By this time Helgerson had come up with the furnace men, a motley crew in all stages of Sunday-morning dishevelment, and armed only as a mob may arm itself at a moment’s notice.  Caleb, the veteran, looked the squad over with a slow smile gathering the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

“You boys’ll have to make up in f’erceness what-all you’re lacking in soldier-looks,” he observed mildly.  Then he gave the word of command to Helgerson.  “Take the gun and put out for the major’s hawss-lot.  I’ll be along as soon as I can saddle the mare.”

Thomas Jefferson went with his father to the stable and helped silently with the saddling.  Afterward he held the mare, gentling her in suppressed excitement while his father went into the house for his rifle.

Martha Gordon met her husband at the door.  She had seen the volunteer gun crew filing past on the pike.

“What is it, Caleb?” she asked anxiously.

He made no attempt to deceive her.

“The railroaders are allowin’ to take what the Major wouldn’t sell ’em—­the right of way through his land down the valley.  Buddy brought the word.”

“Well?” she said, love and fear hardening her heart.  “The railroad would be a good thing for us—­for the furnace.  You know you said it would.”

He shook his head slowly.

“I reckon we mustn’t look at it thataway, Martha.  I’m going to stand by my neighbor, like I’d expect him to stand by me.  Let me get my gun; the boys’ll be there ahead o’ me, and they won’t know what to do.”

“Caleb!  There will be bloodshed; and you remember what the Word says:  ‘whoso sheddeth man’s blood....’  And on the Lord’s Day, too!”

“I know.  But ain’t it somewhere in the same Good Book that it says there’s a time for peace and a time to make war?  And then that there passage about lovin’ your neighbor.  Don’t hender me, little woman.  There ain’t goin’ to be no blood shed—­onless them bushwhackers are a mighty sight f’ercer for it than what I think they are.”

She let him go without further protest, not because he had convinced her, but because she had long since come to know this man, who, making her lightest wish his law in most things, could be as inflexible as the chilled iron of the pouring floor at the call of loyalty to his own standard of right and wrong.  But when he passed down the path to the gate she knelt on the door-stone and covered her face with her hands.

Gordon gathered the slack of the reins on the neck of the mare and put a leg over the saddle.

“That’ll do, Buddy,” he said.  “Run along in to your mammy, now.”

But Thomas Jefferson caught again at the bridle and held on, choking.

“O pappy!—­take me with you!  I—­I’ll die if you don’t take me with you!”

Who can tell what Caleb Gordon saw in his son’s eyes when he bent to loosen the grip of the small brown hand on the rein?  Was it some sympathetic reincarnation of his own militant soul striving to break its bonds?  Without a word he bent lower and swung the boy up to a seat behind him.  “Hold on tight, Buddy,” he cautioned.  “I’ll have to run the mare some to catch up with the boys.”