“And they can't hang this fellow?” said Grog, after a pause.
“Hang! I should think not, indeed.”
“Nor even transport him?”
“No, not touch a hair of his head. He'll have to live abroad for a year or two,—in Paris or Rome,—no great hardship if it were Naples; he 'll make a surrender of his property,—an old house somewhere and some brick-fields, a mine of Daryamon coal, and a flax-mill on a river that has scarcely any water, together with a sheaf of bad bills and Guatemala bonds. They 'll want to examine him before the Court, and he'll send them a sick-certificate, showing how agitation and his recent losses have almost made him imbecile; and even Mr. Linklater will talk feelingly about his great reverse of condition.”
“It's as good as a play to hear about this,” said Grog; “it beats Newmarket all to sticks.”
“If it's a play, it won't be a benefit to a good many folk,” said Hankes, grinning.
“Well, he is a clever fellow,—far and away cleverer than I ever thought him,” said Grog. “Any man—I don't care who he is—can do the world to a short extent, but to go in at them on this scale a fellow must be a genius.”
“He is a genius,” said Hankes, in a tone of decision. “Just think for a moment what a head it must have been that kept all that machinery at work for years back without a flaw or a crack to be detected, started companies, opened banks, worked mines, railroads, and telegraphs, built refuge harbors, drained whole counties, brought vast tracts of waste land into cultivation, equalizing the chances of all enterprises by making the success of this come to the aid of the failure of that: the grand secret of the whole being the dexterous application of what is called 'Credit.'”
“All that wouldn't do at Doncaster,” said Grog; “puff your horse as much as you like, back him up how you will in the betting-ring, if he has n't the speed in him it won't do. It's only on 'Change you can 'brag out of a bad hand.' Dunn would never cut any figure on the turf.”
“There you are all wrong; there never yet was the place, or the station, where that man would n't have distinguished himself. Why, it was that marvellous power of his kept me with him for years back. I knew all that was going on. I knew that we hadn't—so to say—coals for one boiler while we had forty engines in full stroke; but I could n't get away. It was a sort of fascination; and when he 'd strike out a new scheme, and say carelessly, 'Call the capital one million, Hankes,' he spoke like a man that had only to put his hand in a bag and produce the money. Nothing daunted, nothing deterred him. He'd smash a rival company as coolly as you 'd crush a shell under your heel, and he 'd turn out a Government with the same indifference he 'd discharge a footman.”