the doubtful questionings. Did God really trouble Himself about the
millions of things people asked Him to do? It seemed highly incredible,
not to say impossible, in the very nature of it. And if He did, would He
make one person sick for the sake of making another person sorry? These
questions were answerless, like so many of the others; but after the
perplexity had been pushed aside, the doubt remained.
Coming down by such successive steps from the mount of penitent
thanksgivings, it was but a short time before he found himself back on
the old camping-ground of sullen resentment.
When the girl got well enough to go about, she would find him out and
warn him off; or perhaps she might do even worse, and tag him. In either
case he should hate her, and there was a sort of ferocious joy in the
thought that she would doubtless be a long time getting well, and would
probably not be able to find him if he kept far enough out of her way.
Acting on this wise conclusion, he carefully avoided the manor-house and
its neighborhood, making a wide circuit when he went fishing in the
upper pools. And once, when his father had sent him with a message to
the Major, he did violence to his own sense of exact obedience by
transferring the word at the house gate to Mammy Juliet's grandson,
Pete.
But when one's evil star is in the ascendent, precautions are like the
vain strugglings of the fly in the web. The day of reckoning may be
postponed, but it will by no means be effaced from the calendar. One
purple and russet afternoon, when all the silent forest world was
steeped in the deep peace of early autumn, Thomas Jefferson was fishing
luxuriously in the most distant of the upper pools. There were three fat
perch gill-strung on a forked withe under the overhanging bank, and a
fourth was rising to the bait, when the peaceful stillness was rudely
rent by a crashing in the undergrowth, and a great dog, of a breed
hitherto unknown to Paradise, bounded into the little glade to stand
glaring at the fisherman, his teeth bared and his back hairs bristling.
Now Thomas Jefferson in his thirteenth year was as well able to defend
himself as any clawed and toothed creature of the wood, and fear, the
fear of anything he could face and grapple with, was a thing unknown.
Propping his fishing pole so that no chance of a nibble might be lost in
the impending struggle, he got on his knees and picked out the exact
spot in the dog's neck where he would drive the bait knife home when
hostilities actual should begin.
"Oh, please! Don't you hurt my dog!" said a rather weak little voice out
of the rearward void.
But, gray eyes human, holding brown canine in an unwinking gaze: "You
come round here and call him off o' me."
"He is not wishing to hurt you, or anybody," said the voice. "Down,
Hector!"
The Great Dane passed from suspicious rigidity and threatening lip
twitchings to mighty and frivolous gambolings, and Thomas Jefferson got
up to give him room. A girl--_the_ girl, as some inner sense instantly
assured him--was trying to make the dog behave. So he had a chance to
look her over before the battle for sovereignty should begin.
There was a little shock of disdainful surprise to go with the first
glance. Somehow he had been expecting something very different;
something on the order of the Queen of Sheba--done small, of course--as
that personage was pictured in the family Bible; a girl, proud and
scornful, and possibly wearing a silk dress and satin shoes.
Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl
whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a
second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair
of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face. A
double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson's mind: she was
rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks--well,
she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan
Bryerson.
When the dog was reduced to quietude, the small one repaid Thomas
Jefferson's stare with a level gaze out of the over-sized eyes.
"Was it that you were afraid of Hector?" she asked.
"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson, and the scorn was partly for her queer way
of speaking and partly for the foolishness of the question. "Huh! I
reckon you don't know who I am. I'd have killed your dog if he'd jumped
on me, maybe."
"Me? I do know who you are. You are Thomas Gordon. Your mother took care
of me and prayed for me when I was sick. Hector is a--an extremely good
dog. He would not jump at you."
"It's mighty lucky for him he didn't," bragged Thomas Jefferson, with a
very creditable imitation of his father's grim frown. Then he sat down
on the bank of the stream and busied himself with his fishing-tackle as
if he considered the incident closed.
"What is it that you are trying to do?" asked Ardea, when the silence
had extended to the third worm impaled on the hook and promptly
abstracted therefrom by a wily sucker lying at the bottom of the pool.
"I was fishin' some before you and your dog came along and scared all
the perch away," he said sourly. Then, turning suddenly on her: "Why
don't you go ahead and say it? Is it 'cause you're afeard to?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I know what you're going to say; you are going to tell me this is your
grandfather's land and run me off. But I ain't aimin' to go till I'm
good and ready."
She looked down on him without malice.
"You are such a funny boy," she remarked, and there was something in her
way of saying it that made Thomas Jefferson feel little and infantile
and inferior, though he was sure there must be an immense age difference
in his favor.
"Why?" he demanded.
"Oh, I don't know; just because you are. If you knew French I could
explain it better that way."
"I don't know anybody by that name, and I don't care," said Thomas
Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fishing.
Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed
to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool. Then came the
volcanic outburst.
"I think you are mean, mean!" she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her
foot. "I--I want to go ho-ome!"
"Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson
brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such
fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to
his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was
going to be notably easy to bully her--another point of difference
between her and Nan Bryerson.
"I know there isn't anybody holding me, but--but I can't find the way."
That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was
ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling,
in the case of a girl.
"You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the
ungraciousness he could muster into the query.
"You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"
"I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with
gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the
methodical disposal of his fishing-tackle. It would be good for her to
learn that she must wait on his motions.
She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck
of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to
see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone
that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made
him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from
the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."
He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what
hardships she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he
dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst
brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling
until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones.
But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient
creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human
boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a
helplessly pliable subject.
The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down;
but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and
cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll
know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come
on--we're 'most there, now."
But Ardea's troubles were not yet at an end. She stopped crying and got
up to follow him blindly over more hills and through other brier
tangles; and when they finally emerged in the cleared lands, they were
still on the wrong side of the creek.
"It's only about up to your chin; reckon you can wade it?" asked Thomas
Jefferson, in a sudden access of heart-hardening. But it softened him a
little to see her gather her torn frock and stumble down to the water's
edge without a word, and he added: "Hold on; maybe we can find a log,
somewhere."
There was a foot log just around the next bend above, as he very well
knew, and thither he led the way. The dog made the crossing first, and
stood wagging his tail encouragingly on the bank of safety. Then Thomas
Jefferson passed his trembling victim out on the log.
"You go first," he directed; "so 't I can catch you if you slip."
For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.
"Oh, you please go first, so I won't have to look down at the water!"
"No; I'm coming behind--then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to
fall," he said stubbornly.
"Will you walk right up close, so I can know you are there?"
Thomas Jefferson's smile was cruelly misleading, as were his words. "All
you'll have to do will be to reach your hand back and grab me," he
assured her; and thereupon she began to inch her way out over the
swirling pool.
When he saw that she could by no possibility turn to look back, Thomas
Jefferson deliberately sat down on the bank to watch her. There had
never been anything in his life so tigerishly delightful as this game of
playing on the feelings and fears of the girl whose coming had spoiled
the solitudes.
For the first few feet Ardea went steadily forward, keeping her eyes
fixed on the Great Dane sitting motionless at the farther end of the
bridge of peril. Then, suddenly the dog grew impatient and began to leap
and bark like a foolish puppy. It was too much for Ardea to have her
eye-anchor thus transformed into a dizzying whirlwind of gray monsters.
She reached backward for the reassuring hand: it was not there, and the
next instant the hungry pool rose up to engulf her.
In all his years Thomas Jefferson had never had such a stab as that
which an instantly awakened conscience gave him when she slipped and
fell. Now he was her murderer, beyond any hope of future mercies. For a
moment the horror of it held him vise-like. Then the sight of the Great
Dane plunging to the rescue freed him.
"Good dog!" he screamed, diving headlong from his own side of the pool;
and between them Ardea was dragged ashore, a limp little heap of
saturation, conscious, but with her teeth chattering and great, dark
circles around the big blue eyes.
Thomas Jefferson's first word was masculinely selfish.
"I'm awful sorry!" he stammered. "If you can't make out to forgive me,
I'm going to have a miser'ble time of it after I get home. God will whip
me worse for this than He did for the other."
It was here, again, that she gave him the feeling that she was older
than he.
"It will serve you quite right. Now you'd better get me home as quick as
ever you can. I expect I'll be sick again, after this."
He held his peace and walked her as fast as he could across the fields
and out on the pike. But at the Dabney gates he paused. It was not in
human courage to face the Major under existing conditions.
"I reckon you'll go and tell your gran'paw on me," he said hopelessly.
She turned on him with anger ablaze.
"Why should I not tell him? And I never want to see you or hear of you
again, you cruel, hateful boy!"
Thomas Jefferson hung about the gate while she went stumbling up the
driveway, leaning heavily on the great dog. When she had safely reached
the house he went slowly homeward, wading in trouble even as he waded in
the white dust of the pike. For when one drinks too deeply of the cup of
tyranny the lees are apt to be like the little book the Revelator
ate--sweet as honey in the mouth and bitter in the belly.
That evening at the supper-table he had one nerve-racking fear
dispelled and another confirmed by his mother's reply to a question put
by his father.
"Yes; the Major sent for me again this afternoon. That child is back in
bed again with a high fever. It seems she was out playing with that
great dog of hers and fell into the creek. I wanted to tell the Major he
is just tempting Providence, the way he makes over her and indulges her,
but I didn't dare to."
And again Thomas Jefferson knew that he was the one who had tempted
Providence.
IX
THE RACE TO THE SWIFT
From the grave and thoughtful vantage-ground of thirteen, Thomas
Jefferson could look back on the second illness of Ardea Dabney as the
closing incident of his childhood.
The industrial changes which were then beginning, not only for the city
beyond the mountain, but for all the region round about, had rushed
swiftly on Paradise; and the old listless life of the unhasting period
soon receded quickly into a far-away past, rememberable only when one
made an effort to recall it.
First had come the completion of the Great Southwestern. Diverted by the
untiring opposition of Major Dabney from its chosen path through the
valley, it skirted the westward hills, passing within a few hundred
yards of the Gordon furnace. Since business knows no animosities, the
part which Caleb Gordon and his gun crew had played in the right-of-way
conflict was ignored. The way-station at the creek crossing was named
Gordonia, and it was the railway traffic manager himself who suggested
to the iron-master the taking of a partner with capital, the opening of
the vein of coking coal on Mount Lebanon, the installation of
coking-ovens, and the modernizing and enlarging of the furnace and
foundry plant--hints all pointing to increased traffic for the road.
With the coming of Mr. Duxbury Farley to Paradise, Thomas Jefferson
lost, not only the simple life, but the desire to live it. This Mr.
Farley, whom we have seen and heard, momentarily, on the station
platform in South Tredegar, the expanded, hailed from Cleveland, Ohio;
was, as he was fond of saying pompously, a citizen of no mean city. His
business in the reawakening South was that of an intermediary between
cause and effect; the cause being the capital of confiding investors in
the North, and the effect the dissipation of the same in various and
sundry development schemes in the new iron field.
To Paradise, in the course of his goings to and fro, came this purger of
other men's purses, and he saw the fortuitous grouping of the
possibilities at a glance: abundant iron of good quality; an accessible
vein of coal, second only to Pocahontas for coking; land cheap, water
free, and a persuadable subject in straightforward, simple-hearted Caleb
Gordon.
Farley had no capital, but he had that which counts for more in the
promoter's field; namely, the ability to reap where others had sown. His
plan, outlined to Caleb in a sweeping cavalry-dash of enthusiasm, was
simplicity itself. Caleb should contribute the raw material--land, water
and the ore quarry--and it should also be his part to secure a lease of
the coal land from Major Dabney. In the meantime he, Farley, would
undertake to float the enterprise in the North, forming a company and
selling stock to provide the development capital.
The iron-master demurred a little at first. There were difficulties,
and he pointed them out.
"I don't know, Colonel Farley. It appears like I'm givin' all I've got
for a handout at the kitchen door of the big company. Then, again,
there's the Major. He's pizon against all these improvements. You don't
know the Major."
"On the contrary, my dear Mr. Gordon, it is because I do know him, or
know of him, that I am turning him over to you. You are the one person
in the world to obtain that coal lease. I confess I couldn't touch the
Major with a ten-foot pole, any more than you could go North and get the
cash. But you are his neighbor, and he likes you. What you recommend,
he'll do." Thus the enthusiast.
"Well, I don't know," said Caleb doubtfully; "I reckon I can try. He
can't any more 'n fire me, like he did the Southwestern right-o'-way
man. But then, about t'other part of it: I've got a little charcoal
furnace here that don't amount to much, maybe, but it's all mine, and
I'm the boss. When this other thing goes through, the men who are
putting up the money will own it and me. I'll be just about as much
account as the tag on a shoe-string."
This part of the conference was held on the slab-floored porch of the
oak-shingled house, with Thomas Jefferson as a negligible listener.
Since he was listening with both eyes and ears, he saw something in Mr.
Duxbury Farley's face that carried him swiftly back to the South
Tredegar railway station and to that first antipathetic impression. But
again the suave tongue quickly turned the page.
"Don't let that trouble you for a moment, Mr. Gordon," was the
reassuring rejoinder. "I shall see that your apportionment of stock in
the company is as large as the flotation scheme will stand; and as I,
too, shall be a minority stock-holder, I shall share your risk. But
there will be no risk. If the Lord prospers us, we shall both come out
of this rich men, Mr. Gordon."
The slow smile that Thomas Jefferson knew so well came and went like a
flitting shadow.
"I reckon the Lord don't make n'r meddle much with these here little
child's playhouses of our'n," said Caleb; and then he gave his consent
to the promoter's plan.
Singularly or not, as we choose to view it, the difficulties effaced
themselves at the first onset. Though tact was no part of Caleb Gordon's
equipment, his presentation of the matter to Major Dabney became so
nearly a personal asking--with Mr. Duxbury Farley and the Northern
capitalists distantly backgrounding--that the Major granted the lease of
the coal lands on purely personal grounds; would, indeed, have waived
the matter of consideration entirely, if Caleb had not insisted. Had not
the iron-master been raised to the high degree of fellowship by the hand
that signed the lease?
On his part, Mr. Duxbury Farley was equally successful. A company was
formed, the charter was obtained, and the golden stream began to flow
into the treasury; into it and out again in the raceway channels of
development. Thomas Jefferson stood aghast when an army of workmen swept
down on Paradise and began to change the very face of nature. But that
was only the beginning.
For a time Chiawassee Coal and Iron figured buoyantly in the market
quotations, and delegations of stock-holders, both present and
prospective, were personally conducted to the scene of activities by
enthusiastic Vice-President Farley. But when these had served their
purpose a thing happened. One fine morning it was whispered on 'Change
that Chiawassee iron would not Bessemer, and that Chiawassee coke had
been rejected by the Southern Association of Iron Smelters.
Followed a crash which was never very clearly understood by the
simple-hearted soldier iron-master, though it was merely a repetition of
a lesson well conned by the earlier investors in Southern coal and iron
fields. Caleb's craft was the making of iron; not the financing of
top-heavy corporations. So, when he was told that the company had
failed, and that he and Farley had been appointed receivers, he took it
as a financial matter, of course, somewhat beyond his ken, and went
about his daily task of supervision with a mind as undisturbed as it
would have been distraught had he known something of the subterranean
mechanism by which the failure and the receivership had been brought to
pass.
Why Mr. Duxbury Farley spared the iron-master in the freezing-out
process was an unsolved riddle to many. But there were reasons. For one,
there was the lease of the coal lands, renewable year by year--this was
Caleb's own honest provision inserted in the contract for the Major's
protection--and renewable only by the Major's friend. Further, a
practical man at the practical end of an industry is a sheer necessity;
and by contriving to have honest Caleb associated with himself in the
receivership, a fine color of uprightness was imparted to the promoter's
far-reaching plan of aggrandizement.
So, later, when the reorganization was effected; when the troublesome,
dividend-hungry stock-holders of the original company were eliminated by
due process of law, Caleb's name appeared on the Farley slate with the
title of general manager of the new company--for the same good and
sufficient reasons.
It was during the fervid six months of Chiawassee Coal and Iron
development that Thomas Jefferson had passed from the old life to the
new--from childhood to boyhood.
Simultaneously, there were the coal-mines opening under the cliffs of
Mount Lebanon, the long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat
below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of
magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen. Thomas Jefferson did
his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for
knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the
assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine. And
when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same
moment, it distressed him to tears.
Of the home life during that strenuous interval there was little more
than the eating and sleeping for one whose time for the absorbent
process was all too limited. Also, the perplexing questions reaching
down into the under-soul of things were silent. Also, again--mark of a
change so radical that none but a Thomas Jefferson may read and
understand--an awe-inspiring Major Dabney had ceased to be the first
citizen of the world, that pinnacle being now occupied by a tall,
sallow, smooth-faced gentleman, persuasive of speech and superhuman in
accomplishment, who was the life and soul of the activities, and whom
his father and mother always addressed respectfully as "Colonel" Farley.
One day, in the very heat of the battle, this commanding personage, at
whose word the entire world of Paradise was in travail, had deigned to
speak directly to him--Thomas Jefferson. It was at the mine on the
mountain. The workmen were bolting into place the final trestle of the
inclined railway which was to convey the coal in descending carloads to
the bins at the coke-ovens, and Thomas Jefferson was absorbing the
details as a dry sponge soaks water.
"Making sure that they do it just right, are you, my boy?" said the
great man, patting him approvingly on the shoulder. "That's good. I like
to see a boy anxious to get to the bottom of things. Going to be an
iron-master, like your father, are you?"
"N-no," stammered the boy. "I wisht I was!"
"Well, what's to prevent? We are going to have the completest plant in
the country right here, and it will be a fine chance for your father's
son; the finest in the world."
"'Tain't goin' to do me any good," said Thomas Jefferson dejectedly. "I
got to be a preacher."
Mr. Duxbury Farley looked down at him curiously. He was a religious
person himself, coming to be known as a pillar in St. Michael's Church
at South Tredegar, a liberal contributor, and a prime mover in a plan to
tear down the old building and to erect a new one more in keeping with
the times and South Tredegar's prosperity. Yet he was careful to draw
the line between religion as a means of grace and business as a means of
making money.
"That is your mother's wish, I suppose: and it's a worthy one; very
worthy. Yet, unless you have a special vocation--but there; your mother
doubtless knows best. I am only anxious to see your father's son succeed
in whatever he undertakes."
After that, Thomas Jefferson secretly made Success his god, and was
alertly ready to fetch and carry for the high priest in its temple, only
the opportunities were infrequent.