Haddon found two stiff drinks of whisky needful to attract his interest to his breakfast. Then he broke the moody silence which had marked him.
“I say, old man,” he began, “you made a pretty fair speech to the boys last night. We’re holding down more than three hundred thousand acres of land in the Cumberlands. We’re in deep, and some of the fellows were getting cold feet until I brought you on to tell them something about our holdings.”
Joslin sat looking at him in silence, and he went on presently.
“You see, our money has been in there for twenty years, some of it—that was long before I went into the Company, of course. The holding of raw resources is a waiting game—you cash in stiff after a long wait. That’s what we’ve got to do now.
“But the way to handle this thing is to crowd when the line begins to break. It’s time now for us to begin to crowd. We’ve got to begin to cash in before long, for the interest and taxes have been eating us up long enough.
“Now, we need a good man down in there. The boys have been sending me because they couldn’t do any better. You and I between us know about how much I know—we both know that you know a lot more than I do. Now, you’ve been talking to me a lot of rot about starting a college or a school, or something—I don’t remember what all you were saying. Forget it! Cut out all that business about saving your country. Think a little bit about saving yourself. This business of doing a whole lot for other people is all right on paper, but when it comes down to practical life there’s nothing in it. A fellow’s got to think of himself.
“Now, what are you doing for yourself? You’re sitting here in my house—not that I want to rub it in by telling you so—in a suit of my clothes and a pair of my shoes. You’re wearing my shirt and my socks right now. You haven’t got a dollar of your own money in your clothes to-day. You told me that you had a wife and a grandmother. What are you going to do about them? Any way you look, you’re in a fine position to build a college! Why, hell!
“On the other hand, New York ain’t such a slow village, is she? Pretty nice, eh? Something of a party last night, what? Some girls, huh?
“Now, listen. You might do a lot worse than staying right here in New York this fall and winter—you’d be on the pay roll all right. We could make a pretty good thing of it for you if you went in with us and stood by us through thick or thin, right or wrong. We might think of a lot of things we’d like to ask you.
“You’ve been talking a lot of bally rot about your duty to these people—seeing that we wouldn’t rob them in the price we paid for the land or the oil leases. You know mighty well we can go down there and lease a whole farm a hundred years for a dollar. Now, you can crab our whole act—that’s easy to see—if you go down there and tell those people they’re fools, and that they ought to have two dollars an acre for their oil rights—more’n we’ve paid them for all their coal and their timber and their land any time these last twenty years! You can see easily enough from the class of men I’ve shown you here last night that we’ve got all the money we need, all the money that anybody needs to pay for what we want. But we want loyalty. We want service. We want someone to stand with us, thick or thin, right or wrong. Do you understand?”