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