"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and shape up my talk?" Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship. XX DRY WELLS As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials. As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority and doing most of the talking. "What's all this buzzin' round about young Tom?" queried one of the men in the miners' caucus. "Might' nigh every other word with old Caleb was, 'Tom; my son, Tom.' Why, I riccollect him when he wasn't no more'n knee-high to a hop-toad!" "Well, you bet your life he's a heap higher'n that now," said another, who had chanced to be at the station when the Gordons, father and son, left the train together. "He's a half a head taller than the old man, an' built like one o' Maje' Dabney's thoroughbreds. But I reckon he ain't nothin' but a school-boy, for all o' that." "Gar-r-r!" spat a third. "We've had one kid too many in this outfit, all along. I'll bet, if the truth was knowed, th't that young Farley'd skin a louse for the hide and tallow." "Yes," chimed in a fourth, a "huckleberry" miner from the Bald Mountain district, "and I reckon whar thar's sich a hell of a smoke, thar's a right smart heap o' fire, ef it could on'y be onkivered." But all of this was in a manner beside the mark, and there were many to inquire what the Gordons were going to do. Ludlow, check weigher in Number Two entry, and the head of the local union, took it on himself to reply. "B'gosh! I don't b'lieve the old man knows, himself. He fit around and fit around, talkin' to me, and never said nothin' more'n that there was goin' to be a meetin' here at two o'clock, and Tom--his son Tom--was goin' to speak to it." "All right; we're a-waitin' on son Tom right now," said a grizzled old coal-digger on the outer edge of the group. "And ef he's got anything to say, he cayn't say hit none too sudden. My ol' woman told me this mornin' she was a-hittin' the bottom o' the meal bar'l, kerchuck! ever' time she was dippin' into hit. Hit's erbout time there was somepin doin', ez I allow."