When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth Pettigrass's dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday.
The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound's ears, chose to be of this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when Tom fared forth. For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his noon-time snack of bread and meat with Cæsar. Yet Deer Trace set a good table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the mountain side.
Then there were children,—a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses at a mountaineer's cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of whom children and dogs have no fear.
In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it, seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.
Caleb's ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic. What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards and the sheriff's deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his duty as he saw it.
Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-table recountings of the day's happenings; attentive, but only filially interested: willing to encourage his father to talk, but never commenting.
Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite perfect.
But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of extinction—and triumphing hard-heartedly.
It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to hold all objects in suspension.
Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace blowing-engines. He started up quickly.