“I have been thinking a long time, I have a little scheme,” he said, “and I have been to Washington to see Watling, to talk over it.  Well, he thinks much of you.  Fowndes and Ripon are good lawyers, but they are not smart like you.  See Paret, he says, and he can come down and talk to me.  So I ask you to come here.  That is why I say you are wise to get home.  Honeymoons can wait—­eh?”

I smiled appreciatively.

“They talk about monopoly, those Populist senators, but I ask you what is a man in my place to do?  If you don’t eat, somebody eats you—­is it not so?  Like the boa-constrictors—­that is modern business.  Look at the Keystone Plate people, over there at Morris.  For years we sold them steel billets from which to make their plates, and three months ago they serve notice on us that they are getting ready to make their own billets, they buy mines north of the lakes and are building their plant.  Here is a big customer gone.  Next year, maybe, the Empire Tube Company goes into the business of making crude steel, and many more thousands of tons go from us.  What is left for us, Paret?”

“Obviously you’ve got to go into the tube and plate business yourselves,” I said.

“So!” cried Mr. Scherer, triumphantly, “or it is close up.  We are not fools, no, we will not lie down and be eaten like lambs for any law.  Dickinson can put his hand on the capital, and I—­I have already bought a tract on the lakes, at Bolivar, I have already got a plant designed with the latest modern machinery.  I can put the ore right there, I can send the coke back from here in cars which would otherwise be empty, and manufacture tubes at eight dollars a ton less than they are selling.  If we can make tubes we can make plates, and if we can make plates we can make boilers, and beams and girders and bridges....  It is not like it was but where is it all leading, my friend?  The time will come—­is right on us now, in respect to many products—­when the market will be flooded with tubes and plates and girders, and then we’ll have to find a way to limit production.  And the inefficient mills will all be forced to shut down.”

The logic seemed unanswerable, even had I cared to answer it....  He unfolded his campaign.  The Boyne Iron Works was to become the Boyne Iron Works, Ltd., owner of various subsidiary companies, some of which were as yet blissfully ignorant of their fate.  All had been thought out as calmly as the partition of Poland—­only, lawyers were required; and ultimately, after the process of acquisition should have been completed, a delicate document was to be drawn up which would pass through the meshes of that annoying statutory net, the Sherman Anti-trust Law.  New mines were to be purchased, extending over a certain large area; wide coal deposits; little strips of railroad to tap them.  The competition of the Keystone Plate people was to be met by acquiring and bringing up to date the plate mills of King and Son, over the