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.