They had delivered the steel age. The steel industry was their private possession to do with as they damn pleased. They could make a circus of it if they liked. They did. Their way with it had become a national problem. The steel industry was much too important to be conducted in that manner. It kept the country in a state of nerves. These wild, untamable behemoths would have to be bought out. They were willing to sell. There was a ludicrous fiction among them that they were weary of doing, whereas they were only sated with it. However, as they were willing to be bought out and as to be rid of them had become a public necessity, there remained only the question of how. It would take all the spare money there was in the country. Yet it would have to be done. That is what the sign meant.
John called his crowd together saying: “This is the tall goodbye if we want to get out.”
They did. He pledged them in writing to leave everything in his hands and then returned to Wall Street where for months past he had been preparing his ground unobserved. In one of the new steel skyscrapers he had established himself an office. On the door was his name—
John Breakspeare
under that
American Steel Company
North American Manufacturing Company
and nothing more. Inside was a private room of his own with a stock ticker and a desk with a lot of telephones on it. Beyond was a large meeting room furnished with a long table, chairs, brass cuspidors, a humidor and a water cooler. From the window was a panoramic view of New York harbor. A very simple establishment one would think. Yet it was the center of a web radiating in all directions. Nothing much could happen in Wall Street without causing an alarm on his desk, for he had made some very excellent and timely connections. His private telephone wires reached the sources of information. One of them, it would have surprised everyone to know, ran to the office of John Sabath, with whom he had come to confidential terms. So it was that perhaps no one man, save only Bullguard, knew more than he about what was invisibly taking place under that sign which stood higher and higher in the money firmament.
What was visible had by this time become very exciting. The newspapers were giving astonished publicity to the doings of the golden bulls. What they did in Wall Street was recorded by the financial writers; what they did at large was written by the news reporters. And the public’s imagination was inflamed. Incipient Napoleons of finance, greedy little lambs, comet riders, haberdashers’ clerks, preachers, husbands of actresses, dentists, small business men, delicatessen shop-keepers, jockeys, authors, commuters, winesellers, planters, prizefighters, crows and jackals clamored together at the Wall Street tickers. From ten to three they watched steel shares go up and down, betting on them, trying to out-guess the steel men who ordered their fluctuations. In the evening all this motley appeared at the Waldorf Hotel, sitting in rows along Peacock Alley, walking to and fro as if at ease, peering in at the dining-room doors to glimpse the lords and barons of steel at their food and drink.
Everybody loved it. This was the Steel Court,—a court of twenty kings, with its rabble and fringe and jesters, sycophants in favor, men of mystery passing, the unseen lesser deeply bowing to the greater, sour envy taking judgment at a distance, greed on ass-ear wings listening everywhere. One might hear a word to make him rich to-morrow. And the Machiavelli, too. That was Sabath, his beard now grey, otherwise the same, sitting always by himself, darting here and there his piercing eyes.
This court made news. Often the steel men, bored with gaping admiration, would extemporize a midnight stock market and buy and sell their shares among themselves. Each morning as addenda to the regular stock market reports would appear: “Transactions at the Waldorf.” The newest rumors floated here. No financial editor was safe to go to bed until the Waldorf grill room lights were out, for it was generally late at night that the steel men spilled their secrets. One was overheard to say: