The Cinder Buggy (22 page)

The combine was now in a very awkward dilemma. If it met Enoch’s price it not only would be selling its own nails at a loss but selling them at a price far below that at which it was obliged to take Enoch’s entire output in case he should choose to deliver to the combine instead of selling direct to the trade.

“Whipsawed,” said John to Awns, “if you know what that means.”

For the N. A. M. Co., Ltd. from then on it was a race with bankruptcy, Gib pursuing. He sold Damascus nails lower and lower until it was thought he would give them away. He might ultimately go broke, of course, but that was nothing the combine could wait for. He was very rich,—nobody knew how rich,—and nail making after all was a small part of his business.

Under these unnatural circumstances John won the incognizable Slaymaker’s glassy admiration, for in trouble he was dogged and enormously resourceful.

“If we’ve got to live on the sweat of our nails,” he said, “we can’t afford to buy iron.”

Thereupon at a bankrupt price he negotiated the purchase of a blast furnace and puddling mill over which two partners were quarrelling in a suicidal manner. No cash was involved. He paid for it with notes. In Thane’s hands, and with luck that was John’s, the plant performed one of those miracles that made Pittsburgh more exciting than a mining camp. It paid for itself the first year out of its own profits. Then John turned it over to the N. A. M. Co., Ltd., at cost. On seeing him do this, Slaymaker, who had never parted with his first stock holdings, privately increased them.

There was a profit in ore back of the iron. John went to that. He got hold of a small Mesaba ore body on a royalty basis and had then a complete chain from the ore to the finished nail. There was still one profit. That was in the kegs. So cooper shops were added.

What with all this integration, as the word came to be for that method of working back to one’s raw material and articulating the whole series of profits, and what at the same time with Thane’s skill in manufacture, developing to the point of genius, the N. A. M. Company got the cost of nails down very low,—even lower as John one day discovered than it was in Europe. This gave him an idea. There was no profit in nails at home, owing to Enoch’s mad policy of slaughter, but there was the whole world to sell nails in. The N. A. M. Co. invaded the export field. This was a shock to the European nail makers. They met it angrily with reprisals. John went to Europe with a plan to form an international pool in which the nail business of the earth should be divided up,—allotting so much to Great Britain, so much to Germany, so much to Belgium, so much to the United States, and so on. If they would do that everybody might make a little money.

He returned unexpectedly and appeared one morning in Slaymaker’s office.

“Did you get your pool born?”

“Chucked the idea,” said John. “I found this.”

He laid on the banker’s desk a bright, thin, cylindrical object.

“What’s that?” Slaymaker asked, looking at it but not touching it.

“That.” said John, “is a steel wire nail. It will drive the iron nail out. It’s just as good and costs much less to make. You feed steel wire into one end of a machine and nails come out at the other like wheat.”

“Well?” said the banker.

“The machines both for drawing the wire and making the nails are German,” John continued. “I’ve bought all the American rights on a royalty basis.”

“What will you do with them?”

“I bought them for the N. A. M.,” said John.

“If this is going to be such a God Almighty nail why not form a new company to make it?” asked Slaymaker.

“I’d rather pull the horse we’ve got out of the ditch,” said John.

Slaymaker regarded him with an utterly expressionless stare.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Enter the steel wire nail. It solved the N. A. M. Company’s problem. Enoch could not touch it. The combine steadily reduced its output of iron nails, until it was nominal, and flooded the trade with the others. Enoch could make any absurd price he liked for iron nails, but as his output, though a formidable bludgeon with which to beat down prices, was only a fraction of what the country required, and as the remainder of the demand was met with the combine’s new product, wire nails superseded iron nails four or five kegs to one. They could sell at a higher price than iron nails without prejudice because they were different, and John, putting a selling campaign behind them, proved that they were also better. That probably was not so. But people had to have them.

S
TILL there were difficulties quite enough to keep John’s mind enthralled. The steel wire nails soon got the N. A. M. Co. out of the woods. But as the German nail making machines would devour nothing but German wire their food had to be imported by the shipload. The German wire drawing machines, acquired along with the nail making machines, miserably failed when they were asked to reduce American steel to the form of wire. That was not their fault really. It was the fault of American steel. The N. A. M. Co. had either to import German and English steel to make the wire the nail machines ate or import the wire itself. And now for the first time John turned his mind to this great problem of steel. Six or eight Bessemer steel plants had been built in the United States under the English patents at enormous cost and every one had failed. They could produce steel all right, and do it with one melt from the iron ore, which was what they were after. The trouble was that the steel was never twice the same. Its quality and nature varied. The process was treacherous. There were those who said it simply could not be adapted to American ores; that the only way this country could produce true steel was the old long way, which made it much more expensive than iron.

One night John recognized in the hotel lobby a figure that tormented both the flesh and the spirit of Pittsburgh,—the flesh by wasting its substance and the spirit by keeping always before it a riddle it had not solved. He was a frail, bent little man, not yet old, with a long thin mustache and a pleasing, naïve voice that had cost several iron men their entire fortunes. Wood street bankers wished he were dead or had never been born. This was Tillinghast, metallurgist and engineer, who had already designed and constructed four steel plants that were a total loss. He knew in each case what was wrong,—knew it in the instant of failure,—and begged to be permitted to make certain changes. Very simple changes. Quite inexpensive. He would guarantee the result. But as his changes at length involved rebuilding the whole plant and as the last of the steel was still like the first his backers sickened and turned away.

“What’s the matter, Tillinghast?” John asked. “You look so horribly down.”

It was a long story, incoherent with unnecessary details, technical exposition, expostulation and argument aside, told at the verge of tears. A steel plant on the river, opposite Allegheny,—one that everyone knew about,—had been under trial for a week. It was almost right. It needed only one correction. They were actually touching the magic. Yet his backers were on the point of throwing it up in disgust.

“No more money, maybe,” said John.

“Fifty thousand more,” said Tillinghast. “I guarantee the result if they will spend fifty thousand more.

They have spent eight times that already.” His idea of money in large sums was childlike.

John heard for a while, then heard without listening, while Tillinghast went on and on, thinking to himself out loud. On leaving him John was in a state of vague apprehension. Afterward he could not remember whether he had said goodnight.

All that he had ever heard, here and there, first from Thaddeus and then from others about his father’s fateful steel experiment at New Damascus came back to him, fused and made a vivid picture. That was not so strange. But he seemed to know more than he had ever heard. He seemed to be directly remembering,—not what he had learned from others but the experience itself as if it had been his own. He saw it. And presently in another dimension he saw the steel age that was coming. His imagination unrolled it as a panorama. He understood what it meant to increase one hundred fold the production of that metallic fibre of which there could never be enough.

The next morning he went to look at the abandoned steel plant. It was cast on a large scale. Quite four hundred thousand, as Tillinghast said, must have been spent on it.

“They do it in Europe,” he kept saying to himself. “We can do it here. There is only some little trick to be discovered.”

Later in a casual way he made contact with the owners. They were eager to get anything back. On the faintest suspicion that he might be soft-minded, they overwhelmed him with offers to sell out. At last he got it for nothing. That is, he agreed to take it off their hands flat and go on with Tillinghast’s experiment. If success were achieved their interest in it should be exactly what they had already spent on the plant; if not, he would owe them nothing and lose only what he himself put in.

North American Manufacturing Company stock was now valuable. He took a large amount of it to Slaymaker for a loan.

“What’s up now?”

John told him shortly, knowing what to expect. Slaymaker’s phobia was steel. The word made him mad. He had once lost a great deal of money in that experimental process. He snatched the stock certificates out of John’s hands, put a pin through them and tossed them angrily into a corner of his desk.

“I knew it. I knew it. All right. You can have the money. But I warn you. You’ll never see that stock again. You’ll be bankrupt a year from now.”

Nothing else was said.

Tillinghast treated John not as if John had adopted him but as if he had adopted John and his attitude about the steel plant was one of sacrosanct authority. He was really a cracked pot. It took six months to make the changes. Then they fired up. The first run was good steel, the second was poor, the third was good and the fourth was bad. They got so far that the steel made from the raw iron of one furnace would always be good. When they took the molten iron from two or more furnaces successively the results went askew again. Tillinghast cooed when the steel was good and was silent when it was bad. He could not deny that they were baffled and John had sunk two-thirds of everything he owned.

Thane was a constant onlooker. He looked hard and saw everything.

“It ain’t what you do to it afterward,” he said, breaking a long silence. “That’s the same every time. It’s back of that. It’s in the furnace.”

“Well, suppose it is,” said John. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Mix it,” said Thane.

“Mix what?”

“The molten iron from the blast furnaces before it goes to the steel converter.”

“What will you mix it with?”

“With itself,” said Thane. “Ore’s various, ain’t it? Pig iron as comes from ore is various, ain’t it? That’s why you puddle it so as to make it all the same, like wrought iron’s got to be. Here you take a run of stuff from this furnace ‘n one from that furnace ‘n it ain’t the same because it ain’t been puddled, but you run it into that converter thing ‘n think it’s got to come out all one kind of steel. It won’t.”

“How can you mix six or eight tons of molten iron?” John asked.

“There’s got to be some way,” Thane answered.

Tillinghast was deaf. It didn’t make sense to John. Yet Thane kept saying, “Mix it,” until they were sick of hearing him, and the steel persisted in being variable until they were desperate.

“Well, mix it then,” said John. “If you know how, mix it.”

Thereupon Thane built the first mixer,—an enormous, awkward tank or vat resting on rollers that rocked and jigged the fluid, blazing iron. Now they started the blast furnaces again and molten iron in equal quantities from all three was run into this mixer and sloshed around. From there it went to the converter. After two or three trials they began to get and continued to get steel that was both good and invariable.

And that was Eureka!

They tried the steel in every possible way and it was all that steel should be and is. They fed it to those fastidious German wire drawing machines and they loved it. Never again would it be necessary to import German or English steel to make wire, or German wire to make nails. They had it.

John formed a new company. Slaymaker came in. The men from whom John had taken the plant got stock for their interest. A large block was allotted to Thane for his mixer. John had the controlling interest. It was named the American Steel Company. But John and Thane between them spoke of it as the Agnes Plant.

“Let’s call it that for luck,” said John.

Thane made no reply. However, the next time he referred to it he called it so.

O
NE evening Thane and John were sitting together in one of their friendly silences, after supper, in the hotel lobby. Thane cleared his throat.

“We’ve got a house, Agnes ‘n me,” he said. As there was no immediate comment he added: “I suppose you won’t be lonesome here alone. We don’t seem to visit much anyhow.”

John said it was very nice that they had a house;—he hoped they would be comfortable;—had they got everything they needed? He did not ask where the house was nor when they should move; and that was all they said about it.

No. John would not be lonesome. There was another word for it and he couldn’t remember what it was. Although he saw her very seldom and then only at a distance, or when he passed her by chance in the hotel and they exchanged remote greetings, still, just living under the same roof with her had become a fact that deeply pertained to his existence. How much he had made of it unconsciously he did not realize until they were gone. Thereafter as he turned in at the door he had always the desolate thought, “She is not here.” The place was empty. The rooms in which he had settled them were open to transients. He thought of taking them for himself. On coming to do it he couldn’t. Se he went elsewhere to live; he moved about; all places were empty.

From time to time Thane hinted they would like to see him at the house. For some reason it seemed hard for him to come out with a direct invitation. However, he did at last.