ALLISON’S PRIVATE AND PARTICULAR DEVIL
The free and entirely uncurbed enjoyed an unusual treat. It had a
sensation which did not need to be supported by a hectic imagination or
a lurid vocabulary. Vedder Court had been condemned for the use of the
Municipal Transportation Company! A new eight track, double-deck tube
was to be constructed through Crescent Island to the mainland!
Grand climax! Through this tube and into Vedder Court, at the platforms
of the surface and L and subway cars, was to come the passenger trains
of the new Atlantic-Pacific Railroad, a line three hundred miles shorter
than any now stretching between Broadway and the Golden Gate! Any reader
of the daily press, of whom there are several, knows precisely what the
free and entirely uncurbed did with this bit of simon-pure information.
The glittering details began on the first page, turned on the second,
continued on the fourth, jumped over to the seventh, and finished back
among the real estate ads. It began early in the morning, and it
continued until late at night, fresh details piling upon each other in
mad profusion, their importance limited only by the restrictions of
type!
Extra! The trick by which the A.-P. ran through the mountains over the
Inland Pacific’s track!
Extra, extra! The compulsion by which the Midcontinent was brought to
complete the big gap in the new A.-P. system!
Tremendous extra! The contracts of freightage, subject strictly to the
Inter-State Commerce law, between the A.-P. and the cereal trust, the
metal trust, the fuel trust, the cloth trust, and all the other
iniquitous combinations in restraint of everything! Wow! Zowie! That was
the hot one! The A.-P. was the main stem, and within thirteen seconds of
the appearance on the streets of the tremendous extra, every other
fragile branchlet of a railroad not under the immediate protection of
the A.-P., was reduced to a shrivel, and its stocks began to drop with
the sickening plunge of an unopened parachute!
Gail Sargent kept Nanette on the rush for extras from the first yell on
the streets, and she read every word, including the underlines on the
miscellaneous portraits of Allison and the funny pi-lines which
invariably occurred in the middle of the most interesting sentences.
It was true, all true! Here was the first step in Allison’s tremendous
project an accomplished fact. The rest of it would be gradually
revealed, from day to day, as suited his needs, and the empire he had
planned would spread, until its circles touched, and overlapped, and
broke into an intricate webbing, over all the land and water of the
earth! And she was to be the Empress!
Was she? Through all the night she had battled that question, and the
battle had left traces of darkness around her luminous eyes. First, she
had been in the swirl of his tremendous compulsion, overwhelmed by the
sheer physical force of him, captured not by siege but by sortie. Then
had come the dazzling splendour of his great plan, a temptation of
power, of might, of unlimited rulership, in the spoils of which, and the
honour of which, and the glory of which, she would share. Next, in the
midst of her expanding anticipation, there had come, as out of a clear
sky, a sudden inexplicable fear. It was a shrinking, almost like a
chill, which had attacked her. Allison himself! The sheer physical
dominance of him; the tempestuous mastery of him; and again she felt
that breathless sensation of utter helplessness which she had
experienced in the little lookout house. It was as if he were pulling
the very life out of her, to the upbuilding of his own strength! It was
in the very nature of him to sweep her away by storm; it was a part of
his very bigness. He was colossal, gigantic, towering! And she had
conquered this giant, had been the motive of his strength, the very
pinnacle of his cloud-topping ambition! There was pride in that, pride
and to spare. It distressed her that again and again came that impulse
of fear, that shrinking. A new thought dawned. Perhaps this was the
thing which she had desired, the thing for which she had been waiting;
to be taken, and crushed.
Another disturbance came to her. This mighty plan of Allison’s. The
exaltation of achievement, the dazzling glory of accomplishment, had
blinded her to the processes by which the end must be gained, and the
fact which drew her attention to this was the remembrance that her Uncle
Jim was to be protected! What about the others? For Allison to gain
control and dominion over thousands of now segregated interests, those
thousands must lose their own control. What would become of them?
Pshaw! That was the way of the world, particularly of the commercial
world. As her father had often expressed it, the big fish ate the little
fish because fish was the only food for fish; and Allison was the
biggest one of them all. That was the way of him; to devour that he
might live. Even here, far from him, and safe in her dainty little
chintz hung suite, she felt the dominance of him. Turn her eyes where
she would, with the lids open or closed, he filled her vision, not in
his normal stature, but grown to the dimensions of his force, filling
the sky, the earth, the sea, blotting out everything! There was no
escaping him. He had come to claim her, and she belonged to him; that
is, unless she chose to call upon a strength still latent in her. There
was a something else which she could not define just now, which seemed
to call to her persistently through the darkness. A voice—but the typo
for colossus stood between! She wondered if she were happy. She wondered
what her Aunt Helen would say. Bigness and power and dominance; she had
admired them all her life.
Late in the afternoon Jim Sargent came home, drawn, fagged, and with
hollows under his eyes. He had a violent headache, and he looked ten
years older. He walked slowly into the library where Mrs. Sargent and
Mrs. Davies and Gail were discussing the future of Vedder Court, and
dropped into a chair.
Grace Sargent rang a bell instantly. When Jim felt that way, he needed a
hot drink first of all.
“What is the matter?” she asked him, the creases of worry flashing into
her brow.
“It’s been a hard day,” he explained, forcing himself, with an effort,
to answer. Years of persistent experience had taught him to follow the
line of least resistance. “There has been a panic on ’Change. Railroads
are going to smash all up and down the line. Allison’s new A.-P. road.
It’s the star piracy of the century. Allison has brought into the
railroad game the same rough-shod methods he used in his traction
manipulations.”
“Has your company been hurt, Jim?” asked his wife, fully prepared for
the worst, and making up her mind to bear up bravely under it.
“Not yet,” replied Sargent, and he passed his hand over his brow. He was
already making a tremendous effort to brace himself for to-morrow’s
ordeal. “I escaped to-day by an accident. By some mistake the Towando
Valley was mentioned as belonging to the new A.-P. combination. Of
course I didn’t correct it, but by to-morrow they’ll know.”
“Mr. Allison was responsible for that statement,” Gail serenely informed
her uncle. “He promised he’d take care of you.”
“Great guns!” exploded her uncle. “What did you know about this thing?”
“All of it,” smiled Gail. She had known that Allison would keep his
word, but it gave her a strange sense of relief that he had done so.
Her Aunt Helen turned to her with a commanding eye; but Gail merely
dimpled.
“Of course I couldn’t say anything,” went on Gail. “It was all in
confidence. Isn’t it glorious, Uncle Jim!”
“You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d been down town to-day,” responded
her uncle, trying again to erase from his brow the damage which had been
done to his nerves. “They wanted to mob Allison! He has cut the ground
from under the entire railroad business of the United States! Their
stocks have deflated an aggregate of billions of dollars, and the slump
is permanent! He has bankrupted a host of men, rifled the pockets of a
million poor investors; he has demoralised the entire transportation
commerce of the United States; and he gave no one the show of a rat in a
trap!”
“Isn’t that business?” asked Gail, the red spots beginning to come into
her cheeks.
“Not quite!” snapped her Uncle Jim. “Fiction has made that the universal
idea, but there are decent men in business. The majority of them are,
even in railroading. Most roads are organised and conducted for the sole
purpose of carrying freight and passengers at a profit for the
stockholders, and spectacular stock jobbing deals are the exception
rather than the rule.”
“Has Mr. Allison been more unfair than others who have made big
consolidations?” demanded Gail, again aware of the severely inquiring
eye of Aunt Helen.
“Rotten!” replied her uncle, with an emphasis in which there was much of
personal feeling. “He has taken tricky advantage of every unprotected
loophole. He won from the Inland Pacific, at the mere cost of trackage,
a passage which the Inland built through the mountains by brilliant
engineering and at an almost countless cost.”
“Isn’t that accounted clever?” asked Gail.
“So is the work of a confidence man or a wire-tapper!” was the retort.
“But they are sent to jail just the same. The Inland created something.
It built, with brains and money and force, and sincere commercial
enterprise, a line which won it a well-earned supremacy of the Pacific
trade. It was entitled to keep it; yet Allison, by making with it a
tricky contract for the restricted use of the key to its supremacy, uses
that very device to destroy it. He has bankrupted, or will have done so,
a two thousand mile railroad system, which is of tremendous commercial
value to the country, in order to use a hundred miles of its track and
remove it from competition! Allison has created nothing. He has only
seized, by stealth, what others have created. He is not even a
commercial highwayman. He is a commercial pickpocket!”
Gail had paled by now.
“Tell me one thing,” she demanded. “Wouldn’t any of the railroad men
have employed this trick if they had been shrewd enough to think of it?”
“A lot of them,” was the admission, after an awkward pause. “Does that
make it morally and ethically correct?”
“You may be prejudiced, Jim,” interpolated Aunt Helen, moving closer to
Gail. “If they are all playing the game that way, I don’t see why Mr.
Allison shouldn’t receive applause for clever play.”
“You bet I’m prejudiced!” snarled Sargent, overcoming his weariness and
pacing up and down the library floor. “He came near playing my road the
same trick he did the Inland Pacific. He secured control of the L. and
C., because it has a twenty-year contract for passage over fifty miles
of our track. He’d throw the rest of our line away like a peanut hull,
if he had not promised Gail to protect me. I’m an object of charity!”
“Oh!” It was a scarcely audible cry of pain. Aunt Helen moved closer,
and patted her hand. Gail did not notice the action.
“Why did he make you that promise, Gail?” demanded her uncle, turning on
her suddenly, with a physical motion so much like her father’s that she
was startled.
“He wants me to marry him,” faltered Gail.
Aunt Grace sat down by the other side of Gail.
“Have you accepted him, dear?” she asked.
There was a lump in Gail’s throat. She could not answer!
“She’ll never marry him with my consent!” stormed her Uncle Jim. “Nor
with Miles’s! The fellow’s an unscrupulous scoundrel! He’s made of
cruelty from his toes to his hair! He stops at nothing! He even robbed
Market Square Church of six million dollars!”
Gail’s head suddenly went up in startled inquiry. She wanted to still
defend Allison; but she dreaded what was to come.
“We wouldn’t sell him Vedder Court at his price; so he took it from us
at six million less than he originally offered. He did that by a trick,
too.”
All three women looked up at him in breathless interest.
“He had the city condemn Vedder Court,” went on Sargent. “If he had
condemned it outright for the Municipal Transportation Company, he would
have had to pay us about the amount of his original offer; but his own
private and particular devil put the idea into his head that the Vedder
Court tenements should be torn down anyhow, for the good of the public!
So he had the buildings condemned first, destroying six million dollars’
worth of value; then he had the ground condemned! Tim Corman probably
got about a million dollars for that humanitarian job!”
A wild fit of sobbing startled them all.