“Yes,” he said, “I believe if you are bound for a hundred thousand dollars your company will work day and night and I will get my bridges.”

This was the arrangement which gave us what were then the gigantic contracts of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  It is needless to say that I never had to pay that bond.  My partners knew much better than Mr. Garrett the conditions of his work.  The Ohio River was not to be trifled with, and long before his masonry was ready we had relieved ourselves from all responsibility upon the bond by placing the superstructure on the banks awaiting the completion of the substructure which he was still building.

Mr. Garrett was very proud of his Scottish blood, and Burns having been once touched upon between us we became firm friends.  He afterwards took me to his fine mansion in the country.  He was one of the few Americans who then lived in the grand style of a country gentleman, with many hundreds of acres of beautiful land, park-like drives, a stud of thoroughbred horses, with cattle, sheep, and dogs, and a home that realized what one had read of the country life of a nobleman in England.

At a later date he had fully determined that his railroad company should engage in the manufacture of steel rails and had applied for the right to use the Bessemer patents.  This was a matter of great moment to us.  The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company was one of our best customers, and we were naturally anxious to prevent the building of steel-rail rolling mills at Cumberland.  It would have been a losing enterprise for the Baltimore and Ohio, for I was sure it could buy its steel rails at a much cheaper rate than it could possibly make the small quantity needed for itself.  I visited Mr. Garrett to talk the matter over with him.  He was then much pleased with the foreign commerce and the lines of steamships which made Baltimore their port.  He drove me, accompanied by several of his staff, to the wharves where he was to decide about their extension, and as the foreign goods were being discharged from the steamship side and placed in the railway cars, he turned to me and said: 

“Mr. Carnegie, you can now begin to appreciate the magnitude of our vast system and understand why it is necessary that we should make everything for ourselves, even our steel rails.  We cannot depend upon private concerns to supply us with any of the principal articles we consume.  We shall be a world to ourselves.”

“Well,” I said, “Mr. Garrett, it is all very grand, but really your ‘vast system’ does not overwhelm me.  I read your last annual report and saw that you collected last year for transporting the goods of others the sum of fourteen millions of dollars.  The firms I control dug the material from the hills, made their own goods, and sold them to a much greater value than that.  You are really a very small concern compared with Carnegie Brothers and Company.”

My railroad apprenticeship came in there to advantage.  We heard no more of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company entering into competition with us.  Mr. Garrett and I remained good friends to the end.  He even presented me with a Scotch collie dog of his own rearing.  That I had been a Pennsylvania Railroad man was drowned in the “wee drap o’ Scotch bluid atween us.”