y on Paradise; and the old listless life of the unhasting period
soon receded quickly into a far-away past, rememberable only when one
made an effort to recall it.

First had come the completion of the Great Southwestern. Diverted by the
untiring opposition of Major Dabney from its chosen path through the
valley, it skirted the westward hills, passing within a few hundred
yards of the Gordon furnace. Since business knows no animosities, the
part which Caleb Gordon and his gun crew had played in the right-of-way
conflict was ignored. The way-station at the creek crossing was named
Gordonia, and it was the railway traffic manager himself who suggested
to the iron-master the taking of a partner with capital, the opening of
the vein of coking coal on Mount Lebanon, the installation of
coking-ovens, and the modernizing and enlarging of the furnace and
foundry plant--hints all pointing to increased traffic for the road.

With the coming of Mr. Duxbury Farley to Paradise, Thomas Jefferson
lost, not only the simple life, but the desire to live it. This Mr.
Farley, whom we have seen and heard, momentarily, on the station
platform in South Tredegar, the expanded, hailed from Cleveland, Ohio;
was, as he was fond of saying pompously, a citizen of no mean city. His
business in the reawakening South was that of an intermediary between
cause and effect; the cause being the capital of confiding investors in
the North, and the effect the dissipation of the same in various and
sundry development schemes in the new iron field.

To Paradise, in the course of his goings to and fro, came this purger of
other men's purses, and he saw the fortuitous grouping of the
possibilities at a glance: abundant iron of good quality; an accessible
vein of coal, second only to Pocahontas for coking; land cheap, water
free, and a persuadable subject in straightforward, simple-hearted Caleb
Gordon.

Farley had no capital, but he had that which counts for more in the
promoter's field; namely, the ability to reap where others had sown. His
plan, outlined to Caleb in a sweeping cavalry-dash of enthusiasm, was
simplicity itself. Caleb should contribute the raw material--land, water
and the ore quarry--and it should also be his part to secure a lease of
the coal land from Major Dabney. In the meantime he, Farley, would
undertake to float the enterprise in the North, forming a company and
selling stock to provide the development capital.

The iron-master demu