The Quickening Part 26

Caleb Gordon closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. For weeks before the shut-down the foundry had been run on short time, because there was no market for its miscellaneous output. Surely Tom must be losing his mind!

But the negro foundry men were taking his word for it, as the miners had. "Pup-pup-put up yo' hands, boys!" said Patty, and again the ayes had it.

Tom looked vastly relieved.

"Well, that was a short horse soon curried," he said bruskly. "The power goes on to-morrow morning, and we'll blow in as soon as the furnaces are relined. Ludlow, you come to the office at five o'clock and I'll list the s.h.i.+fts with you. Patty, you report to Mr. Helgerson, and you and the pattern-maker show up at half-past five. I want to talk over some new work with you. Anybody else got anything to say? If not, we'll adjourn."

Caleb followed his son out and across the yard to the old log homestead which still served as the superintendent's office and laboratory. When the door was shut, he dropped heavily into a chair.

"Son," he said brokenly, "you're--you're crazy--plum' crazy. Don't you know you can't do the first one o' these things you've been promisin'?"

Tom was already busy at the desk, emptying the pigeonholes one after another and rapidly scanning their contents.

"If I believed that, I'd be taking to the high gra.s.s and the tall timber. But don't you worry, pappy; we're going to do them--all of them."

"But, Buddy, you can't sell a pound of foundry product! We may be able to make pig cheaper than some others, but when it comes to the foundry floor, South Tredegar can choke us off in less'n a week."

"Wait," said Tom, still rummaging. "There is one thing we can make--and sell."

"I'd like tolerable well to know what it is," was the hopeless rejoinder.

"You ought to know, better than any one else. It's cast-iron pipe--water-pipe. Where are the plans of that invention of yours that Farley wouldn't let you install?"

Caleb found the blue-prints, and his hands were trembling. The invention, a pit machine process for molding and casting water-and gas-pipe at a cost that would put all other makers of the commodity out of the field, had been wrought out and perfected in Tom's second Boston year. It was Caleb's one ewe lamb, and he had nursed it by hand through a long preparatory period.

Tom took the blue-prints and spread them on the desk, absorbing the details as his father leaned over him and pointed them out. He saw clearly that the invention would revolutionize pipe-making. The accepted method was to cast each piece separately in a floor flask made in two parts, rammed by hand, once for the drag and again for the cope, with reversings, crane-handlings and all the manipulations necessary for the molding of any heavy casting. But the new process subst.i.tuted machinery.

A cistern-like pit; a circular table pivoted over it, with a hundred or more iron flasks suspended upright from its edges; a huge crane carrying a mechanical ram, these were the main points of the machine which, with a single small gang of men, would do the work of an entire foundry floor.

"It's great!" said Tom enthusiastically. "I got your idea pretty well from your letters, but you've improved on it since then. I wonder Farley didn't snap at it."

"He was willin' to," said Caleb grimly. "Only he wanted me to transfer the patents to the company; in other words, to make him a present of the controlling interest. I bucked at that, and we come near havin' a fall-out. If there was any market for pipe now--"

"There is a market," said Tom hopefully. "I got a pointer on that before I left Boston. Did I tell you I had a little talk with Mr. Clarkson the day I came away?"

"No."

"Well, I did. I told him the conditions and asked his advice. Among other things, I spoke of this pipe pit of yours, and he said at once, 'There is your chance. Cast-iron water-pipe is like bread, or sugar, or butcher's meat--it's a necessity, in good times or bad. If that machine is practicable, you can make pipe for less than half the present labor cost.' Then we talked ways and means. Money is tighter than a shut fist--up East as well as everywhere else. But men with money to invest will still bet on a sure thing. Mr. Clarkson advised me to try our own banks first. Failing with them, he authorized me to call on him. Now you know where I'm digging my sand."

The old iron-master sat back in his chair with his hands locked over one knee, once more taking the measure of this new creation calling itself Tom Gordon and purporting to be his son.

"Say, Buddy," he said at length, "are there many more like you out yonder in the big road?--young fellows that can walk right out o' school and tell their daddies how to run things?"

Tom's laugh was boyishly hearty.

"Plenty of 'em, pappy; lots of 'em! The old world is moving right along; it would be a pity if it didn't, don't you think? But about this pipe business: I want you to make over these patents to me."

"They're yours now, Tom; everything I've got will be yours in a little while," said the father; but his voice betrayed the depth of that thrust. Was the new Tom beginning so soon to grasp and reach out avariciously for the fruit of the old tree?

"You ought to know I don't mean it that way," said Tom, frowning a little. "But here is the way it sizes up. There is money in this pipe-making; some money now, and big money later on. Farley has refused to go into it unless you make it a company proposition; as president and a controlling stock-holder you can't very well go into it now without making it in some sort a company proposition. But you can transfer the patents to me, and I can contract with Chiawa.s.see Consolidated to make pipe for me."

Caleb Gordon's frown matched that of his son.

"That would certainly be givin' Colonel Duxbury a dose of his own medicine; but I don't like it, Tom. It looks as if we were taking advantage of him."

"No. I'd make the proposition to him, personally, if he were here, and the boss; and he'd be a fool if he didn't jump at it," said Tom earnestly. "But there is more to it than that. If we make a go of this, and don't protect ourselves, the two Farleys will come back and put the whole thing in their pockets. I won't go into it on any such terms. When they do come back, I'm going to have money to fight them with, and this is our one little ghost of a chance. Ring up Judge Bates and get him to come over here and make a legal transfer of these patents to me."

The thing was done, though not without some misgivings on Caleb's part.

Honesty and fair dealing, even with a known enemy, had been the rule of his life; and while he could not put his finger on the equivocal thing in Tom's plan, he was vaguely troubled. a.n.a.lyzed after the fact, the trouble was vicarious, and for Tom. It defined itself more clearly when they went together to South Tredegar to have an attorney draw up the agreement under which Tom's pipe venture was to be conducted. Tom, as the owner of the patents, was fair with the Chiawa.s.see Consolidated, but he was not liberal; indeed, he would have been quite illiberal if the attorney had not warned him that an agreement, to be defensible, must be equitable as well as legal.

At this stage in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him.

He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its largeness. Ruth for the Farleys was not to be expected of him, he argued; but behind this was a vaster ruthlessness, arming him to win the industrial battle, making him a hard man as he had suddenly become a strong one.

And the experiences of the summer were all hardening. He plunged headlong into the world of business, into a panic-time compet.i.tion which was in grim reality a fight for life, and there seemed to be little to choose between trampling or being trampled. By early autumn the iron industries of the country were gasping, and the stacks of pig in the Chiawa.s.see yards, kept down a little during the summer by a few meager orders, grew and spread until they covered acres. As long as money could be had, the iron was bonded as fast as it was made, and the proceeds were turned into wages to make more. But when money was no longer obtainable from this source, the pipe venture was the only hope.

With the entire foundry force at the Chiawa.s.see making pipe, Tom had gone early into the market with his low-priced product. But the commercial side of the struggle was fire-new to him, and he found himself matched against men who knew buying and selling as he knew smelting and casting. They routed him, easily at first, with increasing difficulty as he learned the new trade, but always with certainty. It was Norman, the correspondence man, transformed now into a sales agent, who gave him his first hint of the inwardnesses.

"We're too straight, Mr. Gordon; that's at the bottom of it," he said to Tom, over a grill-room luncheon at the Marlboro one day. "It takes money to make money."

Tom's eyebrows went up and his ears were open. The battle had grown desperate.

"Our prices are right," he said. "Isn't that enough?"

"No," said Norman, looking down. Like all the others, he stood a little in awe of the young boss.

"Why?"

"Four times out of five we have to sell to a munic.i.p.al committee, and the other time we have to monkey with the purchasing agent of a corporation. In either case it takes money--other money besides the difference in price."

Tom wagged his head in a slow affirmative. "It's rotten!" he said.

Norman smiled.

"It's our privilege to cuss it out; but it's a condition."

Tom was in town that day for the purpose of taking a train to Louisville, where he was to meet the officials of an Indiana city forced, despite the hard times, to relay many miles of worn-out water-mains. He made a pencil computation on the back of an envelope.

The contract was a large one, and his bid, which he was confident was lower than any compet.i.tor could make, would still stand a cut and leave a margin of profit. Before he took the train he went to the bank, and, when he reached the Kentucky metropolis, his first care was to a.s.sure the "wheel-horse" member of the munic.i.p.al purchasing board that he was ready to talk business on a modern business basis.

Notwithstanding, he lost the contract. Other people were growing desperate, too, it appeared, and his bribe was not great enough. One member of the committee stood by him and gave him the facts. A check had been pa.s.sed, and it was a bigger check than Tom could draw without trenching on the balance left in the Iron City National to meet the month's pay-roll at Gordonia.

"You sent a boy to mill," said the loyal one. "And now it's all over, I don't mind telling you that you sent him to the wrong mill, at that.

Bullinger's a hog."

"I'd like to do him up," said Tom vindictively.

"Well, that might be done, too. But it would cost you something."

Tom did not take the hint; he was not buying vengeance. But on the way home he grew bitterer with every subtracted mile. He could meet one more pay-day, and possibly another; and then the end would come. This one contract would have saved the day, and it was lost.