Well, first, there was no available estate, save only a few thousand dollars in money. The wandering Blue Jay mill wore out at last. Aaron’s final act of business was to sell its good-will to a corporation. That was where the few thousand dollars came from. The plant itself was scrapped for junk. The day after that had happened Aaron lay him down with a fever and never got up again. John, in his junior year at college, was summoned at once, at Aaron’s request, as if he knew he were going to die. Yet he could not wait. He died the night before the boy arrived.
His will, written by himself on a sheet of foolscap, was very simple:
“All I have whatsoever I leave to my son, John. There is no one else.”
Pinned to this was a personal note as follows:
“Boy of Esther, I am leaving you. Go straight and God bless you. Bury me at New Damascus.”
The writing, though clear, was evidently an achievement of great effort. He was dying then and was gone in less than an hour.
The old Woolwine holdings of ore and coal, though still intact, were in a state of suspended development and not very valuable, perhaps quite unsaleable. As for the ore, it would not pay to develop that any further. The whole iron region was now beginning to be flooded with cheap Mesaba ore from the head of the Great Lakes. Gib, in fact, was already buying this ore for his blast furnaces. He could buy it for less than the cost of producing his own. As for the coal, the only market there had ever been for that was at the New Damascus blast furnaces. Gib owned all the furnaces and had all the coal he needed. Coal is coal, of course; it may be sold anywhere. But the Woolwine holdings, which John Breakspeare inherited, were probably not large enough to bear the capital that would be necessary to put New Damascus coal into commercial competition with the output of the big established collieries up the river.
These thoughts all wound up together in the young man’s meditations led nowhere. They merely revolved. They fell into a kind of rhythm. The same ideas kept repeating themselves in an obsessed, uncontrollable manner. “I’m stupid,” he said, and got up to walk. Of a sudden he became aware of what it was that had been making his thoughts go round like that.
There was a throbbing in the air, a rythmic punctuation, a ceaseless hollow murmur. He had heard this voice before, continuously in fact, without attending to it. Now he listened. It came from the chest of the great driving engine in the rolling mill, at the other side of town. It said:
Wrought iron