WORLD'S END

Returning to Athens, he had represented a Swedish engineer named Nordenfeldt, who had invented a machine gun and a submarine. War was threatened between Greece and Turkey, and Zaharoff persuaded the Greek government that it could win the war by purchasing a submarine; then he went to Constantinople and pointed out to the Turkish government the grave peril in which they stood, with the result that they purchased two submarines. Said Robbie Budd: "Forty years' adherence to that simple technique has made him the armaments king of Europe."

New instruments of death were invented, one after another, and the Greek would seek out the inventor and take him into partnership. Robbie laughed and pointed out that a thing had to be invented only once, but it had to be sold many times, and that was why the ex-fireman always had the advantage over his partners. The toughest nut he had to crack was a Maine Yankee of the name of Hiram Maxim, who invented a machine gun better than the Nordenfeldt; the latter gun took four men to handle it, while the Maxim gun took only one and could shoot out the bull's eye of a target just as Bub Smith did with the Budd automatic.

Many were the stories concerning that duel between New England and the Levant; Robbie had got them directly from the mouth of his fellow-Yankee, and so had learned to fight the old Greek devil with his own Greek fire. More than once the devil had got Maxim's mechanics drunk on the eve of an important demonstration; it appeared that in those days it was impossible to find a mechanic who could have any money in his pocket without getting drunk. Later on, Maxim demonstrated his gun to high officers of the Austrian army, including the Emperor Francis Joseph, and wrote the Emperor's initials on the target with bullet holes. Basil Zaharoff stood outside the fence and watched this performance, and assured the assembled newspaper men that the gun which had performed this marvel was the Nordenfeldt - and the story thus went out to the world! Zaharoff explained to the army officers that the reason for Maxim's astonishing success was that Maxim was a master mechanic, and had made this gun by hand; it could not be produced in a factory because every part had to be exact to the hundredth part of a millimeter. This news held up the sale for a long time.

The result of the duel was that Zaharoff learned respect for the Maxim gun, while Maxim learned respect for Zaharoff. They combined their resources, and the Nordenfeldt gun was shelved. Later on Maxim and Zaharoff sold out for six and a half million dollars to the British Vickers; Zaharoff was taken into the concern, and soon became its master. The combination of British mechanical skill with Levantine salesmanship proved unbeatable; but that was all going to be changed, now that the president of Budd Gunmakers Corporation had been persuaded to let his youngest son come over to Europe and show what a Connecticut Yankee could do in the court of King Basil!

IV

When the head salesman of a large business enterprise took time to explain such details to a boy, he pretended that he wanted to unbosom himself; but of course he was following out his plan of preparing the boy for his future career. Robbie Budd had for his son a dream which was no modest one; and now and then he would drop a hint of it - enough to take away the boy's breath.

Basil Zaharoff was sixty-five now, and couldn't last forever. Who was going to take his place as master of the most important of all trades? And where was the industry of the future to be situated? In Sheffield, England? In the French village of Creusot? In the German Ruhr, or at Skoda in Austria, or on the Volga, as the Russian Tsar was daring to dream? Robbie Budd had picked out a far safer location, up the Newcastle River in Connecticut. "It'll not be an extension of Budd's," he explained; "but a new and completely modern plant. No enemy can ever get to it, and when it's in operation it will mean three things: American workingmen will supply the world, an American family will collect the money, and America will stand behind its ramparts, able to defy all the other nations put together. That's what we'll some day have to do, so why not get ready?"

Robbie went on to explain what Zaharoff was doing in France. The country's armament trust was known as Schneider-Creusot, and for years the old Greek devil had been intriguing to get control of it and share the profits of the rearming of Russia. He had bought a popular weekly paper so that he could tell the French people what he wished to have believed. He had endowed a home for retired French sailors and been awarded the rosette of the Legion of Honor. He had bought a Belgian bank, so as to become a director in Schneider's; and when his rivals had kicked him out, he had proceeded to tie up Europe in a net of intrigue in order to bring them to their knees.