He seized his telephone and made an appointment to call at once on Bivens.

The financier extended his delicate hand and with a cordial smile led Stuart to a seat beside his desk. The only sign he betrayed of deep emotion was the ice-like coldness of his slender fingers.

"Well, Jim, you've completed your very thorough investigation?"

"How did you know I was making a thorough investigation?"

Stuart looked at Bivens with a quick movement of surprise. The little man was gazing intently at the ceiling.

"I make it my business to know things which vitally interest me. You found my facts accurate?"

"Remarkably so."

"And you are ready to strike?"

The black eyes flashed.

"When I have confirmed some statements you have made in your story concerning the private life of these men. How do you know the accuracy of the facts you state in a single line, for instance, about the private life and habits of the president of a certain trust company?"

A cold smile played about Bivens's mouth for a moment.

"You don't suppose I would make a statement like that unless I know it to be true?"

"I found all your other facts correct. This I haven't been able to verify. You make it incidentally, as though it were a matter of slight importance. To my mind it's the key to the man's character and to every act of his life. How did you discover it?"

"Very simply."

Bivens walked to his door, opened it, looked outside, stepped to one of the great steel safes and drew its massive doors apart. He pulled a slip from a cabinet fitted with a card-case index, noted the number, replaced the card, opened another door and drew out a manuscript notebook of some three hundred pages of type-written matter. Each page was written without spacing and contained as many words as the average page of a printed novel. On the back of the morocco cover was printed in plain gold lettering:

"THE PRIVATE LIFE OF NO. 560."

He handed the volume to Stuart, closed the safe, and resumed his seat.

"You may take that book with you, Jim," he said quietly. "I trust to your honour not to reveal its contents except in the discharge of your sworn duty as an officer of the law. You will find in it the record of the distinguished president's private life for the past ten years without the omission of a single event of any importance."

Stuart glanced through the book with amazement.

"How did you come into possession of such facts?"

"No trouble at all," was the easy answer. "It only requires a little money and a little patience and a little care in selecting the right men for the right job. Any man in the business world who thinks he can do as he pleases in this town will wake some morning with a decided jolt. The war for financial supremacy has developed a secret service which approaches perfection. The secret service of armies is child's play compared to it.

"Not only do I systematically watch my employees until I know every crook and turn of their lives, but I watch with even greater care the heads of every rival firm in every department of the industrial world where my interests touch theirs.

"I not only watch the heads of firms, I watch their trusted assistants and confidential men. In that big safe a thousand secrets lie locked whose revelation would furnish matter enough to run the yellow journals for the next five years.

"Every man who holds a position of trust and puts his hands on money has his shadow. It's a question of business. The wholesaler must know the character of the retailer to whom he extends credit. A trust must know what its remaining independent rivals are doing, what business they are developing, what big orders they seek. I must know, and I must know accurately and fully what every enemy is doing, what he is thinking, with whom he drinks, where he spends his time and how he lives.

"Modern business is war, the fiercest and most cruel the world has ever known. It is of greater importance to a modern captain of industry to know the plans of his enemy than it ever was to the commanding general of an opposing army."

"I see," Stuart responded, thoughtfully.

"There are men down there in the street now," Bivens went on dreamily, "who are wearing silk hats to-day for whom the prison tailor is cutting a suit. I have their records in that silent little steel-clad room.

It's a pitiful thing, but it's life. And, believe me, the realities of our every-day life here are more wonderful than the wildest romance the novelist can spin.

"Last year I had a man of genius at the head of one of my corporations.

Not the slightest suspicion had ever been directed against him. But my men reported to me that he was supporting two establishments, besides the one he kept for his family, and that in those two secret orchards which he tended he was making presents of fine jewelry. An examination of his office by experts revealed the fact that he was wrong. He was bounced. He would have gone no matter what his accounts showed. It is only a question of time and a very short time when such a man goes wrong.

"The scarcest thing in New York to-day, Jim, is the man who can't be bought and sold. The thing that's beyond price in the business world is character--combined with brains. That's why I made you the offer I did once upon a time to come in with me. There are positions to-day in New York with a salary of half a million a year waiting for men who can fill them. If I could find one man of the highest order of creative and executive ability who would stand by me in my enterprises I could be the richest man in the world in ten years."

Stuart lifted his eyes from the record he was casually scanning and smiled into Bivens's dark, serious face.

The look silenced the speaker. The little man knew instinctively that Stuart was at that moment weighing his own life and character by the merciless standard he had set up for others. Judged by conventional laws he had nothing to fear. He was a faithful member of his church. He gave liberally to its work and gave generously to a hundred worthy charities. He loved his wife with old-fashioned loyalty and tenderness and grieved that she was childless. He stood by his friends and fought his enemies, asking no quarter and giving none.

Yet in his heart of hearts he knew that, judged in the great white light of the Eternal when all things hidden shall be revealed, he could not stand blameless. He knew that while he had kept within the letter of the law, his genius consisted in the skill with which he had learned to divert other men's earnings into his own coffers.

And deep down in the depths of his memory there lay one particular deed which lent colour to all that followed. He knew that however loftily he might discourse at present about "character," "honour," "integrity,"

and "fair dealing," he had stolen the formula from his big-hearted employer with which he had laid the foundation of his fortune. It was the first half-million that came hard. It was this first half-million that bore the stain of shame. He had justified it with fine sophistry until he counted himself a benefactor to Woodman, but the grim fact stood out in his memory with growing clearness as his millions piled up with each succeeding year.

His other questionable acts on which the fate of millions had often hung he had no difficulty in justifying. Business was war. In war it was fair to deceive, to march in the night, to attack when least suspected, to strike to kill, to destroy and lay waste the fairest countries and starve your enemy into submission.

All this had flashed through Bivens's imagination when Stuart smiled, and in spite of his conscious dignity and power, he had fallen silent.

The smile had made him nervous. He wondered vaguely what was in the mind of the tall quiet man that provoked a smile at such a serious moment.

He wondered particularly whether the lawyer could have suspected his hobby, for he had one of the most curious--a collection of historic material on the origin of American fortunes. The origin of his own had early made Bivens suspect that all great fortunes which had mounted into millions, like his own, may have been built in their first foundations on fraud. He wondered if Stuart had by any accident stumbled on this information. Even if he had he could not understand his real motive in such an investigation, and yet the lazy smile with which he looked up from that record was disconcerting.

Bivens waited for him to speak. The moment was one big with fate.

Stuart was about to reach a decision that would make history. No one knew so well its importance as the keen intellect that gleamed behind the little black eyes watching with tireless patience.

Bivens was the one odd man in a thousand who knew that big events were not to be found in earthquakes, tornadoes and battles. He had long since learned that the events which shake the world are always found in the silent hours when the soul of a single man says, "I will!"

Below he could hear the roar of the city's life. On the Curb brokers were shouting their wares with their accustomed gusto. On the floor of the Exchange the tide of business ebbed and flowed with the fierce pulse of an apparently exhaustless strength. Men bought and sold with no fear of to-morrow. Yet a single word from the lips of the tall, clean-shaven young officer of the law and a storm would break which might tear from the foundations institutions on whose solidity modern civilization seemed to rest.

The silence at length became suffocating to Bivens. He moistened his lips and drew his smooth fingers softly over his silky beard.

"Well, Jim," he said at length. "You are going to act?"

In the moment's pause the little swarthy body never moved, his breath ceased and every nerve quivered with the strain and yet he betrayed nothing to the man who sat before him, silent, thoughtful.

Stuart rose abruptly, his reply sharp and clear.

"Yes, I'm going to act."

"At once?"

"It's my duty."

Bivens grasped his hand.