"Yes, I reckon so; that's what makes me say what I does. There's a heap o' sinners left round here, yit, Brother Silas. There's the Major, for one, and I know you're always countin' me in for another. I dunno but you might snatch me as a brand from the burnin', if you could make out to try it one more lap around the you'se. I been thinkin' right p'intedly about—"
But the preacher had cut in with a curt "Good night," and was gone, with his broad-shouldered nephew at his heels; and the horse-trader went on, with the stars for his audience.
"Look at that, now, will ye? Old Brother Silas is gettin' right smart tetchy with the passin' of the years; he is, so. But he's a powerful preacher. If anybody ever gits me for a star in their crown, it's Brother Silas ag'inst the field, even money up."
Pettigrass turned and was groping for the gate latch when a hand fell on his shoulder, and a clutch that was more than half a blow twirled him about to face the roadway. He was doubling his fists for defense when he saw who his assailant was.
"Why, Tom-Jeff! what's ailin' ye?" he began; but Tom broke in with gaspings of rage.
"Japhe Pettigrass, what did you think you saw last Wednesday forenoon up yonder at Big Rock Spring on the mountain? Tell it straight, this time, or by the Godyou don't believe in, I'll dig the truth out of you with my bare hands!"
"Sho, now, Tom-Jeff; don't you git so servigrous over nothin'. I didn't see nothin' but a couple o' young fly-aways playin' 'possum in a hole in the big rock. And I'll leave it to you if I didn't call Cæsar off and go my ways, jes' like I'd like to be done by."
"Yes," snarled Tom, dog-mad and furious in this second submergence of the wave of wrath. "Yes; and then you came straight down here and told my uncle!" The hand he had been holding behind him came to the front, clutching a stone snatched up from the metaling of the pike as he ran. "If I should break your face in with this, Japhe Pettigrass, it wouldn't be any more than you've earned!"
"By gravy!Itell Brother Silas on you, Tom-Jeff? You show me the man 'at says I done any such low-down thing as that, and I'll frazzle a fifty-dollar hawsswhip out on his ornery hide—I will, so. Say, boy; you don't certain'y believe that o' me, do ye?"
"I don't want to believe it of you, Japhe," quavered Tom, as near to tears as the pride of his eighteen years would sanction. "But somebody saw and told, and made it a heap worse than it was." He leaned over the top of the wall and put his face in the crook of his elbow, being nothing better than a hurt child, for all his bigness.
"Well, now; I wouldn't let a little thing like that gravel me, if I was you, Tom-Jeff," said Pettigrass, turned comforter. "Nan's a mighty pretty gal, and you ort to be willin' to stand a little devilin' on her account—more especially as you've—"
Tom put up his arm as if to ward a blow.
"Don't you say it, Japhe, or I'll go mad again," he broke out.
"I ain't sayin' nothin'. But who do you reckon it was told on you? Was there anybody else in the big woods that mornin'?"
"Yes; there were three men testing the pipe-line. We both saw them, and Nan was scared stiff at sight of one of them; that's why I put her up in that hole."
"Who was the man?"
"I don't know. I didn't recognize any of them—they were too far off when I saw them. And afterward, Nan wouldn't tell me."
"Did any of 'em see you and Nan?"
"I thought not. Nan was sitting on the flat rock where you stood and looked into the cave, and when she began to whimper, I flung her over into the leaves and ran with her to the hole."
"H'm," said Japheth. "When you find out who that feller is that Nan's skeered of, you can lay your hand on the man that told Brother Silas on you. But I wouldn't trouble about it none, if I was you. You've got a long ways the best of him, whoever he is, and—"
But Tom had turned to go home, feeling his way by the wall because the angry tears were still blinding him, and the horse-trader fell back into his star-gazing.
"Law, law," he mused; "'the horrible pit an' the miry clay.' What a sufferin' pity it is we pore sinners cayn't dance a little now and ag'in 'thout havin' to walk right up and pay the fiddler! Tom-Jeff, there, now, he's a-thinkin' the price is toler'ble high; and I don't know but it is—I don't know but what it is."
The dinner at Woodlawn that night was a stiff andcomfortless meal, as it had come to be with the taking on of four-tined forks and the other conventions for which an oak-paneled dining-room in an ornate brick mansion sets the pace. Caleb Gordon was fathoms deep in the mechanical problems of the day's work, as was his wont. Silas Crafts was abstracted and silent. Tom's food choked him, as it had need under the sharp stress of things; and the convalescent housemother remained at table only long enough to pour the coffee.
Tom excused himself a few minutes later, and followed his mother to her room, climbing the stair to her door, leaden-footed and with his heart ready to burst.
"Is that you, Thomas?" said the gentle voice within, answering his tap on the panel. "Come in, son; come in and sit by my fire. It's right chilly to-night."
Thomas Jefferson entered and placed his chair so that she could not see him without turning, and for many minutes the silence was unbroken. Then he began, as begin he must, sometime and in some way.
"Mammy," he said, feeling unconsciously for the childish phrase, "Mammy, has Uncle Silas been telling you anything about me?"
She gave a little nod of assent.
"Something, Thomas, but not a great deal. You have had some trouble with Doctor Tollivar?"
"Yes."
"I have known that for some little time. Your uncle might have told me more, but I wouldn't let him. There has never been anything between us to break confidence, Tom. I knew you would tell me yourself, when the time came."
"I have come to tell you to-night, mammy. You musthear it all, from beginning to end. It goes back a long way—back to the time when you used to let me kneel with my head in your lap to say my prayers; when you used to think I was good...."
The fire had died down to a few glowing masses of coke on the grate bars when he had finished the story of his wanderings in the valley of dry bones. Through it all, Martha Gordon had sat silent and rigid, her thin hands lying clasped in her lap, and her low willow rocking-chair barely moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.
But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those who sorrow without hope, crying again and again,"O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious grapplings with the adult fact.
For Thomas Jefferson, grinding tenaciously in the Boston technical school, whither he had gone late in the winter of Beersheban discontent, the stream-crossing fell in the spring of the panic year 1893, what time he was twenty-one, a quarter-back on his college eleven, fit, hardy, studious and athletic; a pace-setter for his fellows and the pride of the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday future,—as he did by times,—the boyish impatience to be at it was gone. Chiawassee Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home letters were merechronicles of sleepy Paradise. The skies were clear, and the present was acutely present. Tom studied hard and played hard; ate like an ogre and slept like a log. And when he finally awoke to find himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon, he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream should fill so vast a chasm.
The call of the ferryman—to keep the figure whole—was a letter from his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the storm of financial depression were already in the air. Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated, though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at heart. What would Tom advise?
Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way. His father was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help. It seemed vastly incredible. Thomas Jefferson's ideal of steady courage, of invincible human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson. What a trumpet blast of alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for help!
Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longera raw recruit, a boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting. It astounded him that the realization had been so slow in arriving. It was as if he had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand. Tumultuously it rushed on him that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be; that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.
He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. Swiftly, with a click like that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed. The highway was the same, but now the man's steps had grown cautious and uncertain and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.
Tom broke the eye-hold on the vision and sprang up to pace the narrow limits of the study.
"It's up to me," he mused, "and I'd like to know what I've been thinking of all this time. Why, pappy's old! he was forty before I was born. And I've been up here taking it easy and having all sorts of a good time, while he's been playing Sindbad to Duxbury Farley's Old Man of the Sea. Coming, pappy!" he shouted; and forthwith flung himself down at the table to write a letter that was to put new life into a weary old man who was fighting against odds in the far-away Southland.
The lone soldier was to take heart of grace, remembering that he had a son; remembering also that the son was now a man grown, stout of arm, steady of head, and otherwise fighting-fit. If the storm should come, the watchword must be to hold on all, keeping steerage-way on the Chiawassee Consolidated craft at all hazards. The June examinations were not far off, and these disposed of, the man-son would be ready to lay hold. Meanwhile, let Caleb Gordon, in his capacity of principal minor stock-holder, insist on a full and exact statement of the company's affairs, and—here the new manhood asserted itself boldly—let that statement, or a copy of it, come to Boston by the first mail.
To this letter there was a grateful reply in which Tom read with a smile his father's half-bewildered attempt to get over to the new point of view. It began, "Dear Buddy," and ended, "Your affectionate pappy," but there was man-to-man matter between the salutation and the signature. The inquiry into the affairs of Chiawassee Consolidated had revealed little or nothing more than the general manager already knew. The president had turned the inquiring stock-holder over to Dyckman, the bookkeeper, with instructions to give Mr. Gordon the fullest possible information, and:
"Dyckman slid out of it, smooth and easy-like," Caleb's letter went on. "He allowed he wasmightybusy, right about then. Wouldn't I just make myself at home and examine the books for myself? I reckon that was about what Farley wanted him to do. I'm no book expert, and I couldn't make head or tail out of Dyckman's spider tracks. Looks to me like all the books are good for is to keep people from finding where the company is at. What little I found out, young Norman told me. He says we're in a hole, and the first wagon-load of dirt that comes along will bury us out of sight."
Tom, driven now with the closing work of the college year, yet took time to write another heartening letter to the hard-pressed old soldier. It had been his good fortune to win the Clarkson prize for crucible tests, and to have gained thereby a speaking acquaintance with the multimillionaire iron king who had founded it. Mr. Clarkson did not believe that the financial storm would grow to panic size. As for himself, Tom thought the hazard was less in the times than in the Farleys. Father Caleb was to keep his finger on the pulse of the main office, wiring Boston at the first sign of its weakening.
The junior metallurgical was in the thick of the June examinations when the catastrophe befell. The brief story of it came to Tom in the first dictated letter he had ever received from his father, and the tremulous shakiness of the signature pointed eloquently to the reason. Chiawassee Consolidated was out of blast—"temporarily suspended," in the pleasant euphemism of the elder Farley; the force, clerical and manual, was discharged, with only Dyckman left in the deserted South Tredegar offices to answer questions; and the three Farleys, with Major Dabney, Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, were to spend the summer in Europe.
Caleb wrote in some bitterness of spirit. Though the Gordon holdings in the company, increased from time to time as the iron-master had prospered, amounted to a little more than a third of the capital stock, everything had been done secretly. The general manager's own notice of the shut-down had come in the posted "Notice to Employees." When the Farleys should leave, he would be utterly helpless; on their return they could repudiate everything he might do in their absence. Meantime, ruin was imminent. The affairs of the company were in the utmost confusion; the treasury was empty, and there were no apparent assets apart from the idle plant. Creditors were pressing; the discharged workmen, led by the white coal-miners, were on the verge of riot; and Major Dabney's royalties on the coal lands were many months in arrears.
Tom rose promptly to the occasion, and in all the stress of things found space to wonder how it chanced that he knew instinctively what to do and how to go about it. Before his information was an hour old a rush telegram had gone to his father, asking from what port and by what steamer the Farleys would sail; asking also that certain documents be sent to a given New York address by first mail.
This done, he laid the exigencies frankly before the examiners in the technical school, praying for such lenity as might be extended under the circumstances. Since all things are possible for an honor-man, beloved of those whose mission it is to grind the human weapon to its edge, the difficulties in this field vanished. Mr. Gordon could go on with the examinations until his presence was needed elsewhere; and after the stressful moment was passed he could return and finish.
Tom, the boy, could not have gone on. It would have been blankly impossible. But Tom, the man, was a new creature. While waiting for the reply to his telegram, he plunged doggedly back into the scholastic whirlpool,kicked, struggled, strangled, got his head above water, and found, vastly to his own amazement, that the thing was actually compassable in spite of the mighty distractions.
The return telegram from Gordonia was a day late. Knowing diplomacy only by name, Caleb Gordon had gone directly to Dyckman for information regarding the Farleys' movements. Dyckman was polite to the general manager, but unhappily he knew nothing of Mr. Farley's plans. Caleb tried elsewhere, and the little mystery thickened. At his club, Mr. Farley had spoken of taking a Cunarder from Boston; to a friend in the South Tredegar Manufacturers' Association he had confided his intention of sailing from Philadelphia. But at the railway ticket office he had engaged Pullman reservations for six persons to New York.
This last was conclusive, as far as it went; and Japheth Pettigrass supplied the missing item. The Dabneys and the Farleys made one party, and Japheth knew the steamer and the sailing date.
"Party will sail by White Star Line Baltic, New York, to-morrow. New York address, Fifth Avenue Hotel. Papers to you care 271 Broadway by mail yesterday," was the message which was signed for by the doorkeeper at the mines and metallurgy examination room in Boston, late in the forenoon of the second day; and Tom looked at the clock. Nothing would be gained by taking a train which would land him in New York late in the evening; so he plunged again into the examination pool and thought no more of Chiawassee Consolidated until his paper on qualitative analysis had been neatly folded, docketed and handed to the examiner.
The hands of his watch were pointing to eight o'clock the following morning when Tom made his way through the throng in the Grand Central station and found a cab. The sailing hour of theBalticwas ten, and he picked his cabman accordingly.
"I shall want you for a couple of hours, and it's double fare if you don't miss. 271 Broadway, first," was his fillip for the driver; and he was speedily rattling away to the down-town address.
The taking of the cab was his first mistake, and he discovered it before he had gone very far. Time was precious, and the horse, pushed to the police limit, was too slow. Tom signaled his Irishman.
"Get me over to the Elevated, and then go to Madison Square and wait for me," he ordered; and by this change of conveyance he obtained his mail and won back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel by late breakfast time.
From that on, luck was with him. The Farleys, father and son, were in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the others to come down to the café breakfast. Tom saw them, confronted them, and went at things very concisely.
"I have come all the way from Boston to ask for a few minutes of your time, Mr. Farley," he said to the president. "Will you give it to me now?"
"Surely!" was the genial reply, and the promoter signed to his son and drew apart with the importunate one. "Well, go on, my boy; what can I do for you at this last American moment?—some message from your good father?"
"No," said Tom shortly; "it's from me, individually. You know in what shape you have left things at home;they've got to be stood on their feet before you go aboard theBaltic."
"What's this—what's this? Why, my dear young man! what can you possibly mean?"—this in buttered tones of the gentlest expostulation.
"I mean just about what I say. You have smashed Chiawassee Consolidated, and now you are going off to leave my father to hold the bag. Or rather I should say, you are taking the bag with you."
The president was visibly moved.
"Why, Thomas—you must be losing your mind! You've—you've been studying too hard; that's it—the term work up there in Boston has been too much for you."
"Cut it out, Mr. Farley," said Tom savagely, all the Gordon fighting blood singing in his veins. "You've got a thing to do, and it is going to be done before you leave America. Will you talk straight business, or not?"
The president adjusted his eye-glasses, and gave this brand-new Gordon a calm over-look.
"And if I decline to discuss business matters with a rude school-boy?" he intimated mildly.
"Then it will be rather the worse for you," was the defiant rejoinder. "Acting for my father and the minority stock-holders, I shall try to have you and your son held in America, pending an expert examination of the company's affairs."
It was a long shot, with a thousand chances of missing. If there was anything criminal in the Farley administration, the evidences were doubtless well buried. But Tom was looking deep into the shifty blue eyes of his antagonist when he fired, and he saw that he had notwholly missed. None the less, the president attempted to carry it off lightly.
"What do you think of this, Vincent?" he said, turning to his son. "Here is Tom Gordon—our Tom—talking wildly about investigations and arrests, and I don't know what all. Shall we give him his breakfast and send him back to school?"
Tom cut in quickly before Vincent could make a reply.
"If you're sparring to gain time, it's no use, Mr. Farley. I mean what I say, and I'm dead in earnest." Then he tried another long shot: "I tell you right now we've had this thing cocked and primed ever since we found out what you and Vincent meant to do. You must turn over the control of Chiawassee Consolidated, legally and formally, to my father before you go aboard theBaltic, or—you don't go aboard!"
"Let me understand," said the treasurer, cutting in. "Are you accusing us of crime?"
"You will find out what the accusation is, later on," said Tom, taking yet another cartridge from the long-range box. "What I want now is a plain, straightforward yes or no, if either of you is capable of saying it."
The president took his son aside.
"Do you suppose Dyckman has been talking too much?" he asked hurriedly.
Vincent shook his head.
"You can't tell ... it looks a little rocky. Of course, we had a right to do as we pleased with our own, but we don't want to have an unfriendly construction put on things."
"But they can't do anything!" protested the president."Why, I'd be perfectly willing to turn over my private papers, if they were asked for!"
"Yes, of course. But there would be misconstruction. There is that contract with the combination, for example; we had a right to manipulate things so we'd have to close down, and it might not transpire that we made money by doing it. But, on the other hand, it might leak out, and there'd be no end of a row. Then there is another thing: there is somebody behind this who is bigger than the old soldier or this young foot-ball tough. It's too nicely timed."
"But, heavens and earth! you wouldn't turn the property over to Gordon, would you?"
The younger man's smile was a mere contortion of the lips. "It's a sucked orange," he said. "Let the old man have it. He may work a miracle of some sort and pull out alive. I should call it a snap, and take him up too quick. If he wins out, so much the better for all concerned. If he doesn't, why, we left the property entirely in his hands, and he smashed it. Don't you see the beauty of it?"
The president wheeled short on Tom.
"What you may think you are extorting, my dear boy, you are going to get through sheer good-will and a desire to give your father every chance in the world," he said blandly. "We discussed the plan of electing him vice-president, with power to act, before we left home, but there seemed to be some objections. We are willing to give him full control—and this altogether apart from any foolish threats you have seen fit to make. Bring your legal counsel to Room 327 after breakfast and we will go through the formalities. Are you satisfied?"
"I shall be a lot better satisfied after the fact," said Tom bluntly; and he turned away to avoid meeting Major Dabney and the ladies, who were coming from the elevator to join the two early risers. He had seen next to nothing of Ardea during the three Boston years, and would willingly have seen more. But the new manhood was warning him that time was short, and that he must not mix business with sentiment. So Ardea saw nothing but his back, which, curiously enough, she failed to recognize.
Picking up his cab at the curb, Tom had himself driven quickly to the office of the corporation lawyer whose name he had obtained from Mr. Clarkson the day before, and with whom he had made a wire appointment before leaving Boston. The attorney was waiting for him, and Tom stated the case succinctly, adding a brief of the interview which had just taken place at the hotel.
"You say they agreed to your proposal?" observed the lawyer. "Did Mr. Farley indicate the method?"
"No."
"Have you a copy of the by-laws of your company?"
Tom produced the packet of papers received that morning from his father, and handed the required pamphlet to Mr. Croswell.
"H'm—ha! the usual form. A stock-holders' meeting, with a resolution, would be the simplest way out of it; but that can't be held without the published call. You say your father is a stock-holder?"
"He has four hundred and three of the original one thousand shares. I hold his proxy."
The attorney smiled shrewdly.
"You are a very remarkable young man. You seem to have come prepared at all points. I assume that you are acting under your father's instructions?"
"Why, with his approval, of course," Tom amended. "But it is my own initiative, under the advice of a good friend of mine in Boston, thus far. Oh, I know what I'm about," he added, in answer to the latent question in the lawyer's eyes.
"You seem to," was the laconic reply. "Now let us see exactly what it is that you want Mr. Farley to concede."
"I want him to turn over the entire control of the company's business, operative and financial, to my father."
The lawyer smiled again.
"That is a pretty big asking. Have you any reason to suppose that Mr. Farley will accede to any such demand?"
"Yes; I have very good reasons, but I reckon we needn't go into them here and now. The time is too short; their liner sails at ten."
The attorney tilted his chair and became reflective.
"The simple way out of it is to have Mr. Farley constitute your father, or yourself, his proxy to vote his stock at a certain specified meeting of the stock-holders, which can be called later. Of course, with a majority vote of the stock, you can rearrange matters to suit yourselves, subject only to Mr. Farley's disarrangement when he resumes control of his holdings. How would that serve?"
"You're the doctor," said Tom bruskly. "Any way to get him out and get my father in."
"It's the simplest way, as I say. But if the propertyis worth anything at all, I should think Mr. Farley would fight you to a finish before he would consent."
"You fix up the papers, Mr. Croswell, and I'll see to it that he consents. Make the proxy run in my father's name."
The attorney went into another room and dictated to his stenographer. While he was absent, Tom sat, watch in hand, counting the minutes. It was his first pitched battle with the Farleys, and victory promised. But with industrial panic in the air the victory threatened to be of the Cadmean sort, and a scowl of anxiety gathered between his eyes.
"Never mind," he gritted, with an out-thrust of the square jaw; "it's the Gordon fighting chance; and pappy says that's all we've ever asked—it's all I'm going to ask, anyway. But I wish Ardea wasn't going over with that crowd!"
The conference in Room 327, Fifth Avenue Hotel, held while the carriages were waiting to take the steamer party to the pier, was brief and businesslike. Something to Tom's surprise, Major Dabney was present; and a little later he learned, with a shock of resentment, that the Major was also a minority stock-holder in the moribund Chiawassee Consolidated. The master of Deer Trace was as gracious to Caleb Gordon's son as only a Dabney knew how to be.
"Nothing could give me greateh pleasure, my deah boy, than this plan of having youh fatheh in command at Gordonia," he beamed, shaking Tom's hand effusively. "I hope you'll have us all made millionaihs when we get back home again; I do, for a fact, suh."
Tom smiled and shook his head.
"It looks pretty black, just now, Major. I'm afraid we're in for rough weather."
"Oh, no; not that, son; a meah passing cloud." And then, with the big Dabney laugh: "You youngstehs oughtn't to leave it for us old fellows to keep up the stock of optimism, suh. A word in youh ear, young man: if these heah damned Yankee rascals would quit thei-uh monkeying right heah in Wall Street, the country would take on a new lease of life, suh; it would for a fact," and he said it loudly enough to be heard in the corridor.
During this bit of side play the attorney was laboring with the two Farleys, and Tom, watching narrowly, saw that there was a hitch of some kind.
"What is it?" he demanded, turning shortly on the trio at the table.
The lawyer explained. Mr. Farley thought the plan proposed was entirely too far-reaching in its effects, or possible effects. He was willing to delegate his authority as president of the company to Caleb Gordon in writing. Would not that answer all the requirements?
Tom asked his attorney with his eyes if it would answer, and read the negative reply very clearly. So he shook his head.
"No," he said, turning his back on the Major and lowering his voice. "We must have your proxy, Mr. Farley."
"And if I don't choose to accede to your demands?"
"I don't think we need to go over that ground again," said Tom coolly. "If you don't sign that paper, you'll miss your steamer."
The president glanced toward the open door, as if he half expected to see an officer waiting for him. Then he said, "Oh, well; it's as broad as it is long," and signed.
The leave-takings were brief, and somewhat constrained, save those of the genial Major. Tom pleaded business, further business, with his attorney, when the Major would have had him wait to tell the ladies good-by; hence he saw no more of the tourists after the conference broke up.
Not to lose time, Tom took a noon train back to Boston, first wiring his father to try and keep things instatu quoat Gordonia for another week at all hazards. Winning back to the technical school, he plunged once more into the examination whirlpool, doing his best to forget Chiawassee Consolidated and its mortal sickness for the time being, and succeeding so well that he passed with colors flying.
But the school task done, he turned down the old leaf, pasting it firmly in place. Telegraphing his father to meet him, on the morning of the third day following, at the station in South Tredegar, he allowed himself a few hours for a run up the North Shore and a conference with the Michigan iron king; after which he turned his face southward and was soon speeding to the battle-field through a land by this time shaking to its industrial foundations in the throes of the panic earthquake.
In accordance with Tom's telegram, Caleb Gordon met his son at the station in South Tredegar, and they went together to breakfast in one of the dining-rooms of the Marlboro. Tom's heart burned within him when he saw how the late stress of things had aged his father, and for the first time in his life he opened a vengeance account: if the Farleys ever came back there should be reckoning for more than the looting of Chiawassee Consolidated. But this was only the primitive under-thought. Uppermost at the moment was the joy of the young soldier arrived, fit and vigorous, on his maiden battle-field.
"You don't know how good it seems to get back home again, pappy," he said, over the bacon and eggs. "I've been grinding pretty hard this year, and now it's over, I feel as if I could whip my weight in wildcats, as Japheth used to say. By the way, how is Japheth?"
Caleb Gordon smiled in spite of the corroding industrial anxieties.
"Japheth's going to surprise you some, I reckon, son; he's gone and got religion."
Tom put down his knife and fork.
"Why, the old sinner!" he laughed. "How did that happen?"
"Oh, just about the way it always does," said Caleb slowly. "The spirit moved your Uncle Silas to come out to Little Zoar and hold a protracted meetin', and Japhe joined the mourners and was gathered into the fold."
"Pshaw!" said Tom, in good-natured incredulity. "Why, the very meat and marrow of his existence is his horse-trading; and who could swap horses and tell the truth at the same time?"
"I don't know," was the doubtful reply. "But Brother Japheth allows that's about what he aims to do. It's sort o' curious the way it works out, too. About a week after the baptizin', Jim Bledsoe came down from Pine Knob with a horse to swap. 'Long about sundown he met up with Japhe, and struck him for a trade on a piebald that the Major wouldn't let run in the same lot with the Deer Trace stock. They had it up one side and down the other; Brother Japhe tryin' to tell Bledsoe that his piebald was about the no-accountest horse in the valley, and Jim takin' it all by contraries and gettin' more and more p'intedly anxious to trade."
"Well?" said Tom, enjoying his return to nature like any creature freed of the urban cage.
"They came to the trade, after a tolerable spell of it," Caleb went on, "and the last thing I heard Japhe say was, 'now you recollect, Brother Bledsoe, I done told you that there piebald's no account on the face of the earth—a-lovin' of my neighbor like I promise' Brother Silas I would.'"
Tom laughed again. There was the smell of the good red soil in the little story, a whiff of the home earth reminiscent and heartening. But the under-thought laid hold on Japheth and his change of heart.
"Japhe was about the last man in Paradise, always excepting Major Dabney," he said half-musingly. "Haven't you often wondered what sort of a maggot it is that gets into the human brain to give it the superstitious twist?"
Caleb's gentle frown was the upcast of paternal bewilderment, partly prideful, partly disconcerting. He was not yet fully acquainted with this young giant with the frank face, the sober gray eyes, and the conscious grasp of himself. More than once since their meeting at the steps of the Pullman car he had felt obliged to reassure himself by saying, "This is Tom; this is my son." There were so many and such marked changes: the quick, curt speech, caught in the Northland; the nervous, sure-footed stride, and the athletic swing of the shoulders; the easy manner and confident air, not of college-boy conceit, but of the assurance of young manhood; and, lastly, this blunt right-about-face in matters of religion. Caleb was not quite sure that this latter change was entirely welcome.
"Whereabouts did ye learn to call it superstition, son? Not at your mammy's knee, leastwise," he said, in sober deprecation.
Tom shook his head. "No; and not altogether at yours. But I guess I've worked around to your point of view, after so long a time."
"It's your mammy's faith, all the same, Buddy," said the father gravely. "Let's not belittle it any more'n we can help."
"I don't belittle it," was the quick response. "In some of its phases it is grand—magnificent. We can't always be prying into the cause; the effect is whatcounts. And there is no denying that the fairy tale which we call Christianity has built some of the most godlike heroes the world has ever seen."
"You're right sure now that it is a fairy story, son?" said the old man, a little wistfully.
"There is no doubt about that," was the decisive rejoinder. "There is room for credulity only in ignorance. Any thinking person who is brought face to face with the materialistic facts—"
Caleb held up a toil-hardened hand.
"Hold on, Buddy; you'll have to pick a place where the water deepens sort o' gradually for the old man or you'll have him flounderin'. I reckon I been sittin' up on the bank all my life, waitin' for somebody to come along and pole the bottom for me in that pool."
"No," said Tom definitively. "There isn't any bank to that pool. You're in it, or you are out of it; one or the other. That was the notion I took with me to Boston. I thought I'd get well up above the eternal wrangle and look down on it—wouldn't believe, wouldn't disbelieve. It can't be done. Jesus, Himself, said, if they've reported Him straight, 'He that is not with me is against me.'"
"Well," said the father, still deprecating, "that's some farther along than I've ever been able to get—not sayin' that I wouldn't be willin' to go." And then: "You don't allow to argue with your mammy about these things, do you, Tom?"
Tom's rejoinder was gravely considerate.
"It is a sealed book between us, now, pappy. She knows—and knows it can't be helped. If I wasn't her son, I hope I should still be the last person in the worldto try to shake her faith—or any one's, for that matter. I have merely turned my own back—because I had to."
The old man put down his coffee-cup and the look in his eyes was half-appealing.
"What was it turned you, son?—nothing I've ever said or done, I hope?"
Tom shook his big blond head slowly.
"No, not directly; though I suppose a man does go back to his father for a measuring-stick. But indirectly you, and the other Gordons, are responsible for the best there is in me—and that's the questioning part. Given the doubt, I hunted till I found the man who could resolve or confirm it."
"Who was he?" inquired Caleb, willing to hear more particularly.
"His name is Bauer—the man I've been rooming with. He is a German biologist who was to have been educated for the Lutheran ministry. His people made the capital mistake of sending him to Freiburg for a couple of years as a preliminary, and, when they found out what the German university had done for him, they sent him to Boston, under the impression that the Puritan American city might correct some of his materialism."
Caleb smiled. "That ain't just the way we think of Boston over here," he remarked.
"No; and, of course, Bauer didn't change his point of view. We used to have it up hill and down. I had Scripture—mother and the Beershebans had taught me that—and Bauer had immense reading, flinty Dutch common sense, and a huge lack of the reverence for the so-called sacred subjects which seems to be ingrainedin every race but the Teutonic. I fought hard, both for mother's sake and because it was the first time I had ever met a man with his sword out on the other side."
"Well?" said Caleb.
"He downed me, horse, foot and artillery; made me realize as I never had before what an absolute begging of the premises the entire Christian argument is."
"But how?" persisted the iron-master.
"Held me up at the muzzle of the cold facts. For example: do you happen to know that the oldest Bible manuscripts in existence go back only to the fourth century, and are doubtless copies of copies of copies?"
The father had pushed back his chair and was trying to fold his napkin in the original creases.
"No; there's a heap o' things I don't know, son, but I'm willin' to learn. One o' these days, if we ever get out o' this business tangle alive, we'll sit down quiet together and you'll do for me what this Dutchman has done for you. For, in spite of what you say, I've been sittin' on the fence all these years, and I reckon you're the one to help me down."
Tom smiled first at the thought of it and then grew suddenly sober. It is one thing to be serenely critical for oneself, and quite another to set the pace for a disciple. And when that disciple chances to be one's father?
"I don't know about that, pappy," he said, rather dubiously. "I'd like to have you meet some of the people on my side of the road first. Maybe you wouldn't like the company."
But Caleb would not have it so. "If they're goodenough for you, son, they're good enough for me," he said. "Not but what there's some mighty good folks trampin' along on the other side, too."
"Yes, and some mighty bad ones," said Tom, thinking of the promoter vestryman of St. Michael's and his Bible-class-teaching son. "We are going right now to investigate the financiering methods of a pair of them. Is Dyckman still on duty? Or are the offices closed?"
"Dyckman's there," was the answer; and they left the breakfast-room together to go around the block and have themselves lifted to the fifth floor of the Coosa Building, where half a dozen gilt-lettered glass doors advertised the administrative headquarters of Chiawassee Consolidated.
If Caleb Gordon had been mildly bewildered by the outward and instantly visible changes in his college-bred son, he was quite lost in wondering admiration when the young man had climbed fairly into the business saddle and gathered his grip on the reins. Notwithstanding the fact of his stock-holding, Caleb the iron-master had always stood a little in awe of the general office grandeurs; of chief priest Dyckman in particular. But Tom seemed to recognize no distinctions of class, age, or previous condition of overlordship. Dyckman was found busily lounging in the absent president's easy-chair, smoking a good cigar and reading the morning papers. At the outset he was inclined to be genially supercilious, thus:
"Ah, good morning, Mr. Gordon! Hello, Tom! Back from college, are you? The books and papers? They are over in the vaults of the Iron City National—byMr. Farley's orders. I suppose he thought they'd be safer there in case of fire. Won't you sit down and have a fresh cigar?"
What Tom said, or the precise wording of it, Caleb could never remember. But the staccato sentence or two had the effect of instantly electrifying Mr. Dyckman. Certainly; whatever Mr. Thomas desired should be done. He—Dyckman—had had no notice of the change in the plans of the company, and Mr. Farley's instructions—
Tom cut the oath of fealty short and stated his desires succinctly. The bookkeeper was to reassemble his office force immediately, taking particular care to reinstate Norman, the correspondence man. That done, he was to prepare full and complete exhibits of the company's condition: assets, liabilities, contracts, in short, the results in statement form of a thorough and searching house-cleaning in the accounting and administrative departments.
"I am going to put you on your good behavior, Dyckman," said the new tyrant in conclusion, driving the words home with a shrewd sword-thrust of the gray eyes. "At first I thought I'd bring an expert accountant down here from New York and put him on your books; but I'm going to spare you that—on one condition. Those exhibits must be made absolutely without fear or favor; they must contain the exact truth and all of it. If you tinker them, you'll not be able to run fast enough nor far enough to get away from me. Do I make it plain?"
"Very plain, indeed, Mr. Tom; the office boy would catch your meaning, I think."
"All right, then; gather up your force and pitch in. I haven't time to watch you, and I don't mean to take it. But I shall know it when you begin to flicker."
When the two early morning disturbers of Mr. Dyckman's peace were once more in the street and on the way to the station to take the train for Gordonia and the seat of war, Caleb found speech.
"Son," he said gravely, "do you know that you've made a mighty bitter enemy in the last fifteen minutes? Dyckman is Farley's confidential man, and when he gets his knife ground good and sharp he's goin' to cut you with it, once for himself and once for his boss."
Tom's laugh was an easing of strains.
"It does me a heap of good to know that I can crack the whip where you'd be putting on the brakes, pappy; it does, for a fact. But you needn't worry about Dyckman. He won't quarrel with his bread and butter. I don't care anything about his personal loyalty so long as he does his work."
Again Caleb had to withdraw a little and look his stalwart young captain over and say: "It is Tom; it's just Buddy, grown up and come to be a man." But it was hard to realize.
"I reckon you've got it all figured out—what-all we're goin' to do, Tom," he said, when they were seated in the car of the accommodation train.
"Yes, I think I have; at least, I have the beginning struck out. We are going to call a stock-holders' meeting, vote you into the presidency, take the bull squarely by the horns and blow in the Chiawassee furnace again—dig coal, roast coke and make iron."
"But, son! at the present price of iron, we can't makeany money; couldn't clear a dollar a car if the buyers would push their cars right into our yard. And there ain't any buyers."
Tom was looking out of the window at the procession of smokeless factory chimneys. The blight had already fallen on the South Tredegar industries.
"It's going to be a battle to the strong, to the fellow who can wait, and work while he waits," he said, half to himself. Then, more particularly to his father's protest: "I know, we are in pretty bad shape. When we get those exhibits we shall find that the Farleys have picked the bones, leaving them for us to bury decently out of sight. Then, when the funeral is over, they'll come back and charge it all to the Gordon mismanagement. It's a cinch, isn't it?"
The old iron-master was silent for the train-speed's measuring of a long mile. Then he said slowly:
"I don't aim to go back on you, Buddy; not a foot 'r an inch. But it does seem to me like you put your finger in the fire when you hilt up Duxbury Farley for that proxy paper in New York. If we go under—and the good Lord only knows how we can he'p it—they'll come out of it with clean clothes, and we'll have to take all the mud-slingin', just as you say."
Tom's smile would have stamped him as the son of the grim old ex-artilleryman in any court of inquiry.
"Did your old general ever go into battle with the idea that he was bound to be licked, pappy?" he asked.
"Who? Stonewall Jackson? Well, I reckon not, son."
"Neither shall we," said Tom laconically. "We are going in to win. We are in bad shape, I admit, but we are better off than a lot of these furnaces that are shutting down. We have our own ore beds, and our own coking plant. Our coal costs us seventy-five cents less than Pocahontas, our water is free, and we can hold the property as long as we can stand the sheriff off. My notion is to make iron and hold it; stack it in the yards, mortgage it for what we can get, and make more iron. Some day the country will get iron hungry; then we'll have it to sell when the other fellows will have to make it first and sell it afterward. Have I got it straight?"
Caleb nodded.
"Yes; I don't know but what you have. What's puzzlin' me right now, son, iswhereyou got it."
Tom's laugh was a tonic for sore nerves.
"I'd like to know what you've been spending your good money on me for if it wasn't to give me a chance to get it. Do you think I've been playing foot-ball all the time?"
"No; but—well, Tom, the last I knew of you, you was just a little shaver, spattin' around barefooted in the dust o' the Paradise pike, and I can't seem to climb up to where you're at now."
Tom laughed again.
"You'll come to it, after while. I reckon I haven't much more sense, in some ways, than the little shaver had; but I've been trying my level best to learn my trade. There is only one thing about this tangle that is worrying me: that's the labor end of it."
"We can get all the labor we want," said Caleb.
"Yes; but didn't you write me that the men were on strike?"
"I said the white miners were likely to make trouble if they got hungry enough."
"Was there any pay in arrears when you shut down?"
"No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but I fought him out o' that."
"Good! Then what are they kicking about?"
"Oh, because they're out of a job. There are always a lot of keen noses in a crowd the size of ours, and they've smelled out some o' the Farley doin's. Of course, they don't believe in the cry of hard times; laborin' men are always the last to believe that."
The train was tracking thunderously around the nose of Lebanon, and Tom was looking out of the window again, this time for the first glimpse of the Gordonia chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.
"That is where you will have to put your shoulder into the collar with me, pappy," he said. "Most of the older men know me as a boy who has grown up among them. When I spring my proposition, they'll howl, if only for that reason."
But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously than ever.
"You won't get any help from the men, Buddy, more 'n what you pay for. You know the whites—Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good sprinklin' o' 'huckleberries.' And the blacks don't count, one way or the other."
The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for Gordonia, and Tom was gathering his dunnage.
"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and shape up my talk?"
Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship.
As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials.
As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority and doing most of the talking.
"What's all this buzzin' round about young Tom?" queried one of the men in the miners' caucus. "Might' nigh every other word with old Caleb was, 'Tom; my son, Tom.' Why, I riccollect him when he wasn't no more'n knee-high to a hop-toad!"
"Well, you bet your life he's a heap higher'n that now," said another, who had chanced to be at the station when the Gordons, father and son, left the train together. "He's a half a head taller than the old man,an' built like one o' Maje' Dabney's thoroughbreds. But I reckon he ain't nothin' but a school-boy, for all o' that."
"Gar-r-r!" spat a third. "We've had one kid too many in this outfit, all along. I'll bet, if the truth was knowed, th't that young Farley'd skin a louse for the hide and tallow."
"Yes," chimed in a fourth, a "huckleberry" miner from the Bald Mountain district, "and I reckon whar thar's sich a hell of a smoke, thar's a right smart heap o' fire, ef it could on'y be onkivered."
But all of this was in a manner beside the mark, and there were many to inquire what the Gordons were going to do. Ludlow, check weigher in Number Two entry, and the head of the local union, took it on himself to reply.
"B'gosh! I don't b'lieve the old man knows, himself. He fit around and fit around, talkin' to me, and never said nothin' more'n that there was goin' to be a meetin' here at two o'clock, and Tom—his son Tom—was goin' to speak to it."
"All right; we're a-waitin' on son Tom right now," said a grizzled old coal-digger on the outer edge of the group. "And ef he's got anything to say, he cayn't say hit none too sudden. My ol' woman told me this mornin' she was a-hittin' the bottom o' the meal bar'l, kerchuck! ever' time she was dippin' into hit. Hit's erbout time there was somepin doin', ez I allow."
"Saw it off!" warned Ludlow. "Here they come, both of 'em."
Tom and his father had entered the building from the cupola side, and Tom mounted the flask-built platform while the men were scattering to find seats. He made a goodly figure of young manhood, standing at ease on the pile of frames until quiet should prevail, and the glances flung up from the throng of workmen were friendly rather than critical. When the time came, he began to speak quietly, but with a certain masterful quality in his voice that unmistakably constrained attention.
"I suppose you have all been told why the works are shut down—why you are out of a job in the middle of summer; and I understand you are not fully satisfied with the reason that was given—hard times. You have been saying among yourselves that if the president and the treasurer could go off on a holiday trip to Europe, the situation couldn't be so very desperate. Isn't that so?"
"That's so; you've hit it in the head first crack out o' the box," was the swift reply from a score of the men.
"Good; then we'll settle that point before we go any further. I want to tell you men that the hard times are here, sure enough. We are all hoping that they won't last very long; but the fact remains that the wheels have stopped. Let me tell you: I've just come down from the North, and the streets of the cities up there are full of idle men. All the way down here I didn't see a single iron-furnace in blast, and those of you who have been over to South Tredegar know what the conditions are there. Mr. Farley has gone to Europe because he believes there is nothing to be done here, and the facts are on his side. For anybody with money enough to live on, this is a mighty good time to take a vacation."
There was a murmur of protest, voicing itself generally in a denial of the possibility for men who wrought with their hands and ate in the sweat of their brows.
"I know that," was Tom's rejoinder. "Some of us can't afford to take a lay-off; I can't, for one. And that's why we are here this afternoon. Chiawassee can blow in again and stay in blast if we've all got nerve enough to hang on. If we start up and go on making pig, it'll be on a dead market and we'll have to sell it at a loss or stack it in the yards. We can't do the first, and I needn't tell you that it is going to take a mighty long purse to do the stacking. It will be all outgo and no income. If—"
"Spit it out," called Ludlow, from the forefront of the miners' division. "I reckon we all know what's comin'."
Gordon thrust out his square jaw and gave them the fact bluntly.
"It's a case of half a loaf or no bread. If Chiawassee blows in again, it will be on borrowed money. If you men will take half-pay in cash and half in promises, the promised half to be paid when we can sell the stacked pig, we go on. If not, we don't. Talk it over among yourselves and let us have your decision."
There was hot caucusing and a fair imitation of pandemonium on the foundry floor following this bomb-hurling, and Tom sat down on the edge of the platform to give the men time. Caleb Gordon sat within arm's reach, nursing his knee, diligently saying nothing. It was Tom, undoubtedly, but a Tom who had become a citizen of another world, a newer world than the one the ex-artilleryman knew and lived in. He—Caleb—had freely predicted a riot as the result of the half-payproposal; yet Tom had applied the match and there was no explosion. The buzzing, arguing groups were not riotous—only fiercely questioning.
It was Ludlow, hammering clamorously for silence on the shell of the big crane ladle, who acted as spokesman when the uproar was quelled.
"You're all right, Tom Gordon—you and your daddy. But you've hit us plum' 'twixt dinner and supper. If you two was the company—"
Tom stood up and interrupted.
"We are the company. While Mr. Farley is away we're the bosses; what we say, goes."
"All right," Ludlow went on. "That's a little better. But we've got a kick or two comin'. Is this half-pay goin' to be in orders on the company's store?"
"I said cash," said Tom briefly.
"Good enough. But I s'pose we'd have to spend it at the company's store, jest the same, 'r get fired."
"No!"—emphatically. "I'm not even sure that we should reopen the store. We shall not reopen it unless you men want it. If you do want it, we'll make it strictly coöperative, dividing the profits with every employee according to his purchases."
"Well, by gol, that's white, anyway," commented one of the coke burners. "Be a mighty col' day in July when old man Farley'd talk as straight as that."
"Ag'in," said Ludlow, "what's this half-pay to be figured on—the reg'lar scale?"
"Of course."
"And what security do we have that t'other half 'll be paid, some time?"
"My father's word, and mine."
"And if old man Farley says no?"
"Mr. Farley is out of it for the present, and he has nothing to say about it. You are making this deal with Gordon and Gordon."
"Well, now, that's a heap more like it." Ludlow turned to the miners. "What d'ye say, boys? Fish or cut bait? Hands up!"
There was a good showing of hands among the white miners and the coke burners, but the negro foundry men did not vote. Patty, the mulatto foreman who was Helgerson's second, explained the reason.
"You ain't said nuttin' 'bout de foundry, Boss Tom. W-w-w-w-we-all boys been wukkin' short ti-ti-time, and m-m-m-makin' pig ain't gwine give we-all n-n-nuttin' ter do." Patty had a painful impediment in his speech, and the strain of the public occasion doubled it.
"We are going to run the foundry, too, Patty, and on full time. There will be work for all of you on the terms I have named."
Caleb Gordon closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. For weeks before the shut-down the foundry had been run on short time, because there was no market for its miscellaneous output. Surely Tom must be losing his mind!
But the negro foundry men were taking his word for it, as the miners had. "Pup-pup-put up yo' hands, boys!" said Patty, and again the ayes had it.
Tom looked vastly relieved.
"Well, that was a short horse soon curried," he said bruskly. "The power goes on to-morrow morning, and we'll blow in as soon as the furnaces are relined. Ludlow, you come to the office at five o'clock and I'lllist the shifts with you. Patty, you report to Mr. Helgerson, and you and the pattern-maker show up at half-past five. I want to talk over some new work with you. Anybody else got anything to say? If not, we'll adjourn."
Caleb followed his son out and across the yard to the old log homestead which still served as the superintendent's office and laboratory. When the door was shut, he dropped heavily into a chair.
"Son," he said brokenly, "you're—you're crazy—plum' crazy. Don't you know you can't do the first one o' these things you've been promisin'?"
Tom was already busy at the desk, emptying the pigeonholes one after another and rapidly scanning their contents.
"If I believed that, I'd be taking to the high grass and the tall timber. But don't you worry, pappy; we're going to do them—all of them."
"But, Buddy, you can't sell a pound of foundry product! We may be able to make pig cheaper than some others, but when it comes to the foundry floor, South Tredegar can choke us off in less'n a week."
"Wait," said Tom, still rummaging. "There is one thing we can make—and sell."
"I'd like tolerable well to know what it is," was the hopeless rejoinder.
"You ought to know, better than any one else. It's cast-iron pipe—water-pipe. Where are the plans of that invention of yours that Farley wouldn't let you install?"
Caleb found the blue-prints, and his hands were trembling. The invention, a pit machine process for molding and casting water-and gas-pipe at a cost that wouldput all other makers of the commodity out of the field, had been wrought out and perfected in Tom's second Boston year. It was Caleb's one ewe lamb, and he had nursed it by hand through a long preparatory period.
Tom took the blue-prints and spread them on the desk, absorbing the details as his father leaned over him and pointed them out. He saw clearly that the invention would revolutionize pipe-making. The accepted method was to cast each piece separately in a floor flask made in two parts, rammed by hand, once for the drag and again for the cope, with reversings, crane-handlings and all the manipulations necessary for the molding of any heavy casting. But the new process substituted machinery. A cistern-like pit; a circular table pivoted over it, with a hundred or more iron flasks suspended upright from its edges; a huge crane carrying a mechanical ram, these were the main points of the machine which, with a single small gang of men, would do the work of an entire foundry floor.
"It's great!" said Tom enthusiastically. "I got your idea pretty well from your letters, but you've improved on it since then. I wonder Farley didn't snap at it."
"He was willin' to," said Caleb grimly. "Only he wanted me to transfer the patents to the company; in other words, to make him a present of the controlling interest. I bucked at that, and we come near havin' a fall-out. If there was any market for pipe now—"
"There is a market," said Tom hopefully. "I got a pointer on that before I left Boston. Did I tell you I had a little talk with Mr. Clarkson the day I came away?"
"No."
"Well, I did. I told him the conditions and asked his advice. Among other things, I spoke of this pipe pit of yours, and he said at once, 'There is your chance. Cast-iron water-pipe is like bread, or sugar, or butcher's meat—it's a necessity, in good times or bad. If that machine is practicable, you can make pipe for less than half the present labor cost.' Then we talked ways and means. Money is tighter than a shut fist—up East as well as everywhere else. But men with money to invest will still bet on a sure thing. Mr. Clarkson advised me to try our own banks first. Failing with them, he authorized me to call on him. Now you know where I'm digging my sand."
The old iron-master sat back in his chair with his hands locked over one knee, once more taking the measure of this new creation calling itself Tom Gordon and purporting to be his son.
"Say, Buddy," he said at length, "are there many more like you out yonder in the big road?—young fellows that can walk right out o' school and tell their daddies how to run things?"
Tom's laugh was boyishly hearty.
"Plenty of 'em, pappy; lots of 'em! The old world is moving right along; it would be a pity if it didn't, don't you think? But about this pipe business: I want you to make over these patents to me."
"They're yours now, Tom; everything I've got will be yours in a little while," said the father; but his voice betrayed the depth of that thrust. Was the new Tom beginning so soon to grasp and reach out avariciously for the fruit of the old tree?
"You ought to know I don't mean it that way," saidTom, frowning a little. "But here is the way it sizes up. There is money in this pipe-making; some money now, and big money later on. Farley has refused to go into it unless you make it a company proposition; as president and a controlling stock-holder you can't very well go into it now without making it in some sort a company proposition. But you can transfer the patents to me, and I can contract with Chiawassee Consolidated to make pipe for me."
Caleb Gordon's frown matched that of his son.
"That would certainly be givin' Colonel Duxbury a dose of his own medicine; but I don't like it, Tom. It looks as if we were taking advantage of him."
"No. I'd make the proposition to him, personally, if he were here, and the boss; and he'd be a fool if he didn't jump at it," said Tom earnestly. "But there is more to it than that. If we make a go of this, and don't protect ourselves, the two Farleys will come back and put the whole thing in their pockets. I won't go into it on any such terms. When they do come back, I'm going to have money to fight them with, and this is our one little ghost of a chance. Ring up Judge Bates and get him to come over here and make a legal transfer of these patents to me."