“Millions,” replied the colonel.
Again Keatcham nodded. “I thought so,” said he. “Of course you are all off; Wall Street is as necessary to the commonwealth as the pores to your skin; they don’t make the poison in the system any more than the pores do; they only let it escape. And I suppose you think that big financiers who control the trusts and the railways and—”
“Us,” the colonel struck in, “well?”
“You think we are thieves and liars and murderers and despots?”
“All of that,” said the colonel placidly; “also fools.”
“You certainly don’t mince your words.”
“You don’t want me to. What use would my opinion be in a one-thousandth attenuation? You’re no homeopath; and whatever else you may be, you’re no coward.”
“Yet, you think I surrendered to Mercer? You think I did it because I was afraid he would kill me? I suppose he would have killed me if I hadn’t, eh?”
“He can speak for himself about that; he seems—well, an earnest sort of man. But I don’t think you gave in because you were afraid, if that is what you mean. You are no more afraid than he was! You wanted to live, probably; you had big things on hand. The Midland was only a trump in the game; you could win the odd trick with something else; you let the Midland go.”
“Pretty close,”—Keatcham really smiled—“but there is a good deal more of it. I was shut up with the results of my—my work. He did it very cleverly. I had nothing to distract me. There were the big type-written pages about the foolish people who had lost their money, in some cases really through my course, mostly because they got scared and let go and were wiped out when, if they had had confidence in me and held on, they would be very much better off, now. But they didn’t, and they were ruined and they starved and took their boys out of college and mortgaged their confounded homes that had been in their families ever since Adam; and the old people died of broken hearts and the girls went wrong and some of the idiotic quitters killed themselves—it was not the kind of crowd you would want shut up with you in the dark! I was shut up with them. He had some sort of way of switching off the lights from the outside. I never saw a face or heard a voice. I would have to sit there in the dark after he thought I had read enough to occupy my mind. It—was unpleasant. Perhaps you suppose that brought me round to his way of thinking?”