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, one would say.

When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth Pettigrass’s dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday.

The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound’s ears, chose to be of this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when Tom fared forth.  For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his noon-time snack of bread and meat with Caesar.  Yet Deer Trace set a good table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the mountain side.

Then there were children,—­a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses at a mountaineer’s cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the cold spring under the dooryard oaks.  They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland.  Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing.  We may bear this in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of whom children and dogs have no fear.