gaspings of rage.
"Japhe Pettigrass, what did you think you saw last Wednesday forenoon up
yonder at Big Rock Spring on the mountain? Tell it straight, this time,
or by the God you don't believe in, I'll dig the truth out of you with
my bare hands!"
"Sho, now, Tom-Jeff; don't you git so servigrous over nothin'. I didn't
see nothin' but a couple o' young fly-aways playin' 'possum in a hole in
the big rock. And I'll leave it to you if I didn't call Cæsar off and go
my ways, jes' like I'd like to be done by."
"Yes," snarled Tom, dog-mad and furious in this second submergence of
the wave of wrath. "Yes; and then you came straight down here and told
my uncle!" The hand he had been holding behind him came to the front,
clutching a stone snatched up from the metaling of the pike as he ran.
"If I should break your face in with this, Japhe Pettigrass, it wouldn't
be any more than you've earned!"
"By gravy! _I_ tell Brother Silas on you, Tom-Jeff? You show me the man
'at says I done any such low-down thing as that, and I'll frazzle a
fifty-dollar hawsswhip out on his ornery hide--I will, so. Say, boy; you
don't certain'y believe that o' me, do ye?"
"I don't want to believe it of you, Japhe," quavered Tom, as near to
tears as the pride of his eighteen years would sanction. "But somebody
saw and told, and made it a heap worse than it was." He leaned over the
top of the wall and put his face in the crook of his elbow, being
nothing better than a hurt child, for all his bigness.
"Well, now; I wouldn't let a little thing like that gravel me, if I was
you, Tom-Jeff," said Pettigrass, turned comforter. "Nan's a mighty
pretty gal, and you ort to be willin' to stand a little devilin' on her
account--more especially as you've--"
Tom put up his arm as if to ward a blow.
"Don't you say it, Japhe, or I'll go mad again," he broke out.
"I ain't sayin' nothin'. But who do you reckon it was told on you? Was
there anybody else in the big woods that mornin'?"
"Yes; there were three men testing the pipe-line. We both saw them, and
Nan was scared stiff at sight of one of them; that's why I put her up in
that hole."
"Who was the man?"
"I don't know. I didn't recognize any of them--they were too far off
when I saw them. And afterward, Nan wouldn't tell me."
"Did any of 'em see you and Nan?"
"I thought not. Nan was sitting on the flat rock where you stood and
looked into the cave, and when she began to whimper, I flung her over
into the leaves and ran with her to the hole."
"H'm," said Japheth. "When you find out who that feller is that Nan's
skeered of, you can lay your hand on the man that told Brother Silas on
you. But I wouldn't trouble about it none, if I was you. You've got a
long ways the best of him, whoever he is, and--"
But Tom had turned to go home, feeling his way by the wall because the
angry tears were still blinding him, and the horse-trader fell back into
his star-gazing.
"Law, law," he mused; "'the horrible pit an' the miry clay.' What a
sufferin' pity it is we pore sinners cayn't dance a little now and ag'in
'thout havin' to walk right up and pay the fiddler! Tom-Jeff, there,
now, he's a-thinkin' the price is toler'ble high; and I don't know but
it is--I don't know but what it is."
The dinner at Woodlawn that night was a stiff and comfortless meal, as
it had come to be with the taking on of four-tined forks and the other
conventions for which an oak-paneled dining-room in an ornate brick
mansion sets the pace. Caleb Gordon was fathoms deep in the mechanical
problems of the day's work, as was his wont. Silas Crafts was abstracted
and silent. Tom's food choked him, as it had need under the sharp stress
of things; and the convalescent housemother remained at table only long
enough to pour the coffee.
Tom excused himself a few minutes later, and followed his mother to her
room, climbing the stair to her door, leaden-footed and with his heart
ready to burst.
"Is that you, Thomas?" said the gentle voice within, answering his tap
on the panel. "Come in, son; come in and sit by my fire. It's right
chilly to-night."
Thomas Jefferson entered and placed his chair so that she could not see
him without turning, and for many minutes the silence was unbroken. Then
he began, as begin he must, sometime and in some way.
"Mammy," he said, feeling unconsciously for the childish phrase, "Mammy,
has Uncle Silas been telling you anything about me?"
She gave a little nod of assent.
"Something, Thomas, but not a great deal. You have had some trouble with
Doctor Tollivar?"
"Yes."
"I have known that for some little time. Your uncle might have told me
more, but I wouldn't let him. There has never been anything between us
to break confidence, Tom. I knew you would tell me yourself, when the
time came."
"I have come to tell you to-night, mammy. You must hear it all, from
beginning to end. It goes back a long way--back to the time when you
used to let me kneel with my head in your lap to say my prayers; when
you used to think I was good...."
The fire had died down to a few glowing masses of coke on the grate bars
when he had finished the story of his wanderings in the valley of dry
bones. Through it all, Martha Gordon had sat silent and rigid, her thin
hands lying clasped in her lap, and her low willow rocking-chair barely
moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.
But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his
efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had
chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she
reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those
who sorrow without hope, crying again and again, _"O my son Absalom, my
son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son,
my son!"_
XVIII
THE AWAKENING
Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult
slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden
extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous
and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious
grapplings with the adult fact.
For Thomas Jefferson, grinding tenaciously in the Boston technical
school, whither he had gone late in the winter of Beersheban discontent,
the stream-crossing fell in the spring of the panic year 1893, what time
he was twenty-one, a quarter-back on his college eleven, fit, hardy,
studious and athletic; a pace-setter for his fellows and the pride of
the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in
his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land
of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in
health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit
of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each
of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday
future,--as he did by times,--the boyish impatience to be at it was
gone. Chiawassee Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home
letters were mere chronicles of sleepy Paradise. The skies were clear,
and the present was acutely present. Tom studied hard and played hard;
ate like an ogre and slept like a log. And when he finally awoke to find
himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon,
he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream
should fill so vast a chasm.
The call of the ferryman--to keep the figure whole--was a letter from
his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and
painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company
letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the
storm of financial depression were already in the air. Iron, more
sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in
the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of
the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated,
though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at
heart. What would Tom advise?
Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day
in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later
boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way. His father
was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help. It seemed vastly
incredible. Thomas Jefferson's ideal of steady courage, of invincible
human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old
soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson. What a trumpet blast of
alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for
help!
Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longer a raw recruit, a
boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting. It astounded
him that the realization had been so slow in arriving. It was as if he
had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage
plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand. Tumultuously it rushed on him
that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be;
that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings
that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the
burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.
He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on
his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze
of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a
strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. Swiftly, with a click like
that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed. The highway
was the same, but now the man's steps had grown cautious and uncertain
and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.
Tom broke the eye-hold on the vision and sprang up to pace the narrow
limits of the study.
"It's up to me," he mused, "and I'd like to know what I've been thinking
of all this time. Why, pappy's old! he was forty before I was born. And
I've been up here taking it easy and having all sorts of a good time,
while he's been playing Sindbad to Duxbury Farley's Old Man of the Sea.
Coming, pappy!" he shouted; and forthwith flung himself down at the
table to write a letter that was to put new life into a weary old man
who was fighting against odds in the far-away Southland.
The lone soldier was to take heart of grace, remembering that he had a
son; remembering also that the son was now a man grown, stout of arm,
steady of head, and otherwise fighting-fit. If the storm should come,
the watchword must be to hold on all, keeping steerage-way on the
Chiawassee Consolidated craft at all hazards. The June examinations were
not far off, and these disposed of, the man-son would be ready to lay
hold. Meanwhile, let Caleb Gordon, in his capacity of principal minor
stock-holder, insist on a full and exact statement of the company's
affairs, and--here the new manhood asserted itself boldly--let that
statement, or a copy of it, come to Boston by the first mail.
To this letter there was a grateful reply in which Tom read with a smile
his father's half-bewildered attempt to get over to the new point of
view. It began, "Dear Buddy," and ended, "Your affectionate pappy," but
there was man-to-man matter between the salutation and the signature.
The inquiry into the affairs of Chiawassee Consolidated had revealed
little or nothing more than the general manager already knew. The
president had turned the inquiring stock-holder over to Dyckman, the
bookkeeper, with instructions to give Mr. Gordon the fullest possible
information, and:
"Dyckman slid out of it, smooth and easy-like," Caleb's letter went on.
"He allowed he was _mighty_ busy, right about then. Wouldn't I just make
myself at home and examine the books for myself? I reckon that was about
what Farley wanted him to do. I'm no book expert, and I couldn't make
head or tail out of Dyckman's spider tracks. Looks to me like all the
books are good for is to keep people from finding where the company is
at. What little I found out, young Norman told me. He says we're in a
hole, and the first wagon-load of dirt that comes along will bury us out
of sight."
Tom, driven now with the closing work of the college year, yet took time
to write another heartening letter to the hard-pressed old soldier. It
had been his good fortune to win the Clarkson prize for crucible tests,
and to have gained thereby a speaking acquaintance with the
multimillionaire iron king who had founded it. Mr. Clarkson did not
believe that the financial storm would grow to panic size. As for
himself, Tom thought the hazard was less in the times than in the
Farleys. Father Caleb was to keep his finger on the pulse of the main
office, wiring Boston at the first sign of its weakening.
The junior metallurgical was in the thick of the June examinations when
the catastrophe befell. The brief story of it came to Tom in the first
dictated letter he had ever received from his father, and the tremulous
shakiness of the signature pointed eloquently to the reason. Chiawassee
Consolidated was out of blast--"temporarily suspended," in the pleasant
euphemism of the elder Farley; the force, clerical and manual, was
discharged, with only Dyckman left in the deserted South Tredegar
offices to answer questions; and the three Farleys, with Major Dabney,
Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, were to spend the summer in Europe.
Caleb wrote in some bitterness of spirit. Though the Gordon holdings in
the company, increased from time to time as the iron-master had
prospered, amounted to a little more than a third of the capital stock,
everything had been done secretly. The general manager's own notice of
the shut-down had come in the posted "Notice to Employees." When the
Farleys should leave, he would be utterly helpless; on their return they
could repudiate everything he might do in their absence. Meantime, ruin
was imminent. The affairs of the company were in the utmost confusion;
the treasury was empty, and there were no apparent assets apart from the
idle plant. Creditors were pressing; the discharged workmen, led by the
white coal-miners, were on the verge of riot; and Major Dabney's
royalties on the coal lands were many months in arrears.
Tom rose promptly to the occasion, and in all the stress of things found
space to wonder how it chanced that he knew instinctively what to do and
how to go about it. Before his information was an hour old a rush
telegram had gone to his father, asking from what port and by what
steamer the Farleys would sail; asking also that certain documents be
sent to a given New York address by first mail.
This done, he laid the exigencies frankly before the examiners in the
technical school, praying for such lenity as might be extended under the
circumstances. Since all things are possible for an honor-man, beloved
of those whose mission it is to grind the human weapon to its edge, the
difficulties in this field vanished. Mr. Gordon could go on with the
examinations until his presence was needed elsewhere; and after the
stressful moment was passed he could return and finish.
Tom, the boy, could not have gone on. It would have been blankly
impossible. But Tom, the man, was a new creature. While waiting for the
reply to his telegram, he plunged doggedly back into the scholastic
whirlpool, kicked, struggled, strangled, got his head above water, and
found, vastly to his own amazement, that the thing was actually
compassable in spite of the mighty distractions.
The return telegram from Gordonia was a day late. Knowing diplomacy only
by name, Caleb Gordon had gone directly to Dyckman for information
regarding the Farleys' movements. Dyckman was polite to the general
manager, but unhappily he knew nothing of Mr. Farley's plans. Caleb
tried elsewhere, and the little mystery thickened. At his club, Mr.
Farley had spoken of taking a Cunarder from Boston; to a friend in the
South Tredegar Manufacturers' Association he had confided his intention
of sailing from Philadelphia. But at the railway ticket office he had
engaged Pullman reservations for six persons to New York.
This last was conclusive, as far as it went; and Japheth Pettigrass
supplied the missing item. The Dabneys and the Farleys made one party,
and Japheth knew the steamer and the sailing date.
"Party will sail by White Star Line Baltic, New York, to-morrow. New
York address, Fifth Avenue Hotel. Papers to you care 271 Broadway by
mail yesterday," was the message which was signed for by the doorkeeper
at the mines and metallurgy examination room in Boston, late in the
forenoon of the second day; and Tom looked at the clock. Nothing would
be gained by taking a train which would land him in New York late in the
evening; so he plunged again into the examination pool and thought no
more of Chiawassee Consolidated until his paper on qualitative analysis
had been neatly folded, docketed and handed to the examiner.
The hands of his watch were pointing to eight o'clock the following
morning when Tom made his way through the throng in the Grand Central
station and found a cab. The sailing hour of the _Baltic_ was ten, and
he picked his cabman accordingly.
"I shall want you for a couple of hours, and it's double fare if you
don't miss. 271 Broadway, first," was his fillip for the driver; and he
was speedily rattling away to the down-town address.
The taking of the cab was his first mistake, and he discovered it before
he had gone very far. Time was precious, and the horse, pushed to the
police limit, was too slow. Tom signaled his Irishman.
"Get me over to the Elevated, and then go to Madison Square and wait for
me," he ordered; and by this change of conveyance he obtained his mail
and won back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel by late breakfast time.
From that on, luck was with him. The Farleys, father and son, were in
the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the others to come down to the café
breakfast. Tom saw them, confronted them, and went at things very
concisely.
"I have come all the way from Boston to ask for a few minutes of your
time, Mr. Farley," he said to the president. "Will you give it to me
now?"
"Surely!" was the genial reply, and the promoter signed to his son and
drew apart with the importunate one. "Well, go on, my boy; what can I do
for you at this last American moment?--some message from your good
father?"
"No," said Tom shortly; "it's from me, individually. You know in what
shape you have left things at home; they've got to be stood on their
feet before you go aboard the _Baltic_."
"What's this--what's this? Why, my dear young man! what can you possibly
mean?"--this in buttered tones of the gentlest expostulation.
"I mean just about what I say. You have smashed Chiawassee Consolidated,
and now you are going off to leave my father to hold the bag. Or rather
I should say, you are taking the bag with you."
The president was visibly moved.
"Why, Thomas--you must be losing your mind! You've--you've been studying
too hard; that's it--the term work up there in Boston has been too much
for you."
"Cut it out, Mr. Farley," said Tom savagely, all the Gordon fighting
blood singing in his veins. "You've got a thing to do, and it is going
to be done before you leave America. Will you talk straight business, or
not?"
The president adjusted his eye-glasses, and gave this brand-new Gordon a
calm over-look.
"And if I decline to discuss business matters with a rude school-boy?"
he intimated mildly.
"Then it will be rather the worse for you," was the defiant rejoinder.
"Acting for my father and the minority stock-holders, I shall try to
have you and your son held in America, pending an expert examination of
the company's affairs."
It was a long shot, with a thousand chances of missing. If there was
anything criminal in the Farley administration, the evidences were
doubtless well buried. But Tom was looking deep into the shifty blue
eyes of his antagonist when he fired, and he saw that he had not wholly
missed. None the less, the president attempted to carry it off lightly.
"What do you think of this, Vincent?" he said, turning to his son. "Here
is Tom Gordon--our Tom--talking wildly about investigations and arrests,
and I don't know what all. Shall we give him his breakfast and send him
back to school?"
Tom cut in quickly before Vincent could make a reply.
"If you're sparring to gain time, it's no use, Mr. Farley. I mean what I
say, and I'm dead in earnest." Then he tried another long shot: "I tell
you right now we've had this thing cocked and primed ever since we found
out what you and Vincent meant to do. You must turn over the control of
Chiawassee Consolidated, legally and formally, to my father before you
go aboard the _Baltic_, or--_you don't go aboard_!"
"Let me understand," said the treasurer, cutting in. "Are you accusing
us of crime?"
"You will find out what the accusation is, later on," said Tom, taking
yet another cartridge from the long-range box. "What I want now is a
plain, straightforward yes or no, if either of you is capable of saying
it."
The president took his son aside.
"Do you suppose Dyckman has been talking too much?" he asked hurriedly.
Vincent shook his head.
"You can't tell ... it looks a little rocky. Of course, we had a right
to do as we pleased with our own, but we don't want to have an
unfriendly construction put on things."
"But they can't do anything!" protested the president. "Why, I'd be
perfectly willing to turn over my private papers, if they were asked
for!"
"Yes, of course. But there would be misconstruction. There is that
contract with the combination, for example; we had a right to manipulate
things so we'd have to close down, and it might not transpire that we
made money by doing it. But, on the other hand, it might leak out, and
there'd be no end of a row. Then there is another thing: there is
somebody behind this who is bigger than the old soldier or this young
foot-ball tough. It's too nicely timed."
"But, heavens and earth! you wouldn't turn the property over to Gordon,
would you?"
The younger man's smile was a mere contortion of the lips. "It's a
sucked orange," he said. "Let the old man have it. He may work a miracle
of some sort and pull out alive. I should call it a snap, and take him
up too quick. If he wins out, so much the better for all concerned. If
he doesn't, why, we left the property entirely in his hands, and he
smashed it. Don't you see the beauty of it?"
The president wheeled short on Tom.
"What you may think you are extorting, my dear boy, you are going to get
through sheer good-will and a desire to give your father every chance in
the world," he said blandly. "We discussed the plan of electing him
vice-president, with power to act, before we left home, but there seemed
to be some objections. We are willing to give him full control--and this
altogether apart from any foolish threats you have seen fit to make.
Bring your legal counsel to Room 327 after breakfast and we will go
through the formalities. Are you satisfied?"
"I shall be a lot better satisfied after the fact," said Tom bluntly;
and he turned away to avoid meeting Major Dabney and the ladies, who
were coming from the elevator to join the two early risers. He had seen
next to nothing of Ardea during the three Boston years, and would
willingly have seen more. But the new manhood was warning him that time
was short, and that he must not mix business with sentiment. So Ardea
saw nothing but his back, which, curiously enough, she failed to
recognize.
Picking up his cab at the curb, Tom had himself driven quickly to the
office of the corporation lawyer whose name he had obtained from Mr.
Clarkson the day before, and with whom he had made a wire appointment
before leaving Boston. The attorney was waiting for him, and Tom stated
the case succinctly, adding a brief of the interview which had just
taken place at the hotel.
"You say they agreed to your proposal?" observed the lawyer. "Did Mr.
Farley indicate the method?"
"No."
"Have you a copy of the by-laws of your company?"
Tom produced the packet of papers received that morning from his father,
and handed the required pamphlet to Mr. Croswell.
"H'm--ha! the usual form. A stock-holders' meeting, with a resolution,
would be the simplest way out of it; but that can't be held without the
published call. You say your father is a stock-holder?"