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The principal offices of Chiawassee Coal and Iron were in South Tredegar, and there the first vice-president was building a hewn-stone mansion, and had become a charter member of the city's first club; was domiciled in due form, and was already beginning to soften his final "r's," and to speak of himself as a Southerner by adoption.
To such an atmosphere of potential social ostracism Tom returned after the final scholastic triumph in Boston; and for the first few days he escaped asphyxiation chiefly because the affairs of Gordon and Gordon and the Chiawassee Consolidated gave him no time to test its quality. But after the first week he began to breathe it unmistakably.
Henry Dyckman, still bookkeeper and cashier for Chiawassee Consolidated, had fewer nightmares; and by the time he had been a month in undisputed command at the general office he had given over searching for a certain packet of papers which had mysteriously disappeared from a secret compartment in his desk.
"A number of things; among others, it buys the entire iron output of the Chiawassee Consolidated, just at present." "Dear me!" she said; "how fine and large that sounds! If I should say anything like that you would tell me that Brag was a good dog, but " He grinned ecstatically. It was so like old times the good old times to be bandying good-tempered abuse with her.
We are going to call a stock-holders' meeting, vote you into the presidency, take the bull squarely by the horns and blow in the Chiawassee furnace again dig coal, roast coke and make iron." "But, son! at the present price of iron, we can't make any money; couldn't clear a dollar a car if the buyers would push their cars right into our yard. And there ain't any buyers."
On the hillside back of the new foundry there was a one-roomed cabin built on the Gordon land years before by a hermit watchman of the Chiawassee plant. It was vacant, and Tom remembered that the few bits of furniture had not been removed when the old watchman died. Would the miserable shack do for a temporary refuge for the outcast?
Every piece of property they have, including Warwick Lodge, is mortgaged to the hilt, and this afternoon Colonel Duxbury put his Chiawassee stock into Henniker's hands as security for a final loan so Norman tells me. Perhaps it would interest you a trifle to know something about the figure at which Henniker accepted it." "It would, for a fact, Buddy."
But when money was no longer obtainable from this source, the pipe venture was the only hope. With the entire foundry force at the Chiawassee making pipe, Tom had gone early into the market with his low-priced product. But the commercial side of the struggle was fire-new to him, and he found himself matched against men who knew buying and selling as he knew smelting and casting.
Whether or not its keepings were destroyed by the fire, was known only to the younger Gordon, who, as the foreman of the Chiawassee night shift informed a Tribune reporter, had broken it open himself, deep in the small hours of the night following the fire, and behind the locked door of the furnace laboratory.
In these days of slowing wheels and silenced anvils South Tredegar had its own troubles, and when some one telephoned the editor of the Morning Tribune that Chiawassee Consolidated had succumbed at last, he did not deem it worth while to inquire whether the strike at Gordonia was the cause or the consequence of the sudden shut-down.
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