Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite perfect. But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of extinction--and triumphing hard-heartedly. It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to hold all objects in suspension. Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace blowing-engines. He started up quickly. "What's that?" he demanded. "Surely they haven't blown in again?" Caleb nodded assent. "I reckon so. Colonel Duxbury allowed to me this mornin' that he was about out o' the woods--in spite of you, he said; as if you'd been the one that was doin' him up." "But he can't be!" exclaimed Tom, so earnestly and definitely that the mask fell away and the father was no longer deceived. "I'm only tellin' you what he allowed to me, son. I reckoned he was about all in, quite a spell ago; but you can't tell nothing by what you see--when it's Colonel Duxbury. He got two car-loads o' new men to-day, the Lord on'y knows where from; and he's shippin' Pocahontas coke, and gettin' it here, too." Tom sat glooming over it for a time, shrouding himself in tobacco smoke. Then he said: "You feazed me a little at first; but I think I know now what has happened." Caleb took time to let the remark sink in. It carried inferences. "Buddy, I been suspectin' for a good while back that you know more about this sudden smash-up than you've let on. Do you?" "I know all about it," was the quiet rejoinder. "You do? What on top o' God's green earth--" Tom held up his hand for silence. A man had let himself in at the roadway gate and was walking rapidly up the path to the house. It was Norman; and after a few hurried words in private with Tom, he went as he had come, declining Caleb's invitation to stay and smoke a pipe on the veranda.