Everyone at length was more enthusiastic than John. He kept thinking of that phrase in the contract with Gib—“unless the party of the second part wishes to sell nails to the trade at a lower price.” No one else had noticed it, not even Slaymaker. Nobody else would have had any misgivings about it. Who could imagine, as Awns said, that a man would undersell his own contract? There is a law of self interest one takes for granted.
XXIV
THANE had been reporting laconically on the Twenty-ninth Street mill. It now was in action and the nails were piling up. John had not been out to see it. Their contacts had become irregular; generally they met by accident in the hotel lobby, rarely in the dining room. This was owing partly to John’s absorption in his scheme and partly to the resolve he had made to avoid Agnes. He had not once been close enough to speak to her since that third morning when his haggard true self met his anti-self in the mirror, saying: “She is his.” The only way he could put her out of his mind at all was to involve himself in difficulties. Trouble was a cave of refuge. As during those two nights of struggle with his anti-self, when it had almost conquered him, he played absently at faro and increased his bets to make the game absorbing, so afterward in business, wilfully at first and then by habit, he preferred the hazardous alternative; he seemed to seek those situations in which the chance was all or none. This made his ways uncanny. Luck seems to favor one who doesn’t care. Or it may be that one who doesn’t care sees more clearly than the rest, being free of fear.
“Better come and sight it,” said Thane, one morning in the lobby. “I’m worried where to put the nails.”
“We’ll go now,” said John. “Anyhow, I want to talk to you. I don’t know about this Twenty-ninth Street mill. It’s a poor layout. Maybe we’d better shut it up. Now don’t get uneasy. Wait till I’m through. The company—(and, by the way, you are a director and there’s some stock in your name)—it has bought nearly all the nail mills there are. Over a hundred, big and little, all over the place. The idea is to combine the nail industry in one organization and put it back on a paying basis. I want you to go around with me and have a look at mills. Some of them we’ll throw away. The trouble was too many of them.”
He went on talking to take up Thane’s injured silence. That he was a director in the company, that he had stock in it, that his salary was to be doubled,—none of this availed against the puddler’s pride in what he had done with the Twenty-ninth Street mill. The thought of now shutting it up hurt him in his middle. John on his side was disappointed in Thane’s inability to rise to an opportunity. So they came to the mill.
“Sounds busy,” said John.
Thane held his thoughts.
On beholding the scene of action within, almost at a glance, John placed the puddler where he belonged. Here was the work of a master superintendent. Nothing was as it had been except the engine and furnace. Everything else had been relocated with one aim in view, which was to eliminate all unnecessary human motion and shorten the train of events from the raw material straight through to the finished nail packed in the keg and stored. Besides the physical achievement, which alone was very notable, there was a subtle psychic relation between Thane and his men. They worked on their toes and liked doing it for him.
“Shake,” said John, holding out his hand. “No, we won’t shut her up. We’ll take her as a pattern. If you can do this with all the mills we’ll walk away with it. Have you figured your costs? They must be fine.”
“In my head,” said Thane.
They stood at a little greasy box-desk screwed to the wall under a window dim with cobwebs.
“I’ll show you how to figure them,” said John. “Iron, so much; fuel, so much; kegs, so much; oil, and so forth, so much; wear and tear of tools and plant, so much; labor, so much; total, so much. Then kegs of nails, so many. Divide that by that and you have the cost per keg. Let’s see how it will work out.”
It worked out nearly as Thane had it in his head and John was sentimental with pride and satisfaction.
“Come on,” he said, impatiently. “Leave a man in charge of this, and we’ll see the other mills.”
Starting with more than a hundred mills, they scrapped twenty outright, saving only their contracts, raw material and stock on hand; others they consolidated. In the end they had fifty well equipped plants strategically placed to supply the trade by the shortest routes. They had all to be overhauled according to Thane’s ideas. He turned the Twenty-ninth Street plant into a training station and sent men from there to work the other mills. It was a large and complicated program. He carried it through so skillfully that he was appointed vice-president in charge of manufacturing, and John was free to organize the company’s business and function executively.
He raised the price of nails, first twenty-five cents a keg, then fifty, then seventy-five cents, and stopped. At that price there was a good profit. Thane was steadily reducing costs by improving plant practice and that increased profits in another way.
A dividend was paid on the preferred stock in the third month. The omens were fine. Still, John was uneasy. No New Damascus nails had been received under their contract with Enoch. The making of nails had not stopped at New Damascus. He made sure of that. No New Damascus nails were coming on the market, either, for John knew everything about the trade. Then what was to be expected?
The answer when it came did not surprise him. He had guessed it already.
One day the nail market was knocked in the head. Enoch was offering nails to the hardware trade at a price seventy-five cents lower than the combine’s price. That meant he was selling them for fifty cents a keg less than the combine had agreed to pay him for his whole output. He had never tendered one ten-penny nail on that contract. Instead, working his plant at high speed, he had accumulated thousands of kegs expressly for the irrational purpose of casting them suddenly on sale to break the combine’s market—John Breakspeare’s market—Aaron’s market! John was the only person who understood it. Everyone else was dazed.
Slaymaker sent for John.
“What’s the matter with that man at New Damascus?”
“He’s out of his mind,” said John.
“Better buy him up at his own price,” said Slaymaker. “That’s what he wants.”
John knew better. However, to satisfy Slaymaker, he sent Awns to see Enoch again.
“You’re right,” Awns reported. “The old man is clean crazy. He won’t sell at any price. All he would do was to point to that stipulation in the contract and laugh at me.”
The combine stood aside until the trade had absorbed the New Damascus nails and then tried to go on without reducing its own price; but the trade became very ugly about it, the combine began to be denounced, and Congress, hearing from the farmers, threatened to take the import duty off nails and let the foreign product in. The combine had to let down the price and wait.
Three months later the preposterous act was repeated, Enoch flooding the market with nails at fifty cents a keg less than the combine’s price. There was no doubt this time that he was selling nails at a ruinous loss, and everyone’s amazement grew. Only John knew why he did it.
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 enor
mously 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.
XXV
STILL 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.”
The Cinder Buggy Page 17
