The combine was now in a very awkward dilemma. If it met Enoch’s price it not only would be selling its own nails at a loss but selling them at a price far below that at which it was obliged to take Enoch’s entire output in case he should choose to deliver to the combine instead of selling direct to the trade.
“Whipsawed,” said John to Awns, “if you know what that means.”
For the N. A. M. Co., Ltd. from then on it was a race with bankruptcy, Gib pursuing. He sold Damascus nails lower and lower until it was thought he would give them away. He might ultimately go broke, of course, but that was nothing the combine could wait for. He was very rich,—nobody knew how rich,—and nail making after all was a small part of his business.
Under these unnatural circumstances John won the incognizable Slaymaker’s glassy admiration, for in trouble he was dogged and enormously resourceful.
“If we’ve got to live on the sweat of our nails,” he said, “we can’t afford to buy iron.”
Thereupon at a bankrupt price he negotiated the purchase of a blast furnace and puddling mill over which two partners were quarrelling in a suicidal manner. No cash was involved. He paid for it with notes. In Thane’s hands, and with luck that was John’s, the plant performed one of those miracles that made Pittsburgh more exciting than a mining camp. It paid for itself the first year out of its own profits. Then John turned it over to the N. A. M. Co., Ltd., at cost. On seeing him do this, Slaymaker, who had never parted with his first stock holdings, privately increased them.
There was a profit in ore back of the iron. John went to that. He got hold of a small Mesaba ore body on a royalty basis and had then a complete chain from the ore to the finished nail. There was still one profit. That was in the kegs. So cooper shops were added.
What with all this integration, as the word came to be for that method of working back to one’s raw material and articulating the whole series of profits, and what at the same time with Thane’s skill in manufacture, developing to the point of genius, the N. A. M. Company got the cost of nails down very low,—even lower as John one day discovered than it was in Europe. This gave him an idea. There was no profit in nails at home, owing to Enoch’s mad policy of slaughter, but there was the whole world to sell nails in. The N. A. M. Co. invaded the export field. This was a shock to the European nail makers. They met it angrily with reprisals. John went to Europe with a plan to form an international pool in which the nail business of the earth should be divided up,—allotting so much to Great Britain, so much to Germany, so much to Belgium, so much to the United States, and so on. If they would do that everybody might make a little money.
He returned unexpectedly and appeared one morning in Slaymaker’s office.
“Did you get your pool born?”