“Is it agreed?”
“Yes,” said Enoch.
Then they said goodnight.
V
Enoch’s misgivings notwithstanding, the partnership of Gib & Breakspeare was very successful. This was owing partly to the ripeness of the opportunity and perhaps even more to the sagacity with which Enoch allotted to Aaron the tasks that were suited to his temperament. They put in equal amounts of capital and pooled their ore and coal lands on a royalty basis. Enoch was the dominant partner by right of knowledge and force of doggedness. He had studied the business. He took the manufacturing end and spent the whole of his time in New Damascus. Aaron took the selling end and made all the outside contacts.
It was easy to open the mines. That kind of work was already well understood in Pennsylvania.
Building a blast furnace was much more of an undertaking. It was in fact a daring adventure. Older and wiser heads had left it to the foolhardiness of youth.
Hitherto iron had been produced in this country, as elsewhere in the world, by primitive methods. Ore was wastefully smelted in rude charcoal furnaces unimproved in design since the Middle Ages. The process was of great antiquity. It was uniform in India at the time of Alexander’s invasion. Its origin even then was lost in myth. Tubal Cain, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” was master of it in the city of his distinguished ancestor, Cain, which was in the land of Nod.
Between the old iron master of the Himalayas, 1,500 years before Christ, with his little clay oven resembling an overturned pot, urging the fire with a bellows clasped in his arms—(a bellows made from the skin of a goat stripped from the animal without ripping the belly part, then tied at the leg holes, fitted with a wooden nozzle at the neck and stopped with an air valve in the tail orifice)—the difference between him and the iron master if the early 19th century was only that the latter had learned to build his forge of rude masonry and to make nature blow his fire.