Read Online Unrivaled by Siri Mitchell - Free Book Online

what it takes to be successful in this business.”
    “The business? You mean . . . you want to go down to the factory ?”
    “Why not?”
    “The boss won’t mind?” He asked the question of Mr. Mundt.
    Mundt gave Mr. Gillespie the smallest of shrugs.
    Mr. Gillespie sighed. “All right. Fine.” He untied the apron and pulled it off over his head, handing it to me. His sleeves and trousers had gone gray where the apron had not covered them. “Might not help much, but you’ll not want to dirty that fancy suit of yours.”
    I put it on and followed him out the door and down a staircase at the back of the long, dark hall. We went through a maze of halls and up and down stairs before emerging into the sunlightalongside several sets of railroad tracks. He nodded across them to a long bay of doors in the building on the opposite side. “That’s where the supplies come into the factory.”
    “From . . . ?”
    “Just about everywhere. New Orleans, Chicago, Cincinnati.”
    I looked up and down the track. “What railroad is this?”
    “It’s a private spur. Boss had it built. It connects with the main railway back toward Union Station. Once the supplies are taken off, then we load the cars up and ship our crates out.”
    “Where to?”
    “Pretty much everywhere. Royal Taffy’s the bestselling candy in the whole United States.” There was a note of pride and satisfaction in his words.
    I ate Royal Taffy all the time, but I hadn’t realized everyone else in the country did too. “So . . . the supplies come in and then what happens to them?”
    “Well, now, that’s when it starts to get interesting.” We crossed the tracks to the factory building that stood on the other side. He motioned to a loading dock that jutted from the wall. Trying to forget that I’d ever met Mr. Dreffs, I took a step backward and then leaped forward to vault up onto the platform.
    The superintendent climbed a ladder I hadn’t seen on the other side of the dock.
    That would have been handy to know about. “I just thought . . .” Now my hands were dirty, and there was no other place to wipe them than on the apron.
    The superintendent sent a questioning look my way. “Might have thought you’d worked on a dock a time or two yourself—if I hadn’t known you were the boss’s son.”
    I hadn’t really ever worked on a loading dock, though I’d seen my share of them, delivering messages on the South Side. I cleared my throat. “After the supplies are delivered?”
    Gillespie took me across the bay and through a door that opened into an enormous room. It was filled with light and sound and motion. “It depends on what part of the process they’re for,” he shouted over the clatter of machinery.
    I leaned close to him. “Give me a for instance.”
    “Well . . . over here are the melting pots. That’s for the sugars—brown and white, vinegar, and water. Butter gets added later.” He walked toward a raised concrete grid work. Huge kettles hung from metal bars. Beneath the kettles, fires danced, throwing off a scorching heat. Between the kettles, men walked on a precarious treadway peering into the huge pots.
    A trickle of sweat slid past my collar and down between my shoulder blades.
    “For the melting, we use men. Boys aren’t tall enough. And girls can’t take the heat. After a couple hours, once it gets hot enough, we pour the syrup off into those buckets.” He gestured toward a line of wheelbarrows that were filled with pails. As we watched, two men wearing masks and padded mitts tipped a kettle, pouring off some of the contents into the pails in one of the wheelbarrows. A boy wheeled it away, head turned from the steam, as another one came to take his place. “The boys take the pails over there, to the mixer where the flavoring gets added.”
    “Over there” was halfway across the room, where several men on ladders were shaking the contents of jugs into huge vats. At least . . . that’s where the