“He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of the Seaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enough to keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay the annual interest and a fair dividend.  And when the Wilsons came to our house to lay before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers to pay enormous profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant and argued with them that the offer was an insult to honest men.  It was he who advised the trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhart from securing control.  I sat in the library when he talked to the elder Wilson and the directors.

“He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the growing tendency to use the people as pawns to enslave themselves and their children.  He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and wealth, someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these New York fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth.  And he told John Wilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by his father and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite, seeking notoriety, and his standing in the financial world was so old and solid that it would have to listen to him.  I remember-how emphatically father said:  ’I tell you, John, even the discussion of such a proposition as that scoundrel Reinhart makes is degrading to an American’s honour.’  He said it didn’t make the least difference if Reinhart counted his millions by the score, and was director in thirty or forty great institutions, and gave a fortune every year for charity and to the church—­that he was a blackleg just the same.  And so is any man, he said, who dares to say he will take the stock of a transportation company, which represents a certain amount of money invested, and double or multiply it by five and ten, simply because he can compel the people to pay exorbitant fares and freight-rates and so get profits on this fraudulently increased capital.

“It was the decision arrived at by father and the Wilsons at this meeting, a decision to refuse in any circumstances to allow our Southern people to be bled by the Wall Street ‘System,’ that started Reinhart and his dollar-fiends on the war-path.  You can see from what I tell you of my father the terrible condition he is in now.  At night, when I get to thinking of him, hoping against hope, with no one to help him, no one with whom he can talk over his affairs, when I think of his nobleness in devoting his time to mother and by sheer will-power concealing from her his awful suffering, it nearly drives me mad.”

“Miss Sands, why will you not let me lend you the money necessary to tide your father over for a while?” I asked.

“You are so good, Mr. Randolph, but you don’t quite understand my father in spite of what I have said.  He would not relieve his suffering at the expense of another, not if it were a hundred times more acute.  You cannot understand the old-fashioned, deep-rooted pride of the Sands.”