“It is, obviously, the only step we can take.” There was no one else, in the room, but Mr. Dawson drew near and whispered into his friend’s ear. His friend nodded from time to time.
“That,” said Mellen quietly, with a sort of convictionless acquiescence, as Dawson concluded, “we must not do until we are certain that he can swamp the world with gold!” He picked up the sheet full of lead-pencilled figures and began to tear it into small bits.
“Confound him!” said the president angrily.
“Yes, Richard,” agreed Mellen, with at air that had a suggestion of conscious guilt. He never swore. It was a sin. He was the richest man in the world.
PART TWO: THE GOLD
On Thursday—the president, a keen psychologist, to reassure the richest man in the world, had jocularly called it Consternation Day—Mr. William Mellen and Mr. Richard Dawson entered the bank. They had ridden from Mr. Mellen’s house in Mr. Mellen’s brougham. They had discussed Mr. Grinnell at great and painful length many times in that week. In the carriage, on the way downtown, they had talked of nothing else. The president was certain that the mystery no longer was a mystery. The burden of his argument had become that a condition, not a theory, confronted them. The time for idle speculation had passed. It behooved them to act. The lingering indecision of Mr. Mellen did not come from inability to change his lifetime’s plans in the twinkling of an eye, but from unwillingness to accept at second-hand the inevitableness of something unspeakably disagreeable. All great business generals are opportunists. But at times the greatest minds work femininely.
“The question of whether he makes his gold or not, or how he gets it, now has merely an academic interest, William. The thing is, that he has the gold.” Dawson said it in a playfully exaggerated pedagogical air, yet ready to become deadly earnest in a twinkling.
“I don’t see it,” said Mellen seriously. “We must find the explanation. What he can do, we can do.”