It was true of Galt, as Harbinger said, that he had no friends; it was not therefore true that his world was full of enemies. He had many acquaintances and no intimates. He was a solitary worker in the money vineyards, keeping neither feud nor tryst with any clan. His reputation in Wall Street was formless and cloudy. Everybody knew him, or knew something about him; for twenty years he had been a pestiferous gadfly on the Stock Exchange, lighting here and there, turning up suddenly in situations where he had to be settled with or bought off, swaggering, bluffing, baiting, playing the greatest of all games of wit with skill and daring--and apparently getting nowhere in the end. Once he had engaged in a lone-handed fight with a powerful banking group over the reorganization of a railroad, demanding to be elected to the directorate as the largest minority stockholder. The bankers were indignant. The audacity of a stock market gambler wanting to sit on a railroad board! What would anybody think? He took his case to the courts and was beaten. Another time he unexpectedly appeared with actual control of a small railroad, having bought it surreptitiously during many months in the open market place; but as he held it mostly with credit borrowed from the banks his position was vulnerable. It would not do for a gambler like this to own a railroad, the bankers said; so his loans were called away from him and he had to sell out at a heart-breaking loss. He was beaten again. He took his defeats grimly and returned each time to the practice of free lance speculation, with private brokerage on the side. The unsuccess of these two adventures caused him to be thought of as a man whose ambitions exceeded his powers. There were a great many facts about him, facts of record and facts of hearsay, but when they were brought together the man was lost. Though he talked a great deal to any one who would listen he revealed nothing of himself. His office was one dark little room, full of telephones; and he was never there. He carried his business in his head. Nobody positively spoke ill of him, or if one did it was on ground of free suspicion, with nothing more specific to be alleged than that he turned a sharp corner. That is nothing to say. To go wide around corners in Wall Street is a mark of self-display. People neither liked nor disliked him. They simply had no place in their minds to put him. So they said, “Oh, yes,--Harry Galt,” and shook their heads. They might say he was unsafe and take it back, remarking that he had never been insolvent. What they meant was that he was visionary. Generally on the Stock Exchange there is a shrewd consensus as to what a man is worth. Nobody had the remotest notion of what Galt was worth. It was believed that his fortune went up and down erratically.