John Breakspeare sat on the veranda of Lycoming House thinking of this situation and of what he should do. His father’s old friends had pursued him with offers of hospitality, and as he had to choose, he chose that of Thaddeus, for two reasons. One was that he liked Thaddeus extravagantly; the other was that living at the inn entailed no social amenities. He was by no means a solitary person. Naturally he was gregarious. But for the first time in his life he wished to be let alone, and that great friendly hulk dozing in the hickory chair at the end of the bar was the only person who had no meddling curiosity and tactfully ignored his existence. Well, first, there was no available estate, save only a few thousand dollars in money. The wandering Blue Jay mill wore out at last. Aaron’s final act of business was to sell its good-will to a corporation. That was where the few thousand dollars came from. The plant itself was scrapped for junk. The day after that had happened Aaron lay him down with a fever and never got up again. John, in his junior year at college, was summoned at once, at Aaron’s request, as if he knew he were going to die. Yet he could not wait. He died the night before the boy arrived.
[96]
His will, written by himself on a sheet of foolscap, was very simple:
“All I have whatsoever I leave to my son, John. There is no one else.”
Pinned to this was a personal note as follows:
“Boy of Esther, I am leaving you. Go straight and God bless you. Bury me at New Damascus.”
The writing, though clear, was evidently an achievement of great effort. He was dying then and was gone in less than an hour.
The old Woolwine holdings of ore and coal, though still intact, were in a state of suspended development and not very valuable, perhaps quite unsaleable. As for the ore, it would not pay to develop that any further. The whole iron region was now beginning to be flooded with cheap Mesaba ore from the head of the Great Lakes. Gib, in fact, was already buying this ore for his blast furnaces. He could buy it for less than the cost of producing his own. As for the coal, the only market there had ever been for that was at the New Damascus blast furnaces. Gib owned all the furnaces and had all the coal he needed. Coal is coal, of course; it may be sold anywhere. But the Woolwine holdings, which John Breakspeare inherited, were probably not large enough to bear the capital that would be necessary to put New Damascus coal into commercial competition with the output of the big established collieries up the river.
[97]
These thoughts all wound up together in the young man’s meditations led nowhere. They merely revolved. They fell into a kind of rhythm. The same ideas kept repeating themselves in an obsessed, uncontrollable manner. “I’m stupid,” he said, and got up to walk. Of a sudden he became aware of what it was that had been making his thoughts go round like that.
There was a throbbing in the air, a rythmic punctuation, a ceaseless hollow murmur. He had heard this voice before, continuously in fact, without attending to it. Now he listened. It came from the chest of the great driving engine in the rolling mill, at the other side of town. It said:
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
Iron, iron.
The mill!
The mill his father founded!
Volcanic fires, incandescent difficulties, quick, elemental fluids,—in these his father wrought and failed. Had not the son some pressing business with that same Plutonic stuff? He moved as if he had. With no shape of an idea in his mind he walked purposefully, stalking the voice of the engine, and came to the rear of the mill.
It was evening.
He had never seen an iron mill before. For some time he stood outside the gate, viewing it at large,[98] smelling and tasting its fumes, acquainting his senses with its moody roar. There was at first no sign of human agency. Then he made out figures passing back and forth through bolts of sudden light. They seemed solitary, silent, bored. The notion crossed his fancy that man had tapped the earth of forces which turned genii on his hands, enslaved him, commanded weary obedience and in the end consumed him.
Now a shift was taking place. Night crews were coming on; day crews were going out. Those arriving walked erect; their faces, white and clean, showed vividly against the murky texture. Those going out were limp and bent; their faces did not show at all. Twice a day they passed like that, bodies healed by sleep and food relieving those all fagged and bruised from a twelve-hour struggle with the genii. Puddlers, heaters, hammermen and rollers were marked apart from common, unskilled labor by leather aprons on their feet, tied round the ankles, flapping as they walked.
Curious glances fell upon the young man idling there in the dusk. Nobody spoke to him. On the gate was a painted sign: “Positively no admittance.” The rule was rigid, even more so in Gib’s mill than at any other in the country, and all iron working plants in those days were guarded very jealously because spies went to and fro stealing methods, formulas and ideas. The weakness of a rigid rule is that everyone supposes it will be observed. No doubt the men who saw Breakspeare enter took him to be a young man from the[99] office. No common trespasser would be so cool about it; a spy would make his entrance surreptitiously. Whatwise, nobody stopped him. He went all the way in and was swallowed up in the gloomy, swirling, glare-punctured commotion. And once inside he could move freely from place to place. No one paid him the slightest heed.
The air was torn, shattered, upheaved, compressed, pierced through, by sounds of shock, strain, impact, clangor, cannonade and shrill whistle blasts, occurring in any order of sequence, and then all at one time dissolving in a moment of vast silence even more amazing to the ear. Conversation would be possible only by shrieks close up. The men seemed never to speak at their work. They did not communicate ideas by signs either. Each man had his place, his part, his own pattern of action, and did what he did with a kind of mechanical inevitability, as if it were something he had never learned. They were related not to each other but to the process, kept their eyes fixedly on it for obvious reasons, and stepped warily. A false gesture might have immediate consequences.
The process just then was that of rolling iron bars. From where Breakspeare stood he saw the latter end of it. He saw the finished bars spurt like dull red serpents from between the rolls. Two men standing with their gaze on the running hole from which the reptile darted forth snared it by the neck with tongs, walked slowly backward with it as the rolls released the glowing body, until its tail came free; then dragged[100] it off, a tame, limp thing, turning black, and put it straight along with others to cool.
The whole process could not be seen at once. It took place in a train of events covering many acres of area. It could be followed backward,—that is by going from the finished bars to the source of the iron, or in the other direction downstream, from the puddling furnaces where the iron is cooked, to the hammermen who mauled it into rough shape and thence to the rolls. Breakspeare, having started that way, traced it backward, from the finished bar to the source of its becoming.
He moved to a position from which he could see all that happened at the rolls.
The rolls were merely enormous cylinders revolving together in gears, with grooves through which to pass the malleable iron. The first groove through which it passed was very large, the next one smaller, the next one smaller still, until the last, out of which the final form appeared. The iron had to be passed back and forth through each of these grooves in turn.
On each side of the rolls stood men in pairs with tongs,—silent, foreboding men, with masks on their faces and leather aprons on their feet, singularly impassive and still, save in moments of action. At intervals of two or three minutes a man came running with two hundred weight of incandescent iron in the shape of a rough log five or six feet long, held in tongs swung by a chain to an overhead rail, and dropped it at the feet of the rollers. Becoming that instant alive, the[101] rollers picked it up with tongs, passed it through the first groove of the rolls, giving it a handful of sand if it stuck, and then stood again in that attitude of brooding immobility, leaning on their tongs, looking at nothing, bathed in sparks as the tail of the iron disappeared. On the other side of the rolls similar men with similar tongs seized it as you would take a reptile by the neck in a cleft stick, controlled an............