The Cinder Buggy

by Garet Garrett

  “Nobody has,” said John.

  “Then we’re all crazy,” said the broker. “More than a million dollars’ worth of the stuff has just been delivered to us. We’ve got to pay for it at once.”

  “Let’s look at it,” said John. “I want to see it.”

  He saw it. The shares that had been delivered to him were Creed’s.

  John paid for them, though it almost broke his back. He used his own money until he had no more and borrowed the rest from Slaymaker and Pick on his notes. The fiasco was complete. American Steel was indignantly stricken from the Stock Exchange list because it had been manipulated in so outrageous a manner and the newspapers wrote about it most scornfully.

  It was all over and John and his crowd, now always excepting Creed, were at dinner in the Holland House, when a reporter from The Sun appeared at their table unannounced and asked: “Mr. Breakspeare, how do you feel?”

  John went on eating as he replied: “I feel like a dog that’s been kicked so much he goes sideways. I’ve got every pain there is but one. That’s belly ache.”

  This was printed the next morning on the front page of The Sun, and Wall Street forgot itself long enough to say: “Not a bad sport, anyhow.”

  “Now I suppose we’ll go back and attend to the steel business,” said Slaymaker.

  “In a day or two,” John answered. “There’s something I want to do here yet.”

  He wanted to find out how it happened. And he did. Bullguard, knowing Creed, had tempted him to part with his shares at a very nice price. These shares Bullguard turned over to Sabath with the understanding that they should be used to club John’s market to death. John had no hostile feeling for Sabath. For Creed he felt only contempt. But with Bullguard he opened a score.

  His state was not one of anger. He had only himself to blame. “I don’t so much mind getting plucked,” he said, “but I look so like Hell.”

  He simply couldn’t leave until he had turned the laugh. This he did in the way as follows: One morning at eleven o’clock a small funeral cortege, instead of stopping at Trinity Church as funerals should in that part of the city, turned down Wall Street and stopped at the door of Bullguard & Company. Six men drew from the hearse a silver-mounted mahogany coffin smothered in roses, carried it into the great banking house, put it down on the floor, went immediately out and drove away. It was so swiftly yet quietly done and it was so altogether incredible that the door attendant knew not what to do or think. His wits were paralyzed and while he stared with his mouth open the pall-bearers disappeared. So did the hearse and carriages. A great crowd instantly gathered. The nearest policeman was called. As no one could say how the coffin got there or what was in it he refused either to move it or to let it be moved until the coroner should come to open it. He was a new policeman and could not be awed. He knew his duty and no manner of entreaty availed. For an hour it lay there on the floor. Police reserves were summoned to keep a way for traffic through the gaping throng. Somewhere inside the banking house, out of sight, was Bullguard, surrounded by his partners, apoplectic and purple with a sense of unanswerable outrage. The coroner was accompanied by a group of reporters.

  When the coffin was opened, there upon the white satin pillow lay a rump of a pig, rampant, tail uppermost; and in the curl of the tail was twisted and tied like a ribbon the few feet of ticker tape on which the last quotations for American Steel were printed

  It was a freak story and the newspapers made much of it. Wall Street rocked with glee. John went back to Pittsburgh with a smile in his midriff, leaving the wreck of a fortune behind him.

  XXXVII

  JOHN’S Wall Street disaster was personal. He assumed all liabilities. Therefore it did not involve his partners, save that he owed Slaymaker and Pick nearly half a million dollars on his notes. Nor did it touch Thane and Agnes. He took good care of that.

  On the day of his return to Pittsburgh he had dinner with them. They had moved again, to a house of their own, one they had built on an unspoiled eminence among some fine old trees. They exhibited it with the pride of children. It was large and expensively made, with an unpretentious air, and one of its features, saved until the last, was an apartment for John. They hardly expected him to adopt it. However, it should be his always, just like that, whenever it might please him to come, and it had pleased them to do it.

  The evening meal was no longer supper. It was dinner. Thane at last was comfortable in the society of servants, even in the brooding, anonymous presence of a butler.

  Agnes now was in full bloom. Life had touched her in its richest mood. There were moments in which her aura seemed luminous, like a halo; or was that a trick of John’s imagination? He had not seen her for above a year. She was more at ease with him than she had ever been, spontaneous, friendly, quite unreserved, and by the same sign infinitely further away. There was no misunderstanding her way with Thane nor Thane’s with her. They had achieved the consonance of two principles. They were the two aspects of one thing, separate and inseparable, like right and left, like diameter and circumference. What one thought the other said; what one said the other thought. They conversed without words.

  Agnes pressed John with questions about the Wall Street episode. They had read a good deal about it in the newspapers. His narrative left much to be vaguely imagined.

  “But you yourself—how did you come out?” she asked. “Nobody else appears to have got hurt. What happened to you?” For on that point he had been evasive.

  “I did get rubbed a bit,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m all right.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Tell him what we’ve been doing,” she said, turning to Thane.

  “Remember,” said Thane, “you said once we’d see ore go in at the top of a blast furnace and come out rails at the other end of the mill without stopping?”

  “Yes,” said John, sitting up.

  “That gave me an idea,” Thane continued. “We’ve done it. It’s experimental yet but we can do it. Take the steel ingots straight out of the soaking pit and put them through the rolls with no reheating.”

  “Does anybody know it?” John asked.

  “Just ourselves,” said Thane.

  Agnes took it up there, described the process in detail, and told how Thane had evolved it through endless nights of trial and failure. John was amazed at the extent and accuracy of her knowledge. Thane anticipated his question.

  “She knows,” he said. “She could run a mill.”

  It was literally true. John was thrilled to hear how at night, in cap and overalls, she had been going with Thane to the mill to watch his experiments. Not only did she learn to understand them; she could discuss them technically, and make helpful suggestions. She had taken up the study of metallurgy in a serious way. She spent her days digesting scientific papers in English, French and German and was continually bringing new knowledge to Thane’s attention. Later to her immense delight she saw phases of this knowledge translate itself through Thane’s hands into practice at the mill.

  “It’s in the blood,” said John, bound with admiration.

  It was a cherishable evening. After dinner they sat on the veranda. Below them was a bottomless sea of velvety blackness, with no horizon, no feeling of solid beneath it, sprinkled at random with lights and intermittently torn by flashes from blast furnaces and converters many miles away.

  “It’s like looking at the sky upside down,” said Agnes.

  They could feel what was taking place off there in the lamp-black darkness. Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what God had forgotten—steel! steel! steel! There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. There an e
pic was forming.

  These three sitting on the veranda were definitely related to all of this. It had never ceased to thrill them. Much of it they had imagined before it was there. Some of those Leviathan tools were Thane’s own. He was thinking of them, not boastfully, yet with a swelling sense of having created them. They were his ectoplasm, his arms and legs and sinews externalized in other forms. Seldom did he review his work, being normally too much absorbed in the difficulty at hand. Now, as he gave way to it, a tingle of satisfaction stole through his blood. It made him wish to touch Agnes. His hand reached for hers and it was near. She seemed to know what he was thinking.

  John was thinking of the steel age, of what it yet required, of its still unimagined possibilities. Every railroad then existing would have to be rebuilt with heavier rails and bridges. Cars would come to be made of steel. Street railways were a new thing: they would take immense quantities of steel.

  They had been silent for a long time.

  “That’s the Agnes plant... way over there... that blue flame. There!” said Thane.

  “I had made it out,” said John.

  “What did you call it?” Agnes asked.

  Sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had called it the Agnes plant.

  “How nice!” she said.

  From that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent. They found they could speak naturally of incidents always until then taboo. They talked of Enoch, of their arrival and beginning in Pittsburgh, of the mill at Damascus which was doing well, and of each other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.

  When Agnes rose to leave she shook hands with John, saying: “Alexander will give you the key. We don’t press you. But it’s there for you whenever you have the impulse to come. Day or night. Any time. And even if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”

  With that she was gone, so suddenly that John had been unable to get any words together. He had not even said good-night.

  “That place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said Thane, lunging out of a silence. “I can’t find any way to say it. We know how it was when you brought us to Pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us until you bought the little nail mill. We know all about it. It’s lucky for all of us,—lucky for Agnes and me, I mean,—I didn’t know enough to see it then. There ain’t no way to say how we feel about it. You can just understand that’s what this key means.”

  John took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and said nothing.

  “The reason Agnes was asking you so close how you came out in Wall Street,” Thane added, “was we thought you might-a got skinned. We’ve got a lot of money. We think it’s a lot. And we want you to know—”

  “Don’t!” said John. “That’s enough. Now stop it. Stop it, I tell you.”

  “A-l-1 right, a-1-1 right,” said Thane. “I’m through, I ain’t a going on, am I? I’ve got it all said.”

  “I’m going,” said John. “Walk down to the gate.”

  At the gate they shook hands and lingered.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” said John. “There’s nothing you two—what I mean—”

  “I know, I know,” said Thane.

  “You don’t know anything,” said John. “Let me say something. I owe you a damn sight more than you owe me. I couldn’t have done anything without you. You’re the axle tree. I’m only the wheel. This one new wrinkle, if it proves out, is worth millions.”

  “Well, don’t lose that key,” said Thane.

  They shook hands again and pushed each other roughly away.

  XXXVIII

  THE steel industry was a giant without lineage, parentage or category. Nobody knew how big it should be nor could tell by looking at it what stage it was in. Not until afterward. It was measurable only by contrast with itself. It was supposed to be already grown up when John brought the American Steel Company back from Wall Street. But it was still in the gristle. Bone and sinew had yet to be acquired.

  “What, my God! if we had sold out then,” Slaymaker would say again and again, with the aghast and devout air of a man whose faith in the deity dates from some miraculous escape. “We should probably never have got in again,” he would add.

  If they had got out then they would have been able to count their wealth in millions. But they had to go on. And when at last they did get out in the golden harvest time years later they counted it in scores and hundreds of millions.

  Thane’s new method, which proved itself in practice, gave the American Steel Company a whip hand in steel rails. It could make them at a lower cost than anyone else in the world, owing to the saving in fuel. Nobody ever knew what that cost was. No matter at what price the Carmichael people sold rails John could sell them a little lower if he needed the business, and he became for that reason a burning thorn in the flesh of Bullguard, who had capitalized the Carmichael properties and brought the shares out in Wall Street. They had a wretched career. Everyone who touched them lost money. This was not only because of the American Steel Company’s competition; the steel industry as a whole was running wild. There was no controlling it. For a year or two the demand for steel would exceed the utmost supply at prices which made a steel mill more profitable than a gold pocket. Then new mills would appear everywhere at once and presently, although there never could be enough steel really, the bowl would slop over from sheer awkwardness.

  There were still the three great groups,—the Western group, the Carmichael group and John’s—all growing very fast. Minor groups were continually springing up at precisely the wrong time. They generally smashed up or had to be bought out by the others to save themselves from ruinous competition. The steel age cared nothing about profits. All it wanted was steel—more and more and more.

  Next was the phase of specialization. One mill made rails exclusively, another merchant steel, another structural shapes for bridges and skyscrapers, another sheet steel, another steel pipe, and so on. That only intensified the competition.

  Then trusts began to be formed, precisely as John had formed the nail trust years before, and for the same purpose, which was to regulate the output and keep prices at a profitable level. Somebody would go around and get options on nearly all the mills of this kind, of that kind and then get bankers to make them into a trust with shares to be listed on the Stock Exchange and sold to the public. So there came to be a steel pipe trust, a sheet steel trust, a bridge and structural steel trust, a tin plate trust, a trust for everything; and matters became a great deal worse because some of the biggest mills, such as John’s, were never in a trust and if the pipe trust or the structural steel trust got prices too high the independent mills would begin to make pipe or structural steel. Besides, each trust was a law unto itself and the steel industry was still anarchic.

  Now finance began to be worried. The shares of these trusts having been floated in Wall Street and the public at last having begun to buy them, an outbreak of disastrous competition among the trusts, or between the trusts and the independents, or an overrunning of the steel spool, caused a panic on the Stock Exchange. Enormous sums of capital had become involved. Every such panic caused a general commotion, like a small earthquake. Something would have to be done to stabilize the steel industry. That was the word; everybody began to say, Stabilize it! Gradually there crystallized the thought of a great trust of trusts to embrace everything. Not otherwise could the steel industry be stabilized. Any such colossal scheme as that would have to consider first of all the three dominant groups. But when overtures were made to John directly or through his partners, he repulsed them. To Wall Street’s emissaries he would say flatly, “No.” To his partners he would say, “Not yet.”

  His word was final. Having retrieved his fortune in the first year after his inglorious shipwreck, by the most daring and brilliant selling campaign the steel industry had ever seen,—a campaign that put American rails over European rails in all the markets of th
e world,—his authority not only was restored: it was increased. Then, having paid off his notes with Slaymaker and Pick, he had got possession of Creed’s shares. That made his interest in the American Steel Company greater than that of any three others. There was still the North American Manufacturing Company, in which he was the largest stockholder; it controlled the manufacture of steel wire and nails, and had never ceased to pay dividends.

  He enforced one policy of business. That was to make steel continuously under all conditions and never to close a plant except for repairs. Back of him was Thane steadily reducing the costs of manufacture. Sometimes they sold steel at a loss. In the long run, however, this policy paid so handsomely that they were presently able to find in their own profits the capital they needed for expansion. On an ever-increasing scale they devoted profits to the construction and purchase of new properties,—more mines, more ships, more mills. When his partners complained, saying it was time to take something out instead of putting all their gains back again, John offered to buy them out.

  So he grew wise and tyrannical and a little grey at the temples. His voice became husky. He lived hard, worked hard, walked steadily on the edge of the precipice, with nothing he cared for in view. On his watch chain he carried the key to Thane’s house. Twice he got as far as the gate and turned back.

  XXXIX

  WHEN the steel age walked across the ocean from Europe a dilemma was created. The will and mentality were here; the labor was there. Until then labor in American mills had been made up of British, Irish, Welsh, Germans, Swedes and, choicest of all, Buckwheats, meaning young American brawn released from the farm by the advent of man-saving agricultural implements. The steel age widened the gap between brain and muscle. It required a higher kind of imagination at the top and a lower grade of labor below. There was no such labor here,—at least, nowhere near enough. Hence an impouring of Hungarians, Slavs, Polacks and other inferior European types,—hairy, brutish, with slanting foreheads.