The Quickening Part 5

So counseled Caleb Gordon, sure, always, of his own standing-ground in any conflict. But from the last of the conferences the Major had ridden home through the fields; and Thomas Jefferson, with an alert eye for windstraws of conduct, had seen him dismount now and then to pull up and fling away the locating stakes driven by the railroad engineers.

In such a contention, in an age wholly given over to progress, there could be, one would say, no possible doubt of the outcome.

Giving the Major a second and a third chance to refuse to grant an eas.e.m.e.nt, the railroad company pushed its grading and track-laying around the mountain and up to the stone wall marking the Dabney boundary, quietly acc.u.mulated the necessary material, and on a summer Sunday morning--Sunday by preference because no restraining writ could be served for at least twenty-four hours--a construction train, black with laborers, whisked around the nose of the mountain and dropped gently down the grade to the temporary end of track.

It was Thomas Jefferson who gave the alarm. Little Zoar, unable to support a settled pastor, was closed for the summer, but Martha Gordon kept the fire spiritual alight by teaching her son at home. One of the boy's Sunday privileges, earned by a faultless recitation of a prescribed number of Bible verses, was forest freedom for the remainder of the forenoon. It was while he was in the midst of the Beat.i.tudes that he heard the low rumble of the coming train, and it was only by resolutely ignoring the sense of hearing that he was enabled to get through, letter-perfect.

"'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you,'" he chanted monotonously, with roving eyes bent on finding his cap with the loss of the fewest possible seconds--"'and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake,'--and that's all." And he was off like a shot.

"Mind, now, Thomas Jefferson; you are not to go near that railroad!" his mother called to him as he raced down the path to the gate.

Oh, no; he would not go near the railroad! He would only run up the pike and cut across through the Dabney pasture to see if the train were really there.

It was there, as he could tell by the noise of hissing steam when the cross-cut was reached. But the parked wooding of the pasture still screened it. How near could he go without being "near" in the transgressing sense of the word? There was only one way of finding out--to keep on going until his conscience p.r.i.c.ked sharply enough to stop him. It was a great convenience, Thomas Jefferson's conscience. As long as it kept quiet he could be reasonably sure there was no sin in sight. Yet he had to confess that it was not always above playing mean tricks; as that of sleeping like a log till after the fact, and then rising up to stab him till the blood ran.

He was half-way across the pasture when the crash of a falling tree stopped him in mid-rush. And in the vista opened by the felled tree he saw a sight to make him turn and race homeward faster than he had come.

The invaders, hundreds strong, had torn down the boundary wall and the earth for the advancing embankment was flying from uncounted shovels.

Caleb Gordon was at work in the blacksmith shop, Sunday-repairing while the furnace was cool, when Thomas Jefferson came flying with his news.

The iron-master dropped his hammer and cast aside the leather ap.r.o.n.

"You hear that, Buck?" he said, frowning across the anvil at his helper, a white man and the foreman of the pouring floor.

The helper nodded, being a man of as few words as the master.

"Well, I reckon we-all hain't got any call to stand by and see them highflyers ride it roughshod over Major Dabney thataway," said Gordon briefly. "Go down to the shanties and hustle out the day s.h.i.+ft. Get Turk and Hardaway and every white man you can lay hands on, and all the guns you can find. And send one o' the black boys up the hill to tell the Major. Like as not, he ain't up yet."

Helgerson hastened away to obey his orders, and Caleb Gordon went out to the foundry sc.r.a.p yard. In the heap of broken metal lay an old cast-iron field-piece, a relic of the battle which had one day raged hotly on the hillside across the creek. A hundred times the iron-master had been on the point of breaking it up for re-melting, and as often the old artilleryman in him had stayed his hand.

Now it was quickly hoisted in the crane shackle,--Thomas Jefferson sweating manfully at the crab crank,--clamped on the axle of a pair of wagon wheels, cleaned, swabbed, loaded with quarry blasting powder and pieces of broken iron to serve for grape, and trundled out on the pike at the heels of the ore team.

By this time Helgerson had come up with the furnace men, a motley crew in all stages of Sunday-morning dishevelment, and armed only as a mob may arm itself at a moment's notice. Caleb, the veteran, looked the squad over with a slow smile gathering the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

"You boys'll have to make up in f'erceness what-all you're lacking in soldier-looks," he observed mildly. Then he gave the word of command to Helgerson. "Take the gun and put out for the major's hawss-lot. I'll be along as soon as I can saddle the mare."

Thomas Jefferson went with his father to the stable and helped silently with the saddling. Afterward he held the mare, gentling her in suppressed excitement while his father went into the house for his rifle.

Martha Gordon met her husband at the door. She had seen the volunteer gun crew filing past on the pike.

"What is it, Caleb?" she asked anxiously.

He made no attempt to deceive her.

"The railroaders are allowin' to take what the Major wouldn't sell 'em--the right of way through his land down the valley. Buddy brought the word."

"Well?" she said, love and fear hardening her heart. "The railroad would be a good thing for us--for the furnace. You know you said it would."

He shook his head slowly.

"I reckon we mustn't look at it thataway, Martha. I'm going to stand by my neighbor, like I'd expect him to stand by me. Let me get my gun; the boys'll be there ahead o' me, and they won't know what to do."

"Caleb! There will be bloodshed; and you remember what the Word says: 'whoso sheddeth man's blood....' And on the Lord's Day, too!"

"I know. But ain't it somewhere in the same Good Book that it says there's a time for peace and a time to make war? And then that there pa.s.sage about lovin' your neighbor. Don't hender me, little woman. There ain't goin' to be no blood shed--onless them bushwhackers are a mighty sight f'ercer for it than what I think they are."

She let him go without further protest, not because he had convinced her, but because she had long since come to know this man, who, making her lightest wish his law in most things, could be as inflexible as the chilled iron of the pouring floor at the call of loyalty to his own standard of right and wrong. But when he pa.s.sed down the path to the gate she knelt on the door-stone and covered her face with her hands.

Gordon gathered the slack of the reins on the neck of the mare and put a leg over the saddle.

"That'll do, Buddy," he said. "Run along in to your mammy, now."

But Thomas Jefferson caught again at the bridle and held on, choking.

"O pappy!--take me with you! I--I'll die if you don't take me with you!"

Who can tell what Caleb Gordon saw in his son's eyes when he bent to loosen the grip of the small brown hand on the rein? Was it some sympathetic reincarnation of his own militant soul striving to break its bonds? Without a word he bent lower and swung the boy up to a seat behind him. "Hold on tight, Buddy," he cautioned. "I'll have to run the mare some to catch up with the boys."

And the mother? She was still kneeling on the door-stone, but the burden of her prayer was not now for Caleb Gordon. "O Lord, have mercy on my boy! Thou knowest how, because of my disobedience, he has the fierce fighting blood and the stubborn unbelief of all the Gordons to contend with: save him alive and make him a man of peace and a man of faith, I beseech Thee, and let not the unbelief of the father or the unfaithfulness of the mother be visited on the son!"

When the one-piece battery dashed at a clumsy gallop through the open gate of the Dabney pasture and swung with a sharp turn into the vista of felled trees, Thomas Jefferson beheld a thing to set his heritage of soldier blood dancing through his veins. Standing fair in the midst of the ax-and-shovel havoc and clearing a wide circle to right and left with the sweep of his old service cavalry saber, was the Major, coatless, hatless, cursing the invaders with mighty and corrosive soldier oaths, and crying them to come on, the unnumbered host of them against one man.

Opposed to him the men of the construction force, generaled by the young engineer in brown duck and b.u.t.toned leggings, were deploying cautiously to surround him. Gordon spoke to his mare; and when he drew rein and wheeled to shout to the gun crew, Thomas Jefferson heard the engineer's low-toned order to the shovelers: "Be careful and don't hurt him, boys.

He's the old maniac who threw me off the veranda of his house. Two of you take him behind, and--"

The break came on the uprush of the unantic.i.p.ated reinforcements. With the battle readiness of a disciplined soldier, Caleb Gordon whipped from the saddle and ran to help the gun crew slue the makes.h.i.+ft field-piece into position.

"Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "fall back on your front line and give the artillery a chanst at 'em. I reckon a dose o' broken pot-iron'll carry fu'ther than that saber o' yourn. Buddy, hunt me a punk match, quick, will ye?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Fall back, Major!" he shouted; "give the artillery a chanst"]

Thomas Jefferson ran to the nearest rotting log, but one of the negroes was before him with a blazing pitch-pine splint. There was a respectful recoil in the opposing ranks which presently became a somewhat panicky surge to the rear. The shovelers, more than half of whom were negroes, had not come out to be blown from a cannon's mouth by a grim-faced veteran who was so palpably at home with the tools of his trade.

"That's right: keep right on goin'!" yelled the iron-master, waving his blazing slow-match dangerously near to the priming. "Keep it up, 'r by the Lord that made ye--"

There was no need to specify the alternative. For now the panic had spread by its own contagion, and the invaders were fighting among themselves for place on the flat-cars. And while yet the rear guard was swarming upon the engine, hanging by toe-and hand-holds where it could, the train was backed rapidly out of range.

Caleb Gordon kept his pine splint alight until the echoes of the engine's exhaust came faintly from the overhanging cliffs of the mountain.

"They've gone back to town, and I reckon the fire's plum' out for to-day, Major," he drawled. "Buck and a few o' the boys 'll stay by the gun, against their rallyin' later on, and you might as well go home to your breakfast. Didn't bring your hawss, did ye? Take the mare, and welcome. Buddy and me'll walk."

But the Major would not mount, and so the two men walked together as far as the manor-house gates, with Thomas Jefferson a pace in the rear, leading the mare.

It was no matter of wonder to him that his father and the Major marched in solemn silence to the gate of parting. But the wonder came tumultuously when the Major wheeled abruptly at the moment of leave-taking and wrung his father's hand.

"By G.o.d, suh, you are a right true-hearted gentleman, and my very good friend, _Mistuh_ Gordon!" he said, with the manner of one who has been carefully weighing the words beforehand. "If you had been given youh just dues, suh, you'd have come home from F'ginia wearin' youh shouldeh-straps." And then, with a little throat-clearing pause to come between: "d.a.m.n it, suh; an own brotheh couldn't have done'mo'! I--I've been misjudgin' you, Caleb, all these yeahs, and now I'm proud to shake you by the hand and call you my friend. Yes, suh, I am that!"

It was, in a manner not to be understood by the Northern alien, the accolade of knighthood, and Caleb Gordon's toil-rounded shoulders straightened visibly when he returned the hearty hand-grasp. And as for Thomas Jefferson: in his heart gratified pride flapped its wings and crowed l.u.s.tily; and for the moment he was almost willing to bury that private grudge he was holding against Major Dabney--almost, but not quite.