alf of the asking. Colonel
Duxbury was writing letters at the Cupola when the broker's telegram was
handed him, and he broke a rule which had held good for the better part
of a cautious, self-contained lifetime: he went to the buffet and took a
stiff drink of brandy--alone. The following morning the miners and all
the white men employed in the furnace and foundries and coke yards at
Gordonia went on strike.

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," has a wide
application in the commercial world. Duxbury Farley had resources! a
comfortable fortune as country fortunes go, amassed by far-seeing
shrewdness, a calm contempt for the well-being of his business
associates, and most of all by a crowning gift in the ability to
recognize the psychological moment at which to let go.

But under pressure of the combined disasters he lost his head, quarreled
with his colder-blooded son, and in spite of Vincent's angry protests,
began the suicidal process of turning his available assets into
ammunition for the fighting of a battle which could have but one
possible outcome.

Strike-breakers were imported at fabulous expense. Armed guards under
pay swarmed at the valley foot, and around the company's property
elsewhere. By hook or crook the foundries were kept going, turning out
water-pipe for which there was no market, and which, owing to the
disturbances which were promptly made an excuse by the railway company,
could not be moved out of the Chiawassee yard.

Later, when the striking workmen began to grow hungry, riot, arson and
bloodshed were nightly occurrences. A charging of coal, mined under the
greatest difficulties, was conveyed to the coke yards, only to be
destroyed--and half of the ovens with it--by dynamite cunningly
blackened and dropped into the chargings. For want of fuel, the furnace
went out of blast, but with the small store of coke remaining in the
foundry yards, the pipe pits were kept at work. By this time the
promoter-president was little better than a madman, fighting like a
berserker, and breeding a certain awed respect in the comment of those
who had hitherto held him only as a shrewd schemer.

And Thomas Jefferson: how did this return to primordial chaos, brought
about in no uncertain sense by his own premeditated act, affect him?
Only a man quite lost to all promptings of the grace that saves and
softens could look unmoved on the burnings and riotings, the cruel
wastings and the bloodlettings,