ied itself very nearly two
hundredfold.

Warder had associated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J.
Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a
month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became
Warder's understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count
on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other
reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J.
Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon
which the International Harvester Company is built.

Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without
a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient
patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty competitors in
a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way
was left open to him.

"I'll beat them," he said, "by making a better machine."

He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of
his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until
1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with
wire. It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke, and had been developed to
its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B.
Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was
pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold
between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism, consisting
mainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire
band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success;
but the farmers disliked it.

"The wire will mix with the straw," they said, "and our horses and cattle
will be killed."

So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to
have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty
of the new machines.

When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he
was enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong
steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut
the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It
seemed magical.

"What am I to do?" asked the farmer who bought the first of these
machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.

"Do!" exclaimed John Webster, the D