of logs and plaster; and in a little while there rose the odorous smoke
and sputtering fat of Hance's girl's cooking. Conrad Wishon soon started
the labor of preparing the forge. Jeremiah Stell, who had some slight
knowledge of carpentry, was directed to repair the plunger of the
water-wind apparatus. Slough was testing the beat and control of the
trip hammer. Hance and Surrie carried outside the neglected heaps of
iron hooks and tongs. Conrad explained to Alexander Hulings:
“I sent word to my son about the charcoal; he'll leave it at my place,
but we shall have to haul it from there. Need another mule—maybe two.
There's enough pig here to start, and my idea is to buy all we will need
now at Blue Lump; they'll lend us a sled, so's we will have it in case
old Wooddrop tries to clamp down on us. I'll go along this afternoon and
see the head furnace man. It will take money.”
Without hesitation, Hulings put a considerable part of his entire small
capital into the other's hand. At suppertime Conrad Wishon returned with
the first load of metal for the Penn Rolling Mills contract.
Later Hance produced a wheezing accordion and, rocking on his feet, drew
out long, wailing notes. He sang:
“Brothers, let us leave
Bukra Land for Hayti;
There we be receive
Grand as Lafayette”
“With changes of men,” Conrad continued to Alexander Hulings, “the
forges could run night and day, like customary. But with only one lot
we'll have to sleep. Someone will stay up to tend the fires.”
In the morning the labor of making the wrought blooms actually
commenced. Conrad Wishon and Hance at one hearth, and Haines Zerbey with
Sur-rie at the other, stood ceaselessly stirring, with long iron rods,
the fluxing metal at the incandescent cores of the fires. Alexander then
saw that the troughs of water were to cool the rapidly heating rods.
Conrad Wishon was relentless in his insistence on long working of the
iron. There were, already, muttered protests. “The dam' stuff was cooked
an hour back!” But he drowned the objections in a surprising torrent of
German-American cursing.
Hulings was outside the shed when he heard the first dull fall of the
hammer; and it seemed to him that the sound had come from a sudden
pounding of his expanded heart. He, Alexander Hulings, was making iron;
his determination, his capability and will were hammering out of
the stubborn raw material of earth a foothold for himself and a
justification! The smoke, pouring blackly, streaked with crimson sparks,
from the forge shed, sifted a fine soot on the green-white flowers of a
dogwood tree. A metallic clamor rose; and Emanuel, the youth, stripped
to the waist and already smeared with sweat and grime, came out for a
gulping breath of unsullied air.
The characteristics of the small force soon became evident. Conrad
Wishon labored ceaselessly, with an unimpaired power at fifty apparent
even to Alexander's intense self-absorption. Of the others, Hance,
the negro, was easily the superior; his strength was Herculean, his
willingness inexhaustible. Surrie was sullen. Mathias Slough constantly
grumbled at the meager provisions for his comfort and efforts; yet he
was a skillful workman. When Alexander had correctly gauged Zer-bey's
daily dram he, too, was useful; but the others were negligible. They
made the motions of labor, but force was absent.
Alexander Hulings watched with narrowed eyes. When he was present the
work in the shed notably improved; all the men except Conrad avoided
his implacable gaze. He rarely addressed a remark to them; he seemed
withdrawn from the operation that held so much for him. Conrad Wishon
easily established his dexterity at “shingling a loop.”
Working off a part of a melting sow, he secured it with wide-jawed
shingling tongs; and, steadying the pulsating mass on an iron plate,
he sledged it into a bloom. For ten hours daily the work continued, the
hearths burned, the trip hammer fell and fell. The interior of the
shed was a grimy shadow lighted with lurid flares and rose and gentian
flowers of iron. Ruddy reflections slid over glistening shoulders and
intent, bitter faces; harsh directions, voices, sounded like the grating
of castings.
The oddly assorted team was dispatched for charcoal, and then sent with
a load of blooms to the canal. Hance had to be spared, with Surrie, for
that; the forge was short of labor, and Alexander Hulings joined Conrad
in the working of the metal. It was, he found, exhausting toil. He was
light and unskilled, and the mass on the hearth slipped continually from
his stirring; or else it fastened, with a seeming spite, on his rod, and
he was powerless to move it. Often he swung from his feet, straining in
supreme, wrenching effort. His body burned with fatigue, his eyes were
scorched by the heat of the fires; he lost count of days and nights:
They merged imperceptibly one into another; he must have dreamed of his
racking exertions, for apparently they never ceased.
Alexander became indistinguishable from the others; all cleanness was
forgotten; he ate in a stupefaction of weariness, securing with his
fingers whatever was put before him. He was engaged in a struggle the
end of which was hidden in the black smoke perpetually hanging over
him; in the torment of the present, an inhuman suffering to which he
was bound by a tryannical power outside his control, he lost all
consciousness of the future.
The hammerman's injured arm prevented his working for two days, and
Alexander Hulings cursed him in a stammering rage, before which the
other was shocked and dumb. He drove Old Man Boeshore and his grandson
with consideration for neither age nor youth; the elder complained
endlessly, tears even slid over his corrugated face; the youth was
brutally burned, but Hulings never relaxed his demands.
It was as if they had all been caught in a whirlpool, in which
they fought vainly for release—the whirlpool of Alexander Hulings'
domination. They whispered together, he heard fragments of intended
revolt; but under his cold gaze, his thin, tight lips, they subsided
uneasily. It was patent that they were abjectly afraid of him.... The
blooms moved in a small but unbroken stream over the road to the canal.
He had neglected to secure other horses or mules; and, while waiting for
a load of iron on the rough track broken from the road to the forge, the
horse slid to his knees, fell over, dead—the last ounce of effort wrung
from his angular frame. The mule, with his ears perpetually laid
back and a raised lip, seemed impervious to fatigue; his spirit, his
wickedness, persisted in the face of appalling toil. The animal's name,
Hulings knew, was Alexander; he overheard Hance explaining this to Old
Man Boeshore:
“That mule's bound to be Alexander; ain't nobody but an Alexander work
like that mule! He's bad too; he'd lay you cold and go right on about
his business.”
Old Man Boeshore muttered something excessively bitter about the name
Alexander.
“If you sh'd ask me,” he stated, “I'd tell you that he ain't human. He's
got a red light in his eye, like——”
Hulings gathered that this was not still directed at the mule.
More than half of the order for the Penn Rolling Mills had been executed
and lay piled by the canal. He calculated the probable time still
required, the amount he would unavoidably lose through the delay of
faulty equipment and insufficient labor. If James Claypole came back
now, he thought, and attempted interference, he would commit murder. It
was evening, and he was seated listlessly, with his chair tipped back
against the dwelling he shared with Conrad Wishon. The latter, close by,
was bowed forward, his head, with a silvery gleam of faded hair, sunk on
his breast. A catbird was whistling an elaborate and poignant song, and
the invisible stream passed with a faint, choked whisper.
“We're going to have trouble with that girl of Hance's,” Wishon
pronounced suddenly; “she has taken to meeting Surrie in the woods. If
Hance comes on them there will be wet knives!”
Such mishaps, Alexander Hulings knew, were an acute menace to his
success. The crippling or loss of Hance might easily prove fatal to
his hopes; the negro, immensely powerful, equable, and willing, was of
paramount importance.
“I'll stop that!” he declared. But the trouble developed before he had
time to intervene.
He came on the two negroes the following morning, facing each other,
with, as Conrad had predicted, drawn knives. Hance stood still; but
Sur-rie, with bent knees and the point of his steel almost brushing the
grass, moved about the larger man. Hulings at once threw himself between
them.
“What damned nonsense's this?” he demanded. “Get back to the team,
Hance, and you, Surrie, drop your knife!”
The former was on the point of obeying, when Surrie ran in with a
sweeping hand. Alexander Hulings jumped forward in a cold fury and felt
a sudden numbing slice across his cheek. He had a dim consciousness
of blood smearing his shoulder; but all his energy was directed on the
stooped figure falling away from his glittering rage.
“Get out!” he directed in a thin, evil voice. “If you are round here in
ten minutes I'll blow a hole through your skull!”
Surrie was immediately absorbed by the underbrush.
Hulings had a long diagonal cut from his brow across and under his
ear. It bled profusely, and as his temper receded faintness dimmed his
vision. Conrad Wishon blotted the wound with cobwebs; a cloth, soon
stained, was bound about Alexander's head, and after dinner he was again
in the forge, whipping the flagging efforts of his men with a voice
like a thin leather thong. If the labor were delayed, he recognized,
the contract would not be filled. The workmen were wearing out, like the
horse. He moved young Emanuel to the hauling with Hance, the wagon now
drawn by three mules. The hammerman's injured arm had grown inflamed,
and he was practically one-handed in his management of the trip hammer.
While carrying a lump of iron to the anvil the staggering, ill-assorted
group with the tongs dropped their burden, and stood gazing stupidly at
the fallen, glowing mass. They were hardly revived by Hulings' lashing
scorn. He had increased Haines Zerbey's daily dram, but the drunkard
was now practically useless. Jeremiah Stell contracted an intermittent
fever; and, though he still toiled in the pursuit of his coveted wage,
he was of doubtful value.
Alexander Hulings' body had become as hard as Conrad's knotted forearm.
He ate huge amounts of half-cooked pork, washed hastily down by tin
cups of black coffee, and fell into instant slumber when the slightest
opportunity offered. His face was matted by an unkempt beard; his hands,
the pale hands of an Eastlake lawyer, were black, like Hance's, with
palms of leather. He surveyed himself with curious amusement in a broken
fragment of looking-glass nailed to the wall; the old Hulings, pursued
by inchoate dread, had vanished.... In his place was Alexander Hu-lings,
a practical iron man! He repeated the descriptive phrase aloud, with an
accent of arrogant pride. Later, with an envelope from the Penn Rolling
Mills, he said it again, with even more confidence; he held the pay
for the blooms which he had-it seemed in another existence—promised to
deliver.
He stood leaning on a tree before the forge; within, Conrad Wishon and
Hance were piling the metal hooks with sharp, ringing echoes. All the
others had vanished magically, at once, as if from an exhausted spell.
Old Man Boeshore had departed with a piping implication, supported by
Emanuel, his grandson.
Alexander Hulings was reviewing his material situation. It was three
hundred and thirty dollars better than it had been on his arrival at
Tubal Cain. In addition to that he had a new store of confidence, of
indomitable pride, vanity, a more actual support. He gazed with interest
toward the near future, and with no little doubt. It was patent that he
could not proceed as he had begun; such combinations could not be
forced a second time. He intended to remain at James Claypole's forge,
conducting it as though it were his own—for the present, anyhow—but he
should have to get an efficient working body; and many additions were
necessary—among them a blacksmith shop. He had, with Conrad Wishon, the
conviction that Clay-pole would not return.
More capital would be necessary. He was revolving this undeniable fact
when, through the lush June foliage, he saw an open carriage turn from
the road and descend to the forge clearing. It held an erect, trimly
whiskered form and a negro driver. The former was John Wooddrop. He
gazed with surprise, that increased to a recognition, a memory, of
Alexander Hulings.
“Jim Claypole?” he queried.
“Not here,” Hulings replied, even more laconically.
“Nonsense! I'm told he's been running Tubal Cain again. Say to him—and
I've no time to dawdle—that John Wooddrop's here.”
“Well, Claypole's not,” the other repeated. “He's away. I'm running this
forge—Alexander Hulings.”
Wooddrop's mouth drew into a straight hard line from precise whisker
to whisker. “I have been absent,” he said finally. It was palpably an
explanation, almost an excuse. Conrad Wishon appeared from within the
forge shed. “Ah, Conrad!” John Wooddrop ejaculated pleasantly.
“Glad to find you at the hearth again. Come and see me in the morning.”
“I think I'll stay here,” the forgeman replied, “now Tubal Cain's
working.”
“Then, in a week or so,” the Ironmaster answered imperturbably.
All Alexander Hulings' immaterial dislike of Wooddrop solidified into
a concrete, vindictive enmity. He saw the beginning of a long, bitter,
stirring struggle.
IV
THAT'. about it!” Conrad Wishon affirmed. They were seated by the
doorway of the dwelling at Tubal Cain. It was night, and hot; and the
heavy air was constantly fretted by distant, vague thunder. Alexander
Hulings listened with pinched lips.
“I saw Derek, the founder at Blue Lump, and ordered the metal; then he
told me that Wooddrop had sent word not to sell a pig outside his own
forges. That comes near closing us up. I misdoubt that we could get
men, anyhow—not without we went to Pittsburgh; and that would need big
orders, big money. The old man's got us kind of shut in here, with only
three mules and one wagon—we couldn't make out to haul any distance; and
John Wooddrop picks up all the loose teams. It looks bad, that's what
it does. No credit, too; I stopped at Harmony for some forge hooks, and
they wouldn't let me take them away until you had paid. A word's been
dropped there likewise.” Hulings could see, without obvious statement,
that his position was difficult; it was impossible seemingly, with
his limited funds and equipment, to go forward and—no backward course
existed: nothing but a void, ruin, the way across which had been
destroyed. He turned with an involuntary dread from the fleeting
contemplation of the past, mingled with monotony and suffering, and set
all his cold, passionate mind on the problem of his future. He would, he
told himself, succeed with iron here. He would succeed in spite of John
Wooddrop—no, because of the Ironmaster; the latter increasingly served
as an actual object of comparison, an incentive, and a deeply involved
spectator.
He lost himself in a gratifying vision, when Conrad's voice, shattering
the facile heights he had mounted, again fastened his attention on the
exigencies of the present.
“A lot of money!” the other repeated. “I guess we'll have to shut
down; but I'd almost rather drive mules on the canal that go to John
Wood-drop.”
Hulings declared: “You'll do neither, and Tubal Cain won't shut down!”
He rose, turned into the house.
“What's up?” Wishon demanded at the sudden movement.
“I'm going after money,” Hulings responded from within—“enough. A packet
is due east before dawn.”
If the canal boat had seemed to go slowly on his way to Harmony, it
appeared scarcely to stir on his return. There was no immediate train
connection at Columbus, and he footed the uneven shaded walks in an
endless pattern, unconscious of houses, trees, or passing people, lost
in the rehearsal of what he had to say, until the horn of an immediate
departure summoned him to a seat in a coach.
The candles at each end sent a shifting, pale illumination over
the cramped interior, voluminous skirts and prodigiously whiskered
countenances. Each delay increased his impatience to a muttering fury;
it irked him that he was unable to declare himself, Alexander Hulings,
to the train captain, and by the sheer bulk of that name force a more
rapid progress.
Finally in Eastlake, Veneada gazed at him out of a silent astonishment.
“You say you're Alex Hulings!” the doctor exclaimed. “Some of you seems
to be; but the rest is—by heaven, iron! I'll admit now I was low about
you when you left, in April; I knew you had gimp, and counted on it;
however———”
The period expired in a wondering exhalation. Veneada pounded on his
friend's chest, dug into his arm. “A horse!” he declared.
Alexander Hulings impatiently withdrew from the other's touch.
“Veneada,” he said, “once you asked me to come to you if I wanted money,
if I happened on a good thing. I said nothing at the time, because I
couldn't picture an occasion when I'd do such a thing. Well—it's come. I
need money, and I'm asking you for it. And, I warn you, it will be a big
sum. If you can't manage it, I must go somewhere else; I'd go to China,
if necessary—I'd stop people, strangers, on the street.
“A big sum,” Hulings reiterated somberly; “perhaps ten, perhaps twenty,
thousand. Not a loan,” he added immediately, “but an investment—an
investment in me. You must come out to Harmony. I can't explain: it
wouldn't sound convincing in Eastlake. In the valleys, at Tubal Cain,
the thing will be self-evident. I have made a beginning with practically
nothing; and I can go on. But it will require capital, miles of forest,
furnaces built, Pittsburgh swept bare of good men. No,” he held up a
hardened, arresting palm, “don't attempt to discuss it now. Come out to
Tubal Cain and see; learn about John Wooddrop and how to turn iron into
specie.”
At the end of the week there were three chairs canted against the stone
wall of the little house by the stream that drove Tubal Cain Forge.
Conrad Wishon, with a scarlet undershirt open on a broad, hairy chest,
listened with wonderment to the sharp periods of Alexander Hulings
and Veneada; incredulously he heard mammoth sums of money estimated,
projected, dismissed as commonplace. Veneada said:
“I've always believed in your ability, Alex; all that I questioned was
the opportunity. Now that has gone; the chance is here. You've got those
steel-wire fingers of yours about something rich, and you will never
let go. It sounds absurd to go up against this Wooddrop, a despot and
a firmly established power; anyone might well laugh at me, but I feel a
little sorry for the older man. He doesn't know you.
“You haven't got insides, sympathies, weaknesses, like the others of
us; the thing is missing in you that ordinarily betrays human men into
slips; yes—compassion. You are not pretty to think about, Alex; but I
suppose power never really is. You know I've got money and you know,
too, that you can have it. As safe with you as in a bank vault!”
“We'll go back to Eastlake tomorrow,” Hulings decided, “lay out our
plans, and draw up papers. We'll buy the loose timber quietly through
agents; I'll never appear in any of it. After that we can let out the
contracts for two furnaces. I don't know anything about them now; but
I shall in a week. Wishon had better live on here, pottering about the
forge, until he can be sent to Pittsburgh after workmen. His pay will
start tomorrow.”
“What about Tubal Cain, and that fellow—what's his name?”
“Claypole, James. I'll keep a record of what his forge makes, along with
mine, and bank it. Common safety. Then I must get over to New York,
see the market there, men. I have had letters from an anchor foundry in
Philadelphia. There are nail factories, locomotive shops, stove plate,
to furnish. A hundred industries. I'll have them here in time—rolling
mills you will hear back in the mountains. People on the packets will
see the smoke of my furnaces—Alexander Hulings' iron!”
“You might furnish me with a pass, so that I could occasionally walk
through and admire,” Veneada said dryly.
Hulings never heard him.
“I'll have a mansion,” he added abstractedly, “better than Wooddrop's,
with more rooms——”
“All full, I suppose, of little glorious Hulingses!” the doctor
interrupted.
Alexander regarded him unmoved. His thoughts suddenly returned to Hallie
Flower. He saw her pale, strained face, her clasped hands; he heard
the thin echo of her mingled patience and dismay: “Then I'll never be
married!” There was no answering stir of regret, remorse; she slipped
for ever out of his consciousness, as if she had been a shadow vanishing
before a flood of hard, white light.
V
GREATLY to Alexander Hillings' relief, Doctor Veneada never considered
the possibility of a partnership; it was as far from one man's wish, for
totally different reasons, as from the other's.
“No, no, Alex,” he declared; “I couldn't manage it. Some day, when
you were out of the office, the widow or orphan would come in with the
foreclosure, and I would tear up the papers. Seriously, I won't do—I'm
fat and easy and lazy. My money would be safer with me carefully removed
from the scene.”
In the end Alexander protected Veneada with mortgages on the timber and
land he secured about Harmony through various agents and under different
names. Some of the properties he bought outright, but in the majority
he merely purchased options on the timber. His holdings in the latter
finally extended in a broad, irregular belt about the extended local
industries of John Wooddrop. It would be impossible for the latter,
when, in perhaps fifteen years, he had exhausted his present forests,
to cut an acre of wood within practicable hauling distance. This
accomplished, a momentary grim satisfaction was visible on Hulings'
somber countenance.
He had, however, spent all the money furnished by Doctor Veneada,
without setting the foundations of the furnaces and forges he had
projected, and he decided not to go to his friend for more. There were
two other possible sources of supply: allied iron industries—the obvious
recourse—and the railroads. The latter seemed precarious; everywhere
people, and even print, were ridiculing the final usefulness of steam
traffic; it was judged unfit for heavy and continuous hauling—a toy of
inventors and fantastic dreaming; canals were the obviously solid means
of transportation. But Alexander Hulings became fanatical overnight in
his belief in the coming empire of steam.
With a small carpetbag, holding his various deeds and options,
and mentally formulating a vigorous expression of his opinions and
projections, he sought the doubting capital behind the Columbus
Transportation Line. When, a month later, he returned to Tubal Cain,
it was in the company of an expert industrial engineer, and with credit
sufficient for the completion of his present plans. He had been gone
a month, but he appeared older by several years. Alexander Hulings had
forced from reluctant sources, from men more wily, if less adamantine,
than himself, what he desired; but in return he had been obliged
to grant almost impossibly favorable contracts and preferences. A
tremendous pressure of responsibility had gathered about him; but under
it he was still erect, coldly confident, and carried himself with the
special pugnacity of small, vain men.