V
Above all, there seemed something uncanny in the unvarying facility with which Rawn made money. There is no real explanation of the difference in money-making power, except that some men make money and some do not. Rawn did, without any doubt or question. Not lacking ability and calmness in judgment, and not lacking full information such as is accorded those said to be upon the sacred inside of the market, he was in and out of Rubber, Coppers, Steel, at precisely the right time. His oil investments in California, played up and down in proper symphony, had made him more than a million dollars, smoothly, easily, simply. The railways market was an open book to him, and Public Utilities seemed something he could gage while others stood and wondered. There are times when some men win. Rawn could not lose, whether he dealt in Ontario Silvers, Arizona Coppers, anything he liked. He was in with the pack when, in these last fierce days of individual and corporate greed, it finished pulling down a republic, and battened, guzzled at the bowels of the quarry. He partook with these of a broad knowledge of the narrowing raw resources of the country, and was in with them at the death. He was one of those to get hold of large acreages of the passing timber lands, he was counted with those who sought the great coal fields for their own; ran true to scent, with these, the trail of monopoly in any commodity which the people more and more must need. In the one matter of his relations with a certain transcontinental railway, Rawn made a quarter million as his share of the three-quarters of a billion taken in sales of mineral lands from the railway's land-grant holdings. That the grants had covered only agricultural lands mattered little, for when the sleepy government at Washington reluctantly took the trail, it was shown a law, cunningly passed a few years earlier, which barred the republic, by virtue of a six-year statute of limitations, from recovering any of its own property! John Rawn often laughed over that. He laughed also when the "suckers," as they called them, bit just as eagerly at irrigation as they had at mines. He often laughed—it was all so ridiculously easy to pull down a country, when the running was in good company! He was a prominent citizen.
(Rawn and Laura)
CHAPTER VIII
A PRINCELY GENEROSITY
I
Mr. Rawn went on with the pack. He was in and out of the market. His money grew. His ambition also grew. He felt coming now upon him another change. He said to himself that he was now about to pass up, into yet another era of his development.
One day, after his usual day's routine, he closed his office door, took his car at the curb, dropped in at his club, imbibed the two cocktails which were now his evening wont, and again emerging, nodded to his chauffeur in the fashion which meant "Home!" They passed on out again through the floating crowd of various and often vulgar vehicles, northbound—shrieking aloud in a vast united chorus, demanding speed, speed, and yet more speed—along the throbbing arteries of the city's population. At last he stopped once more at the front of Graystone Hall. "Forty-five minutes, Dennis," said he to his driver, snapping his watch. "Twenty-one miles; you'll learn it after a while."