The Cost Part 37

"But to get down to business," he went on. "I've eleven millions of the stock left--about a hundred and twenty thousand shares. Gladys has fifty thousand shares--how much have you got?"

"Less than ten thousand. And I'd have had none at all if my mind hadn't been full of other things as I was sailing. I forgot to tell my broker to sell."

Dumont was reflecting. Presently he said: "Those curs not only took most of my stock and forced the sale of most of my other securities; they've put me in such a light that outside stockholders wouldn't send me their proxies now. To get back control I must smash them, and I must also acquire pretty nearly half the shares, and hold them till I'm firm in the saddle again."

"You'd better devote yourself for the present to escaping the grave.

Why bother about business? You've got enough--too much, as it is.

Take a holiday--go away and amuse yourself."

Dumont smiled. "That's what I'm going to do, what I'm doing--amusing myself. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't live, if I didn't feel that I was on my way back to power. Now--in the present market I couldn't borrow on my Woolens stock. I've two requests to make of you."

"Anything that's possible."

"The first is, I want you to lend me four millions, or, rather, negotiate the loan for me, as if it were for yourself. I've got about that amount in Governments, in several good railways and in the property here. The place at Saint X is Pauline's, but the things I can put up would bring four millions and a half at least at forced sale.

So, you'll be well secured. I'm asking you to do it instead of doing it myself because, if I'm to win out, the Herron crowd must think I'm done for and nearly dead."

Langdon was silent several minutes. At last he said: "What's your plan?"

Dumont looked irritated--he did not like to be questioned, to take any one into his confidence. But he restrained his temper and said: "I'm going to make a counter-raid. I know where to strike."

"Are you sure?"

Dumont frowned. "Don't disturb yourself," he said coldly. "I can arrange the loan in another way."

"I'm asking you only for your own sake, Jack," Langdon hastily interposed. "Of course you can have the money, and I don't want your security."

"Then I'll not borrow through you." Dumont never would accept a favor from any one. He regarded favors as profitable investments but ruinous debts.

"Oh--very well--I'll take the security," said Langdon. "When do you want the money?"

"It must be covered into my account at the Inter-State National--remember, NOT the National Industrial, but the Inter-State National. A million must be deposited to-day--the rest by ten o'clock to-morrow at the latest."

"I'll attend to it. What's your other request?"

"Woolens'll take another big drop on Monday and at least two hundred and fifty thousand shares'll be thrown on the market at perhaps an average price of eighteen--less rather than more. I want you quietly to organize a syndicate to buy what's offered. They must agree to sell it to me for, say, two points advance on what they pay for it. I'll put up--in your name--a million dollars in cash and forfeit it if I don't take the stock off their hands. As Woolens is worth easily double what it now stands at, they can't lose. Of course the whole thing must be kept secret."

Langdon deliberated this proposal. Finally he said: "I think brother-in-law Barrow and his partner and I can manage it."

"You can a.s.sure them they'll make from six hundred thousand to a million on a less than thirty days' investment of four millions and a half, with no risk whatever."

"Just about that," a.s.sented Langdon--he had been carefully brought up by his father to take care of a fortune and was cleverer at figures than he pretended.

"Do your buying through Tavistock," continued Dumont. "Give him orders to take on Monday all offerings of National Woolens, preferred and common, at eighteen or less. He'll understand what to do."

"But I may be unable to get up the syndicate on such short notice."

"You must," said Dumont. "And you will. You can get a move on yourself when you try--I found that out when I was organizing my original combine. One thing more--very important. Learn for me all you can--without being suspected--about the Fanning-Smiths and Great Lakes."

He made Langdon go over the matters he was to attend to, point by point, before he would let him leave. He was asleep when the nurse, sent in by Langdon on his way out, reached his bed--the sound and peaceful sleep of a veteran campaigner whose nerves are trained to take advantage of every lull.

At ten the next morning he sent the nurse out of his room. "And close the doors," he said, "and don't come until I ring." He began to use the branch telephone at his bedside, calling up Langdon, and then Tavistock, to a.s.sure himself that all was going well. Next he called up in succession five of the great individual money-lenders of Wall Street, pledged them to secrecy and made arrangements for them to call upon him at his house at different hours that day and Sunday. Another might have intrusted the making of these arrangements to Culver or Langdon, but Dumont never let any one man know enough of his plan of battle to get an idea of the whole.

"Now for the ammunition," he muttered, when the last appointment was made. And he rang for Culver.

Culver brought him writing materials. "Take this order," he said, as he wrote, "to the Central Park Safety Deposit vaults and bring me from my compartment the big tin box with my initials in white--remember, IN WHITE--on the end of it."

Three-quarters of an hour later Culver returned, half-carrying, half-dragging the box. Dumont's eyes lighted up at sight of it. "Ah!"

he said, in a sigh of satisfaction and relief. "Put it under the head of the bed here. Thanks. That's all."

The nurse came as Culver left, but he sent her away. He supported himself to the door, locked it. He took his keys from the night-stand, drew out the box and opened it. On the ma.s.s of stocks and bonds lay an envelope containing two lists--one, of the securities in the box that were the property of Gladys Dumont; the other, of the securities there that were the property of Laura Dumont, their mother.

His hands shook as he unfolded these lists, and a creaking in the walls or flooring made him start and glance round with the look of a surprised thief. But this weakness was momentary. He was soon absorbed in mentally arranging the securities to the best advantage for distribution among the money-lenders as collateral for the cash he purposed to stake in his game.

Such thought as he gave to the moral quality of what he was doing with his sister's and his mother's property without asking their consent was altogether favorable to himself. His was a well-trained, "practical"

conscience. It often antic.i.p.ated his drafts upon it for moral support in acts that might at first blush seem criminal, or for soothing apologies for acts which were undeniably "not QUITE right." This particular act, conscience a.s.sured him, was of the highest morality--under his own code. For the code enacted by ordinary human beings to guide their foolish little selves he had no more respect than a lion would have for a moral code enacted by and for sheep. The sheep might a.s.sert that their code was for lions also; but why should that move the lions to anything but amus.e.m.e.nt? He had made his own code--not by special revelation from the Almighty, as did some of his fellow pract.i.tioners of high finance, but by especial command of his imperial "destiny." And it was a strict code--it had earned him his unblemished reputation for inflexible commercial honesty and commercial truthfulness. The foundation principle was his absolute right to the great property he had created. This being granted, how could there be immorality in any act whatsoever that might be necessary to hold or regain his kingdom? As well debate the morality of a mother in "commandeering" bread or even a life to save her baby from death.

His kingdom! His by discovery, his by adroit appropriation, his by intelligent development, his by the right of mental might--HIS! Stake his sister's and his mother's possessions for it? Their lives, if necessary!

Than John Dumont, president of the Woolens Monopoly, there was no firmer believer in the gospel of divine right--the divine right of this new race of kings, the puissant lords of trade.

When he had finished his preparations for the money-lenders he unlocked the door and sank into bed exhausted. Hardly had he settled himself when, without knocking, Gladys entered, Pauline just behind her. His face blanched and from his dry throat came a hoa.r.s.e, strange cry--it certainly sounded like fright. "You startled me--that was all," he hastened to explain, as much to himself as to them. For, a something inside him had echoed the wondering inquiry in the two women's faces--a something that persisted in reverencing the moral code which his new code had superseded.

XXVII.

THE OTHER MAN'S MIGHT.

At eleven o'clock on Monday morning James, head of the Fanning-Smith family, president of Fanning-Smith and Company, and chairman of the Great Lakes and Gulf railway--to note his chief t.i.tles to eminence up-town and down--was seated in his grandfather's office, in his grandfather's chair, at his grandfather's desk. Above his head hung his grandfather's portrait; and he was a slightly modernized reproduction of it. As he was thus in every outward essential his grandfather over again, he and his family and the social and business world a.s.sumed that he was the reincarnation of the crafty old fox who first saw the light of day through the c.h.i.n.ks in a farm-hand's cottage in Maine and last saw it as it sifted through the real-lace curtains of his gorgeous bedroom in his great Madison Avenue mansion. But in fact James was only physically and t.i.tularly the representative of his grandfather. Actually he was typical of the present generation of Fanning-Smiths--a self-intoxicated, stupid and pretentious generation; a polo-playing and racing and hunting, a yachting and palace-dwelling and money-scattering generation; a business-despising and business-neglecting, an old-world aristocracy-imitating generation. He moved pompously through his two worlds, fas.h.i.+on and business, deceiving himself completely, every one else except his wife more or less, her not at all--but that was the one secret she kept.

James was the husband of Herron's daughter by his first wife, and Herron had induced him to finance the syndicate that had raided and captured National Woolens.

James was bred to conservatism. His timidity was of that wholesome strength which so often saves chuckle-heads from the legitimate consequences of their vanity and folly. But the spectacle of huge fortunes, risen overnight before the wands of financial magicians whose abilities he despised when he compared them with his own, was too much for timidity. He had been born with a large vanity, and it had been stuffed from his babyhood by all around him until it was become as abnormal as the liver of a Strasburg goose--and as supersensitive. It suffered acutely as these Jacks went climbing up their bean-stalk wealth to heights of magnificence from which the establishments and equipages of the Fanning-Smiths must seem poor to shabbiness. He sneered at them as "vulgar new-comers"; he professed abhorrence of their ostentation. But he--and Gertrude, his wife--envied them, talked of them constantly, longed to imitate, to surpa.s.s them.

In the fullness of time his temptation came. He s.h.i.+vered, shrank, leaped headlong--his wife pus.h.i.+ng.

About ten days before the raid on National Woolens there had drifted in to Dumont through one of his many subterranean sources of information a rumor that the Fanning-Smiths had stealthily reduced their holdings of Great Lakes to twenty-one thousand shares and that the property was not so good as it had once been. He never permitted any Wall Street development to pa.s.s unexplained--he thought it simple prudence for a man with the care of a great financial and commercial enterprise to look into every dark corner of the Street and see what was hatching there. Accordingly, he sent an inquiry back along his secret avenue.

Soon he learned that Great Lakes was sound, but the Fanning-Smiths had gone rotten; that they were gambling in the stock of the road they controlled and were supposed in large part to own; that they were secretly selling its stock "short"--that is, were betting it would go down--when there was nothing in the condition of the property to justify a fall. He reflected on this situation and reached these conclusions: "James Fanning-Smith purposes to pa.s.s the autumn dividend, which will cause the stock to drop. Then he will take his profits from the shares he has sold short and will buy back control at the low price. He is a fool and a knave. Only an imbecile would thus trifle with an established property. A chance for some one to make a fortune and win a railroad by smas.h.i.+ng the Fanning-Smiths." Having recorded in his indelible memory these facts and conclusions as to James Fanning-Smith's plunge from business into gambling, Dumont returned to his own exacting affairs.

He had himself begun the race for multi-millions as a gambler and had only recently become ALMOST altogether a business man. But he thought there was a radical difference between his case and Fanning-Smith's.

To use courageous gambling as means to a foothold in business--he regarded that as wise audacity. To use a firm-established foothold in business as a means to gambling--he regarded that as the acme of reckless folly. Besides, when he marked the cards or loaded the dice for a great Wall Street game of "high finance," he did it with skill and intelligence; and Fanning-Smith had neither.

When the banking-house of Fanning-Smith and Company undertook to finance the raid on National Woolens it was already deep in the Great Lakes gamble. James was new to Wall Street's green table; and he liked the sensations and felt that his swindle on other gamblers and the public--he did not call it by that homely name, though he knew others would if they found him out--was moving smoothly. Still very, very deep down his self-confidence was underlaid with quicksand. But Herron was adroit and convincing to the degree attainable only by those who deceive themselves before trying to deceive others; and James' cupidity and conceit were enormous. He ended by persuading himself that his house, directed and protected by his invincible self, could carry with ease the burden of both loads. Indeed, the Great Lakes gamble now seemed to him a negligible trifle in the comparison--what were its profits of a few hundred thousands beside the millions that would surely be his when the great Woolens Monopoly, bought in for a small fraction of its value, should be controlled by a group of which he would be the dominant personality?

He ventured; he won. He was now secure--was not Dumont dispossessed, despoiled, dying?

At eleven o'clock on that Monday morning he was seated upon his embossed leather throne, under his grandfather's portrait, immersed in an atmosphere of self-adoration. At intervals he straightened himself, distended his chest, elevated his chin and glanced round with an air of haughty dignity, though there was none to witness and to be impressed.