support a settled pastor, was closed for the summer, but Martha Gordon
kept the fire spiritual alight by teaching her son at home. One of the
boy's Sunday privileges, earned by a faultless recitation of a
prescribed number of Bible verses, was forest freedom for the remainder
of the forenoon. It was while he was in the midst of the Beatitudes that
he heard the low rumble of the coming train, and it was only by
resolutely ignoring the sense of hearing that he was enabled to get
through, letter-perfect.
"'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you,'" he
chanted monotonously, with roving eyes bent on finding his cap with the
loss of the fewest possible seconds--"'and shall say all manner of evil
against you falsely, for my sake,'--and that's all." And he was off like
a shot.
"Mind, now, Thomas Jefferson; you are not to go near that railroad!" his
mother called to him as he raced down the path to the gate.
Oh, no; he would not go near the railroad! He would only run up the pike
and cut across through the Dabney pasture to see if the train were
really there.
It was there, as he could tell by the noise of hissing steam when the
cross-cut was reached. But the parked wooding of the pasture still
screened it. How near could he go without being "near" in the
transgressing sense of the word? There was only one way of finding
out--to keep on going until his conscience pricked sharply enough to
stop him. It was a great convenience, Thomas Jefferson's conscience. As
long as it kept quiet he could be reasonably sure there was no sin in
sight. Yet he had to confess that it was not always above playing mean
tricks; as that of sleeping like a log till after the fact, and then
rising up to stab him till the blood ran.
He was half-way across the pasture when the crash of a falling tree
stopped him in mid-rush. And in the vista opened by the felled tree he
saw a sight to make him turn and race homeward faster than he had come.
The invaders, hundreds strong, had torn down the boundary wall and the
earth for the advancing embankment was flying from uncounted shovels.
Caleb Gordon was at work in the blacksmith shop, Sunday-repairing while
the furnace was cool, when Thomas Jefferson came flying with his news.
The iron-master dropped his hammer and cast aside the leather apron.
"You hear that, Buck?" he said, frowning across the anvil at his helper,
a white man and the foreman of the pouring floor.
The helper nodded, being a man of as few words as the master.
"Well, I reckon we-all hain't got any call to stand by and see them
highflyers ride it roughshod over Major Dabney thataway," said Gordon
briefly. "Go down to the shanties and hustle out the day shift. Get
Turk and Hardaway and every white man you can lay hands on, and all the
guns you can find. And send one o' the black boys up the hill to tell
the Major. Like as not, he ain't up yet."
Helgerson hastened away to obey his orders, and Caleb Gordon went out to
the foundry scrap yard. In the heap of broken metal lay an old cast-iron
field-piece, a relic of the battle which had one day raged hotly on the
hillside across the creek. A hundred times the iron-master had been on
the point of breaking it up for re-melting, and as often the old
artilleryman in him had stayed his hand.
Now it was quickly hoisted in the crane shackle,--Thomas Jefferson
sweating manfully at the crab crank,--clamped on the axle of a pair of
wagon wheels, cleaned, swabbed, loaded with quarry blasting powder and
pieces of broken iron to serve for grape, and trundled out on the pike
at the heels of the ore team.
By this time Helgerson had come up with the furnace men, a motley crew
in all stages of Sunday-morning dishevelment, and armed only as a mob
may arm itself at a moment's notice. Caleb, the veteran, looked the
squad over with a slow smile gathering the wrinkles at the corners of
his eyes.
"You boys'll have to make up in f'erceness what-all you're lacking in
soldier-looks," he observed mildly. Then he gave the word of command to
Helgerson. "Take the gun and put out for the major's hawss-lot. I'll be
along as soon as I can saddle the mare."
Thomas Jefferson went with his father to the stable and helped silently
with the saddling. Afterward he held the mare, gentling her in
suppressed excitement while his father went into the house for his
rifle.
Martha Gordon met her husband at the door. She had seen the volunteer
gun crew filing past on the pike.
"What is it, Caleb?" she asked anxiously.
He made no attempt to deceive her.
"The railroaders are allowin' to take what the Major wouldn't sell
'em--the right of way through his land down the valley. Buddy brought
the word."
"Well?" she said, love and fear hardening her heart. "The railroad would
be a good thing for us--for the furnace. You know you said it would."
He shook his head slowly.
"I reckon we mustn't look at it thataway, Martha. I'm going to stand by
my neighbor, like I'd expect him to stand by me. Let me get my gun; the
boys'll be there ahead o' me, and they won't know what to do."
"Caleb! There will be bloodshed; and you remember what the Word says:
'whoso sheddeth man's blood....' And on the Lord's Day, too!"
"I know. But ain't it somewhere in the same Good Book that it says
there's a time for peace and a time to make war? And then that there
passage about lovin' your neighbor. Don't hender me, little woman. There
ain't goin' to be no blood shed--onless them bushwhackers are a mighty
sight f'ercer for it than what I think they are."
She let him go without further protest, not because he had convinced
her, but because she had long since come to know this man, who, making
her lightest wish his law in most things, could be as inflexible as the
chilled iron of the pouring floor at the call of loyalty to his own
standard of right and wrong. But when he passed down the path to the
gate she knelt on the door-stone and covered her face with her hands.
Gordon gathered the slack of the reins on the neck of the mare and put a
leg over the saddle.
"That'll do, Buddy," he said. "Run along in to your mammy, now."
But Thomas Jefferson caught again at the bridle and held on, choking.
"O pappy!--take me with you! I--I'll die if you don't take me with you!"
Who can tell what Caleb Gordon saw in his son's eyes when he bent to
loosen the grip of the small brown hand on the rein? Was it some
sympathetic reincarnation of his own militant soul striving to break its
bonds? Without a word he bent lower and swung the boy up to a seat
behind him. "Hold on tight, Buddy," he cautioned. "I'll have to run the
mare some to catch up with the boys."
And the mother? She was still kneeling on the door-stone, but the burden
of her prayer was not now for Caleb Gordon. "O Lord, have mercy on my
boy! Thou knowest how, because of my disobedience, he has the fierce
fighting blood and the stubborn unbelief of all the Gordons to contend
with: save him alive and make him a man of peace and a man of faith, I
beseech Thee, and let not the unbelief of the father or the
unfaithfulness of the mother be visited on the son!"
When the one-piece battery dashed at a clumsy gallop through the open
gate of the Dabney pasture and swung with a sharp turn into the vista of
felled trees, Thomas Jefferson beheld a thing to set his heritage of
soldier blood dancing through his veins. Standing fair in the midst of
the ax-and-shovel havoc and clearing a wide circle to right and left
with the sweep of his old service cavalry saber, was the Major,
coatless, hatless, cursing the invaders with mighty and corrosive
soldier oaths, and crying them to come on, the unnumbered host of them
against one man.
Opposed to him the men of the construction force, generaled by the young
engineer in brown duck and buttoned leggings, were deploying cautiously
to surround him. Gordon spoke to his mare; and when he drew rein and
wheeled to shout to the gun crew, Thomas Jefferson heard the engineer's
low-toned order to the shovelers: "Be careful and don't hurt him, boys.
He's the old maniac who threw me off the veranda of his house. Two of
you take him behind, and--"
The break came on the uprush of the unanticipated reinforcements. With
the battle readiness of a disciplined soldier, Caleb Gordon whipped from
the saddle and ran to help the gun crew slue the makeshift field-piece
into position.
"Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "fall back on your front line and give
the artillery a chanst at 'em. I reckon a dose o' broken pot-iron'll
carry fu'ther than that saber o' yourn. Buddy, hunt me a punk match,
quick, will ye?"
[Illustration: "Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "give the artillery a
chanst"]
Thomas Jefferson ran to the nearest rotting log, but one of the negroes
was before him with a blazing pitch-pine splint. There was a respectful
recoil in the opposing ranks which presently became a somewhat panicky
surge to the rear. The shovelers, more than half of whom were negroes,
had not come out to be blown from a cannon's mouth by a grim-faced
veteran who was so palpably at home with the tools of his trade.
"That's right: keep right on goin'!" yelled the iron-master, waving his
blazing slow-match dangerously near to the priming. "Keep it up, 'r by
the Lord that made ye--"
There was no need to specify the alternative. For now the panic had
spread by its own contagion, and the invaders were fighting among
themselves for place on the flat-cars. And while yet the rear guard was
swarming upon the engine, hanging by toe-and hand-holds where it could,
the train was backed rapidly out of range.
Caleb Gordon kept his pine splint alight until the echoes of the
engine's exhaust came faintly from the overhanging cliffs of the
mountain.
"They've gone back to town, and I reckon the fire's plum' out for
to-day, Major," he drawled. "Buck and a few o' the boys 'll stay by the
gun, against their rallyin' later on, and you might as well go home to
your breakfast. Didn't bring your hawss, did ye? Take the mare, and
welcome. Buddy and me'll walk."
But the Major would not mount, and so the two men walked together as far
as the manor-house gates, with Thomas Jefferson a pace in the rear,
leading the mare.
It was no matter of wonder to him that his father and the Major marched
in solemn silence to the gate of parting. But the wonder came
tumultuously when the Major wheeled abruptly at the moment of
leave-taking and wrung his father's hand.
"By God, suh, you are a right true-hearted gentleman, and my very good
friend, _Mistuh_ Gordon!" he said, with the manner of one who has been
carefully weighing the words beforehand. "If you had been given youh
just dues, suh, you'd have come home from F'ginia wearin' youh
shouldeh-straps." And then, with a little throat-clearing pause to come
between: "Damn it, suh; an own brotheh couldn't have done'mo'! I--I've
been misjudgin' you, Caleb, all these yeahs, and now I'm proud to shake
you by the hand and call you my friend. Yes, suh, I am that!"
It was, in a manner not to be understood by the Northern alien, the
accolade of knighthood, and Caleb Gordon's toil-rounded shoulders
straightened visibly when he returned the hearty hand-grasp. And as for
Thomas Jefferson: in his heart gratified pride flapped its wings and
crowed lustily; and for the moment he was almost willing to bury that
private grudge he was holding against Major Dabney--almost, but not
quite.
VII
THE PRAYER OF THE RIGHTEOUS
Having come thus far with Thomas Jefferson on the road to whatever goal
he will reach, it is high time we were looking a little more closely
into this matter of his grudge against Major Dabney.
Primarily, it based itself upon the dominant quality in a masterful
character; namely, a desire to possess the earth and its fullness
without partnership encumbrances.
From a time back of which memory refused to run, the woods and the
fields of Paradise Valley, the rampart hills and the backgrounding
mountain side, had belonged to Thomas Jefferson by the right of
discovery. The Bates boys and the Cantrells lived over in the great
valley of the Tennessee, and when they planned a fishing excursion up
Turkey Creek, they recognized Thomas Jefferson's suzerainty by
announcing that they were coming over to _his_ house. In like manner,
the Pendrys and the Lumpkins and the Hardwicks were scattered at
farm-width intervals down the pike, and the rampart hills marked the
boundary of their domain on that side.
Now from possession which is recognized unquestioningly by one's
compeers to fancied possession in fee simple is but a step; and from
that to the putting up of "No Trespass" signs the interval can be read
only on a micrometer scale. Wherefore, Thomas Jefferson had developed a
huge disgust on hearing that Major Dabney was going to upset the natural
order of things by bringing his granddaughter to Deer Trace Manor. If
Ardea--the very name of her had a heathenish sound in his
Scripturally-trained ear--had been a boy, the matter would have
simplified itself. Thomas Jefferson had a sincere respect for his own
prowess, and a boy might have been mauled into subjection. But a girl!
His lip curled stiffly at the thought of a girl, a town girl and
therefore a thing without legs, or at best with legs only half useful
and totally unfit for running or climbing trees, dividing the
sovereignty of the fields and the forest, the swimming-hole and the
perch pools in the creek, with him! She would do it, or try to do it. A
girl would not have any more sense than to come prying around into all
the quiet places to say, "This is my grandfather's land. What are _you_
doing here?"
At such thoughts as these a queer prickling sensation like a hot shiver
would run over him from neck to heel, and his eyes would gloom sullenly.
There would be another word to put with that; a word of his own
choosing. No matter if her grandfather, the terrifying Major, did own
the fields and the wood and the stream: God was greater than Major
Dabney, and had he not often heard his mother say on her knees that the
fervent, effectual prayer of the righteous availeth much? If it should
avail even a little, there would be no catastrophe, no disputed
sovereignty of the woods, the fields and the creek.
It was in the middle of a sultry afternoon in the hotter half of
August, two weeks or such a matter after the Great Southwestern Railway
had given up the fight for Paradise Valley to run its line around the
encompassing hills, that Thomas Jefferson was cast alive into the pit of
burnings.
He made sure he should always remember his latest glimpse of the
pleasant, homely earth. He was sitting idly on the porch step, letting
his gaze go adrift over the nearer green-clad hills to the purple deeps
of the western mountain, already steeped in shadow. The pike was
deserted, and the shrill hum of the house-flies played an insistent tune
in which the low-pitched boom of a bumblebee tumbling awkwardly among
the clover heads served for an intermittent bass.
Suddenly into the hot silence came the quick _cloppity-clop_ of
galloping hoofs. Thomas Jefferson's heart was tender on that side of it
which was turned toward the dumb creatures, and his thought was
instantly pitiful and indignant. Who would be cruel enough to gallop a
horse in such weltering weather?
The unspoken query had its answer when Major Dabney's fleet saddle
stallion thundered up to the gate in a white nimbus of dust, and the
Major flung himself from the saddle and called loudly for Mistress
Gordon. Thomas Jefferson sprang up hastily to forward the cry, fear
clutching at his heart; but the Major was before him in the wide passage
opening upon the porch.
"My deah Mistress Gordon! We are in a world of trouble at the
manor-house! Little Ardea, my grand-daughteh, was taken sick last night,
and to-day she's out of huh head--think of it, _out of huh head!_ I'm
riding hotfoot for Doctah Williams, but Lord of Heaven! it'll be nigh
sundown befo' I can hope to get back with him. Could you, my deah madam,
faveh us--"
Thomas Jefferson heard no more; would stay to hear no more. The forest,
always his refuge in time of trial, reached a long finger of scattering
oaks down to the opposite side of the creek, and thither he fled, cold
to the marrow of his bones, though the sun-heated stone coping of the
dam on which he crossed the stream went near to blistering his bare feet
as he ran.
From the crotch of one of the oaks--his watch-tower in other periods of
stress--he saw the Major mount and continue his gallop eastward on the
pike; and a little later the ancient Dabney family carriage came and
went in a smother of white dust, wheeling in front of the home gate and
pausing only long enough to take up his mother hastening to the rescue.
After that he was alone with the hideous tumult of his thoughts. The
girl would die. He was as sure of it as if the heavens and the earth had
instantly become articulate to shout the terrible sentence. God had
taken him at his word! There would be no intruder to tell him that the
woods and the creek belonged to her grandfather. She would be dead;
slain by the breath of his mouth. And for all the years and years and
ages to come, he would be roasting and grilling in that place prepared
for the devil and his angels--and for murderers!
In the acutest misery of it a trembling fit seized him and the oak
seemed to rock and sway as if to be rid of him. When the fit passed he
slid to the ground and flung himself face downward under the spreading
branches. The grass was cool to his face, but there was no moisture in
it, and he thought of Dives praying that Lazarus might come and put a
drop of water on his tongue.
Then the torment took a new and more terrible form. Though he had never
been inside of the gray stone manor-house, his imagination transported
him thither; to the house and to a darkened room on the upper floor with
a bed in it, and in the bed a girl whose face he could not see.
The girl was dying: the doctor had told his mother and the Major, and
they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only
a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But
death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied
the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the
heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the
bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate
struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face of the
old Major.
Thomas Jefferson dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a
mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing
poignancy of it. Was there no way of escape?
He turned over and sat up to try to think it out. Yes, there was a
way--the way which would be taken by the boy in the Sunday-school books.
He would say he was sorry, and would have his sins washed away, and
there would be rejoicing in Heaven over the one sinner who had repented.
Of course, the girl would die, just the same, and all the misery his sin
had caused would remain unchanged. But _he_ would escape.
For one unworthy moment Thomas Jefferson was fiercely tempted. Then the
dogged Gordon blood reasserted itself. He had done the dreadful thing:
he had asked God to take this girl out of his way, and now he would
accept what he had coveted and would not try to sneak out of paying. It
comforted him a little to think that, after all, there must eventually
be some sort of end to the torment, away on in the eternities to come.
When he had suffered all he could suffer, not even God could make him
suffer any more.
When he finally recrossed the creek on the dam head it was supper-time,
and his mother had returned. The misery had now settled into dumb
despair, both more and less agonizing than the acute remorse of the
afternoon. What he needed to know was told in his mother's answer to his
father's inquiry: "Yes; she is a very sick child. I'm going up again
after supper to stay as long as I'm needed. It's a judgment on the
Major; he has been setting the creature above the Creator."
Thomas Jefferson knew well enough that the judgment was his, and not the
Major's; but he let his supper choke him in silence. Afterward, when his
mother had gone back to the house of anxiety and he was alone with his
father, there were some vague promptings toward confession and a cry for
human sympathy. What sealed his lips was the conviction that his father
would comfort him without understanding, just as his mother would
understand and condemn him. Early in the evening his father went back to
the furnace and his chance was lost.
For four heart-searching days Thomas Jefferson lived and endured,
because living and enduring were the two unalterable conditions of the
brimstone pit to which he had consigned himself. During these days his
mother came and went, and prayed oftener than usual--not for the girl's
life, as Thomas Jefferson noticed with deep stirrings of bitterness, but
that the dispensation of Providence might inure to the lasting and
eternal benefit of an impenitent and idolatrous Major Dabney.
Throughout these four days the sickening August heat remained unbroken;
but on the fifth the thunderheads began to gather and a fresh breeze
swept down from the slopes of the distant Cumberland; a wind smelling
sweetly of rain and full of cooling promise.
On this fifth day, Thomas Jefferson, lying in wait at the gate of the
manor-house grounds, waylaid Doctor Williams coming out, and asked the
question which had hitherto had its doleful answer without the necessity
of asking. If the doctor had struck him with the buggy whip the shock
would not have been more real than that consequent on the snapping of
mental tension strings and the surging, strangling uprush of the tidal
wave of relief.
"Little Ardea?" said the doctor. "Oh, she'll do well enough now, I hope.
The fever is broken and she's asleep."
Thomas Jefferson shut the gate mechanically when the doctor had driven
out; but when there was nothing more to hold him, he scrambled over the
stone wall on the opposite side of the pike and ran for the hills like
one demented.
The girl would live! Hell had yawned and cast him up once more on the
pleasant, homely earth; and now the gentle rain of penitence, which
could never water the dry places for a soul in torment, drenched him
like the real rain which was falling to slake the thirst of the parched
fields and the brittle-leaved, rustling forest.
For a long time he lay on his face on the first bit of tree-sheltered
grass he had come to, caring nothing for the storm which was driving all
the wild creatures of the wood to cover. God had not been so pitiless,
after all. There was yet a balm in Gilead.
And for the future? O just Heavens! how straitly and circumspectly he
would walk all the days of his life! Never again should Satan, going
about like a roaring lion, take him unawares. He would even learn to
love the girl, as one should love an enemy; and when she should come and
tell him that all the sacred places were hers by her grandfather's
right, he would smile reproachfully, like the boy being led forth to the
stake in the _Book of Martyrs_, and say--
But the time was not yet fully come for self-pityings; and when Thomas
Jefferson went home after the shower, not even the soggy chill of his
wet clothes could depress the spirit which had made good its footing on
the high mount of humility.
VIII
THE BACKSLIDER
It was late in September before the dreaded invasion of the sacred
places, foreboded by Thomas Jefferson's prophetic soul, became one of
the things to be looked back on; and the interval had sufficed for
another change of heart, or, more correctly, for a descent to the valley
of things as they are from the top of that high mountain of spiritual
humility.
Thomas Jefferson did not analyze the reactionary process. But the
milestones along the backward way were familiar.
In a little while he found that he was once more able to say his prayers
at bedtime with the old glibness, and with the comfortable feeling that
he had done his whole duty if he remained on his knees for sixty full
ticks of the heirloom grandfather clock. It was an accomplishment on
which he prided himself, this knack of saying his prayers and counting
the clock ticks at the same time. Stub Helgerson, whose mother was a
Lutheran and said her prayers out of a book, could not do it. Thomas
Jefferson had asked him.