nsformed Deering from a man in
business simply to make money, into an enthusiast. While he remained as
careful of the business as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself more
than the profit. He would still fuss if he saw half a dozen nails in the
sweepings, or any other waste of pennies. But he poured the golden flood
of profits back into his factory with a recklessness that amazed his
friends. He pampered his beloved machines with roller bearings and bodies
of steel. He sent them to Europe and showed them to kings. Then, as his
enthusiasm grew, he looked ahead to the time when even the farm-horse
shall be set free from drudgery; and he began to build automobile mowers
and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened, as he worked, into a seer who
saw far past the gain or loss of the present into the splendour of the
future.

[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, JR.

CHARLES DEERING Photo by Matzene, Chicago]

Sagacity--that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William
Deering's success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his
competitors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There
seemed to be a business compass in his brain.

He was never a master of men, like McCormick, nor a good mixer among men,
like Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was easily superior to them
both. He knew how to pit his managers one against another, as Carnegie
did; and how to develop a factory into a swift and automatic machine. He
was a statesman of commercialism. He piled up a big fortune, and earned
it.

It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of
the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley, Lewis Miller, Morgan,
Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all
farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of
men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard
stood a farmer's son--John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the
loyalty of Steward that he became Deering's Grand Vizier. He was
inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two
years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen
patents to his credit.

So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the
skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had
begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two
greatest harvester plants in the