His manner was preoccupied and she let him alone. After supper he went to his room, removed his coat, waistcoat, collar and shoes and sat with his feet in the window, thinking.
They had three rooms,—two bed chambers and a living room between. She sat in the middle room sewing, with a view of him through the door, which he left ajar. He did not move, except to refill and light his pipe. He was still there, slowly receding beyond a veil of smoke, when she retired.
Before he went to bed the little nail mill was all made over and the stuff was moving right.
Thane at this time was twenty-five. He had lived nearly all his life in the iron mill at New Damascus. He could not remember a time when its uproar and smells were not familiar to his senses. His mother died when he was three. He was the only child. Then his father, who was a puddler and loved him fiercely, began to take him to the mill. It was a wonderful nursery. When the shift was daytime he was the puddlers’ mascot and playmate. At night he slept on a pallet in some gloom hidden niche from which he could see his father, satanically transfigured in the glare of the furnace. Then he went to school, but spent all his playtime in the mill. The thrill of it never failed him. When he was old enough to carry water he got a job. At nineteen he became his father’s helper and delighted to vie with him in the weight of pig iron he could lift and heave into the maw of the furnace. The normal carry was one pig. He began to carry two at a time and his father matched him. But one day his father stumbled. As they stooped again side by side at the iron pile he picked up one pig. The old man gave him a queer, startled look and did the same. After that it was always one pig, and they never spoke of it. When his father died Alexander took his place, and as he drew his first heat, Enoch watching, the fact stood granted. He was the best puddler in the mill.
He had it in his hands. Of iron, for coaxing, shaping and compelling it, he had that kind of tactile understanding an artist has for paint or clay, or any plastic stuff. He seemed to think with his hands. It is a mysterious gift, and leaves it open to wonder whether the brain has made the hand or the hand the brain. Besides this intuitive knowledge that belongs to the hand Thane possessed a natural sense of mechanics and a naïve way of taking nothing for granted because it happens so to be. All of this was to be revealed. It was John’s luck.
XXIII
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.