"Have to come back up-town early, dad," he called in explanation, and
drove off, going at the reckless speed he affected.

Clayton rode down alone in the limousine. He had meant to outline his
plans of expansion to Graham, but he had had no intention of consulting
him. In his own department the boy did neither better nor worse than any
other of the dozens of young men in the organization. If he had shown
neither special aptitude for nor interest in the business, he had at
least not signally failed to show either. Now, paper and pencil in
hand, Clayton jotted down the various details of the new system in their
sequence; the building of a forging plant to make the rough casts
for the new Italian shells out of the steel from the furnaces, the
construction of a new spur to the little railway which bound the old
plant together with its shining steel rails. There were questions of
supplies and shipping and bank credits to face, the vast and complex
problems of the complete new munition works, to be built out of town and
involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbers of employees.
He scrawled figures and added them. Even with the size of the foreign
contract their magnitude startled him. He leaned back, his mouth
compressed, the lines from the nostrils to the corners deeper than ever.

He had completely forgotten Natalie and the country house.

Outside the gates to the mill enclosure he heard an early extra being
called, and bought it. The Austrian premier had been assassinated. The
successful French counter-attack against Verdun was corroborated,
also. On the center of the front page was the first photograph to reach
America of a tank. He inspected it with interest. So the Allies had at
last shown same inventive genius of their own! Perhaps this was but the
beginning. Even at that, enough of these fighting mammoths, and the
war might end quickly. With the tanks, and the Allied offensive and the
evidence of discontent in Austria, the thing might after all be over
before America was involved.

He reflected, however, that an early peace would not be an unmixed
blessing for him. He wanted the war to end: he hated killing. He felt
inarticulately that something horrible was happening to the world. But
personally his plans were premised on a war to last at least two years
more, until the fall of 1918. That would let him out, cover the cost of
the new plant, bring renewals of his foreign contracts, justify those
stupe