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, 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 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
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. 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
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 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.”
“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 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.