i
the blare and blaze of american life went on in all its capitals of industry. buildings sprang up, factories poured their smoke unceasingly into the sky. men ran hither and thither like ants, busy about what seemed to them of importance. vast hives of heaped-up stone twice daily poured out their population of small creatures, some of them crippled, hurt, shorn in the battle of life, their faces pale, their forms bowed and stunted before their time. out of the rich west poured always a steady stream of the products of the soil and of the mines, wealth unspeakable, dug from the resources of this admirable country of ours. many produced it, a few controlled it, all required it.
but there came a sort of hush over all the country, as though an eclipse were passing, or some gloom cast by a cloud coming between these cities and the sun. men said that business was not so good as it should be, though the country was richer than ever. none understood the popular unrest. many pondered, many attempted to explain, but they found all save the easy and obvious explanation. the masses remained morose, dissatisfied. pamphlets appeared. in the journals pretending to give voice to popular trend of thought there were now to be seen many screeds from many unknown men. some men said that prices should rise, others that rates of transportation should rise, but that wages should decrease. others said that wages should increase—a few only of these, not many; for those who needed most a larger wage were those most dumb of expression, least able and least apt to make any public protest. our proudest may be our poorest—our neediest our most silent.
ii
in john rawn's slowly growing factories near the western capital wages did not rise. he kept on his fight with the labor organizations. for this reason he met additional expense and additional delay in carrying on his plans, but still waged war, relaxing not at all, meeting pickets with policemen, force with force. the popular discontent of the day meant nothing to him. his eye was fixed ahead. to halsey's complaints on the one side, his directors' discreet grumbling on the other, he paid as little attention on the one hand as upon the other. john rawn had a dream, and he knew that his dream must come true. his dream was one of a wide-reaching and relentless power, shared by those few men destined by fate to own the so-called american republic. let the people do what they would, all they could. this was his dream. it had come to him in all its fullness one evening in the great city of the east. he exulted.
as to the industrial situation in international power, rawn now began to prove himself a good business man, and he received more and more the grudged confidence of his associates, who came from almost every rank of big business. through the aid and advice of these, his private fortune began to mount up enormously. so also did international power make money. the only sore place of the directors' overstrained nerves centered in affairs at the gaunt building in the suburb, where a dozen mysterious machines, toothed and armed, cogged and coiled, still stood in a state of half-completion, as inchoate and mysterious now as they had been at their inception. none of the workmen, none of the foremen, could guess what they would look like when completed.
there was something else, which not the most suspicious guessed—john rawn himself did not know! his success was a vast bubble. halsey was the only man who ever had known the full secret of mantling one of the miraculous receivers which they all had seen and all had accepted. rawn, bold enough, kept this to himself, although he feared to go to halsey and make any demands. halsey held grim peace for months—indeed, for more than four years in all, counting from the first motor made in the kelly row woodshed. it was risky, but for once rawn dared make no desperate move. halsey talked little. he was very sad since the birth of his hunchbacked child. sometimes he talked to virginia delaware about it; never to his wife, grace.
and still the seven days' wonder of international power remained to puzzle the industrial world. no inkling of the real intention of the company ever got out. there was, as rawn had predicted, no market for the stock, for the reason that it was not listed and for the further reason that it was not sold. it was held in a close communion of hard-headed and close-mouthed men, and there were no confidences betrayed. the thing was too big to conform to ordinary rules. in the center of all this stood the figure of john rawn, suddenly grown large and strong. he ruled his army, officers, staff and line, cavalry, infantry and auxiliaries, as one born originally to command. he brooked neither parleying nor thwarting of his will—except in one instance. he never made any demands on halsey, never gave him any peremptory orders after that one day in the office, months earlier, before halsey made his first trip to new york.
iii
these months seemed to have aged john rawn, none the less. he grew grimmer and grayer, more taciturn and reserved. at the clubs he was one of the most talked-of men in town, and one who talked least himself. as his hair grew grayer at the temples, his jaw grew harder, at the corner of his chin coming the triangular wrinkles which go with hard-faced middle age. enigmatic, self-centered, he could not have been called a happy man. he smiled but rarely, joked not at all, engaged in no badinage, told no stories, found no lighter side of life, played no golf, had no vacations. like some vast engine of tremendous driving power he went on his way, admired in a city and country full of able men, as one competent to hold his own with the best and strongest of them all. and still of all his traits stood out the one of self-confidence. he played a game of enormous and continuous risk—fundamental risk by reason of halsey, incidental by reason of his widely ballooned market operations; yet his nerve held. moreover, he was learning the price of success—an absolute devotion to the means of success. when he learned that the child of his daughter was not a son, but a girl, and that it was a hunchback for life, a sad-faced, unsmiling child—he set his jaws for a moment, but said few words of condolence, either to his daughter or her husband. he did not smile for three months after that, and never referred to this subject again, after its first discussion with his wife at graystone hall; but it cost him no time and no energy lost from business. it only deepened in his soul his growing hatred for charley halsey, the man whom he dared not chide.
iv
in the headquarter offices a vast, smooth running business machine had now been built up. rawn was an organizer. the laxness and looseness of the old railway offices in st. louis, where he had got his business schooling, were missing in the headquarters of international power. employees had small time to gossip in business hours. out of business hours, it is to be confessed, once in a while there was discussion as to the salary of miss virginia delaware, which was reported a wholly instable affair. it was rumored in stenographic circles that she had taken to wearing very stunning evening gowns. yet not the most captious—though willingness did not lack—could raise voice against her, or couple her name with any other. rawn and she were never seen together excepting during business hours; he never mentioned her name in any company. once or twice a laughing voice at the national union, where rich men met in numbers, tried to create some sort of discussion over rawn's beautiful private secretary, but it was so suddenly stopped by rawn himself that it never was resumed.
upon the other hand, few could speak in definite knowledge regarding the domestic matters of john rawn. he was a man of mystery, though one of known and admitted power. he held what he gained; and, as there must have been accorded to him strength of soul, grasp, readiness, courage, he began to be accepted as one of the large figures of his day alike in industry and finance. he had by this time fully arrived in the prominent citizen class in his chosen metropolis. did firemen perish, john rawn joined the list of those who aided the widows. was some neighboring city swept by flames, again he joined—on the front page of the papers—those who gave succor for the needy. did a famine in india or china sweep off a million souls, john rawn—on the front page—aided the survivors. he was a member of the leading clubs of the city, a director of the board of the art institute. he bought if he did not occupy a box at the opera, and allowed his name to be mentioned at the banquets offered by eager souls to celebrities of one sort or another who proved themselves amenable to receptions, banquets, addresses of welcome, and what-not, anything to bring lesser names into print on any page, tails to any kite. in short, john rawn comported himself as a prominent citizen should. ever he was the kite, never the tail. he loomed a large and growing figure in his little world.
v
above all, there seemed something uncanny in the unvarying facility with which rawn made money. there is no real explanation of the difference in money-making power, except that some men make money and some do not. rawn did, without any doubt or question. not lacking ability and calmness in judgment, and not lacking full information such as is accorded those said to be upon the sacred inside of the market, he was in and out of rubber, coppers, steel, at precisely the right time. his oil investments in california, played up and down in proper symphony, had made him more than a million dollars, smoothly, easily, simply. the railways market was an open book to him, and public utilities seemed something he could gage while others stood and wondered. there are times when some men win. rawn could not lose, whether he dealt in ontario silvers, arizona coppers, anything he liked. he was in with the pack when, in these last fierce days of individual and corporate greed, it finished pulling down a republic, and battened, guzzled at the bowels of the quarry. he partook with these of a broad knowledge of the narrowing raw resources of the country, and was in with them at the death. he was one of those to get hold of large acreages of the passing timber lands, he was counted with those who sought the great coal fields for their own; ran true to scent, with these, the trail of monopoly in any commodity which the people more and more must need. in the one matter of his relations with a certain transcontinental railway, rawn made a quarter million as his share of the three-quarters of a billion taken in sales of mineral lands from the railway's land-grant holdings. that the grants had covered only agricultural lands mattered little, for when the sleepy government at washington reluctantly took the trail, it was shown a law, cunningly passed a few years earlier, which barred the republic, by virtue of a six-year statute of limitations, from recovering any of its own property! john rawn often laughed over that. he laughed also when the "suckers," as they called them, bit just as eagerly at irrigation as they had at mines. he often laughed—it was all so ridiculously easy to pull down a country, when the running was in good company! he was a prominent citizen.
