On his part, Mr. Duxbury Farley was equally successful.  A company was formed, the charter was obtained, and the golden stream began to flow into the treasury; into it and out again in the raceway channels of development.  Thomas Jefferson stood aghast when an army of workmen swept down on Paradise and began to change the very face of nature.  But that was only the beginning.

For a time Chiawassee Coal and Iron figured buoyantly in the market quotations, and delegations of stock-holders, both present and prospective, were personally conducted to the scene of activities by enthusiastic Vice-President Farley.  But when these had served their purpose a thing happened.  One fine morning it was whispered on ’Change that Chiawassee iron would not Bessemer, and that Chiawassee coke had been rejected by the Southern Association of Iron Smelters.

Followed a crash which was never very clearly understood by the simple-hearted soldier iron-master, though it was merely a repetition of a lesson well conned by the earlier investors in Southern coal and iron fields.  Caleb’s craft was the making of iron; not the financing of top-heavy corporations.  So, when he was told that the company had failed, and that he and Farley had been appointed receivers, he took it as a financial matter, of course, somewhat beyond his ken, and went about his daily task of supervision with a mind as undisturbed as it would have been distraught had he known something of the subterranean mechanism by which the failure and the receivership had been brought to pass.

Why Mr. Duxbury Farley spared the iron-master in the freezing-out process was an unsolved riddle to many.  But there were reasons.  For one, there was the lease of the coal lands, renewable year by year—­this was Caleb’s own honest provision inserted in the contract for the Major’s protection—­and renewable only by the Major’s friend.  Further, a practical man at the practical end of an industry is a sheer necessity; and by contriving to have honest Caleb associated with himself in the receivership, a fine color of uprightness was imparted to the promoter’s far-reaching plan of aggrandizement.

So, later, when the reorganization was effected; when the troublesome, dividend-hungry stock-holders of the original company were eliminated by due process of law, Caleb’s name appeared on the Farley slate with the title of general manager of the new company—­for the same good and sufficient reasons.

It was during the fervid six months of Chiawassee Coal and Iron development that Thomas Jefferson had passed from the old life to the new—­from childhood to boyhood.

Simultaneously, there were the coal-mines opening under the cliffs of Mount Lebanon, the long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen.  Thomas Jefferson did his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine.  And when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same moment, it distressed him to tears.