us to understand that he owned or controlled the pipe-making patents absolutely."

"At that time he controlled nothing, as I have explained," said Tom, "not even his majority stock in Chiawassee Consolidated. Of course, he resumed control as soon as he reached home, and his next move was to have me quietly sandbagged while he froze my father out. But father did not transfer the patents, for the simple reason that he couldn't. They are my personal property, made over to me before the firm of Gordon and Gordon came into existence."

The pipe-trust promoter nodded.

"You are the man we'll have to do business with, Mr. Gordon," he said promptly. "Are you quite sure of your legal status in the case?"

"I have good advice. Hanchett, Goodloe and Tryson, Richmond Building, are my attorneys. They will put you in the way of finding out anything you'd like to know."

There was a pause while the New Yorker was making a memorandum of the address. Then he went straight to the point.

"As I have said, I'm here to do business. We don't need the plant. Will you sell us your patents?"

"Yes; on one condition."

"And that is—?"

"That you first put us out of business. You'll have to smash Chiawassee Limited painstakingly and permanently before you can buy my holdings."

The shrewd-eyed gentleman who had unified practically all of the pipe foundries in the United States smiled a gentle negative.

"That would be rather out of our line. If Mr Farley owned the patents, and was disposed to fight us—as, indeed, he is not—we might try to convince him. But we are not out for vengeance—another man's vengeance, at that."

"Very well, then; you won't get what you've come after. The patents go with the plant. You can't have one without the other," said Tom, eyeing his opponent through half-closed lids.

"But we can buy the plant to-morrow, at a very reasonable figure. Farley is anxious enough to come in out of the wet."

"Excuse me, Mr. Dracott, but you can't buy the plant at any price."

"Eh? Why can't we?"

"Because the majority of the stock will vote to fight you to a standstill."

"But, my dear sir! Mr. Farley controls sixty-five per cent. of the stock!"

"That is where you were lied to one more time," said Tom with great coolness. "The capital stock of Chiawassee Limited is divided into one thousand shares, all distributed. My father holds three hundred and fifty shares; Mr. Farley and his son together own four hundred and fifty; and the remaining two hundred are held in trust for Miss Ardea Dabney, to become her property in fee simple when she marries. Pending her marriage, which is currently supposed to be near at hand, the voting power of these two hundred shares resides in Miss Dabney's grandfather, and my father holds his proxy."

This was the thunderbolt Tom had been forging during those quiet days spent on the mountain side; and there was another pause while one might count ten. After which the man from New York spoke his mind freely.

"Your row with these people must be pretty bitter, Mr. Gordon. Are you willing to see your father and these Dabneys go by the board for the sake of breaking the president and his son?"

"I know what I am doing," was the quiet reply. "Neither my father nor Miss Dabney will lose anything that is worth keeping."

"Have you figured that out, too? The field is too small for you down here, Mr. Gordon—much too small. You should come to New York."

Tom rose and took his hat.

"You will fight us?" he asked.

The short-circuiter of corporations laughed.

"We'll put you out of business, if you insist on it. Anything to oblige. Better light a fresh cigar before you go."

Tom helped himself from the box on the table.

"You have it to do, Mr. Dracott. On the day you have hammered Chiawassee Limited down to a dead proposition, you can have my pipe patents at the figure named. If you will meet me at the office of Hanchett, Goodloe and Tryson to-morrow morning at ten o'clock, we will put it in writing. Good night."



XXXIV

THE SMOKE OF THE FURNACE

Hoping always for the best, after the manner prescribed for optimistic gentlemen who successfully exploit their fellows, Mr. Duxbury Farley did not deem it necessary to confide fully in his son when the representative of American Aqueduct broke off negotiations abruptly and went back to New York.

It is a sad state of affairs, reached by respectably villainous fathers the world over, when the son demonstrates the mathematical law of progression by becoming a villain without regard for the respectabilities. Mr. Farley saw the growing outlaw in his son, was not a little disturbed thereby, and was beginning to crouch when it menaced.

Hence, when the comfortable arrangement with the pipe trust threatened to miscarry, all he did was to urge Vincent to hasten the day when Miss Dabney's stock could be utilized as a Farley asset. Pressed for particular reasons, he turned it off lightly. A young man in the fever of ante-nuptial expectancy was a mere pawn in the business game: let it be over and done with, so that the nominal treasurer of Chiawassee Limited could once more become the treasurer in fact.

Whereupon Vincent, who rode badly at best, bought a new saddle-horse and took his place at Miss Dabney's whip-hand in the early morning rides, the place formerly filled by Tom Gordon,—which was not the part of wisdom, one would say. Contrasts are pitiless things; and the wary woman-hunter will break new paths rather than traverse those already broken by his rival.

Tom, meanwhile, had apparently relapsed into his former condition of disinterest, and was once more spending his days on the mountain, seemingly bent on effacing himself socially, as he had been effaced business-wise by the Farley overturn.

A week or more after the relapse, as he was crossing the road leading over the mountain's shoulder, he came on the morning riders walking their horses toward Paradise, and saw trouble in Miss Dabney's eyes, and on Farley's impassive face a mask of sullen anger.

When they were out of sight and hearing, Tom sat on a flat stone by the roadside with his gun between his knees, thoughtfully speculative. Were the high gods invoked in the midnight conference at the Marlboro beginning to point the finger of fate at these two? He was malevolent enough to hope so, and in the comfort of the hope, walked many miles that day through the forests of crimson and gold showering with falling leaves.

Whatever their influence in the field of sentiment, undeniably in that of fact the high gods were imposing Sisyphean labors on Mr. Duxbury Farley.

With the negotiations for the sale to the trust so abruptly terminated, the promoter-president set instant and anxious inquiry afoot to determine the cause. It was soon revealed; and when Mr. Farley found that the pipe-pit patents had not been transferred with the Gordon plant, and that Major Dabney had given Caleb Gordon a power of attorney over Ardea's stock in the company, there were hard words said in the town offices of Messrs. Trewhitt and Slocumb, Chiawassee attorneys, and a torrent of persuasive ones poured into the Major's ear—the latter pointing to the crying necessity for the revocation of the power of attorney, summarily and at once.

The Major proved singularly obstinate and non-committal. "Mistah Caleb Gordon is my friend, suh, and I was mighty proud to do him this small faveh. What his object is makes no manneh of diffe'ence to me, suh; no manneh of diffe'ence, whateveh," was all an anxious promoter could get out of the old autocrat of Deer Trace. But Mr. Farley did not desist; neither did he fail to keep the telegraph wires to New York heated to incandescence with his appeals for a renewal of the negotiations for surrender.

When the wired appeals brought forth nothing but evasive replies, Mr. Farley began to look for trouble, and it came: first in a mysterious closing of the market against Chiawassee pipe, and next in an alarming advance of freight rates from Gordonia on the Great Southwestern.

Colonel Duxbury doubled his field force and gave his travelers a free hand on the price list. Persuasion and diplomacy having failed, a frenzy like that of one who finds himself slipping into the sharp-staked pitfall prepared for others seized on him. It was the madness of those who have seen the clock hands stop and begin to turn steadily backward on the dial of success.

Ten days later the freight rates went up another notch, and there began to be a painful dearth of cars in which to ship the few orders the salesmen were still able to place. Mr. Farley shut his eyes to the portents, put himself recklessly into Mr. Vancourt Henniker's hands as a borrower, and posted a notice of a slashing cut in wages at the works.

As a matter of course, the cut bred immediate and tumultuous trouble with the miners, and in the midst of it the president made a flying trip to New York; to the metropolis and to the offices of American Aqueduct to make a final appeal in person.

But the door was shut. Mr. Dracott was not to be seen, though his assistant was very affable. No; American Aqueduct was not trying to assimilate the smaller plants, or to crush out all competition, as the public seemed to believe. With fifty million dollars invested it could easily control a market for its own product, which was all the share-holders demanded. Was Mr. Farley in the city for some little time? and would he not dine with the assistant at the Waldorf-Astoria?

Mr. Farley took a fast train, south-bound, instead, and on reaching South Tredegar, wired his New York broker to test the market with a small block of Chiawassee Limited. There were no takers at the upset price; and the highest bid was less than half of the asking. Colonel Duxbury was writing letters at the Cupola when the broker's telegram was handed him, and he broke a rule which had held good for the better part of a cautious, self-contained lifetime: he went to the buffet and took a stiff drink of brandy—alone. The following morning the miners and all the white men employed in the furnace and foundries and coke yards at Gordonia went on strike.

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," has a wide application in the commercial world. Duxbury Farley had resources! a comfortable fortune as country fortunes go, amassed by far-seeing shrewdness, a calm contempt for the well-being of his business associates, and most of all by a crowning gift in the ability to recognize the psychological moment at which to let go.

But under pressure of the combined disasters he lost his head, quarreled with his colder-blooded son, and in spite of Vincent's angry protests, began the suicidal process of turning his available assets into ammunition for the fighting of a battle which could have but one possible outcome.

Strike-breakers were imported at fabulous expense. Armed guards under pay swarmed at the valley foot, and around the company's property elsewhere. By hook or crook the foundries were kept going, turning out water-pipe for which there was no market, and which, owing to the disturbances which were promptly made an excuse by the railway company, could not be moved out of the Chiawassee yard.

Later, when the striking workmen began to grow hungry, riot, arson and bloodshed were nightly occurrences. A charging of coal, mined under the greatest difficulties, was conveyed to the coke yards, only to be destroyed—and half of the ovens with it—by dynamite cunningly blackened and dropped into the chargings. For want of fuel, the furnace went out of blast, but with the small store of coke remaining in the foundry yards, the pipe pits were kept at work. By this time the promoter-president was little better than a madman, fighting like a berserker, and breeding a certain awed respect in the comment of those who had hitherto held him only as a shrewd schemer.

And Thomas Jefferson: how did this return to primordial chaos, brought about in no uncertain sense by his own premeditated act, affect him? Only a man quite lost to all promptings of the grace that saves and softens could look unmoved on the burnings and riotings, the cruel wastings and the bloodlettings, one would say.

When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth Pettigrass's dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday.