High in the financial heavens stood a sign,—sign of cabal, sign of rapture, sign of gold. The time had come to form the trust of trusts. Lords and barons of the steel industry began to settle down in Wall Street. They brought their trusts along. One day the Western crowd loaded six trusts on special trains,—brains, books, good will, charters and clerks,—and trundled them thither, banners flying, typewriters clicking, business doing on the way. They took the top floors of the newest steel skyscrapers and preferred solid mahogany furniture with brass mountings. Wall Street said: “Here is the fat of money! It walks into our hands. How shall we divide it?”
But Wall Street had much to learn. These men, brash, boastful and boisterous, were also very wise. They did not come to play Wall Street’s game. Most of them, like John, had sometime meddled with it and cared not for it. Now they were strong enough to play their own game. They brought their brokers with them, from Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh,—men whose tricks they knew,—and bought them seats on the New York Stock Exchange.
“Oh,” said Wall Street. “That’s it, is it? Well,[337] well,” and lolled its tongue in relish. It knew very little about steel and nothing yet about steel people.
“Now, gentlemen,” said the steel people. “Red or black. High or low. Any limit or none. Let’s shoot.”
Using their own brokers to buy and sell the shares of their own trusts they began to make the canyon howl. For a while the play lay between Wall Street and the barbars, and the barbars held all the cards. If Wall Street sold steel shares for a fall the dividends were increased in the night. If it bought them for a rise suddenly the mills were shut up and dividends ceased. Wall Street was outraged. This was worse than gambling. It was a pea and shell game. The steel people were haled to court on the charge of circulating false information about their properties to influence the value of shares.
Nothing to it! Nobody could prove the information to have been false. Merely the steel people had it first, as they naturally would, and acted upon it in the stock market, as everybody would who could. So they all went back to Wall Street and the play waxed hotter and steeper. No one had ever seen speculation like this. At conventions, unwritten rules, limits, the steel people simply guffawed. They invented rules. Nobody was obliged to play with them. Their creed was, “Nothing in moderation.”
After hours they played bridge for ten dollars a point. En route from Wall Street to the Waldorf, which was their rendezvous, they would lay bets in hundred-dollar units on the odd or even of numbered objects, like passing street cars. Whiskey was their[338] innocuous beverage. There was one whose drink was three Scotch high-balls in succession. As the third one disappeared he would slowly rub his stomach, saying: “That one rings the bell.” Yet all the time they attended strenuously to business. They were men of steel, physically and mentally powerful. Carousing was an emotional outlet. Gambling on the Stock Exchange was hardly more than pastime. Night and day they kept their eyes on that sign in the heavens.
They had delivered the steel age. The steel industry was their private possession to do with as they damn pleased. They could make a circus of it if they liked. They did. Their way with it had become a national problem. The steel industry was much too important to be conducted in that manner. It kept the country in a state of nerves. These wild, untamable behemoths would have to be bought out. They were willing to sell. There was a ludicrous fiction among them that they were weary of doing, whereas they were only sated with it. However, as they were willing to be bought out and as to be rid of them had become a public necessity, there remained only the question of how. It would take all the spare money there was in the country. Yet it would have to be done. That is what the sign meant.
John called his crowd together saying: “This is the tall goodbye if we want to get out.”
They did. He pledged them in writing to leave everything in his hands and then returned to Wall Street where for months past he had been preparing his ground unobserved. In one of the new steel skyscrapers[339] he had established himself an office. On the door was his name—
John Breakspeare
under that
American Steel Company
North American Manufacturing Company
and nothing more. Inside was a private room of his own with a stock ticker and a desk with a lot of telephones on it. Beyond was a large meeting room furnished with a long table, chairs, brass cuspidors, a humidor and a water cooler. From the window was a panoramic view of New York harbor. A very simple establishment one would think. Yet it was the center of a web radiating in all directions. Nothing much could happen in Wall Street without causing an alarm on his desk, for he had made some very excellent and timely connections. His private telephone wires reached the sources of information. One of them, it would have surprised everyone to know, ran to the office of John Sabath, with whom he had come to confidential terms. So it was that perhaps no one man, save only Bullguard, knew more than he about what was invisibly taking place under that sign which stood higher and higher in the money firmament.
What was visible had by this time become very exciting. The newspapers were giving astonished publicity to the doings of the golden bulls. What they did in Wall Street was recorded by the financial writers; what they did at large was written by the news reporters. And the public’s imagination was inflamed.[340] Incipient Napoleons of finance, greedy little lambs, comet riders, haberdashers’ clerks, preachers, husbands of actresses, dentists, small business men, delicatessen shop-keepers, jockeys, authors, commuters, winesellers, planters, prizefighters, crows and jackals clamored together at the Wall Street tickers. From ten to three they watched steel shares go up and down, betting on them, trying to out-guess the steel men who ordered their fluctuations. In the evening all this motley appeared at the Waldorf Hotel, sitting in rows along Peacock Alley, wa............