"Not yet, pappy; be patient just a little while longer and you shall know all there is to tell. I'm leaving you with a clear conscience to say to any one who asks that you don't know."
Caleb had struggled up out of his chair, and now he laid a hand on his son's shoulder.
"I ain't askin', Buddy," he said, with a tremulous quaver in his voice; "I ain't askin' a livin' thing. I'm just a-hopin'—hopin' I'll wake up bime-by and find it's on'y a bad dream." Then, with sudden and agonizing emphasis: "My God, son! they been butcherin' one 'nother down yonder for four long weeks!"
"I can't help that!" was the savage response. "It's a battle to the death, and the smoke of it has got into my blood. If I believed in God, as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical thieves,—thugs,—sandbaggers,—hit the bottom!"
He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and presently came back.
"I said you should know after a little: you may as well know now. I planned this thing; I set out to break them; and, as it happened, I wasn't a moment too soon. In another week you and Major Dabney would have had a chance to sell out for little or nothing, or lose it all. Farley had it fixed to be swallowed by the trust, and this is how it was to be done. Farley stipulated that the stock transaction should figure as a forced sale at next to nothing, in which all the stock-holders should participate, and that the remainder of the purchase price, which would have been a fair figure for all the stock, should be paid to him and his son individually as a bonus!"
The old iron-master groaned. In spite of the hard teaching of all the years, he would have clung to some poor shadow of belief in Duxbury Farley if he could have done so.
"That's all," Tom went on stridently: "all but the turning of the trick that put them in the hole they were digging for you and the Major. Vint Farley had no notion of letting Ardea bring her money into the family of her own free will: he planned to rob her first and marry her afterward. Now, by God, I'm going down to tell them both what they're up against! Don't sit up for me."
He had taken a dozen strides down the graveled path when he saw some one coming hurriedly across the lawns from Deer Trace, and heard a voice—the voice of the woman he loved—calling to him softly in the stillness:
"Tom! O Tom!" it said, "please wait—just one minute!"