Had I been vindictive, I would have led him on to humiliate himself more deeply, if greater depths of humiliation there are than those to which he voluntarily descended. But I wished to spare him; I let him see the uselessness of his mission. He looked at me in silence—the look of hate that can come only from a creature weak as well as wicked. I think it was all his keen sense of humor could do to save him from a melodramatic outbreak. He slipped into his habitual pose, rose and withdrew without another word. All this fright and groveling and treachery for plunder, the loss of which would not impair his fortune—plunder he had stolen with many a jest and gibe at his helpless victims. Like most of our debonair dollar chasers, he was a good sportsman only when the game was with him.
That afternoon he threw his Coal holdings on the market in great blocks. His treachery took Roebuck completely by surprise—for Roebuck believed in this fair-weather “gentleman,” foul-weather coward, and neglected to allow for that quicksand that is always under the foundation of the man who has inherited, not earned, his wealth. But for the blundering credulity of rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before Roebuck grasped the situation—that it was not my followers recklessly gambling to break the prices, but Langdon unloading on his “pal.” As soon as he saw, he abruptly withdrew from the market. When the Stock Exchange closed, National Coal securities were offered at prices ranging from eleven for the bonds to two for the common and three for the preferred—offered, and no takers.
“Well, you've done it,” said Joe, coming with the news that Thornley, of the Discount and Deposit Bank, had been appointed receiver.
“I've made a beginning,” replied I. And the last sentence of my next morning's “letter” was:
“To-morrow the first chapter of the History of the Industrial National Bank.”
“I have felt for two years,” said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to me soon afterward, “that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society.”
“He knew me better than I knew myself,” was my comment to Schilling. And I meant it—for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions, I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness, add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap, under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well. Youth and a light knapsack!
But—to my fight on the big bank.
Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National—a place for the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business, as exploited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people pay the war budgets—in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.