Adrift in the Unknown; or, Queer Adventures in a Queer Realm

by William Wallace Cook

Not only was Mr. Emmet Gilhooly a guest of Professor Quinn in the steel castle last night, but so also were Hon. Augustus Popham, the coal baron; J. Archibald Meigs, of Wall Street, late manipulator of the corner in wheat and now engineering a corner in cotton, and Hannibal Markham, well known as the instigator of a plot to control the food supply of the United States.

What has become of these four millionaires and Napoleons of finance? They have gone with Quinn and his castle, disappearing as utterly as though the earth had opened and swallowed them.

Fabulous rewards were offered by the relatives of the missing millionaires for any information relative to the fate that had overtaken them. Foul play was suspected, and the financial world stood aghast and dumbly wondered what was to happen to the business of the country if it really developed, beyond all peradventure, that Gilhooly, Popham, Meigs, and Markham had been eliminated from commercial affairs.

The influence of these four was vast and far-reaching, and they were scheming to make their grip on the republic's resources even more secure and relentless. If their plans carried, no man could eat, or clothe himself, or warm his body and drive his manufacturing engines, or travel from place to place and ship the product of his mills without paying tribute to Gilhooly, Popham, Meigs, and Markham. Should those schemes, titanic in conception, be worked out to their manifest conclusion, four men would hold the destiny of industrial America in the hollow of their hands. Prosperity would wait upon their pleasure, or at a mere nod would be paralyzed and leave the country stranded on the reefs of disaster.

It seemed an odd fatality that, at the very time these commanders-in-chief of industry were plotting to make their power complete, they should have vanished as utterly as though they had been engulfed by a tidal wave and swept into the broad regions of the Atlantic. A few facts were brought to light through the probing of skilled detective minds, but these facts were in nowise clues to the fate that had overtaken the millionaires.

Popham's confidential aide reluctantly admitted that his chief had accepted an invitation from Quinn, and had gone to his "castle" for an interview. Quinn professed to have made some discovery or other which, he declared, would make coal a useless commodity so far as human needs were concerned. Popham, while laughing at Quinn's pretensions, was nevertheless secretly worried. Anything that threatened the success of the coup which was being engineered by himself and his three confreres was to be dealt with decisively and without loss of time.

In the case of Meigs, Markham, and Gilhooly there was no confidential aide to offer testimony, for these bright, particular stars of high finance had placed a limit on the confidence reposed in their secretaries. Nevertheless, the probing minds at work on the case developed the extraordinary fact that these men, no less than Popham, had visited Quinn at the latter's request. A spirit of scoffing investigation animated them, but they were prepared to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears whatever Quinn had to show and to say. If anything that militated against their projected coup was brought before them, they would proceed to lay the spectre forthwith.

Strangely enough, the shrewdest of the detectives failed to connect the disappearance of the millionaires with the comprehensive plans they were forming, and which could not be carried out except by the plotters in person.

Other rich men of the country, who were wont to trim their sails in accordance with whatever wind blew from the offices of The Four, in Wall Street, were already shifting affairs to lay a course that would give them the best headway against the projected new order. This sudden disappearance of the powers to which the lesser rich looked for guidance left them becalmed in an uncharted sea.

The middle class, long accustomed to being mulcted right and left, accepted the astonishing situation with equanimity. So far as they were concerned, Gilhooly, Popham, Meigs, and Markham were abstract generalities—merely names to conjure with. For years the middle class had paid for the conjuring, and had been taught to look calmly into the eyes of what they had come to believe was the inevitable. If their annual outing to the seashore or the mountains cost too much, they could stay at home; if the butcher, the baker, and the grocer ran prices too high, some of the luxuries could be cut out; if anthracite went to $20 a ton, they would heat fewer rooms; and if clothing became too expensive, there would be fewer suits and gowns to wear. By a little self-denial, the middle class also could trim their sails to any gale that blew. They were used to it.

With the poor it was different. They were already down to bed-rock in the way of self-denial. No sooner had it drifted through their brains that the influence of Gilhooly, Popham, Meigs, and Markham had been blotted out than they lifted their voices in praise of the blessed event. Their situation had been bad enough, and any change among the vaguely understood causes presiding over their affairs could hardly be for the worse.