Wimperley leaned forward. "Go on."
"It's simple enough, we're not using Clark properly."
"Isn't seven millions proper?" boomed Stoughton.
"You don't get me," Birch spoke in a thin dry voice totally devoid of any emphasis. "The proper use of a man like that is the purpose for which nature designed him. He's an originator—but not an executive. Dividends don't interest him half as much as the foundations of a new mill."
Wimperley shook his head. "That may be all right, but from my point of view he has become dangerous. He surmounts our resolutions, the ones we make when our pulse is normal. I have never seen him fail to carry his point. Take the matter of this railway. I don't mind betting that if we go up there to-morrow to kill that road we'll be committed to it in twenty-four hours."
"I'll take that for a thousand." There was a spot of faint color in
Birch's hollow cheeks.
Wimperley laughed. "I'm on. What about lunch and finish this afterwards?"
But Stoughton sat tight. "You'll go too far. Suppose that Clark gets on his ear and tells us to run the thing in our own way, and that he'll get out. As I see it, he holds the works together and represents the works in the mind of every one who knows him."
"Well, what if he does drop out? There's no living man who can't be replaced."
"Except one called Robert Fisher Clark. As a first consequence our stocks drop on the Philadelphia exchange like a wet sponge. You can imagine the rest—-you all know enough about the market, and, by the way, does any one happen to remember the various things we have publicly said about that same individual?"