“‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you,’” he chanted monotonously, with roving eyes bent on finding his cap with the loss of the fewest possible seconds—­“’and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake,’—­and that’s all.”  And he was off like a shot.

“Mind, now, Thomas Jefferson; you are not to go near that railroad!” his mother called to him as he raced down the path to the gate.

Oh, no; he would not go near the railroad!  He would only run up the pike and cut across through the Dabney pasture to see if the train were really there.

It was there, as he could tell by the noise of hissing steam when the cross-cut was reached.  But the parked wooding of the pasture still screened it.  How near could he 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.