“No; I don’t believe Caleb knows.”

“That’s better.  Are you going up the mountain to-night?”

“Yes, I had thought of it.  Eva wants me to take her.”

“All right; you go, and get Major Dabney to yourself for a quiet half-hour.  Tell him we are all ready to close the deal, and we’re only waiting on the Gordons.  I’ll be up to dinner, and if anybody asks for me later, let it be understood that I have gone to my room to write letters.”

This bomb-hurling of Dyckman’s occurred on the Wednesday.  That night, between the hours of nine and eleven, the new steel safe in Tom Gordon’s private office was broken open and ransacked, though nothing was taken.  On Thursday afternoon, while Martha Gordon was over at Deer Trace training the new growth on Ardea’s roses, Tom’s room at Woodlawn was thoroughly and systematically pillaged:  drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor, the closets were stripped of their contents, and even the bed mattresses were ripped open and destroyed.

Mrs. Martha was terrified, as so bold a daylight housebreaking gave her a right to be; and Caleb was for sending to the county workhouse for the bloodhounds.  But Tom was apparently unmoved.

“It won’t happen again,” he said; and it did not.  But on the Saturday evening, just before the late dinner-hour at Woodlawn, Japheth Pettigrass, who had been trying to halter a shy filly running loose in the field across the pike, saw a stirring little drama enacted at the Woodlawn gates; saw it, and played some small part in it.

It centered on Tom, who was late getting home.  He never rode with his father now if he could avoid it, and Japheth saw him swinging along up the pike, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of his short coat.  The Woodlawn entrance was a walled semicircle giving back from the roadway, with the carriage gates hinged to great stone pillars in the center, and a light iron grille at the side for foot-passengers.  Tom’s hand was on the latch of the little gate when two men darted from the shadow of the nearest pillar and flung themselves on him.

Japheth saw them first and gave a great yell of warning.  Tom turned at the cry, and so was not taken entirely unawares.  But the two had beaten him down and were busily searching him when Japheth dashed across the pike, shouting as he ran.  The footpads persisted until the horse-trader came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men with blackened faces and hands.  Then they sprang up and vanished in the gathering dusk.

Tom was conscious when Pettigrass got him on his feet and hastily bound a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head.  He was still conscious when Japheth walked him slowly up the path to the house, and was sanely concerned lest his mother should be frightened.

But after they got him to bed he sank into an inert sleep out of which he awoke the next morning wildly delirious.  Ardea’s name was oftenest on his lips in his ravings, and while his strength remained, his calling for her was monotonously insistent.  He seemed to think she was at the great house across the lawns, and it took the united efforts of Japheth and Norman to hold him when he tried to get to the window to shout across for her.