When he went down-stairs he found that Graham had ordered his own car

and was already in it, drawing on his gloves.

"Have to come back up-town early, dad," he called in explanation, and

drove off, going at the reckless speed he affected.

Clayton rode down alone in the limousine. He had meant to outline his

plans of expansion to Graham, but he had had no intention of consulting

him. In his own department the boy did neither better nor worse than any

other of the dozens of young men in the organization. If he had shown

neither special aptitude for nor interest in the business, he had at

least not signally failed to show either. Now, paper and pencil in

hand, Clayton jotted down the various details of the new system in their

sequence; the building of a forging plant to make the rough casts

for the new Italian shells out of the steel from the furnaces, the

construction of a new spur to the little railway which bound the old

plant together with its shining steel rails. There were questions of

supplies and shipping and bank credits to face, the vast and complex

problems of the complete new munition works, to be built out of town and

involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbers of employees.

He scrawled figures and added them. Even with the size of the foreign

contract their magnitude startled him. He leaned back, his mouth

compressed, the lines from the nostrils to the corners deeper than ever.

He had completely forgotten Natalie and the country house.

Outside the gates to the mill enclosure he heard an early extra being

called, and bought it. The Austrian premier had been assassinated. The

successful French counter-attack against Verdun was corroborated,

also. On the center of the front page was the first photograph to reach

America of a tank. He inspected it with interest. So the Allies had at

last shown same inventive genius of their own! Perhaps this was but the

beginning. Even at that, enough of these fighting mammoths, and the

war might end quickly. With the tanks, and the Allied offensive and the

evidence of discontent in Austria, the thing might after all be over

before America was involved.

He reflected, however, that an early peace would not be an unmixed

blessing for him. He wanted the war to end: he hated killing. He felt

inarticulately that something horrible was happening to the world. But

personally his plans were premised on a war to last at least two years

more, until the fall of 1918. That would let him out, cover the cost of

the new plant, bring renewals of his foreign contracts, justify those

stupendous figures on the paper in his hand.




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