"Who? Stonewall Jackson? Well, I reckon not, son."
"Neither shall we," said Tom laconically. "We are going in to win. We are in bad shape, I admit, but we are better off than a lot of these furnaces that are shutting down. We have our own ore beds, and our own coking plant. Our coal costs us seventy-five cents less than Pocahontas, our water is free, and we can hold the property as long as we can stand the sheriff off. My notion is to make iron and hold it; stack it in the yards, mortgage it for what we can get, and make more iron. Some day the country will get iron hungry; then we'll have it to sell when the other fellows will have to make it first and sell it afterward. Have I got it straight?"
Caleb nodded.
"Yes; I don't know but what you have. What's puzzlin' me right now, son, is where you got it."
Tom's laugh was a tonic for sore nerves.
"I'd like to know what you've been spending your good money on me for if it wasn't to give me a chance to get it. Do you think I've been playing foot-ball all the time?"
"No; but—well, Tom, the last I knew of you, you was just a little shaver, spattin' around barefooted in the dust o' the Paradise pike, and I can't seem to climb up to where you're at now."
Tom laughed again.
"You'll come to it, after while. I reckon I haven't much more sense, in some ways, than the little shaver had; but I've been trying my level best to learn my trade. There is only one thing about this tangle that is worrying me: that's the labor end of it."
"We can get all the labor we want," said Caleb.