application in the commercial world. Duxbury Farley had resources! a
comfortable fortune as country fortunes go, amassed by far-seeing
shrewdness, a calm contempt for the well-being of his business
associates, and most of all by a crowning gift in the ability to
recognize the psychological moment at which to let go.
But under pressure of the combined disasters he lost his head, quarreled
with his colder-blooded son, and in spite of Vincent's angry protests,
began the suicidal process of turning his available assets into
ammunition for the fighting of a battle which could have but one
possible outcome.
Strike-breakers were imported at fabulous expense. Armed guards under
pay swarmed at the valley foot, and around the company's property
elsewhere. By hook or crook the foundries were kept going, turning out
water-pipe for which there was no market, and which, owing to the
disturbances which were promptly made an excuse by the railway company,
could not be moved out of the Chiawassee yard.
Later, when the striking workmen began to grow hungry, riot, arson and
bloodshed were nightly occurrences. A charging of coal, mined under the
greatest difficulties, was conveyed to the coke yards, only to be
destroyed--and half of the ovens with it--by dynamite cunningly
blackened and dropped into the chargings. For want of fuel, the furnace
went out of blast, but with the small store of coke remaining in the
foundry yards, the pipe pits were kept at work. By this time the
promoter-president was little better than a madman, fighting like a
berserker, and breeding a certain awed respect in the comment of those
who had hitherto held him only as a shrewd schemer.
And Thomas Jefferson: how did this return to primordial chaos, brought
about in no uncertain sense by his own premeditated act, affect him?
Only a man quite lost to all promptings of the grace that saves and
softens could look unmoved on the burnings and riotings, the cruel
wastings and the bloodlettings, one would say.
When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the
landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the
Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth
Pettigrass's dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all
appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday.
The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound's ears, chose to be of
this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when
Tom fared forth. For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will
be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his
noon-time snack of bread and meat with Cæsar. Yet Deer Trace set a good
table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without
following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the
mountain side.
Then there were children,--a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses
at a mountaineer's cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing
cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the
cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the
strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the
town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain
motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the
tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the
boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the
steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this
in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of
whom children and dogs have no fear.
In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it,
seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of
the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the
dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any
chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.
Caleb's ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of
something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic.
What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping
the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the
lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards
and the sheriff's deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his
duty as he saw it.
Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-table recountings of the
day's happenings; attentive, but only filially interested: willing to
encourage his father to talk, but never commenting.
Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the
tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was
always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the
small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be
in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and
hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate
heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed
dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves
nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite
perfect.
But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly
absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of
extinction--and triumphing hard-heartedly.
It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast
for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed
his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and
since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and
mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to
hold all objects in suspension.
Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe
when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming
and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace
blowing-engines. He started up quickly.
"What's that?" he demanded. "Surely they haven't blown in again?"
Caleb nodded assent.
"I reckon so. Colonel Duxbury allowed to me this mornin' that he was
about out o' the woods--in spite of you, he said; as if you'd been the
one that was doin' him up."
"But he can't be!" exclaimed Tom, so earnestly and definitely that the
mask fell away and the father was no longer deceived.
"I'm only tellin' you what he allowed to me, son. I reckoned he was
about all in, quite a spell ago; but you can't tell nothing by what you
see--when it's Colonel Duxbury. He got two car-loads o' new men to-day,
the Lord on'y knows where from; and he's shippin' Pocahontas coke, and
gettin' it here, too."
Tom sat glooming over it for a time, shrouding himself in tobacco smoke.
Then he said:
"You feazed me a little at first; but I think I know now what has
happened."
Caleb took time to let the remark sink in. It carried inferences.
"Buddy, I been suspectin' for a good while back that you know more about
this sudden smash-up than you've let on. Do you?"
"I know all about it," was the quiet rejoinder.
"You do? What on top o' God's green earth--"
Tom held up his hand for silence. A man had let himself in at the
roadway gate and was walking rapidly up the path to the house. It was
Norman; and after a few hurried words in private with Tom, he went as he
had come, declining Caleb's invitation to stay and smoke a pipe on the
veranda.
When the gate latch clicked at Norman's outgoing, Tom had risen and was
knocking the ash from his pipe and buttoning his coat.
"I was admitting that I knew," he said. "I can tell you more now than I
could a moment ago, because the time for which I have been waiting has
come. You remarked that you thought the Farleys were at the end of their
rope. They were not until to-day, but to-day they are. Every piece of
property they have, including Warwick Lodge, is mortgaged to the hilt,
and this afternoon Colonel Duxbury put his Chiawassee stock into
Henniker's hands as security for a final loan--so Norman tells me.
Perhaps it would interest you a trifle to know something about the
figure at which Henniker accepted it."
"It would, for a fact, Buddy."
"Well, he took it for less than the annual dividend that it earned the
year we ran the plant; and between us two, he's scared to death, at
that."
"Heavens and earth! Why, Buddy, son! we're plum' ruined--and so's old
Major Dabney!"
Tom had finished buttoning his coat and was settling his soft hat on his
head.
"Don't you worry, pappy," he said, with a touch of the old boyish
assurance. "Our part, since Colonel Duxbury saw fit to freeze us out, is
to say nothing and saw wood. If the Major comes to you, you can tell him
that my word to him holds good: he can have par for Ardea's stock any
time he wants it, and he could have it just the same if Chiawassee were
wiped off of the map--as it's going to be."
"But Tom; tell me--"
"Not yet, pappy; be patient just a little while longer and you shall
know all there is to tell. I'm leaving you with a clear conscience to
say to any one who asks that you don't know."
Caleb had struggled up out of his chair, and now he laid a hand on his
son's shoulder.
"I ain't askin', Buddy," he said, with a tremulous quaver in his voice;
"I ain't askin' a livin' thing. I'm just a-hopin'--hopin' I'll wake up
bime-by and find it's on'y a bad dream." Then, with sudden and agonizing
emphasis: "My God, son! they been butcherin' one 'nother down yonder for
four long weeks!"
"I can't help that!" was the savage response. "It's a battle to the
death, and the smoke of it has got into my blood. If I believed in God,
as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking
Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical
thieves,--thugs,--sandbaggers,--hit the bottom!"
He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare
of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and
presently came back.
"I said you should know after a little: you may as well know now. I
planned this thing; I set out to break them; and, as it happened, I
wasn't a moment too soon. In another week you and Major Dabney would
have had a chance to sell out for little or nothing, or lose it all.
Farley had it fixed to be swallowed by the trust, and this is how it was
to be done. Farley stipulated that the stock transaction should figure
as a forced sale at next to nothing, in which all the stock-holders
should participate, and that the remainder of the purchase price, which
would have been a fair figure for all the stock, should be paid to him
and his son individually as a bonus!"
The old iron-master groaned. In spite of the hard teaching of all the
years, he would have clung to some poor shadow of belief in Duxbury
Farley if he could have done so.
"That's all," Tom went on stridently: "all but the turning of the trick
that put them in the hole they were digging for you and the Major. Vint
Farley had no notion of letting Ardea bring her money into the family of
her own free will: he planned to rob her first and marry her afterward.
Now, by God, I'm going down to tell them both what they're up against!
Don't sit up for me."
He had taken a dozen strides down the graveled path when he saw some one
coming hurriedly across the lawns from Deer Trace, and heard a
voice--the voice of the woman he loved--calling to him softly in the
stillness:
"Tom! O Tom!" it said, "please wait--just one minute!"
But there are lusts mightier, momentarily, than love, and the lust of
vengeance is one. He made as if he did not see or hear; and lest she
should overtake him, left the path to lose himself among the trees and
to vault the low boundary wall into the pike at a point safely out of
sight from the gate.
XXXV
A SOUL IN SHACKLES
The blue autumn night haze had almost the consistency of a cloud when
Gordon leaped the wall and set his face toward the iron-works. Or rather
it was like the depths of a translucent sea in which the distant
electric lights of Mountain View Avenue shone as blurs of phosphorescent
life on one hand, and the great dark bulk of Lebanon loomed as the
massive foundations of a shadowy island on the other.
Farther on, the recurring flare from the tall vent of the blast-furnace
lighted the haze depths weirdly, turning the mysterious sea bottom into
fathomless abysses of dull-red incandescence for the few seconds of its
duration--a slow lightning flash submerged and half extinguished.
Gordon was passing the country colony's church when one of the
torch-like flares reddened on the night, and the glow picked out the
gilt cross at the top of the sham Norman tower. He flung up a hand
involuntarily, as if to put the emblem, and that for which it stood, out
of his life. At the same instant a whiff of the acrid smoke from the
distant furnace fires tingled in his nostrils, and he quickened his
pace. The hour for which all other hours had been waiting had struck.
Love had called, and religion had made its silent protest; but the
smell in his nostrils was the smoky breath of Mammon, the breath which
has maddened a world: he strode on doggedly, thinking only of his
triumph and how he should presently compass it.
The two great poplar-trees, sentineling what had once been the gate of
the old Gordon homestead, had been spared through all the industrial
changes. When he would have opened the wicket to pass on to the
log-house offices, an armed man stepped from behind one of the trees
with an oath in his mouth and his gun-butt drawn up to strike. Before
the blow could fall, the furnace flare blazed aloft like a mighty torch,
and the man grounded his weapon.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gordon; I--I took ye for somebody else," he
stammered; and Tom scanned his face sharply by the light of the burning
gases.
"Whom?--for instance," he queried.
"Why-e-yeh--I reckon it don't make any diff'rence--my tellin' you; you'd
ought to have it in for him, too. I was layin' for that houn'-dog 'at
walks on his hind legs and calls hisself Vint Farley."
"Who are you?" Tom demanded.
"Kincaid's my name, and I'm s'posed to be one o' the strike guards;
leastwise, that's what I hired out for a little spell ago. I couldn't
think of nare' a better way o' gettin' at the damned--"
Gordon interrupted bruskly. "Cut out the curses and tell me what you owe
Vint Farley. If your debt is bigger than mine, you shall have the first
chance."
The gas-flash came again. There was black wrath in the man's eyes.
"You can tote it up for yourself, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Late yeste'day
evening when me and Nan Bryerson drove to town for your Uncle Silas to
marry us, she told me what I'd been mistrustin' for a month back--that
Vint Farley was the daddy o' her chillern. He's done might' nigh
ever'thing short o' killin' her to make her swear 'em on to you; and I
allowed I'd jest put off goin' back West till I'd fixed his lyin' face
so 'at no yuther woman'd ever look at it."
Gordon staggered and leaned against the fence palings, the red rage of
murder boiling in his veins. Here, at last, was the key to all the
mysteries; the source of all the cruel gossip; the foundation of the
wall of separation that had been built up between his love and Ardea.
When he could trust himself to speak he asked a question.
"Who knows this, besides yourself?"
"Your Uncle Silas, for one: he allowed he wouldn't marry us less'n she
told him. I might' nigh b'lieve he had his suspicions, too. He let on
like it was Farley that told him on you, years ago, when you was a boy."
"He did? Then Farley was one of the three men who saw us up yonder at
the barrel-spring?"
"Yes; and I was another one of 'em. I was right hot at you that mornin';
I shore was."
"Well, who else knows about it?"
"Brother Bill Layne, and Aunt M'randy, and Japhe Pettigrass. They-all
went in town to stan' up with me and Nan."
Then Tom remembered the figure coming swiftly across the lawns and the
call of the voice he loved. Had Japheth told her, and was she hastening
to make such reparation as she could? No matter, it was too late now.
The fierce hatred of the wounded savage was astir in his heart and it
would not be denied or silenced.
"Give me that gun, and you shall have your first chance," he conceded.
"I make but one condition: if you kill him, I'll kill you."
Kincaid laughed and gave up his weapon.
"I was only allowin' to sp'ile his face some, and a rock'll do for that.
You can have what's left o' him atter I get thoo--and it'll be enough to
kill, I reckon."
At the moment of weapon-passing there came sounds audible above the sob
and sigh of the blowing-engines--a clatter of horses' hoofs and the
grinding of carriage wheels on the pike. Gordon signed quickly to
Kincaid and drew back carefully behind the bole of the opposite poplar.
It was the Warwick Lodge surrey, and it stopped at the gate. Two men got
out and went up the path, and an instant later, Kincaid followed
stealthily.
Gordon waited for the next gas-flare, and by the light of it he threw
the breech-block of the repeating rifle to make sure the cartridge was
in place. Then he, too, passed through the wicket and went to stand in
the shadow of the slab-floored porch, redolent of memories. He had
forgotten the lesser vengeance in the thirst for the greater,--that he
had come to fling their misfortunes into the faces of the father and the
son, and to tell them that the work was his. He heard only the voice of
the savage in his heart, and that was whispering "Kill! kill!"
* * * * *
It was close on midnight when the door giving on the porch opened and
two men stood on the threshold. The younger of the two was speaking.
"It's quieter than usual to-night. That was a good move--getting Ludlow
and the two Helgersons jailed. I was in hopes we could snaffle old Caleb
with the others. He pretends to be peacemaking, but as long as he is
loose, these fools will hang to the idea that they're fighting his
battle against us."
"It is already fought," said the older man dejectedly. "My luck has
gone. When Henniker puts us to the wall, we shall be beggars."
The young man's rejoinder was an exclamation of contempt.
"You've lost your nerve. What you need most is to go to bed and sleep.
Wait for me till I've made a round of the guards, and we'll go home.
Better ring up the surrey right now."
He left the porch on the side nearest the furnace, and Gordon saw an
active figure glide from the shelter of a flask-shed and go in pursuit.
He followed at a distance. It was needful only that he should know where
to find Farley when Kincaid should have squared his account.
The leisurely chase led the round of the great gates first, and thence
through the deserted and ruined coke yard to the foot of the huge slag
dump, cold now from the long shut-down.
Tom looked to see Farley turn back from the toe of the dump. There were
no gates on that side of the yard, and consequently no guards.
But the short cut to the office was up the slope of the dump and along
the railway track over which the drawings of molten slag were run out
to be spilled down the face of the declivity. There had been no
slag-drawing since the new "blow-in" earlier in the day; but while he
was watching to keep Farley in sight in the intervals between the
gas-flares, Gordon was conscious of the note of preparation behind him:
the slackening of the blast, the rattle and clank of the dinkey
locomotive pushing the dumping ladle into place under the furnace lip.
Farley had taken two or three scrambling steps up the rough-seamed
declivity when the workmen tapped the furnace. There was a sputtering
roar and the air was filled with coruscating sparks.
Then the stream of molten matter began to pour into the great ladle, a
huge eight-foot pot swung on tilting trunnions and mounted on a skeleton
flat-car; and for Gordon, standing at the corner of the ore shed with
his back to the slag drawers, the red glow picked out the man scrambling
up the miniature mountain of cooled scoria,--this man and another man
running swiftly to overtake him.
He looked on coldly until he saw Kincaid head off the retreat and face
his adversary. Instantly there was a spurt of fire from a pistol in
Farley's right hand, a brief flash with the report swallowed up in the
roar from the furnace lip. Then the two men closed and rolled together
to the bottom of the slope, and Gordon turned his back.
When he looked again the trampling note of the big blast-engines had
quickened to its normal beat, the blow-hole was plugged with its stopper
of damp clay, and a red twilight born of the reflection from the
surface of the great pot of seething slag had succeeded to the blinding
glare. Where there had been two men locked in struggle there was now
only one, and he was lying quietly with one leg doubled under him.
Gordon set his teeth on an angry oath of disappointment. Had Kincaid
broken his compact?
The first long-drawn exhaust of the dinkey engine moving the slag kettle
out to its spilling place ripped the silence. Gordon heard--and he did
not hear: he was watching the prone figure at the dump's toe. When it
should rise, he meant to fire from where he stood under the eaves of the
ore-shed. The murder-thought contemplated nothing picturesque or
dramatic. It was merely the dry thirst for the blood of a mortal enemy,
as it is wont to be off the stage or out of the pages of the romancers.
The puffing locomotive had pushed the slag-pot car half-way to the
track-end before Farley sat up as one dazed and seemed to be trying to
get on his feet. Twice and once again he essayed it, falling back each
time upon the bent and doubled leg. Then he looked up and saw the
slag-car coming; saw and cried out as men scream in the death agony. The
end rails of the dumping track were fairly above him.
Gordon heard the yell of terror and witnessed the frenzied efforts of
the doomed man to rise and get out of the path of the impending torrent.
Whereupon the murder devil whispered in his ear again. Farley's foot was
caught in one of the many scars or seams in the lava bed. It was only
necessary to wait, to withhold the merciful bullet, to go away and leave
the wretched man to his fate.
That fate was certain, lacking a miracle to avert it. There were no
workmen in that part of the yard; and the two men in charge of the slag
kettle were on the opposite side of the engine where the dumping
mechanism was connected. Farley was screaming again, but now the
safety-valve of the locomotive was blowing off steam with a din to drown
all.
Gordon tossed the gun aside and turned away. It was better so. Possibly
at the climaxing instant he might have lacked the firmness to aim and
press the trigger. This was simpler, easier, more in keeping with
Vincent Farley's deserts; more satisfying to the thirst for vengeance.
Was it? Like a bolt from the heavens, into the very midst of the
cold-blooded, murderous triumph, came a long-neglected form of words,
writing itself in flaming letters in his brain: _Thou shall do no
murder._ And after it another: _But I say unto you, love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you._
He put his hands before his eyes, stumbled blindly and fell down,
groveling in the yellow sand of the ore floor, as that one of old whom
the possessing devils tore and rended. Hell and the furies!--was this to
be the end of it? Did the old, time-worn fables planted in the lush and
mellow soil of childhood wait only for the moment of superhuman trial to
assert themselves truth of the very truth? God in Heaven! must he be
flogged back into the ranks he had deserted when every drop of blood in
his veins was crying out for shame?
Something gripped him and stood him on his feet, and before he realized
what he was doing he was running, gasping, tripping and falling
headlong, only to spring up and run again, with all thoughts trampled
out and beaten down by one: would he still be in time?
There was something wrong with the dumping machinery of the slag-car,
and two men were working with it on the side away from the spilling
slope. Gordon had not breath wherewith to shout; moreover the
safety-valve was still screeching to gulf all human cries. Farley was
lying face down and motionless, with the twisted foot still held fast in
a wedge-shaped crack in the cooled slag. Tom bent and lifted him;
yelled, swore, tugged, strained, kicked fiercely at the imprisoned
shoe-heel. Still the vise-grip held, and the great kettle on the height
above was creaking and slowly careening under the winching of the engine
crew. If the molten torrent should plunge down the slope now, there
would be two human cinders instead of one.