The Ball of Fire

by George Randolph Chester; Lillian Chester

Tremendous extra! The contracts of freightage, subject strictly to the Inter-State Commerce law, between the A.-P. and the cereal trust, the metal trust, the fuel trust, the cloth trust, and all the other iniquitous combinations in restraint of everything! Wow! Zowie! That was the hot one! The A.-P. was the main stem, and within thirteen seconds of the appearance on the streets of the tremendous extra, every other fragile branchlet of a railroad not under the immediate protection of the A.-P., was reduced to a shrivel, and its stocks began to drop with the sickening plunge of an unopened parachute!

Gail Sargent kept Nanette on the rush for extras from the first yell on the streets, and she read every word, including the underlines on the miscellaneous portraits of Allison and the funny pi-lines which invariably occurred in the middle of the most interesting sentences.

It was true, all true! Here was the first step in Allison’s tremendous project an accomplished fact. The rest of it would be gradually revealed, from day to day, as suited his needs, and the empire he had planned would spread, until its circles touched, and overlapped, and broke into an intricate webbing, over all the land and water of the earth! And she was to be the Empress!

Was she? Through all the night she had battled that question, and the battle had left traces of darkness around her luminous eyes. First, she had been in the swirl of his tremendous compulsion, overwhelmed by the sheer physical force of him, captured not by siege but by sortie. Then had come the dazzling splendour of his great plan, a temptation of power, of might, of unlimited rulership, in the spoils of which, and the honour of which, and the glory of which, she would share. Next, in the midst of her expanding anticipation, there had come, as out of a clear sky, a sudden inexplicable fear. It was a shrinking, almost like a chill, which had attacked her. Allison himself! The sheer physical dominance of him; the tempestuous mastery of him; and again she felt that breathless sensation of utter helplessness which she had experienced in the little lookout house. It was as if he were pulling the very life out of her, to the upbuilding of his own strength! It was in the very nature of him to sweep her away by storm; it was a part of his very bigness. He was colossal, gigantic, towering! And she had conquered this giant, had been the motive of his strength, the very pinnacle of his cloud-topping ambition! There was pride in that, pride and to spare. It distressed her that again and again came that impulse of fear, that shrinking. A new thought dawned. Perhaps this was the thing which she had desired, the thing for which she had been waiting; to be taken, and crushed.

Another disturbance came to her. This mighty plan of Allison’s. The exaltation of achievement, the dazzling glory of accomplishment, had blinded her to the processes by which the end must be gained, and the fact which drew her attention to this was the remembrance that her Uncle Jim was to be protected! What about the others? For Allison to gain control and dominion over thousands of now segregated interests, those thousands must lose their own control. What would become of them?

Pshaw! That was the way of the world, particularly of the commercial world. As her father had often expressed it, the big fish ate the little fish because fish was the only food for fish; and Allison was the biggest one of them all. That was the way of him; to devour that he might live. Even here, far from him, and safe in her dainty little chintz hung suite, she felt the dominance of him. Turn her eyes where she would, with the lids open or closed, he filled her vision, not in his normal stature, but grown to the dimensions of his force, filling the sky, the earth, the sea, blotting out everything! There was no escaping him. He had come to claim her, and she belonged to him; that is, unless she chose to call upon a strength still latent in her. There was a something else which she could not define just now, which seemed to call to her persistently through the darkness. A voice—but the typo for colossus stood between! She wondered if she were happy. She wondered what her Aunt Helen would say. Bigness and power and dominance; she had admired them all her life.

Late in the afternoon Jim Sargent came home, drawn, fagged, and with hollows under his eyes. He had a violent headache, and he looked ten years older. He walked slowly into the library where Mrs. Sargent and Mrs. Davies and Gail were discussing the future of Vedder Court, and dropped into a chair.

Grace Sargent rang a bell instantly. When Jim felt that way, he needed a hot drink first of all.

“What is the matter?” she asked him, the creases of worry flashing into her brow.

“It’s been a hard day,” he explained, forcing himself, with an effort, to answer. Years of persistent experience had taught him to follow the line of least resistance. “There has been a panic on ’Change. Railroads are going to smash all up and down the line. Allison’s new A.-P. road. It’s the star piracy of the century. Allison has brought into the railroad game the same rough-shod methods he used in his traction manipulations.”