The Quickening Part 50

"I know all about it," was the quiet rejoinder.

"You do? What on top o' G.o.d'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 b.u.t.toning 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 Chiawa.s.see 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 b.u.t.toning 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 a.s.surance. "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 Chiawa.s.see 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 partic.i.p.ate, 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 G.o.d, 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 l.u.s.ts mightier, momentarily, than love, and the l.u.s.t 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.

x.x.xV

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 phosph.o.r.escent life on one hand, and the great dark bulk of Lebanon loomed as the ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sing 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 compa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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-b.u.t.t 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 d.a.m.ned--"

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 sh.o.r.e was."

"Well, who else knows about it?"

"Brother Bill Layne, and Aunt M'randy, and j.a.phe Pettigra.s.s. 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 j.a.pheth 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.