He blinked his eyes as at a strong light. Of a sudden he pulled himself together, put on his hat, and hastily left the room.
He walked quickly up Wall Street to Broadway, turned southward, and entered the huge home of the International Distributing Syndicate.
“Eighth floor!” he said to the elevator man. The sound of his own voice, husky almost to inaudibleness, startled him.
“Eighth floor,” he repeated, very distinctly.
Walking straight to a door at the end of the hall, marked “Private,” he entered. The burly man at the gate of a railing said: “Good-morning, Mr. Dawson,” and obsequiously opened the gate. But Mr. Dawson made no reply; whereat the burly man wondered, for Mr. Dawson was a polite man.
The president passed, unchallenged, through two rooms, in which clerks worked at desks, and finally confronted the head of the syndicate, who sat at a flat desk. Before him was a sheet on which he had been making calculations with a lead-pencil.
“How do you do, Richard?” said the richest man in the world. He was a middle-aged man, quiet-spoken, brown-eyed; a face quietly alert rather than over-shrewd. His head was curiously shapen, broad above the ears and tapering slightly, though noticeably, at the top. Phrenologists spoke delightedly of the abnormal development of his bump of acquisitiveness, because they knew who he was; and of the absence of the other bumps, for the same irrefutable reason. But the very shape of it conveyed an impression of an unusual brain within it, though, perhaps, people who did not know who he was might not have been so susceptible to the impression. Great leaders seldom look like their imagined portraits.
“William,” said the president of the Metropolitan National Bank, “we are confronted by the greatest crisis in the history of the world!”
Consternation appeared on the face of the richest man in the world, as though it had been flashed upon it by a stereopticon. It was not pleasant to see. His photograph, taken at that moment, would have impressed a stranger as being that of an amateur actor, inartistically expressing dismay—it was so exaggeratedly frightened.
“What has happened, Richard?” he asked tremulously, rising from his chair.