_ILLUSTRATED BY A. B. WENZELL_
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1912, 1913, by_
THE MCCLURE PUBLICATIONS, INC.
_Copyright, 1913, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian_
_March, 1913_
*ILLUSTRATIONS*
"'I shall have the detectives here--a man and a woman--within half an
hour. There's nothing to do but wait'" . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"In that gay party one person was a thief--but which one? ... A match
sputtered. There was a cry of amazement and horror. The table was
absolutely bare"
"'Look here, Rita. Can't I help out some way?'"
"'Come outside--in the garden. I want to speak to you. Come quietly'"
"'I have not hesitated to trust in you--you must in me'"
"'Aha! I made them sit up, didn't I--your cold women!'"
*The Sixty-First Second*
*CHAPTER I*
In the year 19--, toward the end of the month of October, the country
was on the eve of a stupendous panic. A period of swollen prosperity
had just ended in which Titans had striven in a frenzy for the millions
that opportunity had spilled before them.
For months the stock market had steadily lowered, owing to the flight of
the small investor, affrighted by the succession of investigations, the
fear of readjustments, and the distrust of the great manipulators. The
public, which understands nothing of the secret wars and hidden
alliances of finance, had begun tremulously to be aware of the
threatening approach of a stupendous catastrophe. So in the ominous,
grumbling days of October, when the air was full of confusing rumors and
violent alarms, the public, with its necessity for humanizing all
sensations, perceived distinctly only two figures, each dramatically in
peril, about whose safety or ruin the whole comprehensible drama of the
financial cataclysm seemed to center.
These two figures, both presidents of great trust companies, giants in
their own sphere, represented two opposite elements of that great mass
of society which seeks its level in Wall Street. Bernard L. Majendie,
president of the Atlantic Trust Company, member of every exclusive club,
patron of the arts, representative of one of the oldest American
families, accustomed to leadership and wealth from colonial times, was
linked in a common danger with John G. Slade, president of the
Associated Trust Company, promoter, manipulator, owner of a chain of
Western newspapers, a man who had hauled himself out of the lowest
depths of society. Many believed that both, in the relentless
readjustment which the banks were forcing on the trust companies, were
destined to be blotted out in the general catastrophe. Many others,
perceiving the strange oppositeness of the two individuals, speculated
on which would survive the other, if indeed either were to persist.
About three o'clock of a certain afternoon, when each extra brought a
new alarm, John G. Slade came abruptly from the great library, down the
sounding marble descent that was a replica of the famous rampe of the
Chateau of Gerny, into the tapestry-hung vestibule of his palace on
upper Fifth Avenue.
He stood a moment in blank meditation, while the third man held his
overcoat open and ready, watching anxiously the frown on the face of the
master, who stood before him, a massive six-foot-four. Already in the
great marble home itself was that feeling of alarm from the outer world
which had communicated itself to the servants. Suddenly Slade,
returning to himself, detected the furtive scrutiny of the footman and
the butler, who had so far departed from their correctly petrified
attitudes as to exchange wondering glances. He frowned, pointed to his
loose black felt hat and his favorite cane, and tore so rapidly through
the heavily ironed doors and down the steps to the waiting automobile
that the second footman stumbled twice in his haste to be before him.
Two or three reporters, who had been lurking behind the great marble
bastions, sprang forward as Slade, disappearing in the motor, was
whirled away.
"Up river," he said briefly, and sank back in his seat.
He was in the middle forties, a man noticeable anywhere for the
overmastering vitality of his carriage and the defiant poise of his
head. Nature had admirably designed him for what he was intended to
be--a being always at war with men and surrounding circumstances. His
face was devoid of any fine indications of sensibility, of reflection,
or humorous perception of life. The upper and lower maxillary bones
were in such gaunt relief they seemed rather steel girders hung to
support a granite will. The head was square, sunk rather than placed
upon his shoulders, and the line of the head at the back was straight
and full of crude power. He had, at the same time, a suggestion in the
shoulders of the obstinacy of the buffalo, the most distinctive of
American beasts, and in the eye-pits of the fatalism of the Indian,
which as a type often seems not so much the physical tenacity of an
unexplained race as it does the peculiar impress of a continent and an
atmosphere surcharged with vitality.
The eyes were a clear blue, the eyes of a boy in mischief who is still
sublimely defiant of the tripping obstacles of an ethical code. This
quality of the boy, characteristic too of the American, was the secret
of all his seeming inconstancy of unrelenting cruelty and sudden
sentimental impulsiveness. Life was to him a huge dare, and all the
perils of finance the hazards of a monstrous gamble, which alone were
able to supply him with that overwhelming quality of sensation that such
men covet in life.
A waif at six; a wharf rat at twelve, endowed with the strength of a
man; leader of a gang at sixteen, hated, feared, always fighting;
gaining his first start in politics, and then, by making a lucky strike
in the silver mines of Colorado, educating himself with primitive
necessary knowledge, always acquiring, never relaxing what his fingers
touched, a terrible antagonist, risking his all a dozen times in the
hunger for a greater stake--he had emerged at last from the churning
vortex of a brutal struggle, possessor of a fortune that fifty times had
hung on the events of a day. For five years he had been involved in
countless lawsuits, accused of chicanery, extortion, conspiracy, and
even murder. At the end of which period he came forth victorious,
without losing a single suit, surrounded, it is true, by every calumny
that could be invented, accused of manipulating legislatures, corrupting
judges, and removing witnesses.
Through it all he had remained unshattered, boyishly delighted, his body
unyielding to the strain of sleepless nights and months of unrelenting
vigilance. He had lived hard, ready to gamble for a thousand or a
hundred thousand, cynically announcing his motto:
"No friends. So long as every man is my enemy, I am safe."
And this theory of life he had carried out to the minutest detail. Men
represented to him simply the male of the species, to be met head on, to
strive with and overthrow. So completely did this obsess him that no
one, not even his secretaries (whom he changed constantly), had the
slightest inkling of his plans. Two of his subordinates, hoping to
profit by their intimacy, had foolishly invested on his deliberately
given tips--and had been ruined. Afterward he cited their cases as a
warning to other applicants.
From the start, always counting on the year ahead, he had outrun his
income. When he had ten thousand, he was spending fifteen; at fifty
thousand, seventy-five. Every one who came in contact with him was paid
twice over, and robbed him in the bargain--a fact on which he counted
and to which he was quite indifferent.
Coming to Wall Street in that period of fevered speculation, he had been
among the first to perceive the enormous instruments at hand in the
development of a chain of trust companies which would supply a
conveniently masked agency for the enormous capital that he needed to
compete on equal terms with the leaders of the Street.
That now, for the first time, he was confronted with a situation of
absolute and impending ruin, brought him not the slightest depression,
but rather that exhilaration and sudden clearness of mind which is
characteristic of the gambler face to face with the supreme hour which
means absolute bankruptcy or a fortune.
At every block some one on the crowded sidewalk, or a group in a passing
carriage, turned with a hasty exclamation at the sight of his bulky
figure under the black sombrero, fleeing in the red automobile that was
itself at this period a rarity. At one point where a blockade compelled
him to halt, a newsboy, jumping on the sideboard, thrust a newspaper in
his face. He flung a dime and glanced at the headlines: