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.
XXIV
Thane had been reporting laconically on the Twenty-ninth Street mill. It now was in action and the nails were piling up. John had not been out to see it. Their contacts had become irregular; generally they met by accident in the hotel lobby, rarely in the dining room. This was owing partly to John’s absorption in his scheme and partly to the resolve he had made to avoid Agnes. He had not once been close enough to speak to her since that third morning when his haggard true self met his anti-self in the mirror, saying: “She is his.” The only way he could put her out of his mind at all was to involve himself in difficulties. Trouble was a cave of refuge. As during those two nights of struggle with his anti-self, when it had almost conquered him, he played absently at faro and increased his bets to make the game absorbing, so afterward in business, wilfully at first and then by habit, he preferred the hazardous alternative; he seemed to seek those situations in which the chance was all or none. This made his ways uncanny. Luck seems to favor one who doesn’t care. Or it may be that one who doesn’t care sees more clearly than the rest, being free of fear.
“Better come and sight it,” said Thane, one morning in the lobby. “I’m worried where to put the nails.”
“We’ll go now,” said John. “Anyhow, I want to talk to you. I don’t know about this Twenty-ninth Street mill. It’s a poor layout. Maybe we’d better shut it up. Now don’t get uneasy. Wait till I’m through. The company—(and, by the way, you are a director and there’s some stock in your name)—it has bought nearly all the nail mills there are. Over a hundred, big and little, all over the place. The idea is to combine the nail industry in one organization and put it back on a paying basis. I want you to go around with me and have a look at mills. Some of them we’ll throw away. The trouble was too many of them.”
He went on talking to take up Thane’s injured silence. That he was a director in the company, that he had stock in it, that his salary was to be doubled,—none of this availed against the puddler’s pride in what he had done with the Twenty-ninth Street mill. The thought of now shutting it up hurt him in his middle. John on his side was disappointed in Thane’s inability to rise to an opportunity. So they came to the mill.
“Sounds busy,” said John.
Thane held his thoughts.