“He knows both what is and what isn’t.”
“Galt does?”
He nodded and at the same time implored me by gesture not to let my voice rise. “May be anywhere around ... in the next room,” he said, hardly above a whisper. “Yes. He knows things that haven’t happened. If there’s such a gift as pre-vision he has it.”
“If that were true,” I objected, “he would have all the money in the world.”
“Just the same it’s true,” said Harbinger, rising and reaching for his coat. He looked at me a little askance, doubtless with misgivings as to the propriety of having talked so much.
CHAPTER III GALT
i
It was true of Galt, as Harbinger said, that he had no friends; it was not therefore true that his world was full of enemies. He had many acquaintances and no intimates. He was a solitary worker in the money vineyards, keeping neither feud nor tryst with any clan. His reputation in Wall Street was formless and cloudy. Everybody knew him, or knew something about him; for twenty years he had been a pestiferous gadfly on the Stock Exchange, lighting here and there, turning up suddenly in situations where he had to be settled with or bought off, swaggering, bluffing, baiting, playing the greatest of all games of wit with skill and daring—and apparently getting nowhere in the end. Once he had engaged in a lone-handed fight with a powerful banking group over the reorganization of a railroad, demanding to be elected to the directorate as the largest minority stockholder. The bankers were indignant. The audacity of a stock market gambler wanting to sit on a railroad board! What would anybody think? He took his case to the courts and was beaten.