“Do what you think best,” said I. “And, mind you: No word to Morton.”
“Now I was about to suggest that,” said young Van Flange.
Morton should not know what was on my slate for Blackberry. Trust him? yes; and with every hope I had. But it was my vanity to make this move without him. I would open his eyes to it, that young Van Flange, if not so old a sailor as himself, was none the less his equal at charting a course and navigating speculation across that sea of stocks, about the treacherous dangers whereof it had pleased him so often to patronize me.
CHAPTER XXV—PROFIT AND LOSS; MAINLY THE LATTER
SINCE time began, no man, not even a king, has been better obeyed in his mandates, than was I while Chief of Tammany Hall. From high to low, from the leader of a district to the last mean straggler in the ranks, one and all, they pulled and hauled or ran and climbed like sailors in a gale, at the glance of my eye or the toss of my finger. More often than once, I have paused in wonder over this blind submission, and asked myself the reason. Particularly, since I laid down my chiefship, the query has come upon my tongue while I remembered old days, to consider how successes might have been more richly improved or defeats, in their disasters, at least partially avoided.
Nor could I give myself the answer. I had no close friendships among my men; none of them was my confidant beyond what came to be demanded of the business in our hands. On the contrary, there existed a gulf between me and those about me, and while I was civil—for I am not the man, and never was, of wordy violences—I can call myself nothing more.
If anything, I should say my people of politics feared me, and that a sort of sweating terror was the spur to send them flying when I gave an order. There was respect, too; and in some cases a kind of love like a dog's love, and which is rather the homage paid by weakness to strength, or that sentiment offered of the vine to the oak that supports its clamberings.
Why my men should stand in awe of me, I cannot tell. Certainly, I was mindful of their rights; and, with the final admonitions of Big Kennedy in my ears, I avoided favoritisms and dealt out justice from an even hand. True, I could be stern when occasion invited, and was swift to destroy that one whose powers did not match his duty, or who for a bribe would betray, or for an ambition would oppose, my plan.