The Quickening Part 48

Tom's heart burned within him, and the race thirst--for vengeance that could be touched and seen and handled--parched his lips and swelled the veins in his forehead. Vincent Farley had it all: the business, the good repute, the love of the one woman. At such crises the wild beast in a man, if any there be, rattles the bars of its cage, and--well, you will see that the gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth and that fierce talk of heart-cutting at the quickening moment were not inartistic.

Soberer second thought, less frenzied, was no less vengeful and vindictive. Tom had lived four formative years in a climate where the pa.s.sions are colder--and more comprehensive. Also, he was of his own generation--which slays its enemy peacefully and without messing in b.l.o.o.d.y-angle details.

Riding up the pike one sun-shot afternoon in the golden September, Tom saw Ardea entering the open door of the Morwenstow church-copy, drew rein, flung himself out of the saddle and followed her. She saw him and stopped in the vestibule, quaking a little as she felt she must always quake until the impa.s.sable chasm of wedlock with another should be safely opened between them.

"Just a moment," he said abruptly. "There was a time when I said I would spare Vincent Farley and his kin for your sake. Do you remember it?"

She bowed her head without speaking. Her lips were dry.

"That was a year ago," he went on roughly. "Things have changed since then; I have changed. When my father is buried, I shall do my best to fill the mourners' carriages with those who have killed him."

"How is your father to-day?" she asked, not daring to trust speech otherwise.

"He is the same as he was yesterday and the day before; the same as he will always be from this on--a broken man."

"You will strike back?" She said it with infinite sadness in her voice and an upcasting of eyes that were swimming. "I don't question your right--but I pity you. The blow may be just--I don't know, but G.o.d knows--yet it will fall hardest on you in the end, Tom."

His smile was almost boyish in its frank anger. But there was a man's sneer in his words.

"Excuse me; I forgot for the moment that we are in a church. But I am taking consequences, these days."

She looked out from the cool, dark refuge of the vestibule when he mounted and rode on, and her heart was full. It was madness, vindictive madness and fell anger. But it was a generous wrath, large and manlike.

It was not to be a blow in the dark or in the back, as some men struck; and he would not strike without first giving her warning. Ardea had been cross-questioning j.a.pheth about the a.s.sault at the Woodlawn gates--to her own hurt. j.a.pheth had evaded as he could, but she had guessed what he was keeping back--the ident.i.ty of the two footpads blackened to look like negroes. It was a weary world, and life had lost much that had made it worth living.

After the incident of the church vestibule, Tom spent a week or more roaming the forests of Lebanon in rough shooting clothes, with the canvas hat pulled well over his eyes and a fowling-piece under his arm.

People said harsher things then. With old Caleb failing visibly from day to day, and his mother keeping her room for the greater part of the time, it was a shame that a great strong young giant like Tom should go loitering about on the mountain, deliberately s.h.i.+rking his duty. This was the elder Miss Harrison's wording of the censure; and it was kinder than Mrs. Henniker's, since it was the banker's wife who first asked, with uplifted brows and the accent accusative, if the unspeakable Bryerson woman were safely beyond tramping distance from Woodlawn.

They were both mistaken. For all Tom thought of her, Nancy Bryerson was as safe in her retreat at Pine k.n.o.b as were the squirrels he was supposed to be hunting; and they came and frisked unharmed on the branches of the tree under which he sat and munched his bit of bread and meat when the sun was at the meridian.

And he was not killing time. He was deep in an inventive trance, with vengeance for the prize to be won, and for the means to the end, iron-works and pipe plants and forgings--especially the forging of one particular thunderbolt which should shatter the Farley fortunes beyond repair. When this bolt was finally hammered into shape he came out of the wood and out of the inventive trance, had an hour's interview with Major Dabney, and took a train for New York.

I am not sure, but I think it was at Bristol, Tennessee, that the telegram from Norman, begging him to come back to South Tredegar at speed, overtook him. This is a detail, important only as a marker of time. For three days a gentleman with shrewd eyes and a hard-bitted jaw, registering at the Marlboro as "A. Dracott, New York," had been shut up with Mr. Duxbury Farley in the most private of the company's offices in the Coosa Building, and on the fourth day Norman had made s.h.i.+ft to find out this gentleman's business. Whereupon the wire to Tom, already on his way to New York, and the prayer for returning haste.

Tom caught a slow train back, and was met at a station ten miles out of town by his energetic ex-lieutenant.

"Of course, I didn't dare do anything more than give him a hint," was the conclusion of Norman's exciting report. "I didn't know but he might give us away to Colonel Duxbury. So, without telling him much of anything, I got him to agree to meet you at his rooms in the Marlboro to-night after dinner. Then I was scared crazy for fear my wire to you would miss."

"You are a white man, Fred, and a friend to tie to," said Tom; which was more than he had ever said to Norman by way of praise in the days of master and man. Then, as the train was slowing into the South Tredegar station: "If this thing wins out, you'll come in for something bigger than you had with Gordon and Gordon; you can bet on that."

It was ordained that Gordon should antic.i.p.ate his appointment by meeting his man at the dinner-table in the Marlboro cafe; and it was accident or design, as you like to believe, that Dyckman should be sitting two tables away, choking over his food and listening only by the road of the eye, since he was unhappily out of ear range. When the two had lighted their cigars and pa.s.sed out to the elevator, the bookkeeper rose hastily and made for the nearest telephone. This, at least, was not accidental.

The conference in Suite 32 lasted until nearly midnight, with Dyckman painfully shadowing the corridor and sweating like a furnace laborer, though the night was more than autumn cool. The door was thick, the transom was closed, and the keyhole commanded nothing but a square of blank wall opposite in the electric-lighted sitting-room of the suite.

Hence the bookkeeper could only guess what we may know.

"You have let in a flood of light on Mr. Farley's proposition, Mr.

Gordon," said the representative of American Aqueduct, when the ground had been thoroughly gone over. "I don't mind telling you now that he made his first overtures to us on his arrival from Europe, giving us to understand that he owned or controlled the pipe-making patents absolutely."

"At that time he controlled nothing, as I have explained," said Tom, "not even his majority stock in Chiawa.s.see Consolidated. Of course, he resumed control as soon as he reached home, and his next move was to have me quietly sandbagged while he froze my father out. But father did not transfer the patents, for the simple reason that he couldn't. They are my personal property, made over to me before the firm of Gordon and Gordon came into existence."

The pipe-trust promoter nodded.

"You are the man we'll have to do business with, Mr. Gordon," he said promptly. "Are you quite sure of your legal status in the case?"

"I have good advice. Hanchett, Goodloe and Tryson, Richmond Building, are my attorneys. They will put you in the way of finding out anything you'd like to know."

There was a pause while the New Yorker was making a memorandum of the address. Then he went straight to the point.

"As I have said, I'm here to do business. We don't need the plant. Will you sell us your patents?"

"Yes; on one condition."

"And that is--?"

"That you first put us out of business. You'll have to smash Chiawa.s.see Limited painstakingly and permanently before you can buy my holdings."

The shrewd-eyed gentleman who had unified practically all of the pipe foundries in the United States smiled a gentle negative.

"That would be rather out of our line. If Mr Farley owned the patents, and was disposed to fight us--as, indeed, he is not--we might try to convince him. But we are not out for vengeance--another man's vengeance, at that."

"Very well, then; you won't get what you've come after. The patents go with the plant. You can't have one without the other," said Tom, eyeing his opponent through half-closed lids.

"But we can buy the plant to-morrow, at a very reasonable figure.

Farley is anxious enough to come in out of the wet."

"Excuse me, Mr. Dracott, but you can't buy the plant at any price."

"Eh? Why can't we?"

"Because the majority of the stock will vote to fight you to a standstill."

"But, my dear sir! Mr. Farley controls sixty-five per cent. of the stock!"

"That is where you were lied to one more time," said Tom with great coolness. "The capital stock of Chiawa.s.see Limited is divided into one thousand shares, all distributed. My father holds three hundred and fifty shares; Mr. Farley and his son together own four hundred and fifty; and the remaining two hundred are held in trust for Miss Ardea Dabney, to become her property in fee simple when she marries. Pending her marriage, which is currently supposed to be near at hand, the voting power of these two hundred shares resides in Miss Dabney's grandfather, _and my father holds his proxy_."

This was the thunderbolt Tom had been forging during those quiet days spent on the mountain side; and there was another pause while one might count ten. After which the man from New York spoke his mind freely.

"Your row with these people must be pretty bitter, Mr. Gordon. Are you willing to see your father and these Dabneys go by the board for the sake of breaking the president and his son?"

"I know what I am doing," was the quiet reply. "Neither my father nor Miss Dabney will lose anything that is worth keeping."

"Have you figured that out, too? The field is too small for you down here, Mr. Gordon--much too small. You should come to New York."

Tom rose and took his hat.

"You will fight us?" he asked.

The short-circuiter of corporations laughed.