Chapter 13

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

As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials.

As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority and doing most of the talking.

"What's all this buzzin' round about young Tom?" queried one of the men in the miners' caucus. "Might' nigh every other word with old Caleb was, 'Tom; my son, Tom.' Why, I riccollect him when he wasn't no more'n knee-high to a hop-toad!"

"Well, you bet your life he's a heap higher'n that now," said another, who had chanced to be at the station when the Gordons, father and son, left the train together. "He's a half a head taller than the old man, an' built like one o' Maje' Dabney's thoroughbreds. But I reckon he ain't nothin' but a school-boy, for all o' that."

"Gar-r-r!" spat a third. "We've had one kid too many in this outfit, all along. I'll bet, if the truth was knowed, th't that young Farley'd skin a louse for the hide and tallow."

"Yes," chimed in a fourth, a "huckleberry" miner from the Bald Mountain district, "and I reckon whar thar's sich a hell of a smoke, thar's a right smart heap o' fire, ef it could on'y be onkivered."

But all of this was in a manner beside the mark, and there were many to inquire what the Gordons were going to do. Ludlow, check weigher in Number Two entry, and the head of the local union, took it on himself to reply.

"B'gosh! I don't b'lieve the old man knows, himself. He fit around and fit around, talkin' to me, and never said nothin' more'n that there was goin' to be a meetin' here at two o'clock, and Tom--his son Tom--was goin' to speak to it."

"All right; we're a-waitin' on son Tom right now," said a grizzled old coal-digger on the outer edge of the group. "And ef he's got anything to say, he cayn't say hit none too sudden. My ol' woman told me this mornin' she was a-hittin' the bottom o' the meal bar'l, kerchuck! ever' time she was dippin' into hit. Hit's erbout time there was somepin doin', ez I allow."

"Saw it off!" warned Ludlow. "Here they come, both of 'em."

Tom and his father had entered the building from the cupola side, and Tom mounted the flask-built platform while the men were scattering to find seats. He made a goodly figure of young manhood, standing at ease on the pile of frames until quiet should prevail, and the glances flung up from the throng of workmen were friendly rather than critical. When the time came, he began to speak quietly, but with a certain masterful quality in his voice that unmistakably constrained attention.

"I suppose you have all been told why the works are shut down--why you are out of a job in the middle of summer; and I understand you are not fully satisfied with the reason that was given--hard times. You have been saying among yourselves that if the president and the treasurer could go off on a holiday trip to Europe, the situation couldn't be so very desperate. Isn't that so?"

"That's so; you've hit it in the head first crack out o' the box," was the swift reply from a score of the men.

"Good; then we'll settle that point before we go any further. I want to tell you men that the hard times are here, sure enough. We are all hoping that they won't last very long; but the fact remains that the wheels have stopped. Let me tell you: I've just come down from the North, and the streets of the cities up there are full of idle men. All the way down here I didn't see a single iron-furnace in blast, and those of you who have been over to South Tredegar know what the conditions are there. Mr. Farley has gone to Europe because he believes there is nothing to be done here, and the facts are on his side. For anybody with money enough to live on, this is a mighty good time to take a vacation."

There was a murmur of protest, voicing itself generally in a denial of the possibility for men who wrought with their hands and ate in the sweat of their brows.

"I know that," was Tom's rejoinder. "Some of us can't afford to take a lay-off; I can't, for one. And that's why we are here this afternoon. Chiawassee can blow in again and stay in blast if we've all got nerve enough to hang on. If we start up and go on making pig, it'll be on a dead market and we'll have to sell it at a loss or stack it in the yards. We can't do the first, and I needn't tell you that it is going to take a mighty long purse to do the stacking. It will be all outgo and no income. If--"

"Spit it out," called Ludlow, from the forefront of the miners' division. "I reckon we all know what's comin'."

Gordon thrust out his square jaw and gave them the fact bluntly.

"It's a case of half a loaf or no bread. If Chiawassee blows in again, it will be on borrowed money. If you men will take half-pay in cash and half in promises, the promised half to be paid when we can sell the stacked pig, we go on. If not, we don't. Talk it over among yourselves and let us have your decision."

There was hot caucusing and a fair imitation of pandemonium on the foundry floor following this bomb-hurling, and Tom sat down on the edge of the platform to give the men time. Caleb Gordon sat within arm's reach, nursing his knee, diligently saying nothing. It was Tom, undoubtedly, but a Tom who had become a citizen of another world, a newer world than the one the ex-artilleryman knew and lived in. He--Caleb--had freely predicted a riot as the result of the half-pay proposal; yet Tom had applied the match and there was no explosion. The buzzing, arguing groups were not riotous--only fiercely questioning.

It was Ludlow, hammering clamorously for silence on the shell of the big crane ladle, who acted as spokesman when the uproar was quelled.

"You're all right, Tom Gordon--you and your daddy. But you've hit us plum' 'twixt dinner and supper. If you two was the company--"

Tom stood up and interrupted.

"We are the company. While Mr. Farley is away we're the bosses; what we say, goes."

"All right," Ludlow went on. "That's a little better. But we've got a kick or two comin'. Is this half-pay goin' to be in orders on the company's store?"

"I said cash," said Tom briefly.

"Good enough. But I s'pose we'd have to spend it at the company's store, jest the same, 'r get fired."

"No!"--emphatically. "I'm not even sure that we should reopen the store. We shall not reopen it unless you men want it. If you do want it, we'll make it strictly coöperative, dividing the profits with every employee according to his purchases."

"Well, by gol, that's white, anyway," commented one of the coke burners. "Be a mighty col' day in July when old man Farley'd talk as straight as that."

"Ag'in," said Ludlow, "what's this half-pay to be figured on--the reg'lar scale?"

"Of course."

"And what security do we have that t'other half 'll be paid, some time?"

"My father's word, and mine."

"And if old man Farley says no?"

"Mr. Farley is out of it for the present, and he has nothing to say about it. You are making this deal with Gordon and Gordon."

"Well, now, that's a heap more like it." Ludlow turned to the miners. "What d'ye say, boys? Fish or cut bait? Hands up!"

There was a good showing of hands among the white miners and the coke burners, but the negro foundry men did not vote. Patty, the mulatto foreman who was Helgerson's second, explained the reason.

"You ain't said nuttin' 'bout de foundry, Boss Tom. W-w-w-w-we-all boys been wukkin' short ti-ti-time, and m-m-m-makin' pig ain't gwine give we-all n-n-nuttin' ter do." Patty had a painful impediment in his speech, and the strain of the public occasion doubled it.

"We are going to run the foundry, too, Patty, and on full time. There will be work for all of you on the terms I have named."

Caleb Gordon closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. For weeks before the shut-down the foundry had been run on short time, because there was no market for its miscellaneous output. Surely Tom must be losing his mind!

But the negro foundry men were taking his word for it, as the miners had. "Pup-pup-put up yo' hands, boys!" said Patty, and again the ayes had it.

Tom looked vastly relieved.

"Well, that was a short horse soon curried," he said bruskly. "The power goes on to-morrow morning, and we'll blow in as soon as the furnaces are relined. Ludlow, you come to the office at five o'clock and I'll list the shifts with you. Patty, you report to Mr. Helgerson, and you and the pattern-maker show up at half-past five. I want to talk over some new work with you. Anybody else got anything to say? If not, we'll adjourn."

Caleb followed his son out and across the yard to the old log homestead which still served as the superintendent's office and laboratory. When the door was shut, he dropped heavily into a chair.

"Son," he said brokenly, "you're--you're crazy--plum' crazy. Don't you know you can't do the first one o' these things you've been promisin'?"

Tom was already busy at the desk, emptying the pigeonholes one after another and rapidly scanning their contents.

"If I believed that, I'd be taking to the high grass and the tall timber. But don't you worry, pappy; we're going to do them--all of them."

"But, Buddy, you can't sell a pound of foundry product! We may be able to make pig cheaper than some others, but when it comes to the foundry floor, South Tredegar can choke us off in less'n a week."

"Wait," said Tom, still rummaging. "There is one thing we can make--and sell."

"I'd like tolerable well to know what it is," was the hopeless rejoinder.

"You ought to know, better than any one else. It's cast-iron pipe--water-pipe. Where are the plans of that invention of yours that Farley wouldn't let you install?"

Caleb found the blue-prints, and his hands were trembling. The invention, a pit machine process for molding and casting water-and gas-pipe at a cost that would put all other makers of the commodity out of the field, had been wrought out and perfected in Tom's second Boston year. It was Caleb's one ewe lamb, and he had nursed it by hand through a long preparatory period.

Tom took the blue-prints and spread them on the desk, absorbing the details as his father leaned over him and pointed them out. He saw clearly that the invention would revolutionize pipe-making. The accepted method was to cast each piece separately in a floor flask made in two parts, rammed by hand, once for the drag and again for the cope, with reversings, crane-handlings and all the manipulations necessary for the molding of any heavy casting. But the new process substituted machinery. A cistern-like pit; a circular table pivoted over it, with a hundred or more iron flasks suspended upright from its edges; a huge crane carrying a mechanical ram, these were the main points of the machine which, with a single small gang of men, would do the work of an entire foundry floor.

"It's great!" said Tom enthusiastically. "I got your idea pretty well from your letters, but you've improved on it since then. I wonder Farley didn't snap at it."

"He was willin' to," said Caleb grimly. "Only he wanted me to transfer the patents to the company; in other words, to make him a present of the controlling interest. I bucked at that, and we come near havin' a fall-out. If there was any market for pipe now--"

"There is a market," said Tom hopefully. "I got a pointer on that before I left Boston. Did I tell you I had a little talk with Mr. Clarkson the day I came away?"

"No."

"Well, I did. I told him the conditions and asked his advice. Among other things, I spoke of this pipe pit of yours, and he said at once, 'There is your chance. Cast-iron water-pipe is like bread, or sugar, or butcher's meat--it's a necessity, in good times or bad. If that machine is practicable, you can make pipe for less than half the present labor cost.' Then we talked ways and means. Money is tighter than a shut fist--up East as well as everywhere else. But men with money to invest will still bet on a sure thing. Mr. Clarkson advised me to try our own banks first. Failing with them, he authorized me to call on him. Now you know where I'm digging my sand."

The old iron-master sat back in his chair with his hands locked over one knee, once more taking the measure of this new creation calling itself Tom Gordon and purporting to be his son.

"Say, Buddy," he said at length, "are there many more like you out yonder in the big road?--young fellows that can walk right out o' school and tell their daddies how to run things?"

Tom's laugh was boyishly hearty.

"Plenty of 'em, pappy; lots of 'em! The old world is moving right along; it would be a pity if it didn't, don't you think? But about this pipe business: I want you to make over these patents to me."

"They're yours now, Tom; everything I've got will be yours in a little while," said the father; but his voice betrayed the depth of that thrust. Was the new Tom beginning so soon to grasp and reach out avariciously for the fruit of the old tree?

"You ought to know I don't mean it that way," said Tom, frowning a little. "But here is the way it sizes up. There is money in this pipe-making; some money now, and big money later on. Farley has refused to go into it unless you make it a company proposition; as president and a controlling stock-holder you can't very well go into it now without making it in some sort a company proposition. But you can transfer the patents to me, and I can contract with Chiawassee Consolidated to make pipe for me."

Caleb Gordon's frown matched that of his son.

"That would certainly be givin' Colonel Duxbury a dose of his own medicine; but I don't like it, Tom. It looks as if we were taking advantage of him."