The visitor, whose name was William Deering, knew nothing whatever about
reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained a fair-sized fortune in the
wholesale dry-goods business. But he was a Methodist and had confidence in
the ex-reverend E. H. Gammon; so he passed his $40,000 across the table
and the next day went home to Maine.

[Illustration: WILLIAM N. WHITELEY Photo by Baumgardner, Springfield, O.

C. W. MARSH

JOHN F. APPLEBY Photo by Rice, Milwaukee

E. H. GAMMON]

Two years later Deering came down to see how Gammon and the $40,000 were
faring. The books showed a profit of $80,000. So Deering requested that he
be made a partner. A year afterward Gammon fell sick and begged Deering to
come to Illinois and manage the business. Deering consented to be manager
for one year only; but Gammon's sickness continued.

"So," said William Deering, who told me this story, "in that way I got
into the harvester business and had to stay in. But I did not even know,
at that time, the appearance of our own machine."

Deering's competitors at first called him a greenhorn. But they forgot
that he was the only one among them who had been trained in the art of
business. He was already a veteran--a prize winner--in the game of
finance. For thirty years, ever since he began to earn $18 a month in his
father's woolen mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had, in fact,
established the wholesale dry-goods house of Deering, Milliken & Co.,
which still stands as one of the largest of its kind. This training was
all the more valuable an asset because of the conditions that prevailed
when Deering entered the harvester trade. For he arrived in that worst of
all years in the last century--1873. The Jay Cooke panic was at its
height. The proudest corporations were falling like grass before a mower.
It was a year of dread and paralysis. But Deering faced these
disadvantages with ability, with sheer, dogged persistence, and with
business training. In seven years he had become one of the greatest of the
harvester kings, and was leading them all up to a higher level.

We shall understand more clearly what this means if we consider the state
of the trade at the time of his entrance. A man of peaceable and kindly
inclinations, Deering was dragged into a business that was as turbulent as
a bull-fight. For as the reaper had evolved, it had become a bone of
contention, and it remained so from the first patent to the last. The
opening battle was f