“You haven't got insides, sympathies, weaknesses, like the others of us; the thing is missing in you that ordinarily betrays human men into slips; yes—compassion. You are not pretty to think about, Alex; but I suppose power never really is. You know I've got money and you know, too, that you can have it. As safe with you as in a bank vault!”
“We'll go back to Eastlake tomorrow,” Hulings decided, “lay out our plans, and draw up papers. We'll buy the loose timber quietly through agents; I'll never appear in any of it. After that we can let out the contracts for two furnaces. I don't know anything about them now; but I shall in a week. Wishon had better live on here, pottering about the forge, until he can be sent to Pittsburgh after workmen. His pay will start tomorrow.”
“What about Tubal Cain, and that fellow—what's his name?”
“Claypole, James. I'll keep a record of what his forge makes, along with mine, and bank it. Common safety. Then I must get over to New York, see the market there, men. I have had letters from an anchor foundry in Philadelphia. There are nail factories, locomotive shops, stove plate, to furnish. A hundred industries. I'll have them here in time—rolling mills you will hear back in the mountains. People on the packets will see the smoke of my furnaces—Alexander Hulings' iron!”
“You might furnish me with a pass, so that I could occasionally walk through and admire,” Veneada said dryly.
Hulings never heard him.
“I'll have a mansion,” he added abstractedly, “better than Wooddrop's, with more rooms——”
“All full, I suppose, of little glorious Hulingses!” the doctor interrupted.
Alexander regarded him unmoved. His thoughts suddenly returned to Hallie Flower. He saw her pale, strained face, her clasped hands; he heard the thin echo of her mingled patience and dismay: “Then I'll never be married!” There was no answering stir of regret, remorse; she slipped for ever out of his consciousness, as if she had been a shadow vanishing before a flood of hard, white light.