mill. Each in his daily work easily performed feats of strength beyond

the power of others, but with this difference, that while Thane exerted himself only now and then for the mere feeling of it and the sooner when no one was watching, the Cornishman exhibited his superiority continuously because his vanity required it, and set a killing pace for the men of his crew. He was brutal and laughed exultingly if one of them dropped.

There was much debate as to which was the better man. A majority inclined to the Cornishman for that he was always and instantly ready to try it out, whereas Thane put every challenge aside, not as if he were afraid but with an air of distaste.

“I’m making no show of myself,” he said.

“Show be damned,” the eggers said. “The man is braggin’ he can do yu. Ain’t that a show?”

No use. He could not be goaded into a public match. Many misunderstood it. The Cornishman particularly was misled. He got the notion that Thane was afraid of him, and so he became arrogant and offensive.

This is what had been going on for some time. It was what was going on now in the path to the great wonder of a special, fascinated audience of one.

The Cornishman, jutting his chin piece further and further out, did the boasting. Thane answered him with contemptuous looks and now and then a derisive word. Suddenly they brought it to a head. As with one impulse they walked a little apart, put down their dinner baskets, threw off their caps and slipped out of their shirts. This seemed all one movement. Then, facing at the same instant, they drew slowly together. Their bodies, nude to the middle, were crouched in a manner that gave Agnes a new and terrific sensation of the human form, especially of its splendid, destructive power. Each had his left arm upraised and bent, as if to guard his face and head, and in their eyes the lust of combat glistened.

Agnes was transfixed with horror and at the same time thrilled as she had never been thrilled in her life before. No excitement she had ever imagined, waking or dreaming, was remotely comparable to this. She perhaps could not have run if she had tried; she would not have tried if she had thought of it. She thought of nothing. She sat perfectly still, her mouth hard set, her hands clenched, a look in her eyes she would not have believed in her own mirror.

The fighters seemed to pursue each other slowly in a small circle, eye to eye, sparring a little, and Agnes gasped with delight. They moved with the fluid ease and unconscious grace of leopards, and gave the same impression of tense coiled strength. She had not the faintest idea hitherto that the man thing could be like this.

Then, so swiftly that she did not see it, the first clean blow went in, with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver falling on the block. The effect of that sound upon Agnes was tremendous. She felt a swooning of worlds in the pit of her stomach. Solids were fluid. Her moorings gave way. Nothing in her experience of men had prepared her for the possibility of this. She had seen below the surface. The surface would never be the same again. What an awful sound! She felt she could not bear to hear it again; yet she listened for it breathlessly, frantically.

She saw blood on the tall one’s face. That did not make her sick. It made her violently partisan. She has been so all the time without knowing it. Thought of the heavy brute winning was intolerable. She could not see his face distinctly, for he crouched much lower than his antagonist and looked out from under his shaggy eyebrows, thus presenting the top of his head. When by accident, however, his face did come into full view she was relieved to see that he was bleeding freely. The tall one in fact was not bleeding at all. It was the other’s blood transferred to him. And then, as she saw how it was really going, she beat her knees with her fists and could hardly restrain the impulse to cry out.

The Cornishman was Thane’s equal in strength and vitality and forced the fighting at first with ferocious onsets. But he was as a bull against a tiger. His blows, falling short or going wild, landed always where his enemy precisely was not. Thane, doing it thoughtfully, planted his blows unerringly. He let the Cornishman come to him so long as he would and simply cut him to pieces, keeping some of himself all the time in reserve.

The end came in that instant when Thane really exerted himself. The Cornishman changed his tactics. He stopped lunging, stood on the defensive, and waited for Thane to come to him.

In this attitude it happened that the Cornishman’s back was to Agnes, not squarely, but only slightly oblique. Therefore, she had a fair full view of Thane as he came toward the Cornishman. The cool, easy purposefulness of him agitated her in a most extraordinary way. She knew he had won.

He walked straight into the Cornishman’s guard and without any feint or pass he did two things at once with such amazing swiftness that the eye could not follow. With his left hand he put aside the Cornishman’s defending arm and with his right he hit him, on the point of his offensive chin, a blow the sound of which was like the snapping of a great tree trunk on the knee of a windstorm.

For an instant nothing happened, except that Thane folded his arms and stood looking seriously at the Cornishman. Then the Cornishman’s arms fell, his form swayed, and he began to go around in a circle, faster and faster, as if one leg at each step became shorter and was letting him down in spite of his efforts to overtake his balance. He was going to fall. Where?

The battle had taken place all at one side of the path where a level space was. From the other side of the path, where Agnes was, the ground pitched off. The stone on which she sat was two feet below the level of the path. The grass concealed her head.

The spinning Cornishman was almost in the path, directly above her. It seemed probable that he would fall in a heap, pitching forward. It was incredible that he should catch himself up; yet he did it with a mighty effort, stopped spinning, stood upright for a moment, then unexpectedly toppled backward over the edge of the path and fell with all his weight upon Agnes.

She screamed and tried to parry the awful mass. It bore her under and she rolled with it a little distance down the hillside. Before she was free of it she saw above her the face of Thane, white and scared.

He picked her up, all of her, bodily, as if she were a doll, carried her back to the path, and stood her on end experimentally.

“Hurt?”

“No,” she said, grimacing with pain.

“You are,” he said. “Let’s see you stand up.”

He let go of her and she began to go over.

“My ankle,” she said. “It got a little twist. Let me sit down.”

Having lowered her gently to a sitting posture he got down on his knees and regarded her anxiously.

“That all? Just the ankle?”

“I’ll be all right in a minute or two,” she said. Pointing to the vanquished lump she asked: “What about him?”

“That?” he said. “Don’t worry. It ain’t dead. It’ll come to after a bit.”

Her breath was in her throat and her mind was filled with after images of the event. She was still outside of herself with excitement.

“I was on your side,” she said naïvely. Some secret thought then touched her and she doubled up with a tickled sound. Her suppressed feelings were exploding.

Thane at that moment realized that she had witnessed the fight. Next he became painfully conscious of himself. He felt a burning sensation from his middle to the roots of his hair; and as he rose and went looking in the grass for his shirt his movements were awkward, almost clumsy. Having found his shirt he walked a long way off to put it on. When he returned he had the Cornishman’s shirt. That hulk of vanity was beginning to stir as from a deep sleep. Thane helped him to his feet, set him in the path with his face averted, put the garment in his hands, and earnestly desired him to disappear.

Then he stood looking down at Agnes. A moment before they had been as free and natural as children. Now they were false, self-embarrassed.

“How is it now?” he asked.

“Better,” she said.

Silence.

“Maybe you could rub it.”

“It’s getting all right,” she said.

More silence.

“My name is Alexander.”

“My name is Agnes,” she replied.

Silence again.

“Agnes what?”

“Gib,” she said.

“You old Enoch’s girl?” he asked.

She did not answer.

“Was you cuttin’ it?” he asked.

“Was I what?”

“Givin’ ’im the slip?”

“I’m on my way home,” she said. “Please don’t bother any more about me. I’m quite all right now.”

Her manner had changed. Her tone was formal and dismissive. Thane moved away from her, uncertain what to do, looked about in the grass for his lunch basket, found it, stood for some minutes twirling it in his hands, and slowly came back.

“Better’d let me take you home.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I know my way home.”

“It ain’t no place for you out here. Them from the mill is all right, but these new miners, they go back ’n forwards singing and fighting. They’d scare you most to death ... or worse.”

She was looking off into the valley and made no reply.

“Better’d let me take you home.”

“Please,” she said, “I don’t wish to be taken home.”

“Ain’t you got to go home?”

To this her only answer was an exasperated shrug of the shoulders. All he could see of her was the expression of her back and it was so unfriendly that it took everything out of him but the doggedness. He waited until it was evident she did not mean to speak again. Then he walked about in a fumble of perplexity and at length threw himself on the grass and comfortably lighted his pipe.

After a while she spoke without turning her head.

“Are you there for the night?”

“Jus’ standing by,” he said. “Can’t leave you here like you was a cripple bird.”

Agnes was secretly entertained. She had also a feeling of being wonderfully safe. Yet the absurdity of her predicament filled her with chagrin. She hated to be helpless. “I can walk,” she said to herself. “I will.”

She got up, took one step bravely and came down again with an involuntary cry of pain.

At that Thane rose with a fixed intention, knocked his pipe clean on his heel, dropped it in his pocket, and came toward her, hitching at his belt. She knew intuitively what he meant to do and felt herself for an instant in the place of the Cornishman as he stood waiting for Thane to come and finish him.

He did not speak. Leaning over, he picked her off the ground and settled her high in his arms.

First she was furiously angry. Her thoughts were: “How dare you! Put me down instantly and be gone.” The words did not come. She noticed how lightly he carried her, almost as if he were not touching her, and how easily he walked. She was helpless. If she resisted he would only hold her differently and go steadily on. She could scream or struggle. To scream would be childish. She had not the least inclination to scream. And to struggle would be futile. So she took refuge in passivity. Then sensations began to assail her. She was suddenly afraid. Fear was an emotion she seldom experienced. Never had she been afraid like this. What she was afraid of she did not know. She was not sure it was fear. It was more like the thrill one gets in a high swing from the thought, “What if the rope should break!” or in the phantasy of taking the place of the animal trainer, from the thought, “What if the lion should turn!” She remembered not the words but the sense of a line of Greek poetry about maidens swooning from fear of finding that which not to find would grieve them unto death.

She was still herself, Agnes, furiously angry at being carried without her consent. At the same time she was not Agnes. The Agnes she knew was but a name and a memory. She herself, now existing originally, was someone whose only desire was to be carried further, faster, higher, off the edge of the world. She breathed deeply, inhaling his odor.

Seeing that he should carry her more easily if her weight were somewhat distributed by her own effort she put an arm around his neck. It tightened there as she suspended her weight to relieve his arms. Then came an instant in which she was amazed at the impulse, which she restrained, to fasten the other arm about his neck. In the rough places he began to hold her a little closer each time and not to relax when it was smooth again. She was not aware of it. Her odor intoxicated Thane. Sometimes he lost the path and stumbled. That she did not notice. She listened to his breathing, counted it against her own, and felt the rythmic rise and fall of his powerful chest.

At a point where they turned out of the path through a piece of high grass to enter the highway both of them as it were came awake.

“Put me down, please,” she said in a low voice, hardly above a whisper,--a voice she did not know.

He apparently did not hear her.

They came to the great iron gate.

“Put me down,” she said again.

Still he seemed not to hear. With his foot he rattled the gate, calling in a loud, uncontrolled voice,--the voice of a man in danger--“Hey! Hey!” He was trembling all over.

Three times he rattled the gate and called. Twice he was answered only by the reverberations of his own clamor, which shocked the stillness of the night and left a vacant ringing in the ears. In the grass the crickets sang. Far away a dog barked once and a cock woke up. Each could hear the beating of the other’s heart.

What happened the third time was apparitional. Suddenly, there was Enoch, behind the gate, looking at them. He had been there all the time in the shadow of the wall. He held a lighted lantern. That also had been concealed. Slowly he raised the latch-bar and swung the gate ajar. Then he held the lantern high and gazed unbelievingly at Thane, who was the first to speak.

“Found her up there in the grass. Was having a bit of a tiff, two of us, me ’n the Cornishman, ’n he fell on her when I knocked him out, ’n hurt her ankle, hiding there so as nobody could see her. She couldn’t walk, so’s I brought her home.”

Agnes neither stirred nor spoke. In the light of the lantern her eyes gleamed with a trapped expression. Enoch did not look at her, not even on hearing that she was hurt, but continued to stare fixedly at his puddler, repeating after him: “In the grass.”

“Don’t you want her?” Thane asked.

At that Enoch lowered the lantern, swung the gate open and stood aside.

“Take her in,” he said.

As the puddler passed, Enoch closed and barred the gate; he followed them up the driveway toward the mansion. The only sound was the crunching of the two men’s feet on the gravel.

Then Enoch laughed. It was an abominable sound, denoting a cruel conclusion in his mind. Agnes shuddered. Her hold around the puddler’s neck involuntarily tightened. So did his hold of her. Thus a subtle sign passed between them. Neither one spoke.

At the entrance Enoch overtook them, opened the door, and walked ahead. There were no servants in sight. In this household servants appeared when summoned and never otherwise.

“In here,” said Enoch, opening the hall door into the back parlor on the ground floor. This was his side of the house. The room was dimly lighted. The puddler put his burden down on a couch and turned to look at Enoch, who stood in the doorway.

“Stay here, both of you, until I return,” he said. With that he closed the door and turned the key from the outside.

Thane in his mill clothes,--iron studded shoes, ankle aprons, trousers, shirt open to the middle of his chest, and cap,--was bewildered and overcome with conscious awkwardness. He looked at things as if they might bark at him and stood with his weight on one leg, having no use for the other. It stuck out from him at a great distance, and terminated absurdly in a performing foot, rocking on its heel and wearing a place in the varnished surface of the floor.

Agnes, who had been straining her faculties to hear what might be taking place outside, became aware of his distress.

“Please sit down and listen,” she said. “Over there,” pointing to an arm chair.

They heard the jangling of bells, the opening and closing of doors, and presently a carriage went off in haste. It must have been waiting. There had not been time to harness a team. Then faintly they heard footsteps patrolling the hallway. They were Enoch’s.

“I haven’t any idea what I’ve got you into,” said Agnes.

“Seem’s it ain’t ready yet,” he said, and smiled at her.

His smile was a revelation, swift and unexpected, like an event in a starlit sky. Agnes had not seen it before. It gave her a start of joy. She smiled back at him and then blushed. That made her angry. She was always angry at herself for blushing because it gave her away. Her defense was to look at him steadily and that made him self-conscious again. She had discovered that when his thoughts were dynamically engaged, or when his mind was intended to action, instantly all awkwardness left him. Then he was graceful unawares, as children and animals are, never thinking of themselves. She could not bear to see him fidget.

“You don’t seem to care,” she said.

“He bears down hard on you, don’t he, Enoch?” he asked.

“His nature is hard,” she said.

“Maybe you was cuttin’ it an’ here I brought you home. Ain’t that so?”

“No,” she said.

He came half way across the room and regarded her earnestly.

“If that’s it, it ain’t too late now. I’ll take you anywhere you want.” As she did not answer, he added: “Jus take ’n leave you there so’s you need never see me again.”

“Thank you,” she said, gently. “That wouldn’t be nice, would it,--never to see you again after that? No. I’m--what was it you said?--I’m standing by.”

He sat down again, disappointed.

“I must tell you what happened,” she said. “I broke out and went to a party in town. That isn’t allowed. I expected a scene when I got home. It might have been very disagreeable for the--for my escort, you know. So, having first run away to go to the party, I next ran away from the party and started home alone. You know the rest.”

“Oh,” said Thane, thoughtfully.

A sudden constraint fell upon them. Their eyes did not meet again.

They were sitting in silence, she in reverie, when a sound of commotion was heard in the hallway. The carriage had returned. Double footsteps approached.

The door opened, admitting Enoch, and with him the Presbyterian minister, a clean, tame, ox-like man with a very large bald head, no eyebrows and round blue eyes. Enoch closed the door. Thane stood up. The minister looked first at him and then at Agnes. Her eyes were full of wonder, tinged with premonition. Enoch spoke.

“We found her in the grass. That’s the man. Marry them.”

The minister, regarding both of them at once in an oblique manner, began to nod his head up and down as if saying to himself, “Oh-ho! So this is what we find?”

Thane was slow to understand Enoch’s words. He had the look of a man in the act of doubting his familiar senses.

Agnes, very pale, lips slightly parted, nostrils distended, sitting very erect, turned her head slowly and gazed at her father. The muscles around her eyes were tense and drawn, her eyes were hard and partially closed as if the sun were in them, and she looked at him so until his countenance fell. But not his wickedness.

“Marry them,” he said.

Thane reacted suddenly. He cleared his throat, swallowed, glanced right and left, and took a step forward, with a tug at his belt.

“You’re supposing what ain’t so,” he shouted at Enoch. “What do you mean by that about finding her in the grass? What does that mean? Me ’n the Cornishman was racketing up there in the path like I told you at the gate. He ain’t come to yet, so there’s nobody can say as what happened but me ’n the girl. She oughten have seen it. That’s correct. But there ain’t no harm done--none as you could speak of. If you don’t believe me ask her.... You tell them,” he said, turning to Agnes.

“My father is mad,” she said.

Thane began to tell them what had passed on the path and became utterly incoherent. Despairing, he made a move toward Enoch. The minister raised his hand.

“What is your name?”

“Alexander Thane.”

Enoch, who had been standing with his back to the door, opened it, reached around the jamb and drew it back holding a shot gun, the barrel of which he rested on his left arm.

“Marry them, I tell you.” His voice was low. “Make it short.”

Thane made another move toward him. The minister raised his hand again,--a fat, white hand. It fascinated Thane and calmed him.

“Thane,” said the minister, “do you take this woman to be your lawful wife?”

“Not as he says it. Not for that shooting thing as he’s got there in his hand,” said Thane. “Not unless the girl wants it,” he added, as a disastrous and extremely complicated afterthought.

If he had flatly said no, the shape of the climax might have been different. There was no lack of courage. What stopped him was a romantic seizure.

The minister turned to Agnes.

“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”

The die was then in her hands. Thane had not meant to pass it. Gladly would he have retaken it if only he had known how to do so. The situation was beyond his resources. Moreover, the question--“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”--was so momentous to him that it deprived him of his wits and senses, save only the sense of hearing.

Emotions more dissimilar could scarcely be allotted to three men in a single scene, one of them mad, yet for a moment they were united by a feeling of awe and regarded Agnes with one expression. The woman’s courage surpasses the man’s. This he afterward denies in his mind, saying the difference is that she lacks a sense of consequences.

Agnes was cool and contemplative, and in no haste to answer. She kept them waiting. They could not see her face. Her head was bent over. With one hand she plucked at the pattern of her dress and seemed to be counting. Then slowly she began to nod her head.

“Yes,” she said, distinctly, though in a very far voice, “I will.”

“Stand up, please,” said the minister.

Thane made his responses as one in a dream. Hers were firm and clear, and all the time she was looking at her father as she had looked at him first, with those tight little wrinkles around her eyes.

So they were married.

“That’s all,” said Enoch, to the minister, curtly. “The carriage is at the door.”

The minister bowed and vanished.

Enoch drew a piece of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to Thane. It was a blue ticket,--the token of dismissal.

“Now go,” he said, “and let me never see you again.”

Agnes looked up at Thane.

“I can walk,” she said, taking him by the arm. It was so. She could, with a slight limp. Enoch, seeing it, sneered. He watched them walk into the night and closed the door behind them.

At the gate Thane said: “But you can’t,” and started to pick her up.

“Don’t,” she said.

They had changed places. She was no longer afraid of him. He was afraid of her.

XIX

All this time John had been seeking Agnes. First he went the high road to the mansion until he was sure she had not gone that way, for if she had he would have overtaken her. Turning back he began to make inquiries and presently heard of someone, undoubtedly she, who had been seen walking wide of the town, past the mill, toward the mountain. Knowing the path and divining her intention he walked in her footsteps.

The smell of Thane’s pipe was still in the air when he arrived at the place where the fight had taken place. A thing of white in the grass drew his eye. He picked it up and got a bad start. It was a tiny handkerchief. By the light of a match he made out the initials A. G. embroidered in one corner. Looking further he found a scarf that he instantly recognized. He had particularly noticed it on their way to the party. Now in a panic he began to examine the ground closely and discovered extensive evidence of a human struggle. Running up and down the path a short distance each way he came on the Cornishman’s shirt a little to one side where the groggy owner had tossed it away. To John’s disgust it was slimy with something that came off in his hands; as this proved to be blood his disgust gave way to horror.

Without actually formulating the thought, because it was too dreadful to be true, he acted under the tyranny of a fixed idea, which was that Agnes had met with a foul disaster. The possibility was real. Lately there had come to New Damascus a group of mill hands whose ways and morals were alien to the community. They were bestial drinkers and had been making a great deal of trouble.

In a state of frenzy he explored the mountain side, calling her name. His panic rising, it occurred to him to ask at the mill among the men who continually used the path. He found several who had been over it within a hour or so. Someone was missing, he told them. Something unknown had happened. Had they seen or heard anything unusual. They became individually contemplative, made him say it all over again, repeated it after him, thought very hard and shook their heads. Nobody had seen or heard the least thing strange. But somebody did, by a freak of intelligent association, remember the Cornishman. He was out there under the water tank, speechless and weeping, not caring whether Enoch saw him or not. Maybe something had happened to him.

John found him as indicated, with his face in his hands, water dripping on his naked back.

“What happened to you?” John asked, shaking him.

“Gotten m’dam head knocked off,” he groaned, without moving. It was a refrain running through him. John’s attack had made it once audible.

“Up there in the path?”

He grunted.

“Who was it?”

Faintly, though very definitely, the Cornwall beauty expressed a passionate desire to be let alone.

“Was there a girl?” John asked.

“Huh!” said the hulk, instantly penetrated by the sound of that word.

John repeated the question.

The Cornishman stirred painfully, sat up, turned a stupidly grinning face and nodded--yes.

“Who took her away?” John asked, thumping the body to keep the mind afloat. “Tell me,” he said, shaking him by the hair. “Where did they go?” he asked, kicking him in the shins.

But the Cornishman was either slyer or more stupefied than one could imagine. He relapsed. Nothing more could be got out of him.

There now was but one rational thing to do--report to Enoch and raise a general alarm.

From running hard with a load of dread John was almost spent when he arrived at the mansion gate. It was shut and barred; the house was dark and where he had expected to find alarm and commotion everything was strangely still. Foreboding assailed him. Thinking it might be quicker to open the gate than to climb the wall he put his hand through and began to fumble with the latch bar inside. He was so intent upon the effort that a certain indefinable sense one may have of another’s invisible proximity failed to warn him of Enoch’s presence.

There was a swift, noiseless movement in the darkness and a hand clutched him powerfully by the wrist. The physical disadvantage of his position made him helpless. Over the vertical bars of the gate ran a pattern of wrought iron ornamentation in the form of vine and leaves; the interstices were irregular, with sharp edges. It was impossible to use his free arm defensively because there was no other opening through which he could reach far enough in. Besides, if he resisted Enoch could instantly snap the bones of his trapped arm. He was utterly bewildered by the circumstances. Enoch’s gesture was menacing, even terrifying in its sinister precision, and yet John could scarcely imagine that his intentions were destructive. So he submitted his arm passively to the old man’s dangerous grip and spoke.

“It is I,” he said. His voice betrayed his spirit, which was at the verge of panic. Enoch did not speak. His hold tightened. “I was trying to let myself in to save time,” said John. “Agnes is lost. That is, I can’t find her. I was coming to tell you.”

Enoch still did not speak.

“Perhaps she is home,” said John. “Have you seen her? If you haven’t I’m afraid something has happened to her.”

The old man’s continued silence was unnatural and ominous. Slowly, purposefully, he drew John’s arm further in, to almost the elbow; it came to him unresistingly and bare, the cuffs of the coat and shirt having caught on the vine work outside. Then he began to explore it upward from the wrist, feeling through the flesh for the edges of the radius and ulna bones, passing them an inch at a time between his thumb and forefinger as if searching for something he was afraid to find. John’s arm had once been broken in a football game at school. There was a perceptible ridge in the radius bone at the point of fracture. On this ridge Enoch’s fingers stopped, lost their strength and began to tremble. At the same time the grip of his other hand around John’s wrist began to relax in a slow, involuntary manner.

“_Aaron!_” he whispered, awesomely.

The next instant John’s arm was free and there was the sound of a body falling on the gravel inside the gate.

Now John scaled the wall. He stopped to make sure Enoch was breathing and to ease his form on the ground; then he ran to the mansion. His furious alarm brought a stolid, dark woman to the door, holding a small oil light over her head.

“Is Miss Gib at home?” he asked.

The woman shook her head.

“Does anyone know where she is?”

In a dull manner the woman shook her head again.

“Mr. Gib has fallen at the front gate,” said John. “Go to him at once and send someone for the doctor.”

The woman put the lamp down on the floor where she stood and started alone down the driveway, running.

“Call the servants,” said John. “You may have to carry him in.”

But she went only faster. He followed her. Before he could overtake her she met Enoch. He could see them both clearly in the light streaming from the doorway. The woman looked at Enoch anxiously and made as if to touch him, solicitously. He did not exactly ignore her; he seemed not to see her at all and walked steadily on.

John turned out of the light and passed unobserved in the darkness. Then he ran headlong off the grounds, feeling at each step that his knees would let him down. His emotional state was almost unmanageable. The episode with Enoch at the gate had been not only very mysterious but fraught with some ghastly inner meaning to which he had no clue whatever. He knew nothing of Enoch’s obsession that he, John, was Aaron reincarnated. He had never heard of that boyhood contest in which Enoch broke Aaron’s arm. Therefore he could not know what it meant in Enoch’s troubled brain to find in the arm of Aaron’s son the scar of a similar fracture at almost precisely the corresponding place. To him it _was_ the same scar in the same arm. It was the last thing needed to fix his hallucination and the discovery had momentarily overwhelmed his senses.

In that instant he had called John by his father’s name,--Aaron!

What did it mean? Intuitively John knew that here was the key to the riddle. But he could not apply it. He could see that in taking Esther, his mother, away from Enoch his father had brought upon himself Enoch’s undying hatred. He could understand how such hatred might naturally be transferred to the son. Only, in that case, how could he explain the fact that until now Enoch’s attitude toward him had been friendly or indifferent?

XX

So his thoughts were running in this perplexed and absent manner when suddenly a very urgent question burst through.

“What of Agnes?”

She was not at home. He could think of no way to find her unassisted. He knew not where to look next and time was pressing. It was necessary to raise a wide alarm and organize a search. But he had no authority to act. It was her father’s business to take such steps. Now recalling what he had said to Enoch through the gate about Agnes he realized that it was absurdly inadequate. He had not at all communicated his fears concerning her. Therefore, though the thought of another encounter with Enoch made him shudder, he would have to go back. On this decision he came to a sudden stop and was surprised to see how far he had come unawares, and that he was not on the highway. When or how he had left it he did not remember. “I must have come fast,” he thought. He was half way back to New Damascus, not far from the mill, in a road that further on became a street running into sooty locust trees, cinder sidewalks, rows of company houses and a stale, historic smell of fried food. Turning in his tracks he was making back when his name was called from the side of the road by a voice he instantly knew.

“Thane!” he said, going toward him. “I need you. Please go--oh! I’m sorry. I thought you were alone.”

He veered off at seeing the figure of a woman behind Thane, leaning on the fence, her face averted; but Thane, coming forward, caught him by the arm, saying anxiously:

“I need your advice is why I called you.”

“Hold it, whatever it is, Thane,” John answered. “I can’t stop now. I just can’t.” He was pulling away.

“Won’t hold,” said Thane.

“It must,” said John. “I can’t stop. I’m sorry.” He liked Thane and was loath to leave him in a lurch. “Go to the hotel and wait for me there,” he said, pushing him off. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

With that he was going when the woman spoke.

“Are you looking for me?”

“Agnes!” said John to himself, as a declaration of preposterous fact. He wheeled around and stood stone still.

One instant before he had been mad with anxiety to hear her voice. Yet to the sound of it, so collected and sure, his emotional reaction was one of fierce anger. There was also a desolate world-wide sense of loss. Why he was angry or what was lost he could not have said in words. These feelings referred to her. Toward Thane there was a thought that seemed to rise behind him with purpose and power of its own; and he braced his back against it.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, approaching her. “I found these.” He held out the handkerchief and scarf. She took them. “Then I went to the mansion ... and....” There he stopped.

“Yes. What did you learn there?” she asked.

His anger kept rising. How could she be so suave and frontal about it? He had actually the impulse to set hands upon her roughly and demand to know what she had been doing, how she came to be here alone on a dark road with an iron puddler and how she could pretend to be so unembarrassed.

“Nothing,” he said. “It had just this instant occurred to me to go back and try again. I was in a beastly fume about you.”

“And seem to be still,” she said, in a way to put him in mind of the high tone he had been using.

“For reasons to which you are pleased to be oblivious,” he retorted. “It is to be imagined that I have some interest in seeing you safely home. May I take you on from here?”

“Another one,” Agnes murmured in a tone of soliloquy. “How repetitious!”

The thought touched off her feelings. They exploded in a burst of shrill, irrelevant laughter. John was scandalized. His rage was boundless. Yet at the same time his sense of responsibility increased. Abominable thoughts assailed him. He wondered if perhaps her father had not been right to keep her under restraint. He fervently wished he had never tempted her to break out. A resolve to get her home by force if necessary was forming in his mind when Thane put in.

“They ain’t no home,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”

“What do you know about it?” John asked, blazing.

“Oughten I know somewhat about it seeing as she’s my own wife?” said Thane, with dismal veracity.

John, for an instant appalled, turned fiercely on Agnes. “Now what have you done?” he asked. She was so startled by his manner that she couldn’t speak. “What have you done?” he demanded, now shaking her and with such authority that for a moment her spirit quailed. “Is it true? Are you married?”

“Yes,” she said.

“To a....” He caught the word just in time, slowly let go of her and stepped back.

“Say it,” she dared him. “To a ... to ... a what? Go on. Say it.”

John’s anger was gone. Other emotions had swallowed it up,--sorrow, pity, remorse, that devastating sense of loss again, more poignant than before in some new way, and above all a great yearning toward both of them.

“Where?” he asked, in a changed voice.

“In my father’s house,” said Agnes, derisively. “What a pity you missed it!”

“But what happened?” asked John.

She answered weirdly, improvising silly words to a silly tune:--

“What hap-pen-ed What hap-pen-ed What hap-pen-ed Here Mildred?

“That hap-pen-ed That hap-pen-ed That hap-pen-ed Sir, she said.”

A horrified silence fell.

“Was it flat?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I know something to do. Let’s each one tell the story of his life. Shall I begin?”

She began to sing again:--

“What hap-pen-ed ...”

“Please,” said John. “Please don’t. You make my blood run cold.”

“She’s that way ever since,” said Thane, with an air of sharing his misery.

“Then you tell me,” said John.

“I carried her home,” said Thane, now weary of telling it, “from where she got hurt between me an’ the Cornishman knocking ourselves around in the path, an’ old Enoch he got a wicked notion as I don’t know what an’ sent for the preacher an’ we was married. Then he handed me the blue ticket an’ put us out of the house.”

John turned to Agnes with a question on his tongue. She anticipated him and began to sing:--

“What hap-pen-ed ...”

As he shuddered and turned away again she stopped.

“I was coming for my street clothes to where I live,” continued Thane, “being as I was all that time in my puddling rig an’ we got bogged here like you see us now. Nothing I say let’s do will move her. And when I say all right, what does she want, she chanties about me, making them up out of nothing.”

“When they get like that,” said John, “you have to use force. You’ve got to pick them up.”

“Can’t work it,” said Thane.

“Why not? Does she bite?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Can’t work it,” said Thane. “Not since,” he added.

“The subject of this clinic is conscious,” said Agnes, pleasantly.

They paid no attention to her.

“You board, don’t you? You were not intending to take her there?” said John.

“Only so as to get my clothes,” said Thane.

“We can’t do anything until you get your clothes,” said John. “That’s plain. I’ll stay here with her while you go for them. But don’t be long. Then maybe we can think of something to do.”

Thane went off at once with a tremendous sigh of relief in the feeling of action. His feet made a cavernous _tlump, tlump, tlump_-ing on the hard dirt road. John, who stood regarding Agnes from the side of the road, was sure he saw her shudder. Then from the heedless tone with which she broke the silence he was sure he had been mistaken.

“It seems you know my husband,” she said.

He was surprised that she had no difficulty with the word, though it must have been the first time she had ever used it in the possessive sense--and in such circumstances!

“Can’t you think of anything feasible to do?” John asked.

“Do you like him?” she inquired.

“Because if you can’t,” said John, “I can. It’s too much for Thane. That isn’t fair.”

He supposed she was thinking. To his disgust she began to sing, softly, tunefully:

“Lovely maiden, tell me truly, Is the ocean very wet? If I meet you on the bottom, Will you never once----”

“Stop it!” He moved as if to menace her. She stopped and looked at him soberly.

“Is there nothing I can do to entertain you? I might recite. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“You give me the horrors,” he blurted. “No, no I’m sorry. I’m unstrung, that’s all. Please do be serious. We’ve got to think of what we shall do.”

“Who are we?”

“I beg your pardon. You, then,” he amended.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Agnes, do for....”

“Mrs. Thane, please.”

“I don’t expect you to be amiable,” he said, “but please for one moment be reasonable.”

“When they are like that you can’t do anything with them,” she said. “Really you can’t. You will have to see my husband.”

She had seated herself on a grassy bench with her back to the fence, her feet in the dry ditch, and was viciously jabbing the earth with a limber stick. She threw the stick from her, leaned back, folded her arms and tilted her chin at the sky, with an air of casting John out of existence. He had given up trying to talk and stood observing her in an overt manner. It was thus he saw how she looked at the moon, first vacantly without seeing it, then with a start as of recognition or recollection, and at length with an expression of such twisted mocking wistfulness that he knew one shape of her heart and turned wretchedly away, almost wishing he had not seen.

For a long time she did not move. She seemed under a kind of spell. Thane found them so, in separate states of reverie. Neither heard his footsteps approaching.

“I was thinking why should I bother you like this,” said Thane, “being though as we are friends in a way. If only it was so as I could touch something.”

“Thane,” said John, slowly, “listen to what I am thinking. The skeins of our three lives have run together in a hard knot. Mine and that of Agnes were already twisted together in a very strange history. Yours got entangled by chance, heaven knows why. Fate does it. Nobody is to blame. But I am responsible.”

“For us being married?” asked Thane.

“For that, yes. But for a great deal more. I am only beginning to see the meaning of things. By inheritance I am responsible for something my father and mother did to Enoch before I was born, for the fact that Agnes is his daughter and he is not my father, for the fact that he is mad. He has had his revenge on Aaron’s son, greater than he knows. What that means I cannot tell you. I shall never say it again. But what I want you to see is that I cannot leave you to face the consequences alone. It is not a matter of friendship. You are married to Agnes. In a foster sense I am married to both of you.”

His face was lighted from within. He spoke in the absent, anonymous manner of one undergoing a mystical experience. Something of his mood entered Thane. With one impulse they had struck hands and now stood looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

“I don’t know as I see what you mean,” said Thane.

“No,” said John. “You wouldn’t. I’ve confused you, trying to get it all said at once. There is first the fact that we are friends. My feeling for you in that way has increased suddenly, I don’t quite know why. And now, above that, is my sense of responsibility for what has happened. You must accept my view of that. It shall be understood that I have a right to stand by and that I may be trusted ... absolutely trusted ... whatever comes....”

He groped and stopped and seemed to have gone to sleep with his eyes open.

Thane moved uneasily. John, returning to himself, started slightly and released Thane’s hand. When he spoke his voice was altered.

“I can’t make it come clear,” he said. “I thought I could.”

“I’ve looked my eyes out that way, too,” said Thane. “Let’s take it as it is.”

What John at first had so clear a vision of was an act of heroic self-denial. It thrilled him with momentary ecstasy. That may be understood. Man is an emotional formation, subject to sudden passions, one of which is the passion of sacrifice. Blindly on the spot he rears an altar, lays the wood in order and looks to see what offering hath in a miraculous manner provided itself to be burnt. Lo! there stands the one thing most beloved in all the world. The Lord sometimes interferes, as for Isaac. Sometimes the victim saves itself. Then again the man draws back. He has not the heart to do it.

John drew back. To conclude the covenant with Thane meant forswearing Agnes in his heart forever. That was a vow he could neither bring himself to make nor trust himself to keep. And yet, any secret reservation seemed treachery to Thane. So there he stood before this truth of contradiction and “looked his eyes out” at it. How came Thane to have a thought like that?

Agnes was observing them intently with one elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, eyes half closed. She was not thinking. She was verifying a kind of knowledge that underlies the mind. She knew why John faltered, why he lost his way toward what he meant to do, what that was, and why he dropped Thane’s hand. She knew what it was of a sudden to become a woman and why a woman need never be afraid.

Far away in the sky of her immemorial self, so far that what she saw of it was but its heat’s reflection, passed a flash of contempt for those tame, romantic vanities in which now man sublimates the reckless impulses of his savage egoism. At that instant, too, as it were in the light of this archaic intuition, there stood upon her memory the figure of the Cornishman, and she was horribly ashamed.

Nevertheless she continued to feel cynical about the emotional male principle. It bored her. There was one obvious thing to do. There was in fact only one thing possible to be done. But apparently neither Thane nor John was ever going to think of it, or give her a chance to suggest it without boldly naming it. One might have thought they had forgotten her existence. They stood in the middle of the road, John with his back to her, Thane with his eyes in the heavens, sharing a vast man-silence. She was at the core of that silence; she was all there was there. That did not interest her at all. She wished to be somewhere else.

She got up quietly and walked away from them, away from New Damascus, with a very bad list and limp. They overtook her in four or five steps, one on each side.

“What’s this way now?” Thane asked.

No answer.

“She isn’t fit to walk,” said John. “Don’t let her do it.”

She looked at Thane; the gesture he was making toward her froze in the air.

“Take her as you would a nettle, firmly,” John recommended.

“’Tain’t what’s outside I’m afraid of,” said Thane.

Stepping ahead and turning, John confronted her. Thane did the same. She made to go around them, right. They moved that way. She made to go around them, left. They moved that way. With a frustrated gesture she gave it up, turned a tormented profile and made them feel how much she despised them.

“Mrs. Thane,” said John, “do you wish to leave New Damascus--leave it now--tonight?”

Agnes turned on him in a sudden rage of exasperation.

“Fly, I suppose! Fly away with a--a--what is he? I forget.”

“Oh, oh,” John groaned.

“What are you?” she said to Thane.

“Puddler,” he answered, with dignity, the look of a hurt animal in his face.

“It’s very well known,” she said, “puddlers don’t fly. Besides it’s too late. We’ve stopped to think. We had to take time to change his clothes. He’s out of a job and has no money. He told me so. I wonder what the wives of puddlers do.”

“Some would envy you your sting,” said John, horrified at what she was doing to Thane. She understood him perfectly.

“But you are immune,” she said. “I have not married you. Or have I? Are you this puddler’s David? What are your rights in him? How come you to suppose that you have rights in me?”

“Tantrums, thank God, and not hysterics,” said John.

“Shall we spend the rest of the night in this way?” she asked. “And what then?”

“I am leaving New Damascus tonight,” said John, pursuing a flash of intuition.

Agnes gave him an incredulous glance.

“So far as I know, forever,” he continued. “This decision is my own. You have nothing to do with it. But if you were also about to leave, perhaps taking the same direction, why shouldn’t we go together, as far as it’s parallel?”

“Who goes or stays, no matter what happens, I shall not be in sight of New Damascus at daybreak,” said Agnes, her face averted from both John and her husband, and she spoke as one making a vow. “So, whatever you do,” she added, “please hurry.”

Thane would have asked her a question, not knowing how women consent; John restrained him with a sign.

“Then I’ll pick you up here,” he said, setting off abruptly. “And I won’t be very long.”

When he returned with a smart bay team and a light road wagon, his own rig, the moon was sinking. Agnes was asleep on the dewy grass in Thane’s coat. He wrapped her in the rug John held out to him and lifted her to the seat. She was docile and limp, like a groggy child. John had to hold her erect until Thane got up on the other side. She sat between them.

Where the road turns abruptly out of the valley John pulled up and looked back. It was now quite dark. All that he could see was the mill, like a live malignant cinder in the eye of darkness, glowing faintly, going almost out, then spurting forth quick tongues of flame. He had the sensation of a great solitary weight rolling about in his stomach. Tears came to his eyes. Until that moment he had not known that he cared for New Damascus. His caring was like an inherited memory.

And though he knew it not, this night was the time and his exit the sign that sealed the fate of New Damascus. It was left in the hands of Enoch, who fanatically withheld it from the steel age.

“Where to?” Thane asked.

“Wilkes-Barre tonight,” said John. “Then to Pittsburgh. I’m buying a mill at Pittsburgh that I want you to take hold of. We’ll discuss it tomorrow.”

“What shape of mill?” asked Thane.

John hesitated.

“Nothing like the mill behind us,” he said.

The idea of buying a mill had only that instant come to him. So of course he did not know what kind of mill it was.

He looked at Agnes. She was sound asleep, leaning on Thane, who had his arm around her. Again he looked at her. She was in the same position, but her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.

XXI

The flying triangle reached Wilkes-Barre for breakfast.

While waiting for Agnes, John and Thane transacted an important piece of business.

“Look here,” said John.

He sat at a desk in the office and wrote rapidly on a sheet of hotel paper as follows:

MEMORANDUM OF CONTRACT

In consideration of one month’s wages paid in hand on the signing of this paper, Alexander Thane agrees to give his skill and services exclusively to the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., (John Breakspeare, agent), for a period of two years, and the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., agrees to pay Alexander Thane not less that five thousand dollars a year, plus a ten per cent. share in the profits.

Signed { { JOHN BREAKSPEARE

“Put your name over mine,” he said, handing the paper to Thane, who read it slowly.

“This the mill you meant last night?”

“Yes,” said John.

“How did you come to know as I could run a mill?”

“I think you can,” John said.

Thane signed his name in large, bold writing, blotted it hard, and handed the paper back to John.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can. And if it appears for any reason as I can’t that thing ain’t no good and you can tear it up.”

It never occurred to him that the business had a fabulous aspect. He took what John said at its face value. He could imagine no other way of taking a friend’s word. And if it were unusual for a young puddler to become a participating mill superintendent over night, so urgently wanted that he must sign up before breakfast, that might be easily explained. His friend, John Breakspeare, was an extravagant person, very impulsive, with unexpected flashes of insight. Who else would have known what Thane could do? Anyhow he had got the right man to run the mill. Thane was sure of that. He supposed John was sure of it, too.

John just then was sure of nothing. His one anxiety was to get Thane and Agnes into some kind of going order. He was aware that his motives were exceedingly complex and would not examine them. He let himself off with saying it was his moral responsibility; he was to blame for having got them into a dilemma that neither was able to cope with. Yet all the time he was thrilled by what he did because he was doing it for Agnes.

Thane’s artlessness about the contract was an instant relief. A fatal difficulty might otherwise have arisen at that point. But it was also very surprising. Was he so extremely naïve? Or had he such a notion of his ability to conduct a mill as to think he would be worth five thousand a year and one-tenth of the profits? Yes, that was the explanation, John decided: and it gave him a bad twist in his conscience to think how hurt and unforgiving Thane would be if he knew the truth,--that he had signed a contract with a non-existent company to superintend a mythical mill.

They ate a hearty breakfast, coming to it from a night in the open air with no sleep at all. Although they talked very little they were friendly under a truce without terms, all tingling with a sense of plastic adventure. There was no telling what would come of it; but it was exciting; and everything that happened was new.

Both Agnes and John had a surreptitious eye for the puddler’s manners. They were not intrinsically bad or disgusting. They were only fundamentally wrong. He delivered with his knife, took his coffee from his saucer, modelled and arranged his food before attacking it, cut all his meat at once, did everything that cannot be done, and did it all with a certain finish. That is to say, he was a neat eater, very handy with his tools, and cleaned up. He took pride in the performance; his confidence in it was impervious. He was not in the least embarrassed or uneasy. He did not wait to see what they did. He did it his way and minded his own business.

Once John caught Agnes eyeing Thane aslant, and she stared him down for it. He could not decide whether she was scandalized or fascinated.

When they had finished Thane called for the reckoning and paid, John politely protesting, Agnes looking somewhat surprised. After that in all cases Thane paid for two and John paid for himself.

Instead of resting for a day in Wilkes-Barre they chose to go on by train to Pittsburgh and arrived there in the middle of the afternoon. John recommended a hotel where he was sure they could be quite comfortable while deciding how they wished to live. He was acquainted there. He would introduce them. In fact, it was where he meant to lodge himself. So of course they all went together.

John managed the whole affair of settling them in their rooms, doing it so tactfully, however, as to leave Thane with the sense of having done it himself. When at last there was not another thing to be thought of John held out his hand to Agnes, saying:

“Congratulations.”

This was subtle, wicked treachery, and in the act was a sting of shame, yet her coolness was so audacious he could not resist the temptation to try its depth. She took his hand and met his look with steady eyes.

“Thank you,” she said. “May I share them with my husband?”

“No, don’t,” he said. “They are all his. I’m about to lose my wits. Well, no matter.... Thane,”--turning to him,--“Mrs. Thane may want to do some shopping. The best places are three blocks east. I’ll see you in the morning. Or later, perhaps? There’s no hurry.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Thane answered.

They were standing in a group outside the Thanes’ rooms, loath to break up, each for a different reason.

“I’m under the same roof, you know, if you should need me,” said John.

“Thanks,” said Thane.

Still they lingered in a group.

“Have a bit of supper with us,” said Thane, suddenly.

“Not tonight,” said John. “We shall be too sleepy.”

Agnes was silent.

After a long pause, “Well,” said Thane, “this is Pittsburgh.”

John pensively nodded his head, and added, “Well.”

Agnes might have yawned. That would have produced the necessary centrifugal impulse. Or she might have said something to have that effect. But she was apparently sunk in thought.

After another long pause the two men shook hands in a hasty manner and John walked rapidly down the hall. From the head of the staircase he looked back. They were still there,--Agnes, her hands behind her, leaning against the wall with her head thrown back, gazing from afar at Thane, who stood in an awkward twist, with one superfluous leg, looking away. His face was towards John, and John waved his hand, but there was no response. The puddler was staring at an invisible thing.

That last accidental glimpse of them left a vivid after-image in John’s eyes. It stood there for hours like a transparent illusion. He walked the sun down on a country road and still it was there. Returning, he paced the streets until ten o’clock and it tortured him still. Coming presently to a fine brick house, not very large, with a marble fountain and small flower garden in front, he turned in. His feet knew their way up the narrow walk and he pulled the bell knob with the air of one to whom nothing unexpected is likely to happen. No light was anywhere visible. The windows were hermetically shuttered. Nor did his pull at the bell knob produce any audible sound. Yet almost at once the door opened, revealing a brilliantly lighted interior, and a servant in livery bowed him in. There was an air of vulgar elegance about the hall. The servant did not speak. Having offered to take the visitor’s hat, to which the visitor shook his head, he opened a heavy door to the right and there came from beyond it intermittent sounds of small clatter. The room John entered was what had been the front drawing room. Back of it were two more rooms, in a train to the depth of the house, all thrown together by means of unfolded doors, so that the effect was of one very long apartment, about thirty feet wide, laid with rich, deep carpet on which the feet made not the slightest sound. The walls were full of pictures, some of them good. There were several art objects on pedestals, a great many nice chairs and some small tables, like tea tables, evidently used for serving refreshments. On one of these tables was a large humidor and on another a tray with a cut glass service of decanters, goblets and ice bowl. That was all, except down both sides of the first two rooms roulette wheels and in the last room at the end three faro layouts.

Twenty or thirty men were betting at roulette, in groups of three or four each. John passed them with a negligent, preoccupied air, walking straight back.

No faro play was just then going on. At one layout sat a dealer in that state of chilled ophidian tension characteristic of professional gamblers in the face of their prey, and by none so remarkably achieved as by the faro bank dealer, who drinks ice water without warming it, who sees without looking, who speaks only under great provocation and then softly, and whose slightest movement is pontifical until he reaches for the six-shooter. That movement is as a rattlesnake strikes.

On the players’ side of a faro table are representations of the thirteen cards,--ace, deuce, trey, etc., to the king, in two rows of six each with the seven at one end. On the dealer’s side, besides the rack containing the chips, the cash drawer and the invisible six-shooter, is a little metal box in which a pack of cards will snugly lie, face up. The dealer moves the cards off one at a time. They fall alternately into two piles. One pile wins; the other loses. The players bet which pile a card will fall in, indicating it by the way they place their money on the table. No vocal sound is necessary. It is a silent game. The expert might play for ever and never speak a word.

John dragged up a large chair, hung his coat on the back of it, settled himself to face the dealer and passed five hundred dollars across the table. The dealer put the money in the cash drawer and pushed out five stacks of yellow chips. John began to play. He did not make his bets at random. He played a slow, rhythmic, two-handed game, never hesitating, always thoughtful, precisely with the air of a man playing solitaire.

For an hour or more he lost steadily. Several times his hands made a bothered gesture, as of clearing the space in front of his face. The dealer, the cards, the yellow chips, all objects of common reality, were dim and uncertain, by reason of the image persisting in his eyes,--that etched impression of Agnes and Thane in the hallway, so twain, so improbable, yet so imminent, so-- ... so--....

He groaned aloud and held his head between clenched hands. The dealer stopped and waited. Players sometimes behave that way.

Recalling himself with a start, John looked up, cleared his play, gave the dealer a nod to proceed and doubled the scale of his bets. That made his game steep enough to attract attention. A little gallery gathered. No one else cut in. He kept the table to himself. Gradually the haunted mist broke up. The tormenting picture went away. If it threatened to return he raised his bets again. His health revived. He had some supper brought in and ate it as he played. He played all night.

At seven he rose, yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes like a man coming out of a deep sleep, pushed his chips across the table to be cashed, and drew on his coat while the dealer counted them.

He had won over three thousand dollars. But it was neither the fact of his winning nor the amount of his gain that floated his spirits. It was getting that picture out of his eyes and the feeling that went with it out of his heart. Losing would have served him quite as well, psychically, though of course winning was only that much more to boot.

Always for him the excitement of chance was a perfect refuge from thought and reality, better than sleep, which may be troubled with dreams, and restful in the same way that dreamless sleep is.

Now as he walked toward the hotel, though the morning was wet and heavy, he felt fresh in his body and optimistic in his mind. He could think of seeing Agnes and Thane at breakfast without that ugly lurching of his heart.

They were in the dining room when he arrived there an hour later. His impulse was to let them alone, but Thane, seeing him, stood up and beckoned.

“We kept a place for you,” he said.

It was so. The table was laid for three. John wondered whose wish that was.

“I’ve had word from New Damascus,” he said to Agnes. “Your father is all right.”

“Was there any reason to think he might not be all right?” she asked in surprise.

“No, no,” he said. “It was merely mentioned, like the state of the weather.”

She detected his confusion.

“You saw him last,” she said. “Did anything unusual occur?” She was regarding him keenly.

“I thought he looked ill, or about to be,” John said, “And I asked the servants to call the doctor. Apparently it was nothing. Anyhow ... I’ve had word that he’s all right.”

She did not pursue the subject, but became suddenly silent, and thereafter avoided John’s eyes, for in the midst of his explanation his expression had changed. He had looked at her in a most extraordinary way and she suffered a deep psychic disturbance. It was as if he had blunderingly discovered a nameless secret. And that was precisely what had happened. As he was talking to her,--positively as he would swear with no wanton curiosity in his mind,--as he looked at her and as her eyes met his in open frankness there came an instant in which he saw how matters stood.

How can one tell? One cannot tell. It tells itself in the way the eyes look back, in what is missing from them, in something there that was not there before, in a certain hardness of the chin.

In no such way had Agnes changed.

That was what John saw. The discovery shook him. All his senses leaped exultingly. She was not Thane’s,--not yet. Wild thoughts got loose. The dining room began to sway. Then he looked at Thane and enormously repented. His feeling for Thane was one of intense affection. He could no more help it than he could help his feeling for Agnes. They were separate chemistries, antagonistic. So he was torn between them, and when he could bear it no longer he began clumsily to excuse himself.

“We are delayed by legal formalities,” he said to Thane. “May be three or four days yet. Take it easy. The company can stand it.”

So he left them abruptly.

All that day he fled from himself. All night he played. The next morning he looked at his haggard self in the mirror,--looked deeply into his own eyes, and said aloud:

“But she is his, not mine, and I will let her be, by God.”

On that he slept for twenty-four hours and rose on the third day with a strong appetite, a clear mind and a great vow to the divinity with whom he kept now a time of feud, now a time of grace, whimsically alternating.

XXII

The divinity that made the pattern of John’s life is infinitely mysterious. Some call it luck. Others call it chance. Both are begging names. Mathematicians call it probability--the theory of, and devote a branch of their science to it. Definition is impossible. It is whatever it is that causes, permits or brings one thing to happen in place of all the other things that might just as well have happened. Its commonest manifestations are profoundly obscure. On the first toss of a coin the chances are even between head and tail. On the second toss they change. Why they change nobody can tell; but everyone knows that the odds against the heads coming twice in succession are two to one. If you think of it, how preposterous! Rationally, how can the result of one throw create any probability as to the result of the next? Yet it does. Here evidently is some principle or rhythmic variation that we do not understand.

We speak of the law of chance. There is no such thing, for if chance could be reduced to law it would cease to be chance. It is outside any law we know. The mathematical odds are two to one against double heads, yet the head may happen to come ten times in succession, so that the actual predestined odds against the tail showing once in ten throws were ten to one. If the head may come ten times in succession, could it come a thousand times? No one will say it could not. But since it has never happened as a matter of record you can’t imagine it, and the odds against it are what you will.

The fact of oneself is an amazing unlikelihood. The biological chances against one’s getting born as one is, plus the chances against any particular organism getting born at all, must have been billions to one. Yet here one is, thinking it had been precisely inevitable since all eternity. Perhaps it was. There may be no such thing as chance. It may be only that we never know all the factors. It may be. Yet does not everyone believe from experience that survival is a continuous chance?

There are innumerable chances for and against one’s living another day, another hour. These chances are estimated statistically and great companies are formed to bet on them. That is life insurance. The insurance company bets not on the life of an individual, for that would be gambling; it bets that the aggregate life of ten thousand people will correspond to the average duration of human life, and that works out, because those who fall short of the average are balanced by those who exceed it, and there is an average. But any single life is the sport of pure chance. And we know nothing about this fickle arbiter. Therefore we become superstitious. Belief in luck is the only universal religion. Luck is the happy chance. The right thing happens when it is needed. It strains a point to happen. Why it happens, in streaks, why it happens more to some than to others, why to a darling few it happens importunately,--these are questions one asks in a rhetorical sense. There is no answer. Luck and genius may be two aspects of the same thing. Luck happens and genius happens, and there is no accounting for it.

It came to be a notorious saying about John Breakspeare that he was lucky. But people at the same time said he was dangerous, which would mean that he sometimes failed. That was true. He often failed. When that happened he did not curse his luck. It only occurred to him that he had played the wrong chance, and he went on from there. Probably in a case like his there is a highly developed intuition of the winning chance corresponding to a musical composer’s intuition of harmony. The principles of harmony have been partially discovered. But the rhythms of chance are still a mystery.

Certainly it was chance, not luck, that brought John this day to the edge of a small crowd in front of the county court house just as the auctioneer was saying:

“Three thousand--three thousand--three thousand--t-h-r-E-E thous-A-N-D! Three thousand dollars for a first class nail mill. Why, gentlemen, it would fetch more than that by the pound for junk. Three thousand do I hear one? Three thousand do I hear one? GOING, at three--One! Thank you, sir.”

He bowed ironically to John.

“Thirty-one--thirty-one--thirty-one hund-r-e-d! Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Two over there! Now do I hear three? Do-I-hear-three? Two-do-I-hear-three?”

He was looking at John.

“Going at thirty-two. Are you all DONE? T-h-i-r-t-y-two, ONCE. T-h-i-r-t-y-two, T W I C E. T-h-i-r-t-y-two for the third and--”

John nodded his head.

“Three! Three-I-have, three-I-have, three-I-have. Thirty-three-hundred dollars for an up-to-date iron mill in the great city of Pittsburgh. Thirty-three-hundred. Do I hear four? Four do I hear? Thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three. Going at thirty-three hundred. Going, ONCE. Going, TWICE. Going for the third and last time--SOLD! to that young man over there. Now, gentlemen, the next property to be sold by the decree of the court is a nail mill as is a mill. It has a capacity of--”

John, thrusting his way through the crowd, interrupted.

“Where shall I go to settle for this?”

The auctioneer eyed him suspiciously and relighted his cigar before speaking.

“If I were you,” he squinted, “I’d try the clerk of the court.”

“Where is he?”

“Haven’t you seen him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There was no occasion.”

The auctioneer could not stand anything so opaque. It made him sarcastic.

“If you have been playing booby horse with me and the court,--if you h-a-v-e! Does anybody around here know your figger to look at it?”

“This is a public auction, isn’t it?” John asked.

“Yes-sir-ee.”

“A certain property was put up here for sale?”

“Yes-sir-ee.”

“Well, I bought it,” said John. “Now I want to pay for it. Is that clear? I want to pay for it in cash. Does that make it any clearer? Whom shall I pay? That’s all I want to know.”

The auctioneer saved his ego with a gesture of being exceedingly bored. He turned to the bailiff at his side and wearily tore from his hands a large legal document. “I’ll read this,” he said. “Take him in to the clerk.” Then he resumed--“A nail mill as is a mill, gentlemen, particularly described, if we may read without further interruption, in terms as follows:--”

Half an hour later John walked out of the courthouse with title to a mill he had never seen, guaranteed by the bankruptcy court to exist in Twenty-ninth Street and to contain tools, machines, devices, etc., pertaining to the manufacture of cut iron nails. It was one of four nail mills sold that day on the court house steps.

“Can’t be much of a mill,” mused John. “Still, it doesn’t take much of a mill to be worth thirty-three hundred dollars.”

Not until long afterward, and then not very hard, did the incongruity of this transaction strike his sense of humor. And in fact it was not as irrational as it might seem. He had to have a mill of some sort in which to place Thane. Nail mills were very cheap because they had increased too fast and were falling into bankruptcy. The other bidders undoubtedly were men who not only had examined the mill but who knew the state of the nail industry. It was not likely that they would over-value the property; and he paid only one hundred dollars more than they had been willing to give for it.

The next thing he did was to visit a lawyer whom he favorably remembered from slight acquaintance. That was Jubal Awns,--two small black eyes in a big round head and a pleasant way of saying yes.

John drew a slip of paper from his pocket. He wished to incorporate a company, to be styled the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., with an authorized capital of a quarter of a million dollars and three incorporators,--himself, the lawyer Awns and a man named Thane.

“What is the business?” Awns asked.

“Manufacturing,” said John.

“Yes,” said Awns, “but what do we manufacture? What is the property to be incorporated?”

“A nail mill to begin with,” said John.

“Where is it?”

“Here in Pittsburgh. Thirty-ninth Street.”

“That’s got me,” said Awns. “I can’t think of any nail mill in Thirty-ninth Street.”

John looked at the bill of sale and improved the address without the slightest change of expression.

“Twenty-ninth,” he said.

The lawyer took the bill of sale, glanced at it, and gave John a curious look.

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“Bought it sight unseen?”

“Yes.”

“How much stock of this new company do you mean to issue?”

“Founders’ shares, or whatever they are, and then stock to myself for what I put in,--the mill, the money to start with, and so on.”

“Then why an authorized capital of a quarter of a million?”

“Because I’m going into the iron and steel business,” said John.

Awns studied him in silence.

“You have quit with Gib at New Damascus?”

“I’m out for myself,” said John.

“All right,” said Awns. “Here’s for the North American Manufacturing Company, Limited.”

They drew up papers. At the end of the business John asked: “Will you take your fee in cash or stock?”

Jubal Awns was amazed, and somehow challenged, too. He was ten years older than John, successful and shrewd, with a delusion that he was romantic. He loved to dramatize a matter and make unexpected decisions. Putting down the papers he got up and walked three times across the floor with an air of meditation.

“I’ll take it in stock,” he said, “provided I may incorporate all of your companies and take my fees that way each time.”

They shook hands on it.

It was late that afternoon when John and Thane together set out in a buggy from the hotel to inspect the mill. Thane was eager and communicative. He had not been taking it easy. He evidently had visited all the big mills in and around Pittsburgh. He had seen some new practice and much that was bad, and had got a lot of ideas. He had informed himself as to the conditions of labor. Here and there he had found a man he meant to pick up.

And all the time John’s heart was sinking.

As they turned into Twenty-ninth Street the eight stacks of the Keystone Iron Works rose in their eyes. No other iron working plant was visible in the vicinity, and as John, looking for his nail mill, began to slow up, Thane leaped to the notion that the Keystone was their goal.

“She’s a whale,” he said, enthusiastically, but with no sound of awe. John gave him a squinting glance.

“Would you tackle that?” he asked.

“Oh,” said Thane, “then that ain’t it.” In his tone was a sense of disappointment that answered John’s question. Of course he would tackle it.

They drove slowly past the Keystone, past dump heaps, sand lots, a row of unpainted, upside down boxes called houses, and came at length to a group of rude sheds, one large one and four small ones. One of the small ones, open in front like a wood-shed, was filled with empty nail kegs in tiers.

The front door of the big central shed was propped shut with an iron bar. John kicked it away, pulled the door open, and they went in. A figure rose out of the dimness, asking, “What’d ye want?”

“Are you Coleman’s caretaker?” John asked. Coleman was the name of the bankrupt.

“Yep,” said the man.

So this was the mill.

“We’ve bought him out,” said John. “Want to have a look at the plant.”

“Help yourself.”

They walked about silently on the earthen, scrap littered floor. A nail mill, as nail mills were at that time, was not much to look at, and a cold iron working plant of any kind has a bygone, extinct appearance. Thane had never seen a cold mill. He was horribly depressed. Gradually their eyes grew used to the dimness. The equipment consisted of an overloaded driving engine, one small furnace for heating iron bars, a train of rolls for reducing the bars to sheets the thickness of nails and five automatic machines for cutting nails from the sheet like cookies,--all in bad to fair condition.

“Won’t look so sad when you get her hot and begin to turn her over,” said John.

Thane said nothing. Having examined the machinery and the furnace thoughtfully he stood for a long time surveying the mill as a whole. There was no inventory to speak of. The raw material, which was bar iron bought outside, had been worked up clean. They looked into the small sheds and then it began to be dark. As they drove away Thane spoke. It was the first word he had uttered.

“When do we start up?”

“Right away,” said John. “I’ll contract some iron tomorrow.”

“Give me a couple of weeks,” said Thane. “There’s a lot to be done to that place.”

“What?”

“She’s all upside down,” he said. “The stuff ain’t moving right. No wonder they had to shut up.”

That night at supper Agnes questioned her puddler.

“What is your mill like?”

“A one horse thing.”

His manner was preoccupied and she let him alone. After supper he went to his room, removed his coat, waistcoat, collar and shoes and sat with his feet in the window, thinking.

They had three rooms,--two bed chambers and a living room between. She sat in the middle room sewing, with a view of him through the door, which he left ajar. He did not move, except to refill and light his pipe. He was still there, slowly receding beyond a veil of smoke, when she retired.

Before he went to bed the little nail mill was all made over and the stuff was moving right.

Thane at this time was twenty-five. He had lived nearly all his life in the iron mill at New Damascus. He could not remember a time when its uproar and smells were not familiar to his senses. His mother died when he was three. He was the only child. Then his father, who was a puddler and loved him fiercely, began to take him to the mill. It was a wonderful nursery. When the shift was daytime he was the puddlers’ mascot and playmate. At night he slept on a pallet in some gloom hidden niche from which he could see his father, satanically transfigured in the glare of the furnace. Then he went to school, but spent all his playtime in the mill. The thrill of it never failed him. When he was old enough to carry water he got a job. At nineteen he became his father’s helper and delighted to vie with him in the weight of pig iron he could lift and heave into the maw of the furnace. The normal carry was one pig. He began to carry two at a time and his father matched him. But one day his father stumbled. As they stooped again side by side at the iron pile he picked up one pig. The old man gave him a queer, startled look and did the same. After that it was always one pig, and they never spoke of it. When his father died Alexander took his place, and as he drew his first heat, Enoch watching, the fact stood granted. He was the best puddler in the mill.

He had it in his hands. Of iron, for coaxing, shaping and compelling it, he had that kind of tactile understanding an artist has for paint or clay, or any plastic stuff. He seemed to think with his hands. It is a mysterious gift, and leaves it open to wonder whether the brain has made the hand or the hand the brain. Besides this intuitive knowledge that belongs to the hand Thane possessed a natural sense of mechanics and a naïve way of taking nothing for granted because it happens so to be. All of this was to be revealed. It was John’s luck.

XXIII

While Thane was thinking how to set the nail mill in order, John, sitting in the hotel lobby with his feet in the window, gnawing a cigar, was reflecting in another sphere. His problem was the nail industry at large. It was in a parlous way. Although cut iron nails had been made by automatic machines for a long time there had recently appeared a machine that displaced all others, because it made the nail complete, head and all, in one run, and was very fast. This machine coming suddenly into use had caused an over-production of nails. The price had fallen to a point where there was actually a loss instead of a profit in nail making unless one produced one’s own iron and got a profit there. The Twenty-ninth Street plant had to buy its iron. The probability of running it at a profit was nil.

His meditations carried him far into the night. The lights were put out and still he sat with his feet in the window, musing, reflecting, dreaming, with a relaxed and receptive mind. An idea came to him. It will be important to consider what that idea was for it became afterward a classic pattern. It had the audacity of great simplicity. He would combine the whole nail making industry in his North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd. Then production could be suited to demand and the price of nails could be advanced to a paying level.

He took stock of his capital. It was fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe it could be stretched to twenty. In his work with Gib, selling rails, he had acquired a miscellaneous lot of very cheap and highly speculative railroad shares, some of which were beginning to have value. But twenty thousand dollars would be the outside measurement, and to think of setting out with that amount of capital to acquire control of the nail making industry, worth perhaps half a million dollars, was at a glance fantastic. But one’s capital may exist in the idea. John already understood the art of finance.

Leaving the Twenty-ninth Street plant in Thane’s hands, with funds for overhauling it, he consulted with Jubal Awns and set out the next morning on his errand.

The nail makers were responsive for an obvious reason. They were all losing money. In a short time John laid before Awns a sheaf of papers.

“There’s the child,” he said. “Examine it.”

He had got options in writing on every important nail mill in the country save one. The owners agreed to sell out to the North American Manufacturing Co., Ltd., taking in payment either cash or preferred shares at their pleasure. The inducement to take preferred shares was that if they did they would receive a bonus of fifty per cent. in common stock.

“But they will take cash in every case,” said Awns, “and where will you find it?”

“They won’t,” said John. “I’ll see to that. What have you done with Gib?”

Awns had been to see Enoch. The New Damascus mill produced in its nail department a fifth of all the nails then made. There was no probability of buying him out. John well knew that. Yet his nail output had to be controlled in some way, else the combine would fail. So he had sent Awns to him with alternative propositions. The first was to buy him out of the nail making business. And when he had declined to sell, as of course he would, Awns was to negotiate for his entire output under a long term contract.

“He wouldn’t sell his nail business,” said Awns.

“I knew that,” said John.

“But I’ve got a contract for all his nails,” said Awns, handing over the paper. “The price is stiff,--fifty cents a keg more than nails are worth. It was the best I could do.”

“That’s all right,” said John reading the agreement. “We are going to add a dollar a keg to nails. This phrase--‘unless the party of the second part,’ (that’s Gib), ‘wishes to sell nails at a lower price to the trade’--who put that in?”

“He did,” said Awns. “I couldn’t see any point in objecting to it. No man is going to undersell his own contract.”

John handed the agreement back and sat for several minutes musing.

“There’s a loose wheel in your scheme, if I’m not mistaken,” said Awns. “If you add a dollar a keg to nails won’t you bring in a lot of new competition? Anybody can make nails if it pays. These same people who sell out to you may turn around and begin again. You’ll be holding the umbrella for everybody else.”

“Anybody can’t make nails,” said John. “I’ve looked at that.”

“Why not?”

“Nail making machines are covered by patents. There are only four firms that make them. I’ve made air tight contracts with them. We take all their machines at an advance of twenty-five per cent. over present prices and they bind themselves to sell machines to nobody else during the life of the contract. So we’ve got the bag sewed up top and bottom. They were glad to do it because there isn’t any profit in machines either with the nail makers all going busted.”

Awns stared at him with doubt and admiration mingled.

“Well, that is showing them something,” he said. “If you go far with that kind of thing laws will be passed to stop it.”

“It’s legal, isn’t it?”

“There’s no law against it,” said Awns.

“We’re not obliged to be more legal than the law,” said John. “Tell me, what do you know about bankers in Pittsburgh? I’ve got to do some business in that quarter.”

Pittsburgh at this time was not a place prepared. It was a sign, a pregnant smudge, a state of phenomena. The great mother was undergoing a Cæsarian operation. An event was bringing itself to pass. The steel age was about to be delivered.

Men performed the office of obstetrics without knowing what they did. They could neither see nor understand it. They struggled blindly, falling down and getting up. Forces possessed them. Their psychic condition was that of men to whom fabulous despair and extravagant expectation were the two ends of one ecstasy. They were hard, shrewd, sentimental, superstitious, romantic in friendship and conscienceless in trade. They named their blast furnaces after their wives and sweethearts, stole each other’s secrets, fell out with their partners, knew no law of business but to lay on what the traffic would bear, read Swedenborg and dreamed of Heaven as a thoroughfare resembling Wood Street, Pittsburgh, lined with banks and in the door of each bank a grovelling president, pleading: “Here’s money for your payrolls. Please borrow it here. Very fine quality of money. Pay it back when you like.”

They were always begging money at the banks. When they made money they used it to build more mills and to fill the mills with automatic monsters that grew stranger and more fantastic. Many of these monsters, like things in nature’s own history of trial and error, appeared for a short time and became extinct. When they were not making money they were bankrupt. That was about half the time. Then they came to the banks in Wood Street to implore, beg, wheedle money to meet their payrolls.

There is the legend of a man, afterward one of the great millionaires, who drove one mare so often to Wood Street and from one bank to another in a zigzag course that the animal came to know the stops by heart, made them automatically, and could not be made to go in a straight line through this lane of money doors.

The bankers were a tough minded group. They had to be. Nobody was quite safe. A man with a record for sanity would suddenly lose his balance and cast away the substance of certainty to pursue a vision. The effort to adapt the Bessemer steel process to American conditions was an irresistible road to ruin. That process was producing amazing results in Europe but in this country it was bewitched with perversity and it looked as if the English and German manufacturers would walk away with the steel age. Fortunes were still being swallowed up in snail shaped vessels called converters, not unlike the one Aaron had built at New Damascus twenty-five years before.

Of all the bankers in Wood Street the toughest minded was Lemuel Slaymaker.

“All the same,” said Awns, “I should try him first. His name would put it through and he loves a profit.”

Awns knew him. They went together to see him. Slaymaker saluted Awns and acknowledged his introduction of Mr. John Breakspeare not otherwise nor more than by turning slowly in his chair and staring at them. He had a large white face, pale blue eyes and red, close-cropped hair. The impression he made was one of total sphericity. There was no way to take hold of him. No thought or feeling projected.

John laid out his plan, producing the papers as exhibits, A, B, C, in the appropriate places. Lastly he produced data on the nail trade, showing the amount of nails consumed in the country and the normal rate of annual increase with the growth of population, together with a carefully developed estimate of the combine’s profits at various prices per keg. When he had finished the idea was lucid, complete in every part and self-evident. Therein lay the secret of his extraordinary power of persuasion. He seemed never to argue his case. He expressed no opinion of his own to be combatted. He merely laid down a state of facts with an air of looking at them from the other man’s point of view.

“And what you want is a bank to guarantee this scheme,” said Slaymaker. “You want a bank to guarantee that if these people want cash instead of stock the cash will be forthcoming.”

This was the first word he had spoken. The papers he had not even glanced at. They lay on his desk as John had placed them there.

“That’s it,” said John. “Guarantee it. Very little cash will be required.”

“How do you say that?”

“To make them want stock instead of cash,” said John, “you have only to engage brokers to make advance quotations for the stock, here and in Philadelphia at, say, par for the preferred and fifty for the common. If you do not know brokers who can do that I will find them. The scheme is sound. The stock will pay dividends from the start. A bank that had guaranteed it might very well speak a good word for it here and there. The public will want some of the stock.”

Slaymaker gazed at a corner of the ceiling and twiggled his foot. Then he turned his back on them.

“Leave the papers,” he said, “and see me at this time tomorrow.”

When they were in the street again Awns said: “You got him.”

And so the infant trust was born,--first of its kind, first of a giant brood. Biologically they were all alike, but with evolution their size increased prodigiously. The swaddling cloths of this one would not have patched the eye of a twentieth century specimen delivered in Wall Street.

Slaymaker’s lawyers and Jubal Awns together verified all the agreements. The stock of the N. A. M. Co., Ltd., was increased enough to make sure there would be plenty to go around. Slaymaker took a large amount for banker’s fees, John took a block for promoter’s services and another block for the Twenty-ninth Street mill, the lawyers took some, and a certain amount was set aside for Thane,--for Agnes really. John was elected president and the combine was launched. Before the day came on which the options of purchase were to be exercised the preferred stock was publicly quoted at 105 and the common stock at 55, and there were symptoms of public interest in its possibilities. As John predicted, nearly all the nail manufacturers elected to take stock in the new company, with Slaymaker’s name behind it.

Everyone at length was more enthusiastic than John. He kept thinking of that phrase in the contract with Gib--“unless the party of the second part wishes to sell nails to the trade at a lower price.” No one else had noticed it, not even Slaymaker. Nobody else would have had any misgivings about it. Who could imagine, as Awns said, that a man would undersell his own contract? There is a law of self interest one takes for granted.

XXIV

Thane had been reporting laconically on the Twenty-ninth Street mill. It now was in action and the nails were piling up. John had not been out to see it. Their contacts had become irregular; generally they met by accident in the hotel lobby, rarely in the dining room. This was owing partly to John’s absorption in his scheme and partly to the resolve he had made to avoid Agnes. He had not once been close enough to speak to her since that third morning when his haggard true self met his anti-self in the mirror, saying: “She is his.” The only way he could put her out of his mind at all was to involve himself in difficulties. Trouble was a cave of refuge. As during those two nights of struggle with his anti-self, when it had almost conquered him, he played absently at faro and increased his bets to make the game absorbing, so afterward in business, wilfully at first and then by habit, he preferred the hazardous alternative; he seemed to seek those situations in which the chance was all or none. This made his ways uncanny. Luck seems to favor one who doesn’t care. Or it may be that one who doesn’t care sees more clearly than the rest, being free of fear.

“Better come and sight it,” said Thane, one morning in the lobby. “I’m worried where to put the nails.”

“We’ll go now,” said John. “Anyhow, I want to talk to you. I don’t know about this Twenty-ninth Street mill. It’s a poor layout. Maybe we’d better shut it up. Now don’t get uneasy. Wait till I’m through. The company--(and, by the way, you are a director and there’s some stock in your name)--it has bought nearly all the nail mills there are. Over a hundred, big and little, all over the place. The idea is to combine the nail industry in one organization and put it back on a paying basis. I want you to go around with me and have a look at mills. Some of them we’ll throw away. The trouble was too many of them.”

He went on talking to take up Thane’s injured silence. That he was a director in the company, that he had stock in it, that his salary was to be doubled,--none of this availed against the puddler’s pride in what he had done with the Twenty-ninth Street mill. The thought of now shutting it up hurt him in his middle. John on his side was disappointed in Thane’s inability to rise to an opportunity. So they came to the mill.

“Sounds busy,” said John.

Thane held his thoughts.

On beholding the scene of action within, almost at a glance, John placed the puddler where he belonged. Here was the work of a master superintendent. Nothing was as it had been except the engine and furnace. Everything else had been relocated with one aim in view, which was to eliminate all unnecessary human motion and shorten the train of events from the raw material straight through to the finished nail packed in the keg and stored. Besides the physical achievement, which alone was very notable, there was a subtle psychic relation between Thane and his men. They worked on their toes and liked doing it for him.

“Shake,” said John, holding out his hand. “No, we won’t shut her up. We’ll take her as a pattern. If you can do this with all the mills we’ll walk away with it. Have you figured your costs? They must be fine.”

“In my head,” said Thane.

They stood at a little greasy box-desk screwed to the wall under a window dim with cobwebs.

“I’ll show you how to figure them,” said John. “Iron, so much; fuel, so much; kegs, so much; oil, and so forth, so much; wear and tear of tools and plant, so much; labor, so much; total, so much. Then kegs of nails, so many. Divide that by that and you have the cost per keg. Let’s see how it will work out.”

It worked out nearly as Thane had it in his head and John was sentimental with pride and satisfaction.

“Come on,” he said, impatiently. “Leave a man in charge of this, and we’ll see the other mills.”

Starting with more than a hundred mills, they scrapped twenty outright, saving only their contracts, raw material and stock on hand; others they consolidated. In the end they had fifty well equipped plants strategically placed to supply the trade by the shortest routes. They had all to be overhauled according to Thane’s ideas. He turned the Twenty-ninth Street plant into a training station and sent men from there to work the other mills. It was a large and complicated program. He carried it through so skillfully that he was appointed vice-president in charge of manufacturing, and John was free to organize the company’s business and function executively.

He raised the price of nails, first twenty-five cents a keg, then fifty, then seventy-five cents, and stopped. At that price there was a good profit. Thane was steadily reducing costs by improving plant practice and that increased profits in another way.

A dividend was paid on the preferred stock in the third month. The omens were fine. Still, John was uneasy. No New Damascus nails had been received under their contract with Enoch. The making of nails had not stopped at New Damascus. He made sure of that. No New Damascus nails were coming on the market, either, for John knew everything about the trade. Then what was to be expected?

The answer when it came did not surprise him. He had guessed it already.

One day the nail market was knocked in the head. Enoch was offering nails to the hardware trade at a price seventy-five cents lower than the combine’s price. That meant he was selling them for fifty cents a keg less than the combine had agreed to pay him for his whole output. He had never tendered one ten-penny nail on that contract. Instead, working his plant at high speed, he had accumulated thousands of kegs expressly for the irrational purpose of casting them suddenly on sale to break the combine’s market--John Breakspeare’s market--_Aaron’s market_! John was the only person who understood it. Everyone else was dazed.

Slaymaker sent for John.

“What’s the matter with that man at New Damascus?”

“He’s out of his mind,” said John.

“Better buy him up at his own price,” said Slaymaker. “That’s what he wants.”

John knew better. However, to satisfy Slaymaker, he sent Awns to see Enoch again.

“You’re right,” Awns reported. “The old man is clean crazy. He won’t sell at any price. All he would do was to point to that stipulation in the contract and laugh at me.”

The combine stood aside until the trade had absorbed the New Damascus nails and then tried to go on without reducing its own price; but the trade became very ugly about it, the combine began to be denounced, and Congress, hearing from the farmers, threatened to take the import duty off nails and let the foreign product in. The combine had to let down the price and wait.

Three months later the preposterous act was repeated, Enoch flooding the market with nails at fifty cents a keg less than the combine’s price. There was no doubt this time that he was selling nails at a ruinous loss, and everyone’s amazement grew. Only John knew why he did it.

The combine was now in a very awkward dilemma. If it met Enoch’s price it not only would be selling its own nails at a loss but selling them at a price far below that at which it was obliged to take Enoch’s entire output in case he should choose to deliver to the combine instead of selling direct to the trade.

“Whipsawed,” said John to Awns, “if you know what that means.”

For the N. A. M. Co., Ltd. from then on it was a race with bankruptcy, Gib pursuing. He sold Damascus nails lower and lower until it was thought he would give them away. He might ultimately go broke, of course, but that was nothing the combine could wait for. He was very rich,--nobody knew how rich,--and nail making after all was a small part of his business.

Under these unnatural circumstances John won the incognizable Slaymaker’s glassy admiration, for in trouble he was dogged and enormously resourceful.

“If we’ve got to live on the sweat of our nails,” he said, “we can’t afford to buy iron.”

Thereupon at a bankrupt price he negotiated the purchase of a blast furnace and puddling mill over which two partners were quarrelling in a suicidal manner. No cash was involved. He paid for it with notes. In Thane’s hands, and with luck that was John’s, the plant performed one of those miracles that made Pittsburgh more exciting than a mining camp. It paid for itself the first year out of its own profits. Then John turned it over to the N. A. M. Co., Ltd., at cost. On seeing him do this, Slaymaker, who had never parted with his first stock holdings, privately increased them.

There was a profit in ore back of the iron. John went to that. He got hold of a small Mesaba ore body on a royalty basis and had then a complete chain from the ore to the finished nail. There was still one profit. That was in the kegs. So cooper shops were added.

What with all this integration, as the word came to be for that method of working back to one’s raw material and articulating the whole series of profits, and what at the same time with Thane’s skill in manufacture, developing to the point of genius, the N. A. M. Company got the cost of nails down very low,--even lower as John one day discovered than it was in Europe. This gave him an idea. There was no profit in nails at home, owing to Enoch’s mad policy of slaughter, but there was the whole world to sell nails in. The N. A. M. Co. invaded the export field. This was a shock to the European nail makers. They met it angrily with reprisals. John went to Europe with a plan to form an international pool in which the nail business of the earth should be divided up,--allotting so much to Great Britain, so much to Germany, so much to Belgium, so much to the United States, and so on. If they would do that everybody might make a little money.

He returned unexpectedly and appeared one morning in Slaymaker’s office.

“Did you get your pool born?”

“Chucked the idea,” said John. “I found this.”

He laid on the banker’s desk a bright, thin, cylindrical object.

“What’s that?” Slaymaker asked, looking at it but not touching it.

“That,” said John, “is a steel wire nail. It will drive the iron nail out. It’s just as good and costs much less to make. You feed steel wire into one end of a machine and nails come out at the other like wheat.”

“Well?” said the banker.

“The machines both for drawing the wire and making the nails are German,” John continued. “I’ve bought all the American rights on a royalty basis.”

“What will you do with them?”

“I bought them for the N. A. M.,” said John.

“If this is going to be such a God Almighty nail why not form a new company to make it?” asked Slaymaker.

“I’d rather pull the horse we’ve got out of the ditch,” said John.

Slaymaker regarded him with an utterly expressionless stare.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Enter the steel wire nail. It solved the N. A. M. Company’s problem. Enoch could not touch it. The combine steadily reduced its output of iron nails, until it was nominal, and flooded the trade with the others. Enoch could make any absurd price he liked for iron nails, but as his output, though a formidable bludgeon with which to beat down prices, was only a fraction of what the country required, and as the remainder of the demand was met with the combine’s new product, wire nails superseded iron nails four or five kegs to one. They could sell at a higher price than iron nails without prejudice because they were different, and John, putting a selling campaign behind them, proved that they were also better. That probably was not so. But people had to have them.

XXV

Still there were difficulties quite enough to keep John’s mind enthralled. The steel wire nails soon got the N. A. M. Co. out of the woods. But as the German nail making machines would devour nothing but German wire their food had to be imported by the shipload. The German wire drawing machines, acquired along with the nail making machines, miserably failed when they were asked to reduce American steel to the form of wire. That was not their fault really. It was the fault of American steel. The N. A. M. Co. had either to import German and English steel to make the wire the nail machines ate or import the wire itself.

And now for the first time John turned his mind to this great problem of steel. Six or eight Bessemer steel plants had been built in the United States under the English patents at enormous cost and every one had failed. They could produce steel all right, and do it with one melt from the iron ore, which was what they were after. The trouble was that the steel was never twice the same. Its quality and nature varied. The process was treacherous. There were those who said it simply could not be adapted to American ores; that the only way this country could produce true steel was the old long way, which made it much more expensive than iron.

One night John recognized in the hotel lobby a figure that tormented both the flesh and the spirit of Pittsburgh,--the flesh by wasting its substance and the spirit by keeping always before it a riddle it had not solved. He was a frail, bent little man, not yet old, with a long thin mustache and a pleasing, naïve voice that had cost several iron men their entire fortunes. Wood Street bankers wished he were dead or had never been born. This was Tillinghast, metallurgist and engineer, who had already designed and constructed four steel plants that were a total loss. He knew in each case what was wrong,--knew it in the instant of failure,--and begged to be permitted to make certain changes. Very simple changes. Quite inexpensive. He would guarantee the result. But as his changes at length involved rebuilding the whole plant and as the last of the steel was still like the first his backers sickened and turned away.

“What’s the matter, Tillinghast?” John asked. “You look so horribly down.”

It was a long story, incoherent with unnecessary details, technical exposition, expostulation and argument aside, told at the verge of tears. A steel plant on the river, opposite Allegheny,--one that everyone knew about,--had been under trial for a week. It was almost right. It needed only one correction. They were actually touching the magic. Yet his backers were on the point of throwing it up in disgust.

“No more money, maybe,” said John.

“Fifty thousand more,” said Tillinghast. “I guarantee the result if they will spend fifty thousand more. They have spent eight times that already.” His idea of money in large sums was childlike.

John heard for a while, then heard without listening, while Tillinghast went on and on, thinking to himself out loud. On leaving him John was in a state of vague apprehension. Afterward he could not remember whether he had said goodnight.

All that he had ever heard, here and there, first from Thaddeus and then from others about his father’s fateful steel experiment at New Damascus came back to him, fused and made a vivid picture. That was not so strange. But he seemed to know more than he had ever heard. He seemed to be directly remembering,--not what he had learned from others but the experience itself as if it had been his own. He saw it. And presently in another dimension he saw the steel age that was coming. His imagination unrolled it as a panorama. He understood what it meant to increase one hundred fold the production of that metallic fibre of which there could never be enough.

The next morning he went to look at the abandoned steel plant. It was cast on a large scale. Quite four hundred thousand, as Tillinghast said, must have been spent on it.

“They do it in Europe,” he kept saying to himself. “We can do it here. There is only some little trick to be discovered.”

Later in a casual way he made contact with the owners. They were eager to get anything back. On the faintest suspicion that he might be soft-minded, they overwhelmed him with offers to sell out. At last he got it for nothing. That is, he agreed to take it off their hands flat and go on with Tillinghast’s experiment. If success were achieved their interest in it should be exactly what they had already spent on the plant; if not, he would owe them nothing and lose only what he himself put in.

North American Manufacturing Company stock was now valuable. He took a large amount of it to Slaymaker for a loan.

“What’s up now?”

John told him shortly, knowing what to expect. Slaymaker’s phobia was steel. The word made him mad. He had once lost a great deal of money in that experimental process. He snatched the stock certificates out of John’s hands, put a pin through them and tossed them angrily into a corner of his desk.

“I knew it. I knew it. All right. You can have the money. But I warn you. You’ll never see that stock again. You’ll be bankrupt a year from now.”

Nothing else was said.

Tillinghast treated John not as if John had adopted him but as if he had adopted John and his attitude about the steel plant was one of sacrosanct authority. He was really a cracked pot. It took six months to make the changes. Then they fired up. The first run was good steel, the second was poor, the third was good and the fourth was bad. They got so far that the steel made from the raw iron of one furnace would always be good. When they took the molten iron from two or more furnaces successively the results went askew again. Tillinghast cooed when the steel was good and was silent when it was bad. He could not deny that they were baffled and John had sunk two-thirds of everything he owned.

Thane was a constant onlooker. He looked hard and saw everything.

“It ain’t what you do to it afterward,” he said, breaking a long silence. “That’s the same every time. It’s back of that. It’s in the furnace.”

“Well, suppose it is,” said John. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Mix it,” said Thane.

“Mix what?”

“The molten iron from the blast furnaces before it goes to the steel converter.”

“What will you mix it with?”

“With itself,” said Thane. “Ore’s various, ain’t it? Pig iron as comes from ore is various, ain’t it? That’s why you puddle it so as to make it all the same, like wrought iron’s got to be. Here you take a run of stuff from this furnace ’n one from that furnace ’n it ain’t the same because it ain’t been puddled, but you run it into that converter thing ’n think it’s got to come out all one kind of steel. It won’t.”

“How can you mix six or eight tons of molten iron?” John asked.

“There’s got to be some way,” Thane answered.

Tillinghast was deaf. It didn’t make sense to John. Yet Thane kept saying, “Mix it,” until they were sick of hearing him, and the steel persisted in being variable until they were desperate.

“Well, mix it then,” said John. “If you know how, mix it.”

Thereupon Thane built the first mixer,--an enormous, awkward tank or vat resting on rollers that rocked and jigged the fluid, blazing iron. Now they started the blast furnaces again and molten iron in equal quantities from all three was run into this mixer and sloshed around. From there it went to the converter. After two or three trials they began to get and continued to get steel that was both good and invariable.

And that was Eureka!

They tried the steel in every possible way and it was all that steel should be and is. They fed it to those fastidious German wire drawing machines and they loved it. Never again would it be necessary to import German or English steel to make wire, or German wire to make nails. They had it.

John formed a new company. Slaymaker came in. The men from whom John had taken the plant got stock for their interest. A large block was allotted to Thane for his mixer. John had the controlling interest. It was named the American Steel Company. But John and Thane between them spoke of it as the Agnes Plant.

“Let’s call it that for luck,” said John.

Thane made no reply. However, the next time he referred to it he called it so.

XXVI

One evening Thane and John were sitting together in one of their friendly silences, after supper, in the hotel lobby. Thane cleared his throat.

“We’ve got a house, Agnes ’n me,” he said. As there was no immediate comment he added: “I suppose you won’t be lonesome here alone. We don’t seem to visit much anyhow.”

John said it was very nice that they had a house;--he hoped they would be comfortable;--had they got everything they needed? He did not ask where the house was nor when they should move; and that was all they said about it.

No. John would not be lonesome. There was another word for it and he couldn’t remember what it was. Although he saw her very seldom and then only at a distance, or when he passed her by chance in the hotel and they exchanged remote greetings, still, just living under the same roof with her had become a fact that deeply pertained to his existence. How much he had made of it unconsciously he did not realize until they were gone. Thereafter as he turned in at the door he had always the desolate thought, “She is not here.” The place was empty. The rooms in which he had settled them were open to transients. He thought of taking them for himself. On coming to do it he couldn’t. So he went elsewhere to live; he moved about; all places were empty.

From time to time Thane hinted they would like to see him at the house. For some reason it seemed hard for him to come out with a direct invitation. However, he did at last.

“Mrs. Thane wants you up to supper,” he said, abruptly.

“Thanks,” said John. “I’m ashamed of myself, tell her. I’ll stop in some evening.”

“You don’t know where it is,” said Thane.

“That’s so. Tell me how to find it.”

He wrote the directions down. Still, it was most indefinite. Some evening meant nothing at all. Thane took him by the shoulders and regarded him with an expression that John avoided.

“And _I_ want you to come,” he said, with slow emphasis on the first pronoun. “To-morrow.”

“All right,” said John. “Meet me here at the office and I’ll go with you.”

It was a small house in a poor street, saved only by some large old trees. This surprised John, because Thane’s income was enough to enable them to live in a very nice way, in moderate luxury even. He was still more surprised at the indecorative simplicity of its furnishings. Thane’s nature was not parsimonious. He would not have stinted her. Then why had they set up a household more in keeping with the status of a first rate puddler than with that of the vice-president of a flourishing nail trust, receiving in salary and dividends more than twenty thousand a year? Yet simple, even commonplace as everything was there was evidence of taste beyond Thane’s. It must have been Agnes who did it.

The first thing Thane did on entering was to remove his collar and place it conspicuously on a table in the hallway by the foot of the staircase. “I forget that if I don’t see it going out,” he said. He unbuttoned the neck of his shirt, breathed and looked around with an air of satisfaction. “Beats living at a hotel,” he said, opening the door into a little front sitting room for John to see. “The only thing I picked out,” he said, “was that big chair,” referring to an enormous structure of hickory and rush that filled all one corner of the room. “I’ll show you upstairs,” he added. Coming to his own room he said: “This ain’t much to look at but that ain’t what it’s for. Nobody sees it.” It was furnished with a simple cot, another hickory chair and a plain pine table. On the table was a brass lamp ready to be lighted; also, tobacco jar, matches, some technical books, mechanical drawings, pencils and paper.

At the other end of the hall Thane stopped before a closed door. “She’s downstairs,” he said, at the same time knocking. He opened it softly, saying: “This is hers.” John got a glimpse of a little white bed, a white dressing table, some white chairs and two tiny pictures on the wall. A nun’s chamber could hardly have been more austere. He turned away. At the head of the staircase he looked back. Thane had momentarily forgotten him and was still standing on the threshold of the little white room gazing into it. Suddenly he remembered John, closed the door gently and joined him.

“We’ll see about supper,” he said, leading the way through the sitting room into the next one, where the table was spread.

Just then Agnes appeared from the kitchen, bearing a tray. John had another surprise. Her appearance made an unexpected contrast, so striking as to be almost theatrical. She wore a dainty apron. Behind that was an elaborate toilette. She was exquisite, lovely. His first thought was that she had prepared this effect for him. Yet he noticed that Thane was not in the least surprised. He looked at her calmly, taking it all for granted, as if this had been her normal way of appearing. And so it was.

She shook hands with John. Her manner was a little too cordial. “Supper is quite ready,” she said. “Please sit down.” She had served a joint of beef, mashed potatoes browned, some creamed vegetables. Thane surveyed the food.

“Nothing fried?” he said.

“Shall I fry you something?” she asked. “It won’t take a minute.” Her tone puzzled John. It expressed patience, readiness, even tractability, and yet submissiveness was in a subtle sense explicitly denied.

“I was only fooling,” Thane replied. He whetted the carving knife carefully, as for a feat of precision, ran his thumb over the edge and applied it to the roast with an extremely deft effect.

“Did you buy the house?” John asked. “It’s very charming.”

The note failed. He felt Agnes looking at him.

“Rent it,” said Thane. “Mrs. Thane thought we’d better rent a while, maybe as we’d want another shape of house afterward. I want her to get a girl. She says there ain’t nothing for a girl to do.”

There was a silence. John did not know which side to take. He spoke highly of the food.

“Mr. Thane tells me you also have left the hotel,” she said.

“You get tired of it,” John answered absently. He was wondering what to make of the fact that they were Mr. and Mrs. to each other. Twice he had been at the point of calling her Agnes. He wished to get one full look at her and tried to surprise her eyes. She avoided him. Then as if accepting a challenge she met his gaze steadily and utterly baffled his curiosity.

This time he could not be sure. A kind of wisdom was in her eyes that had never been there before. It might be only that she was on her guard, knowing the secret he was after.

Conversation suffered many lapses. There seemed so little they could talk about. All the three of them had in common was reminiscent; and reminiscences were taboo. After supper they sat as far apart as three persons could in the small front room,--Thane in his big chair, Agnes in a stiff chair with some needlework over which her head was bent. Her knees were crossed. The men were fascinated by the swift, delicate, tantalizing, puncturing rhythm of her needle, and in the margin of John’s vision was exactly all she meant to be seen of a small silk-clad ankle and slippered foot.

If it was as he suspected, how could Thane endure it?

“We are very quiet,” she said, not looking up.

At that John began to talk about Thane,--of his work and the genius showing in it, of the methods he had evolved, of the things he had invented, of his way with his men and what a brilliant future he had. Agnes listened attentively, even tensely, as he could see, but made no comment; and Thane, sinking lower and lower in his chair, became intolerably embarrassed. He stopped it by beginning of a sudden to talk about John. He knew much less about John’s work, however, than John knew about his. For that reason the narrative fell into generalities and was not convincing. Agnes listened for a while and became restive. Suddenly she put her needlework away and asked if anyone would like refreshments. John looked at the time. It was past eleven o’clock and he arose to go. Thane would have detained him; Agnes politely regretted that he had to go so soon. Still, when she shook hands with him at the door her manner was spontaneous and warm and she pressed him to come again.

John walked about in the night without any mind at all. When his thoughts became coherent he found himself saying: “No. They are not man and wife. They are strangers. I wonder what goes on in that house. Why does she do it?... Why does she do it?”

Why did she?

XXVII

As the door closed behind their visitor Agnes turned without speaking and went back to the front room where she sat at a little desk to write in a large black book. This was the last thing she did each day.

Thane leaned against the door jamb looking at her back. It was the view of her that sometimes thrilled him most. It made him see her again as she was that first night, in the moonlight, sitting at the edge of the mountain path, mysteriously averse. Approaching timidly he stood behind her chair, close enough to have touched her, as he longed to do if only he dared. He looked at his hands, turning them in the light; then at himself, downward, and was overcome with a sense of incongruity.

To him she was as untouchable as a butterfly. Her way of dressing so elaborately was at once an insurmountable barrier and a maddening provocation. Never did he see her in less formidable attire, not even at breakfast. Her morning gowns were forbidding in quite another way. Their effect was to put him on his sense of honor. If it should happen that he came home unexpectedly she was always in her room and when she appeared it was like this. Embellishment was her armor. It was constant and never slipped. Yet the need for it was only in those moments such as now when his feeling for her broke down his pride and moved him toward her in spite of himself. This was not often. It had happened only a few times since the first night in the hotel, when after supper she met his impulse by looking at him with such scorn and anger, even horror, that his desire instantly collapsed and left him aching cold. His pride was as black a beast as hers.

For a long time after that they had no way with each other, almost no way of meeting each other’s eyes. Then to his great surprise she offered truce, not in words but by implications of conduct. She became friendly and began to talk to him about himself, about his work and by degrees about themselves. It was she who proposed to take a house. She chose it, bought the things that went into it, ordered the pattern of their twain existence within its walls. He was for spending more money, telling her how much he made and how well they could afford having more. She was firm in her own way, asking him only if he were comfortable, and he was.

The only thing she would freely spend money for was clothes. He pondered this and found no clue to its meaning. They had no social life whatever. She never went out alone. Twice in a year they had been to the play and nowhere else. Except for the recurring frustrations of his impulse toward her, which left him each time worse mangled in his pride and filled with rage, shame and self-abomination, he was happy.

He had been standing there back of her chair for so long that he began to wonder if she was aware of his presence when she spoke abruptly.

“Yes?” she said, in a quick, sharp tone.

He quailed, with the look of a man turned suddenly hollow. His pride saved him. Without a word he turned and went upstairs. When his footsteps were near the top she called, “Goodnight.” Apparently he did not hear her. At least he did not answer. She went on writing.

The black book was the ledger of her spirit’s solvency. Each night she wrote it up. There was first a record of all the money received from Thane. Then a record of all expenditures, under two heads,--money spent for household purposes, itemized, and money spent upon herself, for clothes, etc., unitemized. At the end of each month against her personal expenditures was entered,--“Item, to Agnes, for wages, $50.” If her personal expenditures exceeded her wage credit she wrote against the excess,--“Balance owing Alexander Thane, to be accounted for.”

Some day she would have a fortune of her own. Then she would return everything she had spent above her wages. That was what the record said. Anyone could see it at a glance. The book was always lying there on the desk. Perhaps covertly she wished he would have the curiosity to look into it and see what she was doing. He never did and he never knew. She meant sometime to tell him. What was the point of not telling him? Yet she didn’t, and the longer she put it off the more difficult it was, for a reason she was afraid to face. She would not face it for fear it was true. But even more she feared it might not be true.

So it appears that what went on in that house was as much an enigma to Thane as to John; and nobody could answer John’s question,--“Why does she do it?”--for Agnes who knew concealed the truth from herself.

XXVIII

Thane became vice-president also of the American Steel Company. Its capacity was greater than the need was for wire to make nails. For this reason the N. A. M. Co. enlarged its scope and began to make steel wire for all purposes, especially for that distinctively American product called barbed wire which ran the first year into thousands of miles of farm fencing. It was cheaper than the rude, picturesque rail fence which it immediately superseded and at the same time appealed in an unaccountable manner to the Yankee sense of humor.

Steel wire was indispensable to the steel age. There were bridges to be cast in the air like cobwebs, chasms to be spanned, a thousand giants to be snared in their sleep with threads of steel wire, single, double, or twisted by hundreds into cables. Enough of them would make a rope strong enough to halt the world in its flight if one end could be made fast in space. There could never have been a steel age without steel wire. But the steel age required first of all steel rails to run on. John saw this clearly. Iron rails wore out too fast under the increasing weight of trains; besides, the time had almost come when they simply couldn’t be made in quantities sufficient to meet the uncontrollable expansion of the railroad system. The importation of steel rails over the high tariff wall was increasing. American steel rails had been made experimentally, were still being made, but they were variable and much distrusted. When they were good they were excellent. They were just as likely to be very bad. They could not be guaranteed, owing to the variableness of steel obtained in this country by the Bessemer process.

This factor of variability was now eliminated by Thane’s celebrated mixer. For the first time there was the certainty of being able to produce American steel rails that would not only outwear iron as iron outwears oak, that would not only not break, that would not only be satisfactory when they were good, but rails that would be always the same and always good. It was natural that the American Steel Company should turn to rails. John knew the rail business upside down. He believed in railroads. When other people were thinking railroad building had been overdone he said it had not really begun. He imagined the possibility that the locomotive would double in size.

It did. Then it doubled again. It could not have done so without steel rails under its feet, and if it had not doubled and then doubled again this now would be a German world. Democracy even then was shaping its weapons for Armageddon through men who knew nothing about it. They were free egoists, seeking profit, power, personal success, everyone attending to his own greatness. Never before in the world had the practise of individualism been so reckless, so purely dynamic, so heedless of the Devil’s harvest. Yet it happened,--it precisely happened,--that they forged the right weapons. It seems sometimes to matter very little what men think. They very often do the right thing for wrong reasons. It seems to matter even less why they work. All that the great law of becoming requires is that men shall work. They cannot go wrong really. They cannot make wrong things. The pattern is foreordained.

Knowing what difficulties lay in the path of the steel rail,--knowing them very well indeed, since many of them were of his own work,--John executed a brilliant preliminary maneuver. The point of it was to create his market beforehand. With that in view he persuaded the officials of several large railroads to take ground floor shares in the North American Steel Company. Its capitalization was increased for that purpose. Thus not only was capital provided toward the building of a great rail making addition to the plant but powerful railroad men now had a participating interest in the success of the steel rail.

Meanwhile others also had discovered true steel formulas. As usual in such cases many hands were pressing against the door. Once the latch is lifted the door flies open for everyone. And then it appears that all the time there were several ways to have done it. Thane’s way was not the only way. He had been the one to see where the cause of variableness lay. After that there could be several methods of casting it out. So the American Steel Company had competition almost from the start. However, as its rails were all bespoken by the railroads whose officials were stockholders, and as in any case the demand for rails was increasing very fast, there would have been prosperity for everyone if Enoch Gib had not been mad.

No sooner had the American Steel Company begun to produce rails than Enoch did with iron rails as he had done before with iron nails. He began to sell the famous Damascus iron rail at a ruinous price. The steel rail makers had to meet him. Then he lowered his price again, and again, and still again, all the time increasing his output, until there was no profit in rails for anybody.

John knew what it cost to make Damascus rails. Enoch was selling them actually at a loss.

The fact that puissant railroad officials were stockholders in the American Steel Company counted for less and less. Though they might prefer steel rails for both personal and intrinsic reasons, still they could not spend their railroad’s money for steel rails with the famous Damascus rail selling at a price that made it a preposterous bargain. There was a panic in Pittsburgh.

John’s emotions were those of Jonah riding the storm with an innocent face and a sense of guilt at his heart. He made no doubt that Enoch had set out deliberately to ruin the steel rail industry and would if need be commit financial suicide to accomplish that end. Nobody else knew or suspected the truth. John could not publish it.

Other steel rail makers quit. They could not stand the loss. And there it lay between Enoch and John. Enoch’s mind was governed by two passions. One was his hatred of steel. The other was his hatred of John, who symbolized _Aaron_. He had the advantage of a fixed daemonic purpose. His strength was unknown. How long he might last even John could not guess.

In the fight over nails John’s rule had been defensive. It had to be. But here there was choice. His resources now were so much greater that a policy of reprisals might be considered. If Enoch were determined to find his own breaking point the sooner the end the better for everyone else. The American Steel Company could slaughter rails, too, increasing both its own loss and Enoch’s, and thus foreshorten the agony. But when it came to the point of adopting an offensive course John wavered. He could not bring himself to do it. Never had he hated Enoch. So far from that, his feeling for him was one of unreasoning pity. The old man probably would not survive bankruptcy. It would kill him. “Therefore,” said John, “let him bring it about in his own time.”

And so it was that a lone and dreadful man, stalking day and night through the New Damascus iron mill like a tormented apparition, goading his men to the point of frenzy, using them up and casting them off, yet holding them to it by force of contempt for fibre that snapped,--that one man in a spirit of madness frustrated the steel age and made it to limp on iron rails long after the true steel to shoe it with had been available. In all the histories of iron and steel you read men’s blank amazement at the fact that it took so many years for the steel rail, once perfected, to supersede the iron rail. They cannot account for it.

At about this time a committee of New Damascus business men went forth to investigate the subject of steel. Enoch caused this to be done. His mood was one of exulting. Many had begun to believe that steel might overthrow iron. He was resolved to put that heresy down. He chose the right time. The committee going to and fro saw steel rail plants lying idle; it found the steel people in despair, terrorized by Enoch. It returned to New Damascus and saw with its own eyes on Enoch’s books how the output of iron rails was increasing. Who would go behind such evidence? The committee reported that steel would never supersede iron. Except perhaps in some special uses, iron was forever paramount. It adopted a resolution in praise of Enoch, who had made New Damascus the iron town it was, and disbanded.

The sun of New Damascus was then at its zenith and the days of Enoch were few to run. He lived them out consistently. No man saw him but in his strength. His weakness was invisible like his nakedness. His end was as that of the oak that once more flings back the storm, then suddenly falls of its own weight. Never had his power seemed so immeasurable as at its breaking point.

For all that John could or could not do, the American Steel Company came itself to the brink. It could not forever go on making steel rails at a loss. How far short of bankruptcy would it give up the struggle and stop? The rocks were already in sight. Seeing them clearly, John did not act. He stood still and waited as if fascinated. The longer he waited the more desperate was the chance of saving the company. Its credit was sinking. All of this he saw. “Then what am I waiting for?” he would ask himself, and postpone the answer. Twice he had called the directors together to lay before them a plan of salvage, which was to abandon rail making and convert the plant to other uses; and each time at the last minute he changed his mind.

One morning at breakfast he was electrified by a single black line in his newspaper.

_“Damascus Mill Closes.”_

Beneath it was this dispatch:

“New Damascus, June 11.--The Damascus mill closed down last night in all departments for the first time in its history. There is no explanation. Enoch Gib is understood to be ill.”

John knew what this meant. The end had come. Having verified the news by telegraph he went to Slaymaker and told him for the first time enough of the history of New Damascus and its people to illuminate what had been going on.

“Why do you tell me this now?” Slaymaker asked.

“Isn’t it a great relief?” said John. “The ghastly game that’s nearly ruined us is at an end.”

“There’s some other reason,” Slaymaker insisted.

“You have lost a lot of money with me in American Steel,” John said. “Now of course it will all come back. Still, you might be able to turn this information to special advantage. There are two or three idle rail mills that could be picked up for nothing.”

Slaymaker took time to reflect.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll help.”

John shook his head.

“It’s an apple I don’t like the taste of. If I were in your place I’d know what to do. That’s why I have told you. But leave me out of it entirely.”

“I can’t for the life of me see why you shouldn’t,” said Slaymaker.

“Neither can I,” said John. “There’s no reason. Say I’m superstitious and let it drop.”

“There’s nothing the matter with the apple though?” asked Slaymaker.

“Not for you,” said John.

He left the banker on the edge of his chair. When he arrived at his own office Thane was there waiting.

“We’ve got a telegram Enoch is dying. Thought maybe as you would go along with us.”

“How does Mrs. Thane take it?”

“Cold and still,” said Thane. “But you can’t tell.”

“Does she want me to go?”

“She knows I’m asking you,” said Thane. “There’s just time. She’s at the depot.”

John turned and went with him.

XXIX

It was six hours by train from Pittsburgh to New Damascus. The last hour was from Wilkes-Barre down the valley, the railway now running with the turnpike on which Agnes passed her wedding night between Thane and John over the flying heels of a pair of bays. Not one of them had seen it since. Surreptitiously watching for signs and landmarks they became silent and solitary. Memories in which they were intimately associated instead of drawing them together caused separate states of reverie.

Agnes sat at the window with her face averted. John and Thane were together in the opposite seat. Her eyebrows were a little raised, acutely bent and drawn together, and in her forehead was a Gothic cross. This muscular tension never for a moment relaxed, not even when she spoke and smiled. In her eyes was an expression of strained and baffled interrogation, inward looking.

Two years were gone since that night of John’s first supper with the Thanes in their trial abode. In this time she had changed at the base of her personality. The girl of her had vanished almost without trace.

What becomes of the being we have ceased to be?

That Agnes of the tantalizing armor, half of ice and half of flame, part disdain and part desire, who froze the impulse she provoked and singed the pride that saved her,--she was gone, entirely gone. This Agnes knew her not. This Agnes was a woman who knew bitterness and the taste of dust. When she had been ready ... willing ... dying ... to give her pride to save her love the door was closed. The shop was dark.

The light went out that night she let him stand behind her chair in an agony of longing, pretending not to know he stood there, and then broke him with a hard, glissando “Y-e-s?” It was ominous that he did not respond from the top of the staircase to her careless goodnight. She regarded him particularly the next morning and began to wonder. Never again did he look at her in that way she ached for and dreaded. The more he didn’t look at her in that way the more she ached for it and the less she dreaded it, until she couldn’t remember why she had dreaded it and forgot why she had ever repulsed him.

She had repulsed because her vanity required it. He had got her to wife without wooing her. She had been thrust upon him. The thought was a sleepless scorpion in her breast. It poisoned her dreams. Well ... but before he could touch her he should have to want her and prove it. She would attend to that. To reach her at all he should have to overcome a great barrier. This she resolved and so she repulsed him. Each hurt to his pride was a stone added to the barrier, and she set no limit to it, for the higher it was the more it would prove if he ever got over. Then she would see what her own feelings were.

He on his part, after that night, once and for all accepted the only inference he could draw from her behaviour. He was hateful to her; he filled her with loathing and disgust. Well ... he could no more help that than he could help the fact of their being married: but he could avoid those moments on the rack. They left him limp and useless for days afterward. He could lock the impulse up. Its getting loose was what drew her scorn upon him. So he chained and locked it up.

At first, seeing the door was closed, she walked to and fro before it, thinking he would read in her manner a sign of remorse. He saw nothing. Then she began to knock. He did not hear. She thought he was making her pay. She was willing, even greedy, to pay. She went on knocking. Presently she realized that he was blind and deaf. In a panic she beat upon the door, hurled her weight against it, crying out her wish to surrender. But she had seared his heart. He could see only with his eyes and hear but with his ears, and totally misapprehended her woman’s gesture.

She imagined that now _he_ repulsed HER, not in revenge, not to trample on her,--that she could easily have endured,--but coldly, with undesire.

This completed the irony. Thereafter she held aloof and began to fear him. She put away her glittering armor, staining it with tears of rage and chagrin, and he never noticed even that. He was always gentle, always absent, always cold. He grew on her in this aspect, assumed colossal proportions, and began to seem as inaccessible to her as she had seemed to him. They changed places again. She stood in awe of him. What he wished for was. He spoke of a way of living more in keeping with their circumstances. She moved them to a larger house and organized their lives according to such dim suggestions as she could get from him, one of which was that she should “stay out of the kitchen.” There had to be servants. Evenings were so much worse on that account that they began to go out more, often alone, sometimes together. By a law of contradiction, the more they concealed themselves from each other in the tatters of their pride and the further they went apart, the more polite they became and the easier it was to be friendly.

Her outwardness had changed no less. A wilful, pouting mouth had found the shape of wistfulness. Her eyes had lost their defiant glitter; they were softer, deeper and full of recognition. Into her movements had come that kind of gentle dignity, loftier than pride, lovelier than loveliness, which is idolized of men above the form and sign of beauty.

“Almost there,” she said, settling back in her seat.

“How strange the mill looks!--cold,” said Thane.

Agnes did not look.

“Five years,” said John. “What a long time!”

“Six,” said Agnes.

“Six,” said Thane.

The Gib carriage was waiting at the station. “I’ll be at the inn,” said John. “It will take no time to bring me if I’m wanted. If Enoch--if you don’t stay at the mansion I’d like you to have supper with me.”

“I’ll send you word,” said Thane.

XXX

On the last terrace the carriage was stopped by two men who detached themselves from a sullen group on the lawn and stood in the driveway with their hands upraised. Thane recognized them. The two who halted the carriage were puddlers with whom he had worked side by side in the