The Cinder Buggy Read Online Free Page B

only the newness of the idea that bothers you?”
    “I would not have entertained the thought as my own,” he said. “Since it comes from you I do not reject it. I merely do not wish to be responsible for it. You are not a man for business. Your father was not.
    Your grandfather distinctly was not. You would do better in law or politics. Still, as you say, there’s an obvious advantage in bringing all the properties together. We’ll talk about it to-morrow if you like. It’s on your initiative, remember.”
    “Let’s agree on the main point now and leave the details,” said Aaron. “I’ll take my chances with business.”
    He held out his hand. Enoch took it slowly. They looked at each other steadily in the moonlight.
    “Is it agreed?”
    “Yes,” said Enoch.
    Then they said goodnight.

V
    E NOCH’s misgivings notwithstanding, the partnership of Gib & Breakspeare was very successful. This was owing partly to the ripeness of the opportunity and perhaps even more to the sagacity with which Enoch allotted to Aaron the tasks that were suited to his temperament. They put in equal amounts of capital and pooled their ore and coal lands on a royalty basis. Enoch was the dominant partner by right of knowledge and force of doggedness. He had studied the business. He took the manufacturing end and spent the whole of his time in New Damascus. Aaron took the selling end and made all the outside contacts.
    It was easy to open the mines. That kind of work was already well understood in Pennsylvania.
    Building a blast furnace was much more of an undertaking. It was in fact a daring adventure. Older and wiser heads had left it to the foolhardiness of youth.
    Hitherto iron had been produced in this country, as elsewhere in the world, by primitive methods. Ore was wastefully smelted in rude charcoal furnaces unimproved in design since the Middle Ages. The process was of great antiquity. It was uniform in India at the time of Alexander’s invasion. Its origin even then was lost in myth. Tubal Cain, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” was master of it in the city of his distinguished ancestor, Cain, which was in the land of Nod.
    Between the old iron master of the Himalayas, 1,500 years before Christ, with his little clay oven resembling an overturned pot, urging the fire with a bellows clasped in his arms—(a bellows made from the skin of a goat stripped from the animal without ripping the belly part, then tied at the leg holes, fitted with a wooden nozzle at the neck and stopped with an air valve in the tail orifice)—the difference between him and the iron master if the early 19th century was only that the latter had learned to build his forge of rude masonry and to make nature blow his fire.
    The prize in both cases was a nugget of glowing iron, the most useful non-digestible substance yet discovered by man. It is tenacious, ductile, easily tempered, malleable at red heat, marriageable at white heat and possesses one miraculous quality. It is magnetic. It calls electricity out of the void, snares it, delivers it helpless into the hands of man. Without this blackhearted substance, fallen from the sun, natively pure only in form of a meteorite, lightning could not have been captured and enslaved on earth.
    The glowing nugget on the forge hearth, called the loup or bloom, is in a crystalline condition. It is removed and further refined by hammering, drawing and rolling at red heat. It may be hammered by hand on an anvil, or beaten under a trip-hammer, or rolled between rollers. The effect of this treatment is to elongate the crystals into tough fibres.
    A blast furnace differs from a forge not in principle so much as in audacity, method and degree. The forge pricks nature and extracts iron one molten drop at a time. The blast furnace cuts a gash in her side and extracts iron in a blazing stream.
    There were blast furnaces before those of Gib and Breakspeare, in England, Germany and France, but they were few