go without being "near" in the
transgressing sense of the word? There was only one way of finding
out--to keep on going until his conscience pricked sharply enough to
stop him. It was a great convenience, Thomas Jefferson's conscience. As
long as it kept quiet he could be reasonably sure there was no sin in
sight. Yet he had to confess that it was not always above playing mean
tricks; as that of sleeping like a log till after the fact, and then
rising up to stab him till the blood ran.

He was half-way across the pasture when the crash of a falling tree
stopped him in mid-rush. And in the vista opened by the felled tree he
saw a sight to make him turn and race homeward faster than he had come.
The invaders, hundreds strong, had torn down the boundary wall and the
earth for the advancing embankment was flying from uncounted shovels.

Caleb Gordon was at work in the blacksmith shop, Sunday-repairing while
the furnace was cool, when Thomas Jefferson came flying with his news.
The iron-master dropped his hammer and cast aside the leather apron.

"You hear that, Buck?" he said, frowning across the anvil at his helper,
a white man and the foreman of the pouring floor.

The helper nodded, being a man of as few words as the master.

"Well, I reckon we-all hain't got any call to stand by and see them
highflyers ride it roughshod over Major Dabney thataway," said Gordon
briefly. "Go down to the shanties and hustle out the day shift. Get
Turk and Hardaway and every white man you can lay hands on, and all the
guns you can find. And send one o' the black boys up the hill to tell
the Major. Like as not, he ain't up yet."

Helgerson hastened away to obey his orders, and Caleb Gordon went out to
the foundry scrap yard. In the heap of broken metal lay an old cast-iron
field-piece, a relic of the battle which had one day raged hotly on the
hillside across the creek. A hundred times the iron-master had been on
the point of breaking it up for re-melting, and as often the old
artilleryman in him had stayed his hand.

Now it was quickly hoisted in the crane shackle,--Thomas Jefferson
sweating manfully at the crab crank,--clamped on the axle of a pair of
wagon wheels, cleaned, swabbed, loaded with quarry blasting powder and
pieces of broken iron to serve for grape, and trundled out on the pike
at the heels of the ore team.

By this time Helgerson had come up with the furnace men, a motley crew
in all stages of Sunday-morning dishevelm