Chapter XXXV: A Soul in Shackles 378 (11)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Duxbury Farley nodded his head slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXII

WHOSO DIGGETH A PIT

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

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

"Ardea!" he said tremulously.

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

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

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

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

"Saturday? And this is--"

"This is Wednesday."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where is he now?"

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

He raised himself on one elbow.

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

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

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

His smile was a mere grimace of torture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head impatiently.

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom struggled to his feet, tottering.

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

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

XXXIII

THE WINE-PRESS OF WRATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pipe-trust promoter nodded.

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

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

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

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

"Yes; on one condition."

"And that is--?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Eh? Why can't we?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom rose and took his hat.

"You will fight us?" he asked.

The short-circuiter of corporations laughed.

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

Tom helped himself from the box on the table.

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

XXXIV

THE SMOKE OF THE FURNACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound's ears, chose to be of this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when Tom fared forth. For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his noon-time snack of bread and meat with Cæsar. Yet Deer Trace set a good table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the mountain side.

Then there were children,--a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses at a mountaineer's cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of whom children and dogs have no fear.

In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it, seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.

Caleb's ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic. What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards and the sheriff's deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his duty as he saw it.

Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-table recountings of the day's happenings; attentive, but only filially interested: willing to encourage his father to talk, but never commenting.

Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite perfect.

But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of extinction--and triumphing hard-heartedly.

It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to hold all objects in suspension.

Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace blowing-engines. He started up quickly.

"What's that?" he demanded. "Surely they haven't blown in again?"

Caleb nodded assent.

"I reckon so. Colonel Duxbury allowed to me this mornin' that he was about out o' the woods--in spite of you, he said; as if you'd been the one that was doin' him up."

"But he can't be!" exclaimed Tom, so earnestly and definitely that the mask fell away and the father was no longer deceived.

"I'm only tellin' you what he allowed to me, son. I reckoned he was about all in, quite a spell ago; but you can't tell nothing by what you see--when it's Colonel Duxbury. He got two car-loads o' new men to-day, the Lord on'y knows where from; and he's shippin' Pocahontas coke, and gettin' it here, too."

Tom sat glooming over it for a time, shrouding himself in tobacco smoke. Then he said:

"You feazed me a little at first; but I think I know now what has happened."

Caleb took time to let the remark sink in. It carried inferences.

"Buddy, I been suspectin' for a good while back that you know more about this sudden smash-up than you've let on. Do you?"

"I know all about it," was the quiet rejoinder.

"You do? What on top o' God's green earth--"

Tom held up his hand for silence. A man had let himself in at the roadway gate and was walking rapidly up the path to the house. It was Norman; and after a few hurried words in private with Tom, he went as he had come, declining Caleb's invitation to stay and smoke a pipe on the veranda.

When the gate latch clicked at Norman's outgoing, Tom had risen and was knocking the ash from his pipe and buttoning his coat.

"I was admitting that I knew," he said. "I can tell you more now than I could a moment ago, because the time for which I have been waiting has come. You remarked that you thought the Farleys were at the end of their rope. They were not until to-day, but to-day they are. Every piece of property they have, including Warwick Lodge, is mortgaged to the hilt, and this afternoon Colonel Duxbury put his Chiawassee stock into Henniker's hands as security for a final loan--so Norman tells me. Perhaps it would interest you a trifle to know something about the figure at which Henniker accepted it."

"It would, for a fact, Buddy."

"Well, he took it for less than the annual dividend that it earned the year we ran the plant; and between us two, he's scared to death, at that."

"Heavens and earth! Why, Buddy, son! we're plum' ruined--and so's old Major Dabney!"

Tom had finished buttoning his coat and was settling his soft hat on his head.

"Don't you worry, pappy," he said, with a touch of the old boyish assurance. "Our part, since Colonel Duxbury saw fit to freeze us out, is to say nothing and saw wood. If the Major comes to you, you can tell him that my word to him holds good: he can have par for Ardea's stock any time he wants it, and he could have it just the same if Chiawassee were wiped off of the map--as it's going to be."

"But Tom; tell me--"

"Not yet, pappy; be patient just a little while longer and you shall know all there is to tell. I'm leaving you with a clear conscience to say to any one who asks that you don't know."

Caleb had struggled up out of his chair, and now he laid a hand on his son's shoulder.

"I ain't askin', Buddy," he said, with a tremulous quaver in his voice; "I ain't askin' a livin' thing. I'm just a-hopin'--hopin' I'll wake up bime-by and find it's on'y a bad dream." Then, with sudden and agonizing emphasis: "My God, son! they been butcherin' one 'nother down yonder for four long weeks!"

"I can't help that!" was the savage response. "It's a battle to the death, and the smoke of it has got into my blood. If I believed in God, as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical thieves,--thugs,--sandbaggers,--hit the bottom!"

He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and presently came back.

"I said you should know after a little: you may as well know now. I planned this thing; I set out to break them; and, as it happened, I wasn't a moment too soon. In another week you and Major Dabney would have had a chance to sell out for little or nothing, or lose it all. Farley had it fixed to be swallowed by the trust, and this is how it was to be done. Farley stipulated that the stock transaction should figure as a forced sale at next to nothing, in which all the stock-holders should participate, and that the remainder of the purchase price, which would have been a fair figure for all the stock, should be paid to him and his son individually as a bonus!"

The old iron-master groaned. In spite of the hard teaching of all the years, he would have clung to some poor shadow of belief in Duxbury Farley if he could have done so.

"That's all," Tom went on stridently: "all but the turning of the trick that put them in the hole they were digging for you and the Major. Vint Farley had no notion of letting Ardea bring her money into the family of her own free will: he planned to rob her first and marry her afterward. Now, by God, I'm going down to tell them both what they're up against! Don't sit up for me."

He had taken a dozen strides down the graveled path when he saw some one coming hurriedly across the lawns from Deer Trace, and heard a voice--the voice of the woman he loved--calling to him softly in the stillness:

"Tom! O Tom!" it said, "please wait--just one minute!"