the air like edged things. "Tell me the truth: is your cause entirely
just? Your motive is not revenge?"
"As God is my witness," he said solemnly. "It is my father's cause, and
none of mine; more than that, it is your grandfather's cause--and
yours."
She pushed the buggy hood back with a quick arm sweep and gave him her
free hand. "Step carefully," she cautioned; and a minute later they were
speeding swiftly down the pike in a white dust cloud of their own
making.
* * * * *
There was a sharp crisis to the fore in the old log-house office at the
furnace. Caleb Gordon, haggard and tremulous, sat at one end of the
trestle-board which served as a table, with Norman at his elbow; and
flanking him on either side were the two Farleys, Dyckman, Trewhitt,
acting general counsel for the company in the Farley interest, and
Hanchett, representing the Gordons.
Having arranged the preliminaries to his entire satisfaction, Colonel
Duxbury had struck true and hard. The pipe foundry might be taken into
the parent company at a certain nominal figure payable in a new issue of
Chiawassee Limited stock, or three several things were due to happen
simultaneously: the furnace would be shut down indefinitely "for
repairs," thus cutting off the iron supply and making a ruinous
forfeiture of pipe contracts inevitable; suit would be brought to
recover damages for the alleged mismanagement of Chiawassee Consolidated
during the absence of the majority stock-holders; and the validity of
the pipe-pit patents would be contested in the courts. This was the
ultimatum.
The one-sided battle had been fought to a finish. Hanchett, hewing away
in the dark, had made every double and turn that keen legal acumen and a
sharp wit could suggest to gain time. But Mr. Farley was inexorable. The
business must be concluded at the present sitting; otherwise the papers
in the two suits, which were already prepared, would be filed before
noon. Hanchett took his principal into the laboratory for a private
word.
"It's for you to decide, Mr. Gordon," he said. "If you want to follow
them into the court, we'll do the best we can. But as a friend I can't
advise you to take that course."
"If we could only make out to find out what Tom's holdin' over 'em!"
groaned Caleb helplessly.
"Yes; but we can't," said the lawyer. "And whatever it may be, they are
evidently not afraid of it."
"We'll never see a dollar's dividend out o' the stock, Cap'n Hanchett. I
might as well give 'em the foundry free and clear."
"That's the chance you take, of course. But on the other hand, they can
force you to the wall in a month and make you lose everything you have.
I've been over the books with Norman: if you can't fill your pipe
contracts, the forfeitures will ruin you. And you can't fill them unless
you can have Chiawassee iron, and at the present price."
The old iron-master led the way back to the room of doom and took his
place at the end of the trestle-board table.
"Give me the papers," he said gloomily; and the Farleys' attorney passed
them across, with his fountain-pen.
There was a purring of wheels in the air and the staccato clatter of a
horse's hoofs on the hard metaling of the pike. Vincent Farley rose
quietly in his place and tiptoed to the door. He was in the act of
snapping the catch of the spring-latch, when the door flew inward and he
fell back with a smothered exclamation. Thereupon they all looked up,
Caleb, the tremulous, with the pen still suspended over the signatures
upon which the ink was still wet.
Tom was standing in the doorway, deathly sick and clinging to the jamb
for support. In putting on his hat he had slipped the bandages, and the
wound was bleeding afresh. Dyckman yelped like a stricken dog,
overturning his chair as he leaped up and backed away into a corner.
Only Mr. Duxbury Farley and his attorney were wholly unmoved. The lawyer
had taken his fountain-pen from Caleb's shaking fingers and was
carefully recapping it; and Mr. Farley was pocketing the agreement, by
the terms of which the firm of Gordon and Gordon had ceased to exist.
Tom lurched into the room and threw himself feebly on the promoter, and
Vincent made as if he would come between. But there was no need for
intervention. Duxbury Farley had only to step aside, and Tom fell
heavily, clutching the air as he went down.
The dusty office which had once been his mother's sitting-room was
cleared of all save his father when Tom recovered consciousness and sat
up, with Caleb's arm to help.
"There, now, Buddy; you ortn't to tried to get up and come down here,"
said the father soothingly. But Tom's blood was on fire.
"Tell me!" he raved: "have they got the foundry away from you?"
Caleb nodded gravely. "But don't you mind none about that, son. What I'm
sweatin' about now is the fix you're in. My God! ain't Fred ever goin'
to get back with Doc Williams!"
Tom struggled to his feet, tottering.
"I don't need any doctor, pappy; you couldn't kill me with a bullet--not
till I've cut the heart out of these devils that have robbed you. Give
me the pistol from that drawer, and drive me down to the station before
their train comes. I'll do it, and by God, I'll do it now!"
But when old Longfellow, jigging vertically between the buggy shafts,
picked his way out of the furnace yard, he was permitted to turn of his
own accord in the homeward direction; and an hour later the sick man was
back in bed, mingling horrible curses with his insistent calls for
Ardea. And this time Miss Dabney did not come.
XXXIII
THE WINE-PRESS OF WRATH
There was more to that crazy outburst of Tom's about the cutting out of
hearts, and the like, than would appear on the surface of things, to you
who dwell in a land shadowed with wings, where law abides and a man sues
his neighbor for defamation of character, if he is called a liar, I
mean.
In the land unshadowed, where Polaris makes a somewhat sharper angle
with the horizon, there is law, also, but much of it is unwritten. And
one of the unwritten statutes is that which maintains the inherent right
of a man to avenge his own quarrel with his own hand.
So, when the younger Gordon was up and about again, and was able to keep
his seat soldierly on the back of the big bay, folk who knew the Gordon
blood and temper looked for trouble, not of the plaintiff-and-defendant
sort; and when it did not come, there were a few to lament the
degeneracy of the times, and to say that old Caleb, for example, would
never have so slept on his father's wrongs.
But Tom was not degenerate, even in the sense of those who thought he
should have called out and shot the younger of the Farleys. It was in
him to kill or be killed, quite in the traditional way: that grim gift
is in the blood as the wine is in the grape--to stay unless you shall
water it to extinction with many base inbreedings. Nor was the spur
lacking. When the sweeping extent of the business _coup de grâce_ was
measured, Woodlawn was left, and there were a few thousands in bank;
these and the three hundred and fifty shares of the reorganization stock
which the Farleys might render worthless at will.
Tom's heart burned within him, and the race thirst--for vengeance that
could be touched and seen and handled--parched his lips and swelled the
veins in his forehead. Vincent Farley had it all: the business, the good
repute, the love of the one woman. At such crises the wild beast in a
man, if any there be, rattles the bars of its cage, and--well, you will
see that the gnashing of teeth and that fierce talk of heart-cutting at
the quickening moment were not inartistic.
Soberer second thought, less frenzied, was no less vengeful and
vindictive. Tom had lived four formative years in a climate where the
passions are colder--and more comprehensive. Also, he was of his own
generation--which slays its enemy peacefully and without messing in
bloody-angle details.
Riding up the pike one sun-shot afternoon in the golden September, Tom
saw Ardea entering the open door of the Morwenstow church-copy, drew
rein, flung himself out of the saddle and followed her. She saw him and
stopped in the vestibule, quaking a little as she felt she must always
quake until the impassable chasm of wedlock with another should be
safely opened between them.
"Just a moment," he said abruptly. "There was a time when I said I
would spare Vincent Farley and his kin for your sake. Do you remember
it?"
She bowed her head without speaking. Her lips were dry.
"That was a year ago," he went on roughly. "Things have changed since
then; I have changed. When my father is buried, I shall do my best to
fill the mourners' carriages with those who have killed him."
"How is your father to-day?" she asked, not daring to trust speech
otherwise.
"He is the same as he was yesterday and the day before; the same as he
will always be from this on--a broken man."
"You will strike back?" She said it with infinite sadness in her voice
and an upcasting of eyes that were swimming. "I don't question your
right--but I pity you. The blow may be just--I don't know, but God
knows--yet it will fall hardest on you in the end, Tom."
His smile was almost boyish in its frank anger. But there was a man's
sneer in his words.
"Excuse me; I forgot for the moment that we are in a church. But I am
taking consequences, these days."
She looked out from the cool, dark refuge of the vestibule when he
mounted and rode on, and her heart was full. It was madness, vindictive
madness and fell anger. But it was a generous wrath, large and manlike.
It was not to be a blow in the dark or in the back, as some men struck;
and he would not strike without first giving her warning. Ardea had been
cross-questioning Japheth about the assault at the Woodlawn gates--to
her own hurt. Japheth had evaded as he could, but she had guessed what
he was keeping back--the identity of the two footpads blackened to look
like negroes. It was a weary world, and life had lost much that had made
it worth living.
After the incident of the church vestibule, Tom spent a week or more
roaming the forests of Lebanon in rough shooting clothes, with the
canvas hat pulled well over his eyes and a fowling-piece under his arm.
People said harsher things then. With old Caleb failing visibly from day
to day, and his mother keeping her room for the greater part of the
time, it was a shame that a great strong young giant like Tom should go
loitering about on the mountain, deliberately shirking his duty. This
was the elder Miss Harrison's wording of the censure; and it was kinder
than Mrs. Henniker's, since it was the banker's wife who first asked,
with uplifted brows and the accent accusative, if the unspeakable
Bryerson woman were safely beyond tramping distance from Woodlawn.
They were both mistaken. For all Tom thought of her, Nancy Bryerson was
as safe in her retreat at Pine Knob as were the squirrels he was
supposed to be hunting; and they came and frisked unharmed on the
branches of the tree under which he sat and munched his bit of bread and
meat when the sun was at the meridian.
And he was not killing time. He was deep in an inventive trance, with
vengeance for the prize to be won, and for the means to the end,
iron-works and pipe plants and forgings--especially the forging of one
particular thunderbolt which should shatter the Farley fortunes beyond
repair. When this bolt was finally hammered into shape he came out of
the wood and out of the inventive trance, had an hour's interview with
Major Dabney, and took a train for New York.
I am not sure, but I think it was at Bristol, Tennessee, that the
telegram from Norman, begging him to come back to South Tredegar at
speed, overtook him. This is a detail, important only as a marker of
time. For three days a gentleman with shrewd eyes and a hard-bitted jaw,
registering at the Marlboro as "A. Dracott, New York," had been shut up
with Mr. Duxbury Farley in the most private of the company's offices in
the Coosa Building, and on the fourth day Norman had made shift to find
out this gentleman's business. Whereupon the wire to Tom, already on his
way to New York, and the prayer for returning haste.
Tom caught a slow train back, and was met at a station ten miles out of
town by his energetic ex-lieutenant.
"Of course, I didn't dare do anything more than give him a hint," was
the conclusion of Norman's exciting report. "I didn't know but he might
give us away to Colonel Duxbury. So, without telling him much of
anything, I got him to agree to meet you at his rooms in the Marlboro
to-night after dinner. Then I was scared crazy for fear my wire to you
would miss."
"You are a white man, Fred, and a friend to tie to," said Tom; which was
more than he had ever said to Norman by way of praise in the days of
master and man. Then, as the train was slowing into the South Tredegar
station: "If this thing wins out, you'll come in for something bigger
than you had with Gordon and Gordon; you can bet on that."
It was ordained that Gordon should anticipate his appointment by
meeting his man at the dinner-table in the Marlboro café; and it was
accident or design, as you like to believe, that Dyckman should be
sitting two tables away, choking over his food and listening only by the
road of the eye, since he was unhappily out of ear range. When the two
had lighted their cigars and passed out to the elevator, the bookkeeper
rose hastily and made for the nearest telephone. This, at least, was not
accidental.
The conference in Suite 32 lasted until nearly midnight, with Dyckman
painfully shadowing the corridor and sweating like a furnace laborer,
though the night was more than autumn cool. The door was thick, the
transom was closed, and the keyhole commanded nothing but a square of
blank wall opposite in the electric-lighted sitting-room of the suite.
Hence the bookkeeper could only guess what we may know.
"You have let in a flood of light on Mr. Farley's proposition, Mr.
Gordon," said the representative of American Aqueduct, when the ground
had been thoroughly gone over. "I don't mind telling you now that he
made his first overtures to us on his arrival from Europe, giving us to
understand that he owned or controlled the pipe-making patents
absolutely."
"At that time he controlled nothing, as I have explained," said Tom,
"not even his majority stock in Chiawassee Consolidated. Of course, he
resumed control as soon as he reached home, and his next move was to
have me quietly sandbagged while he froze my father out. But father did
not transfer the patents, for the simple reason that he couldn't. They
are my personal property, made over to me before the firm of Gordon and
Gordon came into existence."
The pipe-trust promoter nodded.
"You are the man we'll have to do business with, Mr. Gordon," he said
promptly. "Are you quite sure of your legal status in the case?"
"I have good advice. Hanchett, Goodloe and Tryson, Richmond Building,
are my attorneys. They will put you in the way of finding out anything
you'd like to know."
There was a pause while the New Yorker was making a memorandum of the
address. Then he went straight to the point.
"As I have said, I'm here to do business. We don't need the plant. Will
you sell us your patents?"
"Yes; on one condition."
"And that is--?"
"That you first put us out of business. You'll have to smash Chiawassee
Limited painstakingly and permanently before you can buy my holdings."
The shrewd-eyed gentleman who had unified practically all of the pipe
foundries in the United States smiled a gentle negative.
"That would be rather out of our line. If Mr Farley owned the patents,
and was disposed to fight us--as, indeed, he is not--we might try to
convince him. But we are not out for vengeance--another man's vengeance,
at that."
"Very well, then; you won't get what you've come after. The patents go
with the plant. You can't have one without the other," said Tom, eyeing
his opponent through half-closed lids.
"But we can buy the plant to-morrow, at a very reasonable figure.
Farley is anxious enough to come in out of the wet."
"Excuse me, Mr. Dracott, but you can't buy the plant at any price."
"Eh? Why can't we?"
"Because the majority of the stock will vote to fight you to a
standstill."
"But, my dear sir! Mr. Farley controls sixty-five per cent. of the
stock!"
"That is where you were lied to one more time," said Tom with great
coolness. "The capital stock of Chiawassee Limited is divided into one
thousand shares, all distributed. My father holds three hundred and
fifty shares; Mr. Farley and his son together own four hundred and
fifty; and the remaining two hundred are held in trust for Miss Ardea
Dabney, to become her property in fee simple when she marries. Pending
her marriage, which is currently supposed to be near at hand, the voting
power of these two hundred shares resides in Miss Dabney's grandfather,
_and my father holds his proxy_."
This was the thunderbolt Tom had been forging during those quiet days
spent on the mountain side; and there was another pause while one might
count ten. After which the man from New York spoke his mind freely.
"Your row with these people must be pretty bitter, Mr. Gordon. Are you
willing to see your father and these Dabneys go by the board for the
sake of breaking the president and his son?"
"I know what I am doing," was the quiet reply. "Neither my father nor
Miss Dabney will lose anything that is worth keeping."
"Have you figured that out, too? The field is too small for you down
here, Mr. Gordon--much too small. You should come to New York."
Tom rose and took his hat.
"You will fight us?" he asked.
The short-circuiter of corporations laughed.
"We'll put you out of business, if you insist on it. Anything to oblige.
Better light a fresh cigar before you go."
Tom helped himself from the box on the table.
"You have it to do, Mr. Dracott. On the day you have hammered Chiawassee
Limited down to a dead proposition, you can have my pipe patents at the
figure named. If you will meet me at the office of Hanchett, Goodloe and
Tryson to-morrow morning at ten o'clock, we will put it in writing. Good
night."
XXXIV
THE SMOKE OF THE FURNACE
Hoping always for the best, after the manner prescribed for optimistic
gentlemen who successfully exploit their fellows, Mr. Duxbury Farley did
not deem it necessary to confide fully in his son when the
representative of American Aqueduct broke off negotiations abruptly and
went back to New York.
It is a sad state of affairs, reached by respectably villainous fathers
the world over, when the son demonstrates the mathematical law of
progression by becoming a villain without regard for the
respectabilities. Mr. Farley saw the growing outlaw in his son, was not
a little disturbed thereby, and was beginning to crouch when it menaced.
Hence, when the comfortable arrangement with the pipe trust threatened
to miscarry, all he did was to urge Vincent to hasten the day when Miss
Dabney's stock could be utilized as a Farley asset. Pressed for
particular reasons, he turned it off lightly. A young man in the fever
of ante-nuptial expectancy was a mere pawn in the business game: let it
be over and done with, so that the nominal treasurer of Chiawassee
Limited could once more become the treasurer in fact.
Whereupon Vincent, who rode badly at best, bought a new saddle-horse
and took his place at Miss Dabney's whip-hand in the early morning
rides, the place formerly filled by Tom Gordon,--which was not the part
of wisdom, one would say. Contrasts are pitiless things; and the wary
woman-hunter will break new paths rather than traverse those already
broken by his rival.
Tom, meanwhile, had apparently relapsed into his former condition of
disinterest, and was once more spending his days on the mountain,
seemingly bent on effacing himself socially, as he had been effaced
business-wise by the Farley overturn.
A week or more after the relapse, as he was crossing the road leading
over the mountain's shoulder, he came on the morning riders walking
their horses toward Paradise, and saw trouble in Miss Dabney's eyes, and
on Farley's impassive face a mask of sullen anger.
When they were out of sight and hearing, Tom sat on a flat stone by the
roadside with his gun between his knees, thoughtfully speculative. Were
the high gods invoked in the midnight conference at the Marlboro
beginning to point the finger of fate at these two? He was malevolent
enough to hope so, and in the comfort of the hope, walked many miles
that day through the forests of crimson and gold showering with falling
leaves.
Whatever their influence in the field of sentiment, undeniably in that
of fact the high gods were imposing Sisyphean labors on Mr. Duxbury
Farley.
With the negotiations for the sale to the trust so abruptly terminated,
the promoter-president set instant and anxious inquiry afoot to
determine the cause. It was soon revealed; and when Mr. Farley found
that the pipe-pit patents had not been transferred with the Gordon
plant, and that Major Dabney had given Caleb Gordon a power of attorney
over Ardea's stock in the company, there were hard words said in the
town offices of Messrs. Trewhitt and Slocumb, Chiawassee attorneys, and
a torrent of persuasive ones poured into the Major's ear--the latter
pointing to the crying necessity for the revocation of the power of
attorney, summarily and at once.
The Major proved singularly obstinate and non-committal. "Mistah Caleb
Gordon is my friend, suh, and I was mighty proud to do him this small
faveh. What his object is makes no manneh of diffe'ence to me, suh; no
manneh of diffe'ence, whateveh," was all an anxious promoter could get
out of the old autocrat of Deer Trace. But Mr. Farley did not desist;
neither did he fail to keep the telegraph wires to New York heated to
incandescence with his appeals for a renewal of the negotiations for
surrender.
When the wired appeals brought forth nothing but evasive replies, Mr.
Farley began to look for trouble, and it came: first in a mysterious
closing of the market against Chiawassee pipe, and next in an alarming
advance of freight rates from Gordonia on the Great Southwestern.
Colonel Duxbury doubled his field force and gave his travelers a free
hand on the price list. Persuasion and diplomacy having failed, a frenzy
like that of one who finds himself slipping into the sharp-staked
pitfall prepared for others seized on him. It was the madness of those
who have seen the clock hands stop and begin to turn steadily backward
on the dial of success.
Ten days later the freight rates went up another notch, and there began
to be a painful dearth of cars in which to ship the few orders the
salesmen were still able to place. Mr. Farley shut his eyes to the
portents, put himself recklessly into Mr. Vancourt Henniker's hands as a
borrower, and posted a notice of a slashing cut in wages at the works.
As a matter of course, the cut bred immediate and tumultuous trouble
with the miners, and in the midst of it the president made a flying trip
to New York; to the metropolis and to the offices of American Aqueduct
to make a final appeal in person.
But the door was shut. Mr. Dracott was not to be seen, though his
assistant was very affable. No; American Aqueduct was not trying to
assimilate the smaller plants, or to crush out all competition, as the
public seemed to believe. With fifty million dollars invested it could
easily control a market for its own product, which was all the
share-holders demanded. Was Mr. Farley in the city for some little time?
and would he not dine with the assistant at the Waldorf-Astoria?
Mr. Farley took a fast train, south-bound, instead, and on reaching
South Tredegar, wired his New York broker to test the market with a
small block of Chiawassee Limited. There were no takers at the upset
price; and the highest bid was less than half of the asking. Colonel
Duxbury was writing letters at the Cupola when the broker's telegram was
handed him, and he broke a rule which had held good for the better part
of a cautious, self-contained lifetime: he went to the buffet and took a
stiff drink of brandy--alone. The following morning the miners and all
the white men employed in the furnace and foundries and coke yards at
Gordonia went on strike.