They can come together by consolidation; or

They can continue fighting until one or the other has been annihilated.

Nothing else is possible. Therefore, one of these four things is to be the outcome of the present war.

If you can be shown now that if one of the first three is not settled upon before next Wednesday the fourth will be impossible beyond that date, and that it is absolutely in the power of one man, without consultation with any one, to bring about the accomplishment of any one of the first three, you will meet that man before next Wednesday and make your selection.

I can absolutely prove to you that this war will not continue after next Wednesday, and that it is absolutely in my power, without consulting any one, to do any one of the three things you signify you desire done.

Mr. Vinal reported that Mr. Rogers also read this letter a second time, but slowly and carefully, as though he were weighing each word, and then, sealing it in the envelope, pa.s.sed it back to him with: "Say to your employer I return to New York to-morrow, Sunday night, and shall be at my office, 26 Broadway, from 9.30 on Monday morning till five in the afternoon; that I shall dine at my house, 26 East 57th Street; that I shall be through dinner at eight o'clock, and that I go to bed at 10.30.

Tell him that any man who has an important communication to make to me affecting a matter in which I have large interests will be welcome to call on me between the hours I have named, provided he notifies me a little while in advance."

When my secretary, whose practice it was to give me the minutest details of such affairs as this errand, had reported all that had happened, I at once sent a message to 26 Broadway stating that I would be at Rogers' house at eight o'clock on Monday night, and on the stroke I pushed his electric latchstring. His man had hardly taken my hat when Mr. Rogers himself came down the hall with outstretched hand.

CHAPTER XVII

A MEMORABLE CONFERENCE

If the years of my life are protracted beyond the Psalmist's threescore and ten, even though the events that chance in the comparatively long future seethe and struggle as strenuously as those that befell in the eager, vivid procession of yesterdays which makes up my past, my memory's picture of this meeting will always hang where the lights cast their kindest reflections.

I had left Boston on the noon train, and got down to my hotel, the Brunswick, on Fifth Avenue, by six o'clock. In those kind days of good memory when New Yorkers really lived instead of looping-the-loop through life, the Brunswick was head-quarters for Southerners and Bostonians of the old school. To-day its bricks and mortar and the picturesque iron balconies, from which two generations of America's celebrities reviewed the marching armies of peace and war, are heaps of refuse; for the old Brunswick has had to give place to yet one more of the twenty-storied, emblazoned hostelries, whose alabaster halls, frescoed walls, mosaic floors, and onyx and silver bathtubs are designed to minister to the comfort of our great and free people when they needs must wander from the luxury of their homes. When I had dressed I crossed over to the old Delmonico's opposite, and, in a secluded corner beside an open window which gave full view of the pa.s.sing show on Gotham's great boulevard, I sat and listened to old "Philip," who, time out of mind, had been high-priest of the famous Frenchman's temple of appet.i.te, as he posted me on the latest doings of the town where no one remembers further back than yesterday, and to-morrow doesn't count. Ordinarily I should have lingered for hours with "Philip" and his tidbits, but that night my mind was a mad steeplechase of memories and hopes, all starting and finishing at 26 East 57th Street, and I fear he must have thought he had failed in the plump little duck which I left unpicked, and in the bottle of Chianti which I hardly sipped.

At 7.30 I lit my cigar and started for what I felt was to be the tomb or the forcing-house of all the air-castles I had cherished from boyhood.

At last I was to meet the real champion; I was to tussle hand-to-hand with the head of the financial clan, the man of all men best fitted to test to the utmost the skill and quickness which I had picked up in the rough and tumble of a hundred fights on State and Wall streets--Rogers, wary, intrepid, implacable, the survivor of b.l.o.o.d.y battles in comparison with which mine were but pink skirmishes.

I had carefully put aside that half-hour between dinner and the moment for my appointment to run up and down my mental keyboard under what to me are the most favorable conditions possible--an evening walk through the streets of a great city. Some men can invite their souls only in sylvan solitudes, but the flare of light, the clash of traffic, the kaleidoscopic procession of humanity, with its challenging contrasts shifting and seething on great metropolitan highways, breed in my mind a sense of calm, cool remoteness in which all the glitter and excitement of the spectacle suggests only its appalling transiency.

From the gay carnival of Broadway I cut across through the brownstone gloom of 27th Street into Sixth Avenue, where the tired men and women of the toiling millions sat in their doorways or at their windows over the shops resting after the heat and travail of the day. Some watched the sidewalk antics of their children--perhaps speculating on the possibility that this or the other among that merry throng of urchins might rise to be an alderman or even a city boss--perhaps President of the greatest republic on earth--or--transcendent bliss--a Rogers or a Rockefeller.

From 42d Street I turned up Fifth Avenue, lifting my hat and exchanging a word with Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sage, and for an instant, as I left them, my wandering thoughts took a new twist, for Mrs. Sage had informed me that "Father and I are on the way to prayer-meeting"--early evening prayer-meeting in New York! For an instant I was in one of those tiny New Hampshire villages, a forgotten haven of rest and simplicity, innocent as yet of steam, machinery, or trolleys, for the sweet lady and the angular man with the pained gait which spoke in loud tones of the unbroken store-shoe could belong in no other than a rural place. But the image of the New Hampshire village only flitted across my mind's film, for my truant senses seized on a message over memory's telephone: "Russell Sage has $100,000,000." One hundred millions, and I was back on earth again, but as I walked the thought was buzzing in my brain: "Is it possible that that countryman has MADE _one hundred million dollars_, when the expert carpenter who started at the birth of Christ to trudge the world until from his honest labors he had acc.u.mulated $1,000,000 by laying aside each day all the wage he was ent.i.tled to, one dollar, had at the end of 1,900 years only a little more than half that sum?"

At last I turned the corner of 57th Street, and when I looked down Mr.

Rogers' home-like hall and grasped his outstretched hand and heard his "Lawson, I'm glad to see you!" I would have sworn it was hours and hours since I left the little table in the corner of Delmonico's.

The chief impression I recall of my experience that night is grat.i.tude for Henry H. Rogers' unexpected kindness, and admiration for his manliness, ability, and firmness. When this memory rises in my mind I regret "Frenzied Finance" and all the consequences with which it is fraught for him and his connections. When the American people are aroused, as they surely will be, to demand rest.i.tution and are in the act of brushing, with a mighty sweep of indignation, back into the laps of the plundered the billions of which they have been robbed, and "Standard Oil" and the "System" break and fall like trees before the gale, I doubt, even if Henry H. Rogers be brought face to face with ruin, that he will feel half the pain I shall, for I know that the picture of that memorable night will surely come back to me with all the vividness of reality.

But as my mind harks back, there clashes with this another, a h.e.l.lish picture, which the same Henry H. Rogers painted with the brush of Amalgamated, and a procession of convicts and suicides trail slowly toward me out of the canvas. Then I realize that my pen is but the instrument of a righteous retribution and that no personal feelings, however tender, must be allowed to interfere.

"Come this way," said my host, striding ahead of me along the hall. "In here we can have our talk and our smoke undisturbed." He led me into the big, empty dining-room and closed the door.

"Mr. Rogers," I began, "it is kind of you to be so friendly after the mean things we have said of each other. Am I to understand you don't lay any of all that has pa.s.sed up against me?"

"Lay it up against you, my boy? Drop that all out of your mind. You probably know I talk to the point and mean what I say. If you had hit below the belt as that--Add.i.c.ks has, I _would_ lay it up against you and a hundred years would not make me forget it. I know what you've done and why you've done it, and it was as much your right to do it as mine to do what I have done. I have nothing against you, and if events place me in a position where I can do anything to make your job easier without hurting my own interests--mind that, without hurting my own interests--I will do it. You have my word for it."

We sat within a few feet of each other, and I looked squarely into his eyes as he said, "You have my word for it," and they were honest eyes--honest as the ten-year-old boy's who with legs apart and hands in pockets throws his head back and says: "Wait until I am a man, and I will do it if I die for it!" I looked into them and I knew "My word for it" was all gold and a hundred cents to the dollar. For a minute we gazed steadily into--through each other, and I knew he was reading away into the back of my head. Inwardly I said: "If I do business with this man for a day or for a lifetime, I will never face him and give him my word for one thing and mean another," and in the years after when we did millions upon millions of business, with only each other's word for a bond of fair treatment, not once did I depart from the letter of my resolution. Up to the recent famous "Gas Trial," where our roads suddenly shot off at right angles, owing to a foul act of perjury, Henry H. Rogers never tired of meeting all his a.s.sociates' attacks upon me with: "Lawson's word is gospel truth for me."

When we dropped our eyes, both evidently satisfied, he said: "Now, what have you to say to me?"

I spoke my piece rapidly and without interruption: "There are four things possible, as I wrote you--only four. I will take up the fourth first. I have absolute power to speak for all our local companies. If we, you and I, come to no settlement by to-morrow night, I will, without warning to any one, confess a default to the notes of our different companies and have a receiver appointed. As our stocks and bonds are held by our best investors all over New England, and as no such move is suspected, there will be a terrific rumpus. In the crash I shall go down with Add.i.c.ks and the rest, for we have all put our personal resources behind the enterprise. I will see that the howl following the crash shall be such as all must hear, and I will call attention to the illegal acts of every one--your companies, Add.i.c.ks' companies, and the city and State officials that have made such conditions possible. I don't think you will be able to stand against the cyclone this crash will raise; but even if you do, the receiver, having no interest to pay on bonds, will be in a position to smash the price of gas to seventy or seventy-five cents, and make it impossible for you to get possession of our companies for so long a time that the consumers will never allow you to get the price back to a profitable one. Have I made it clear that you cannot, as you were counting on doing, continue this fight till you have us tired out and crushed?"

His answer came as clear, quick, and sharp as the click of a revolver: "Perfectly, provided you can do the thing you say."

"I will prove to you I can."

"It is not necessary," he clicked back. "Do you give me your word that you can?"

"Absolutely."

"I am satisfied. Go on."

"That leaves only three possibilities," I continued. "You buy us; we buy you; or, we consolidate. I will take the third first. Under any circ.u.mstances or conditions will you join forces and do business with us?"

"Under no circ.u.mstances nor conditions will I do any business with Add.i.c.ks. He has played me false, broken his word, and lied to me when there was no necessity for doing so, and no man who has done this once can ever do business with me a second time."

I once stood by a mechanism through which pa.s.sed a strip of metal.

Click! 'Twas cut. Whir! 'Twas a cylinder. Click! Whir! Click! A corner, an edge, an end, and b-r-r-rr! It was dropped, a metallic cartridge, to do its part in peace or war. Even more fascinating was it to see this human machine eject the product of its whirring brain.

"Then we have but two possibilities. Will you buy us out at the price we must have?"

"What is the price?"

"Sufficient to make good the promises that I have made to Add.i.c.ks, my friends, and the public since I have been in command," I replied.

"Pa.s.s that by as an impossibility."

"Then, Mr. Rogers, we are down to this: You must sell and we must buy you out."

"Right. Now, how do you propose to buy?"

For months the ablest financiers and business men of Wall Street and Boston had striven to start up negotiations with Mr. Rogers with a view to settlement, and all had dropped them without even getting in an opening wedge, and here was I at the end of fifteen minutes of my first meeting, with my task half accomplished. I went on:

"There is something more you must do, Mr. Rogers. You must a.s.sist us in buying, which means you must sell at the terms you and I agree are the only ones we can meet. Therefore I will run over our situation. You have certain property, consisting of the Brookline Company and miscellaneous investments in connection with it. What cost does it stand you?"

Frankly, he went over what his Boston gas-war equipment consisted of and what it had cost, which, boiled down, amounted to $3,500,000. He then said:

"Let us figure what it will be worth to you when, it being known you have won out, you will have additional prestige and no compet.i.tion."

We agreed upon $2,000,000 as representing the probable appreciation in what we were to acquire from him over and above any increase to our own securities.

"I'll take cost, $3,500,000, if it is cash or the equivalent, or I will take $4,500,000 if it is to be credit of a nature that a.s.sures me my money eventually, and I will divide my profit of a million equally with you. This sum will of course be in addition to anything you may be paid by Add.i.c.ks."

Instantly, as if we had agreed upon it in advance, our eyes met--his cold, clear, and steely business--mine, I hoped, the same. For a second neither of us said a word. Then I said: "Thank you for the offer of the $500,000 profit, but we will cut all such offers out. My pay comes from my side. I never yet have known the man who could take pay from both sides and do his work properly." I slowly drew out the word "_properly_," and he in the same tone of voice said: