While Thane was thinking how to set the nail mill in order, John,
sitting in the hotel lobby with his feet in the window, gnawing a
cigar, was reflecting in another sphere. His problem was the nail
industry at large. It was in a parlous way. Although cut iron nails
had been made by automatic machines for a long time there had recently
appeared a machine that displaced all others, because it made the nail
complete, head and all, in one run, and was very fast. This machine
coming suddenly into use had caused an over-production of nails. The
price had fallen to a point where there was actually a loss instead of
a profit in nail making unless one produced one’s own iron and got a
profit there. The Twenty-ninth Street plant had to buy its iron. The
probability of running it at a profit was nil.
His meditations carried him far into the night. The lights were put
out and still he sat with his feet in the window, musing, reflecting,
dreaming, with a relaxed and receptive mind. An idea came to him.
It will be important to consider what that idea was for it became
afterward a classic pattern. It had the audacity of great simplicity.
He would combine the whole nail making industry in his North American
Manufacturing Company, Ltd. Then production could be suited to demand
and the price of nails could be advanced to a paying level.
He took stock of his capital. It was fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe it
could be stretched to twenty. In his work with Gib, selling rails, he
had acquired a miscellaneous lot of very cheap and highly speculative
railroad shares, some of which were beginning to have value. But
twenty thousand dollars would be the outside measurement, and to think
of setting out with that amount of capital to acquire control of the
nail making industry, worth perhaps half a million dollars, was at a
glance fantastic. But one’s capital may exist in the idea. John already
understood the art of finance.
Leaving the Twenty-ninth Street plant in Thane’s hands, with funds
for overhauling it, he consulted with Jubal Awns and set out the next
morning on his errand.
The nail makers were responsive for an obvious reason. They were all
losing money. In a short time John laid before Awns a sheaf of papers.
“There’s the child,” he said. “Examine it.”
He had got options in writing on every important nail mill in the
country save one. The owners agreed to sell out to the North American
Manufacturing Co., Ltd., taking in payment either cash or preferred
shares at their pleasure. The inducement to take preferred shares was
that if they did they would receive a bonus of fifty per cent. in
common stock.
“But they will take cash in every case,” said Awns, “and where will you
find it?”
“They won’t,” said John. “I’ll see to that. What have you done with
Gib?”
Awns had been to see Enoch. The New Damascus mill produced in its nail
department a fifth of all the nails then made. There was no probability
of buying him out. John well knew that. Yet his nail output had to be
controlled in some way, else the combine would fail. So he had sent
Awns to him with alternative propositions. The first was to buy him out
of the nail making business. And when he had declined to sell, as of
course he would, Awns was to negotiate for his entire output under a
long term contract.
“He wouldn’t sell his nail business,” said Awns.
“I knew that,” said John.
“But I’ve got a contract for all his nails,” said Awns, handing over
the paper. “The price is stiff,--fifty cents a keg more than nails are
worth. It was the best I could do.”
“That’s all right,” said John reading the agreement. “We are going to
add a dollar a keg to nails. This phrase--‘unless the party of the
second part,’ (that’s Gib), ‘wishes to sell nails at a lower price to
the trade’--who put that in?”
“He did,” said Awns. “I couldn’t see any point in objecting to it. No
man is going to undersell his own contract.”
John handed the agreement back and sat for several minutes musing.
“There’s a loose wheel in your scheme, if I’m not mistaken,” said Awns.
“If you add a dollar a keg to nails won’t you bring in a lot of new
competition? Anybody can make nails if it pays. These same people who
sell out to you may turn around and begin again. You’ll be holding the
umbrella for everybody else.”
“Anybody can’t make nails,” said John. “I’ve looked at that.”
“Why not?”
“Nail making machines are covered by patents. There are only four firms
that make them. I’ve made air tight contracts with them. We take all
their machines at an advance of twenty-five per cent. over present
prices and they bind themselves to sell machines to nobody else during
the life of the contract. So we’ve got the bag sewed up top and bottom.
They were glad to do it because there isn’t any profit in machines
either with the nail makers all going busted.”
Awns stared at him with doubt and admiration mingled.
“Well, that is showing them something,” he said. “If you go far with
that kind of thing laws will be passed to stop it.”
“It’s legal, isn’t it?”
“There’s no law against it,” said Awns.
“We’re not obliged to be more legal than the law,” said John. “Tell
me, what do you know about bankers in Pittsburgh? I’ve got to do some
business in that quarter.”
Pittsburgh at this time was not a place prepared. It was a sign, a
pregnant smudge, a state of phenomena. The great mother was undergoing
a Cæsarian operation. An event was bringing itself to pass. The steel
age was about to be delivered.
Men performed the office of obstetrics without knowing what they did.
They could neither see nor understand it. They struggled blindly,
falling down and getting up. Forces possessed them. Their psychic
condition was that of men to whom fabulous despair and extravagant
expectation were the two ends of one ecstasy. They were hard, shrewd,
sentimental, superstitious, romantic in friendship and conscienceless
in trade. They named their blast furnaces after their wives and
sweethearts, stole each other’s secrets, fell out with their partners,
knew no law of business but to lay on what the traffic would bear, read
Swedenborg and dreamed of Heaven as a thoroughfare resembling Wood
Street, Pittsburgh, lined with banks and in the door of each bank a
grovelling president, pleading: “Here’s money for your payrolls. Please
borrow it here. Very fine quality of money. Pay it back when you like.”
They were always begging money at the banks. When they made money
they used it to build more mills and to fill the mills with automatic
monsters that grew stranger and more fantastic. Many of these monsters,
like things in nature’s own history of trial and error, appeared for
a short time and became extinct. When they were not making money they
were bankrupt. That was about half the time. Then they came to the
banks in Wood Street to implore, beg, wheedle money to meet their
payrolls.
There is the legend of a man, afterward one of the great millionaires,
who drove one mare so often to Wood Street and from one bank to another
in a zigzag course that the animal came to know the stops by heart,
made them automatically, and could not be made to go in a straight line
through this lane of money doors.
The bankers were a tough minded group. They had to be. Nobody was quite
safe. A man with a record for sanity would suddenly lose his balance
and cast away the substance of certainty to pursue a vision. The effort
to adapt the Bessemer steel process to American conditions was an
irresistible road to ruin. That process was producing amazing results
in Europe but in this country it was bewitched with perversity and it
looked as if the English and German manufacturers would walk away with
the steel age. Fortunes were still being swallowed up in snail shaped
vessels called converters, not unlike the one Aaron had built at New
Damascus twenty-five years before.
Of all the bankers in Wood Street the toughest minded was Lemuel
Slaymaker.
“All the same,” said Awns, “I should try him first. His name would put
it through and he loves a profit.”
Awns knew him. They went together to see him. Slaymaker saluted Awns
and acknowledged his introduction of Mr. John Breakspeare not otherwise
nor more than by turning slowly in his chair and staring at them. He
had a large white face, pale blue eyes and red, close-cropped hair. The
impression he made was one of total sphericity. There was no way to
take hold of him. No thought or feeling projected.
John laid out his plan, producing the papers as exhibits, A, B, C, in
the appropriate places. Lastly he produced data on the nail trade,
showing the amount of nails consumed in the country and the normal
rate of annual increase with the growth of population, together with a
carefully developed estimate of the combine’s profits at various prices
per keg. When he had finished the idea was lucid, complete in every
part and self-evident. Therein lay the secret of his extraordinary
power of persuasion. He seemed never to argue his case. He expressed
no opinion of his own to be combatted. He merely laid down a state of
facts with an air of looking at them from the other man’s point of view.
“And what you want is a bank to guarantee this scheme,” said Slaymaker.
“You want a bank to guarantee that if these people want cash instead of
stock the cash will be forthcoming.”
This was the first word he had spoken. The papers he had not even
glanced at. They lay on his desk as John had placed them there.
“That’s it,” said John. “Guarantee it. Very little cash will be
required.”
“How do you say that?”
“To make them want stock instead of cash,” said John, “you have only to
engage brokers to make advance quotations for the stock, here and in
Philadelphia at, say, par for the preferred and fifty for the common.
If you do not know brokers who can do that I will find them. The scheme
is sound. The stock will pay dividends from the start. A bank that had
guaranteed it might very well speak a good word for it here and there.
The public will want some of the stock.”
Slaymaker gazed at a corner of the ceiling and twiggled his foot. Then
he turned his back on them.
“Leave the papers,” he said, “and see me at this time tomorrow.”
When they were in the street again Awns said: “You got him.”
And so the infant trust was born,--first of its kind, first of a giant
brood. Biologically they were all alike, but with evolution their size
increased prodigiously. The swaddling cloths of this one would not
have patched the eye of a twentieth century specimen delivered in Wall
Street.
Slaymaker’s lawyers and Jubal Awns together verified all the
agreements. The stock of the N. A. M. Co., Ltd., was increased enough
to make sure there would be plenty to go around. Slaymaker took a large
amount for banker’s fees, John took a block for promoter’s services and
another block for the Twenty-ninth Street mill, the lawyers took some,
and a certain amount was set aside for Thane,--for Agnes really. John
was elected president and the combine was launched. Before the day came
on which the options of purchase were to be exercised the preferred
stock was publicly quoted at 105 and the common stock at 55, and
there were symptoms of public interest in its possibilities. As John
predicted, nearly all the nail manufacturers elected to take stock in
the new company, with Slaymaker’s name behind it.
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.