“What are you going to do?” he cried. “For God’s sake, Matt, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Go to your desk,” I commanded. And he quieted down and went. I hadn’t been schooling him in the fire drill for fifteen years in vain.
I went up the street and into the great banking and brokerage house of Galloway & Co. I made my way through the small army of guards, behind which the old beast of prey was intrenched, and into his private den. There he sat, at a small, plain table, in the middle of a room without any article of furniture in it but his table and his chair. On the table was a small inkstand, perfectly clean, a steel pen, equally clean, on the rest attached to it. And that was all—not a letter, not a scrap of paper, not a sign of work or an intention to work. It might have been the desk of a man who did nothing; in fact, it was the desk of a man who had so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to dispatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read in the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and in the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision—the greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway had both.
He respected Roebuck; Roebuck feared him. Roebuck did have some sort of a conscience, distorted though it was, and the dictator of savageries Galloway would have scorned to commit. Galloway had no professions of conscience—beyond such small glozing of hypocrisy as any man must put on if he wishes to be intrusted with the money of a public that associates professions of religion and appearances of respectability with honesty. Roebuck’s passion was wealth—to see the millions heap up and up. Galloway had that passion, too—I have yet to meet the millionaire who is not avaricious and even stingy. But Galloway’s chief passion was power—to handle men as a junk merchant handles rags, to plan and lead campaigns of conquest with his golden legions, and to distribute the spoils like an autocrat who is careless how they are divided, since all belongs to him, whenever he wishes to claim it.
He pierced me with his blue eyes, keen as a youth’s, though his face was seamed with the scars of seventy tumultuous years. He extended toward me over the table his broad, stubby white hand—the hand of a builder, of a constructive genius. “How are you, Blacklock?” said he. “What can I do for you?” He just touched my hand before dropping it, and resuming that idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like everyone who came into that room and that presence, had a sense of an interminable procession behind me, a procession of men who must be seen by this master-mover, that they might submit important and pressing affairs to him for decision. It was unnecessary for him to tell anyone to be brief and pointed.
“I shall have to go to the wall today,” said I, taking a paper from my pocket, “unless you save me. Here is a statement of my assets and liabilities. I call to your attention my Coal holdings. I was one of the eight men whom Roebuck has got round him for the new combine—it is a secret, but I assume you know all about it.”
He laid the paper before him, put on his nose-glasses and looked at it.
“If you will save me,” I continued, “I will transfer to you, in a block, all my Coal holdings. They will be worth double my total liabilities within three months—as soon as this lockout is settled and the reorganization is announced. I leave it to your sense of justice to decide whether I shall have any part of them back when this storm blows over.”
“Why didn’t you go to Roebuck?” he asked, without looking up.
“Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me.”