Arnbush pounded on the table with his fat clenched hand. “The rest of the bunch can keep on wishin’ and startin’ little lawsuits. I’m goin’ after this thing good and proper.” He was a stout, heavy man, advanced in life. His hair was white and thick, his eyes gray. His manner was heavy and determined, like that of one accustomed to crush out, by superior mass, opposition before him. One thought of the steam roller as the man’s ideal of an attacking engine. It was night. The two were at a table in the corner of the big Waldorf dining room that looks out on Fifth Avenue. It was beyond the hour at which even the late arrival dined. It was drawing on toward midnight. A less known or a less valuable guest would hardly have kept a place in the big dining room at this hour. An old waiter hung about, evidently attached by impressive gratuities to this guest; peculiar, but with an open and enormous purse to sustain it. The man was accustomed to obtaining what he wanted, and at any cost in money. Avarice was not a motive in the man. The motive in him, deep-seated and dominant, was power. Money was a jinn to be commanded, to fetch and carry and break open as he wished. Arnbush and the attorney, Stetman, sat at the table after the fragments of the dinner had been removed. They were at the end of days of innumerable meetings, conferences, and legal discussions with the owners and lawyers of a business now threatened with destruction. The great distiller chewed an unlighted cigar. The lawyer smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes, with care and precision, into a metal tray on the table beside his arm. He was an able man in his profession: fertile in resources, accurate, but with a large daring that fitted him for adventuring beyond the conceptions of little counselors in the law. And he was not too elevated in his own esteem to disregard any notion of his client, however bizarre it might appear in its raw suggestion. The distiller’s big hand was thumping on the table. “You hear what I say, Stetman! I’m goin’ to land this bunch of cranks! On the day you discover the active principle in alcohol they’re done! There’s nothin’ to it, they’re done! The whole country will get drunk and stay drunk! God Almighty couldn’t stop it when you get the kickdrop out of the bottle of water that’s in a quart of alcohol. “It’ll take an army of agents to stop the smuggling of liquor as it is; how will they stop it if a man can carry the punch of a barrel of whisky in an ounce bottle?” Arnbush’s voice thickened with an indignant energy. “And I’m a-goin’ to put up the money to get it. I’m a-goin’ to put up five millions of dollars! “You hear what I say, Stetman! You cut out the lawsuits. This country’s goin’ to hell, an’ I’m goin’ to give it a shove along.” He extended his big hand, with a determined gesture, across the table.