“We can buy it now for one or two dollars less than it costs us to get it out of our own woods,” Halloran added.
This interested the cashier very much indeed. Higginson & Company were good, all the way through; and their manager seemed to have a keen business sense. Mr. Higginson's sickness entered his calculations; but still the investment was sound. The amount must be discussed and one or two details mentioned. But it was after a very few minutes of talk that the cashier said:
“We shall be very glad to let you have the money, Mr. Halloran.”
The arrangements were soon made. Then Hal-loran said good-morning and went down to the telegraph office in the basement of the building. And as this short message hummed over the wires to Crosman, “Go ahead. Halloran,” he walked out into the street to begin the battle. All idleness was over now for Halloran—all merely defensive work, all waiting for results. From now on it was to be straight-out fighting; and he knew that the best man would win.
Before that Saturday afternoon was far advanced Halloran's agents were at work. Their instructions were simple. “Buy all the one-inch and two-inch stuff you can get, pine and hemlock, in regular lengths and widths,” was what he had said, in starting them out; and before evening orders had been placed in Chicago alone for nearly a million feet. The work would be pushed still further on Monday and Tuesday. Every company in the “combine” would be given an opportunity to sell heavily.
Farther up Lake Michigan Crosman was working with equal energy. It was a chance for Crosman, an opportunity to show his metal, and he realized it. There had been some pulling at odds in the office, and the assistant had perhaps been inclined to misunderstand Halloran in more ways than one; but all that was now swept away, and the enthusiasm of vigorous work was in him.
For the first time since the fight began he fully understood it; he had been made to see that there was a possibility of winning. And when Halloran's message reached him that morning and he realized that no regular steamer would cross the lake before evening, he hurried a tug into commission, and with Captain Craig and MacGregor to get him over he made the passage to Milwaukee in less than seven hours. Late as it was when he arrived, he not only organized the work for Monday, but succeeded in placing the first few orders.
And so it fell out that the reduction in price, made solely to ruin Higginson, was suddenly and unexpectedly turned to his advantage. The busy companies that were scattered about the northern shores of the lake did not know this yet—did not dream that they were crowding extra shifts of men into their mills to help out Higginson, that the logs floating down a score of rivers in both peninsulas were to be cut for Higginson, that the steamers loading at a score of wharves were running for Higginson, that the long list of lake towns from which had arisen the heavy demand for lumber were buying for Higginson. They did not know these things, and Halloran did not mean that they should know them.
Perhaps it was the knowledge of all this, and the natural elation after such a day's work, that between them took Halloran's actions out of his own hands that Saturday evening. There were times when he was likely to surprise himself; this seemed to be one of them. During these past three years he had been in Chicago a number of times, but always only to transact his business and go directly back to Wauchung, always heeding that stubborn quality somewhere within him that had had so much to do with pulling him up from nothing and pushing him on in the world, that had kept him out of foolishness on at least one important occasion. He had managed, until now, to side with the stubborn quality against a certain impulse that had occasionally given him trouble, but to-night the impulse caught him off his guard. There were a good many things he might have done—there were even one or two details of the fight still to be studied out—but the impulse, once securely planted in authority, swept aside every other thought. And so, after dinner, Halloran caught a train for Evanston.
An odd feeling took possession of him when he found himself once more, after three years, on the scene of his struggles. It did not seem so long ago. That he had greatly changed he knew; since the days of furnace-tending, and study, and work as a surfman, and all the other interests that had crowded those earlier years, he had thrown himself out into the world. He had come to know something of the joy of directing men and events, of playing a positive part in the life about him. He had come to love the fighting, to love the play of fact upon fact and mind upon mind. During the last year he had begun to understand the feeling of the trained swimmer when he plunges into deep water. There was the exhilaration, not only of keeping afloat where weak men sink, but of laying a course and following it, sure of his strength and endurance. While this change was taking place in him he had been inclined to forget that these three years were, after all, but a ninth or tenth part of his life so far, and that the other nine-tenths were also a fact. But to-night, as he walked up toward the Ridge where the big houses stood, he felt that he was taking up his old life where he had laid it down that day when he took the boat for Wauchung. And somehow he was not so sure of himself as he had been when he said good-morning to the cashier.