The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for Gordonia, and Tom was gathering his dunnage.
"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and shape up my talk?"
Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship.
XX
DRY WELLS
As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials.
As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority and doing most of the talking.
"What's all this buzzin' round about young Tom?" queried one of the men in the miners' caucus. "Might' nigh every other word with old Caleb was, 'Tom; my son, Tom.' Why, I riccollect him when he wasn't no more'n knee-high to a hop-toad!"