That was not the case. He had an inherited feeling for iron. Here was an opportunity to learn the business. There was of course a romantic touch in learning it on the ancestral scene. But that was an after-thought. It never occurred to him that he had a feud to keep with Enoch Gib. So far as he could see there was more reason for Gib to hate him as his father’s son than for him to hate Gib as a man who might have been his father if his mother had not changed her mind. His father had never spoken ill of Gib—had never spoken of him at all in fact. It was not in the Breakspeare character to bequeath a quarrel. And since Gib had been willing in this strange way to receive the son of a man whom he hated indelibly why should the son be loath? As for what happened to Enoch Gib’s young men,—and of this John heard more and more,—that was a matter he lightly dismissed.
A curious fact was that from the first Aaron’s son liked Enoch Gib. Perhaps like is too strong a word. His feeling for him was one of irrational sympathy, which, though he did not know it, had been Aaron’s feeling for Enoch to the end.
When John presented himself at eight o’clock Thursday morning Gib’s way with him was impersonal and energetic.
“Did you ever sell anything?” he asked.
“No,” said John.
“You will,” said Gib, “I see it in you.”
He removed the towel from over his coat on the back of the chair, folded the towel, laid it on the desk, and drew on his coat, saying: “I’ll show you now the difference between steel and iron. The first thing to be learned. The last thing to be forgotten.”
They went to the mill yard. Laborers were piling up rails that looked all alike to John except that they varied in length and weight. Gib led the way straight to an isolate pile and pointed John’s attention to the name of an English firm embossed on the web of each rail.
“That’s a steel rail,” he said. “It’s imported into this country from England. Now look.”
He beckoned. Four men who knew what he wanted lifted one of those rails and dropped it across a block of pig iron on the ground. It snapped with a clean, crisp break in the middle.