________________________________________________
_ It was not long afterward that Daylight came on to New York. A
letter from John Dowsett had been the cause--a simple little
typewritten letter of several lines. But Daylight had thrilled
as he read it. He remembered the thrill that was his, a callow
youth of fifteen, when, in Tempas Butte, through lack of a fourth
man, Tom Galsworthy, the gambler, had said, "Get in, Kid; take a
hand." That thrill was his now. The bald, typewritten
sentences seemed gorged with mystery. "Our Mr. Howison will
call upon you at your hotel. He is to be trusted. We must not
be seen together. You will understand after we have had our
talk." Daylight conned the words over and over. That was it.
The big game had arrived, and it looked as if he were being
invited to sit in and take a hand. Surely, for no other reason
would one man so peremptorily invite another man to make a
journey across the continent.
They met--thanks to "our" Mr. Howison,--up the Hudson, in a
magnificent country home. Daylight, according to instructions,
arrived in a private motor-car which had been furnished him.
Whose car it was he did not know any more than did he know the
owner of the house, with its generous, rolling, tree-studded
lawns. Dowsett was already there, and another man whom Daylight
recognized before the introduction was begun. It was Nathaniel
Letton, and none other. Daylight had seen his face a score of
times in the magazines and newspapers, and read about his
standing in the financial world and about his endowed University
of Daratona. He, likewise, struck Daylight as a man of power,
though he was puzzled in that he could find no likeness to
Dowsett. Except in the matter of cleanness,--a cleanness that
seemed to go down to the deepest fibers of him,--Nathaniel Letton
was unlike the other in every particular. Thin to emaciation, he
seemed a cold flame of a man, a man of a mysterious, chemic sort
of flame, who, under a glacier-like exterior, conveyed, somehow,
the impression of the ardent heat of a thousand suns. His large
gray eyes were mainly responsible for this feeling, and they
blazed out feverishly from what was almost a death's-head, so
thin was the face, the skin of which was a ghastly, dull, dead
white. Not more than fifty, thatched with a sparse growth of
iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet
Nathaniel Letton possessed control--Daylight could see that
plainly. He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high,
attenuated calm--a molten planet under a transcontinental ice
sheet. And yet, above all most of all, Daylight was impressed by
the terrific and almost awful cleanness of the man. There was
no dross in him. He had all the seeming of having been purged by
fire. Daylight had the feeling that a healthy man-oath would be
a deadly offence to his ears, a sacrilege and a blasphemy.
They drank--that is, Nathaniel Letton took mineral water served
by the smoothly operating machine of a lackey who inhabited the
place, while Dowsett took Scotch and soda and Daylight a
cocktail. Nobody seemed to notice the unusualness of a Martini
at midnight, though Daylight looked sharply for that very thing;
for he had long since learned that Martinis had their strictly
appointed times and places. But he liked Martinis, and, being a
natural man, he chose deliberately to drink when and how he
pleased. Others had noticed this peculiar habit of his, but not
so Dowsett and Letton; and Daylight's secret thought was: "They
sure wouldn't bat an eye if I called for a glass of corrosive
sublimate."
Leon Guggenhammer arrived in the midst of the drink, and ordered
Scotch. Daylight studied him curiously. This was one of the
great Guggenhammer family; a younger one, but nevertheless one of
the crowd with which he had locked grapples in the North. Nor
did Leon Guggenhammer fail to mention cognizance of that old
affair. He complimented Daylight on his prowess-"The echoes of
Ophir came down to us, you know. And I must say, Mr.
Daylight--er,
Mr. Harnish, that you whipped us roundly in that affair."
Echoes! Daylight could not escape the shock of the
phrase--echoes
had come down to them of the fight into which he had flung all
his
strength and the strength of his Klondike millions. The
Guggenhammers sure must go some when a fight of that dimension
was no more than a skirmish of which they deigned to hear echoes.
"They sure play an almighty big game down here," was his
conclusion, accompanied by a corresponding elation that it was
just precisely that almighty big game in which he was about to be
invited to play a hand. For the moment he poignantly regretted
that rumor was not true, and that his eleven millions were not
in reality thirty millions. Well, that much he would be frank
about; he would let them know exactly how many stacks of chips he
could buy.
Leon Guggenhammer was young and fat. Not a day more than thirty,
his face, save for the adumbrated puff sacks under the eyes, was
as smooth and lineless as a boy's. He, too, gave the impression
of cleanness. He showed in the pink of health; his unblemished,
smooth-shaven skin shouted advertisement of his splendid physical
condition. In the face of that perfect skin, his very fatness
and mature, rotund paunch could be nothing other than normal. He
was constituted to be prone to fatness, that was all.
The talk soon centred down to business, though Guggenhammer had
first to say his say about the forthcoming international yacht
race and about his own palatial steam yacht, the Electra, whose
recent engines were already antiquated. Dowsett broached the
plan, aided by an occasional remark from the other two, while
Daylight asked questions. Whatever the proposition was, he was
going into it with his eyes open. And they filled his eyes with
the practical vision of what they had in mind.
"They will never dream you are with us," Guggenhammer
interjected, as the outlining of the matter drew to a close, his
handsome Jewish eyes flashing enthusiastically. "They'll think
you are raiding on your own in proper buccaneer style."
"Of course, you understand, Mr. Harnish, the absolute need for
keeping our alliance in the dark," Nathaniel Letton warned
gravely.
Daylight nodded his head. "And you also understand," Letton went
on, "that the result can only be productive of good. The thing
is legitimate and right, and the only ones who may be hurt are
the stock gamblers themselves. It is not an attempt to smash the
market. As you see yourself, you are to bull the market. The
honest investor will be the gainer."
"Yes, that's the very thing," Dowsett said. "The commercial need
for copper is continually increasing. Ward Valley Copper, and
all that it stands for,--practically one-quarter of the world's
supply, as I have shown you,--is a big thing, how big, even we
can
scarcely estimate. Our arrangements are made. We have plenty of
capital ourselves, and yet we want more. Also, there is too much
Ward Valley out to suit our present plans. Thus we kill both
birds
with one stone-"
"And I am the stone," Daylight broke in with a smile.
"Yes, just that. Not only will you bull Ward Valley, but you
will at the same time gather Ward Valley in. This will be of
inestimable advantage to us, while you and all of us will profit
by it as well. And as Mr. Letton has pointed out, the thing is
legitimate and square. On the eighteenth the directors meet,
and, instead of the customary dividend, a double dividend will be
declared."
"And where will the shorts be then?" Leon Guggenhammer cried
excitedly.
"The shorts will be the speculators," Nathaniel Letton explained,
"the gamblers, the froth of Wall Street--you understand. The
genuine investors will not be hurt. Furthermore, they will have
learned for the thousandth time to have confidence in Ward
Valley. And with their confidence we can carry through the large
developments we have outlined to you."
"There will be all sorts of rumors on the street," Dowsett warned
Daylight, "but do not let them frighten you. These rumors may
even originate with us. You can see how and why clearly. But
rumors are to be no concern of yours. You are on the inside.
All you have to do is buy, buy, buy, and keep on buying to the
last stroke, when the directors declare the double dividend.
Ward Valley will jump so that it won't be feasible to buy after
that."
"What we want," Letton took up the strain, pausing significantly
to sip his mineral water, "what we want is to take large blocks
of Ward Valley off the hands of the public. We could do this
easily enough by depressing the market and frightening the
holders. And we could do it more cheaply in such fashion. But
we are absolute masters of the situation, and we are fair enough
to buy Ward Valley on a rising market. Not that we are
philanthropists, but that we need the investors in our big
development scheme. Nor do we lose directly by the transaction.
The instant the action of the directors becomes known, Ward
Valley will rush heavenward. In addition, and outside the
legitimate field of the transaction, we will pinch the shorts for
a very large sum. But that is only incidental, you understand,
and in a way, unavoidable. On the other hand, we shall not turn
up our noses at that phase of it. The shorts shall be the
veriest gamblers, of course, and they will get no more than they
deserve."
"And one other thing, Mr. Harnish," Guggenhammer said, "if you
exceed your available cash, or the amount you care to invest in
the venture, don't fail immediately to call on us. Remember, we
are behind you."
"Yes, we are behind you," Dowsett repeated.
Nathaniel Letton nodded his head in affirmation.
"Now about that double dividend on the eighteenth-" John Dowsett
drew a slip of paper from his note-book and adjusted his glasses.
"Let me show you the figures. Here, you see..."
And thereupon he entered into a long technical and historical
explanation of the earnings and dividends of Ward Valley from the
day of its organization.
The whole conference lasted not more than an hour, during which
time Daylight lived at the topmost of the highest peak of life
that he had ever scaled. These men were big players. They were
powers. True, as he knew himself, they were not the real inner
circle. They did not rank with the Morgans and Harrimans. And
yet they were in touch with those giants and were themselves
lesser giants. He was pleased, too, with their attitude toward
him. They met him deferentially, but not patronizingly. It was
the deference of equality, and Daylight could not escape the
subtle flattery of it; for he was fully aware that in experience
as well as wealth they were far and away beyond him.
"We'll shake up the speculating crowd," Leon Guggenhammer
proclaimed jubilantly, as they rose to go. "And you are the man
to do it, Mr. Harnish. They are bound to think you are on your
own, and their shears are all sharpened for the trimming of
newcomers like you."
"They will certainly be misled," Letton agreed, his eerie gray
eyes blazing out from the voluminous folds of the huge Mueller
with which he was swathing his neck to the ears. "Their minds
run in ruts. It is the unexpected that upsets their stereotyped
calculations--any new combination, any strange factor, any fresh
variant. And you will be all that to them, Mr. Harnish. And I
repeat, they are gamblers, and they will deserve all that befalls
them. They clog and cumber all legitimate enterprise. You have
no idea of the trouble they cause men like us--sometimes, by
their
gambling tactics, upsetting the soundest plans, even overturning
the stablest institutions."
Dowsett and young Guggenhammer went away in one motor-car, and
Letton by himself in another. Daylight, with still in the
forefront of his consciousness all that had occurred in the
preceding hour, was deeply impressed by the scene at the moment
of departure. The three machines stood like weird night monsters
at the gravelled foot of the wide stairway under the unlighted
porte-cochere. It was a dark night, and the lights of the
motor-cars cut as sharply through the blackness as knives would
cut through solid substance. The obsequious lackey--the
automatic genie of the house which belonged to none of the three
men,--stood like a graven statue after having helped them in.
The fur-coated chauffeurs bulked dimly in their seats. One after
the other, like spurred steeds, the cars leaped into the
blackness, took the curve of the driveway, and were gone.
Daylight's car was the last, and, peering out, he caught a
glimpse of the unlighted house that loomed hugely through the
darkness like a mountain. Whose was it? he wondered. How came
they to use it for their secret conference? Would the lackey
talk? How about the chauffeurs? Were they trusted men like
"our" Mr. Howison? Mystery? The affair was alive with it. And
hand in hand with mystery walked Power. He leaned back and
inhaled his cigarette. Big things were afoot. The cards were
shuffled even the for a mighty deal, and he was in on it. He
remembered back to his poker games with Jack Kearns, and laughed
aloud. He had played for thousands in those days on the turn of
a card; but now he was playing for millions. And on the
eighteenth, when that dividend was declared, he chuckled at the
confusion that would inevitably descend upon the men with the
sharpened shears waiting to trim him--him, Burning Daylight. _
Read next: PART II: CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART II: CHAPTER I
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