A few weeks later Keith heard that Mr. Aaron Wickersham was dead.  The clerks said that he had had a quarrel with his son the day after the panic and had fallen in an apoplectic fit soon afterwards.  But then the old clerks had been discharged immediately after his death.  Young Wickersham said he did not want any dead-wood in his offices.  Also he did not want any dead property.  Among his first steps was the sale of the old Keith plantation.  Gordon, learning that it was for sale, got a friend to lend him the money and bought it in, though it would scarcely have been known for the same place.  The mansion had been stripped of its old furniture and pictures soon after General Keith had left there, and the plantation had gone down.

Rumor also said that Wickersham’s affairs were in a bad way.  Certainly the new head of the house gave no sign of it.  He opened a yet larger office and began operations on a more extensive scale.  The Clarion said that his Southern enterprises would be pushed actively, and that the stock of the Great Gun Mine would soon be on the New York Exchange.

Ferdy Wickersham suddenly returned to New Leeds, and New Leeds showed his presence.  Machinery was shipped sufficient to run a dozen mines.  He not only pushed the old mines, but opened a new one.  It was on a slip of land that lay between the Rawson property and the stream that ran down from the mountain.  Some could not understand why he should run the shaft there, unless it was that he was bent on cutting the Rawson property off from the stream.  It was a perilous location for a shaft, and Matheson, the superintendent, had protested against it.

Matheson’s objections proved to be well founded.  The mine was opened so near the stream that water broke through into it, as Matheson had predicted, and though a strong wall was built, the water still got in, and it was difficult to keep it pumped out sufficiently to work.  Some of the men struck.  It was known that Wickersham had nearly come to a rupture with the hard-headed Scotchman over it; but Wickersham won.  Still, the coal did not come.  It was asserted that the shafts had failed to reach coal.  Wickersham laughed and kept on—­kept on till coal did come.  It was heralded abroad.  The Clarion devoted columns to the success of the “Great Gun Mine” and Wickersham.

Wickersham naturally showed his triumph.  He celebrated it in a great banquet at the New Windsor, at which speeches were made which likened him to Napoleon and several other generals.  Mr. Plume declared him “greater than Themistocles, for he could play the lute and make a small city a great one.”

Wickersham himself made a speech, in which he professed his joy that he had silenced the tongue of slander and wrested from detraction a victory not for himself, but for New Leeds.  His enemies and the enemies of New Leeds were, he declared, the same.  They would soon see his enemies suing for aid.  He was applauded to the echo.  All this and much more was in the Clarion next day, with some very pointed satire about “rival mines.”