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At the close of his college course he would go home prepared to deal firmly but justly with the Farleys, prepared to show Ardea and the small world of Paradise a pattern of business rectitude, of filial devotion, of upright, honorable manhood. As Ardea had said, the example was needed; it should be forthcoming.
So he must gird his loins for the perilous venture of a break into the open under the eyes of men. Up beyond Angels, slumbering amid its rotting placers and abandoned ditches, lies the old camp of Farleys.
Again the ladies were not at home, but Mr. Vancourt Henniker came out and smoked a cigar with his customer on the piazza. The talk was pointedly of business, and the banker was urbanely gracious and mildly inquisitive. Would there be a consolidation of the allied iron industries of Gordonia when the Farleys should return? Mr.
It was not his province to make or meddle in the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was silent, having many things to render him reflective. When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.
Norman's recounting of this to Miss Dabney was the merest unburdening of an overloaded soul, and he was careful to garble it so that the prospective daughter-in-law of Colonel Duxbury might not be hurt. But Ardea read between the lines. Could it be possible that Tom's lifelong enmity for the Farleys, father and son, had even a little justification in fact?
Duxbury Farley asked these questions pathetically and insistently; at the Cupola Club, in the Manufacturers' Association, in season and out of season, wherever there was a willing ear to hear or the smallest current of public sentiment to be diverted into the channel so patiently dug for it. Was his virtuous indignation merely the mental attitude of all the Duxbury Farleys toward things external?
Through Major Dabney, who was not proof against Colonel Duxbury's blandishments at short range, however much he might distrust them at a distance, Tom's plan of reorganization, with the suggestion of the trusteeship for Ardea's third, had become known to the Farleys. Thereupon ensued a conference of two held in Vincent's room in the hotel, and sentence of extinction was passed on Tom and Caleb.
While he was absent, Tom sat, watch in hand, counting the minutes. It was his first pitched battle with the Farleys, and victory promised. But with industrial panic in the air the victory threatened to be of the Cadmean sort, and a scowl of anxiety gathered between his eyes.
Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year's, and there was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his assault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of "Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid.
Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike." But again he was shaking his head dubiously. "I'm not so sure about that.
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