already in the air. Iron, more
sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in
the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of
the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated,
though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at
heart. What would Tom advise?

Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day
in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later
boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way. His father
was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help. It seemed vastly
incredible. Thomas Jefferson's ideal of steady courage, of invincible
human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old
soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson. What a trumpet blast of
alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for
help!

Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longer a raw recruit, a
boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting. It astounded
him that the realization had been so slow in arriving. It was as if he
had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage
plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand. Tumultuously it rushed on him
that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be;
that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings
that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the
burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.

He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on
his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze
of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a
strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. Swiftly, with a click like
that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed. The highway
was the same, but now the man's steps had grown cautious and uncertain
and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.

Tom broke the eye-hold on the vision and sprang up to pace the narrow
limits of the study.

"It's up to me," he mused, "and I'd like to know what I've been thinking
of all this time. Why, pappy's old! he was forty before I was born. And
I've been up here taking it easy and having all sorts of a good time,
while he's been playing Sindbad to Duxbury Farley's Old Man of the Sea.
Coming, pappy!" he shouted; and forthwith