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Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward to start up with Caleb for superintendent the idle Chiawassee plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.
Or are the offices closed?" "Dyckman's there," was the answer; and they left the breakfast-room together to go around the block and have themselves lifted to the fifth floor of the Coosa Building, where half a dozen gilt-lettered glass doors advertised the administrative headquarters of Chiawassee Consolidated.
The safe, as the onlookers observed, was taken from the debris and conveyed, unopened, across the road to the Chiawassee laboratory and yard office.
The pipe foundry might be taken into the parent company at a certain nominal figure payable in a new issue of Chiawassee Limited stock, or three several things were due to happen simultaneously: the furnace would be shut down indefinitely "for repairs," thus cutting off the iron supply and making a ruinous forfeiture of pipe contracts inevitable; suit would be brought to recover damages for the alleged mismanagement of Chiawassee Consolidated during the absence of the majority stock-holders; and the validity of the pipe-pit patents would be contested in the courts.
Trewhitt and Slocumb, Chiawassee attorneys, and a torrent of persuasive ones poured into the Major's ear the latter pointing to the crying necessity for the revocation of the power of attorney, summarily and at once. The Major proved singularly obstinate and non-committal. "Mistah Caleb Gordon is my friend, suh, and I was mighty proud to do him this small faveh.
The inquiry into the affairs of Chiawassee Consolidated had revealed little or nothing more than the general manager already knew. The president had turned the inquiring stock-holder over to Dyckman, the bookkeeper, with instructions to give Mr. Gordon the fullest possible information, and: "Dyckman slid out of it, smooth and easy-like," Caleb's letter went on.
When the wired appeals brought forth nothing but evasive replies, Mr. Farley began to look for trouble, and it came: first in a mysterious closing of the market against Chiawassee pipe, and next in an alarming advance of freight rates from Gordonia on the Great Southwestern. Colonel Duxbury doubled his field force and gave his travelers a free hand on the price list.
One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home for the first time in two weeks.
But when these had served their purpose a thing happened. One fine morning it was whispered on 'Change that Chiawassee iron would not Bessemer, and that Chiawassee coke had been rejected by the Southern Association of Iron Smelters.
Though Thomas Jefferson did not know it, his deliverance on that side was nigh. It had been decided in the family council of two with a preacher-uncle for a casting-vote third that he was to be sent away to school, Chiawassee Coal and Iron promising handsomely to warrant the expense; and the decision hung only on the choice of courses to be pursued.
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