“No more money, maybe,” said John.
“Fifty thousand more,” said Tillinghast. “I guarantee the result if they will spend fifty thousand more. They have spent eight times that already.” His idea of money in large sums was childlike.
John heard for a while, then heard without listening, while Tillinghast went on and on, thinking to himself out loud. On leaving him John was in a state of vague apprehension. Afterward he could not remember whether he had said goodnight.
All that he had ever heard, here and there, first from Thaddeus and then from others about his father’s fateful steel experiment at New Damascus came back to him, fused and made a vivid picture. That was not so strange. But he seemed to know more than he had ever heard. He seemed to be directly remembering,—not what he had learned from others but the experience itself as if it had been his own. He saw it. And presently in another dimension he saw the steel age that was coming. His imagination unrolled it as a panorama. He understood what it meant to increase one hundred fold the production of that metallic fibre of which there could never be enough.
The next morning he went to look at the abandoned steel plant. It was cast on a large scale. Quite four hundred thousand, as Tillinghast said, must have been spent on it.
“They do it in Europe,” he kept saying to himself. “We can do it here. There is only some little trick to be discovered.”
Later in a casual way he made contact with the owners. They were eager to get anything back. On the faintest suspicion that he might be soft-minded, they overwhelmed him with offers to sell out. At last he got it for nothing. That is, he agreed to take it off their hands flat and go on with Tillinghast’s experiment. If success were achieved their interest in it should be exactly what they had already spent on the plant; if not, he would owe them nothing and lose only what he himself put in.
North American Manufacturing Company stock was now valuable. He took a large amount of it to Slaymaker for a loan.
“What’s up now?”
John told him shortly, knowing what to expect. Slaymaker’s phobia was steel. The word made him mad. He had once lost a great deal of money in that experimental process. He snatched the stock certificates out of John’s hands, put a pin through them and tossed them angrily into a corner of his desk.