This thing couldn’t happen; in some way, he must get his foot inside the door, so that it couldn’t shut on him. There was that note of Lewiston’s, due in thirty days—no, twenty-five now. What about that?
Later in the day, after he had been seeing drayful after drayful of boxes leave the factory opposite, Bullen, the foreman, came into the office with some estimates, pointing out the figures with a small strip of steel tubing held absently in his fingers.
While the clerks were all deferential, and those of foreign birth obsequious, Bullen had an air that was more than sturdily independent—the air and the eye of the skilled mechanic. On his own ground he was master, and Justin, with a smile, deferred to him. But Justin broke into Bullen’s calculations abruptly, after a while, to ask:
“What’s that you’ve got there? It looks like one of those bars that nearly smashed us.”
“You’ve got a good eye, sir,” said Bullen approvingly. “A year and a half ago you’d not have seen any difference between one bit of steel and another. But there’s one thing I didn’t see about it myself until Venly—he’s a new man we’ve taken on—pointed it out to me. He came across a case of these to-day we’d thrown out in the waste-heap. We thought our machine had jarred them out of shape, because they were a fraction off size; well, so they were. But Venly he spotted them in a minute, when he was out there, and he asked me if they weren’t from the Benschoten factory—he was turned off from there last week, they’re cutting down the force; they always do, come spring. He said they looked like part of a bum lot that had flaws in them. He got the magnifying-glass and showed me, and, sure enough, ’twas right he was! He says they’ve got piles of them they’ve been workin’ off on the trade at a cut price. Venly he said he didn’t have any stomach for a skin game like that.”
“That’s a pretty ruinous way to do business, isn’t it?” asked Justin.
“Oh, they’re going to sell out in July, so they don’t care. I pity anyone that’s counting on any sort of machine that’s got these in ’em. Would you take the glass and look for yourself, sir? Every one of ’em is flawed!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a—” Leverich’s words were not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling—a wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous, chill self-possession.
“You’re sure the agreement’s made?”