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 borders of a sister state; the
Somersworth Bridge and Construction Company and the Gring Steel and Wire
Company were to be absorbed. When all of this should have been
accomplished, there would be scarcely a process in the steel industry,
from the smelting of the ore to the completion of a bridge, which the
Boyne Iron Works could not undertake. Such was the beginning of the
"lateral extension" period.

"Two can play at that game," Mr. Scherer said. "And if those fellows
could only be content to let well enough alone, to continue buying their
crude steel from us, there wouldn't be any trouble."...

It was evident, however, that he really welcomed the "trouble," that he
was going into battle with enthusiasm. He had already picked out his
points of attack and was marching on them. Life, for him, would have been
a poor thing without new conflicts to absorb his energy; and he had
already made of the Boyne Iron Works, with its open-hearth furnaces, a
marvel of modern efficiency that had opened the eyes of the Steel world,
and had drawn the attention of a Personality in New York,--a Personality
who was one of the new and dominant type that had developed with such
amazing rapidity, the banker-dinosaur; preying upon and superseding the
industrial-dinosaur, conquering type of the preceding age, builder of the
railroads, mills and manufactories. The banker-dinosaurs, the gigantic
ones, were in Wall Street, and strove among themselves for the industrial
spoils accumulated by their predecessors. It was characteristic of these
monsters that they never fought in the open unless they were forced to.
Then the earth rocked, huge economic structures tottered and fell, and
much dust arose to obscure the vision of smaller creatures, who were
bewildered and terrified. Such disturbances were called "panics," and
were blamed by the newsp