heavily on the table. In times of
excitement his speech suggested the German idiom. Abruptly his air grew
mysterious; he glanced around the room, now becoming empty, and lowered
his voice.

"I have been thinking a long time, I have a little scheme," he said,
"and I have been to Washington to see Watling, to talk over it. Well, he
thinks much of you. Fowndes and Ripon are good lawyers, but they are not
smart like you. See Paret, he says, and he can come down and talk to me.
So I ask you to come here. That is why I say you are wise to get home.
Honeymoons can wait--eh?"

I smiled appreciatively.

"They talk about monopoly, those Populist senators, but I ask you what
is a man in my place to do? If you don't eat, somebody eats you--is it
not so? Like the boa-constrictors--that is modern business. Look at
the Keystone Plate people, over there at Morris. For years we sold them
steel billets from which to make their plates, and three months ago
they serve notice on us that they are getting ready to make their own
billets, they buy mines north of the lakes and are building their plant.
Here is a big customer gone. Next year, maybe, the Empire Tube Company
goes into the business of making crude steel, and many more thousands of
tons go from us. What is left for us, Paret?"

"Obviously you've got to go into the tube and plate business
yourselves," I said.

"So!" cried Mr. Scherer, triumphantly, "or it is close up. We are not
fools, no, we will not lie down and be eaten like lambs for any law.
Dickinson can put his hand on the capital, and I--I have already bought
a tract on the lakes, at Bolivar, I have already got a plant designed
with the latest modern machinery. I can put the ore right there, I can
send the coke back from here in cars which would otherwise be empty, and
manufacture tubes at eight dollars a ton less than they are selling. If
we can make tubes we can make plates, and if we can make plates we can
make boilers, and beams and girders and bridges.... It is not like it
was but where is it all leading, my friend? The time will come--is right
on us now, in respect to many products--when the market will be flooded
with tubes and plates and girders, and then we'll have to find a way to
limit production. And the inefficient mills will all be forced to shut
down."

The logic seemed unanswerable, even had I cared to answer it.... He
unfolded his campaign. The Boyne Iron Works was to become the Boyne Iron
Works, Ltd