"When can we look it over?" A spurt of eagerness spoke in the tone.
"Come up next week.... Bring Mrs. Judson?"
"I doubt if she could make it."
"You'll come?"
"Ye-es. I may bring the eldest boy."
After dinner he told Mary of the conversation. "We couldn't pull up
stakes, I'm afraid. Anyway, Pelham will enjoy the trip. How about it,
son?"
"Oh, father!" The bright-eyed face was expressive enough.
Her consent was assumed, Mary noticed, as had been her husband's custom
for the last few years.
He did not tell her how his mind kept recurring to the other suggestion
that Guild had made. If he were ever to leave Jackson, the time had
come. The state capital stood still. Adamsville, founded since the war,
already crowded New Orleans as the commercial center of the gulf region.
Judge Little had moved his law office there; at least a dozen prominent
Jacksonians were prospering in the iron city. The iron city! He could
find room to stretch his visions there!
Nathaniel Guild stayed over and made the trip with the two Judsons. It
was a tiresome journey for all of them; at length, his attention worn
out with the dizzying panorama of the sunset hills, the boy's head
nodded forward on his hands, his eyes closed, his breathing became deep
and regular.
Some time later, the father reached over and shook the sleeping boy
kindly by the shoulder. "Wake up, Pelham,--Adamsville!"
The tired child straightened quickly, showering a drizzle of cooled
cinders from Paul's linen duster, tucked around him. "Are we there?"
"Just about.... I'm afraid it's too dark to see the mountain. These are
the furnace yards.... Watch for the coke ovens!"
Pelham needed no urging.
The train was slowing. The heavy coaches bumped over uneven places in
the roadbed. There was a subdued hissing scream where wheel met track.
At first he could make out nothing through the window. The light from
the smelly kerosene lamps above fell on the dull sides of freight cars;
he could see only a vague darkness between them.
Abruptly the string of cars ended. Beyond a wide open space he saw
sinister black buildings, grotesque, bulging with vast tanks. Above, a
trellis-work of ladders ended in ungainly smokestacks that crowded the
sky. Suddenly a burst of flame, a piercing tongue of reds and yellows,
broke from the top of one of the wider tanks. Dense smoke and steam shot
out. The whole yard was washed in a red glare.
"Charging the furnace," Paul said. He was as thrilled as his son at the
sight.
Guild, in the window corner, shriveled still farther into his seat, his
lined face crackling with pleasure, as he observed the boy's intense
astonishment.
Pelham did not answer his father. He greedily absorbed every sharp
detail of the burning picture. The metallic buildings seemed made of
flame. The occasional windows just passed flickered redly,--as if the
night, within and without, were on fire. The light dimmed, burned
brightly for a moment, then startlingly went out. The vacant night was
blacker than ever.
Dim thoughts struggled within the mind of the child,--clouded fancies of
the mouth of hell, the pit of eternal burning and damnation.
Then, as the train ground to a standstill, again the night flared
brilliantly. The tracks glowed like pulsing, living gold. Just beyond
the third pair, and parallel to them, ran a long mound, hardly higher
than the train. Every few feet leaping fire twisted up from it. The
smell of the smoke stung his nostrils.
A man with a lantern ran shouting past the window, and disappeared; his
face was coal-smeared, red, horrible, in the sudden glow. The boy
shuddered. There were black figures standing around the fire holes.
Three or four were dumping a squat-bellied car into one of them. The
waiting train was stiflingly warm. It must be frightfully hot above the
fire! Those devils there emptying cargoes of lost souls into the
brimstone pits,--surely they could not be men!
"Coke ovens," explained the father.
Pelham pressed his nose more tightly to the pane.
The other man drew out his bulky wallet, and was lost in the intricacies
of some creased maps. Paul Judson pointed here, there, upon their
surfaces, arguing vehemently. The boy paid no attention to any of it.
This was his first sight of the iron city. He never forgot it....
The mountain, when they reached it the next morning, was marvelously
different. The steam dummy passed the last house, and the negro shacks
sprawling beyond, and began to puff and cough up the steep slope.
It was May, and the boy's dreamy fancies were caught and tangled in the
green vistas that endlessly opened and closed on both sides of the
track. Below the fill on the town side a succession of heavy-fruited
blackberry bushes ran close to the tracks. The broad leaves and waxen
flowers of the May-apple carpeted unexpected clearings. A shapeless
negress, four babies clutching her skirts, balanced her heavy basket on
her head, and blinked stolidly at them.
At last they struck the level gap road, and the end of the dummy line
just beyond.
Pelham gathered wild flowers, as they climbed up to the northern crest
of the gap. They were for his mother, if they could be induced to last
until night. On the top overlooking the wide valley he found a
convenient rise of rock steps, shaped out of the solid iron ore; while
his father and Mr. Guild talked and pointed, he sat down, fanning
himself with his sailor....
The men strolled back, Paul's face flushed. He gestured impetuously from
the elevation to the citied valley below. "A magnificent chance,
Nathaniel. Your mountain grips me."
"It'll take a long time, remember. Don't go off half-cocked."
"The thing's here before my eyes!"
"Adamsville won't really touch the mountain for ten years. It's good ...
fine residence property, but.... That's the Crenshaw land, just beyond.
They have four eighties; they run all the way to this road." The heads
bent over the map again.
"We've simply got to take it all," Paul reiterated.
Guild's familiar cautions and objections came forth again. "Not that I
wouldn't like to, but...."
"That's all you can see in it, then?" Paul asked finally.
"Frankly, it's all I can put in anything now."
"I'm going into it hard. How will this do? We'll take half of this
eighty together, and the nearest Crenshaw one. I'll buy the rest of this
and the Crenshaw land, and the Logan place on the south.... I can raise
it somehow. Pratt will help me.... It will be first mortgage."
With this settled, they circled down to the gap, and back by dummy to
the Great Southern Hotel.
On the way down to the dummy station, Paul picked a dogwood blossom. It
was still fresh in his lapel when he and his son arrived at the pillared
home in Jackson.
Pelham's flowers of the morning had withered; his moist clenched fingers
had reluctantly abandoned most of them on the seat of the tardy Dixie
Flier. But the limp remains in his grimy handkerchief he carried into
his mother's room, and left on her dresser.
The boy was asleep when she found them. After pausing above a
half-emptied scuttle, she arranged them in a small green vase, and
replaced them in the bedroom. All night their quiet odor upset the
ordered room with a word of wilder life.