I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper. At all events, she never forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman.
He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn, playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather.
When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.
She had succeeded in making the Great Dane carry her on his back quite all the way around the circular coleus bed when the explosion took place. There was a startling thunderclap of fierce words from the portico, and she slipped from the dog's back and stared wide-eyed. Her grandfather was on his feet, towering above the visitor as if he were about to fall on and crush him.
"Bring youh damned Yankee railroad through my fields and pastchuhs, suh? Foul the pure, God-given ai-ah of this peaceful Gyarden of Eden with youh dust-flingin', smoke-pot locomotives? Not a rod, suh! not afoot or an inch oveh the Dabney lands! Do I make it plain to you, suh?"
"But Major Dabney—one moment; this is purely a matter of business; there is nothing personal about it. Our company is able and willing to pay liberally for its right of way; and you must remember that the coming of the railroad will treble and quadruple your land values. I am only asking you to consider the matter in a business way, and to name your own price."
Thus the smooth-spoken young locating engineer in brown duck, serving as plowman for his company. But there be tough old roots in some soils, roots stout enough to snap the colter of the commercializing plow,—as, for example, in Paradise Valley, owned, in broken areas, principally by an unreconciled Major Dabney.
"Not anotheh word, or by Heaven, suh, you'll make me lose my tempah! You add insult to injury, suh, when you offeh me youh contemptible Yankee gold. When I desiah to sell my birthright for youh beggahly mess of pottage, I'll send a black boy in town to infawm you, suh!"
It is conceivable that the locating engineer of the Great Southwestern Railway Company was younger than he looked; or, at all events, that his experience hitherto had not brought him in contact with fire-eating gentlemen of the old school. Else he would hardly have said what he did.
"Of course, it is optional with you, Major Dabney, whether you sell us our right of way peaceably or compel us to acquire it by condemnation proceedings in the courts. As for the rest—is it possible that you don't know the war is over?"
With a roar like that of a maddened lion the Major bowed himself, caught his man in a mighty wrestler's grip and flung him broadcast into the coleus bed. The words that went with the fierce attack made Ardea crouch and shiver and take refuge behind the great dog. Japheth Pettigrass jumped down from his step-ladder and went to help the engineer out of the flower bed. The Major had sworn himself to a stand, but the fine old face was a terrifying mask of passion.
"The old firebrand!" the engineer was muttering under his breath when Pettigrass reached him; but the foreman cut him short.
"You got mighty little sense, looks like, to me. Stove up any?"
"Nothing to hurt, I guess."
"Well, your hawss is waitin' for ye down yonder at the gate, and I don't b'lieve the Major is allowin' to ask ye to stay to supper."
The railroad man scowled and recovered his dignity, or some portion of it.
"You're a hospitable lot," he said, moving off toward the driveway. "You can tell the old maniac he'll hear from us later."
Pettigrass stooped with his back to the portico and patted the dog.
"Don't you look so shuck up, little one," he whispered reassuringly to Ardea. "There ain't nothin' goin' to happen, worse than has happened, I reckon." But Ardea was mute.
When the engineer had mounted and ridden away down the pike, the foreman straightened himself and faced about. The Major had dropped into his big arm-chairand was trying to relight his pipe. But his hands shook and the match went out.
Pettigrass moved nearer and spoke so that the child should not hear. "If you run me off the place the nex' minute, I'm goin' to tell you you ort to be tolerably 'shamed of yourse'f, Maje' Dabney. That po' little gal is scared out of a year's growin', right now."
"I know, Japheth; I know. I'm a damned old heathen! For, insultin' as he was, the man was for the time bein' my guest, suh—my guest!"
"I'm talkin' about the little one—not that railroader. So far as I know, he earned what he got. I allowed they'd make some sort of a swap with you, so I didn't say anything when they was layin' out their lines thoo' the hawss-lot and across the lower corn-field this mornin'—easy, now; no more r'arin' and t'arin' with that thar little gal not a-knowin' which side o' the earth's goin' to cave in next!"
The Major dropped his pipe, laid fast hold of the arms of his chair, and breathed hard.
"Laid outtheyuhlines—acrossmyprope'ty? Japheth, faveh me by riding down to the furnace and askin' Caleb Gordon if he will do me the honor to come up heah—this evenin', if he can. I—I—it's twenty yeahs and mo' since I've troubled the law cou'ts of ouh po', Yankee-ridden country with any affai-ah of mine; and now—well, I don't know—I don't know," with a despondent shake of the leonine head.
After Pettigrass had gone on his errand the Major rose and went unsteadily into the house. Then, and not till then, Ardea got up on her knees and put her arms around the neck of the Great Dane.
"O, Hector!" she whispered; "me, I am Dabney, too! Once the gamins killed a poor little cat of mine; and I forgot God—the good God—and said wicked things; and I could have torn them into little, little pieces! But we—we shall be very good and patient after this, won't we, Hector—you and me—no, you andI? What is it when you lick my face that way? Does it mean that you understand?"
In a world full of puzzling questions for Thomas Jefferson, one of the chief clustering points of the persistent "whys" was Major Dabney's attitude, as a Man of Sin, and as the natural overlord of Paradise Valley.
That the Major was a Man of Sin there could be no manner of doubt. During the revival he had been frequently and pointedly prayed for by that name, and the groans from the Amen corner were conclusively damning. Just what the distinction was between a Man of Sin and a sinner—spelled with a small "s"—was something which Thomas Jefferson could never quite determine; but the desire to find out made him spy on Major Dabney at odd moments when the spying could be done safely and with a clear field for retreat in the event of the Major's catching him at it.
Thus far the spying had been barren of results—of that kind which do not have to be undone and made over to fit in with other things. Once, Thomas Jefferson had been picking blackberries behind the wall of his father's infield when the Major and Squire Bates had met on the pike. There was some talk of the new railroad; and when the Squire allowed that it was certain to come through Paradise, the Major had taken the nameof God in vain in a way that suggested the fiery blast roaring from the furnace lip after the iron was out.
This was one of the results. But on reflection, Thomas Jefferson decided that this could not be The Sin. Profane swearing—that was what the Sunday-school lesson-leaf called it—was doubtless a mortal sin in a believer; was not he, Thomas Jefferson, finding the heavens as brass and the earth a place of fear and trembling because of that word to Nan Bryerson? But in other people—well, he had heard his father swear once, when one of the negroes at the furnace had opened the sand at the end of the sow and let the stream of molten iron run out into the creek.
The charge of profanity being tried and found wanting in the Major's case, there remained that of violence. One day, Tike Bryerson—Nan's father and the man who had tried to kill his Uncle Silas in the revival meeting—was beating his horses because they would not take the water at the lower ford. Tike had been stilling more pine-top whisky, and had been to town with some jugs hidden under the cornstalks in his wagon-bed. When he did that, he always came back with his eyes red like a squirrel's, and everybody gave him all the road.
But this time the Major had happened along, and when Tike would not stop beating the horses for a shouted cursing-out from the bank, the Major had spurred his Hambletonian into the creek and knocked Tike winding. More than that, he had made him lead his team out of the ford and go back to the bridge crossing.
Being himself committed to the theory of turning the other cheek, Thomas Jefferson could not question theacute sinfulness of all this; yet it did not sufficiently account for the Major as a Man of Sin. Had not Peter, stirred, no doubt, by some such generous rage as the Major's, snatched out his sword and smitten off a man's ear?
In the other field, that of overlordship, the subtleties were still more elusive. That the negroes, many of whom were the sons and daughters of the Major's former slaves, should pass the old-time "Mawstuh" on the pike with uncovered heads and respectful heel-scrapings, was a matter of course. Thomas Jefferson was white, free, and Southern born. But why his own father and mother should betray something of the same deference was not so readily apparent.
On rare occasions the Major, riding to or from the cross-roads post-office in Hargis's store, would rein in his horse at the Gordon gate and ask for a drink of water from the Gordon well. At such times Thomas Jefferson remarked that his mother always hastened to serve the Major with her own hands; this notwithstanding her own and Uncle Silas's oft-repeated asseveration touching the Major's unenviable preëminence as a Man of Sin. Also, he remarked that the Major's manner at such moments was a thing to dazzle the eye, like the reflection of the summer sun on the surface of burnished metal. But beneath the polished exterior, the groping perceptions of the boy would touch a thing repellent; a thing to stir a slow current of resentment in his blood.
It was Thomas Jefferson's first collision with the law of caste; a law Draconian in the Old South. Before the war, when Deer Trace Manor had been a seigniory with its six score black thralls, there had been no visiting between the great house on the inner knoll and the overgrown log homestead at the iron furnace. Quarrel there was none, nor any shadow of enmity; but the Dabneys were lords of the soil, and the Gordons were craftsmen.
Even in war the distinction was maintained. The Dabneys, father and son, were officers, having their commissions at the enrolment; while Caleb Gordon, whose name headed the list of the Paradise volunteers, began and ended a private in the ranks.
In the years of heart-hardenings which followed, a breach was opened, narrow at first, and never very deep, but wide enough to serve. Caleb Gordon had accepted defeat openly and honestly, and for this the unreconstructed Major had never fully forgiven him. It was an added proof that there was no redeeming drop of thesang azurein the Gordon veins—and Major Caspar was as scrupulously polite to Caleb Gordon's wife as he would have been, and was, to the helpmate of Tike Bryerson, mountaineer and distiller of illicit whisky.
Thomas Jefferson was vaguely indignant when Pettigrass came to ask his father to go forthwith to the manor-house. In the mouth of the foreman the invitation took on something of the flavor of a command. Besides, since the Major's return from New York, Thomas Jefferson had a grudge against him of a purely private and personal nature.
None the less, he was eager for news when his father came back, and though he got it only from overhearing the answer to his mother's question, it was satisfyingly thrilling.
"It's mighty near as we talked, Martha. The Major lumps the railroad in with all the other improvements,calls 'em Yankee, and h'ists his battle-flag. The engineer, that smart young fellow with the peaked whiskers and the eye-glasses, went to see him this evenin' about the right of way down the valley, and got himself slung off the porch of the great house into a posy bed."
"There is going to be trouble, Caleb; now you mark my words. You mustn't mix up in it."
"I don't allow to, if I can he'p it. The railroad's goin' to be a mighty good thing for us if I can get Mr. Downing to put in a side-track for the furnace."
Following this there were other conferences, the Major unbending sufficiently to come and sit on the Gordon porch in the cool of the evening. The iron-master, as one still in touch with the moving world, gave good advice. Failing to buy, the railroad company might possibly seek to bully a right of way through the valley. But in that case, there would certainly be redress in the courts for the property owners. In the meantime, nothing would be gained by making the contest a personal fight on individuals.
So counseled Caleb Gordon, sure, always, of his own standing-ground in any conflict. But from the last of the conferences the Major had ridden home through the fields; and Thomas Jefferson, with an alert eye for windstraws of conduct, had seen him dismount now and then to pull up and fling away the locating stakes driven by the railroad engineers.
In such a contention, in an age wholly given over to progress, there could be, one would say, no possible doubt of the outcome.
Giving the Major a second and a third chance to refuse to grant an easement, the railroad company pushed itsgrading and track-laying around the mountain and up to the stone wall marking the Dabney boundary, quietly accumulated the necessary material, and on a summer Sunday morning—Sunday by preference because no restraining writ could be served for at least twenty-four hours—a construction train, black with laborers, whisked around the nose of the mountain and dropped gently down the grade to the temporary end of track.
It was Thomas Jefferson who gave the alarm. Little Zoar, unable to support a settled pastor, was closed for the summer, but Martha Gordon kept the fire spiritual alight by teaching her son at home. One of the boy's Sunday privileges, earned by a faultless recitation of a prescribed number of Bible verses, was forest freedom for the remainder of the forenoon. It was while he was in the midst of the Beatitudes that he heard the low rumble of the coming train, and it was only by resolutely ignoring the sense of hearing that he was enabled to get through, letter-perfect.
"'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you,'" he chanted monotonously, with roving eyes bent on finding his cap with the loss of the fewest possible seconds—"'and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake,'—and that's all." And he was off like a shot.
"Mind, now, Thomas Jefferson; you are not to go near that railroad!" his mother called to him as he raced down the path to the gate.
Oh, no; he would not go near the railroad! He would only run up the pike and cut across through the Dabney pasture to see if the train were really there.
It was there, as he could tell by the noise of hissingsteam when the cross-cut was reached. But the parked wooding of the pasture still screened it. How near could he go without being "near" in the transgressing sense of the word? There was only one way of finding out—to keep on going until his conscience pricked sharply enough to stop him. It was a great convenience, Thomas Jefferson's conscience. As long as it kept quiet he could be reasonably sure there was no sin in sight. Yet he had to confess that it was not always above playing mean tricks; as that of sleeping like a log till after the fact, and then rising up to stab him till the blood ran.
He was half-way across the pasture when the crash of a falling tree stopped him in mid-rush. And in the vista opened by the felled tree he saw a sight to make him turn and race homeward faster than he had come. The invaders, hundreds strong, had torn down the boundary wall and the earth for the advancing embankment was flying from uncounted shovels.
Caleb Gordon was at work in the blacksmith shop, Sunday-repairing while the furnace was cool, when Thomas Jefferson came flying with his news. The iron-master dropped his hammer and cast aside the leather apron.
"You hear that, Buck?" he said, frowning across the anvil at his helper, a white man and the foreman of the pouring floor.
The helper nodded, being a man of as few words as the master.
"Well, I reckon we-all hain't got any call to stand by and see them highflyers ride it roughshod over Major Dabney thataway," said Gordon briefly. "Go down tothe shanties and hustle out the day shift. Get Turk and Hardaway and every white man you can lay hands on, and all the guns you can find. And send one o' the black boys up the hill to tell the Major. Like as not, he ain't up yet."
Helgerson hastened away to obey his orders, and Caleb Gordon went out to the foundry scrap yard. In the heap of broken metal lay an old cast-iron field-piece, a relic of the battle which had one day raged hotly on the hillside across the creek. A hundred times the iron-master had been on the point of breaking it up for re-melting, and as often the old artilleryman in him had stayed his hand.
Now it was quickly hoisted in the crane shackle,—Thomas Jefferson sweating manfully at the crab crank,—clamped on the axle of a pair of wagon wheels, cleaned, swabbed, loaded with quarry blasting powder and pieces of broken iron to serve for grape, and trundled out on the pike at the heels of the ore team.
By this time Helgerson had come up with the furnace men, a motley crew in all stages of Sunday-morning dishevelment, and armed only as a mob may arm itself at a moment's notice. Caleb, the veteran, looked the squad over with a slow smile gathering the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
"You boys'll have to make up in f'erceness what-all you're lacking in soldier-looks," he observed mildly. Then he gave the word of command to Helgerson. "Take the gun and put out for the major's hawss-lot. I'll be along as soon as I can saddle the mare."
Thomas Jefferson went with his father to the stable and helped silently with the saddling. Afterward heheld the mare, gentling her in suppressed excitement while his father went into the house for his rifle.
Martha Gordon met her husband at the door. She had seen the volunteer gun crew filing past on the pike.
"What is it, Caleb?" she asked anxiously.
He made no attempt to deceive her.
"The railroaders are allowin' to take what the Major wouldn't sell 'em—the right of way through his land down the valley. Buddy brought the word."
"Well?" she said, love and fear hardening her heart. "The railroad would be a good thing for us—for the furnace. You know you said it would."
He shook his head slowly.
"I reckon we mustn't look at it thataway, Martha. I'm going to stand by my neighbor, like I'd expect him to stand by me. Let me get my gun; the boys'll be there ahead o' me, and they won't know what to do."
"Caleb! There will be bloodshed; and you remember what the Word says: 'whoso sheddeth man's blood....' And on the Lord's Day, too!"
"I know. But ain't it somewhere in the same Good Book that it says there's a time for peace and a time to make war? And then that there passage about lovin' your neighbor. Don't hender me, little woman. There ain't goin' to be no blood shed—onless them bushwhackers are a mighty sight f'ercer for it than what I think they are."
She let him go without further protest, not because he had convinced her, but because she had long since come to know this man, who, making her lightest wish his law in most things, could be as inflexible as the chilled iron of the pouring floor at the call of loyaltyto his own standard of right and wrong. But when he passed down the path to the gate she knelt on the door-stone and covered her face with her hands.
Gordon gathered the slack of the reins on the neck of the mare and put a leg over the saddle.
"That'll do, Buddy," he said. "Run along in to your mammy, now."
But Thomas Jefferson caught again at the bridle and held on, choking.
"O pappy!—take me with you! I—I'll die if you don't take me with you!"
Who can tell what Caleb Gordon saw in his son's eyes when he bent to loosen the grip of the small brown hand on the rein? Was it some sympathetic reincarnation of his own militant soul striving to break its bonds? Without a word he bent lower and swung the boy up to a seat behind him. "Hold on tight, Buddy," he cautioned. "I'll have to run the mare some to catch up with the boys."
And the mother? She was still kneeling on the door-stone, but the burden of her prayer was not now for Caleb Gordon. "O Lord, have mercy on my boy! Thou knowest how, because of my disobedience, he has the fierce fighting blood and the stubborn unbelief of all the Gordons to contend with: save him alive and make him a man of peace and a man of faith, I beseech Thee, and let not the unbelief of the father or the unfaithfulness of the mother be visited on the son!"
When the one-piece battery dashed at a clumsy gallop through the open gate of the Dabney pasture and swung with a sharp turn into the vista of felled trees, Thomas Jefferson beheld a thing to set his heritage ofsoldier blood dancing through his veins. Standing fair in the midst of the ax-and-shovel havoc and clearing a wide circle to right and left with the sweep of his old service cavalry saber, was the Major, coatless, hatless, cursing the invaders with mighty and corrosive soldier oaths, and crying them to come on, the unnumbered host of them against one man.
Opposed to him the men of the construction force, generaled by the young engineer in brown duck and buttoned leggings, were deploying cautiously to surround him. Gordon spoke to his mare; and when he drew rein and wheeled to shout to the gun crew, Thomas Jefferson heard the engineer's low-toned order to the shovelers: "Be careful and don't hurt him, boys. He's the old maniac who threw me off the veranda of his house. Two of you take him behind, and—"
The break came on the uprush of the unanticipated reinforcements. With the battle readiness of a disciplined soldier, Caleb Gordon whipped from the saddle and ran to help the gun crew slue the makeshift field-piece into position.
"Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "fall back on your front line and give the artillery a chanst at 'em. I reckon a dose o' broken pot-iron'll carry fu'ther than that saber o' yourn. Buddy, hunt me a punk match, quick, will ye?"
"Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "give the artillery a chanst""Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "give the artillery a chanst"
Thomas Jefferson ran to the nearest rotting log, but one of the negroes was before him with a blazing pitch-pine splint. There was a respectful recoil in the opposing ranks which presently became a somewhat panicky surge to the rear. The shovelers, more than half of whom were negroes, had not come out to be blown froma cannon's mouth by a grim-faced veteran who was so palpably at home with the tools of his trade.
"That's right: keep right on goin'!" yelled the iron-master, waving his blazing slow-match dangerously near to the priming. "Keep it up, 'r by the Lord that made ye—"
There was no need to specify the alternative. For now the panic had spread by its own contagion, and the invaders were fighting among themselves for place on the flat-cars. And while yet the rear guard was swarming upon the engine, hanging by toe-and hand-holds where it could, the train was backed rapidly out of range.
Caleb Gordon kept his pine splint alight until the echoes of the engine's exhaust came faintly from the overhanging cliffs of the mountain.
"They've gone back to town, and I reckon the fire's plum' out for to-day, Major," he drawled. "Buck and a few o' the boys 'll stay by the gun, against their rallyin' later on, and you might as well go home to your breakfast. Didn't bring your hawss, did ye? Take the mare, and welcome. Buddy and me'll walk."
But the Major would not mount, and so the two men walked together as far as the manor-house gates, with Thomas Jefferson a pace in the rear, leading the mare.
It was no matter of wonder to him that his father and the Major marched in solemn silence to the gate of parting. But the wonder came tumultuously when the Major wheeled abruptly at the moment of leave-taking and wrung his father's hand.
"By God, suh, you are a right true-hearted gentleman, and my very good friend,MistuhGordon!" he said, with the manner of one who has been carefully weighing the words beforehand. "If you had been given youh just dues, suh, you'd have come home from F'ginia wearin' youh shouldeh-straps." And then, with a little throat-clearing pause to come between: "Damn it, suh; an own brotheh couldn't have done'mo'! I—I've been misjudgin' you, Caleb, all these yeahs, and now I'm proud to shake you by the hand and call you my friend. Yes, suh, I am that!"
It was, in a manner not to be understood by the Northern alien, the accolade of knighthood, and Caleb Gordon's toil-rounded shoulders straightened visibly when he returned the hearty hand-grasp. And as for Thomas Jefferson: in his heart gratified pride flapped its wings and crowed lustily; and for the moment he was almost willing to bury that private grudge he was holding against Major Dabney—almost, but not quite.
Having come thus far with Thomas Jefferson on the road to whatever goal he will reach, it is high time we were looking a little more closely into this matter of his grudge against Major Dabney.
Primarily, it based itself upon the dominant quality in a masterful character; namely, a desire to possess the earth and its fullness without partnership encumbrances.
From a time back of which memory refused to run, the woods and the fields of Paradise Valley, the rampart hills and the backgrounding mountain side, had belonged to Thomas Jefferson by the right of discovery. The Bates boys and the Cantrells lived over in the great valley of the Tennessee, and when they planned a fishing excursion up Turkey Creek, they recognized Thomas Jefferson's suzerainty by announcing that they were coming over tohishouse. In like manner, the Pendrys and the Lumpkins and the Hardwicks were scattered at farm-width intervals down the pike, and the rampart hills marked the boundary of their domain on that side.
Now from possession which is recognized unquestioningly by one's compeers to fancied possession in fee simple is but a step; and from that to the putting up of"No Trespass" signs the interval can be read only on a micrometer scale. Wherefore, Thomas Jefferson had developed a huge disgust on hearing that Major Dabney was going to upset the natural order of things by bringing his granddaughter to Deer Trace Manor. If Ardea—the very name of her had a heathenish sound in his Scripturally-trained ear—had been a boy, the matter would have simplified itself. Thomas Jefferson had a sincere respect for his own prowess, and a boy might have been mauled into subjection. But a girl!
His lip curled stiffly at the thought of a girl, a town girl and therefore a thing without legs, or at best with legs only half useful and totally unfit for running or climbing trees, dividing the sovereignty of the fields and the forest, the swimming-hole and the perch pools in the creek, with him! She would do it, or try to do it. A girl would not have any more sense than to come prying around into all the quiet places to say, "This is my grandfather's land. What areyoudoing here?"
At such thoughts as these a queer prickling sensation like a hot shiver would run over him from neck to heel, and his eyes would gloom sullenly. There would be another word to put with that; a word of his own choosing. No matter if her grandfather, the terrifying Major, did own the fields and the wood and the stream: God was greater than Major Dabney, and had he not often heard his mother say on her knees that the fervent, effectual prayer of the righteous availeth much? If it should avail even a little, there would be no catastrophe, no disputed sovereignty of the woods, the fields and the creek.
It was in the middle of a sultry afternoon in thehotter half of August, two weeks or such a matter after the Great Southwestern Railway had given up the fight for Paradise Valley to run its line around the encompassing hills, that Thomas Jefferson was cast alive into the pit of burnings.
He made sure he should always remember his latest glimpse of the pleasant, homely earth. He was sitting idly on the porch step, letting his gaze go adrift over the nearer green-clad hills to the purple deeps of the western mountain, already steeped in shadow. The pike was deserted, and the shrill hum of the house-flies played an insistent tune in which the low-pitched boom of a bumblebee tumbling awkwardly among the clover heads served for an intermittent bass.
Suddenly into the hot silence came the quickcloppity-clopof galloping hoofs. Thomas Jefferson's heart was tender on that side of it which was turned toward the dumb creatures, and his thought was instantly pitiful and indignant. Who would be cruel enough to gallop a horse in such weltering weather?
The unspoken query had its answer when Major Dabney's fleet saddle stallion thundered up to the gate in a white nimbus of dust, and the Major flung himself from the saddle and called loudly for Mistress Gordon. Thomas Jefferson sprang up hastily to forward the cry, fear clutching at his heart; but the Major was before him in the wide passage opening upon the porch.
"My deah Mistress Gordon! We are in a world of trouble at the manor-house! Little Ardea, my grand-daughteh, was taken sick last night, and to-day she's out of huh head—think of it,out of huh head!I'm riding hotfoot for Doctah Williams, but Lord of Heaven! it'llbe nigh sundown befo' I can hope to get back with him. Could you, my deah madam, faveh us—"
Thomas Jefferson heard no more; would stay to hear no more. The forest, always his refuge in time of trial, reached a long finger of scattering oaks down to the opposite side of the creek, and thither he fled, cold to the marrow of his bones, though the sun-heated stone coping of the dam on which he crossed the stream went near to blistering his bare feet as he ran.
From the crotch of one of the oaks—his watch-tower in other periods of stress—he saw the Major mount and continue his gallop eastward on the pike; and a little later the ancient Dabney family carriage came and went in a smother of white dust, wheeling in front of the home gate and pausing only long enough to take up his mother hastening to the rescue.
After that he was alone with the hideous tumult of his thoughts. The girl would die. He was as sure of it as if the heavens and the earth had instantly become articulate to shout the terrible sentence. God had taken him at his word! There would be no intruder to tell him that the woods and the creek belonged to her grandfather. She would be dead; slain by the breath of his mouth. And for all the years and years and ages to come, he would be roasting and grilling in that place prepared for the devil and his angels—and for murderers!
In the acutest misery of it a trembling fit seized him and the oak seemed to rock and sway as if to be rid of him. When the fit passed he slid to the ground and flung himself face downward under the spreading branches. The grass was cool to his face, but there was no moisturein it, and he thought of Dives praying that Lazarus might come and put a drop of water on his tongue.
Then the torment took a new and more terrible form. Though he had never been inside of the gray stone manor-house, his imagination transported him thither; to the house and to a darkened room on the upper floor with a bed in it, and in the bed a girl whose face he could not see.
The girl was dying: the doctor had told his mother and the Major, and they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face of the old Major.
Thomas Jefferson dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was there no way of escape?
He turned over and sat up to try to think it out. Yes, there was a way—the way which would be taken by the boy in the Sunday-school books. He would say he was sorry, and would have his sins washed away, and there would be rejoicing in Heaven over the one sinner who had repented. Of course, the girl would die, just the same, and all the misery his sin had caused would remain unchanged. Buthewould escape.
For one unworthy moment Thomas Jefferson wasfiercely tempted. Then the dogged Gordon blood reasserted itself. He had done the dreadful thing: he had asked God to take this girl out of his way, and now he would accept what he had coveted and would not try to sneak out of paying. It comforted him a little to think that, after all, there must eventually be some sort of end to the torment, away on in the eternities to come. When he had suffered all he could suffer, not even God could make him suffer any more.
When he finally recrossed the creek on the dam head it was supper-time, and his mother had returned. The misery had now settled into dumb despair, both more and less agonizing than the acute remorse of the afternoon. What he needed to know was told in his mother's answer to his father's inquiry: "Yes; she is a very sick child. I'm going up again after supper to stay as long as I'm needed. It's a judgment on the Major; he has been setting the creature above the Creator."
Thomas Jefferson knew well enough that the judgment was his, and not the Major's; but he let his supper choke him in silence. Afterward, when his mother had gone back to the house of anxiety and he was alone with his father, there were some vague promptings toward confession and a cry for human sympathy. What sealed his lips was the conviction that his father would comfort him without understanding, just as his mother would understand and condemn him. Early in the evening his father went back to the furnace and his chance was lost.
For four heart-searching days Thomas Jefferson lived and endured, because living and enduring were the two unalterable conditions of the brimstone pit to which hehad consigned himself. During these days his mother came and went, and prayed oftener than usual—not for the girl's life, as Thomas Jefferson noticed with deep stirrings of bitterness, but that the dispensation of Providence might inure to the lasting and eternal benefit of an impenitent and idolatrous Major Dabney.
Throughout these four days the sickening August heat remained unbroken; but on the fifth the thunderheads began to gather and a fresh breeze swept down from the slopes of the distant Cumberland; a wind smelling sweetly of rain and full of cooling promise.
On this fifth day, Thomas Jefferson, lying in wait at the gate of the manor-house grounds, waylaid Doctor Williams coming out, and asked the question which had hitherto had its doleful answer without the necessity of asking. If the doctor had struck him with the buggy whip the shock would not have been more real than that consequent on the snapping of mental tension strings and the surging, strangling uprush of the tidal wave of relief.
"Little Ardea?" said the doctor. "Oh, she'll do well enough now, I hope. The fever is broken and she's asleep."
Thomas Jefferson shut the gate mechanically when the doctor had driven out; but when there was nothing more to hold him, he scrambled over the stone wall on the opposite side of the pike and ran for the hills like one demented.
The girl would live! Hell had yawned and cast him up once more on the pleasant, homely earth; and now the gentle rain of penitence, which could never water the dry places for a soul in torment, drenched him likethe real rain which was falling to slake the thirst of the parched fields and the brittle-leaved, rustling forest.
For a long time he lay on his face on the first bit of tree-sheltered grass he had come to, caring nothing for the storm which was driving all the wild creatures of the wood to cover. God had not been so pitiless, after all. There was yet a balm in Gilead.
And for the future? O just Heavens! how straitly and circumspectly he would walk all the days of his life! Never again should Satan, going about like a roaring lion, take him unawares. He would even learn to love the girl, as one should love an enemy; and when she should come and tell him that all the sacred places were hers by her grandfather's right, he would smile reproachfully, like the boy being led forth to the stake in theBook of Martyrs, and say—
But the time was not yet fully come for self-pityings; and when Thomas Jefferson went home after the shower, not even the soggy chill of his wet clothes could depress the spirit which had made good its footing on the high mount of humility.
It was late in September before the dreaded invasion of the sacred places, foreboded by Thomas Jefferson's prophetic soul, became one of the things to be looked back on; and the interval had sufficed for another change of heart, or, more correctly, for a descent to the valley of things as they are from the top of that high mountain of spiritual humility.
Thomas Jefferson did not analyze the reactionary process. But the milestones along the backward way were familiar.
In a little while he found that he was once more able to say his prayers at bedtime with the old glibness, and with the comfortable feeling that he had done his whole duty if he remained on his knees for sixty full ticks of the heirloom grandfather clock. It was an accomplishment on which he prided himself, this knack of saying his prayers and counting the clock ticks at the same time. Stub Helgerson, whose mother was a Lutheran and said her prayers out of a book, could not do it. Thomas Jefferson had asked him.
A little farther along he came to the still more familiar milestone of the doubtful questionings. Did God really trouble Himself about the millions of things people asked Him to do? It seemed highly incredible, not to say impossible, in the very nature of it. And if He did, would He make one person sick for the sake of making another person sorry? These questions were answerless, like so many of the others; but after the perplexity had been pushed aside, the doubt remained.
Coming down by such successive steps from the mount of penitent thanksgivings, it was but a short time before he found himself back on the old camping-ground of sullen resentment.
When the girl got well enough to go about, she would find him out and warn him off; or perhaps she might do even worse, and tag him. In either case he should hate her, and there was a sort of ferocious joy in the thought that she would doubtless be a long time getting well, and would probably not be able to find him if he kept far enough out of her way.
Acting on this wise conclusion, he carefully avoided the manor-house and its neighborhood, making a wide circuit when he went fishing in the upper pools. And once, when his father had sent him with a message to the Major, he did violence to his own sense of exact obedience by transferring the word at the house gate to Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete.
But when one's evil star is in the ascendent, precautions are like the vain strugglings of the fly in the web. The day of reckoning may be postponed, but it will by no means be effaced from the calendar. One purple and russet afternoon, when all the silent forest world was steeped in the deep peace of early autumn, Thomas Jefferson was fishing luxuriously in the most distant of the upper pools. There were three fat perch gill-strung ona forked withe under the overhanging bank, and a fourth was rising to the bait, when the peaceful stillness was rudely rent by a crashing in the undergrowth, and a great dog, of a breed hitherto unknown to Paradise, bounded into the little glade to stand glaring at the fisherman, his teeth bared and his back hairs bristling.
Now Thomas Jefferson in his thirteenth year was as well able to defend himself as any clawed and toothed creature of the wood, and fear, the fear of anything he could face and grapple with, was a thing unknown. Propping his fishing pole so that no chance of a nibble might be lost in the impending struggle, he got on his knees and picked out the exact spot in the dog's neck where he would drive the bait knife home when hostilities actual should begin.
"Oh, please! Don't you hurt my dog!" said a rather weak little voice out of the rearward void.
But, gray eyes human, holding brown canine in an unwinking gaze: "You come round here and call him off o' me."
"He is not wishing to hurt you, or anybody," said the voice. "Down, Hector!"
The Great Dane passed from suspicious rigidity and threatening lip twitchings to mighty and frivolous gambolings, and Thomas Jefferson got up to give him room. A girl—thegirl, as some inner sense instantly assured him—was trying to make the dog behave. So he had a chance to look her over before the battle for sovereignty should begin.
There was a little shock of disdainful surprise to go with the first glance. Somehow he had been expecting something very different; something on the order of theQueen of Sheba—done small, of course—as that personage was pictured in the family Bible; a girl, proud and scornful, and possibly wearing a silk dress and satin shoes.
Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face. A double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson's mind: she was rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks—well, she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan Bryerson.
When the dog was reduced to quietude, the small one repaid Thomas Jefferson's stare with a level gaze out of the over-sized eyes.
"Was it that you were afraid of Hector?" she asked.
"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson, and the scorn was partly for her queer way of speaking and partly for the foolishness of the question. "Huh! I reckon you don't know who I am. I'd have killed your dog if he'd jumped on me, maybe."
"Me? I do know who you are. You are Thomas Gordon. Your mother took care of me and prayed for me when I was sick. Hector is a—an extremely good dog. He would not jump at you."
"It's mighty lucky for him he didn't," bragged Thomas Jefferson, with a very creditable imitation of his father's grim frown. Then he sat down on the bank of the stream and busied himself with his fishing-tackle as if he considered the incident closed.
"What is it that you are trying to do?" asked Ardea, when the silence had extended to the third worm impaled on the hook and promptly abstracted therefrom by a wily sucker lying at the bottom of the pool.
"I was fishin' some before you and your dog came along and scared all the perch away," he said sourly. Then, turning suddenly on her: "Why don't you go ahead and say it? Is it 'cause you're afeard to?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I know what you're going to say; you are going to tell me this is your grandfather's land and run me off. But I ain't aimin' to go till I'm good and ready."
She looked down on him without malice.
"You are such a funny boy," she remarked, and there was something in her way of saying it that made Thomas Jefferson feel little and infantile and inferior, though he was sure there must be an immense age difference in his favor.
"Why?" he demanded.
"Oh, I don't know; just because you are. If you knew French I could explain it better that way."
"I don't know anybody by that name, and I don't care," said Thomas Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fishing.
Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool. Then came the volcanic outburst.
"I think you are mean, mean!" she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her foot. "I—I want to go ho-ome!"
"Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was going to be notably easy to bully her—another point of difference between her and Nan Bryerson.
"I know there isn't anybody holding me, but—but I can't find the way."
That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling, in the case of a girl.
"You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the ungraciousness he could muster into the query.
"You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"
"I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the methodical disposal of his fishing-tackle. It would be good for her to learn that she must wait on his motions.
She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."
He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what hardships she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst brier patchesand across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a helplessly pliable subject.
The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down; but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come on—we're 'most there, now."
But Ardea's troubles were not yet at an end. She stopped crying and got up to follow him blindly over more hills and through other brier tangles; and when they finally emerged in the cleared lands, they were still on the wrong side of the creek.
"It's only about up to your chin; reckon you can wade it?" asked Thomas Jefferson, in a sudden access of heart-hardening. But it softened him a little to see her gather her torn frock and stumble down to the water's edge without a word, and he added: "Hold on; maybe we can find a log, somewhere."
There was a foot log just around the next bend above, as he very well knew, and thither he led the way. The dog made the crossing first, and stood wagging his tail encouragingly on the bank of safety. Then Thomas Jefferson passed his trembling victim out on the log.
"You go first," he directed; "so 't I can catch you if you slip."
For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.
"Oh, you please go first, so I won't have to look down at the water!"
"No; I'm coming behind—then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to fall," he said stubbornly.
"Will you walk right up close, so I can know you are there?"
Thomas Jefferson's smile was cruelly misleading, as were his words. "All you'll have to do will be to reach your hand back and grab me," he assured her; and thereupon she began to inch her way out over the swirling pool.
When he saw that she could by no possibility turn to look back, Thomas Jefferson deliberately sat down on the bank to watch her. There had never been anything in his life so tigerishly delightful as this game of playing on the feelings and fears of the girl whose coming had spoiled the solitudes.
For the first few feet Ardea went steadily forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the Great Dane sitting motionless at the farther end of the bridge of peril. Then, suddenly the dog grew impatient and began to leap and bark like a foolish puppy. It was too much for Ardea to have her eye-anchor thus transformed into a dizzying whirlwind of gray monsters. She reached backward for the reassuring hand: it was not there, and the next instant the hungry pool rose up to engulf her.
In all his years Thomas Jefferson had never had such a stab as that which an instantly awakened conscience gave him when she slipped and fell. Now he was her murderer, beyond any hope of future mercies. For a moment the horror of it held him vise-like. Then the sight of the Great Dane plunging to the rescue freed him.
"Good dog!" he screamed, diving headlong from his own side of the pool; and between them Ardea was dragged ashore, a limp little heap of saturation, conscious, but with her teeth chattering and great, dark circles around the big blue eyes.
Thomas Jefferson's first word was masculinely selfish.
"I'm awful sorry!" he stammered. "If you can't make out to forgive me, I'm going to have a miser'ble time of it after I get home. God will whip me worse for this than He did for the other."
It was here, again, that she gave him the feeling that she was older than he.
"It will serve you quite right. Now you'd better get me home as quick as ever you can. I expect I'll be sick again, after this."
He held his peace and walked her as fast as he could across the fields and out on the pike. But at the Dabney gates he paused. It was not in human courage to face the Major under existing conditions.
"I reckon you'll go and tell your gran'paw on me," he said hopelessly.
She turned on him with anger ablaze.
"Why should I not tell him? And I never want to see you or hear of you again, you cruel, hateful boy!"
Thomas Jefferson hung about the gate while she went stumbling up the driveway, leaning heavily on the great dog. When she had safely reached the house he went slowly homeward, wading in trouble even as he waded in the white dust of the pike. For when one drinks too deeply of the cup of tyranny the lees are apt to be like the little book the Revelator ate—sweet as honey in the mouth and bitter in the belly.
That evening at the supper-table he had one nerve-racking fear dispelled and another confirmed by his mother's reply to a question put by his father.
"Yes; the Major sent for me again this afternoon. That child is back in bed again with a high fever. It seems she was out playing with that great dog of hers and fell into the creek. I wanted to tell the Major he is just tempting Providence, the way he makes over her and indulges her, but I didn't dare to."
And again Thomas Jefferson knew that he was the one who had tempted Providence.
From the grave and thoughtful vantage-ground of thirteen, Thomas Jefferson could look back on the second illness of Ardea Dabney as the closing incident of his childhood.
The industrial changes which were then beginning, not only for the city beyond the mountain, but for all the region round about, had rushed swiftly on Paradise; and the old listless life of the unhasting period soon receded quickly into a far-away past, rememberable only when one made an effort to recall it.
First had come the completion of the Great Southwestern. Diverted by the untiring opposition of Major Dabney from its chosen path through the valley, it skirted the westward hills, passing within a few hundred yards of the Gordon furnace. Since business knows no animosities, the part which Caleb Gordon and his gun crew had played in the right-of-way conflict was ignored. The way-station at the creek crossing was named Gordonia, and it was the railway traffic manager himself who suggested to the iron-master the taking of a partner with capital, the opening of the vein of coking coal on Mount Lebanon, the installation of coking-ovens, and the modernizing and enlarging of the furnace andfoundry plant—hints all pointing to increased traffic for the road.
With the coming of Mr. Duxbury Farley to Paradise, Thomas Jefferson lost, not only the simple life, but the desire to live it. This Mr. Farley, whom we have seen and heard, momentarily, on the station platform in South Tredegar, the expanded, hailed from Cleveland, Ohio; was, as he was fond of saying pompously, a citizen of no mean city. His business in the reawakening South was that of an intermediary between cause and effect; the cause being the capital of confiding investors in the North, and the effect the dissipation of the same in various and sundry development schemes in the new iron field.
To Paradise, in the course of his goings to and fro, came this purger of other men's purses, and he saw the fortuitous grouping of the possibilities at a glance: abundant iron of good quality; an accessible vein of coal, second only to Pocahontas for coking; land cheap, water free, and a persuadable subject in straightforward, simple-hearted Caleb Gordon.
Farley had no capital, but he had that which counts for more in the promoter's field; namely, the ability to reap where others had sown. His plan, outlined to Caleb in a sweeping cavalry-dash of enthusiasm, was simplicity itself. Caleb should contribute the raw material—land, water and the ore quarry—and it should also be his part to secure a lease of the coal land from Major Dabney. In the meantime he, Farley, would undertake to float the enterprise in the North, forming a company and selling stock to provide the development capital.
The iron-master demurred a little at first. There were difficulties, and he pointed them out.
"I don't know, Colonel Farley. It appears like I'm givin' all I've got for a handout at the kitchen door of the big company. Then, again, there's the Major. He's pizon against all these improvements. You don't know the Major."
"On the contrary, my dear Mr. Gordon, it is because I do know him, or know of him, that I am turning him over to you. You are the one person in the world to obtain that coal lease. I confess I couldn't touch the Major with a ten-foot pole, any more than you could go North and get the cash. But you are his neighbor, and he likes you. What you recommend, he'll do." Thus the enthusiast.
"Well, I don't know," said Caleb doubtfully; "I reckon I can try. He can't any more 'n fire me, like he did the Southwestern right-o'-way man. But then, about t'other part of it: I've got a little charcoal furnace here that don't amount to much, maybe, but it's all mine, and I'm the boss. When this other thing goes through, the men who are putting up the money will own it and me. I'll be just about as much account as the tag on a shoe-string."
This part of the conference was held on the slab-floored porch of the oak-shingled house, with Thomas Jefferson as a negligible listener. Since he was listening with both eyes and ears, he saw something in Mr. Duxbury Farley's face that carried him swiftly back to the South Tredegar railway station and to that first antipathetic impression. But again the suave tongue quickly turned the page.
"Don't let that trouble you for a moment, Mr. Gordon," was the reassuring rejoinder. "I shall see that your apportionment of stock in the company is as large as the flotation scheme will stand; and as I, too, shall be a minority stock-holder, I shall share your risk. But there will be no risk. If the Lord prospers us, we shall both come out of this rich men, Mr. Gordon."
The slow smile that Thomas Jefferson knew so well came and went like a flitting shadow.
"I reckon the Lord don't make n'r meddle much with these here little child's playhouses of our'n," said Caleb; and then he gave his consent to the promoter's plan.
Singularly or not, as we choose to view it, the difficulties effaced themselves at the first onset. Though tact was no part of Caleb Gordon's equipment, his presentation of the matter to Major Dabney became so nearly a personal asking—with Mr. Duxbury Farley and the Northern capitalists distantly backgrounding—that the Major granted the lease of the coal lands on purely personal grounds; would, indeed, have waived the matter of consideration entirely, if Caleb had not insisted. Had not the iron-master been raised to the high degree of fellowship by the hand that signed the lease?
On his part, Mr. Duxbury Farley was equally successful. A company was formed, the charter was obtained, and the golden stream began to flow into the treasury; into it and out again in the raceway channels of development. Thomas Jefferson stood aghast when an army of workmen swept down on Paradise and began to change the very face of nature. But that was only the beginning.
For a time Chiawassee Coal and Iron figured buoyantly in the market quotations, and delegations of stock-holders, both present and prospective, were personally conducted to the scene of activities by enthusiastic Vice-President Farley. But when these had served their purpose a thing happened. One fine morning it was whispered on 'Change that Chiawassee iron would not Bessemer, and that Chiawassee coke had been rejected by the Southern Association of Iron Smelters.
Followed a crash which was never very clearly understood by the simple-hearted soldier iron-master, though it was merely a repetition of a lesson well conned by the earlier investors in Southern coal and iron fields. Caleb's craft was the making of iron; not the financing of top-heavy corporations. So, when he was told that the company had failed, and that he and Farley had been appointed receivers, he took it as a financial matter, of course, somewhat beyond his ken, and went about his daily task of supervision with a mind as undisturbed as it would have been distraught had he known something of the subterranean mechanism by which the failure and the receivership had been brought to pass.
Why Mr. Duxbury Farley spared the iron-master in the freezing-out process was an unsolved riddle to many. But there were reasons. For one, there was the lease of the coal lands, renewable year by year—this was Caleb's own honest provision inserted in the contract for the Major's protection—and renewable only by the Major's friend. Further, a practical man at the practical end of an industry is a sheer necessity; and by contriving to have honest Caleb associated with himself in the receivership, a fine color of uprightness was imparted to the promoter's far-reaching plan of aggrandizement.
So, later, when the reorganization was effected; when the troublesome, dividend-hungry stock-holders of the original company were eliminated by due process of law, Caleb's name appeared on the Farley slate with the title of general manager of the new company—for the same good and sufficient reasons.
It was during the fervid six months of Chiawassee Coal and Iron development that Thomas Jefferson had passed from the old life to the new—from childhood to boyhood.
Simultaneously, there were the coal-mines opening under the cliffs of Mount Lebanon, the long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen. Thomas Jefferson did his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine. And when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same moment, it distressed him to tears.
Of the home life during that strenuous interval there was little more than the eating and sleeping for one whose time for the absorbent process was all too limited. Also, the perplexing questions reaching down into the under-soul of things were silent. Also, again—mark of a change so radical that none but a Thomas Jefferson may read and understand—an awe-inspiring Major Dabney had ceased to be the first citizen of the world, that pinnacle being now occupied by a tall, sallow, smooth-faced gentleman, persuasive of speech and superhuman in accomplishment, who was the life and soul ofthe activities, and whom his father and mother always addressed respectfully as "Colonel" Farley.
One day, in the very heat of the battle, this commanding personage, at whose word the entire world of Paradise was in travail, had deigned to speak directly to him—Thomas Jefferson. It was at the mine on the mountain. The workmen were bolting into place the final trestle of the inclined railway which was to convey the coal in descending carloads to the bins at the coke-ovens, and Thomas Jefferson was absorbing the details as a dry sponge soaks water.
"Making sure that they do it just right, are you, my boy?" said the great man, patting him approvingly on the shoulder. "That's good. I like to see a boy anxious to get to the bottom of things. Going to be an iron-master, like your father, are you?"
"N-no," stammered the boy. "I wisht I was!"
"Well, what's to prevent? We are going to have the completest plant in the country right here, and it will be a fine chance for your father's son; the finest in the world."
"'Tain't goin' to do me any good," said Thomas Jefferson dejectedly. "I got to be a preacher."
Mr. Duxbury Farley looked down at him curiously. He was a religious person himself, coming to be known as a pillar in St. Michael's Church at South Tredegar, a liberal contributor, and a prime mover in a plan to tear down the old building and to erect a new one more in keeping with the times and South Tredegar's prosperity. Yet he was careful to draw the line between religion as a means of grace and business as a means of making money.
"That is your mother's wish, I suppose: and it's a worthy one; very worthy. Yet, unless you have a special vocation—but there; your mother doubtless knows best. I am only anxious to see your father's son succeed in whatever he undertakes."
After that, Thomas Jefferson secretly made Success his god, and was alertly ready to fetch and carry for the high priest in its temple, only the opportunities were infrequent.
For, wide as the Paradise field seemed to be growing from Thomas Jefferson's point of view, it was altogether too narrow for Duxbury Farley. The principal offices of Chiawassee Coal and Iron were in South Tredegar, and there the first vice-president was building a hewn-stone mansion, and had become a charter member of the city's first club; was domiciled in due form, and was already beginning to soften his final "r's," and to speak of himself as a Southerner—by adoption.
So sped the winter and the spring succeeding Thomas Jefferson's thirteenth birthday, and for the first time in his life he saw the opening buds of the ironwood and the tender, fresh greens of the herald poplars, and smelled the sweet, keen fragrance of awakening nature, without being moved thereby.
Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening. He had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more.
As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altarrock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his own "pine-top."
In the new life, as in the old, summer followed quickly on the heels of spring, and when the hepaticas and the violets were gone, and the laurel and the rhododendron were decking the cliffs of Lebanon in their summer robes of pink and white and magenta, another door was opened for Thomas Jefferson.
Vaguely it had been understood in the Gordon household that Mr. Duxbury Parley was a widower with two children: a boy, some two years older than Thomas Jefferson, at school in New England, and a girl younger, name and place of sojourn unknown. The boy was coming South for the long vacation, and the affairs of Chiawassee Coal and Iron—already reaching out subterraneously toward the future receivership—would call the first vice-president North for the better portion of July. Would Mrs. Martha take pity on a motherless lad, whose health was none of the best, and open her home to Vincent?