mill. The others, to the number of six, were heaters and rollers, all

men of long service under the tyrant.

“Want a word with you, Thane,” said the taller one of the two puddlers.

He got out of the carriage and stood for an instant hesitating whether to let Agnes go on to the house alone or have her wait. Suddenly a scream of mindless, futile fury canted through the air. Everybody shuddered.

“Him,” said the puddler, answering Thane’s startled look.

Deciding then not to let Agnes go on alone he took her out, led her to an iron bench in the shade, and returned to hear what the men were so anxious to tell him.

“You heard him,” said the tall puddler. “That’s at us. We ain’t a going to do it. Nary if nor and about it, we ain’t. It’s against God, man and nature. It’s irreligious. What’s moreover the men won’t have it. They got to work there, don’t they? No sir. They won’t have it.”

“What does he want?” Thane asked.

“He takes on that a way and says as he can’t die until’s we promise. But we ain’t a going to promise.”

“What does he want you to promise?” Thane asked, patiently.

“No sir,” the puddler went on. “Nobody’s a going to. Not so as you could notice it. Ain’t it bad enough to have him always on our necks alive?”

“You ain’t told him yet,” said the second puddler.

“’Tain’t Christian,” said the tall one, walking off by himself. “It’s heathen,” he mumbled. “It’s unbelieving. It’s....”

“You tell me,” said Thane to the second puddler. “What does Enoch want?”

“Wants us to burn him up in a puddlin’ furnace,” said the second puddler. Trying to say it calmly, even lightly, and all at once, he lost control of his voice. It squeaked with horror on the last word.

“Is that all?”

The puddler recoiled. The group behind him fell back a step.

“Is that all he wants?” Thane asked again.

“That’s what he’s a screaming at us for,” said the puddler, sharply.

Thane went back to Agnes. He had time to tell her before they reached the mansion.

“If he wants it, and you have no will to the contrary, I’ll promise to do it,” he concluded.

“It strikes one with terror,” she said. “If he wants it that’s enough.”

Just as they were admitted they heard the dreadful scream again. The door, closing, seemed to cut it off. Inside there was no sound of it.

The family doctor anxiously received them. He talked rapidly, addressing Agnes in a manner tactfully to include Thane, whom he had never seen before. The two best consulting physicians in Wilkes-Barre were present, he said. There had arrived within the hour also an eminent alienist from Philadelphia. Four men nurses had been provided. Everything possible to be done had been thought of almost at once.

“But what is it?” Agnes asked. “What has happened?”

The doctor was sympathetic. Naturally she would want to know what it was and how it happened. Those were questions anyone would ask. Alas! who could answer them? He, the doctor, had attended the late Mrs. Gib; it had been his happiness to know Agnes before she could possibly know herself; but Mr. Gib, as they all knew, lived to himself. He had, so to speak, no pathological history. Three days before it happened he had begun to behave strangely at the mill. The men noticed it. He interfered with their work by having them hold the furnace doors open while he committed papers, bundles and various unidentified objects to the fire, thereby spoiling several heats of good iron. It was not a doctor’s business to know these things. He had taken it upon himself, nevertheless, to make inquiries.

On the third day there had been a conference between Mr. Gib and his lawyers. What took place at this conference a doctor would probably not understand if he were told; however, he had not been told. The lawyers were reticent to the point of being rude, not knowing, of course, how important it was for a doctor to be able to reconstruct the events that have immediately preceded the seizure. Mr. Gib, he had learned, never returned to the mill from that conference with his lawyers. The notice of the mill’s closing was posted by the lawyers; it was signed by them with power of attorney. Mr. Gib went straight home and was next seen in a state of frenzy. When the doctor arrived he was in a paroxysm of rage, very dangerous to himself but otherwise harmless, since it seemed to vent itself upon imaginary objects. This state was followed by others, in rapid, alarming alternation--despair, exultation, terror. It had been necessary, as they could realize, to put him under restraint. Two men nurses were by him constantly.

What was it? The Wilkes-Barre consultants had agreed upon one diagnosis. The patient, they said, had been attacked by delusional mania. If the attack subsided he would recover; if not he would die of exhaustion. That might be a matter of weeks. The Philadelphia alienist had only just now seen the patient; yet his mind was made up. He pronounced it a kind of progressive disintegration of the brain matter, with sudden, catastrophic lesions. Death would take place in a few hours. And it certainly was true that all the symptoms grew worse.

“What is your opinion?” Agnes asked.

“My own?” said the doctor, casting glances around. He lowered his voice to a nonprofessional tone. “We have different names for it,” he said. “That is scientific. No matter. We are all talking about the same thing.... He ... is ... possessed.”

Agnes shuddered.

“What does he want from these mill workers outside?” Thane asked.

Yes, yes. The doctor was just coming to that. Mr. Gib had lucid, coherent intervals. They were decreasing in frequency and duration and that was an ominous sign. In the very first of these intervals he seemed to be facing the thought of death and revealed an extreme horror of natural interment. He had in one such interval either conceived a way or remembered one of cheating the earth, which was to be cremated in one of his own furnaces. Thereupon he began to call for certain old puddlers and heaters by name and when they were brought up to him he demanded of them a promise to dispose of his body in that extraordinary way. While he looked at them they had not the strength to say outright they would not; but he could not make them promise, and each time he failed it was very bad for him. The state of terror returned, and if this continued the consequences would be fatal.

“Would it relieve him if I promised?” Thane asked.

“Promised what?” the doctor asked moving uneasily.

“To do what he wants done with his body,” said Thane.

“But who would do it?” the doctor asked.

“I would,” said Thane.

The doctor looked away in all four directions. “Certainly it would relieve him now,” he said, vaguely, as if that were not the point.

Thane suggested that Agnes be permitted to see him in the next lucid interval, and that afterward, in the same interval if possible, and if not, then in the next one, they should try letting him promise to carry out the old man’s cremation wish.

The doctor agreed. However, he was not to be held responsible for the consequences. He had been responsible until now for everything because there was no one else. He could not be unaware of the fact that there had been an unfortunate family episode. No one could tell how Mr. Gib would be affected by the unexpected sight of his own daughter. He had not asked to see her. However, she _was_ his daughter and there was no one else,--no one. How extraordinary!

He left them to ascertain and report.

Agnes, putting off her hat and gloves, sat facing the window. Thane took several turns about the room, came up behind her chair, laid his hand gently on her head. She sat quite still and reached over her shoulder for his other hand. They did not speak. The doctor returned in haste, saying: “If Mrs. Thane will come now, at once, very softly, we may try.” Agnes and the doctor walked up the staircase together, Thane following. Her feet were as steady as his own. He was suddenly swept with a feeling of great tenderness for her.

The Philadelphia alienist and the Wilkes-Barre consultants made a group in the front hall window. They had been arguing technically and stopped to stare a little at Agnes and then at Thane, who fell back and stood leaning against the wall as Agnes and the doctor went on. The doctor opened the door carefully and peered in. Standing aside he motioned Agnes to enter.

Her father lay in a great four-poster on his back, extended to his full length, his feet together and vertical, his head slightly raised on pillows,--and their eyes met as she crossed the threshold. He recognized her instantly. She was sure of it,--sure he was in his right mind. Yet he gave not the slightest sign of his feelings. She was surprised that he was not more shrunken. His bulk was intact. But he was the color of sand. His aspect was sepulchral. She advanced slowly, holding his gaze, hardly aware of two men standing alert at the head of the bed, just outside the line of vision, ready to seize him.

When she was half way to him he began to sit up, lifting his whole trunk from the hips without the use of his arms, his feet at the same time rising a little, under the lower part of the sheet.

“Go away!” he said hoarsely, and she stopped. “Go away!” he meant to say again, but as his voice rose he became inarticulate and made guttural sounds. He began to repel her with excited gestures. The doctor interfered. “Come,” he whispered. She half turned to go, but faced her father again. In a clear, loud voice, she uttered the three words he had once with all his strength demanded and could not make her say. “I am sorry.” Their effect was to excite him all the more. He continued to wave her away. When the door had closed behind her he collapsed.

Thane was waiting outside the door. She leaned on him heavily and seemed about to go under. He took her in his arms and bore her downstairs. She revived at once and sharply declined to be made about, even by the doctor, whose smelling salts she put aside. Thane walked with her in the air.

Presently the doctor joined them. The idea of bringing Mr. Thane to Mr. Gib’s notice as one who would promise to do the strange thing he desired,--this idea, he said, had been discussed with the alienist; and it was the alienist’s notion first to put the patient under the suggestion that a puddler named Thane had been sent for, the point being that Mr. Gib might remember Mr. Thane as a puddler and forget him as a son-in-law. This seemed to the doctor too subtle altogether; still, as it couldn’t do any harm he had consented. It had in fact been done with such success that Mr. Gib now lay in a fever of hope. Would Mr. Thane, the puddler, please come at once?

Thane had never been in a sick room. He had never seen death transacting. He had known two idiots and had an idea of imbecility; insanity he could not imagine. The doctor’s long medical discourse on Enoch’s disorder had filled him with a vague sense of resentment; and the doctor’s private conviction that Enoch was possessed had made him angry. He did not believe in devils. That flash of superstition threw the professional manner into grotesque relief and he was contemptuous of it. His feelings went over and stood with Enoch against these self-important outsiders who by some law of their own had established themselves above him in his own house, were permitted to restrain him in his own bed, who stood about in his hallway disputing as to how and why he should die.

As Thane entered the room the two nurses were leaning over the old man from opposite sides of the bed, and the sight of them deepened his antagonism. They stood back as he approached. Enoch, slowly opening his eyes, gazed at Thane with a look of tense recognition. Otherwise he lay perfectly inert until Thane stood looking down at him. Then his lips began to move as if he were talking. No sound was audible. Thane, bending lower and lower, dropped on his knees and put his ear very close. Enoch was whispering. His words, though faint, were distinct, almost fluent, and dramatically intentional.

What he said was that worse puddlers and lesser men than Thane, men he had known all his life, had refused to do for him that service one cannot perform for oneself and must therefore be permitted to ask as a favor. This service was to dispose of his remains agreeably to a certain wish, which was to be cremated. There was no physical difficulty whatever. It was feasible to be done in a puddling furnace!--his own furnace!--his own mill!--his own body! Why not?

“I will do it,” said Thane, removing his ear and meeting the old man’s eyes. Enoch’s lips continued to move. Thane returned his ear.

It was to be done in Number One Furnace.

Thane met his eyes again, saying: “All right. In Number One. I understand.”

Enoch’s lips were still moving. Thane listened.

There was one thing more, Enoch said. He had no right to ask it except as a favor for which he would be deeply grateful. Would Thane listen very carefully? In that walnut secretary by the door, in a secret drawer of it that would come open when the moulding above the pen rack was pressed downward--there he would find the key to a room upstairs, directly above the one they were in. He wished to die in that room upstairs,--_by himself_. He knew better than to ask the nurses or the doctors. They already thought him mad. Anyhow they would ask questions and he couldn’t tell them why he wished to die in that room alone. He had been saving his strength against an opportunity to give them the slip, intending to lock himself into it. Once in it he would be safe. But his strength had suddenly departed forever. No one knew this yet. It had just happened. The nurses supposed he was resting. The fact was he could not move foot, hand or finger. So now he was utterly helpless and hopeless except for Thane,--and the end was so near.

Would Thane get the key?--carry him over all obstacles to that room above?--set him in a certain chair, taking care not to move it?--then retire and lock the door and keep them all off for an hour? An hour would do it. In one hour he would be out of their reach.

Thane did not pause to reflect. The old man’s appeal to be permitted to die as he would in his own house was irresistible. It moved him dynamically. He strode to the walnut secretary, discovered the key, dropped it in his pocket and returned to the bedside.

The nurses were dumfounded! scandalized! to see him suddenly take the old man up in his arms, sheet and all, and start off with him toward the door.

They followed, exclaiming and chattering. They were too amazed to act. At the door occurred a scene of pure confusion. As Thane pulled it open the four doctors, having heard the commotion within, were there in a group on the momentum of entry. At sight of Enoch in Thane’s arms they recoiled and stood blankly aghast. The two nurses behind Thane became hysterically vocal, trying all in one breath to exculpate themselves and explain an inconceivable thing.

Thane was pushing through.

“He wants to die upstairs,” he said.

Instantly on speaking of it he became aware that the situation had an irrational aspect; and he wondered how he should clear them out of the room in which Enoch wished to die and keep them out,--for of course they would follow. He could not help that. With a resolve if necessary to throw them all downstairs he crossed the threshold. The alienist from Philadelphia and the two Wilkes-Barre consultants fell back. It was not their case. The family doctor barred Thane’s way at the foot of the staircase.

“You must be crazy,” he shouted, waving his arms. “This simply cannot be permitted. As his physician I order you to take him back.”

“Stand aside,” said Thane.

“You will kill him,” said the doctor. “Do you hear that? This will kill him. I forbid it.”

Thane seemed not at all impressed. Probably he would have pursued his purpose in a straight line but that his mind was arrested by a startling change in the heft and feeling of his burden.

It became suddenly so much heavier that he almost lost his balance. And as he looked to see what this could mean there rose out of Enoch a groan unlike any sound concerned with life. With that the body underwent a violent muscular commotion and threw itself into a state of rigid extension. Thane needed all his strength to hold it. Immediately there was another change. The body began slowly to go limp.

“It’s over,” said the Philadelphia alienist.

What Thane held in his arms was no longer Enoch, but a distasteful object, fallen in one breath from the first person _I_, from the second person _you_, to the state of a pronominal third thing which is spoken of--_that_!

Thane carried it back to the bed.

All of this had taken place in less than half an hour. Thane found Agnes as he had left her, on an iron bench in the maple shade.

“He is dead,” she said, on looking at him.

He answered by sitting by her side in silence.

She asked him nothing about the end, and he was glad, for it had been extremely harrowing. Still, he was surprised at her want of curiosity, and had a moment of thinking her callous. He had somehow mysteriously arrived at an understanding of Enoch, was shaken by a sense of loss, even grief, and yearned to share his emotion with Agnes.

Having been for some time withdrawn in thought she started slightly. “Did you promise?” she asked. “Was there time for that?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t let it upset you,” he continued gently. “You won’t have to think about it. I’ve got it worked out in my mind. There can be funeral services here like they have sometimes when nobody goes to the grave or when there ain’t going to be any burial. Then I can go alone with him to the mill. There’s nobody at the mill, you know. It’s shut.”

She regarded him with a troubled, unbelieving expression.

“Alone!” she said.

“I’d rather to,” he said, “with everybody being so superstitious about it.”

“But I shall go,” she said.

“May take a long time,” he said uneasily. “I’ll have the furnace going, of course, but it’s got to be kept going and watched I don’t know how long.”

She met these difficulties with a scornful gesture.

“All right,” he said. “He’ll be pleased you feel that way.”

XXXI

Late that night Thane was telling John how Enoch died and how his remains were to be disposed of. He had to tell someone. It was a weight on his mind and he was tormented with misgivings about his own conduct. When he came to the key he remembered having it in his pocket still and produced it associatively. John took it out of his hand and continued to regard it thoughtfully long after the narrative was finished.

“Was I right?” Thane asked, anxiously.

“Admirable!” said John, a little off the point as it seemed to Thane. He added thoughtfully: “The fate that amuses itself with our lives knew what it wanted when it tangled you in.”

“Seems there’s a lot as I don’t know,” said Thane, a faint edge to his voice.

“It’s hard to get at,” said John. He continued: “This place, if you know, was founded by General Woolwine, my great grandfather, whose partner was a younger man named Christopher Gib, this Enoch’s father.”

So he began, as if opening a book. Some of it was missing, parts were illegible, yet the shape of the drama stood vividly forth. When he came to the end--to where the invisible writing stopped,--it was sudden and for a moment bewildering, almost as if they had forgotten who they were and had been unexpectedly let down in the middle of a story. They sat a while musing.

“To be continued by the three of us,” said John. “I should like to know what is in that room.”

“Let’s go see,” said Thane.

He had come to the hotel only to talk to John and was returning to the mansion. John went with him.

Enoch’s body lay where it was in the second floor bed chamber. They passed it without stopping and went on to the third floor. On the landing was a little table with a lighted glass lamp, which John took up.

“That would be it,” he said, indicating a certain doorway. The key fitted the lock, but to their surprise the bolt was already drawn. John held the light. Thane went first. He had but crossed the threshold when he started back, recoiled rather, with a movement so sudden and involuntary that John immediately behind him was thrown off his balance, and dropped the lamp, which burst and harmlessly petered out. They were then in darkness. There was no other light on that floor.

“Match,” said Thane, now standing quietly.

John had matches and he divided them by a sense of touch. Each struck one and held it out.

What had startled Thane was the figure of a woman. As they saw her now in the flickering light of their matches she stood at the other side of the room, her back to the wall, facing them. John recognized her at once as the woman who met him in the front doorway, holding an oil light over her head, the night he came seeking Agnes and encountered Enoch at the gate. She was dishevelled. Her thick black hair had fallen on one side and her face was distorted and swollen from weeping. Her eyes were alight with a kind of wild animal defiance. As they approached her she began to move along the wall, sideways, her arms a little spread. In one hand she held a coil of small rope.

“Who are you?” Thane asked.

She did not speak, but continued slowly to edge along the wall, staring at them angrily. They lit fresh matches from the dying ones and pursued her in this way, asking her who she was and what she did there, and she answered only with that wild look, until with more presence of mind than they were able to summon she had worked herself to a position between them and the open door. Their matches gave out and she disappeared in the dark. They heard her go down the back stairway.

“We’ll have to get a light,” said John.

They groped their way downstairs, both absurdly unnerved, found some candles and returned to the room. Both had the same thought. From what they had glimpsed of the interior in the light of their matches by a kind of marginal vision it seemed quite empty. And so it was. There was no trace of what had been there, except dust, which on the floor showed evidence of much moving about. The only object of any kind was a key that evidently the woman had dropped. It was a duplicate of the one in Thane’s possession. They examined the room with silent curiosity. The walls gave a dead, solid sound to the rap of their knuckles. The windows were double and grated inside with iron bars.

Now they went in search of the woman, knowing nothing about her, not even her name. She was probably the housekeeper. Agnes would know. But they hated to disturb Agnes. She was at the other side of the mansion and it was very late. Besides, they had a feeling that the sequel might be distressing.

The woman had vanished. They could find no trace of her, nor could they raise any servants indoors, for the reason afterward disclosed that latterly Enoch’s ménage had consisted of three persons,--housekeeper, gardener and stable man.

“Let’s try the stable,” John suggested. “There must be somebody alive.”

On their way to the stable they stared curiously at a great unsightly heap of ashes, still smoking and glowing in spots, on the back terrace, as if a miscellaneous lot of things had been gathered hastily together and burned.

“Strange place for a fire,” said Thane, with an unspoken intuition that John shared.

The stable-man was sitting up, smoking, with the look of a man whose eyes have seen more than mind can grasp. He knew Thane and seemed comforted by the advent of human society.

“Nobody in the house. What’s the matter?” Thane asked.

“I ain’t the housekeeper,” said the stable-man. “No, thank God, I ain’t her. She’s on her way.”

“Way where?”

“Wherever,” he said, with the air of a man who for cause has newly resolved not to meddle with things that will be.

“What do you know about her?” John asked.

They had only to listen and piece it together. He was full of it. The woman’s name was Ann Sibthorp and she came from nobody knew where,--most likely from some place where they had ceased to speak well of her. She had been Enoch’s housekeeper for many years and at last his only house servant. She was not a woman you could get acquainted with. You wouldn’t if you could. So it wasn’t that anybody cared, but that she gave herself airs about her station, became oppressive and drove the help away. She did much that Enoch probably knew nothing about. Yet she had her way, even with him, and it got so nobody dared to cross her. For several days she had been going strange. When the old man died she seemed to lose her mind. She looked without seeing. There was no sense in her eyes. A little while before dark she began to carry things from the house and pile them out there on the terrace. He could not say exactly what they were,--some pieces of furniture, a chair, a bed no doubt; yes, and some clothes, a pair of white slippers and little what-not objects. When he saw her pouring oil on them he protested. She didn’t hear him. She wasn’t natural and he was afraid to do anything except to draw a lot of water in case something caught fire. Then she lighted the pile and watched it burn, fairly standing in the flames, poking them with a stick, rubbing her hands in them, taking on like a witch. It made a God-fearing person sick to see her. After that she went in and he didn’t see her again until just now when she rushed out of the house and disappeared among the trees.

“She’s a going to do herself a damage, that woman,” he predicted, calmly. “Found this in the edge of the ashes,” he remembered, drawing from his pocket a small square brown case, badly singed at one corner. “Maybe you would know what it is.”

It was a daguerreotype in a faded leather case. Thane opened it and held it for John to see in the light of the stable lantern.

“I recognize it,” said John. Thane gave it to him.

That was all from the stable-man. And that was all that was ever known about Ann Sibthorp. She was never seen again, dead or alive.

“You know the picture?” Thane asked, as they were parting at the gate.

“It’s a portrait of my mother,” John answered.

“Esther that you just told me about?”

“Yes.”

XXXII

At daybreak smoke was seen curling out of one of the cold mill stacks. Everybody in New Damascus knew that Enoch’s body was to be burned in a puddling furnace.

“There he goes!” one said. “There goes old Enoch now.”

“Not yet,” said another. “Take a hotter fire than that. Don’t you see it’s just started. That’s his puddler son-in-law getting it ready for him.”

It takes eight or ten hours, starting with it cold, to get the maw of a puddling furnace white hot. In this case it would take even longer since Thane had it all to do alone and would be unable to stoke the fire steadily. There were other duties. Simple obsequies would take place at the mansion in the afternoon. That was all the public was permitted to know. Only Thane and Agnes knew at what hour the cremation would begin. The point of keeping it secret was obvious.

All day long people watched the smoke with fascinated horror. Crowds gathered on the mountainside and at points overlooking the mill to witness this weird translation of the symbol that was Enoch,--symbol of iron, symbol of indestructibility. There were many who believed he would not burn.

After the funeral services had taken place at the mansion interest in the smoke became intense. Changes in its color or density or in the way it twisted out of the top of the stack evoked exclamations of horrendous wonder and cries of “Look! Look! That’s the image of him. That’s Enoch going up. Don’t you see him?” Then news would come, seemingly by a telepathic impulse, that that had been only the son-in-law poking up the fire; the body was still at the mansion. Again it would be rumored that a previous rumor was positively true. The remains had been got into the mill unobserved. Everybody had been fooled. Enoch had got the last laugh. He had been burning up for more than an hour and had already very largely vanished into the sky.... So the whole afternoon and the early evening passed.

An hour after sunset the stable-man drove a spring wagon to the Enoch portal of the Gib mansion. He tied the horse to the ring in the hand of the ironboy hitching post and went indoors. Presently the front door swung open. Thane, the gardener and the stable-man appeared bearing the coffin. They slid it into the bed of the wagon over the tailboard. Agnes followed with a black drape. Thane covered the coffin with it. Then he helped Agnes up over the high front wheel, took the lines from the stable-man, got up beside her, and they drove away at a walk.

At the entrance to the mill yard Agnes held the lines while Thane got down to unlock the gate. A number of people were idly gathered there in separate knots, pretending to be non-existent. News of the body’s arrival would travel fast. That couldn’t be helped. What Thane had counted on was that darkness would cheat the eye of morbidity. But he had forgotten the moon; it was full and coming up. The whorl of smoke rising from the stack looked even more ghost-like by moonlight than in daytime and the watchers, now sure of their spectacle and of Enoch’s presence in the smoke, were more gruesomely thrilled than they had hoped to be.

The yard and mill were deserted. Even the watchmen had been sent away until midnight. Agnes still holding the lines, Thane leading the horse, they crossed the yard, picking their way around heaps of rusty pig iron, abandoned castings, rails piled up like cord wood, and came to the rear door of the mill.

“You stay here for a minute,” said Thane. “I’ll come and get you.”

He drew the coffin half way out of the wagon, stooped to get his shoulder under, lifted it, and walked slowly into the gloom, treading cautiously. There was no light and there were many pitfalls, but his feet knew every inch of this ground before they wore shoes. He soon returned, tied the horse, helped Agnes down and led her by the hand.

At first she could see nothing and followed him blindly. Then far off in the crêpe interior she saw a sultry glow. As they drew near she heard the roar of the furnace fire, like the sound at the brink of a cataract. A fire is a cataract upward. It grew louder and louder with each step until she could feel its vibrations in the soles of her feet. She never had been in the mill before.

A puddling furnace is a low brick structure somewhat resembling a double tomb. One side is the fire pit; the other side is the oven. The flames from the fire pit are sucked by draught across the roof of the oven. As you face the furnace you see two iron doors--one is to the fire pit, opening on the grate, to receive the fuel. To the right of that on a higher level is the small square door of the oven. Through the first door when it is open you see the fire. Through the other you see heat,--nothing but heat,--blinding incandescence.

Thane led Agnes to a bench facing the furnace, spread his coat upon it and motioned her to sit down. The roar was so great that conversation in normal tones was impossible. She now began to take in the scene.

The fire pit at the last stoking had evidently been gorged to the teeth. A long iron bar was propped against the door to hold it shut. Gases, smoke and cherry flames were belching through the cracks. The oven door was set in a square halo of exuding white light. And directly in front of this door, pointing toward it head first, was the coffin, resting on a pair of iron horses.

There was no light other than that escaping from the furnace doors, and as it was continually running through unpredictable changes, so perspectives, and the forms, dimensions and relations of objects, were always changing with a very weird effect.

Thane threw off his collar, tie, waistcoat and hat, and seemed to take the furnace by the jaws with his bare hands. First he opened the oven door and was immersed in scalding light. He slammed it to, shaking his head. Kicking away the iron bar, he opened the fire door and immediately banged it shut, still shaking his head. The fire was not hot enough. Rolling up his sleeves he seized a great poker, pulled the fire door open again, and made several passes; then he stopped, slammed the door, and stood for a moment in apparent dilemma. No wonder. Who in a white shirt could bring a fire to its zenith? He disappeared into the gloom and was lost for five minutes. When he reappeared he was in the puddler’s rig he had worn earlier in the day,--naked to the middle, trousers rolled at the waist, cowhide shoes, gloves and skullcap. Now he could talk to the fire. As he thrust the javelin into its throat it roared back at him like an angry beast. He made it turn over, lie down, turn over again and rear on its legs. For moments he was swallowed up in smoke and Agnes could scarce restrain a shriek of thrill and terror. Each time he miraculously emerged unsinged. Then he cast in more fuel, working swiftly, with heroic ease and grace, and banged the door shut just in time, for the monster was on the point of lunging headlong forth. With another look at the inside of the oven he came and sat on the end of the bench. She noticed that his chest rose and fell slowly. All that exertion had not forced his breathing. Ten minutes passed. He rowelled the fire again. This time instead of returning to sit on the bench he walked to and fro in front of the furnace.

In Agnes a mysterious excitement was rising. It seemed incongruous with what they were doing; therefore she ceased to be aware of that. The emotion comprehended Thane, centered in him, excluded everything else save the fact of herself in relation to him. As she watched him his figure became splendid, fabulous! Her own ego’s importance collapsed. In his power with ideas man is dimly admirable to woman; in his power over circumstances he inspires her with trust; in his power over people he satisfies her taste for grandeur; but in his power over elements,--in that aspect he wrecks her completely, for she is herself an element. In that moment he is god-like; she cannot comprehend him.

She was in love with him. That fact had long been desperate and apparently hopeless, since he had closed the door. But now, in addition to the potential of her love, she felt that sweet, fierce longing for the thing of life, that headlong impulse to perpetuation, with which we are mysteriously seized in the presence of death. This nameless elemental forethought will pierce through grief, affliction and terror. Sir John Everett Millais caught its gesture in the most poignant pencil sketch in the world--“Marrying and Giving in Marriage at the Deluge.”

Thane’s emotions were parallel. He loved that woman. And the stark enigma moved him in the same way to answer death with life. Being a man he thought himself abominable. Yet the impulse overthrew him.

Breaking his walk before the furnace he strode to the bench where she sat, lifted her free, pressed her to him and kissed her once hotly on the mouth.

Instantly overcome at what he had done, humiliated, chagrined, horribly ashamed of the desire that possessed him, he put her down as suddenly as he had picked her up, roughly, leaving her stunned and limp.

She had been overwhelmed, in all her senses. The impact was catastrophic. There had not been time for her to react as her nature listed. For a moment she could scarcely believe it had happened. It might almost have been an episode of phantasy. She rose to run after him.

At that instant he opened the furnace door and the glare blinded her. When he closed it and turned she was at one end of the coffin and he at the other. So they faced each other.

“It is ready,” he said. Though she could not hear she knew what he meant. The fire at last was hot enough. As she neither moved nor made a sign, he asked: “Is there anything to say?” That also she understood.

She crossed her arms and dropped her head on the foot of the coffin. Thane looked away.... She raised her head and stood back. Thane flung the door wide open, quickly lifted the coffin by the middle, rested the head of it on the lip of the oven, then took it by the foot and pushed it in. It made a grating sound above the roar of the fire and was instantly wrapped in a flame of burning wood. Seizing an iron bar he pushed it far in and slammed the door.

Hours passed. No word was spoken. Thane gave the fire no peace. He made it rage and bellow. The door of the oven was not opened again. From time to time he unstopped the little round eye through which a puddler kneads the waxing iron and peered in.

It was nearly two o’clock when he gorged the pit once more with fuel, propped the fire door shut, and stood in front of Agnes, saying: “We could go now.”

She rose slowly and he took her by the hand to lead her out.

When they came to the air by the door at which they went in he said: “Wait here by the wagon. I want to wash a bit.” She caught a white gleam of him in the moonlight as he got out of the puddler’s rig and heard him splashing under the tap at the water tank. He was not long, and returned carrying his coat on his arm, otherwise dressed as when he came, except that his collar was missing and the front of his shirt lay open. He offered to help her up.

“I’d like to walk,” she said.

One of the watchmen who had returned took charge of the horse and they departed on foot. Although dense smoke still issued from the stack there was very little of Enoch left in it, perhaps not a trace. When Thane last looked there was nothing on the incandescent bed of the oven but an ashy outline fainter than a shadow. The fire as it was would continue to burn for hours.

“Thought you might rather go to the hotel,” he said, when they were through the gate, and he had locked it again. “We’ve got rooms there.”

“I would,” she answered, “only I’ve no sleep in me and I’d like to walk.”

She was looking toward the mountain and they walked that way. Thane was stirred by an intuition, which he disbelieved, that if he were passive and let her choose they would come to a certain path. And they did. He had a further intuition, most unbelievable, that of her own accord she would stop at a certain place, turn in a certain way, and stand looking into the valley. And she did.

It was the spot at which they first met, the night of his battle with the Cornishman,--a night very like this one.

All the way she had been silent. If they touched, walking side by side, he made it clear without words that the contact was accidental. When they came to the path he stood aside and she went ahead. When at this spot she stopped and turned her face to the valley he went a few paces away, not to disturb her reverie, and stood with his face averted.

The summer night was cool; but the air he breathed was hot, tasteless and suffocating. Memory reconstructed the episode of their original meeting. It went on from there. He saw as in one picture the whole of his life with Agnes and feelings extremely inconsistent assailed him. There was one,--the one he thought he had got control of,--that rose higher and higher, for a reason he seemed painfully aware of and yet for a moment could not recall. Then he remembered. It referred to that moment in the mill when he kissed her for the first time in his life, and by force. He had forgotten it as one might momentarily forget having just committed a murder. He loathed himself for having done it. He wondered that she could tolerate him afterward, could walk with him alone, could speak to him with no sign of disgust. He wondered what she was thinking, so still in the moonlight. Probably thinking of that.

He became aware that she moved. She was coming toward him. He did not turn round. He detested himself so much that he could not bear to look at her, or to be looked at, and stepped out of the path to let her pass. She did not pass.

He felt her standing close to him,--near enough to have touched him. Still he did not turn. She raised her arms, slowly, with a wistfulness he could not have imagined or believed. He knew her hands were stealing around his neck and he could not realize it. Then she clasped him fiercely, hung her weight against him, adhered to him like a vine, saying, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Turning in her embrace he tried to kiss her. She buried her face in his neck, sobbing deeply, all the time clinging to him frantically as if she expected him to put her off. Lifting her head she leaned far back against the encircling chain of his arms and lay there looking at him, moonbeams in her eyes. Clasping him again she kissed his face, his mouth, his eyes, stopping only to whisper in his ear the most stupendous three words a woman can say.

For a long time he did not let the ground touch her feet. He carried her to and fro in the path, then up the mountain, higher and higher, and at last to the very top.

XXXIII

John, unable to sleep, had risen from his bed and gone walking. He let his feet drift, having nothing consciously in view, and presently found himself in the path where on just such a night six years before he had raced up and down in a panic calling the name of Agnes. It occurred to him to look for the spot at which he had found her things. Unable to make sure of it he idly gave up the effort. The view of the valley impressed him and he sat on a stone at some distance below the path to sense it. He was there when Agnes and Thane arrived. They could not see him; shrubbery above his seat concealed him. He could see them distinctly. His first impulse naturally was to disclose himself. Hesitation arose on the thought that their coming to this place must have been by romantic impulse; and then as the scene between them developed he could only sit still. They should never know he had witnessed it. Long after they were gone he sat there. And when he departed he stumbled straight down the mountain side to the highway lest they should still be near and see him if he went by the path.

He felt strangely exalted. His love for Agnes was hopeless. It had been hopeless as a matter of honor because she rightfully belonged to Thane. Now it was hopeless in a new and final sense because she had learned to love Thane as he loved her. What had been inevitable now was fulfilled, and what had been renounced in fair conduct was beyond temptation. There was also his feeling for Thane which made them closer than brothers.

He waited for them to seek him. That occurred on the second day. They had come to the hotel and Thane asked him to join them for supper. They required his advice. Much to their surprise Enoch not only had left no estate; he was hopelessly bankrupt. The mill was heavily in debt. They had to decide whether to pay off its debts or let it be sold for the benefit of creditors. They were in no state about it. Agnes, it was true, would never come into that fortune of her own out of which she had meant to pay those “balances owing Alexander Thane to be accounted for,” according to the black book. That no longer made the slightest difference. As for Thane, he cared nothing about being rich. Besides, his income now was large. Nevertheless, was it not an astonishing fact?

“Had you suspected it?” Agnes asked.

John told them of Enoch’s obsession against steel and how the wreck was made. He put it entirely on the ground of Enoch’s steel phobia and left himself out of it.

“What would be your guess to do with the mill?” Thane asked.

This question they debated at length.

“It’s too late to make New Damascus a steel town,” John said. “That opportunity has gone around. However, there will always be a want for New Damascus iron. I’ll go halves, if you like, to pay off the debts. We’ll form a close corporation and save the mill. Rationally worked it will pay its way.”

To this both Thane and Agnes agreed.

John went back to Pittsburgh. Thane and Agnes remained for several weeks, to settle Enoch’s affairs, to dismantle Number One Furnace and to arrange for reopening the mill under a superintendent brought by Thane from the Agnes plant.

And New Damascus unawares was delivered to its fate.

XXXIV

Now the steel age was come with its deluge of things.

Man’s environment was made over twice in one generation. Nothing was built but to be built again on a greater scale. It seemed impossible to make anything big enough. Wonders were of a day’s duration.

In twenty-five years the country’s population doubled. In the same time the production of things unto the use, happiness and discontent of people increased five, ten, twenty fold. Man had now in his hand the universal power of steel. It extended his arms and legs unimaginably, grotesquely.

The production of metallic fibre increased more than one hundred fold. Railways were built which if placed end to end and run around the globe would have circled it six times. Those already grown when the steel age came were not yet old when a ton of freight was transported more than 2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child living on American soil. Food was cheaper and more abundant than ever before in the life of man because the railways, pursuing the sun, had suddenly opened a virgin continent to bonanza farming. So was everything else. Modern cities were made and were no sooner made than torn down and built over again. Chicago grew faster than St. Louis because it had less to tear down. Rivers were moved, mountains were levelled, swamps were lifted up. Nothing was right as God left it.

O, bigger! and deeper! and higher! O, faster! and cheaper! and plus!

And it is still incredible, like the Pyramids. Men lived in strife by doing. They labored and brought it forth. There was never a moment to think. There has not come that moment yet. What it was toward nobody knows.

Steel was to make men free. They said this who required a slogan. Men are not free. Why should they be? What shall they be free to do? Go to and fro, perhaps. What shall they be free to think? Anything wherein is refuge from the riddles they invent.

The men who delivered the steel age were not thinkers. They were magicians who monkeyed with the elements until they had conjured forth from the earth a spirit that said: “Serve me!”

Those who directly served it were of two kinds.

First were the men who thought with their hands. They were daring in invention. Mechanical impossibilities intoxicated them. They abhorred a pause in the production process as nature abhors a vacuum.

Next were the men of vision, who worked by inspiration, who had a phantasy of things beyond the feeling of them, and ran ahead.

And since men of both kinds are more available here than in Europe the steel age walked across the ocean.

Here were men like Thane whose genius fashioned tools in the guise of sentient creatures,--walking tools, thinking tools, co-operating tools, with eyes and ears and nerves and powers of discrimination. Human tools but that they lacked the sense of good and evil.

Fancy a tool larger than an elephant keeping vigil before a row of furnaces, pacing slowly up and down, apparently brooding, and then at the right moment opening a door and plucking forth a block of incandescent steel weighing many tons, neatly, with not the slightest effort, and nowhere in sight a human being!

Fancy another tool to drudge and fag for this one! It comes running up, stands still while the other gently lays upon its back the white-hot slab, then runs and dumps it on a train of rollers.

That two hundred weight of flaming iron you saw swinging through the gloom of Enoch’s mill in hand tongs now is a mass of ninety tons or more, handled, carried hither, delivered there, shaped and forged, all by automatic tools. The ladle no larger than a pot in which the fluid iron was first decanted is now a car on wheels,--no, not one but many in a string, hence called a ladle train, running through the night behind a donkey locomotive, slopping over at the turns, on the way from where the ore is smelted to where the mixers mix it and the converters change it into steel.

The Thanes did that.

And here were men like John to say: “Give us a tariff protection of six-tenths of a cent a pound for ten years and we will not only make all our own steel wire hereafter but wire for all the world,”--who got it and did it.

Here were men to say: “We spend half a million good American dollars each year in England for tin cans to throw over the alley fence. Give us a duty on tin plate and we will not only make our own but in ten years other people will be throwing our cans over the fence,”--who got it and proved it.

Here were men to say: “There is going to be only one steel concern in the world. That’s us.”--They meant it literally.

They were men who knew not how to stop. They dared not stop. The one who did was lost. Every little while they had to throw away everything they had created, cast it out on the junk heap, because new ideas came in so fast. It was nothing to scrap a million dollars’ worth of machinery before it had settled in, a greater, faster engine of production having just appeared. Whereas formerly every new thing came from England, Germany or France, now Europe’s ironmongers were continually coming over here to see what the Americans were doing and how and why they had captured the steel age.

Later, when the pace of evolution began somewhat to abate, when original discoveries were fewer and a steel mill would stand awhile, when the wild and reckless youth of the steel age was past and Wall Street found it out,--then all these dynamic, self-paramount men began to get rich. And as you may suppose, they no more knew how to stop getting rich than they knew how to stop anything else. Of that in its right place.

XXXV

No two were more the darlings of the steel age than John and Thane. They were for it and of it, lover and husband to it, remarkably possessing between them the qualities it demanded of men. No part of its mystery was unknown to them. They became miners and smelters of ore, bringers of coal, burners of coke, drawers of wire, rollers of rails, in a very large way. Their wealth in property increased alarmingly. One thing begat another so fast and new opportunities so unexpectedly appeared that their resources were chronically stretched to the utmost and they were continually in need of more capital. John was always buying something they couldn’t pay for,--an ore mountain perhaps, a ship to transport the ore down the Great Lakes, a steel plant somebody had blunderingly steered on the rocks. He was like a man on a tight rope juggling more glass balls than he can hold all at once. He has to keep them going in the air. He cannot stop. John never thought of stopping. It wasn’t that he wished to be rich; it wasn’t that he had a passion for power; he craved excitement. And there was plenty of it.

The steel industry had frightful growing pains for which there was no diagnosis. The trouble was it grew by violent starts and then had fits of coma. The profits were so great when there was any profit at all that the steel maker would pawn his hope of the everlasting to build more mills; and perhaps before they were finished the profit had vanished and his despair was as wild as his ecstasy. The time to buy steel plants was when the sky was visible at Pittsburgh; the time to sell them was when the smoke was so dense that the sun at midday resembled a pickled beet. But at one time no one had the money to buy anything with and at the other time nobody would sell.

These were conditions perfectly suited to the exercise of John’s reckless speculative genius. In the sloughs of despond he bought more property, as he had bought the Agnes plant, with his notes of hand and promises to pay. He seemed never so serene as when treading the edge of a financial precipice in a high wind with a swaying load on his back. People watched him with awe. He would do it once too often, they said, as each time he got back to safe ground again. Certainly he was a dangerous man to walk with. In an industry controlled by fatalists he was unique for daring. Yet back of his apparent passion for the gambling chance were saving qualities. He had keen, brooding vision and rare business sagacity. When he told a committee of United States Senators that with a tariff protection of six-tenths of a cent a pound he would make this country independent of the European steel wire makers (this was at the beginning),--when he said that nobody took him seriously. However, they gave him what he wanted. The price of wire was then twelve cents a pound and this country was importing from Europe three-quarters of all it used. A few years later the tables were turned. This country was making more than half the steel wire used in the whole world, selling it heavily even in England, and the price was two cents a pound. So with all things of steel. So with steel rails. When the American steel industry got started at last foreign steel rails were being imported for American railways at $125 a ton. Ultimately American steel rails sold for $18 a ton in this country, in Europe, in Asia and Africa. The United States then had become an exporting nation selling the products of its skill to the four ends of the earth.

Business is warfare in time of peace. Hence its lure for combative men. Its goal is conquest. Let alone it would perhaps wreck itself or enslave the world. No matter. When it is ruthless, knowing no law but its own necessity, then it is magnificent.

Attila, king of the Huns, vowing no grass to grow where his horse had trod the enemy’s soil, is magnificent. We can see him in that light now that he is far away in history and not pursuing us.

Business as it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century also is far away. Nothing like it can ever happen again. It was utterly lawless, free in its own elemental might, lustful and glamorous. The barbaric invasion that overturned Roman civilization was more obvious as a spectacle but no more extraordinary, no more unexpected, and perhaps as it shall turn out, no more significant, than America’s economic invasion of the world in the steel age. One stupendous sequel already present is the economic, financial and political supremacy of the isolated American people in the affairs of this earth. What will come of that nobody knows.

The Breakspeares conceived it, imagined it, planned it; the Thanes tooled it. There was of course labor. But labor no more invents the tools that are the means to economic conquest than soldiers invent the weapons of war, and has generally less understanding of ends than soldiers have of the strategy.

The men controlling the steel industry came to be grouped in three main divisions. There was the original Pittsburgh group, under the leadership of a round head named Carmichael; it had founded itself in iron and then gone into steel. It was steady and powerful and had gained some influential support in Wall Street. There was the western group, always falling down and getting up again, very unstable, yet dangerous as competitors.

And thirdly was the Breakspeare group, extremely unpredictable, whose interests lay in every direction.

John naturally attracted men who loved risk and lived easily with danger. Slaymaker learned the attitude, not thoroughly, but sufficiently, and walked doggedly along. His goal was wealth for its own sake. Although John’s high adventures often threatened to involve all of them in colossal bankruptcy, yet this never quite happened, and each time it didn’t happen Slaymaker took a part of his profit and hid it away, never to be risked again. Jubal Awns, the lawyer, became superstitious about John and followed him blindly. Besides these two, who had been in from the start, there were three others who would be called general partners. They not only were very large stockholders and directors in John’s companies; they joined their capital with his in new undertakings. One was Isaac Pick, a wordless man who conversed in gestures and disbelieved everything including the fact of his own existence. He had made a fortune in scrap iron and was brought into the group by Slaymaker at a time when new capital was urgently needed. Another was Col. Wingreene, an exceedingly profane man, one of the railroad officials whom John had induced to take original stock in the American Steel Company when it began to make rails. Wingreene had bought out the other railroad people and now devoted himself entirely to the steel business. A third was Justinian Creed, a Cleveland banker, very obese, who believed in the better way and twice a year was in a grovelling panic about his sins, never thinking, however, to divest himself of the fruits thereof. Thane was a partner, too, only his work was in other material. There were many others loosely affiliated, but these five,--Slaymaker, Awns, Pick, Wingreene and Creed,--were John’s own, whom he led, and who came to be known generically as the Breakspeare Crowd.

When the game was hot they worked at high pressure, wholly sustained one would have thought by strong waters; when it was won they let down with a bang. They were men of strong habits, strong wills, strong feelings and strong humor. One of their odd passions was for getting one another’s goat. In their practical jokes they were serious, grim and imaginative, with an amazing power of deception. Never was a time when some absurd hoax was not brewing; and if one knew of nothing in pickle for another he began to be uneasy about himself. His defence was to prepare something of his own against the field. They were always on guard and regarded one another askance, with a kind of owlish suspicion. One would have thought, seeing them together, that they were too distrustful of themselves to look away or turn to spit. So they were. But this was personal, part of a game, and had nothing to do with business really.

Their code of conduct was intricate. If the word passed they could trust one another implicitly. Yet they avoided the word so far as possible, preferring in all normal circumstances unlimited freedom of personal action, each fellow for himself. In an emergency they came close together, stood back to back, and presented a solid ring to the world. In all situations John led them. Often he moved them against their judgment. Sometimes he was wrong. Generally he was right. When they acted severally against his judgment, on their own, they were always wrong. His character was perhaps no stronger than theirs; his judgment intrinsically was no better. But he had above all of them a faculty of intuition, and he could change his mind. Creed used to say: “John, he looks where he isn’t going and goes where he isn’t looking. His eyes are crossed inside.”

He said it cynically, and it was distorted by John’s enemies, who took it to mean that he could not be trusted by his own crowd. That was not so. He never broke the code. Creed, as it turned out, was the only man who needed watching within the rules.

Fortuity was the stuff they worked in; hazard was what they played with. They were always betting. No game of chance or skill but they had to add stakes to make it interesting. As they grew richer and more easily bored it was increasingly difficult to find a pastime in which the stakes were high enough. John turned the leisure of their minds to horse racing. They would appear in a body on the race track and scare the bookmakers with the size of their wagers. John was their oracle. They never believed him; they only followed him. When he had involved them in enormous loss they were obliged to go on; there was no other hope of getting out but by his star of luck. And it was by no means infallible. Once at Saratoga they had a frightful week. Twice they had telegraphed home for money. Their losses had gone into six figures. Slaymaker met Awns, Wingreene, Pick and Creed on the hotel veranda after breakfast. He was exceedingly sore.

“As long as I live and have my senses I’ll never bet on another horse John picks,” he said. “He dreams these things. He never had a real tip in his life.”

They were all of one mind. They were through. Just then John’s voice reached them from the doorway, saying: “We’ll get it all back today.”

They groaned and turned their backs.

“No, now listen?” he said. “You always get cold feet at the wrong time. This is our chance. It’s air tight. It’s so secret I can’t even tell you what horse it is. Give me your money and I’ll bet it with mine.”

He sat down and went on with it until Slaymaker said: “I’m an imbecile. If anybody knew what an imbecile I am there would be a run on my bank. This is positively the last time.”

They all gave him their money. It was the third race. No more could he tell them. The horses went to the post and still they did not know which one carried their money.

“It’s on,” said John. “It’s down all right. Don’t worry about that.”

“Lord, no,” said Slaymaker. “That’s not what we are worried about.”

John watched the horses. The others watched him.

A horse named Leadbeater took the lead at the start, held all the way and won by four lengths. John fell back with a blank expression.

“That the horse?” asked Slaymaker.

“Yes,” said John. “That’s it.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“I didn’t bet on it,” said John.

“You didn’t--what!”

“That was the horse,” John explained. “Only after we came out here I got what I thought was a better tip and bet all the money on.... Now, wait!”

They would not wait. They rose with one impulse and left him alone in Saratoga. That night on the train they began to get telegrams from him. Would they authorize him to lay five thousand apiece for them on a horse that was bound to win the next day at odds of 100 to 1? They tore up the telegrams. More kept coming, overtaking them en route all that night and until noon the next day. They would not even reply. But that horse did win and John by himself broke half the bookmakers at Saratoga.

It was the end of their racing sport for that season. The crowd was too disgusted to touch it again and John did not care for it alone. Slaymaker said it was forever; so did all the rest. Yet the next season they did it all over again.

XXXVI

All the men who got rich with John Breakspeare developed strange pathologies from nervous shock and strain. Their eyes became opaque and had that uncanny trick of suddenly and without movement changing their focus while they looked at you, as if something were transacting on the far-away horizon of their thoughts and you for that instant were transparent. They had their luck by the tail and could not let go. They could count their gains; they could not seize them. John was always getting them in; he never got them out. Their wealth was in property to which enormous additions had continuously to be made by an uncontrollable law of growth. Thus the richer they grew the greater correspondingly their liabilities were and there seemed no way either to quit or get out. If you had all the wealth in the world you could not sell it. There would be no one to buy it. In principle that was their problem. If they could sell out they would be millionaires. But where was there anybody with money enough to buy them out? It would take twenty-five millions or more. Once they had begun to look at this dilemma they could not let it alone; it filled them with anxiety. They began to worry John about it. He had got them in. Couldn’t he find a way to get them out?

“All right,” he said. “I’ll show you a way out.”

“How?”

“We’re like a railroad,” he said. “No railroad is privately owned any more. It’s too big. It represents too much capital. Only the public is rich enough to own a railroad. It takes thousands of investors putting their money together to build a railroad. Then somebody works it for them and pays them dividends on their shares. We can do that,--put our shares on the New York Stock Exchange and sell out to the public.”

So he led them to Wall Street. The motive was theirs; the plan was his.

The American Steel Company was reorganized. Its capitalization was increased to take in properties hitherto jointly owned among them and for other purposes. They agreed to sell no shares except through John in order that all should fare alike. It was a verbal agreement. All of their private agreements were verbal and never so far had one been broken.

Enter John Breakspeare upon the Wall Street scene with something to sell.

The shares of the American Steel Company were duly listed on the New York Stock Exchange,--that is, they were added to the list of securities permitted to be dealt in there and allotted sign and booth in the great investment bazar.

People stared and passed by. It was a strange sign not only because it was new but for the reason also that the public knew only mining and railroad shares. The day of industrial company shares had not come. John was a pioneer in that line. He was a vendor unused to the ways of this fair with merchandise nobody had ever seen before.

He was not disappointed. He knew, if anybody did, that goods must be brought to the buyer’s attention. Nothing will sell itself, least of all seven per cent. shares for which there is instinctively neither hunger nor thirst. He knew also in principle how this kind of impalpable merchandise should be displayed. It has no appeal to any of the natural senses. Therefore it must be made to appeal to all of them at once, symbolically. How?

First to be engaged is the sense of sight. The shares move. They go up. People ask: “What is that?” They move again. People ask: “Why is that?” They continue to move, going up, then down a little, then suddenly up a great deal, and people say: “Here before our eyes is something doing,--a chance to make some money.” And when once they begin to say that all their senses and appetites are touched with expectation, for money, however derived, is in itself palpable. It is the symbol of all things whatever.

For the art of making shares go up and down in a manner to excite first attention, then curiosity and then an impulse to act for gain, there is a long, inartistic word. The word is manipulation. The stock market manipulator is an illusionist. Perched high upon some eerie crag of the Wall Street canyon, producing enchantment at a distance, he is himself invisible save to the initiate, and even they do not know what he intends or why, because what he seems to be doing is never at all what he is really doing. If it were, the lesser fauna--the wolves, the jackals, the foxes, apes and crows,--would anticipate his ends and take the quarry out of his hands. He makes shares rise when he is selling them and fall when he is buying them. He can take an unnoticed, unwanted thing like American Steel and cause it to become an object of extravagant speculative interest, so that tens of thousands hang over the tape and wait for the next quotation, betting whether it shall be up or down. Moreover, he is a ventriloquist. When he has made certain shares very active by the apparently simple though extremely intricate expedient of buying and selling them furiously through different brokers, no two of whom know they have the same principal,--when he has done this and people begin to ask the question, then answers suitable to his purpose are in everyone’s ears, saturate the atmosphere, and although he, the manipulator, is the source of them that fact is as little known as the fact that he was himself the solitary source of all the buying and selling that started the excitement. Not only is the public deceived; the fauna, too, will often be caught. All is flesh that rises to his lure. His work is sometimes legitimate, as when he creates a public demand for shares the proceeds of which go to build a railroad or some other great economic work so vast that the capital could not have been obtained in any other way; it is sometimes predatory, sometimes wanton.

At this time the pendragon of manipulators was one Sabath,--James Sabath,--feared by the wicked and righteous both. He was not a member of the Stock Exchange for he did not wish to be bound by the rules. There was no name on his door nor was his name in any directory or book of celebrities. Yet it was constantly on the lips of all men concerned in gains and losses from speculation. One might have asked in every bank in Wall Street who and where this Sabath was and one’s inquiry would have been received with utter blankness. Yet there would have been hardly a banker in Wall Street, certainly no very important one, who had not had transactions with him of an extremely intimate and delicate nature. Such is the way of men in the money canyon.

For example, there was Bullguard. He was the great private banker of his time,--a kind of Cæsar’s wife to the institution of American finance. His authority was absolute, his power was feudal and tyrannical. For him to have been seen in the society of Sabath would have been scandalous. Nobody would have known what to make of it. Yet in the pursuit of his ends he often engaged Sabath to do things he could not risk doing for himself. That again is the way of men in the little autonomous state which is Wall Street.

John sought an audience with Sabath. After long delay and much unnecessary mystery he was received in that strange man’s lair. Besides himself there was nothing in it except a ticker, some chairs and a worn Turkey carpet. The room was without windows, therefore lighted artificially in daytime. Twice during the interview he rang a bell and each time a boy appeared with one glass of whiskey in his hand. Sabath drank it at a gulp, with no here’s how or by your leave. He sat in an arm chair and combed his beard upward from its roots with his fingers, or for change twisted it with the other hand. His head was continually moving; sometimes he threw it far back to start his fingers through his beard; no matter what he did with his head his eyes all the time were perfectly still and held John in a blue, vise-like gaze. He looked at people in a way to make them feel full of holes. His head was very large; his body was neat and small; his voice was sarcastic, thin and shrill.

John explained his errand. He wished Sabath to take hold of American Steel shares and create some public interest in them. Sabath said nothing, but continued to look at him. John went into details, telling about the company, what it owned and what it earned. Still Sabath continued to gaze at him in silence. John told him at length how the shares had been pooled in his hands by his associates, none to be sold except through him. And Sabath said nothing.

“Does it interest you at all?” John asked at last.

“Come back tomorrow,” said Sabath. He made a gesture toward the door without looking at it. As John went he sat still, but for his head, which turned slowly in a reptilian manner.

To John’s surprise Sabath was vocal the next day and asked many questions in a high, twanging voice. Some of his questions were oblique and some apparently quite irrelevant. Suddenly he said:

“And so you know that God-fearing Creed, do you? You must know him very well. How much of this precious stock has Mr. Creed got?”

John told him. Sabath tweaked his beard, saying: “Who would imagine I’d ever be found in the same alley with a he-cat like Creed.”

“What’s the matter with him?” asked John.

“I say nothing against him,” Sabath answered. “I only say I’d hate to go into a room with him alone.”

There was a third interview, then a fourth and a fifth. Terms were stated. It seemed to be all ready for the signatures and as there weren’t going to be any signatures John couldn’t understand why Sabath kept postponing the final word. Then one day out of a painted sky he said: “We seem unable to make a trade, Mr. Breakspeare. I cannot allow myself to waste any more of your valuable time. I’m not interested.”

John was amazed.

“However,” he said, “I suppose I can trust you to keep to yourself the information you have obtained in the course of these interviews?”

“That’s what we live on down here,--trust,” said Sabath. “We couldn’t do business without it.”

With that he turned his back and stood looking at the ticker. John, thus rudely dismissed, was at the door with his hand on the knob when Sabath spoke again, without turning around, without moving his head, as if he were thinking out loud.

“What did you ever do to Mr. Bullguard?”

“I don’t know him,” said John. “Why?”

“He knows you,” said Sabath, still reading the tape. “He says you are a gambler. Is that true?”

“I don’t know what he means,” said John. “It would be absurd to talk about it. I have some business to transact in Wall Street. How does that concern him?”

Sabath now turned and walked with him to the door. His manner was both ingratiating and menacing; his voice was ironic, and yet there was a suspicion of friendliness in his words. “Because if you are,” he continued, as if John had not spoken, “I would urge you to keep all that talent for the steel business. I understand the steel business needs it. We don’t like gambling in Wall Street. You are a young man. I have wasted your time. Now I offer you my advice. Don’t try anything in Wall Street. Gamblers don’t go far down here. We eat them. Mr. Bullguard would swallow you up at one bite.” He made an exaggerated bow. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you before you go back to Pittsburgh.”

“Thanks,” said John. “When I want to be amused I’ll look you up. Tell Mr. Bullguard I’ve been eaten up so often that I like it. Sometimes I fairly hunger for it. Why did you change your mind?”

“How could I have changed my mind?” Sabath injuredly asked. “How can you say that? It had never been made up.”

“Why did you change your mind?” John insisted.

“You would be betrayed,” said Sabath. “I should be betrayed, too, of course; but I’m used to it and you’re not. The only man you don’t suspect is always the one who betrays you.”

“Did Mr. Bullguard call you off?” John asked.

“You might never get used to it,” Sabath continued, vaguely, ignoring the question. “You wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve been betrayed so much that I know it before it happens. And I know what to do. You never get through a deal like this without being betrayed.”

He turned sadly and walked back to the ticker. The interview was closed.

John reacted to this experience with thoughtful curiosity. He was baffled and chagrined and at the same time deeply interested, for he perceived that here was a province of the dynamic mind in which subtlety was carried to its ultimate point. After long reflection he was still of the opinion that underlying Sabath’s diabolism lay a vein of well meaning; also of the opinion still that the puissant Bullguard had interfered. But why? What could his motive be? This was presently to be discovered. John explored the matter adroitly and learned that Bullguard was about to do for the Carmichael crowd what John lone-handed had attempted to do for his crowd,--that is to say, capitalize the steel business and introduce it to the public. Naturally Bullguard desired the field to himself and took a high-handed way against the interloper.

Nevertheless, John resolved to go on. He would be his own manipulator. Why not? The stock market was nobody’s private preserve. He had as much right there as Bullguard or Sabath. Besides, where was the risk? He controlled all the shares of the American Steel Company.

So he engaged a broker, who engaged other brokers, and buying and selling orders, both issuing from John, began to be executed in American Steel. For a while he was delighted. It was so easy to make the shares active, to make them go up and down, to create the illusion of excited bargaining, that he began to wonder why anyone should pay manipulators large fees to do this simple trick. He wondered, too, what Sabath was thinking of his performance. He could almost feel Sabath watching him. He imagined him at the ticker, tweaking his beard, sneering at the amateur quotations that were appearing on the tape for American Steel.

They were beautiful quotations, rising from 80 to 85, then to 90, then to 95 and at length to 100; they were also very costly quotations. Commissions to brokers who executed his orders began to run into large figures and there were no offsetting returns. That is to say, real buyers were not in the least intrigued. After several weeks John himself was the only buyer and the only seller. He discussed it with his broker who thought what he needed was publicity. He ought to get American Steel written about in the newspapers.

Financial writers to the number of twenty were invited to meet the president of the American Steel Company. Six came. John received them in his broker’s private office and spoke eloquently and earnestly of the company, its merits, earnings and all that. They stared at him incredulously, then began to look very bored and went away. The American Steel was not written about except in one newspaper, which told of the solicited interview in a way to make it ludicrous.

Now a most improbable thing happened. John’s broker reported that someone was selling American Steel shares.

Selling them? Who could be selling them? Nobody had any to sell.

Nevertheless, it was true. Well, next best to selling the shares to the public, which he hadn’t succeeded in doing, was to buy them from speculators who would sell them without owning them, for in that case when the sellers were called upon to deliver what they never had then they couldn’t and John would be in a position to squeeze them. He would have them in a corner. So he gave orders to buy all the American Steel anyone offered to sell. The selling steadily increased. How strange that professional Stock Exchange gamblers, the canniest men in the world, would sell themselves into a corner in that silly manner! Yet what else could it be? Still sure the sellers were selling what they couldn’t deliver John continued to buy until very large sums began to be involved.

One afternoon his broker informed him that the selling had been traced to Sabath. This John had already suspected. He was now in deep water and wired for his crowd,--Slaymaker, Awns, Wingreene, Pick and Creed. Having laid the cards before them he proposed that they should unite their resources and bring off a corner in American Steel. Clearly they had Sabath cornered. They had only to let him go on selling until he was tired; then they could make him settle on their own terms.

Creed declined. This was John’s party, he said. They had authorized him to sell their shares. Instead he had got himself involved in a contest with the most powerful speculator in Wall Street and now expected them to stand under. They would be fools to get into that kind of game. He flatly wouldn’t do it.

The others wavered. They hated to leave John in the lurch; they were afraid to stand by. Creed withdrew and vanished.

While the other four were hesitating a sudden panic shook the stock market. American Steel shares fell from 103 to 25 in ten minutes, plunging headlong through John’s buying orders. And while this was taking place his broker came to him in a state of gibbering excitement.

“I thought you said nobody had any American Steel to sell?”

“Nobody has,” said John.

“Then we’re all crazy,” said the broker. “More than a million dollars’ worth of the stuff has just been delivered to us. We’ve got to pay for it at once.”

“Let’s look at it,” said John. “I want to see it.”

He saw it. The shares that had been delivered to him were Creed’s.

John paid for them, though it almost broke his back. He used his own money until he had no more and borrowed the rest from Slaymaker and Pick on his notes. The fiasco was complete. American Steel was indignantly stricken from the Stock Exchange list because it had been manipulated in so outrageous a manner and the newspapers wrote about it most scornfully.

It was all over and John and his crowd, now always excepting Creed, were at dinner in the Holland House, when a reporter from _The Sun_ appeared at their table unannounced and asked: “Mr. Breakspeare, how do you feel?”

John went on eating as he replied: “I feel like a dog that’s been kicked so much he goes sideways. I’ve got every pain there is but one. That’s belly ache.”

This was printed the next morning on the front page of _The Sun_, and Wall Street forgot itself long enough to say: “Not a bad sport, anyhow.”

“Now I suppose we’ll go back and attend to the steel business,” said Slaymaker.

“In a day or two,” John answered. “There’s something I want to do here yet.”

He wanted to find out how it happened. And he did. Bullguard, knowing Creed, had tempted him to part with his shares at a very nice price. These shares Bullguard turned over to Sabath with the understanding that they should be used to club John’s market to death. John had no hostile feeling for Sabath. For Creed he felt only contempt. But with Bullguard he opened a score.

His state was not one of anger. He had only himself to blame. “I don’t so much mind getting plucked,” he said, “but I look so like Hell.”

He simply couldn’t leave until he had turned the laugh. This he did in the way as follows: One morning at eleven o’clock a small funeral cortege, instead of stopping at Trinity Church as funerals should in that part of the city, turned down Wall Street and stopped at the door of Bullguard & Company. Six men drew from the hearse a silver-mounted mahogany coffin smothered in roses, carried it into the great banking house, put it down on the floor, went immediately out and drove away. It was so swiftly yet quietly done and it was so altogether incredible that the door attendant knew not what to do or think. His wits were paralyzed and while he stared with his mouth open the pall-bearers disappeared. So did the hearse and carriages. A great crowd instantly gathered. The nearest policeman was called. As no one could say how the coffin got there or what was in it he refused either to move it or to let it be moved until the coroner should come to open it. He was a new policeman and could not be awed. He knew his duty and no manner of entreaty availed. For an hour it lay there on the floor. Police reserves were summoned to keep a way for traffic through the gaping throng. Somewhere inside the banking house, out of sight, was Bullguard, surrounded by his partners, apoplectic and purple with a sense of unanswerable outrage. The coroner was accompanied by a group of reporters.

When the coffin was opened, there upon the white satin pillow lay a rump of a pig, rampant, tail uppermost; and in the curl of the tail was twisted and tied like a ribbon the few feet of ticker tape on which the last quotations for American Steel were printed. It was a freak story and the newspapers made much of it. Wall Street rocked with glee. John went back to Pittsburgh with a smile in his midriff, leaving the wreck of a fortune behind him.

XXXVII

John’s Wall Street disaster was personal. He assumed all liabilities. Therefore it did not involve his partners, save that he owed Slaymaker and Pick nearly half a million dollars on his notes. Nor did it touch Thane and Agnes. He took good care of that.

On the day of his return to Pittsburgh he had dinner with them. They had moved again, to a house of their own, one they had built on an unspoiled eminence among some fine old trees. They exhibited it with the pride of children. It was large and expensively made, with an unpretentious air, and one of its features, saved until the last, was an apartment for John. They hardly expected him to adopt it. However, it should be his always, just like that, whenever it might please him to come, and it had pleased them to do it.

The evening meal was no longer supper. It was dinner. Thane at last was comfortable in the society of servants, even in the brooding, anonymous presence of a butler.

Agnes now was in full bloom. Life had touched her in its richest mood. There were moments in which her aura seemed luminous, like a halo; or was that a trick of John’s imagination? He had not seen her for above a year. She was more at ease with him than she had ever been, spontaneous, friendly, quite unreserved, and by the same sign infinitely further away. There was no misunderstanding her way with Thane nor Thane’s with her. They had achieved the consonance of two principles. They were the two aspects of one thing, separate and inseparable, like right and left, like diameter and circumference. What one thought the other said; what one said the other thought. They conversed without words.

Agnes pressed John with questions about the Wall Street episode. They had read a good deal about it in the newspapers. His narrative left much to be vaguely imagined.

“But you yourself--how did you come out?” she asked. “Nobody else appears to have got hurt. What happened to you?” For on that point he had been evasive.

“I did get rubbed a bit,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m all right.”

She looked at him thoughtfully.

“Tell him what we’ve been doing,” she said, turning to Thane.

“Remember,” said Thane, “you said once we’d see ore go in at the top of a blast furnace and come out rails at the other end of the mill without stopping?”

“Yes,” said John, sitting up.

“That gave me an idea,” Thane continued. “We’ve done it. It’s experimental yet but we can do it. Take the steel ingots straight out of the soaking pit and put them through the rolls with no reheating.”

“Does anybody know it?” John asked.

“Just ourselves,” said Thane.

Agnes took it up there, described the process in detail, and told how Thane had evolved it through endless nights of trial and failure. John was amazed at the extent and accuracy of her knowledge. Thane anticipated his question.

“She knows,” he said. “She could run a mill.”

It was literally true. John was thrilled to hear how at night, in cap and overalls, she had been going with Thane to the mill to watch his experiments. Not only did she learn to understand them; she could discuss them technically, and make helpful suggestions. She had taken up the study of metallurgy in a serious way. She spent her days digesting scientific papers in English, French and German and was continually bringing new knowledge to Thane’s attention. Later to her immense delight she saw phases of this knowledge translate itself through Thane’s hands into practice at the mill.

“It’s in the blood,” said John, bound with admiration.

It was a cherishable evening. After dinner they sat on the veranda. Below them was a bottomless sea of velvety blackness, with no horizon, no feeling of solid beneath it, sprinkled at random with lights and intermittently torn by flashes from blast furnaces and converters many miles away.

“It’s like looking at the sky upside down,” said Agnes.

They could feel what was taking place off there in the lamp-black darkness. Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what God had forgotten--_steel! steel! steel!_ There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. There an epic was forming.

These three sitting on the veranda were definitely related to all of this. It had never ceased to thrill them. Much of it they had imagined before it was there. Some of those Leviathan tools were Thane’s own. He was thinking of them, not boastfully, yet with a swelling sense of having created them. They were his ectoplasm, his arms and legs and sinews externalized in other forms. Seldom did he review his work, being normally too much absorbed in the difficulty at hand. Now, as he gave way to it, a tingle of satisfaction stole through his blood. It made him wish to touch Agnes. His hand reached for hers and it was near. She seemed to know what he was thinking.

John was thinking of the steel age, of what it yet required, of its still unimagined possibilities. Every railroad then existing would have to be rebuilt with heavier rails and bridges. Cars would come to be made of steel. Street railways were a new thing: they would take immense quantities of steel.

They had been silent for a long time.

“That’s the Agnes plant ... way over there ... that blue flame. There!” said Thane.

“I had made it out,” said John.

“What did you call it?” Agnes asked.

Sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had called it the Agnes plant.

“How nice!” she said.

From that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent. They found they could speak naturally of incidents always until then taboo. They talked of Enoch, of their arrival and beginning in Pittsburgh, of the mill at Damascus which was doing well, and of each other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.

When Agnes rose to leave she shook hands with John, saying: “Alexander will give you the key. We don’t press you. But it’s there for you whenever you have the impulse to come. Day or night. Any time. And even if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”

With that she was gone, so suddenly that John had been unable to get any words together. He had not even said good-night.

“That place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said Thane, lunging out of a silence. “I can’t find any way to say it. We know how it was when you brought us to Pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us until you bought the little nail mill. We know all about it. It’s lucky for all of us,--lucky for Agnes and me, I mean,--I didn’t know enough to see it then. There ain’t no way to say how we feel about it. You can just understand that’s what this key means.”

John took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and said nothing.

“The reason Agnes was asking you so close how you came out in Wall Street,” Thane added, “was we thought you might-a got skinned. We’ve got a lot of money. We think it’s a lot. And we want you to know--”

“Don’t!” said John. “That’s enough. Now stop it. Stop it, I tell you.”

“A-l-l right, a-l-l right,” said Thane. “I’m through. I ain’t a going on, am I? I’ve got it all said.”

“I’m going,” said John. “Walk down to the gate.”

At the gate they shook hands and lingered.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” said John. “There’s nothing you two--what I mean--”

“I know, I know,” said Thane.

“You don’t know anything,” said John. “Let me say something. I owe you a damn sight more than you owe me. I couldn’t have done anything without you. You’re the axle tree. I’m only the wheel. This one new wrinkle, if it proves out, is worth millions.”

“Well, don’t lose that key,” said Thane.

They shook hands again and pushed each other roughly away.

XXXVIII

The steel industry was a giant without lineage, parentage or category. Nobody knew how big it should be nor could tell by looking at it what stage it was in. Not until afterward. It was measurable only by contrast with itself. It was supposed to be already grown up when John brought the American Steel Company back from Wall Street. But it was still in the gristle. Bone and sinew had yet to be acquired.

“What, my God! if we had sold out then,” Slaymaker would say again and again, with the aghast and devout air of a man whose faith in the deity dates from some miraculous escape. “We should probably never have got in again,” he would add.

If they had got out then they would have been able to count their wealth in millions. But they had to go on. And when at last they did get out in the golden harvest time years later they counted it in scores and hundreds of millions.

Thane’s new method, which proved itself in practice, gave the American Steel Company a whip hand in steel rails. It could make them at a lower cost than anyone else in the world, owing to the saving in fuel. Nobody ever knew what that cost was. No matter at what price the Carmichael people sold rails John could sell them a little lower if he needed the business, and he became for that reason a burning thorn in the flesh of Bullguard, who had capitalized the Carmichael properties and brought the shares out in Wall Street. They had a wretched career. Everyone who touched them lost money. This was not only because of the American Steel Company’s competition; the steel industry as a whole was running wild. There was no controlling it. For a year or two the demand for steel would exceed the utmost supply at prices which made a steel mill more profitable than a gold pocket. Then new mills would appear everywhere at once and presently, although there never could be enough steel really, the bowl would slop over from sheer awkwardness.

There were still the three great groups,--the Western group, the Carmichael group and John’s--all growing very fast. Minor groups were continually springing up at precisely the wrong time. They generally smashed up or had to be bought out by the others to save themselves from ruinous competition. The steel age cared nothing about profits. All it wanted was steel--more and more and more.

Next was the phase of specialization. One mill made rails exclusively, another merchant steel, another structural shapes for bridges and skyscrapers, another sheet steel, another steel pipe, and so on. That only intensified the competition.

Then trusts began to be formed, precisely as John had formed the nail trust years before, and for the same purpose, which was to regulate the output and keep prices at a profitable level. Somebody would go around and get options on nearly all the mills of this kind, of that kind and then get bankers to make them into a trust with shares to be listed on the Stock Exchange and sold to the public. So there came to be a steel pipe trust, a sheet steel trust, a bridge and structural steel trust, a tin plate trust, a trust for everything; and matters became a great deal worse because some of the biggest mills, such as John’s, were never in a trust and if the pipe trust or the structural steel trust got prices too high the independent mills would begin to make pipe or structural steel. Besides, each trust was a law unto itself and the steel industry was still anarchic.

Now finance began to be worried. The shares of these trusts having been floated in Wall Street and the public at last having begun to buy them, an outbreak of disastrous competition among the trusts, or between the trusts and the independents, or an overrunning of the steel spool, caused a panic on the Stock Exchange. Enormous sums of capital had become involved. Every such panic caused a general commotion, like a small earthquake. Something would have to be done to stabilize the steel industry. That was the word; everybody began to say, _Stabilize it_! Gradually there crystallized the thought of a great trust of trusts to embrace everything. Not otherwise could the steel industry be stabilized. Any such colossal scheme as that would have to consider first of all the three dominant groups. But when overtures were made to John directly or through his partners, he repulsed them. To Wall Street’s emissaries he would say flatly, “No.” To his partners he would say, “Not yet.”

His word was final. Having retrieved his fortune in the first year after his inglorious shipwreck, by the most daring and brilliant selling campaign the steel industry had ever seen,--a campaign that put American rails over European rails in all the markets of the world,--his authority not only was restored: it was increased. Then, having paid off his notes with Slaymaker and Pick, he had got possession of Creed’s shares. That made his interest in the American Steel Company greater than that of any three others. There was still the North American Manufacturing Company, in which he was the largest stockholder; it controlled the manufacture of steel wire and nails, and had never ceased to pay dividends.

He enforced one policy of business. That was to make steel continuously under all conditions and never to close a plant except for repairs. Back of him was Thane steadily reducing the costs of manufacture. Sometimes they sold steel at a loss. In the long run, however, this policy paid so handsomely that they were presently able to find in their own profits the capital they needed for expansion. On an ever-increasing scale they devoted profits to the construction and purchase of new properties,--more mines, more ships, more mills. When his partners complained, saying it was time to take something out instead of putting all their gains back again, John offered to buy them out.

So he grew wise and tyrannical and a little grey at the temples. His voice became husky. He lived hard, worked hard, walked steadily on the edge of the precipice, with nothing he cared for in view. On his watch chain he carried the key to Thane’s house. Twice he got as far as the gate and turned back.

XXXIX

When the steel age walked across the ocean from Europe a dilemma was created. The will and mentality were here; the labor was there. Until then labor in American mills had been made up of British, Irish, Welsh, Germans, Swedes and, choicest of all, Buckwheats, meaning young American brawn released from the farm by the advent of man-saving agricultural implements. The steel age widened the gap between brain and muscle. It required a higher kind of imagination at the top and a lower grade of labor below. There was no such labor here,--at least, nowhere near enough. Hence an inpouring of Hungarians, Slavs, Polacks and other inferior European types,--hairy, brutish, with slanting foreheads.

Nobody thought of the consequences. Nobody thought at all. The labor was needed. That was enough. There was no effort to Americanize or assimilate it. There wasn’t time. It had to be fed raw to the howling new genie. It lived wretchedly in sore clusters from which Americans averted their eyes. Where it came from life was wretched, even worse, perhaps; but here were contrasts, no gendarmes, freedom of discontent, and a new weapon, which was the strike. These men, bred with sullen anger in their blood, melancholy and neglected in a strange land, having no bond with the light, were easily moved to unite against the work bosses who symbolized tyranny anew. Their impulse to violence was built upon by labor leaders and the steel industry became a battle ground. Strikes were frequent, bloody and futile, save for their educational value, which was hard to see then and is not at all clear yet.

This was all in the way of business,--big business. We imported labor and exported steel. We flung Slavs into our racial melting pot and sold rails and bridges in Hungary. One can easily imagine an invisible force to have been at work, a blind force, perhaps. The centers of power were shifted in the world. Greatness was achieved. The rest is hidden.

One advantage the Breakspeare mills had was almost complete immunity from labor troubles. In every reign of terror destruction passed them by. For this there was Thane to thank. He handled all labor problems. In disputes between the workers and the steel companies the question of wages was seldom the basic matter, even when it seemed to be. The trouble was much more subtle, or more simple, as you happen to see it, turning upon the ways and hungers of humanity. Thane knew men, he knew what drudgery costs the soul and how little it takes beyond what is due to overcome its bitterness. He knew, besides, how and in what proportions to mix different kinds of men so that the characteristics of one kind would neutralize those of another kind by a sort of chemistry.

Seven miles down the river from the Agnes plant had been built a magnificent new plate mill, called the Wyoming Steel Works. It had every element of success save one. The manager had no way with labor. He was continually engaged in desperate struggles with the Amalgamated Unions and the plant for that reason had involved its New York owners in heavy loss. These troubles, becoming chronic, culminated in a strike that spread sympathetically over the whole eastern steel industry. At the Agnes plant the men went out for the first time. They had no quarrel of their own. That was made very clear. But they felt obliged, as all other union workers did, to take up the quarrel of the men at the Wyoming Works and settle it for good; they would if necessary tie up every steel plant in the country in order to bring pressure to bear upon their arch enemy, the Wyoming manager, to whose destruction they had made a vow.

Not only did the strikers seize the Wyoming Works, as was the first step in hostilities; they took possession of the town that had grown up around the plant and organized themselves on a military basis. An Advisory Committee of workers declared martial law, mounted a siren on the town hall to give signals by a secret code, put sentinels around the works, around the town, up and down the river front, and held a mobile force of eight hundred Hungarians, Poles and Slavs in readiness for battle at any point. No one could enter the town on an unfriendly errand. Trains were not permitted to stop. The telegraph office was seized. The Advisory Committee announced that any attempt on the part of the owners to retake possession of their property,--say nothing of trying to work it with non-union labor,--would mean an abundant spilling of blood.

This was the situation when Thane received a telegram from John in New York, as follows:

“Can buy Wyoming Steel Works for a song. Will close transaction at once if you will say labor trouble can be straightened out with the plant in our hands.”

Almost without reflection Thane answered:

“Yes. Go ahead.”

He had no doubt that the mere announcement of their having bought the works would end the violent phase of the strike. The rest would be a matter of peaceable negotiation. He might have made the announcement in Pittsburgh. The strikers there would have communicated it fast enough. He might have telegraphed it to the Advisory Committee. He might have done it in one of several ways. But his natural way was to go himself and see to it. He knew the strike leaders; he talked their language. An hour after answering John’s telegram he was in a launch going down the river.

There had been no news from the scene of passion since the afternoon before. No one knew what was taking place in the Wyoming Steel Works town.

In the night two barge loads of Pinkerton men, recruited in Philadelphia, had silently drifted down the river past Pittsburgh. The manager was resolved to get possession of the plant by force. The plan was to land the Pinkerton men before daylight on the river bank. Once inside the works they could stand siege until the state authorities could be persuaded to send the militia in. But the barges were sighted by the Advisory Committee’s sentinels a mile above the town. The siren blew an alarm. Men, women and children tumbled out of bed. The armed battalion was rushed to receive the Pinkerton men.

In the darkness a running fire was exchanged between the strikers on shore and the barges; however, the barges did land at the works and the leader of the Pinkerton men signalled for a parley. He told the strikers he had come to take possession of the works and meant to do it. The strike leaders dared him to try. He did. He formed his men and started them off the barges. They were stopped by a volley from the Slav battalion entrenched behind piles of steel in the yard,--and fled back to the barges. Daylight came. The Pinkerton men, unwilling to venture forth a second time, hoisted a white flag. The strikers scoffed at it and went on firing at the barges. They became discouraged. They could see the holes their shots made in the planks; they couldn’t be sure they were hitting the men inside. So they floated burning oil down the river and sent tanks of burning oil down the bank against the barges. That was ineffective. Pinkerton men would not burn on earth. Someone thought of dynamite. Cases of it were brought, and the lightest of arm among the strikers calmly attached fuses to the sticks of dynamite, lighted them, and hurled them at the barges, like firecrackers. Once in a while they made the target, tearing a great hole in the barge planking. Then there would be a volley of shots at the Pinkerton men suddenly exposed. Two cannons were brought. They were handled so awkwardly that they did little damage to the barges and took off one striker’s head. The use of dynamite increased. In some fashion the Pinkerton men fought back. When a striker fell groans were heard. When a Pinkerton man was hit cheers went up from the strikers and were repeated by the spectators,--women, children and noncombatants,--who gorged the spectacle from afar.

And that was what had been going on for hours when Thane’s launch appeared, speeding down the middle of the river. He was steering it himself; his boatman lay flat on the bottom. Having recognized him the sentinels above the town passed word down their line, so that the strikers at the works knew who he was before he had come within rifle range. Firing ceased. He steered the boat in, shot it high on the bank, and stepped out.

At that instant there appeared from behind one of the steel piles the figure of frenzy personified. This was not a striker. It was one of those weak, anæmic creatures who are intoxicated by participation in the lusts and passions of others and go mad over matters that do not concern them. He was a clerk in a dry goods store and taught a Sunday School class. It must be supposed that the cessation of firing made him think the strikers were weakening. He brandished a rifle, shrieking:

“Citizens! There are the men who wreck our homes, assault our women, take away our bread. Kill them! Kill them without mercy!” He was unnaturally articulate. “Cowards!” he cried. “Follow me!”

He levelled his rifle at the barges. The only man in sight was Thane, walking up the bank. The insane neurotic fired and Thane fell in a crumpled heap.

Several men together leaped at the assassin and disarmed him. He disappeared.

Thane was unconscious. There was no doctor, no ambulance. They took him to Pittsburgh in the launch.

John arrived the next morning. He looked once at Agnes and knew the worst.

Thane lived through that day and into the night. Shortly before he died he wished to be alone with John. They clasped hands and read each other in silence. Once the doctor opened the door and softly closed it again. Thane beckoned to John to bring his head nearer.

“Take ... Agnes,” he said. “That’s ... all ... everything.... Let her ... come back ... now.”

Only Agnes knew when he died. At daylight the doctor went in and she was still holding his form in her arms.

XL

For John the sense of loss in Thane’s death was as if part of himself had broken off and sunk out of sight.

To Agnes it was as if the whole world were gone. She seemed to have forgotten there was ever anything in it but Thane. Her life had inhabited his.

She went on living in the house, almost as if he were still there, often calling his name and answering aloud to an audible memory of his voice. She saw no one but John. She hardly knew anyone else. And she saw him only because she was aware of his great feeling for Thane and they could talk about him.

This was a bond between them and led to a companionship without which both would have missed the Autumn and gone directly from Midsummer to the Winter of their lives. It was impersonal, yet very sweet, and they came to rely upon it much more than they knew. Agnes had neither kin nor friends. John was that solitary being who has many friends and no brothers among men.

Agnes began to fade. John induced her to travel. She went to Europe. He joined her there. They went around the world together. When they returned she seemed much improved in spirits. She had begun to smile again. After a month in the house among the trees she became terribly depressed. He coaxed her to New York and settled her luxuriously in a hotel apartment. She disliked it and stayed on. More and more of John’s time now passed in New York for business reasons. He told her this.

“We’ve no one else to visit with,” he said. “Let’s stay in the same town.”

She said nothing. Often he surprised her looking at him with a thoughtful, far away expression as if trying to remember what it was he reminded her of. Suddenly she made up her mind to go to New Damascus and build herself a house there. It would be something to do John said at once, and that was what she needed. The house, which was small but exquisite, occupied her for a year. Before it was finished she had conceived the idea of building in New Damascus the finest hospital in the state.

Journeys to New Damascus now became John’s sole recreation.

And so the Autumn stole upon them.

XLI

High in the financial heavens stood a sign,--sign of cabal, sign of rapture, sign of gold. The time had come to form the trust of trusts. Lords and barons of the steel industry began to settle down in Wall Street. They brought their trusts along. One day the Western crowd loaded six trusts on special trains,--brains, books, good will, charters and clerks,--and trundled them thither, banners flying, typewriters clicking, business doing on the way. They took the top floors of the newest steel skyscrapers and preferred solid mahogany furniture with brass mountings.

Wall Street said: “Here is the fat of money! It walks into our hands. How shall we divide it?”

But Wall Street had much to learn. These men, brash, boastful and boisterous, were also very wise. They did not come to play Wall Street’s game. Most of them, like John, had sometime meddled with it and cared not for it. Now they were strong enough to play their own game. They brought their brokers with them, from Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh,--men whose tricks they knew,--and bought them seats on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Oh,” said Wall Street. “That’s it, is it? Well, well,” and lolled its tongue in relish. It knew very little about steel and nothing yet about steel people.

“Now, gentlemen,” said the steel people. “Red or black. High or low. Any limit or none. Let’s shoot.”

Using their own brokers to buy and sell the shares of their own trusts they began to make the canyon howl. For a while the play lay between Wall Street and the barbars, and the barbars held all the cards. If Wall Street sold steel shares for a fall the dividends were increased in the night. If it bought them for a rise suddenly the mills were shut up and dividends ceased. Wall Street was outraged. This was worse than gambling. It was a pea and shell game. The steel people were haled to court on the charge of circulating false information about their properties to influence the value of shares.

Nothing to it! Nobody could prove the information to have been false. Merely the steel people had it first, as they naturally would, and acted upon it in the stock market, as everybody would who could. So they all went back to Wall Street and the play waxed hotter and steeper. No one had ever seen speculation like this. At conventions, unwritten rules, limits, the steel people simply guffawed. They invented rules. Nobody was obliged to play with them. Their creed was, “Nothing in moderation.”

After hours they played bridge for ten dollars a point. En route from Wall Street to the Waldorf, which was their rendezvous, they would lay bets in hundred-dollar units on the odd or even of numbered objects, like passing street cars. Whiskey was their innocuous beverage. There was one whose drink was three Scotch high-balls in succession. As the third one disappeared he would slowly rub his stomach, saying: “That one rings the bell.” Yet all the time they attended strenuously to business. They were men of steel, physically and mentally powerful. Carousing was an emotional outlet. Gambling on the Stock Exchange was hardly more than pastime. Night and day they kept their eyes on that sign in the heavens.

They had delivered the steel age. The steel industry was their private possession to do with as they damn pleased. They could make a circus of it if they liked. They did. Their way with it had become a national problem. The steel industry was much too important to be conducted in that manner. It kept the country in a state of nerves. These wild, untamable behemoths would have to be bought out. They were willing to sell. There was a ludicrous fiction among them that they were weary of doing, whereas they were only sated with it. However, as they were willing to be bought out and as to be rid of them had become a public necessity, there remained only the question of how. It would take all the spare money there was in the country. Yet it would have to be done. That is what the sign meant.

John called his crowd together saying: “This is the tall goodbye if we want to get out.”

They did. He pledged them in writing to leave everything in his hands and then returned to Wall Street where for months past he had been preparing his ground unobserved. In one of the new steel skyscrapers he had established himself an office. On the door was his name--

_John Breakspeare_

under that

_American Steel Company North American Manufacturing Company_

and nothing more. Inside was a private room of his own with a stock ticker and a desk with a lot of telephones on it. Beyond was a large meeting room furnished with a long table, chairs, brass cuspidors, a humidor and a water cooler. From the window was a panoramic view of New York harbor. A very simple establishment one would think. Yet it was the center of a web radiating in all directions. Nothing much could happen in Wall Street without causing an alarm on his desk, for he had made some very excellent and timely connections. His private telephone wires reached the sources of information. One of them, it would have surprised everyone to know, ran to the office of John Sabath, with whom he had come to confidential terms. So it was that perhaps no one man, save only Bullguard, knew more than he about what was invisibly taking place under that sign which stood higher and higher in the money firmament.

What was visible had by this time become very exciting. The newspapers were giving astonished publicity to the doings of the golden bulls. What they did in Wall Street was recorded by the financial writers; what they did at large was written by the news reporters. And the public’s imagination was inflamed. Incipient Napoleons of finance, greedy little lambs, comet riders, haberdashers’ clerks, preachers, husbands of actresses, dentists, small business men, delicatessen shop-keepers, jockeys, authors, commuters, winesellers, planters, prizefighters, crows and jackals clamored together at the Wall Street tickers. From ten to three they watched steel shares go up and down, betting on them, trying to out-guess the steel men who ordered their fluctuations. In the evening all this motley appeared at the Waldorf Hotel, sitting in rows along Peacock Alley, walking to and fro as if at ease, peering in at the dining-room doors to glimpse the lords and barons of steel at their food and drink.

Everybody loved it. This was the Steel Court,--a court of twenty kings, with its rabble and fringe and jesters, sycophants in favor, men of mystery passing, the unseen lesser deeply bowing to the greater, sour envy taking judgment at a distance, greed on ass-ear wings listening everywhere. One might hear a word to make him rich to-morrow. And the Machiavelli, too. That was Sabath, his beard now grey, otherwise the same, sitting always by himself, darting here and there his piercing eyes.

This court made news. Often the steel men, bored with gaping admiration, would extemporize a midnight stock market and buy and sell their shares among themselves. Each morning as addenda to the regular stock market reports would appear: “Transactions at the Waldorf.” The newest rumors floated here. No financial editor was safe to go to bed until the Waldorf grill room lights were out, for it was generally late at night that the steel men spilled their secrets. One was overheard to say:

“There’s a billion dollar steel trust on the way.”

What tidings!

The remark had gone around the world before daylight, and at the opening of the stock market in London people began to sell American securities. Those Yankees, they said, always a bit mad, now were drunk with the arithmetic of their wealth. Wall Street was vaguely uneasy, too. There was no such thing as a billion-dollar corporation.

Rumor for once in its life was below the truth. The great steel trust was to be capitalized at a billion and a half. There had to be room for everybody. Bullguard was to be its deity. There could be no other. The charter had been applied for. Famous lawyers had reconciled it with the law. All these facts came out gradually, mostly in the form of midnight rumors. In the highest circles of the steel court an extremely curious fact was already privately known. Sabath was to be the manipulator. If he could not perform the unimaginable feat of selling the shares of a billion-and-a-half dollar corporation to the public nobody could. Yet how strange that Bullguard and Sabath should sail a ship together.

At length all the salient probabilities had been established, and nothing happened. A week passed. Then another. Wall Street was strung with suspense and the nightly Waldorf swarm buzzed with adverse rumors. Time was priceless. The public was in a fever of excitement. If ever there was an opportunity it was then. Why did Bullguard wait? What unexpected difficulty had been encountered?

There was but one obstacle and that was John. The Breakspeare properties were too important to be left out. A trust of trusts without them simply could not be. Bullguard sent for all the other lords and barons first, and they were quick to come. Then one day John received a telephone call from the office of Bullguard & Company. Would he be pleased to come to their office for a conference? His response was to mention his business address. Next day one of Bullguard’s partners called in person.

“Mr. Bullguard wishes to see you,” he said.

“If I wished to see Mr. Bullguard, I’d look for him at his office, not mine,” said John.

“I beg your pardon?”

John repeated it. The partner went away, deeply offended in the name of Bullguard.

Sabath came to see him. He had been sent. John knew it and Sabath knew he knew it.

“When are you going to see Mr. Bullguard?” he asked.

“I’m here nearly every day,” said John.

“Mr. Bullguard is performing a great public service,” said Sabath, with not a twinkle, as if they did not understand each other down to the ground. “He’s trying to get all you gamblers out of the steel business and bring some peace to the country. And because he spanked you once when you were in knee pants, now you’re as proud as a pig with a ribbon in its hereafter. I’ll tell him what I’ve said.”

“Except the pig allusion. I’ll lay odds you won’t repeat that.”

“I will,” said Sabath, departing. “I will.”

John’s partners began to be alarmed. He kept nothing from them. When they importuned him to bend a little, thinking his obduracy might have disastrous consequences for all of them, he would say: “It amuses me and it will pay you.”

One morning Sabath’s voice called him on the telephone, saying: “The great mountain is walking. You damn gamblers! Do you want everything in the world?”

“Thanks,” said John.

Twenty minutes later Bullguard appeared. He walked right in, sat on the edge of a chair, crossed his arms, leaned forward on his stick, and glared. When he glared the world was supposed to tremble. He was rather awful to look at. His purple face was of a strawberry texture; his nose was monstrous, angry, red, bulbous, with hairy warts upon it; his eyebrows were almost vertical.

Three words were spoken,--all three by Bullguard.

“How much?” he asked.

John drew a pencil pad out of his desk and wrote slowly in large, owlish characters, this:

If you smile-- $300,000,000 No smile $350,000,000

Having written it he stopped to gaze at it thoughtfully for a minute, then pulled out the slide leaf of his desk, tossed the pad there for Bullguard to see, and leaned back.

Bullguard glanced at it and stood up.

“That!” he said, tapping the $350,000,000 with his forefinger, and stalked out.

Slaymaker, Awns, Wingreene and Pick were waiting in the big room. John walked in and threw the pad on the table.

“There are the terms.”

Knowing John they understood the pencil writing.

“Did he smile?” they asked as one.

“No,” said John.

“My God!” murmured Slaymaker. He sank into a chair and wept.

Two-fifths of it was John’s. His share included the Thane interest which amounted to nearly twenty millions. Slaymaker, Awns, Wingreene and Pick divided $170,000,000. The balance went to thirty or forty minor stockholders in the Breakspeare companies.

XLII

So the fabulous Damosel of the Dirty Face, rescued from the goat herds who had found and reared her, was clothed in what she should wear, christened in due manner, annointed in the name of order, and presented to the American people. Or, that is to say, the steel industry was bought from the barbars and sold to the public.

Auspicated by Bullguard and Company, manipulated by Sabath, advertised by common wonder, the shares of the biggest trust in the world were launched on the New York Stock Exchange. Popular imagination, prepared in suspense, delivered itself headlong to the important task of buying them. A craze to exchange money for steel shares swept the country. That seemed to be only what people got up every morning to do. Such manias, like panics inverted, have often occurred. They have a large displacement in the literature of popular delusions. This one, although of a true type and spontaneous, was fomented in an extraordinary manner by Sabath, who for the first time in his life had all the power and sanction of Wall Street behind him. The hand of the Ishmaelite that everyone feared now strummed the official lyre and the tune it played untied a million purse strings.

The steel people removed their hats and bowed.

“We were amateurs,” they admitted.

For weeks and weeks they sat behind piles of steel engraved certificates, fresh from the printer, and signed their names until they were weary of making pen strokes at ten thousand dollars each. Before the ink of their signatures was dry the certificates were cast upon the market to be converted into cash,--the market Sabath made. There seemed no bottom or end to it. The capacity of that market was unlimited. The public’s power to buy was greater than anybody knew.

When it was over, when Sabath’s sweet melody ceased, when the public owned the steel industry and the barbars were out, then steel shares began to fall. For several years they fell, disastrously, and the public howled with rage. The trust went near the rocks.

All who had had any part in the making of it faced a storm of wild opprobrium. There is much to be said in reproach. However, given the problem as it was, how else could anyone have solved it? The trust got by the rocks. The steel industry was stabilized. And ultimately the shares were worth much more than the public originally paid for them.

This eventuality few of the great steel barbars lived to witness. A little touched with madness anyhow, as heroic stature is, the Wall Street harvest finished them. They were of a sudden Nabobs with nothing on earth to do. Their wealth had been in mills and mines and ships, and business was a very jealous mistress. Now it was in money and they were free.

In the first place they didn’t know what to do with the money itself. Some of them bought banks of their own to keep it in. Then what could they spend it for? What could they invest it in? The only thing they knew was steel and they were out of that. Some of them began to buy railroads. They would say: “This looks like a pretty good railroad. Let’s buy that.” And they would buy it offhand in the stock market. Then Wall Street, controlling railroads without owning them, was struck with a new terror. It wasn’t safe to leave control of a railroad lying around loose. There was no telling what these men would do next with their money. They had got control of several great banks and railroads before anyone knew what they were doing.

But after they had invested their money in banks and railroads they still had nothing really to do. They built themselves castles, in some cases two or three each, and seldom if ever lived in them because they were so lonesome. One transplanted a full grown forest and it died; he did it again with like result, and a third time, and then he was weary. He never went back to see. They got rid of their old wives and bought new and more expensive ones. Even that made no perceptible hole in their wealth. They tried horses and art and swamped everything they touched. Gambling they forgot. One developed a peacock madness, never wore the same garments more than an hour; his dressing room resembled a clothing store, with hundreds of suits lying on long tables in pressed piles. One had a phantasy for living out the myth of Pan and ceased to be spoken of anywhere. One travelled ceaselessly and carried with him a private orchestra that played him awake and attended his bath. He died presently under the delusion that he had lost all his money and all his friends, which was only half true.

They disappeared.

Blasted prodigies!

Children of the steel age, overwhelmed in its cinders.

XLIII

John like all the others signed steel trust certificates until his hand became an automaton. If he noticed what it was doing it faltered and forgot. He sat in the big room at the long table, a clerk standing by to remove the engraved sheets one by one and blot the signature. Suddenly he saw it all as for the first time, in an original, unfamiliar manner.

“What are we doing?” he asked the clerk.

“Signing the certificates, sir. They want this lot before 2 o’clock.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

“What does it mean?” the clerk repeated. “I don’t know, sir. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know either,” said John. He threw the pen away, got up, reached for his hat.

“You’re not going now, sir? They are waiting for these certificates.”

“Let them wait.”

“What shall I say when they call for them?”

“Anything you like. Ask them what it means.”

Up and down the money canyon people moved with absent gestures, some in haste, some running, some loitering, all with one look in their eyes. Bulls were bellowing on the Stock Exchange. Steel shares were rising. Sabath was in his highest form. To the strumming of his lyre men of all shapes and conditions turned from their ways and came hither and wildly importuned brokers to exchange their money for bits of paper believed to represent steel mills they had never seen, would never see, had never heard of before. What did it mean?

As John gazed at the scene it became unreal and detached. He was alone, as one is in some dreams, there and not there, somehow concerned in the action but invisible to the actors and to oneself. It was like a dream of anxiety, full of confusion and grotesque matter.

He was lonely and very wretched and accused Agnes. He would accuse her to her face. That was what he was on his way to do, perhaps because there was no other excuse for seeing her in the middle of the day. He would tell her how selfish and unreasonable she was. They were two solitary beings in one world together. Their hours were running away. He loved her. He had always loved her. And at least she loved nobody else. Then why should they not join their lives?

Three times he had asked her that question. Each time she had said: “Let’s go on being friends. That’s very nice, isn’t it?”

A year had passed since the last time. He had watched for some sign of change. But she was always the same, except that after having been gently though firmly unwilling to say either yes or no she seemed to come nearer in friendship and baffled him all the more. If she had any feeling for him whatever beyond friendship he had been unable to detect or surprise it, and fate would bear witness that the possibility was one he had stalked with all patience and subtlety. In fact, he really believed that if he pressed her to the point she would say no,--that she had not said it already only because she hated to hurt him. This notion tormented him exceedingly. It would be a relief to know.

She had been for some weeks in town, at the Savoy, where he detained her on the pretext that her presence was necessary in her own interest. It was only a little past twelve when he arrived there and called her on the telephone, from the desk, asking her down to lunch. She was surprised and pleased and answered him in a voice that had a ring of youth.

The sound of it echoing in his ears evoked memories and caused the years to fall away. He waited, not there in the hotel lobby, but in a boxwood hedge, surreptitiously, and saw her as a girl again, plucking flowers, pretending not to know he was there, yet coming nearer, always nearer, with a thoughtful air; and for a moment he forgot that anything had happened since.

“Business or pleasure at this time of day?” she asked, coming up behind him.

Instantly, at the provocation of her voice, an impish, youth-time impulse took possession of him. It provided its own idea complete and he did not stop to examine it. His mood seized it.

“Personal,” he said.

“But you look so serious.”

“It is serious--for me.”

They sat at a table in the far corner of the dining room.

“Out with it. Lucky it isn’t murder. You’d be suspected at first glance.”

“What shall we eat? Pompano. That ought to be good.... Don’t look at me like that. I’m so happy I can’t stand it. That’s all that’s the matter with me.... Filet of sole. How about that?”

“Anything to cure such happiness. Sole, salad and iced tea for me, please. Now then.”

“A sweet? Or shall we decide about that later?”

“Later. I may be too much surprised by that time to want a sweet.”

She was regarding him intently, with a very curious expression. He avoided her eyes.

“Yes, it may surprise you,” he said. “_Here, waiter!..._ Of course you know--(_Sole, hearts of lettuce and tomato salad, French dressing, iced tea for one, large coffee, sweets later_)--what an emotional animal I am.--(_Two salads, yes._)--Or romantic. Whatever you like to call it. (_Sole for two._) After all, I don’t know why--(_No, hot coffee for one._)--Why I should be so self-conscious about it. The fact is simple enough. I’m going to be married.”

“Oh! How exciting. When?”

“When? When, did you say? Why, right away. This evening perhaps.”

“Who is the lady?”

“I’d rather not tell you yet.”

“Yet? But it’s to be this evening, you say.”

“You would know her name at once and you might be prejudiced in spite of yourself. I can’t very well explain it. But I want you to meet her first.”

“This afternoon?”

“Or this evening. I’m coming to that. I very much need your help. It’s an extraordinary thing to ask. I’m anxious to keep it very quiet, both on her account and my own. Not the fact afterward. That must come out. But its taking place, when and where. Then of course we can go away, for a year, two years; live permanently abroad perhaps.”

“Yes?”

“I say I can’t explain it very clearly. You’ll just have to take a good deal of it for granted. The newspapers are so curious and impertinent. I’d like this to happen without anyone knowing it until the notice is published and we are gone. She has no home. I mean, she lives at a hotel. I have no home either. At a church or any public place like that we’d be noticed at once.”

“Will you ask the waiter to bring some more butter, please. Yes, go on. What can I do to help?”

“Take mine. I hoped you’d guess by this time. There’s no one else I can ask.”

“Thanks. No, I can’t guess.”

“Well, if you would let the ceremony take place in your apartment here and sort of manage the fussy part I’d never know how much to thank you.”

“Yes, indeed. I’d love to do it. Why did you make such a bother of asking? I’ll have some decorations sent in. What will she wear? What colors does she like?”

“I’ll have to find out.”

“And the time?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“As soon as you can. And that’s what you were so glum about? Now cheer up. Men are such lumps when they are happy.”

“You are very sweet about it.”

“Don’t mind me. Only go as fast as you can and get the details. You don’t know how important they are. I’ll expect to hear from you within an hour. You will call me up?”

“Yes.”

The next he knew he was in the Central Park Zoo looking at the monkeys and wondering why they were so mystified. What had they to be puzzled about? Then there was a little brown bear that precisely expressed the absurdity he felt in himself. He did not mind feeling absurd. No, that was even comforting. A pain in the ego counteracting one in the heart. Clumsy as the device was it had served his purpose. He had found out. But it was no relief whatever. In the way he hoped she might she cared less than not at all--less than a foster sister or an old maid aunt. He could not be mistaken. He had watched her closely. She had betrayed not the slightest sign of self-concern. He had that same diminished, ignominious feeling with which he retired from the boxwood hedge on the evening of their first youth-time encounter.

What an asinine thing to have done!

When he called her on the telephone two hours later, as he had promised to do, this conversation occurred:

“This is John.”

“Yes. Now tell me all about it. You’ve been a long time.”

“Hello.”

“Yes. What time?”

“Hello.”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Agnes, it’s too much of an imposition altogether. I can’t imagine how I could have asked you to do it. Thanks all the same, but we’ll call it off.”

“Nonsense. You’re not telling me the truth. Something has happened.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, I withdraw the request.”

“Where are you?”

“Near by. Not very far.”

“Meet me in the tea room downstairs. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Not waiting for him to answer she closed the wire. She was there waiting when he arrived.

“I’m sorry if anything has happened,” she said, most sympathetically. “Can you tell me about it?”

“It’s off,” he said, feeling secretly and utterly ludicrous. “That’s all.”

“Oh, that can’t be,” she said. “Suppose I talk to her. I shan’t be modest about you. I’ll not promise to be even truthful.”

“No use,” he said. “I’ve said everything there is to say for myself. She knows me well enough--too well, perhaps. That may be it.”

“Tell me about her. What is she like?”

“Cold. You wouldn’t think so, but she is. The fact that a man loves her means nothing--not a thing.”

“Is she so used to it?”

“I don’t know. No. That isn’t it....”

“What?”

“I was going to say selfish. I ought not to say that. I’m selfish to want her. She wants to keep her life to herself. It’s her own life.”

“But it’s only postponed. She doesn’t say no, does she?”

“Worse than that. She says--”

“Yes. What does she say?”

“She says it’s nicer as it is. We shall go on being friends. Friendship is all right. It blooms in the next world.”

“Let me talk to her, please.”

“No. It’s hopeless.”

“I’d not urge you if I weren’t so sure I could change her mind. The fact is, I think I know her.”

John started and became rigid with astonishment. He regarded her fixedly with a groping, incredulous expression. She stirred her tea very thoughtfully and kept her eyes down.

“If she’s the person I think she is,” Agnes continued, still looking down, “what you say about her is probably true. And yet--”

“Agnes! Be careful what you say.”

“I’ll be as careful as I know how to be. Trust me.”

“How long have you known her?”

“In one way, of course, you deserve to be wretched. It isn’t all on one side. Do you think it’s nice--?”

“How long have you known her, I ask?”

“A long time. Longer than you have,” she said.

* * * * *

Note from the society column of the New York _Times_, November 6, 1901:

Mr. and Mrs. Breakspeare are passing their honeymoon in Mediterranean waters on Mr. Breakspeare’s yacht, the “Damascene.”

THE END

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

The following change was made:

p. 11: 1879 changed to 1789 (in 1789 Gen.)