Caleb followed his son out and across the yard to the old log homestead which still served as the superintendent’s office and laboratory.  When the door was shut, he dropped heavily into a chair.

“Son,” he said brokenly, “you’re—­you’re crazy—­plum’ crazy.  Don’t you know you can’t do the first one o’ these things you’ve been promisin’?”

Tom was already busy at the desk, emptying the pigeonholes one after another and rapidly scanning their contents.

“If I believed that, I’d be taking to the high grass and the tall timber.  But don’t you worry, pappy; we’re going to do them—­all of them.”

“But, Buddy, you can’t sell a pound of foundry product!  We may be able to make pig cheaper than some others, but when it comes to the foundry floor, South Tredegar can choke us off in less’n a week.”

“Wait,” said Tom, still rummaging.  “There is one thing we can make—­and sell.”

“I’d like tolerable well to know what it is,” was the hopeless rejoinder.

“You ought to know, better than any one else.  It’s cast-iron pipe—­water-pipe.  Where are the plans of that invention of yours that Farley wouldn’t let you install?”

Caleb found the blue-prints, and his hands were trembling.  The invention, a pit machine process for molding and casting water-and gas-pipe at a cost that would put all other makers of the commodity out of the field, had been wrought out and perfected in Tom’s second Boston year.  It was Caleb’s one ewe lamb, and he had nursed it by hand through a long preparatory period.

Tom took the blue-prints and spread them on the desk, absorbing the details as his father leaned over him and pointed them out.  He saw clearly that the invention would revolutionize pipe-making.  The accepted method was to cast each piece separately in a floor flask made in two parts, rammed by hand, once for the drag and again for the cope, with reversings, crane-handlings and all the manipulations necessary for the molding of any heavy casting.  But the new process substituted machinery.  A cistern-like pit; a circular table pivoted over it, with a hundred or more iron flasks suspended upright from its edges; a huge crane carrying a mechanical ram, these were the main points of the machine which, with a single small gang of men, would do the work of an entire foundry floor.

“It’s great!” said Tom enthusiastically.  “I got your idea pretty well from your letters, but you’ve improved on it since then.  I wonder Farley didn’t snap at it.”

“He was willin’ to,” said Caleb grimly.  “Only he wanted me to transfer the patents to the company; in other words, to make him a present of the controlling interest.  I bucked at that, and we come near havin’ a fall-out.  If there was any market for pipe now—­”

“There is a market,” said Tom hopefully.  “I got a pointer on that before I left Boston.  Did I tell you I had a little talk with Mr. Clarkson the day I came away?”