“Yes, Mr. Ford, in the way of unprincipled scoundrelism it was,” declared Enoch with some heat. “Piracy on the high seas of finance. Piracy, pure and simple,” he declared, his stern voice rising savagely.
“Why, Mr. Crane, you surprise me!” exclaimed Mrs. Ford.
“Piracy, madam; there’s no other word for it.”
“Um!” exclaimed Ford. “You call a man a pirate and a scoundrel, because he’s successful—because he’s got grit, and nerve, and brains enough to carry a deal through that made him, if I recollect it right, over a million dollars in a single day?”
“I do,” snapped Enoch, “when that million means the financial ruin of hundreds of honest families. Sam Van Cortlandt ruined them by the wholesale. He ruined them from New Orleans to San Francisco,” he cried hotly. “Many of them have never recovered.”
Mrs. Ford raised her thin eyebrows to the speaker in silent astonishment.
“Six months later,” continued Enoch brusquely, squaring himself before the fireless grate, his hands clenched behind him, “Van Cortlandt again held his grip on the cotton market. Those who had managed to escape the first crash, went down under the second. A few came out limping, but he got most of them in the end—more than one he drove to suicide. Then they thought of running him for governor. Instead, the Supreme Court ran him uncomfortably close to the penitentiary for complicity in bribery relative to his mining territory in Montana. You have asked me about Sam Van Cortlandt. Very well; I have told you.”
He shut his square jaws hard, and gazed for some seconds at the pattern in the faded carpet.
Mrs. Ford did not utter a syllable; she sat immovable on the sofa, redder under the shock of Enoch’s tirade, though none too willing to believe it. The Van Cortlandt’s millions and social position, their niceness to her daughter, and the glamour of her being welcomed to their exclusive society serving only too readily as a balm to heal the gaping wound left by Enoch’s words.
Enoch had slashed deep; he had bared the truth about Sam Van Cortlandt down to the bone.