The contract offered by the shareholders was half per cent. lower than the one offered by Ivan.
But even this rebuff didn't daunt him. Two and two make four, and those who sin against multiplication must come to ruin sooner or later.
Ivan continued making in his workshop iron bars and rails. He accumulated a store in his magazines. Some time they would be wanted.
The Bondavara Railroad was to be made.
Csanta wanted to sell his houses in X——; the whole street was for sale. He said he was going to live in Vienna, and to fill his office of one of the directors to the company. He was to receive a large salary, and to have little or nothing to do. He had changed all his gold into papers—there is no use nowadays for houses or land or cattle or mines; nothing is good but paper. It wants neither groom nor manure nor pay nor machinery.
Therefore, he wished to sell the whole street. Fortunately, there was so little money in X—— that the inhabitants of the whole town put together couldn't produce enough money to buy a poor little street.
The Bondavara Railway was in progress. Along the line the navvies were working like a swarm of ants; they shoved wheelbarrows from morning until night; they dug the ground, blew up rocks, bored mountains, rammed plugs into water-sources, hewed stones, dammed rivers.
In the dark mouth of the Bondavara mine one man stood immovable. He was ever watching the work. His gloomy, threatening face was fixed steadily upon a windlass.
This man was Peter Saffran. He held in his hand a lump of coal, and as he looked back from the noisy landscape to the remnant of trees his eyes seemed to say, "Thou art the cause of all this tumult, this wealth, this splendor; thou art a living power—thou!" And he hurled the coal against the wall.