Thomas Jefferson was vaguely indignant when Pettigrass came to ask his father to go forthwith to the manor-house.  In the mouth of the foreman the invitation took on something of the flavor of a command.  Besides, since the Major’s return from New York, Thomas Jefferson had a grudge against him of a purely private and personal nature.

None the less, he was eager for news when his father came back, and though he got it only from overhearing the answer to his mother’s question, it was satisfyingly thrilling.

“It’s mighty near as we talked, Martha.  The Major lumps the railroad in with all the other improvements, calls ’em Yankee, and h’ists his battle-flag.  The engineer, that smart young fellow with the peaked whiskers and the eye-glasses, went to see him this evenin’ about the right of way down the valley, and got himself slung off the porch of the great house into a posy bed.”

“There is going to be trouble, Caleb; now you mark my words.  You mustn’t mix up in it.”

“I don’t allow to, if I can he’p it.  The railroad’s goin’ to be a mighty good thing for us if I can get Mr. Downing to put in a side-track for the furnace.”

Following this there were other conferences, the Major unbending sufficiently to come and sit on the Gordon porch in the cool of the evening.  The iron-master, as one still in touch with the moving world, gave good advice.  Failing to buy, the railroad company might possibly seek to bully a right of way through the valley.  But in that case, there would certainly be redress in the courts for the property owners.  In the meantime, nothing would be gained by making the contest a personal fight on individuals.

So counseled Caleb Gordon, sure, always, of his own standing-ground in any conflict.  But from the last of the conferences the Major had ridden home through the fields; and Thomas Jefferson, with an alert eye for windstraws of conduct, had seen him dismount now and then to pull up and fling away the locating stakes driven by the railroad engineers.

In such a contention, in an age wholly given over to progress, there could be, one would say, no possible doubt of the outcome.

Giving the Major a second and a third chance to refuse to grant an easement, the railroad company pushed its grading and track-laying around the mountain and up to the stone wall marking the Dabney boundary, quietly accumulated the necessary material, and on a summer Sunday morning—­Sunday by preference because no restraining writ could be served for at least twenty-four hours—­a construction train, black with laborers, whisked around the nose of the mountain and dropped gently down the grade to the temporary end of track.

It was Thomas Jefferson who gave the alarm.  Little Zoar, unable to support a settled pastor, was closed for the summer, but Martha Gordon kept the fire spiritual alight by teaching her son at home.  One of the boy’s Sunday privileges, earned by a faultless recitation of a prescribed number of Bible verses, was forest freedom for the remainder of the forenoon.  It was while he was in the midst of the Beatitudes that he heard the low rumble of the coming train, and it was only by resolutely ignoring the sense of hearing that he was enabled to get through, letter-perfect.