The colonel crossed his legs and uncrossed them again; he looked straight into the other’s eyes; his own narrowed with thought.
“I’ll tell you,” said he. “I don’t know much about the Street or high finance or industrial development. I’m a plain soldier; I’m not a manufacturer and I’m not a speculator. I understand perfectly that you can’t have great changes without somebody’s getting hurt in the shuffle. It is beyond me to decide whether the new industrial arrangements with the stock-jobber on top instead of the manufacturer will make for better or for worse—but I know this; it is against the fundamental law to do evil that good may come. And you fellows in Wall Street, when, to get rich quick, you lie about stocks in order to buy cheap and then lie another way to sell dear; when you make a panic out of whole cloth, as you did in 1903, because, having made about all you can out of things going up, you want to make all you can out of them going down; when you play foot-ball with great railway properties and insurance properties, because you are as willing to rob the dead as the living; when you do all that, and when your imitators, who haven’t so much brains or so much decency as you, when they buy up legislatures and city councils; and their imitators run the Black Hand business and hold people up who have money and are not strong enough, they think, to hunt them down—why, not being a philosopher but just a plain soldier, I call it bad, rotten bad. What’s more, I can tell you the American people won’t stand for it.”
“You think they can help themselves?”
“I know they can. You fellows are big, but you won’t last over night if the American people get really aroused. And they are stirring in their sleep and kicking off the bed-clothes.”
“Yet you ought to belong to the conservatives.”
“I do. That’s why the situation is dangerous. You as an old San Franciscan ought to remember how conservative was that celebrated Vigilance Committee. It is when the long-suffering, pusillanimous, conservative element gets fighting mad that something is doing.”
“Maybe,” muttered Keatcham thoughtfully. “I believe we can manage for you better than you can for yourselves; but when the brakes are broken good driving can’t stop the machine; all the chauffeur can do is to keep the middle of the road. I like to be beaten as little as any of them; but I’m not a fool. Winter, you are used to accomplishing things; what is your notion of the secret?”
“Knowing when to stop exhausting trumps, I reckon—but you don’t play cards.”
“It is the same old game whatever you play,” said the railway king. He did not pursue the discussion; his questions, Winter had found, invariably had a purpose, and that purpose was never argument. He lay back on the big leather cushions of the lounge, his long, lean fingers drumming on the table beside him and an odd smile playing about the corners of his mouth; his next speech dived into new waters. He said: “Have those men from New York got Atkins, yet?”
“They couldn’t find him,” answered the colonel. “I have been having him shadowed, on my own idea—I think he stabbed you, though I have no proof of it; I take it you have proof of your matter.”