"To consider a method for clipping Burton's claws," he announced with decisive brevity.

"Why not let sleeping dogs lie?" The inquiry came thoughtfully from Meegan of the Cosmopolitan Bank.

Malone's voice rang like steel on flint. "Gentlemen, this man is a charlatan. As his power grows his menace increases. Consolidated has never brooked disobedience nor insolence. It has been our policy to reward the faithful servant and punish the unfaithful." He glanced around the group, then continued in the manner of one issuing an edict.

"Heretofore we have not waited until the refractory child grew too big to punish. We should not do so now."

"For my part," suggested Harrison with a quiet twinkle in his eyes, "I'm just as willing to let someone else take this child out to the woodshed now."

"Hamilton Burton is outgrowing restraint." Malone was snapping out his words with categorical crispness. "Do you realize the perilous scope of his dream? His overvaulting ambition looks to a one-man power of finance; a power vested solely in himself. We are rearing a Frankenstein, gentlemen. To overlook it means our ultimate ruin--and, what is more, a national cataclysm."

"And yet," interposed Harrison quietly, "his power is largely of our making. We took him to our hearts."

J.J. Malone admitted the statement with a grave nod.

"Up to the point where arrogance became a mania, he was a most valuable lieutenant. I select men for efficiency. When they seek to become usurpers, I endeavor to halt them."

The Honorable S.T. Browne, as general counsel for many Consolidated interests, had evolved the theorem that from every statute there is an escape. Now he inquired, "How did he gain his seat in the saddle?

Sudden, wasn't it?"

"He came into my office one day only a few years ago," answered the chief baron. "Twice I refused to see him, but he meant to see me--and he did. More than that, he fascinated me. I knew that I was talking with a genius and a man of dauntless mind. Such minds I can use. I used his."

Meegan knocked the ash from his cigar and laughed. "Burton has a certain hypnotic quality of address," he conceded.

"It is not address--it is genius. This man held me with his eye and forced me to listen. He came with no apology and no misgiving. He knew himself for a child of Destiny, and within ten minutes I knew it, too.

What is the biggest accomplishment, gentlemen, that stands to the credit of Consolidated in the past ten years?"

"The merging of Inter-ocean Coal and Ore." Meegan gave the response without hesitation, and no one contradicted him.

"That," asserted Malone, "was the wild scheme which Hamilton Burton brought to me as his letter of introduction. I found no flaw in his plan--aside from its stupendous audacity. You ask me why I put him in a position of power. He rode in on his own usefulness--led by his intrinsic self-faith."

"So far as you have gone," suggested Harrison drily, "you have summarized several fairly solid reasons for keeping him with us."

"Quite true. I concede him a Napoleonic caliber and I recognize his Napoleonic effrontery. His conscienceless lust for power has unbalanced him. He seeks to sack the world. He must be stopped."

"So you suggest--?" Browne left his question unfinished save for the interrogation of his lifted brows.

"He sits in seven of our directorates. You know how Consolidated has sought to avoid the appearance of too narrow a domination. You know, too, that we have avoided directors who were obviously pure dummies. For several weeks I have been tracing out the holdings in Coal and Ore stock. Hamilton Burton with his following looms too large. Left to his own devices, he may outgrow control."

Meegan studied his cigar with attentively knit brows before he inquired: "Does Burton assume such proportions in Coal and Ore as to suggest turning the balance of control? Is that what you mean?"

"Not yet." Malone drew from his pocket a small note-book and consulted its pages. "We hold a safe balance in our own hands, barring treachery, but we have let him gain a stronger nucleus than now seems advisable.

You gentlemen know that we have always held out the impression that only a small amount of Consolidated stock is offered the general public."

"As we also know," amended Harrison bluntly, "that in fact a large proportion of it is in the hands of the casual investor. Still another fact is sure. Burton's sobriquet of the Great Bear was not gratuitously bestowed. If we read him out of meeting he will bring a panic about our cars."

Malone puffed for a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ribbon of the wake.

"I have also considered that point," he said at last. "Burton has two cardinal maxims of finance. One is that Securities are usually sold above their intrinsic worth. The other is that Cash alone is an absolutely stable form of property. Acting on these two principles, he is doubtless building to the logical end. Some day he will make another raid--and, if he is allowed to select the day and the conditions, it will be a panic-making raid. If an enemy's attack is inevitable the best defense is offense. There is no wisdom in giving him time to prepare.

Every day we stand idle his power grows. We must show enough strength at the next meeting of our stock-holders to reorganize the Coal and Ore directorate."

Harrison rose and walked to the rail. He stood for a moment looking out, then came back and spoke quickly.

"If this is to be done we should let no more time slip by. It's a safe bet that he isn't wasting days."

Malone's fist crashed down on the arm of his chair. He rose, too, and paced backward and forward, talking as he walked.

"Waste time! By heaven, we must waste no minute. We must go after him and bring in his pelt. We must treat him like a wolf prowling around our sheep-folds. There can be no peace for any of us until he is destroyed ... and, damn him, I mean to see that it's done!"

The others watched the broad shoulders of the head baron and the resolute carriage of the head, thrown back as if in challenge. He paused once to relight the cigar which in his vehemence he had let die, and as the match flared they saw that his eyes blazed and his features were set in that wrath which the Street feared.

"By heaven," exclaimed Malone fiercely, "we've got to smash him--damn him!"

CHAPTER XIII

Mary Burton was discovering some things about June. She had often watched lovers leaning silently on a deck-rail, with eyes fixed on a moonlit wake and hands that crept surreptitiously together. She had envied the credulity of these people and turned away with an ache and emptiness in her own heart.

Now at twenty-five she awoke each morning with a smile for the sunlight and a proprietary joy in the blue of the skies and a delight for the roses whose hearts were no younger than her own had become.

Bridge-tables and tennis courts saw little of her, because the woods were waiting and Jefferson Edwardes was there to tramp and ride and fish and be companion and guide.

It was most beautiful far back from the oiled roads and trimmed hedges, for here were only woodland voices and languorous forest fragrances.

Here, too, hid all those wild flowers that in childhood she had known and fancifully christened--and since forgotten, and here two people with the lilt of this abundant June song in their hearts could leave a few of their years by the roadside and forget them. To Mary Burton it was all a rediscovery and a miracle. He had promised to give her back the message of her hills. He was giving her back the joy of life.

One afternoon she and Jefferson Edwardes were tramping toward a brook where the trout would be flashing like phantom darts, and as he led the way along a narrow trail she followed him with a smile on her lips.

At a sheer twist around the hill's shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand. The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of hill and sky.

As she stood by his side her eyes and parted lips spoke her unworded appreciation and the man's gaze came back from the broad picture and dwelt upon her.

"It's strange," she said finally with a vaguely puzzled expression, "that I who was born in just such hills as these should now be realizing their wonder for the first time."

But her companion laughed at her seriousness. "When you knew them first," he reminded her, "you had nothing else with which to compare them. It is one who comes from the north who finds a marvel in the bigness and softness of southern stars. Now you have been away--and have come home, dearest."

She was standing very lancelike and straight by the slender bole of a silver birch. A golden sun flooded richly through the greenery. Overhead was a tunefully unflecked sky and into the shadows crept a richness of furtively underlying color and echoes of color. It was all vivid and beautiful and the girl standing there seemed to dominate its vividness and its beauty. But her eyes were grave, even when a shaft of the radiance struck her delicately blossoming cheeks and played upon the escaping locks with which the breeze played, too.

"Do you know, I suppose in a way I ought to hate you?" she told the man, and he swiftly demanded:

"Hate me? In heaven's name, why?"

"When a woman has been deluded into believing herself a bird of paradise ... and has been content with her feathers, it doesn't precisely help to discover that--" her voice grew self-contemptuous--"that after all she has only lived the life of a Strassburg goose and has been fed to death until she is no earthly good for anything except to be some glutton's delicacy--"

"Strassburg geese don't search their consciences," he smiled. "They are too busy being fed to death. If you had lost your soul I should help you find it--thank God, you don't need my guidance."

"Yet your coming crystallized all the self-accusations that had begun to stir in me. It made me feel my utter emptiness."

"Which only means realizing--that you might have become empty and have not." He came close and bent upon her the eyes whose honesty was so convincing and whose fealty was so clearly writ. In a voice that lost a little of its steadiness he demanded tensely, "Do you hate me?"