But at that Mr. De Malquit turned and bent on him a very troubled look, which, however, did not move Mr. Osterman any. “Mr. Osterman,” he said, “I am not here to waste either your time or mine. I am in a corner, and I am desperate. Unless you can let me have some of this stock at a reasonable price I am done for. That will bring too much trouble to those who are near and dear to me for me to care to live any longer. I am too old to begin over again. Let me have some of it now. To-morrow will be too late. Perhaps it won’t make any difference to you, but I won’t be here to pay anybody. I have a wife who has been an invalid for two years. I have a young son and daughter in school. Unless I can go on—” He turned, paused, swallowed, and then moistened his lips.
But Mr. Osterman was not inclined to believe any broker or to be worked by sentiment. “Sorry. One hundred is the best I can do.”
At that De Malquit struck his hands together, a resounding smack, and then went out, turning upon Osterman a last despairing glance. That same night De Malquit killed himself, a thing which Osterman had assumed he would not do—or so he said, and I resigned. The man had really been in earnest. And, to make matters worse, only three months later De Malquit’s wife killed herself, taking poison in the small apartment to which she had been forced to remove once the breadwinner of the family was gone. According to the pictures and descriptions published in the newspapers at the time she was, as De Malquit had said, an invalid, practically bedridden. Also, according to the newspapers, De Malquit had in more successful days been charitably inclined, having contributed liberally to the support of an orphan asylum, the Gratiot Home for Orphans, the exterior appearance of which Osterman was familiar with. This fact was published in all of the papers and was said to have impressed Osterman, who was said always to have had a friendly leaning toward orphans. I have since heard that only his very sudden death three years ago prevented his signing a will which contained a proviso leaving the bulk of his great fortune to a holding company instructed to look after orphans. Whether this is truth or romance I do not know.
2. The case of Henry Greasadick, another of Mr. Osterman’s competitors, was similar. Mr. Greasadick has been described to me as a very coarse and rough man, without any education of any kind, but one who understood oil prospecting and refining, and who was finally, though rather unfortunately for himself, the cause of the development by Osterman of the immensely valuable Arroya Verde field. It is not likely that Greasadick would ever have made the fortune from this field that Osterman and his confrères were destined to reap. However, it is equally true that he was most shabbily treated in the matter, far more so than was De Malquit in regard to his very questionable holdings and sales. The details of the Arroya Verde field and Greasadick are as follows: Greasadick has been described to me as a big, blustery, dusty soul, uncouth in manners and speech, but one who was a sound and able prospector. And Osterman, it appears, having laid the foundation of his fortune by treating De Malquit and others as he had, had come west, first to the lumber properties of Washington and Oregon, where he bought immense tracts; and later, to the oil lands of California and Mexico, in which state and country he acquired very important and eventually (under him) productive holdings. Now it chanced that in his wanderings through southern California and Arizona he came across Greasadick, who had recently chanced upon a virgin oil field which, although having very little capital himself, he was secretly attempting to develop. In fact, Greasadick had no money when he discovered this oil field and was borrowing from L. T. Drewberry, of the K. B. & B., and one or two others on the strength of his prospects. It also appears that Drewberry it was who first called the attention of Osterman to Greasadick and his find and later plotted with him to oust Greasadick. Osterman was at that time one of three or four men who were interested in developing the K. B. & B. into a paying property by extending it into Arizona.
At any rate, Greasadick’s holdings were one hundred miles from any main line road, and there was very little water, only a thin trickle that came down through a cut. True, the K. B. & B. was about to build a spur to Larston in order to aid him, but Larston, once the line was built to it, was fourteen miles away and left Greasadick with the problem of piping or hauling his oil to that point. Once he heard of it Osterman saw at a glance that by a little deft manœuvring it could be made very difficult for Greasadick to do anything with his property except sell, and this manœuvring he proceeded to do. By buying the land above Greasadick’s, which was a mountain slope, and then because of a thin wall of clay and shale dividing the Arroya Verde, in which lay Greasadick’s land, from the Arroya Blanco, which was unwatered and worthless, being able to knock the same through, he was able to divert the little water upon which Greasadick then depended to do his work. Only it was all disguised as a landslide—an act of God—and a very expensive one for Greasadick to remedy. As for the proposed spur to Larston—well, that was easy to delay indefinitely. There was Drewberry, principal stockholder of the K. B. & B., who joined with Osterman in this adroit scheme. Finally, there was the simple device of buying in the mortgage given by Greasadick to Drewberry and others and waiting until such time as he was hard-pressed to force him to sell out. This was done through Whitley, Osterman’s efficient assistant, who in turn employed another to act for him. Throughout, Osterman saw to it that he personally did not appear.
Of course Greasadick, when he discovered what the plot was, roared and charged like a bull. Indeed before he was eventually defeated he became very threatening and dangerous, attempting once even to kill Drewberry. Yet he was finally vanquished and his holdings swept away. With no money to make a new start and seeing others prosper where he had failed for want of a little capital, he fell into a heavy gloom and finally died there in Larston in the bar that had been erected after the K. B. & B. spur had been completed. Through all of this Mr. Osterman appears to have been utterly indifferent to the fate of the man he was undermining. He cared so little what became of him afterwards that he actually admitted, or remarked to Whitley, who remained one of his slaves to the end, that one could scarcely hope to build a large fortune without indulging in a few such tricks.
3. Lastly, there was the matter of the C. C. and Q. L. Railroad, the major portion of the stock of which he and Frank O. Parm, of the Parm-Baggott chain of stores, had managed to get hold of by the simple process of buying a few shares and then bringing stockholders’ suits under one and another name in order to embarrass President Doremus and his directors, and frighten investors so they would let go of the stock. And this stock, of course, was picked up by Osterman and Parm, until at last these two became the real power behind the road and caused it to be thrown into the hands of a receiver and then sold to themselves. That was two years before ever Michael Doremus, the first president of the road, resigned. When he did he issued a statement saying that he was being hounded by malign financial influences and that the road was as sound as ever it had been, which was true. Only it could not fight all of these suits and the persistent rumors of mismanagement that were afoot. As a matter of fact, Mr. Doremus died only a year after resigning, declaring at that time that a just God ruled and that time would justify himself. But Mr. Osterman and Mr. Parm secured the road, and finally incorporated it with the P. B. & C. as is well known.
III
Some data taken from the biographic study of the late J. H. Osterman, multimillionaire and oil king, prepared for Lingley’s Magazine and by it published in its issue for October, 1917.
In order to understand the late J. H. Osterman and his great success and his peculiar faults one would first have to have known and appreciated the hard and colorless life that had surrounded him as a boy. His father, in so far as I have been able to ascertain, was a crude, hard, narrow man who had been made harder and, if anything, cruder by the many things which he had been compelled to endure. He was not a kind or soft-spoken man to his children. He died when John Osterman, the central figure of this picture, was eleven. Osterman’s mother, so it is said, was a thin and narrow and conventional woman, as much harried and put upon by her husband as ever he was by life. Also there was one sister, unattractive and rough-featured, an honest and narrow girl who, like her mother, worked hard up to nineteen, when her mother died. After that, both parents being dead, she and her brother attempted to manage the farm, and did so fairly successfully for two years when the sister decided to marry; and Osterman consenting, she took over the farm. This falling in with his mood and plans, he ceased farming for good and betook himself to the Texas oil fields, where he appears to have mastered some of the details of oil prospecting and refining.