“Jim, how does he do what he does? I cannot make out from anything I have read or you have told me, how he creates those panics and makes all that money.”
“No one has ever been able to figure it out,” I answered. “I understand the stock business, but I cannot for the life of me see how he does it. He has none of the money powers in league with him, that’s sure, for in the mood he has been in during the past two years it would be impossible for him to work with them, even if his salvation depended on it. The mention of any of the big ‘System’ men drives him to a fury. He has to-day made more money than any one man ever made in a day since the world began, and he had only commenced his work when he quit to please me. As I stand in the Exchange and watch him do it, it seems commonplace and simple. Afterward it is beyond my comprehension. At the gait he is going, the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould fortunes combined will look tiny in comparison with the one he will have in a few years. It is beyond my power of figuring out, and it gives me a headache every time I try to see through it.”
Chapter VIII.
A number of times during the following year, and finally on the anniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge of panic, only to turn the market and save “the Street” in the end. His profits were fabulous. Already his fortune was estimated to be between two and three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world. His name had become one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in. Wall Street had come to regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, as inevitably successful. Now and again he would jump into the market when some of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put them to rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until it looked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side as he was wont to do on the down. At such times he was the idol of the Exchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him who pulls them down. Once when war news flashed over the wires from Washington and rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and Congressmen selling the market short on advance information, when the “Standard Oil” banks had put up money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash seemed inevitable, Bob suddenly smashed the loan market by offering to lend one hundred millions at four per cent.; and by buying and bidding up prices at the same time, he put the whole Washington crowd and its New York accomplices to disastrous rout and caused them to lose millions. He continued his operations with increasing violence and increasing profits up to the fourth anniversary of the tragedy. On the intervening anniversary I had been compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull down the entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off. But with his growing madness my influence was waning. Each raid it was with greater difficulty that I got his ear.
Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be running into something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused to accede to my appeal, telling me that he would not stop, even if Randolph & Randolph were doomed to go down in the crash. It had become known on the floor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in his frenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the members of the Exchange with triple eyed suspense. When it was clear from his emphatic gestures and raised voice—for he was in a reckless mood from drink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions—that I could not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles to throw over stocks in advance of him. Suddenly, after I had turned from him in despair, there flashed into my mind an idea. The situation was desperate. I was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justified in making this last try. I rushed back to him. “Bob, good-bye,” I whispered in his ear, “good-bye. In ten minutes you will get word that Jim Randolph has cut his throat!” He stopped as though I had plunged a knife into him, struck his forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild brown eyes came a sickening look of fear.
“Stop, Jim, for God’s sake, don’t say that to me. My cup is full now. Don’t tell me I am to have that crime on my soul.” He thought a moment. “I don’t know whether you mean it, Jim, but I can take no chances, not for all the money in the world, not even for revenge. Wait here, Jim.” He yelled for his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts of the room. He sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for the Amalgamated-pole. The day was saved.
Presently he came back to me. “Jim, I must have a talk with you. Come over to my office.” When we got there he turned the key and stood in front of me. His great eyes looked full into mine. In college days, gazing into their brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroines of always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures far back in the burning Yule log flames. But there were no joyous beings in the haunted depths of Bob’s eyes that day.
“Jim, you gave me an awful scare,” he said brokenly. “Don’t ever do it again. I have little left to live for. To be sure I have some feeling for mother, Fred, and sisters. But for you I have a love second only to that I should have felt for Beulah had I been allowed to have her. The thought, Jim, that I had wrecked your life, with all you have to live for, would have been the last straw. My life is purgatory. Beulah is only an ever-present curse to me—a ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minute with a blind frenzy to revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorse that I have not already done so. If I did not have her, perhaps in time I could forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devils whose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have taken from that main shaft of hell I might do things that would at least bring quiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of Beulah Sands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brain all the time the song, ‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’ It is impossible to give it up, Jim. I must have revenge. I must stop this machinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each year than all the rest of earth’s grinders combined. Every day I delay I become more fiendish in my desires. Jim, don’t think I do not know that I have literally turned into a fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in the mirror, I shudder. When I think of what I was when your father stood us up in his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing business, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except with rum. You know what it means for me to say this, me who started with all the pride of a Brownley; but it is so, Jim. The other night I went home with my soul frozen with thoughts of the past and with my brain ablaze with rum, intending to end it all. I got out my revolver, and woke Beulah, but as I said, ‘Bob is going to kill Beulah and himself,’ she laughed that sweet child’s laugh and clapping her hands said, ‘Bob is so good to play with Beulah,’ and then I thought of that devil Reinhart and the other fiends of the ‘System’ being left to continue their work unhindered and I could not do it. I must have revenge; I must smash that heart-crushing machinery. Then I can go, and take Beulah with me. Now, Jim, let us have it clearly understood once and for all.”
Remorse and softness were past; he was the Indian again. “I am going to wreck that hell-annex some day, and that some day will be the next time I start in. Don’t argue with me, don’t misunderstand me. To-day you stopped me. I don’t know whether you meant what you threatened; I don’t care now. It is just as well that I stopped, for the ‘System’s’ machine will be there whenever I start in again. It loses nothing of its fiendishness, none of its destructive powers by grinding, but, on the contrary, as you know, it increases its speed every day it runs. Now, Jim Randolph, I want to tell you that you must get yours and the house’s affairs in such shape that you won’t be hurt when I go into that human rat-pit the next time, for when I come from it the New York Stock Exchange and the ‘System’ will have had their spines unjointed. Yes, and I’ll have their hearts out, too. Neither will ever again be able to take from the American people their savings and their manhood and womanhood and give them in exchange unadulterated torment. I am going to be fair with you, Jim; this is the last time I will discuss the subject. After this you must take your chance with the rest of those who have to do with the cursed business. When I strike again, none will be spared. I will wreck ‘the Street’, and the innocent will go down with the guilty, if they have any stocks on hand at that time.
“My power, Jim, is unlimited; nothing can stay it. I am not going to explain any further. You have seen me work. You must know that my power is greater than the ‘System’s,’ and you and I and ‘the Street’ have always known that the ‘System’ is more powerful than the Government, more powerful than are the courts, legislatures, Congress, and the President of the United States combined, that it absolutely controls the foundation on which they rest—the money of the nation. But my power is greater, a thousand, yes, a million times greater than theirs. Jim, they say that I have made more money than any man in the world. They say that I have five hundred millions of dollars, but the fools don’t keep track of my movements. They only know that I have pulled five hundred millions from my open whirls, the ones they have had an opportunity to keep tab on. But I tell you that I have made even more in my secret deals than the amount they have seen me take. I have had my agents with my capital in every deal, every steal the ‘System’ has rigged up. The world has been throwing up its hands in horror because Carnegie, the blacksmith of Pittsburgh, pulled off three hundred millions of swag in the Steel hold-up—yes, swag, Jim. Don’t scowl as though you wanted to read me a lecture on the coarseness of my language. I have learned to call this game of ours by its right name. It is not business enterprise with earned profits as results, but pulled-off tricks with bags of loot—black-jack swag—for their end.