Chapter 9

He was up with the dawn and at his desk again, but by four that afternoon he was too dazed, too exhausted to continue. His eyes were playing him tricks, the room was whirling, his hand was shaking until his fingers staggered drunkenly across the sheets of paper. Ground plans, substructures, superstructures, were jumbled into a frightful tangle. He wanted to yell. Instead he flung the drawings about the room, stamped savagely upon them, then rushed down-stairs and devoured a table d'hôte dinner. He washed the meal down with a bottle of red wine, smoked a long cigar, then undressed and went to bed amid the scattered blueprints. He slept like a dead man.

He arose at sun-up, clear-headed, calm. All day he worked like a machine, increasing his speed as the hours flew. He took good care to eat and drink, and, above all, to smoke at regular intervals, but he did not leave his room. By dark he had much of the task behind him; by midnight he began to have hope; toward dawn he saw the end; and when daylight came he collapsed.

He had deciphered the tank and superstructure plans on forty-five sets of blueprints, had formulated a proposition, exclusive of substructure work, basing a price per pound on the American market then ruling, f.o.b. tidewater, New York. He had the proposition in his pocket when he tapped on the ground-glass door of Mr. Peebleby's office at ten-twenty-nine Thursday morning.

The Director General of the great Robinson-Ray Syndicate was genuinely surprised to learn that the young American had completed a bid in so short a time, then requested him, somewhat absent-mindedly, to leave it on his desk where he could look it over at his leisure.

"Just a moment," said his caller. "I'm going to sit down and talk to you again. How long have you been using cyanide tanks, Mr. Peebleby?"

"Ever since they were adopted." Mr. Peebleby was visibly annoyed at this interruption to his morning's work.

"Well, I can give you a lot of information about them."

The Director General raised his brows haughtily. "Ah! Suggestions, amendments, improvements, no doubt."

"Exactly."

"In all my experience I never sent out a blueprint which some youthful salesman could not improve upon. Generally the younger the salesman the greater the improvement."

In Mitchell's own parlance he "beat Mr. Peebleby to the punch." "If that's the case, you've got a rotten line of engineers," he frankly announced.

"Indeed! I went over those drawings myself. I flattered myself that they were comprehensive and up-to-date." Mr. Peebleby was annoyed, nevertheless he was visibly interested and curious.

"Well, they're not," the younger man declared, eying him boldly. "For instance, you call for cast-iron columns in your sub-and super-structures, whereas they're obsolete. We've discarded them. What you save in first cost you eat up, twice over, in freight. Not only that, but their strength is a matter of theory, not of fact. Then, too, in your structural-steel sections your factor of safety is wrongly figured. To get the best results your lower tanks are twenty inches too short and your upper ones nine inches too short. For another thing, you're using a section of beam which is five per cent. heavier than your other dimensions call for."

The Director General sat back in his chair, a look of extreme alertness replacing his former expression.

"My word! Is there anything else?" He undertook to speak mockingly, but without complete success.

"There is. The layout of your platework is all wrong--out of line with modern practice. You should have interchangeable parts in every tank. The floor of your lower section should be convex, instead of flat, to get the run-off. You see, sir, this is my line of business."

"Who is your engineer?" inquired the elder man. "I should like to talk to him."

"You're talking to him now. I'm him--it--them. I'm the party! I told you I knew the game."

There was a brief silence, then Mr. Peebleby inquired, "By the way, who helped you figure those prints?"

"Nobody."

"You did that _alone_, since Monday morning?" The speaker was incredulous.

"I did. I haven't slept much. I'm pretty tired."

There was a new note in Mr. Peebleby's voice when he said: "Jove! I've treated you badly, Mr. Mitchell, but--I wonder if you're too tired to tell my engineers what you told me just now? I should like them to hear you."

"Trot them in." For the first time since leaving this office three days before, Mitchell smiled. He was getting into his stride at last. After all, there seemed to be a chance.

There followed a convention of the draftsmen and engineers of the Robinson-Ray Syndicate before which an unknown American youth delivered an address on "Cyanide Tanks. How to Build Them; Where to Buy Them."

It was the old story of a man who had learned his work thoroughly and who loved it. Mitchell typified the theory of specialization; what he knew, he knew completely, and before he had more than begun his talk these men recognized that fact. When he had finished, Mr. Peebleby announced that the bids would not be opened that day.

The American had made his first point. He had gained time in which to handle himself, and the Robinson-Ray people had recognized a new factor in the field. When he was again in the Director General's room, the latter said:

"I think I will have you formulate a new bid along the lines you have laid down."

"Very well."

"You understand, our time is up. Can you have it ready by Saturday, three days from now?"

Mitchell laughed. "It's a ten days' job for two men."

"I know, but we can't wait."

"Then give me until Tuesday; I'm used to a twenty-four-hour shift now. Meanwhile I'd like to leave these figures here for your chief draftsman to examine. Of course they are not to be considered binding."

"Isn't that a bit--er--foolish?" inquired Peebleby? "Aren't you leaving a weapon behind you?"

"Yes, but not the sort of a weapon you suspect," thought Mitchell. "This is a boomerang." Aloud, he answered, lightly: "Oh, that's all right. I know I'm among friends."

When his request was granted he made a mental note, "Step number two!"

Again he filled a cab with drawings, again he went back to the Metropole and to maddening columns of new figures--back to the monotony of tasteless meals served at his elbow.

But there were other things besides his own bid to think of now. Mitchell knew he must find what other firms were bidding on the job, and what prices they had bid. The first promised to require some ingenuity, the second was a Titan's task.

Salesmanship, in its highest development, is an exact science. Given the data he desired, Louis Mitchell felt sure he could read the figures sealed up in those other bids to a nicety, but to get that data required much concentrated effort and much time. Time was what he needed above all things; time to refigure these myriad drawings, time to determine when the other bids had gone in, time to learn trade conditions at the competitive plants, time to sleep. There were not sufficient hours in the day for all these things, so he rigidly economized on the least important, sleep. He laid out a program for himself; by night he worked in his room, by day he cruised for information, at odd moments around the dawn he slept. He began to feel the strain before long. Never physically robust, he began to grow blue and drawn about the nostrils. Frequently his food would not stay down. He was forced to drive his lagging spirits with a lash. To accomplish this he had to think often of his girl-wife. Her letters, written daily, were a great help; they were like some God-given cordial that infused fresh blood into his brain, new strength into his flagging limbs. Without them he could not have held up.

With certain definite objects in view he made daily trips to Threadneedle Street. Invariably he walked into the general offices unannounced; invariably he made a new friend before he came out. Peebleby seemed to like him; in fact asked his opinion on certain forms of structure and voluntarily granted the young man two days of grace. Two days! They were like oxygen to a dying man.

Mitchell asked permission to talk to the head draftsman and received it, and following their interview he requested the privilege of dictating some notes regarding the interview. In this way he met the stenographer. When he had finished with her he flipped the girl a gold sovereign, stolen from the sadly melted nine hundred and twenty.

As Mitchell was leaving the office the Director General yielded to a kindly impulse and advised his new acquaintance to run over to Paris and view the Exposition.

"You can do your figuring there just as well as here," said he. "I don't want your trip from Chicago to be altogether wasted, Mr. Mitchell."

Louis smiled and shook his head. "I can't take that Exposition back with me, and I can take this contract. I think I'll camp with my bid."

In the small hours of that night he made a discovery that electrified him. He found that the most commonly used section in his specifications, a twelve-inch I-beam, was listed under the English custom as weighing fifty-four pounds per foot, whereas the standardized American section, which possessed the same carrying strength, weighed four pounds less. Here was an advantage of eight per cent. in cost and freight! This put another round of the ladder beneath him; he was progressing well, but as yet he had learned nothing about his competitors.

The next morning he had some more dictation for Peebleby's stenographer, and niched another sovereign from his sad little bank-roll. When the girl gave him his copy he fell into conversation with her and painted a picture of Yankeeland well calculated to keep her awake nights. They gossiped idly, she of her social obligations, he of the cyanide-tank business--he could think of nothing else to talk about. Adroitly he led her out. They grew confidential. She admitted her admiration for Mr. Jenkins from Edinburgh. Yes, Mr. Jenkins's company was bidding on the Krugersdorpf job. He was much nicer than Mr. Kruse from the Brussels concern, and, anyhow, those Belgian firms had no chance at this contract, for Belgium was pro-Boer, and--well, she had heard a few things around the office.

Mitchell was getting "feed-box" information. When he left he knew the names of his dangerous competitors as well as those whom, in all likelihood, he had no cause to fear. Another step! He was gaining ground.

In order to make himself absolutely certain that his figures would be low, there still remained three things to learn, and they were matters upon which he could afford to take no slightest chance of mistake. He must know, first, the dates of those other bids; second, the market-price of English steel at such times; and, third, the cost of fabrication at the various mills. The first two he believed could be easily learned, but the third promised to afford appalling difficulties to a man unfamiliar with foreign methods and utterly lacking in trade acquaintances. He went at them systematically, however, only to run against a snag within the hour. Not only did he fail to find the answer to question number one, but he could find no market quotations whatever on structural steel shapes such as entered into the Krugersdorpf job.

He searched through every possible trade journal, through reading rooms and libraries, for the price of I-beams, channels, Z-bars, and the like; but nowhere could he even find mention of them. His failure left him puzzled and panic-stricken; he could not understand it. If only he had more time, he reflected, time in which to learn the usages and the customs of this country. But time was what he had not. He was tired, very tired from his sleepless nights and hours of daylight strain--and meanwhile the days were rushing past.

While engaged in these side labors, he had, of course, been working on his draftsmen friends, and more assiduously even than upon his blue-prints. On Tuesday night, with but one more day of grace ahead of him, he gave a dinner to all of them, disregarding the fact that his bank-roll had become frightfully emaciated.

For several days after that little party blue-printing in the Robinson-Ray office was a lost art. When his guests had dined and had settled back into their chairs, Mitchell decided to risk all upon one throw. He rose, at the head of the table, and told them who he was. He utterly destroyed their illusions regarding him and his position with Comer & Mathison, he bared his heart to those stoop-shouldered, shabby young men from Threadneedle Street and came right down to the nine hundred and twenty dollars and the girl. He told them what this Krugersdorpf job meant to him and to her, and to the four twenty-dollar bills in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Those Englishmen listened silently. Nobody laughed. Perhaps it was the sort of thing they had dreamed of doing some day, perhaps there were other girls in other tiny furnished flats, other hearts wrapped up in similar struggles for advancement. They were good mathematicians, it seemed, for they did not have to ask Mitchell how the nine hundred and twenty was doing, or to inquire regarding the health of the other eighty. One of them, a near-sighted fellow with thick lenses, arose with the grave assertion that he had taken the floor for the purpose of correcting a popular fallacy; Englishmen and Yankees, he declared, were not cousins, they were brothers, and their interests ever had been and ever would be identical. He said, too, that England wanted to do business with America, and as for this particular contract, not only did the British nation as a whole desire America to secure it, but the chaps who bent over the boards at No. 42-1/2 Threadneedle Street were plugging for her tooth and nail. His hollow-chested companions yelled their approval of this statement, whereupon Mitchell again arose, alternately flushing and paling, and apologized for what had happened in 1776. He acknowledged himself ashamed of the 1812 affair, moreover, and sympathized with his guests over their present trouble with the Boers. When he had finished they voted him the best host and the best little cyanide tank-builder known to them--and then everybody tried to tell him something at once.

They told him among other things that every bid except his had been in for two weeks, and that they were in the vault under the care of Mr. Pitts, the head draftsman. They promised to advise him if any new bids came in or if any changes occurred, and, most important of all, they told him that in England all structural steel shapes, instead of being classified as in America, are known as "angles," and they told him just how and where to find the official reports giving the price of the same for every day in the year.

The word "angles" was the missing key, and those official market reports formed the lock in which to fit it. Mitchell had taken several mighty strides, and there remained but one more step to take.

When his guests had finally gone home, swearing fealty, and declaring this to be the best dinner they had ever drunk, he hastened back to his room, back to the desert of blueprints and to the interminable columns of figures, and over them he worked like a madman.

He slept two hours before daylight, then he was up and toiling again, for this was his last day. Using the data he had gathered the night before, he soon had the price of English and Scottish steel at the time the last bids were closed. Given one thing more--namely, the cost of fabrication in these foreign shops, and he would have reduced this hazard to a certainty, he would be able to read the prices contained in those sealed bids as plainly as if they lay open before him. But his time had narrowed now to hours.

He lunched with John Pitts, the head draughtsman, going back to pick up the boomerang he had left the week before.

"Have you gone over my first bid?" he asked, carelessly.

"I have--lucky for you," said Pitts. "You made a mistake."

"Indeed! How so?"

"Why, it's thirty per cent. too low. It would be a crime to give you the business at those figures."

"But, you see, I didn't include the sub-structure. I didn't have time to figure that." Mitchell prayed that his face might not show his eagerness. Evidently it did not, for Pitts walked into the trap.

"Even so," said he; "it's thirty per cent. out of the way. I made allowance for that."

The boomerang had finished its flight!

Once they had separated, Mitchell broke for his hotel like a hunted man. He had made no mistake in his first figures. The great Krugersdorpf job was his; but, nevertheless, he wished to make himself absolutely sure and to secure as much profit as possible for Comer & Mathison. Without a handsome profit this three-million-dollar job might ruin a firm of their standing.

In order to verify Pitts's statement, in order to swell his proposed profits to the utmost, Mitchell knew he ought to learn the "overhead" in English mills; that is, the fixed charges which, added to shop costs and prices of material, are set aside to cover office expenses, cost of operation, and contingencies. Without this information he would have to go it blind, after a fashion, and thereby risk penalizing himself; with it he could estimate very closely the amounts of the other bids and insure a safe margin for Comer & Mathison. In addition to this precaution he wished to have his own figures checked up, for even under normal conditions, if one makes a numerical error in work of this sort, he is more than apt to repeat it time and again, and Mitchell knew himself to be deadly tired--almost on the verge of collapse. He was inclined to doze off whenever he sat down; the raucous noises of the city no longer jarred or startled him, and his surroundings were becoming unreal, grotesque, as if seen through the spell of absinthe. Yes, it was necessary to check off his figures.

But who could he get to do the work? He could not go to Threadneedle Street. He thought of the Carnegie representative and telephoned him, explaining the situation and his crying need, only to be told that no one in that office was capable of assisting him. He was referred, however, to an English engineer who, it was barely possible, could handle the job. In closing, the Carnegie man voiced a vague warning:

"His name is Dell, and he used to be with one of the Edinburgh concerns, so don't let him know your inside figures. He might spring a leak."

A half-hour later Mitchell, his arms full of blue-prints, was in Mr. Dell's office. But the English engineer hesitated; he was very busy; he had numerous obligations. Mitchell gazed over the threadbare rooms and hastily estimated how much of the nine hundred and twenty dollars would be left after he had paid his hotel bill. What there was to do must be done before the next morning's sun arose.

"This job is worth ten sovereigns to me if it is finished tonight," he declared, briskly.

Mr. Dell hesitated, stumbled, and fell. "Very well. We'll begin at once," said he.

He unrolled the blue-prints, from a drawer he produced a sliding-rule. He slid this rule up; he slid it down; he gazed through his glasses at space; he made microscopic Spencerian figures in neat rows and columns. He seemed to pluck his results from the air with necromantic cunning, and what had taken the young man at his elbow days and nights of cruel effort to accomplish--what had put haggard lines about his mouth and eyes--the engineer accomplished in a few hours by means of that sliding-rule. Meanwhile, with one weary effort of will, his visitor summoned his powers and cross-examined him adroitly. Here was the very man to supply the one missing link in the perfect chain; but Mr. Dell would not talk. He did not like Americans nor American methods, and he made his dislike apparent by sealing his lips. Mitchell played upon his vanity at first, only to find the man wholly lacking in conceit. Changing his method of attack, Mitchell built a fire under Mr. Dell. He grilled everything British, the people, their social customs, their business methods, even English engineers, and he did it in a most annoying manner. Mr. Dell began to perspire. He worked doggedly on for a while, then he arose in defense of his country, whereupon Mitchell artfully shifted his attack to English steel-mills. The other refuted his statements flatly. At length the engineer was goaded to anger, he became disputative, indignant, loquacious.

When Louis Mitchell flung himself into the dark body of his cab, late that evening, and sank his legs knee-deep into those hateful blue-prints, he blessed that engineer, for Dell had told him all he wished to know, all he had tried so vainly to discover through other sources. The average "overhead" in British mills was one hundred and thirty per cent., and Dell _knew_.

The young man laughed hysterically, triumphantly, but the sound was more like a tearful hiccough. To-morrow at ten-thirty! It was nearly over. He would be ready. As he lolled back inertly upon the cushions he mused dreamily that he had done well. In less than two weeks, in a foreign country, and under strange conditions, without acquaintance or pull or help of any sort, he had learned the names of his competitive firms, the dates of their bids, and the market prices ruling on every piece of steel in the Krugersdorpf job when those bids were figured. He had learned the rules governing English labor unions; he knew all about piece-work and time-work, fixed charges and shop costs, together with the ability of every plant figuring on the Robinson-Ray contract to turn out the work in the necessary time. All this, and more, he had learned legitimately and without cost to his commercial honor. Henceforth that South-African contract depended merely upon his own ability to add, subtract, and multiply correctly. It was his just as surely as two and two make four--for salesmanship is an exact science.

The girl would be very happy, he told himself. He was glad that she could never know the strain it had been.

Again, through the slow, silent hours of that Wednesday night, Mitchell fought the fatigue of death, going over his figures carefully. There were no errors in them.

Dawn was creeping in on him when he added a clean thirty-per-cent. profit for his firm, signed his bid, and prepared for bed. But he found that he could not leave the thing. After he had turned in he became assailed by sudden doubts and fears. What if he had made a mistake after all? What if some link in his chain were faulty? What if some other bidder had made a mistake and underfigured? Such thoughts made him tremble. Now that it was all done, he feared that he had been overconfident, for could it really be possible that the greatest steel contract in years would come to him? He grew dizzy at the picture of what it meant to him and to the girl.

He calmed himself finally and looked straight at the matter, sitting up in bed, his knees drawn up under his chin. While so engaged he caught sight of his drawn face in the mirror opposite and started when he realized how old and heavy with fatigue it was. He determined suddenly to shave that profit to twenty-nine per cent. and make assurance doubly sure, but managed to conquer his momentary panic. Cold reasoning told him that his figures were safe.