“I have asked Gates,” said Galt. “I am sure of Valentine.”
Another way of Galt’s was to stop at the peak of his argument, and wait. When the other man in his mind is coming over to your side a word too much will often stop him. Galt knew he was winning. There was a long silence. They began to wonder if Mordecai was asleep. He was a man of few but surprising contradictions. Conservative, cautious, axiomatic, he had on the other side great courage of mind and a latent capacity for daring. He distrusted intuition as a faculty, yet on rare occasions he astonished his associates by arriving most unexpectedly at an intuitive conclusion, knowing it to be such, and acting upon it with fatalistic intensity. On those occasions he was never wrong.
Now he sat up slowly and began to toy with a jeweled paper knife.
“Nobody vill understand id, Mr. Gald.... Nobody vill understand id.... Ve accepd your plan. Ve promise all our invluence to use zat you vill be made chairman of ze board,—on one condition. You vill resign iv ve ask id immediately.”
Galt unhesitatingly accepted the condition.
When he was gone Mordecai said to his partners: “Ve haf a gread man discovered. Id iss only zat ve zhall a liddle manage him.”
v
In September the plan was brought out. Though it caused a good deal of dubious comment the verdict of general opinion was ultimately favorable. The security holders liked it because they were not assessed in the ordinary way. They received, instead, the “privilege” so-called of buying new securities.
When all arrangements were completed the assets of the old Great Midwestern Railroad Company, meaning the railroad itself and all its possessions and appurtenances, were put up at auction. Mordecai & Co., acting as trustees, were the only bidders.
They delivered the assets to the new Great Midwestern Railway Company, which had been previously incorporated under the laws of New Jersey. Afterward there was a stockholders’ meeting in Jersey City, in one of those corporation tenements where rooms are hired in rotation by corporations that never live in them but come once a year for an hour or two to transact some formal business and thereby satisfy the fiction of legal residence.