hold his proxy."
The attorney smiled shrewdly.
"You are a very remarkable young man. You seem to have come prepared at
all points. I assume that you are acting under your father's
instructions?"
"Why, with his approval, of course," Tom amended. "But it is my own
initiative, under the advice of a good friend of mine in Boston, thus
far. Oh, I know what I'm about," he added, in answer to the latent
question in the lawyer's eyes.
"You seem to," was the laconic reply. "Now let us see exactly what it is
that you want Mr. Farley to concede."
"I want him to turn over the entire control of the company's business,
operative and financial, to my father."
The lawyer smiled again.
"That is a pretty big asking. Have you any reason to suppose that Mr.
Farley will accede to any such demand?"
"Yes; I have very good reasons, but I reckon we needn't go into them
here and now. The time is too short; their liner sails at ten."
The attorney tilted his chair and became reflective.
"The simple way out of it is to have Mr. Farley constitute your father,
or yourself, his proxy to vote his stock at a certain specified meeting
of the stock-holders, which can be called later. Of course, with a
majority vote of the stock, you can rearrange matters to suit
yourselves, subject only to Mr. Farley's disarrangement when he resumes
control of his holdings. How would that serve?"
"You're the doctor," said Tom bruskly. "Any way to get him out and get
my father in."
"It's the simplest way, as I say. But if the property is worth anything
at all, I should think Mr. Farley would fight you to a finish before he
would consent."
"You fix up the papers, Mr. Croswell, and I'll see to it that he
consents. Make the proxy run in my father's name."
The attorney went into another room and dictated to his stenographer.
While he was absent, Tom sat, watch in hand, counting the minutes. It
was his first pitched battle with the Farleys, and victory promised. But
with industrial panic in the air the victory threatened to be of the
Cadmean sort, and a scowl of anxiety gathered between his eyes.
"Never mind," he gritted, with an out-thrust of the square jaw; "it's
the Gordon fighting chance; and pappy says that's all we've ever
asked--it's all I'm going to ask, anyway. But I wish Ardea wasn't going
over with that crowd!"
The conference in Room 327, Fifth Avenue Hotel, held while the carriages
were waiting to take the steamer party to the pier, was brief and
businesslike. Something to Tom's surprise, Major Dabney was present; and
a little later he learned, with a shock of resentment, that the Major
was also a minority stock-holder in the moribund Chiawassee
Consolidated. The master of Deer Trace was as gracious to Caleb Gordon's
son as only a Dabney knew how to be.
"Nothing could give me greateh pleasure, my deah boy, than this plan of
having youh fatheh in command at Gordonia," he beamed, shaking Tom's
hand effusively. "I hope you'll have us all made millionaihs when we get
back home again; I do, for a fact, suh."
Tom smiled and shook his head.
"It looks pretty black, just now, Major. I'm afraid we're in for rough
weather."
"Oh, no; not that, son; a meah passing cloud." And then, with the big
Dabney laugh: "You youngstehs oughtn't to leave it for us old fellows to
keep up the stock of optimism, suh. A word in youh ear, young man: if
these heah damned Yankee rascals would quit thei-uh monkeying right heah
in Wall Street, the country would take on a new lease of life, suh; it
would for a fact," and he said it loudly enough to be heard in the
corridor.
During this bit of side play the attorney was laboring with the two
Farleys, and Tom, watching narrowly, saw that there was a hitch of some
kind.
"What is it?" he demanded, turning shortly on the trio at the table.
The lawyer explained. Mr. Farley thought the plan proposed was entirely
too far-reaching in its effects, or possible effects. He was willing to
delegate his authority as president of the company to Caleb Gordon in
writing. Would not that answer all the requirements?
Tom asked his attorney with his eyes if it would answer, and read the
negative reply very clearly. So he shook his head.
"No," he said, turning his back on the Major and lowering his voice. "We
must have your proxy, Mr. Farley."
"And if I don't choose to accede to your demands?"
"I don't think we need to go over that ground again," said Tom coolly.
"If you don't sign that paper, you'll miss your steamer."
The president glanced toward the open door, as if he half expected to
see an officer waiting for him. Then he said, "Oh, well; it's as broad
as it is long," and signed.
The leave-takings were brief, and somewhat constrained, save those of
the genial Major. Tom pleaded business, further business, with his
attorney, when the Major would have had him wait to tell the ladies
good-by; hence he saw no more of the tourists after the conference broke
up.
Not to lose time, Tom took a noon train back to Boston, first wiring his
father to try and keep things in _statu quo_ at Gordonia for another
week at all hazards. Winning back to the technical school, he plunged
once more into the examination whirlpool, doing his best to forget
Chiawassee Consolidated and its mortal sickness for the time being, and
succeeding so well that he passed with colors flying.
But the school task done, he turned down the old leaf, pasting it firmly
in place. Telegraphing his father to meet him, on the morning of the
third day following, at the station in South Tredegar, he allowed
himself a few hours for a run up the North Shore and a conference with
the Michigan iron king; after which he turned his face southward and was
soon speeding to the battle-field through a land by this time shaking to
its industrial foundations in the throes of the panic earthquake.
XIX
ISSACHAR
In accordance with Tom's telegram, Caleb Gordon met his son at the
station in South Tredegar, and they went together to breakfast in one of
the dining-rooms of the Marlboro. Tom's heart burned within him when he
saw how the late stress of things had aged his father, and for the first
time in his life he opened a vengeance account: if the Farleys ever came
back there should be reckoning for more than the looting of Chiawassee
Consolidated. But this was only the primitive under-thought. Uppermost
at the moment was the joy of the young soldier arrived, fit and
vigorous, on his maiden battle-field.
"You don't know how good it seems to get back home again, pappy," he
said, over the bacon and eggs. "I've been grinding pretty hard this
year, and now it's over, I feel as if I could whip my weight in
wildcats, as Japheth used to say. By the way, how is Japheth?"
Caleb Gordon smiled in spite of the corroding industrial anxieties.
"Japheth's going to surprise you some, I reckon, son; he's gone and got
religion."
Tom put down his knife and fork.
"Why, the old sinner!" he laughed. "How did that happen?"
"Oh, just about the way it always does," said Caleb slowly. "The spirit
moved your Uncle Silas to come out to Little Zoar and hold a protracted
meetin', and Japhe joined the mourners and was gathered into the fold."
"Pshaw!" said Tom, in good-natured incredulity. "Why, the very meat and
marrow of his existence is his horse-trading; and who could swap horses
and tell the truth at the same time?"
"I don't know," was the doubtful reply. "But Brother Japheth allows
that's about what he aims to do. It's sort o' curious the way it works
out, too. About a week after the baptizin', Jim Bledsoe came down from
Pine Knob with a horse to swap. 'Long about sundown he met up with
Japhe, and struck him for a trade on a piebald that the Major wouldn't
let run in the same lot with the Deer Trace stock. They had it up one
side and down the other; Brother Japhe tryin' to tell Bledsoe that his
piebald was about the no-accountest horse in the valley, and Jim takin'
it all by contraries and gettin' more and more p'intedly anxious to
trade."
"Well?" said Tom, enjoying his return to nature like any creature freed
of the urban cage.
"They came to the trade, after a tolerable spell of it," Caleb went on,
"and the last thing I heard Japhe say was, 'now you recollect, Brother
Bledsoe, I done told you that there piebald's no account on the face of
the earth--a-lovin' of my neighbor like I promise' Brother Silas I
would.'"
Tom laughed again. There was the smell of the good red soil in the
little story, a whiff of the home earth reminiscent and heartening. But
the under-thought laid hold on Japheth and his change of heart.
"Japhe was about the last man in Paradise, always excepting Major
Dabney," he said half-musingly. "Haven't you often wondered what sort of
a maggot it is that gets into the human brain to give it the
superstitious twist?"
Caleb's gentle frown was the upcast of paternal bewilderment, partly
prideful, partly disconcerting. He was not yet fully acquainted with
this young giant with the frank face, the sober gray eyes, and the
conscious grasp of himself. More than once since their meeting at the
steps of the Pullman car he had felt obliged to reassure himself by
saying, "This is Tom; this is my son." There were so many and such
marked changes: the quick, curt speech, caught in the Northland; the
nervous, sure-footed stride, and the athletic swing of the shoulders;
the easy manner and confident air, not of college-boy conceit, but of
the assurance of young manhood; and, lastly, this blunt right-about-face
in matters of religion. Caleb was not quite sure that this latter change
was entirely welcome.
"Whereabouts did ye learn to call it superstition, son? Not at your
mammy's knee, leastwise," he said, in sober deprecation.
Tom shook his head. "No; and not altogether at yours. But I guess I've
worked around to your point of view, after so long a time."
"It's your mammy's faith, all the same, Buddy," said the father gravely.
"Let's not belittle it any more'n we can help."
"I don't belittle it," was the quick response. "In some of its phases it
is grand--magnificent. We can't always be prying into the cause; the
effect is what counts. And there is no denying that the fairy tale
which we call Christianity has built some of the most godlike heroes the
world has ever seen."
"You're right sure now that it is a fairy story, son?" said the old man,
a little wistfully.
"There is no doubt about that," was the decisive rejoinder. "There is
room for credulity only in ignorance. Any thinking person who is brought
face to face with the materialistic facts--"
Caleb held up a toil-hardened hand.
"Hold on, Buddy; you'll have to pick a place where the water deepens
sort o' gradually for the old man or you'll have him flounderin'. I
reckon I been sittin' up on the bank all my life, waitin' for somebody
to come along and pole the bottom for me in that pool."
"No," said Tom definitively. "There isn't any bank to that pool. You're
in it, or you are out of it; one or the other. That was the notion I
took with me to Boston. I thought I'd get well up above the eternal
wrangle and look down on it--wouldn't believe, wouldn't disbelieve. It
can't be done. Jesus, Himself, said, if they've reported Him straight,
'He that is not with me is against me.'"
"Well," said the father, still deprecating, "that's some farther along
than I've ever been able to get--not sayin' that I wouldn't be willin'
to go." And then: "You don't allow to argue with your mammy about these
things, do you, Tom?"
Tom's rejoinder was gravely considerate.
"It is a sealed book between us, now, pappy. She knows--and knows it
can't be helped. If I wasn't her son, I hope I should still be the last
person in the world to try to shake her faith--or any one's, for that
matter. I have merely turned my own back--because I had to."
The old man put down his coffee-cup and the look in his eyes was
half-appealing.
"What was it turned you, son?--nothing I've ever said or done, I hope?"
Tom shook his big blond head slowly.
"No, not directly; though I suppose a man does go back to his father for
a measuring-stick. But indirectly you, and the other Gordons, are
responsible for the best there is in me--and that's the questioning
part. Given the doubt, I hunted till I found the man who could resolve
or confirm it."
"Who was he?" inquired Caleb, willing to hear more particularly.
"His name is Bauer--the man I've been rooming with. He is a German
biologist who was to have been educated for the Lutheran ministry. His
people made the capital mistake of sending him to Freiburg for a couple
of years as a preliminary, and, when they found out what the German
university had done for him, they sent him to Boston, under the
impression that the Puritan American city might correct some of his
materialism."
Caleb smiled. "That ain't just the way we think of Boston over here," he
remarked.
"No; and, of course, Bauer didn't change his point of view. We used to
have it up hill and down. I had Scripture--mother and the Beershebans
had taught me that--and Bauer had immense reading, flinty Dutch common
sense, and a huge lack of the reverence for the so-called sacred
subjects which seems to be ingrained in every race but the Teutonic. I
fought hard, both for mother's sake and because it was the first time I
had ever met a man with his sword out on the other side."
"Well?" said Caleb.
"He downed me, horse, foot and artillery; made me realize as I never had
before what an absolute begging of the premises the entire Christian
argument is."
"But how?" persisted the iron-master.
"Held me up at the muzzle of the cold facts. For example: do you happen
to know that the oldest Bible manuscripts in existence go back only to
the fourth century, and are doubtless copies of copies of copies?"
The father had pushed back his chair and was trying to fold his napkin
in the original creases.
"No; there's a heap o' things I don't know, son, but I'm willin' to
learn. One o' these days, if we ever get out o' this business tangle
alive, we'll sit down quiet together and you'll do for me what this
Dutchman has done for you. For, in spite of what you say, I've been
sittin' on the fence all these years, and I reckon you're the one to
help me down."
Tom smiled first at the thought of it and then grew suddenly sober. It
is one thing to be serenely critical for oneself, and quite another to
set the pace for a disciple. And when that disciple chances to be one's
father?
"I don't know about that, pappy," he said, rather dubiously. "I'd like
to have you meet some of the people on my side of the road first. Maybe
you wouldn't like the company."
But Caleb would not have it so. "If they're good enough for you, son,
they're good enough for me," he said. "Not but what there's some mighty
good folks trampin' along on the other side, too."
"Yes, and some mighty bad ones," said Tom, thinking of the promoter
vestryman of St. Michael's and his Bible-class-teaching son. "We are
going right now to investigate the financiering methods of a pair of
them. Is Dyckman still on duty? Or are the offices closed?"
"Dyckman's there," was the answer; and they left the breakfast-room
together to go around the block and have themselves lifted to the fifth
floor of the Coosa Building, where half a dozen gilt-lettered glass
doors advertised the administrative headquarters of Chiawassee
Consolidated.
If Caleb Gordon had been mildly bewildered by the outward and instantly
visible changes in his college-bred son, he was quite lost in wondering
admiration when the young man had climbed fairly into the business
saddle and gathered his grip on the reins. Notwithstanding the fact of
his stock-holding, Caleb the iron-master had always stood a little in
awe of the general office grandeurs; of chief priest Dyckman in
particular. But Tom seemed to recognize no distinctions of class, age,
or previous condition of overlordship. Dyckman was found busily lounging
in the absent president's easy-chair, smoking a good cigar and reading
the morning papers. At the outset he was inclined to be genially
supercilious, thus:
"Ah, good morning, Mr. Gordon! Hello, Tom! Back from college, are you?
The books and papers? They are over in the vaults of the Iron City
National--by Mr. Farley's orders. I suppose he thought they'd be safer
there in case of fire. Won't you sit down and have a fresh cigar?"
What Tom said, or the precise wording of it, Caleb could never remember.
But the staccato sentence or two had the effect of instantly
electrifying Mr. Dyckman. Certainly; whatever Mr. Thomas desired should
be done. He--Dyckman--had had no notice of the change in the plans of
the company, and Mr. Farley's instructions--
Tom cut the oath of fealty short and stated his desires succinctly. The
bookkeeper was to reassemble his office force immediately, taking
particular care to reinstate Norman, the correspondence man. That done,
he was to prepare full and complete exhibits of the company's condition:
assets, liabilities, contracts, in short, the results in statement form
of a thorough and searching house-cleaning in the accounting and
administrative departments.
"I am going to put you on your good behavior, Dyckman," said the new
tyrant in conclusion, driving the words home with a shrewd sword-thrust
of the gray eyes. "At first I thought I'd bring an expert accountant
down here from New York and put him on your books; but I'm going to
spare you that--on one condition. Those exhibits must be made absolutely
without fear or favor; they must contain the exact truth and all of it.
If you tinker them, you'll not be able to run fast enough nor far enough
to get away from me. Do I make it plain?"
"Very plain, indeed, Mr. Tom; the office boy would catch your meaning, I
think."
"All right, then; gather up your force and pitch in. I haven't time to
watch you, and I don't mean to take it. But I shall know it when you
begin to flicker."
When the two early morning disturbers of Mr. Dyckman's peace were once
more in the street and on the way to the station to take the train for
Gordonia and the seat of war, Caleb found speech.
"Son," he said gravely, "do you know that you've made a mighty bitter
enemy in the last fifteen minutes? Dyckman is Farley's confidential man,
and when he gets his knife ground good and sharp he's goin' to cut you
with it, once for himself and once for his boss."
Tom's laugh was an easing of strains.
"It does me a heap of good to know that I can crack the whip where you'd
be putting on the brakes, pappy; it does, for a fact. But you needn't
worry about Dyckman. He won't quarrel with his bread and butter. I don't
care anything about his personal loyalty so long as he does his work."
Again Caleb had to withdraw a little and look his stalwart young captain
over and say: "It is Tom; it's just Buddy, grown up and come to be a
man." But it was hard to realize.
"I reckon you've got it all figured out--what-all we're goin' to do,
Tom," he said, when they were seated in the car of the accommodation
train.
"Yes, I think I have; at least, I have the beginning struck out. We are
going to call a stock-holders' meeting, vote you into the presidency,
take the bull squarely by the horns and blow in the Chiawassee furnace
again--dig coal, roast coke and make iron."
"But, son! at the present price of iron, we can't make any money;
couldn't clear a dollar a car if the buyers would push their cars right
into our yard. And there ain't any buyers."
Tom was looking out of the window at the procession of smokeless factory
chimneys. The blight had already fallen on the South Tredegar
industries.
"It's going to be a battle to the strong, to the fellow who can wait,
and work while he waits," he said, half to himself. Then, more
particularly to his father's protest: "I know, we are in pretty bad
shape. When we get those exhibits we shall find that the Farleys have
picked the bones, leaving them for us to bury decently out of sight.
Then, when the funeral is over, they'll come back and charge it all to
the Gordon mismanagement. It's a cinch, isn't it?"
The old iron-master was silent for the train-speed's measuring of a long
mile. Then he said slowly:
"I don't aim to go back on you, Buddy; not a foot 'r an inch. But it
does seem to me like you put your finger in the fire when you hilt up
Duxbury Farley for that proxy paper in New York. If we go under--and the
good Lord only knows how we can he'p it--they'll come out of it with
clean clothes, and we'll have to take all the mud-slingin', just as you
say."
Tom's smile would have stamped him as the son of the grim old
ex-artilleryman in any court of inquiry.
"Did your old general ever go into battle with the idea that he was
bound to be licked, pappy?" he asked.
"Who? Stonewall Jackson? Well, I reckon not, son."
"Neither shall we," said Tom laconically. "We are going in to win. We
are in bad shape, I admit, but we are better off than a lot of these
furnaces that are shutting down. We have our own ore beds, and our own
coking plant. Our coal costs us seventy-five cents less than Pocahontas,
our water is free, and we can hold the property as long as we can stand
the sheriff off. My notion is to make iron and hold it; stack it in the
yards, mortgage it for what we can get, and make more iron. Some day the
country will get iron hungry; then we'll have it to sell when the other
fellows will have to make it first and sell it afterward. Have I got it
straight?"
Caleb nodded.
"Yes; I don't know but what you have. What's puzzlin' me right now, son,
is _where_ you got it."
Tom's laugh was a tonic for sore nerves.
"I'd like to know what you've been spending your good money on me for if
it wasn't to give me a chance to get it. Do you think I've been playing
foot-ball all the time?"
"No; but--well, Tom, the last I knew of you, you was just a little
shaver, spattin' around barefooted in the dust o' the Paradise pike, and
I can't seem to climb up to where you're at now."
Tom laughed again.
"You'll come to it, after while. I reckon I haven't much more sense, in
some ways, than the little shaver had; but I've been trying my level
best to learn my trade. There is only one thing about this tangle that
is worrying me: that's the labor end of it."
"We can get all the labor we want," said Caleb.
"Yes; but didn't you write me that the men were on strike?"
"I said the white miners were likely to make trouble if they got hungry
enough."
"Was there any pay in arrears when you shut down?"
"No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but I fought him out o' that."
"Good! Then what are they kicking about?"
"Oh, because they're out of a job. There are always a lot of keen noses
in a crowd the size of ours, and they've smelled out some o' the Farley
doin's. Of course, they don't believe in the cry of hard times; laborin'
men are always the last to believe that."
The train was tracking thunderously around the nose of Lebanon, and Tom
was looking out of the window again, this time for the first glimpse of
the Gordonia chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.
"That is where you will have to put your shoulder into the collar with
me, pappy," he said. "Most of the older men know me as a boy who has
grown up among them. When I spring my proposition, they'll howl, if only
for that reason."
But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously than ever.
"You won't get any help from the men, Buddy, more 'n what you pay for.
You know the whites--Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good sprinklin' o'
'huckleberries.' And the blacks don't count, one way or the other."
The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for Gordonia, and Tom was
gathering his dunnage.
"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the
meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this
afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay
in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and
shape up my talk?"
Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And
so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father
who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship.
XX
DRY WELLS