The Sixty-First Second

In the year 19--, toward the end of the month of October, the country was on the eve of a stupendous panic. A period of swollen prosperity had just ended in which Titans had striven in a frenzy for the millions that opportunity had spilled before them.

For months the stock market had steadily lowered, owing to the flight of the small investor, affrighted by the succession of investigations, the fear of readjustments, and the distrust of the great manipulators. The public, which understands nothing of the secret wars and hidden alliances of finance, had begun tremulously to be aware of the threatening approach of a stupendous catastrophe. So in the ominous, grumbling days of October, when the air was full of confusing rumors and violent alarms, the public, with its necessity for humanizing all sensations, perceived distinctly only two figures, each dramatically in peril, about whose safety or ruin the whole comprehensible drama of the financial cataclysm seemed to center.

These two figures, both presidents of great trust companies, giants in their own sphere, represented two opposite elements of that great mass of society which seeks its level in Wall Street. Bernard L. Majendie, president of the Atlantic Trust Company, member of every exclusive club, patron of the arts, representative of one of the oldest American families, accustomed to leadership and wealth from colonial times, was linked in a common danger with John G. Slade, president of the Associated Trust Company, promoter, manipulator, owner of a chain of Western newspapers, a man who had hauled himself out of the lowest depths of society. Many believed that both, in the relentless readjustment which the banks were forcing on the trust companies, were destined to be blotted out in the general catastrophe. Many others, perceiving the strange oppositeness of the two individuals, speculated on which would survive the other, if indeed either were to persist.

About three o'clock of a certain afternoon, when each extra brought a new alarm, John G. Slade came abruptly from the great library, down the sounding marble descent that was a replica of the famous rampe of the Chateau of Gerny, into the tapestry-hung vestibule of his palace on upper Fifth Avenue.

He stood a moment in blank meditation, while the third man held his overcoat open and ready, watching anxiously the frown on the face of the master, who stood before him, a massive six-foot-four. Already in the great marble home itself was that feeling of alarm from the outer world which had communicated itself to the servants. Suddenly Slade, returning to himself, detected the furtive scrutiny of the footman and the butler, who had so far departed from their correctly petrified attitudes as to exchange wondering glances. He frowned, pointed to his loose black felt hat and his favorite cane, and tore so rapidly through the heavily ironed doors and down the steps to the waiting automobile that the second footman stumbled twice in his haste to be before him. Two or three reporters, who had been lurking behind the great marble bastions, sprang forward as Slade, disappearing in the motor, was whirled away.

"Up river," he said briefly, and sank back in his seat.

He was in the middle forties, a man noticeable anywhere for the overmastering vitality of his carriage and the defiant poise of his head. Nature had admirably designed him for what he was intended to be--a being always at war with men and surrounding circumstances. His face was devoid of any fine indications of sensibility, of reflection, or humorous perception of life. The upper and lower maxillary bones were in such gaunt relief they seemed rather steel girders hung to support a granite will. The head was square, sunk rather than placed upon his shoulders, and the line of the head at the back was straight and full of crude power. He had, at the same time, a suggestion in the shoulders of the obstinacy of the buffalo, the most distinctive of American beasts, and in the eye-pits of the fatalism of the Indian, which as a type often seems not so much the physical tenacity of an unexplained race as it does the peculiar impress of a continent and an atmosphere surcharged with vitality.

The eyes were a clear blue, the eyes of a boy in mischief who is still sublimely defiant of the tripping obstacles of an ethical code. This quality of the boy, characteristic too of the American, was the secret of all his seeming inconstancy of unrelenting cruelty and sudden sentimental impulsiveness. Life was to him a huge dare, and all the perils of finance the hazards of a monstrous gamble, which alone were able to supply him with that overwhelming quality of sensation that such men covet in life.

A waif at six; a wharf rat at twelve, endowed with the strength of a man; leader of a gang at sixteen, hated, feared, always fighting; gaining his first start in politics, and then, by making a lucky strike in the silver mines of Colorado, educating himself with primitive necessary knowledge, always acquiring, never relaxing what his fingers touched, a terrible antagonist, risking his all a dozen times in the hunger for a greater stake--he had emerged at last from the churning vortex of a brutal struggle, possessor of a fortune that fifty times had hung on the events of a day. For five years he had been involved in countless lawsuits, accused of chicanery, extortion, conspiracy, and even murder. At the end of which period he came forth victorious, without losing a single suit, surrounded, it is true, by every calumny that could be invented, accused of manipulating legislatures, corrupting judges, and removing witnesses.

Through it all he had remained unshattered, boyishly delighted, his body unyielding to the strain of sleepless nights and months of unrelenting vigilance. He had lived hard, ready to gamble for a thousand or a hundred thousand, cynically announcing his motto:

"No friends. So long as every man is my enemy, I am safe."

And this theory of life he had carried out to the minutest detail. Men represented to him simply the male of the species, to be met head on, to strive with and overthrow. So completely did this obsess him that no one, not even his secretaries (whom he changed constantly), had the slightest inkling of his plans. Two of his subordinates, hoping to profit by their intimacy, had foolishly invested on his deliberately given tips--and had been ruined. Afterward he cited their cases as a warning to other applicants.

From the start, always counting on the year ahead, he had outrun his income. When he had ten thousand, he was spending fifteen; at fifty thousand, seventy-five. Every one who came in contact with him was paid twice over, and robbed him in the bargain--a fact on which he counted and to which he was quite indifferent.

Coming to Wall Street in that period of fevered speculation, he had been among the first to perceive the enormous instruments at hand in the development of a chain of trust companies which would supply a conveniently masked agency for the enormous capital that he needed to compete on equal terms with the leaders of the Street.

That now, for the first time, he was confronted with a situation of absolute and impending ruin, brought him not the slightest depression, but rather that exhilaration and sudden clearness of mind which is characteristic of the gambler face to face with the supreme hour which means absolute bankruptcy or a fortune.

At every block some one on the crowded sidewalk, or a group in a passing carriage, turned with a hasty exclamation at the sight of his bulky figure under the black sombrero, fleeing in the red automobile that was itself at this period a rarity. At one point where a blockade compelled him to halt, a newsboy, jumping on the sideboard, thrust a newspaper in his face. He flung a dime and glanced at the headlines: