high in the financial heavens stood a sign,—sign of cabal, sign of rapture, sign of gold. the time had come to form the trust of trusts. lords and barons of the steel industry began to settle down in wall street. they brought their trusts along. one day the western crowd loaded six trusts on special trains,—brains, books, good will, charters and clerks,—and trundled them thither, banners flying, typewriters clicking, business doing on the way. they took the top floors of the newest steel skyscrapers and preferred solid mahogany furniture with brass mountings.

wall street said: “here is the fat of money! it walks into our hands. how shall we divide it?”

but wall street had much to learn. these men, brash, boastful and boisterous, were also very wise. they did not come to play wall street’s game. most of them, like john, had sometime meddled with it and cared not for it. now they were strong enough to play their own game. they brought their brokers with them, from chicago, cleveland, and pittsburgh,—men whose tricks they knew,—and bought them seats on the new york stock exchange.

“oh,” said wall street. “that’s it, is it? well,[337] well,” and lolled its tongue in relish. it knew very little about steel and nothing yet about steel people.

“now, gentlemen,” said the steel people. “red or black. high or low. any limit or none. let’s shoot.”

using their own brokers to buy and sell the shares of their own trusts they began to make the canyon howl. for a while the play lay between wall street and the barbars, and the barbars held all the cards. if wall street sold steel shares for a fall the dividends were increased in the night. if it bought them for a rise suddenly the mills were shut up and dividends ceased. wall street was outraged. this was worse than gambling. it was a pea and shell game. the steel people were haled to court on the charge of circulating false information about their properties to influence the value of shares.

nothing to it! nobody could prove the information to have been false. merely the steel people had it first, as they naturally would, and acted upon it in the stock market, as everybody would who could. so they all went back to wall street and the play waxed hotter and steeper. no one had ever seen speculation like this. at conventions, unwritten rules, limits, the steel people simply guffawed. they invented rules. nobody was obliged to play with them. their creed was, “nothing in moderation.”

after hours they played bridge for ten dollars a point. en route from wall street to the waldorf, which was their rendezvous, they would lay bets in hundred-dollar units on the odd or even of numbered objects, like passing street cars. whiskey was their[338] innocuous beverage. there was one whose drink was three scotch high-balls in succession. as the third one disappeared he would slowly rub his stomach, saying: “that one rings the bell.” yet all the time they attended strenuously to business. they were men of steel, physically and mentally powerful. carousing was an emotional outlet. gambling on the stock exchange was hardly more than pastime. night and day they kept their eyes on that sign in the heavens.

they had delivered the steel age. the steel industry was their private possession to do with as they damn pleased. they could make a circus of it if they liked. they did. their way with it had become a national problem. the steel industry was much too important to be conducted in that manner. it kept the country in a state of nerves. these wild, untamable behemoths would have to be bought out. they were willing to sell. there was a ludicrous fiction among them that they were weary of doing, whereas they were only sated with it. however, as they were willing to be bought out and as to be rid of them had become a public necessity, there remained only the question of how. it would take all the spare money there was in the country. yet it would have to be done. that is what the sign meant.

john called his crowd together saying: “this is the tall goodbye if we want to get out.”

they did. he pledged them in writing to leave everything in his hands and then returned to wall street where for months past he had been preparing his ground unobserved. in one of the new steel skyscrapers[339] he had established himself an office. on the door was his name—

john breakspeare

under that

american steel company

north american manufacturing company

and nothing more. inside was a private room of his own with a stock ticker and a desk with a lot of telephones on it. beyond was a large meeting room furnished with a long table, chairs, brass cuspidors, a humidor and a water cooler. from the window was a panoramic view of new york harbor. a very simple establishment one would think. yet it was the center of a web radiating in all directions. nothing much could happen in wall street without causing an alarm on his desk, for he had made some very excellent and timely connections. his private telephone wires reached the sources of information. one of them, it would have surprised everyone to know, ran to the office of john sabath, with whom he had come to confidential terms. so it was that perhaps no one man, save only bullguard, knew more than he about what was invisibly taking place under that sign which stood higher and higher in the money firmament.

what was visible had by this time become very exciting. the newspapers were giving astonished publicity to the doings of the golden bulls. what they did in wall street was recorded by the financial writers; what they did at large was written by the news reporters. and the public’s imagination was inflamed.[340] incipient napoleons of finance, greedy little lambs, comet riders, haberdashers’ clerks, preachers, husbands of actresses, dentists, small business men, delicatessen shop-keepers, jockeys, authors, commuters, winesellers, planters, prizefighters, crows and jackals clamored together at the wall street tickers. from ten to three they watched steel shares go up and down, betting on them, trying to out-guess the steel men who ordered their fluctuations. in the evening all this motley appeared at the waldorf hotel, sitting in rows along peacock alley, walking to and fro as if at ease, peering in at the dining-room doors to glimpse the lords and barons of steel at their food and drink.

everybody loved it. this was the steel court,—a court of twenty kings, with its rabble and fringe and jesters, sycophants in favor, men of mystery passing, the unseen lesser deeply bowing to the greater, sour envy taking judgment at a distance, greed on ass-ear wings listening everywhere. one might hear a word to make him rich to-morrow. and the machiavelli, too. that was sabath, his beard now grey, otherwise the same, sitting always by himself, darting here and there his piercing eyes.

this court made news. often the steel men, bored with gaping admiration, would extemporize a midnight stock market and buy and sell their shares among themselves. each morning as addenda to the regular stock market reports would appear: “transactions at the waldorf.” the newest rumors floated here. no financial editor was safe to go to bed until the waldorf grill room lights were out, for it was generally[341] late at night that the steel men spilled their secrets. one was overheard to say:

“there’s a billion dollar steel trust on the way.”

what tidings!

the remark had gone around the world before daylight, and at the opening of the stock market in london people began to sell american securities. those yankees, they said, always a bit mad, now were drunk with the arithmetic of their wealth. wall street was vaguely uneasy, too. there was no such thing as a billion-dollar corporation.

rumor for once in its life was below the truth. the great steel trust was to be capitalized at a billion and a half. there had to be room for everybody. bullguard was to be its deity. there could be no other. the charter had been applied for. famous lawyers had reconciled it with the law. all these facts came out gradually, mostly in the form of midnight rumors. in the highest circles of the steel court an extremely curious fact was already privately known. sabath was to be the manipulator. if he could not perform the unimaginable feat of selling the shares of a billion-and-a-half dollar corporation to the public nobody could. yet how strange that bullguard and sabath should sail a ship together.

at length all the salient probabilities had been established, and nothing happened. a week passed. then another. wall street was strung with suspense and the nightly waldorf swarm buzzed with adverse rumors. time was priceless. the public was in a fever of excitement. if ever there was an opportunity it[342] was then. why did bullguard wait? what unexpected difficulty had been encountered?

there was but one obstacle and that was john. the breakspeare properties were too important to be left out. a trust of trusts without them simply could not be. bullguard sent for all the other lords and barons first, and they were quick to come. then one day john received a telephone call from the office of bullguard & company. would he be pleased to come to their office for a conference? his response was to mention his business address. next day one of bullguard’s partners called in person.

“mr. bullguard wishes to see you,” he said.

“if i wished to see mr. bullguard, i’d look for him at his office, not mine,” said john.

“i beg your pardon?”

john repeated it. the partner went away, deeply offended in the name of bullguard.

sabath came to see him. he had been sent. john knew it and sabath knew he knew it.

“when are you going to see mr. bullguard?” he asked.

“i’m here nearly every day,” said john.

“mr. bullguard is performing a great public service,” said sabath, with not a twinkle, as if they did not understand each other down to the ground. “he’s trying to get all you gamblers out of the steel business and bring some peace to the country. and because he spanked you once when you were in knee pants, now you’re as proud as a pig with a ribbon in its hereafter. i’ll tell him what i’ve said.”

[343]

“except the pig allusion. i’ll lay odds you won’t repeat that.”

“i will,” said sabath, departing. “i will.”

john’s partners began to be alarmed. he kept nothing from them. when they importuned him to bend a little, thinking his obduracy might have disastrous consequences for all of them, he would say: “it amuses me and it will pay you.”

one morning sabath’s voice called him on the telephone, saying: “the great mountain is walking. you damn gamblers! do you want everything in the world?”

“thanks,” said john.

twenty minutes later bullguard appeared. he walked right in, sat on the edge of a chair, crossed his arms, leaned forward on his stick, and glared. when he glared the world was supposed to tremble. he was rather awful to look at. his purple face was of a strawberry texture; his nose was monstrous, angry, red, bulbous, with hairy warts upon it; his eyebrows were almost vertical.

three words were spoken,—all three by bullguard.

“how much?” he asked.

john drew a pencil pad out of his desk and wrote slowly in large, owlish characters, this:

if you smile—

$300,000,000

no smile

$350,000,000

having written it he stopped to gaze at it thoughtfully[344] for a minute, then pulled out the slide leaf of his desk, tossed the pad there for bullguard to see, and leaned back.

bullguard glanced at it and stood up.

“that!” he said, tapping the $350,000,000 with his forefinger, and stalked out.

slaymaker, awns, wingreene and pick were waiting in the big room. john walked in and threw the pad on the table.

“there are the terms.”

knowing john they understood the pencil writing.

“did he smile?” they asked as one.

“no,” said john.

“my god!” murmured slaymaker. he sank into a chair and wept.

two-fifths of it was john’s. his share included the thane interest which amounted to nearly twenty millions. slaymaker, awns, wingreene and pick divided $170,000,000. the balance went to thirty or forty minor stockholders in the breakspeare companies.