"'Now, you listen,' I said to Standley and Ackerman—and I wasn't afraid of them—'I'll show you how to make something that everybody has to have. I'll put speed into the work of every laboring man—I'll double his efficiency, double his hours and halve his pay, and I'll cut off his ability to help himself. I'll make labor unions impossible. I'll gear up, pace up, stiffen up the whole theory of life and work, I tell you, gentlemen,' said I, 'so that one hour will count for two, one man will count for two, one wage will count for two! Do you get me, gentlemen?' I asked of them—just those two were in the office then, and the door was locked behind me. 'You're big men,' said I, 'but you're not as big as I am. It's a cheap bluff about that gun,' I said to Ackerman. 'Put it up. You wouldn't dare kill me, or dare do anything I didn't want you to. I came to you because it was easier to walk down this hall than it was to walk across the street. Do you want me to walk across the street?'"
Rawn chuckled gently; and now indeed he did present the very image of self-confidence. "Well, then, they saw it," said he finally. "They didn't want me to walk across the street! Standley laughed at Ackerman. 'No use to kill him yet,' says he. I laughed then, we all laughed. 'No, it wouldn't be any use,' said I to them. 'The question is, how much I ought to give you.'
"Ackerman took it hard. He's a bulldog sort of man. 'You're damned impudent!' said he. 'I'll have you fired.'
"'I'm fired now!' says I to them. 'You think I'm only a common clerk. Didn't both of you come up from clerking? Can't I take you higher yet than where you are now?' The Old Man, Standley, nodded then; and pretty soon he reached out and took my hand. 'Come in, son,' says he. 'You're on.'
"Well, that's nearly all there was about it, Charley. I say to you, too, 'Come in, son—you're on.'
VIII
"Now then," he went on in his monologue, "we're up to the wait while the laws are being made, and while all the plans for financing the proposition are going through. We'll have to pro-rate this stuff with the big railway companies, of course, and with the oil and steel industries, and some of the other leading combinations—Standley and Ackerman'll have no trouble, with their acquaintance among the big men of the East. You can't stop such men. Give them this idea of mine and you can't keep them from controlling this country. These are things that can't be altered."
"But it will alter the world!" exclaimed young Halsey, at last beginning to arouse. "Who knows how much power there is in the water of even one big river? You can use it over and over again. Why, on that one river—"
"Our river," said John Rawn, smiling.
"The people's river!" retorted Halsey fiercely. "Their river! God made that river, and all the rest of them, for something, I don't know what. But it wasn't for this."