In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it, seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.

Caleb’s ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic.  What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards and the sheriff’s deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his duty as he saw it.

Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-table 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.”