e recountings of the
day's happenings; attentive, but only filially interested: willing to
encourage his father to talk, but never commenting.

Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the
tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was
always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the
small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be
in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and
hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate
heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed
dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves
nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite
perfect.

But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly
absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of
extinction--and triumphing hard-heartedly.

It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast
for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed
his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and
since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and
mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to
hold all objects in suspension.

Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe
when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming
and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace
blowing-engines. He started up quickly.

"What's that?" he demanded. "Surely they haven't blown in again?"

Caleb nodded assent.

"I reckon so. Colonel Duxbury allowed to me this mornin' that he was
about out o' the woods--in spite of you, he said; as if you'd been the
one that was doin' him up."

"But he can't be!" exclaimed Tom, so earnestly and definitely that the
mask fell away and the father was no longer deceived.

"I'm only tellin' you what he allowed to me, son. I reckoned he was
about all in, quite a spell ago; but you can't tell nothing by what you
see--when it's Colonel Duxbury. He got two car-loads o' new men to-day,
the Lord on'y knows where from; and he's shippin' Pocahontas coke, and
gettin' it here, too."

Tom sat glooming over it for a time, shrouding himself in tobacco smoke.
Then he said:

"You feazed me a little at first; but I think I know now what ha