Dumont had helped Fanshaw as much as he could. He immediately detected
the coyote. He knew it was impossible to make a lion or even a wolf
out of one who was both small and crooked. He used him only in minor
matters, chiefly in doing queer, dark things on the market with
National Woolens, things he indirectly ordered done but refused to know
the details of beyond the one important detail--the record of checks
for the profits in his bank account. For such matters Fanshaw did as
well as another. But as Dumont became less of a wolf and more of a
lion, less of a speculator and more of a financier, he had less and
less work of the kind Fanshaw could do.
But Leonora, unaware of her husband's worthlessness and desperate in
her calamities, sneered and jeered and lashed him on--to ruin. The
coyote could put on the airs of a lion so long as the lion was his
friend and protector; when he kept on in kingly ways after the lion had
cast him off, he speedily came to grief.
As he stood looking helplessly up and down Broad Street he was debating
what move to make. There were about even measures of truth and
falsehood in his statement to Dumont--he did need two hundred thousand
dollars; and he must have it before a quarter past two that day or go
into a bankruptcy from which he could not hope to save a shred of
reputation or to secrete more than fifty thousand dollars.
"To the New York Life Building," he finally said to the driver as he
got into his hansom. Then to himself: "I'll have a go at old Herron."
He knew that Dumont and Herron had quarreled, and that Herron had sold
out of the National Woolens Company. But he did not know that Herron
was a man with a fixed idea, hatred of Dumont, and a fixed purpose, to
damage him at every opportunity that offered or could be created, to
ruin him if possible.
When the National Woolens Company was expanded into the huge
conglomerate it now was--a hundred millions common, a hundred millions
preferred, and twenty millions of bonds--Herron had devised and
directed the intricate and highly perilous course among the rocks of
law and public opinion in many states and in the nation. It was a
splendid exhibition of legal piloting, and he was bitterly dissatisfied
with the modest reward of ten millions of the preferred stock which
Dumont apportioned to him. He felt that that would have been about his
just share in the new concern merely in exchange for his stock in the
old. When he found Dumont obdurate, and grew frank and spoke such
words as "dishonor" and "dishonesty" and got into the first syllable of
"swindling," Dumont cut him off with--
"If you don't like it, get out! I can hire that sort of work for half
what I've paid you. You're swollen with vanity. We ought to have a
young man in your position, anyhow."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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