rning until midnight--from midnight until the
first ray of dawn slanted down Broadway, Perkins dashed from hotel to
hotel like a human shuttle. Deering conceded one point if McCormick would
concede another. Glessner yielded one of his claims, and Jones withdrew
something else. Inch by inch these stubborn men were pushed within tying
distance of each other; and the fifty-year harvester war was about to come
to an end.

The next day Perkins renewed the struggle, but he was too tired to
continue the cab driving between hotels. He telephoned the four Harvester
Men to meet him at Morgan's office. As each man climbed up the rusty iron
steps of the Morgan Building he was switched by the big Irish doorkeeper
into one of those large inner rooms at the rear, on the ground floor,
where many a broken business has been mended. Four men in four rooms, with
Perkins flying in and out--such was the way that the great harvester
company was finished. It was a unique situation, as much like an incident
in comic opera as an affair of business. But the Morgan experts knew that
if the four men were allowed to meet, the old hurtful rivalries would
break out afresh and the project might snap off like a broken dream.

To strengthen the new company with a big surplus of ready money, a
one-sixth interest was sold for twenty millions to Morgan and several
other New York financiers of the "old reliable" sort. Also, a fifth
harvester company, in Milwaukee, was bought from Stephen Bull for about
five millions. And when the last rivet had been clinched and the last nail
driven home, the four Westerners suddenly found themselves sitting around
the same table, in the new International Harvester Company, of Chicago.

There were several harvester companies that remained independent, but
probably not from choice. I do not know of one that has not, at some stage
of its career, tried to get into a trust. Fifteen companies were merged by
Colonel Conger in 1892, but they were poorly fastened together and soon
fell apart. It is also a fact, though one not before made public, that the
Mutual Life Insurance Company tried to form a second Harvester Combine in
1903, with four large manufacturing companies in the merger, and under the
presidency of E. D. Metcalf, of Auburn, New York. When this project
failed, three independent companies--two in New York and one in Canada,
offered themselves for sale to the Harvester Company. It bought one--the
Osborne--for six milli