t a point safely out of
sight from the gate.

XXXV

A SOUL IN SHACKLES

The blue autumn night haze had almost the consistency of a cloud when
Gordon leaped the wall and set his face toward the iron-works. Or rather
it was like the depths of a translucent sea in which the distant
electric lights of Mountain View Avenue shone as blurs of phosphorescent
life on one hand, and the great dark bulk of Lebanon loomed as the
massive foundations of a shadowy island on the other.

Farther on, the recurring flare from the tall vent of the blast-furnace
lighted the haze depths weirdly, turning the mysterious sea bottom into
fathomless abysses of dull-red incandescence for the few seconds of its
duration--a slow lightning flash submerged and half extinguished.

Gordon was passing the country colony's church when one of the
torch-like flares reddened on the night, and the glow picked out the
gilt cross at the top of the sham Norman tower. He flung up a hand
involuntarily, as if to put the emblem, and that for which it stood, out
of his life. At the same instant a whiff of the acrid smoke from the
distant furnace fires tingled in his nostrils, and he quickened his
pace. The hour for which all other hours had been waiting had struck.
Love had called, and religion had made its silent protest; but the
smell in his nostrils was the smoky breath of Mammon, the breath which
has maddened a world: he strode on doggedly, thinking only of his
triumph and how he should presently compass it.

The two great poplar-trees, sentineling what had once been the gate of
the old Gordon homestead, had been spared through all the industrial
changes. When he would have opened the wicket to pass on to the
log-house offices, an armed man stepped from behind one of the trees
with an oath in his mouth and his gun-butt drawn up to strike. Before
the blow could fall, the furnace flare blazed aloft like a mighty torch,
and the man grounded his weapon.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gordon; I--I took ye for somebody else," he
stammered; and Tom scanned his face sharply by the light of the burning
gases.

"Whom?--for instance," he queried.

"Why-e-yeh--I reckon it don't make any diff'rence--my tellin' you; you'd
ought to have it in for him, too. I was layin' for that houn'-dog 'at
walks on his hind legs and calls hisself Vint Farley."

"Who are you?" Tom demanded.

"Kincaid's my name, and I'm s'posed to be one o' the strike guards;
leastwise, that's w